The hard metal of the swords hilt, hit him in the face, hard, sending him to the floor and a cascade of blood to run down into his mouth. “Arrggh!” The young boy wheezed, the air viciously escaping his lungs, spitting out the iron tasting blood he looked up at his attacker. A grizzled bearded man towered above him, decorated with many of his own hard won scars. He looked disapprovingly down at the boy before him, “By Odin’s beard Bryn, if you want to come on a raid with me and your brothers, you WILL learn to be tough.” Blinking away the threat of tears the boy, Bryn, sprang up and readied his own small axe, wiping away at the blood still running down his face. “Yes, father... can we try again?” A gentle breeze from the sea ruffled the man's beard enough to show a small smile. “Now that’s better boy, another round before your mother skins me for keeping you from your bed.” Bryn beamed at his father's words and they began to fight once more in the warm light of dusk.
A loud screeching was his only warning before the mass landed on him, ensuring that Bryn wasn’t returning to his fond memories anytime soon. Blinking away sleep he focused on what had just awoken him, pale blue eyes peered up at Bryn from under a mass of unkempt brown hair, that framed a dirt coloured face seemingly too dark for his eyes. “Morning Hadi.” Bryn smiled at the boy ruffling his hair, as the boy made himself at home on top of the wolf’s fur blanket. “Afternoon and papa said to get you up to help with chores, because mama’s teaching us to fight bears!” Hadi said excitedly, illustrating his last words with a childlike bear impression. Brynjar smiled at the boy before shifting back under the soft and inviting covers, “Well then I don’t think there’s anything for me to do, so back to sleep.” This panicked Hadi who pulled at the man’s arm while Bryn continued pretending to be asleep. “Come on uncle Bryn, papa said that if you didn’t do chores then mama couldn’t teach us to fight bears!” The boy struggled to grab hold of the much larger man's arm. Hadi sat back on his haunches in defeat, when suddenly his uncle's arm stirred, if only to put him into a headlock. “You’re going to have to be quicker than that if you want to fight bears.” Brynjar chuckled at the boys meager attempts to get free before letting him go, “Now off with you, find your mama and learn to fight bears boy.” Hadi hopped down from the bed and raced through the door, reappearing a second later to make sure his uncle really was getting up from bed, before once again vanishing in search of his mama and adventure.
Laughing as he sat up in bed, Brynjar slowly began his rituals for the day. Stretching his legs slowly he rubbed the sleep from his eyes, while absent mindedly scratching the scar that his father had given him so many years ago. Looking around the longhouse he spied where Eir had moved his clothes, to sit neatly atop a chair by the table, keeping them somewhat clean. Sighing heavily he rose, stretched once more and rubbed away the aches and pains of his battle hardened body. Walking to the chair he picked up his pants before looking for a small wooden wash bowl, making his way over he also picked up a small cloth to dry himself afterwards. Taking particular care Bryn washed his face, ears and nose, pulled his pants on and said a silent prayer to Odin for the souls of his lost son and new daughter. Finishing his prayers, Bryn stretches a final time and heads out to start his rather late daily grind.
Another piece of short fiction, based on this Fake First Line.
It began as an ordinary day: I awoke at dawn, made strong tea, put the porridge on a low fire, went out to gather eggs and thyme, came back in, maintained the wards with salt and lifeblood, and woke up Kajjin for his breakfast. As always, he said he was glad he'd married such a fine housekeeper.
I’m not one to devalue my own accomplishments, but Kajjin was such a flatterer. Lalip, down the street, made the best tea you ever tasted; Mida fed his family upon dishes that even those-below might envy; and nothing polluted had crossed Ursita’s threshold in sixteen years (a record for our domain!) I think, truly, that Kajjin liked that I never set foot outside the garden, and so devoted most of my time and effort to the house. It was my duty, but also my pleasure. Anyway, if I did not do my duty, a house has its own ways of dealing with a poor keeper.
After Kajjin had left, I woke the baby and fed her, and then, as babies do, she wanted to nap, so I laid her down in her cradle and set about housekeeping: dishes in the cupboard, pots in the sink, eggs in the cellar, salt and bread in the god-bowl, more wood in the hearth. There was one time—only one—in all my days that I did not feed the hearthfire, and only my mistake in putting too much salt in the wards that day saved us. One sin may correct a path another has made crooked.
The houses, and more important, the domain, rest on these small daily tasks. Oh, we have other occupations: farmers and glaziers and carpenters, smiths and poets and idolmakers, and all the rest, and they do a fine job. But fire, blood, and salt are what keep out pollution, and we housekeepers who provide them are the warp upon which the domain is woven.
After the work, the worship. Ancestors, gods, godlets, demons: all of them needing their word or their bread. Cast rosemary into the fire for the Roof Spirit, smear the salt-paste on the storeroom door for the Jar God, put a dish of crumbs before the grandmother tablets. We build our lives act upon act, like bricks in a wall, and that is both our work and our protection. Some of us may leave chinks here and there, but as long as enough people labor at the same task, we are safe. The ancestors do their part from the grave; the gods do theirs from the strange dreamy below-space they inhabit. All to keep out pollution.
But pollution, like anything that relies on wit to survive, is clever. I did not know then how clever it was. I have heard that living things adapt and change to fit their environment. We provided the environment; pollution adapted.
Once the fire, the blood, and the salt are in their correct places, pollution must be invited or brought in by the person who laid them down. We all know how to recognize it: grey, right-handed more often than not (if it has hands), and hungry-looking. There were legends about it (if it has hair, it has an even number of hairs; if it has eyes, it never blinks; it always speaks in sentences of ten words, and so on), but those three traits were constant. We had all faced it at one point or another. Most of us had accidentally let it in, usually in the form of a fine grey dust tracked in from outside the house, for example. But all you have to do is put more blood into the wards and perhaps sprinkle a bit of salt around, so the domain had not been breached in over a century.
I have had time to reflect on these things, but that morning I did not. Soon after Kajjin left for his work at the looms, I began mixing batter for the little cakes he liked to eat for lunch. You need flour, honey, yogurt, and oil, but every house has their own ancestral variation on that simple theme. My house, Nanta, had a recipe which my mother passed to me, which she had received from her own mother, who got it from hers, and so on; it is probably as old as the domain itself. It’s simply a little pounded caraway added just before cooking: Mida, I know, would put saffron and salt in his, but that was not my mother’s way. We live in the rhythms established by our ancestors, but we improvise when it’s our turn to drum the beat. All over the domain, housekeepers were mixing these cakes for their husbands or wives, who would be home just before noon to eat, and the smell of the thousand variations began to fill the air. I went out to the garden for caraway and stood for a moment breathing in spices and herbs. I was happy.
As I was gathering some of the dried seed heads, I noticed a small black cat peeping at me from atop the stone boundary. I smiled at it, put the caraway in my basket, and went to see my visitor.
“Where did you come from?” I said, stretching out a hand. The cat rubbed its head against my palm and purred. It was black, and it was plump, and it did not favor any of its paws over the others. I picked it up. “Let’s go inside,” I said. “There are probably mice in the storeroom that you can eat.”
I carried the cat to the storeroom and set it down. I set the basket of caraway on a shelf and began to knock the seeds into their earthenware jar. The cat made a hawking noise, as if it were about to spit up a hairball on my clean floor.
“Not in my house,” I said with a smile, and I turned.
The cat was still retching, but what it coughed up was not a hairball. A large grey clot dirtied my floor. It twitched this way and that, like a rabbit’s nose smelling the air. I felt very hot, and I tasted copper in my mouth, and I knew: the wards had been breached.
The pollution stretched upward. I remember crying out my grandmother’s name. The air turned grey.
My stomach gurgled with nausea. I fell to my knees. I gagged and coughed. Something was coiling up out of my throat, and spots clouded my vision. I vomited, and I saw my body fall to one side, pale and limp. The spots cleared, since I had left them behind with my eyes.
The grey mist rippled and poured in through my nostrils and mouth. Silence fell. I could not feel or touch anything; I was only a soul, a mass of perception and memory. I watched my body twitch a bit. Its mouth foamed. I ached. I can only assume this is what an arm feels when it is amputated.
My body’s eyes blinked. I saw them try to focus. It made small moaning sounds. It could not control my fingers or tongue; it could only perform large and unrefined movements, so when it stood it did so by propping itself up first on my hands. The right one bent backward as weight was put on it, and I heard bones crack, but it did not seem to feel pain. With the wall as support, it pushed itself upright. It lurched out out of the storeroom on numb legs, trying to escape the god whose protective anger I could sense building up in the stones.
The Jar God was faithful, even if I had not been. But now its wrath turned against me. I had died unwitnessed, without dust and anointment. I was myself pollution. And the god whom I and my family had served for generations did not know me, and it began to tear at me. I screamed.
But my grandmother knew me. I had cared for her, and she now upheld her end of the bargain. You who are alive cannot understand the senses of a naked soul, but I knew she was there. Like the god, she was in the house’s bones. Unlike the god, she was not a blind force of protection. Her love encircled me. —You know her, she said to the Jar God. Back to sleep. Hush. She is the keeper of this house.
And the god folded its anger away for later use.
—I cannot take your body back, said my grandmother. Nor can you. But look, here is a body. Take it. You are the housekeeper. Keep this house.
She helped me to put on, like a pair of trousers, the cat’s body. As I slipped into it, I noticed that it had a single grey hair on its tail. I should have known.
I heard the other me, the former me, clattering around in the kitchen. I half-expected the hearth goddess to hear also and awaken: after all, aside from our grandmothers, she is the most zealous protector we have. But no; she saw me, not the pollution inside, and with my blood in the wards not even the house itself would detect anything wrong.
Walking with four legs is difficult if you are used to two. I learned, after falling over two or three times, that the cat’s body knew what it was doing, and I did not have to try very hard to direct it. I still bumped into things on my way out of the storeroom though.
From my new height, Nanta looked monstrous, distorted. Even the colors were wrong. And the smells were heightened until I almost could not breathe. It was not enough to take my body: even my house must now be unfamiliar. I tried to cry and it came out as a strangled yowl.
The polluted-me heard that. Its footsteps approached, sounding arrhythmically on the tiles. I darted away from it and ran to the grandmother tablets. Even asleep, they knew me and did not know it, so I could be safe there for a little while.
I could hear the baby sleeping, snoring her tiny snores. When the thing shuffled away, I ran into her room and leaned over the cradle. She was beautiful, and she was unaware of her danger. I believed she was safe: with cradle-god and nursery-god and the ever-present grandmothers, the thing would not be able to get close to her. It had my blood, but it did not have my love. But if she woke up and crawled out? She had done that before, just the other week.
I took up a post at the door of her room. Kajiin would see me there when he came home, and he would know something was amiss. I curled up to watch the outer door. I only had to wait the thing out. Did it know that Kajjin would be back for his lunch soon? What would it do to him?
But I could not see it from where I sat. It could be doing anything. While I kept my daughter safe, larger and more horrible things could happen. What might the thing let in? What would it prepare for my husband and my child, my house and my domain? I extended my claws.
This was my house and my body, and both had been invaded. And I was a fool to think that waiting would accomplish anything. I stood. My fur puffed up. At that moment, I would not have cared if the rest of the domain collapsed, as long as my walls and my gods stood.
The thing had shambled back into the kitchen and was mixing up cakes for lunch—with my food. Its movements were becoming easier, more practiced. Did my body remember motion in the same way as the cat’s? If it did, it forgot the caraway, and I smiled a cat-smile at the knowledge that its food would not be nearly as good as mine.
Taking advantage of the cat’s quiet paws, I bounded to the window and peered out. Other housekeepers were welcoming home their spouses. Across the garden, Mida was greeting his husband with a kiss and a taste of something; beyond them, Lalip grabbed hers by the arm and dragged him in, probably to yell at him. So the workers were coming home, and Kajjin was late, thank the grandmothers. I had a little more time.
I smelled the cakes baking and heard the thing beginning to wash up. So help me, if it turned out to be as good a housekeeper as I…but I’m embarrassed that I thought of this at the time. I think I could not accept what had happened, so my mind turned to the small things it could grasp.
Time was wasting. Late or not, Kajjin would be home soon, and the baby would wake up, and in this foreign body, I could not prevent what would happen. But how to fight my body? And the very house, except the grandmothers, would turn against me: it had possession of the wards now.
Did it have any sort of plan? Had it even expected to get this far? For the rest of the day, the wards would function, but when morning came, they would fade: did it know that? Likely it did, if it had watched the domain for any length of time. In response to my anxiety, the cat’s body began to knead the floor, and I sensed Nanta’s faint indignation at the tiny scratches.
Yes. The house. My house. The wards might have fallen, but this was my house, in my keeping, home of my grandmothers and my gods. I knew it better than that thing. It was my weapon—though in order to wield it, I would have to do everything I had ever been trained not to.
I ran into the kitchen. My body was just taking cakes out of the low clay oven. I leapt at it and scratched its face. It dropped the cakes, and I scrambled over them, breaking them into bits and kicking them into the oven. They landed on the coals and caught fire. Smoke poured out of the oven.
Before it could catch me, I jumped into the water barrel and pissed in it. The small god who lives in its staves came awake. As my body reached in to catch me, I clawed my way up its arm and jumped to the floor. (That part was the cat, which hated water more than I’d anticipated.) The barrel god mistook my body for the cat’s and clung to it, preparing to eradicate it like any other contamination. My body screamed. I could not see what was happening very well (by then, the burning cakes had filled the kitchen with their smoke), but I could imagine.
I ran in and out of the cupboards, knocking over crockery. I scratched myself over the jars of flour and honey. I shat in the butter churn.
One by one, the kitchen gods came awake. Too much had gone wrong for them to ignore. Their distant voices clamored about fire, violence, and food waste.
—A housekeeper must not burn food!
—A housekeeper must put out fires!
—A housekeeper cannot neglect duties!
They unfolded their spectral limbs, ready to restrain this unfit housekeeper, this imposter, until someone could come along and inspect the home.
I heard the front door open. Kajjin. The gods quieted: the faulty housekeeper could now be dealt with. But I went cold all over, for as Kajjin came bewildered into the kitchen, my body sobbed and pointed at me.
“Where did that cat come from?” he said.
My body only sobbed and shook its head. It collapsed amid the shards of crockery and kept crying. Kajjin looked at me, eyes narrow. Of course he would get rid of what bothered his wife and ask questions later. He picked up a jar to throw at me.
Kajjin, I tried to say, but all I could do was yowl. The jar hit me between the eyes, and the cat’s body collapsed. It was dying, and as it convulsed and dry-heaved, I felt myself being pulled out again.
Kajjin, bending over my body to comfort it, did not see the small smile on its face. It knew what was happening. Once more, the gods would turn on me.
No. Not again. I had nowhere to go, but I still had a chance—
Kajjin saw my body twitch, my eyes roll back, an inhuman scream come from my lips, and then, in a brief moment when I was once more in control of myself, I shouted my grandmother’s name.
She came, and with her came others, hundreds of ancestresses going back to the very founding of the house. My body screamed, and the grey mist poured out of it, tried to cling to it, but by then Nanta itself had come awake. The gods realized their foolishness. Kajjin, I think, understood what was happening a moment after they did, and he leaped back.
—Pollution, said Nanta in its thousand divine voices. And the hearth at last awoke, and her purifying fire roared throughout the house.
There was a harsh smell, and a sound of screaming, and when it faded the pollution was gone, and I was dead.
But this time, I was not unwitnessed. Kajjin saw, and wept, and though I had no mouth or eyes I wept with him. He staggered to the garden for dust, which he sprinkled over my body, and he smeared butter on my forehead, and I was at peace.
As a housekeeper, my highest honor was to give my life in the service of my house. Nobody had been called on to do that in generations. Nanta knew my sacrifice; my grandmothers’ love enveloped me, and they accepted me as one of their own.
After the mourning period was over, Kajjin had a small onyx figure of a cat carved in my memory, and he engraved it with my name so that it was a grandmother tablet, and that is where I now live, watching over the house from a place of honor. Another keeps Nanta now; I think he is my great-grandson, and he does it nearly as well as I did.
But sometimes he forgets the caraway, until I remind him with a cat-screech. So all is well.
FAST came about as an idea in my head whilst sitting down and planning my Skyrim Tales Diary series on Tumblr. I was unsatisfied with certain aspects of Skyrims Economy regarding player collected/made ingredients and items etc. Having played around with the wonderful Hunting in Skyrim mod by B1gBadDaddy (http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/18866/?) I thought that I would have a go at my own changes and this is the end result.
Place the FASTFirewood.esp, FASTSmelting.esp, FASTTanning.esp & FASTTAnningDG.esp in your /Skyrim/Data/ directory. Since at this time I am unaware of any conflicts, I would suggest using Skyrim's Data manager (or a mod manager of your choice) to load this mods files last in the order
