Flesh and Fire by Laura Anne Gilman Read Free Book Online

more than roll their eyes at Detta’s shout, their work continuing at the same busy pace. This, at least, was familiar to the boy, even if the surroundings were strange. A kitchen was a kitchen, no matter how grand.
    “Lil, I’ll need hot water, and much of it. Soap, two cakes from the look of him, and. . .” Detta stopped and touched a finger to the boy’s chin. “No shears for this one, and no razor. I doubt it’s old enough to shave regularly yet.”
    He was, barely, but a sharp-edged rock had taken the growth off a few days before, and it hadn’t grown back yet. The overseer did not like slaves with body hair that might be hiding lice or other parasites. It seemed Detta felt the same. Geordie was not only clean shaven, but had a shaved pate as well, and both of the girls had their hair cut short and tied back with red cloths around their heads.
    There were no females among the vineyard slaves, but Jerzy often saw local girls walking along the roadway, going to and from market with their baskets and barrows, and the Players often had women in their troop, although no slave came close enough to do more than note their gender. Closer, the cook who worked the sleep-house kitchen had two young daughters who were kept under their father’s watchful eye. Their laughter while they played sometimes triggered a faint memory, almost a dream, of a woman with dark eyes, and a younger girl child who cried silently, but he could not name them, and after a few years he stopped trying to remember.
    “Tub’s still set up from last night,” the girl at the spit, Roan, said. “And a kettle’s just been to boil. We’ll have him scalded nice and pretty before he knows what’s what.” She smiled at him, and the boy blinked at her in confusion. He was to be scalded? There was too much new, too much out of his experience, and he was lost.
    “Bet it’s never had a bath before,” Geordie, the other slave at the spit, said. A taller boy, dark skinned and dark eyed, his red cloth tied around his neck, his expression wasn’t as friendly as the girl’s.
    “You hadn’t, either, when you came here,” the girl said, tossing her head so that her short cap of dark brown hair rose and fell like a sparrow’s wing. “And you smelled.”
    “I did not.”
    “Like a cess pot,” the girl replied. “I thought I’d die of the stink.”
    “I’ll have Michel bring out the water,” the other slave—Lil—said, ignoring the two spatting, even as they turned the spit, roasting a great slab of meat over the fire. She was pale as the stone, from hair to skin, and taller than any girl he had ever seen before. “And clothing?”
    “Not for now. Let’s see how things go before we know where he goes.”
    Lil raised pale eyebrows at that. “It’s not sealed?”
    “Master just plucked him from the field. Bath first, then the testing.”
    The boy breathed a little easier, knowing for the first time what was happening, if not why. There were always tests, to see what you knew, what you could learn. It was like being assigned a new task as he had been this morning; they would tell him what he had to do soon enough. But first. . .
    “Detta?” He had to ask. “What do you mean, bath?”
    “No!”
    “Stop being such a baby and get in.”
    “No.”
    “Jerzy. In. Now.”
    The boy stared at the wooden tub, half as large as a wine cask and filled to the brim with steaming hot water, and considered balking again. A stream, yes. Standing under the rain with a handful of soap-weed, that was natural. This. . .was. . .unnatural. You cooked with hot water, you didn’t wash in it!
    But Detta stood behind him, her arms folded across her ample chest, and he had the bad feeling that if he refused, she would have no hesitation about throwing him in headfirst.
    “You’ve nothing I haven’t seen before and I doubt I’ll be impressed now, boy child.”
    Her voice, more than her words, convinced him. Stripping off his tunic and pants, he dropped them