LI. News of a festival! Another festival in Dribblewick! You hear this from some John—though he said his name was “J-O-N” and you have no idea how to spell; you suspect that this man is a homosexual—and are a bit confused. The last festival was not long ago enough to warrant yet another, but you pay this little mind, for perhaps the Frowners’ weird ways have them celebrating God-only-knows-what God-only-knows-when. In any case, it excites you and your family to have them all show up, yet again, at once, despite their increasingly strange habits of disappearing. Even your sons are somehow back from the war. When you press them as to how they are home and not fighting in whatever war the Frowners certainly have them fighting, and probably against your own kings in exile no less, they kind of just grumble and mumble something about, “No one cares if a few of our kind up and disappear.” This sounds like the dung of a virgin cow to you, but you pay this no mind at all. It is time to prepare for the festival! No one helps you, as per the apparent custom of your family. Even starting at daybreak, you only manage to collect the necessary wares and stuffs and thinges for the journey and stay by evening. It probably didn’t help your morale and speed to see your entire family standing or milling about outside the hovel, more or less just watching you bust your back readying all of it alone. You feel a certain ember of resentment, perhaps quite old, smoldering inside you—but no, this is the Devil’s flame. You are grateful to God that you have a family and are not dead yet. But still, they could have helped like, what is wrong with them? Who does that? When you tell them that you are exhausted from the day’s toil, and that all of you will certainly be set upon by bandits should you travel by night, everyone starts grumbling much more loudly. “What a loser,” “I can’t believe how slow he is,” “Can we get a new father?” “Xxytliet Kthemtrlix xapanatluixx!” you hear, but you can’t pinpoint who is saying what apart from that last bit. Almost involuntarily, your neck weakens and your head hangs in something resembling shame—but also resentment, perhaps, but not now; “That is not for now,” you hear inside your head. You motion for everyone to head inside what will soon be an unbearably stuffy and smelly hovel, what with everyone back, but if they see your motioning, they ignore it. Whatever. You pull the door, which now has an enormous crack in it, nearly cleaving it in two, off the doorway and just climb into bed. You can’t sleep, even hours later. The war wives are all at it with what sounds like more than just Hafdold. You pray to the Heavenly Father that it is just one of your sons. You cannot suffer homosexuality under your roof, God forbid. Or is adultery worse? You should ask the pries–, oh. Nevermind.

LII. Another day, another eighth-farthing, probably counterfeit! You managed to get a few minutes of fitful sleep amidst your wife’s thrashing about, trying to sleep at night, and the bestial moans coming from Hafdold’s area of the hovel. You rise with the sun and say a few prayers in the half-Latin you remember from your seven sessions of Sunday school before the friar teaching you was spirited away for reasons no one would say except in whispers. There’s no use in trying to rouse any of your family, of course, surveying the various heaps of snoring, stinking bodies. If only they would take their yearly-ish bath. You can see too many feet sticking out of the low mud wall built in a vain attempt to conceal the unnatural business of Hafdold and the war wives. So it has come to this? Your neck weakens again, but you must hold it high if you are to ready the remaining horse and ass. The different gaits will make the journey much less pleasant than it was already to be and you hope that no one notices your illicit simultaneous driving of incompatible animals. You estimate that you will arrive just after nightfall, if you really hoof it. After three hours of squatting by the ramshackle wagon, chewing pebble-ridden sour cakes, you break a tooth. You yelp in pain—this is one of your molars, which sucks because soon, no more pebble-ridden sour cakes for you unless someone chews it for you and Hell if anyone would ever help you like that—waking your family. You hear the grumbling growing inside. You yell, reminding them that they needn’t grumble, that they should thank the Good Lord that it is the day of the Festival! The grumbling continues unabated. The door falls forward into the horrific and poisonous muck, now glowing softly at night, breaking in two. You’ve told them many times to be careful with the door; that it will take a very long time to craft a new one; that repairing that wormeaten, splintrous thing would be almost impossible and certainly a danger; but no one ever listens. The resentment… No, the Devil. You sigh. Your family exits the hovel, one by one, some walking, some stumbling, a few outright falling out the hole in your hovel where the door once stood—the door your very father fashioned from the good wood, now long gone—and your wife, who runs out at uncanny speed, hissing. Well that's rather new. She bee-lines it for the cover of the wagon and before anyone else has made it more than a few dozen thumbs from the hovel, she is inside, under a blanket. Eventually, the lighter ones make it inside the wagon, mainly womenfolk and the recently re-emaciated Bryland, and the heavier ones ready for the trek. You double check the axles to make sure that the war wives haven’t played another bizarre trick on you. You check on them inside the wagon. They’re fast asleep, not gawking and laughing. A good sign. You announce that you are all on your way to the Festival at Dribblewick! Groans.

LIII. Pilgrims! Or, well, you think they’re pilgrims. They’ve got religious-looking garb and you’ve been told that these people are, in fact, “Christians,” but “of a different persuasion.” This is absolutely lost on you but Christian is Christian, or something like that. You think you’ve heard someone important say that once. Weird thing about these guys is that they appear to be going the wrong way. They’re heading north, away from the Holy Land and all four shrines you’ve heard of. If you go much further north of the moor, you get into a pagan stronghold you refer to as “Stayawaye.” No shrines there. So whither go they? It’s your lucky day because it’s that time of year again: Time to rotate the souring yams out for the crasses! You can almost taste the 24/7 heartburn, but it will keep you largely alive long enough to die. Wait, that the Devil’s whispers, never you mind. You’re out in the field when you are beset by two Johns: John Sweetpeat and John Butter. The former is too out of breath to speak when they arrive—gotta watch those tubers, Sweetpeat, that sweet yam he found last week will be the end of him—so Butter, wheezing only a bit less than Sweetpeat, says, “They are– ow, shit, my sides! They are com– ah God in Heaven this is terrible this pain I suffer. They are coming, the pil–” he sneezes suddenly and percussively and a moment thereafter, you hear one of your two remaining goats grunt, followed by the sound of it hitting the ground. Great, another goat lost to heart attack. You were told a while back that those goats were cursed by Jews, but you have no idea what Jews are apart from that they are strange people with strange ways and so cannot be trusted with anything but moneychanging and perhaps running entire economies. Well, at least you won’t have to slaughter the thing. You’ve been finding just the most untoward stuff in their innards, getting to be the limit with that. In any case, Butter is now rolling on the ground making, oddly enough, goat-like sounds, when Sweetpeat chimes in, “The pilgrims are arriving from the southern patches of hategrass! Look and see them now!” He holds up his left hand and, following the two phalanges left on his gangrenous-looking index finger, you see that he is not lying like usual. There is indeed a caravan of bizarrely and lavishly dressed pilgrims, or near enough. There is a very tall man bearing a vertically and horizontally symmetric cross—good sign, you think; no one else uses that symbol except Good Christian; Deus Gratius! [sic] you think—but it looks like there are a bunch of other things flanking it which appear… less than Christian. In fact, they look less than human. Strange letters, gilded, and heraldry that is almost glowing, bearing the forms of strange beasts and even stranger berries. You rise from your field-turning labor which you had been doing with your bare hands because all your tools have rotted away and there is just no one left interested in helping you recently. You look at the Johns. Sweetpeat is now rolling on the ground in a manner similar to that of Butter. Perhaps it is time for them to see the chirurgeon but last time you brought that up they took drunken revenge on you and some others. The caravan is rapidly approaching you now, having left the ditch-thing where the road once was, trekking across your very fields. They’re heading straight for you. The Johns have apparently rolled away in the direction of the really bad part of the forest and you suddenly feel a great deal smaller and more vulnerable than a moment prior, and it’s not simply because you can tell that the Crossbearer is twice your height, his head completely covered by a dark purple, cobalt-sequined hood. There is a strange, deep droning of men’s voices and it sounds like that goddamned trash that your war-daughters-in-law speak. Foul! The contempt for your Good Tongue! The defilement of all that is liturgical! Wait a second, perhaps this means that your war-daughters-in-law are, in fact, this outré sort of Christian? Holy shit, is the carriage floating? The Crossbearer is now within a medium-sized stone-heave away from you. You feel a swoon a’comin’ so you fall to the ground. The pilgrims, you figure in retrospect, took this as a sign of obeisance, which is the only reason they didn’t absolutely murder you on their way North. And also why they deposited four more “war wives” in your hovel, so that all your sons can have “equal dame” in their laws. More mouths to feed. Christian mouths, you hope, but hope is hard to come by– No, this is the Devil’s whispers.

LIIII. You wake up. It’s probably Saturday. It’s dark and gray outside and has been for weeks. There’s a knock at the door. The latrine diggers are at it again. The absence of your outhouse has not gone unnoticed by their spies. You take a deep, trembling breath, bellowing out, “Get you away, ye knaves, for we have no need of your ‘services’ such as they are! It is known on the moor that ye are thieving crackledabs and monstrous in your hubstammery! I hold in my hands a maul and I will dispatch you if need arise!” You look around to see that no one has moved, despite your yelling. You hear the latrine diggers moaning and they shamble away to bother John Swamps or perhaps John Hillfallen. Yeah, not a peep from your family, not even the new war-wife-types so graciously given by the insane pilgrim train the other day, or week. It really has been very gray for a long time and the days are short, You turn toward your wife—this process is more like a delicate sequence of shufflings aimed at not annoying your bedmate who takes up the majority of the straw-covered slab you use as a bed—whom you see is awake. And staring at you. You’re taken aback, both at the odd stare and the fact that she is in bed when it is likely still night. “Those aren’t the latrinemen,” she says, with a veritable chorus of disdain exploding from every syllable, “those are very much not. The Latrinemen.” She rolls over, much less carefully, let’s say, than you do, and her sizable rump—doubled in mass by some yet-unidentified contaminant in her wormwood stew—knocks you to the damp, earthen floor. This wakes a few of your daughters. Stifled laughter. Then silence. It is again dark and quiet in your hovel.

LV. It is high time that you find another place to sleep. Not another house, Heaven forfend. You cannot appear so jilted as to arouse further suspicion. Your wife’s nightly flights to God-knows-where are enough to have the handful of Johns within a half-day’s walk talking about henbane and brooms and pyres. You must find somewhere inside the hovel to sleep now that your wife’s bosom has… blossomed, and even more than her wormwooded bottom. Your spot on the clay slab-bed is only half a handspan wide at this point and really, you can only be pushed out of bed so many times before the Devil’s whispers start turning into jeers and commands. So, late one October or November night, when your wife has vanished, all but the most delirious of your daughters and her halfwit male acquaintance are missing, and your sons et al. are out hunting something, you gather what wood you can find that has neither been claimed by the new lords nor is so rotten and wormridden as to be completely useless. Time to make a loft. There’s a small area above the depression in the earthen floor where your daughters make their semi-regular sleeping pile where, with a few boards nailed into the beams what pass for a frame, some some branches tossed athwart, and with twigs and moss and straw: You could absolutely craft a bed wide enough to eject you perhaps only thrice each night. You have no nails, however. You’ve salvaged every nail you possibly could at this point, so it’s off to Ogilthwarpe’s again. You’re very much not looking forward to this. Perhaps you could just make do with the old bed but, when you look at it, you are overwhelmed with panic and nausea. Yes, Ogilthwarpe’s it is.