The Reckless Oath We Made

While we waited for lunch to cook, Gentry sat down beside me on the log bench I’d been occupying all morning.

“Thou art well, Lady Zhorzha?” he said.

I was tempted to answer with Rosalinda’s “Oh, ay,” but I didn’t want him to think I was making fun of her. Even though I was.

“I’m okay. Thanks. And thanks for this, um, dress thing, I guess. I mean, thanks for sure, but I can’t remember what it’s called. I’m gonna shut up now.”

“’Tis a cotehardie. And hearen thy voice me liketh. Thou seemest well,” he said down into his chest. “Wouldst eat of an apple?”

“Oh god, yes. I’m starving.” I was so hungry I couldn’t even be polite about it.

“Dame Rosalinda offered thee no bread to break thy fast?”

He didn’t make me answer, because it was obviously no. He took a knife off his belt and an apple out of his pocket. He cut it in half, flicked the core into the fire, and pared a slice off for me. While I ate, he kept cutting slices and passing them to me on the tip of his knife.

“You don’t want any?” I said, as I scarfed another piece.

“Nay, lady. I regret thou wast famished this day. ’Twas not my wish.”

“It’s okay. I’m fine.”

Right then it was true. I ate the whole apple, and I sat in front of the fire, not thinking about anything. After the meat was cooked, everything got ladled into bowls, and I could see that our medieval midday meal was ramen. Seriously. Ramen noodles in soup with grilled vegetables and meat on top.

Since there wasn’t a table, I spent a few minutes watching Gentry’s technique, which was resting the bowl on his leg while he used chopsticks for noodles and things. In between he picked the bowl up and drank the soup.

“So, did they have chopsticks in medieval times?” I said.

“I should think in Asia they did, though certainly neither Saxon nor Dane had them. We take an ecumenical approach to our reenactment,” Edrard said, which didn’t exactly answer my question and added a vocabulary word I didn’t know.

“I thank thee, Dame Rosalinda, for this meal,” Gentry said.

“Nay. I thank thee, Sir Gentry, for having secured meat for our soup,” she said.

“I declare this mystery meat ramen most excellent,” Edrard said.

“It’s not exactly a mystery,” I said, even though I’d been trying not to think about that.

“A staple of medieval Japanese cuisine: phabbit ramen. And now for a recitation. Things which Sir Gentry hath killed and eaten, parts one through nineteen.” Edrard hummed a little note and then half recited, half sang: “Pheasant, rabbit, bison, songbird. Prairie chicken, lesser and greater. Catfish, trout, carp, duck, duck, goose. Rattlesnake, quail, vole, elk, deer, moose. Unicorn, selkie, ogre, dragon. Pegasus, phoenix, elf, and griffin.”

“Nay, Sir Edrard. Thou makest me a great villain. I have ne killed ne eaten so many creatures,” Gentry said, but he was laughing. That was new. He was normally pretty serious around me.

After lunch, I got to see the inside of Mud Manor, when I helped Gentry wash dishes. It was sort of half hut, half trailer park. The inside walls were made of the same mud-looking stuff as the outside, except they were painted white. There was a fridge and a kitchen sink, but no stove, unless I counted the fireplace. Helping Gentry mostly involved me standing there with my sleeves sewn closed while he washed and rinsed. I took the chance to do a little spying, and looked in at the bedroom. They had a futon and a cupboard. Little nooks and crannies were set into the mud walls, and they were full of books and bottles and crystals and shit. Except for the shelf where there was shampoo and toothpaste and a box of tampons. It hit me then: Edrard and Rosalinda lived there. They weren’t camping out. It was their home all the time.

“My lady,” Gentry said behind me. Even after all the times I’d snooped in other people’s homes, I was embarrassed to get caught. “Wilt thou walk with me?”

“Yeah. Let’s take a walk.”

We went up to our camp first, and he put a blanket, a jug of water, and a book into a basket, so I grabbed the book I’d borrowed from him. The one about the boy who runs away to become a knight.

Our walk was more like a hike. Across a meadow and up another hill. The path wasn’t clear-cut, and long skirts aren’t great for hiking, but Gentry did what he’d done the night before, and pulled me up the steepest parts of it. I thought there must be another hill, because I could see a limestone embankment through the trees, but it wasn’t a hill. It was a stone house.

Not a house. A castle. A castle in progress.

“Lady Zhorzha, I welcome thee to Bryn Carreg,” he said.

“This is yours? Your house?”

“Yea. ’Tis my keep. Tho I have many labors before me.”

“Wait. You’re building this? You are building it?”

“Yea. Stone by stone,” he said.

My mind was blown, because that was a lot of stones to be building one by one. The walls were taller than me, and on the end closest to where we had come up the hill, the tower was probably three stories high. There was a gate there, big enough to drive a car through, and that was where we went in.

The walls were probably three feet thick and made out of blocks of limestone. I laid my hand on it as we walked through, and it was warm from the sun shining on it. Inside the tower, there was a door that led out to the courtyard, and a bank of stone stairs that went up in a spiral around the outer wall. Where there would have been a roof, there were blue tarps stretched across big wooden beams. The whole thing was probably forty feet across.

I put my hand on the wall again, because it was so familiar.

“Have you been to Colorado?” I said. “There’s this guy. I don’t remember his name. It’s not that far from the Royal Gorge and—”

“Bishop Castle,” Gentry said. “My lady, yes, I have seen it. It—it—it—”

I got to laughing, because that’s how excited he was; he couldn’t get any words out. He had to set down the basket he was carrying, so he could scratch his shoulders with both hands.

“It’s amazing!” I said. “This is amazing! I can’t believe you’re building a castle.”

“I saw Bishop Castle when I was a boy of ten, no more. Thou hast the book I read in thy hand. I would not rest til I had seen a castle. My father took me thither. Us alone, for brother Trang was yet a babe and my mother stayed home and—wilt thou come up?”

Of course, I would. We went up the stairs, even though there was no railing, and I remembered that about Bishop Castle, too. How in some places you were going up stairs with nothing to stop you from falling off, or standing with your back against the castle wall with the wind whipping around you. This wasn’t anywhere near that tall, but it was closer to four stories than three. When we got to the top, Gentry pulled back the tarp so we could poke our heads out, and I could see why it was worth all the walking to have built up on the hill.