XXXI. You return to your hovel from tilling the small field that always smells too much like brimstone for your liking to find all of your daughters inside. You almost jump at the sight of all of them, suddenly all at home for no obvious reason. You sidle toward your wife, who is sitting on a bench-like dolmen around which you built your house, carding the mange-leavings you managed to peel off the few goats which can still grow patches of wool. You whisper to her that you’re a bit spooked to see all your daughters at home. Without looking up from her task, she says, “What on earth are you talking about, husband? They’re here every afternoon.” Utterly confused, you search your memory: Is it possible that you’ve been missing from the hovel every afternoon? No, that’s absurd. “Are you sure, wife?” you ask her, your voice breaking slightly. With an annoyed sigh, again without looking up at you, she says, “Why don’t you just ask Bryland? He’s in charge of roll call.” Roll call?

XXXII. Late one afternoon you return from hoeing the muddy remains of the closer part of the west field to see two of your daughters whom you haven't seen in over a month playing what looks like a game of cards. You've never seen this pack of cards, indeed you're not sure if you've ever seen cards, but you have heard of such, and you ask them where they got them. They look up at you briefly and then return to their card game, laughing quietly, and you realize it's not really worth it is it, as the reappearance of your daughters with unknown goods is not a completely uncommon phenomenon in your household. You think for a moment and remember that John Johnson across the rocky ravine through which flows that stream on which you have to rely when the well goes bad has a number of children and also dealings with gypsies, so you think it might be a good time to give him a visit. God only knows how you make it there considering how totally impassable the ravine is, but you do manage to get there. You knock loudly on the door to his hovel, which is essentially identical to yours, except that his thatched roof looks recently replaced. His wife must be a lot louder than yours. He comes to the door which somehow does not emit an ear splitting grinding, and you greet him, “Good day to you, John Johnson. How goes it by your stead and family?” He sticks his head out of the crack in the doorway, sidles out, closing the door quietly behind him. He looks around, showing an odd degree of suspicion given that you are almost certainly leagues away from anyone who might hear your conversation. “I’m okay, John. My sons have returned but they are bedridden with War Worry and I am afraid John Jr. is going to take a hatchet to someone soon.” You find this distressing, obviously, and try to provide what advice you can vis-à-vis the War Worry, but it falls on deaf ears because John… Johnson? never listens to your advice—indeed, he finds it condescending and obnoxious even when very insightful, even useful. He shifts his weight a little, nervously, and you get to the point, asking if he knows where the cards your daughters have came from, to which he nods in assent, though avoiding eye contact. You wait for him to say something, like a normal person might, but you find that you have to clear your throat, “Ahem, well?” He looks at you furtively, returning his eyes to the ground, and says, “From the Shire Reeve.” Well, okay, that makes sense given the latter’s access to God-knows-what, but that hardly answers the real question. “How is it that he came to give them to you? I only ask,” you say, coming up with a half-lie on the spot, “because my daughters have taken quite a liking to them and I fear for witchery.” He looks at you momentarily again, whisper-muttering what sounds like, “I gave him John Jr., okay,” and his gaze shifts to everything around him except you. Ah. Goods in exchange for that which is Unmentionable. You understand, but snort and try to spit, but your throat is crazy dry. You look at him a moment and then turn your back to him, but not before he says, “Also, I’m not called Johnson anymore. My name is John Sweetpeat.” You stop mid-stride, gasping out, “How is it, my friend, that you came by such a pleasing second name?” You turn around when you hear nothing for too long to see John Sweetpeat kicking nothing on the ground, hands sticking out of his pants through his unpatched pockets, who says, again quietly, “...John Jr.” He turns at once and flees into his hovel. Perhaps it isn’t so grave a sin if John Jr. is catatonic. In any case, you pray feverishly on your way home, but you fall into the ravine and hit your cheek on one of the moss-covered stones which just took you down, so that makes praying aloud basically impossible.

XXXIII. End of the third harvest! Berlynd has also taken well to farming again and has been helping Hafdold with the bulbous buckwheat. You have more than you’ve ever had in recent memory, and you realize just how long it will take you to grind all that stuff, even if you manage to thresh and winnow it before the first stale frost that will ergotize just about everything that isn’t fully ground and stored properly in the sub-cellar that will never not smell overwhelmingly of that old batch of spiced mandrake wine that your wife forgot about until it was too late. You approach your wife, who is engaged in some chore you’re pretty sure you’ve never seen before, and ask her, “What shall we do, my wife, with this excess of grains?” She turns from whatever the hell she was up to and puts her hands on the crumbling earthen “counter” behind her and says, “I don’t know, John, what do you think we should do?” The contempt in her voice is confusing. You can’t recall having had any conversation about this, but her emphasis on “think” makes you do just that. Maybe that was her point? She turns around, shaking her head and muttering under her breath. You turn around as well to see four of your daughters, Berkind, and the “war wives” looking at you with a mixture of confusion and contempt. You lower your gaze and think for a moment. After several hours of just standing there, you are hit with the idea that perhaps she means the ruined windmill. You turn around to find your wife precisely where she was, engaged in a totally different but equally baffling task, her back turned to you. “Do you mean for me to repair the old windmill, my love?” Without turning around this time, she lets out a long and deliberately audible sigh, saying, “What else do you think I could have meant?” This wounds your pride a bit, but you can’t help but wonder why she didn’t offer this, like, five minutes into your long thinking. It would have still been day and now you have lost a whole day of possible repairs. “I shall get to work on it before dawn tomorrow,” you say. “I’m going to bed,” she says in response. It is certainly past midnight, you think, so you guess that makes sense. You turn around to see Berkind sitting on the dirt floor alone, your daughters’ beds empty.

XXXIIII. It is midsummer, you think—the sun has been weird lately—and you are out in the field with all three of your sons for the first time since they left for that war and came back wrong. What a joy it is to be underneath the blue sky, even if there is something off about the sunlight, at work on the farm with all of your boys, now grown into strong men in the prime of life. You’re delicately hoeing out some unknown tubers you were told to plant by Undercount Xxallamatrymkeznakim’s lackey, John, whose second name—sorry, “surname” is the word you recently learned—escapes you, when you hear the strangest sound. It is of a musical quality, but it isn’t music so far as you understand the word or idea. You look up and see your sons also with their minds clearly off their work, looking around for the source of the queer musical voice-of-sorts. Out of the valley, the damn pig valley, you see a figure in the most garish and lurid piebald garb you’ve ever seen by leaps and bounds. He’s wearing colors you’ve never seen before, nor did you realize were even possible to dye into fabric, and he’s carrying a large bag on his shoulder which you take to be an oversized bagpipe of some variety or another. As he approaches, your sons gather around you, their “hoes” held ready as if for combat—one “hoe” is a rake repurposed as a hoe and the other is a particularly tough shard of a dinner plate affixed to a nice stick you found once. You raise a hand to stay their rising bloodlust, but this just makes their panting and grunting more intense. You, uh, move forward just a little to put some distance between you and your sons, who you now believe to be half-barbarized by horrors seen in that war they helped lose. The music-maker comes within three or four spitting distances of you and only then notices you. He is wearing something composed of white circles, held together by perhaps twine or wire, over his eyes. His music, you suppose you might call it, halts abruptly and he calls out to you in your language. “Hoes” still at ready, you do hear your sons’ war noises quieting a little. “Good noon to all of you gentlefolk!” he cries, a hand cupped around his mouth. “We are all of us men, not folk. These two of my sons were only once dressed as women and they have made their lots right with the One Almighty God for that.” The noisy piebald man from the valley stands motionless for a moment, his face frozen in what you take to be confusion. He mutters some kind of low apology, which you accept begrudgingly, making sure to remind him of the severity of embarrassing men in public with such talk. He bows and asks if he may approach, “you gentlemen,” he says, kind of passive-aggressively, but you’ve got to let this one go. He gets within a single spitting distance and you see that the white circles are some kind of very thick glass, or very clear stone, and you ask after what in God’s creation they are. He explains that they are “spectacles” which allow him to see what is not within three thumbs of his face, which you accept as okay so long as he explains the rest of his getup. He can’t really do that, but says it’s “just part of his role as an ‘Ashen Bard.’” You know this word, “ashen,” and though a bit hazy on the meaning, you’re pretty sure he’s the opposite of “ashen.” A second time, you ask after this really just “off” stuff about him, and he, again, can’t really answer apart from, “This is just the name of my job, good fellows.” Whatever—you ask what the sound was that he was making, which makes him wince, since he informs you that it was, in fact, music, though perhaps “of a different sort” than what you are “used to.” You bid him play on, which he is more than glad to do, and so he hefts the large bag—indeed the guts of a large ruminant, made into a bag for pipes—onto his shoulder. He begins to play and your stomach turns. Your sons double over and Hafdold starts dry-heaving. You yell at this “Ashen Bard” to stop the horrific din he has created, which he does and hangs his head. “For this you are paid? This is your trade?” you ask. “Yes,” the Ashen Bard says in a voice dripping with decades of rejection and self-pity. “Why don’t you practice? Or find a new instrument? Learn a song to sing?” asks Hafdold, still bent over and spitting bile into the mud. “I don’t know,” the Ashen Bard says, turning around and walking back into the valley. Maybe the pigs like the music? It would make them easier to catch and eat, you think, but they’re so stupid already that this hardly seems necessary. Once he’s five spitting distances away, you hear the “music” resume, the quality of it much sadder now. You can hear him crying through the jerking of the sounds through the pipes.

XXXV. Rumors have reached you somehow that Cowshivers is spreading throughout the land. This is not your first rodeo with a Cowshivers scare, but it seems really serious this time because the birds have been acting up and one of your daughters knows about that sort of thing, what with the birds. You’re not sure which one it was, which daughter, but you think it was the one you’ve always suspected might be a cuckoo, though you have no evidence of such. Oh well, if she acts up too much, all the easier to have her taken away to a nunnery or desolate shoreline. And hey, there’s a nunnery coming up in the next few centuries, too. In any case, this Cowshivers business has you in the dumps so bad that even your wife has taken note. One evening when you are getting into the bed that is way too small for two and yet this is your life, she says, “Husband, do you worry about the Shivers?” to which you reply that you are, indeed. She sighs and pulls the goat burlap blanket up to her chin and says, “You know you’ll have to slaughter them, yes?” Now your turn to sigh, “Wife, yes, I do know this. I will ask our daughter with the preternatural knowledge of spreading sickness about what is coming tomorrow and decide then.” Your wife turns her head to you, caressing your largely-bald, psoriatic scalp, and says, “My good Husband, if you wait that long, the Feast of the Good Saint Xxylamt will be upon us, and we will only be able to slaughter sheep for the next four weeks.” You feel your stomach sink. Your wife… You look over and see her smiling face, radiating a strange equanimity. “I guess I’ll get to the slaughtering, then,” you say, but really just to get the hell out of bed. “Don’t forget to use the new knife I got from the nuns! It’s already out there in the barn on top of the rotting bales of crab hay!” your wife yells to you as you flee the hovel. What knife? From the nuns? You don’t recall any “Good Saint Xxylamt,” but there have probably been thirty or forty canonizations since you last had contact with Rome, so who knows? The name is pretty weird, though. Doesn’t even sound like language. Sounds more like the sounds the “war wives” make. How are you going to store the meat from an entire cow? And one that has eaten in the past month? There isn’t enough salt on the whole of the moor for such bounty. You’ll have to smoke it, which you do, but you’ve never done it before so you basically carbonize the whole thing.