Ch. 459 - Building a Life (part 2)

The foundation was the slowest part of the entire job, but physically, it was the easiest. He’d been able to use magic for almost all of that, and only had to lift each stone twice: once to put it on his sledge, and again to fit them into place. The timbers, as well, were fairly easy, since he used magic to cut the pockets they’d slide into. That work, at least, was assisted by hiring a few men from one of the nearby villages to help him fit them all into place.

That job had only lasted a couple of days, but over the course of it, every single laborer managed to imply that Simon was a lucky man for finding such a beautiful bride. They wouldn't hear any explanations to the contrary. Instead, they offered him a wink and a nod like he was protesting too much.

When all of the heavy lifting was done, though, the hard work truly began. Once Simon had the vertical stakes in place, he enlisted Millie to help him do the daub and wattle instead of keeping her occupied elsewhere. Still, he gave her the easy part. She gathered reeds and willow branches and wove them between the stakes, creating a flimsy fence that would serve as the anchor for the clay that he would gather.

Constructing walls in this way was simple enough; he’d never done more than help others with patch jobs, but there was little that could go wrong. All that daub and wattle construction required was a structure with strong vertical branches that was woven through with thinner, flexible horizontal branches. It was like making the ugliest, coarsest tapestry imaginable, and then coating the whole thing with a muddy clay coating, because you were ashamed at how it looked.

There were lots of particulars, and Simon spent a couple of nights at their local tavern, asking for tips before he started mixing clay, straw, and sand together in just the right amounts to create a gooey, lumpy mess. Working with Millie was almost as fun as it was exhausting, and they made steady progress. Even though they still slept in a tent, the walls of their tiny fortress slowly grew up around them.

Millie seemed very pleased to be helping, and worked hard at her task, though eventually Simon caught up with her, near the end of the west wall, despite a several-day headstart. Simon paused his plastering work then and switched to helping her, and after a few trips to gather more material, they had enough switches and reeds that he expected they’d have to burn a few when all was said and done.

“It really is starting to look like a home,” she remarked as they were tidying up for the day. “But only if you stand exactly in this spot.”

Simon moved to join her and found that she was right. The cottage hadn’t been whitewashed yet, and it didn’t have a roof, a chimney, or even a front door, but it had two good walls, and from a certain point of view, it really was starting to look nice.

As they made the walls, Simon was too tired at night to research or work on any new magical implements, so he mostly just chatted with Millie as they ate simple meals over the fire or fancier ones retrieved from the village.

“What I miss most is having a proper kitchen,” Simon admitted one night. “There’s only so much you can do over an open flame, but with a decent setup and some proper crockery, I’m actually a decent chef.”

“A cook and a mage,” she answered cheerfully. “Truly the stuff of miracles. Why would you bother to learn to cook, though, if you could just summon a nice meal? Is such a miracle really beyond the bounds of magic?”

Simon answered that it would be frivolous and wasteful, but it was a riddle that kept recurring in his mind the rest of the week. What would be the constraint that would keep me from making something like that? Is it the words I have? Is it a lack of imagination?

Meiren was quite literally the word of creation. He might use it as fire most of the time, but was there a reason he couldn’t use it to make a medium rare steak, or even a cheeseburger? Would he have to add words for earth and plants?

He eventually decided that the word of lesser cheeseburger would be something like Meiren Aufvarum Hyakk Zyvon Vosden. While he had no desire to test it right now, what the thought experiment really told him was that he was still thinking too small about this world’s magic. If he could summon a cheeseburger, which was still very much an open question, why couldn’t he summon a wand, or even a monster?

A monster like a golem would doubtlessly be complicated, and he doubted that he knew enough about anatomy and biology to make true life, but a false life was certainly doable. Mages less talented than him seemed to do it pretty regularly with zombies.

Having a golem would certainly speed all of this up, he thought. Pity the farmers would react rather poorly to it.

All it took was one look back at the scorched ruins of Castle Gravenstone, a few hundred yards away, to remind himself that he couldn’t test anything so obvious out in this place, but he still thought about it. How could he not, while he was harvesting this much clay?

He could sculpt a servitor to be artistic as well as functional, with ball joints, and then harden the whole thing with magic. He could hide the runes of activation underneath a breastplate… No, he corrected himself. I could hide the whole thing in platemail to better disguise it, or maybe I could just animate platemail by itself…

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Simon’s thoughts went round and round while he worked, but they were eventually banished when they finished all of the wattle, and Simon enlisted Millie to mix the clay and sand with the straw using her bare feet. It was like a dirtier version of stomping grapes into wine, and as much as he sped up his work, it slowed him down significantly, because he couldn’t help but look at the spectacle.

Millie was pretty enough, but he never really looked at her in a sexual way until her skirts were hiked up to her knees as she moved. Those moves weren’t quite a dance, but they were close enough that he found them titillating as he got flashes of her pale thighs whenever he fetched more daub.

He looked away to preserve her modesty, but after he’d been reminded of what a pretty young thing she was, it was harder to sleep next to her. As Simon lay awake that night, he chastised himself for his weakness. The girl is barely twenty. You’d be too old for her even if you were your physical age. As it is, you’re more than ten times her age. What could you possibly have in common with her?

Those stray thoughts only got worse as the heat of summer arrived and slowly intensified. Simon often worked stripped to his waist on the hottest days and took a dip into the water with every load of clay he harvested from the river banks with an adze. Sometimes, though, Millie followed suit, and when she did, her blouse was made practically transparent, showing him just how juicy the forbidden fruit could be.

If it had just been her body he was attracted to, that would have been easier, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. She was a kind person with a bright soul.

As they worked on the third and eventually fourth wall, Simon tried to put some emotional distance between the two of them, but paradoxically, that only made Millie more clingy. She knew he would be leaving soon, and even though she never brought it up, it was clear that it was weighing on her.

Before this, you were in her life for a week, Simon reminded himself. You’re already going above and beyond here because you dragged her through a portal. If not for that, you wouldn’t even remember her name in a couple of lives. You don’t owe her anything more than this.

It was a simple message, but he had trouble making himself believe it when she told him stories about what it was like growing up in a simple community not so different from where they were now. The lottery had screwed up her life, and then Simon had gone and screwed it up a second time.

He had plenty of time to think about that as they finished the fourth and final wall, and he marked where the chimney would go, halfway between the two planned hearths. After that, the last thing they had to do to complete the walls was whitewash them.

Simon did that with a smooth coating of lime over the course of three days while Millie sprinkled water behind him as he went to keep them moist. According to the men he spoke to about the process, the step was vital, or the cottage would get cracks when it dried too quickly, and Simon had no desire to do this backbreaking step twice.

When he finished that, and the maid was off cleaning up, Simon used his talisman of earth to solidify the walls further. They wouldn’t stand up to dragon fire or anything, but as the cold rippled through the building, he felt quite confident that no amount of goblins would ever manage to burn it down.

I should visit this place in future ages, he told himself as he looked upon it with pride. To see how well it stands up to the tests of time.

When that was done, the house still wasn’t complete. They had to do the roof, the floor, the door, and the chimney at a minimum. He probably also needed to do shutters, proper windows, and arrange for someone to make Millie some furniture, but that all felt doable. It was only the height of summer.

To celebrate, Simon paid Burlwick’s innkeeper several silver coins to prepare a small feast for them. It was a complete surprise to Millie. He sent her to fetch their dinner as he often did while he worked on framing a window. Then, when she was out of sight, he mounted up and rode the long way, beating her there by ten minutes, which was enough time to help the innkeeper's wife finish setting up one of their rooms on the ground floor as Simon and Millie’s private dining room for the evening.

By the time she arrived, he was sitting there casually as if he hadn’t just spent the last few minutes frantically moving furniture around.

“Simon!” she cried out in shock. “What’s all this?”

“I just thought our progress was worth celebrating,” Simon answered with a shrug. “We’ve got four walls. That’s practically done as far as I’m concerned.”

“Always another magic trick with you,” she said with a smile as she surveyed their tiny feast. “If you'd told me you’d done all this, I would have freshened up!”

Simon almost told her she looked beautiful the way she was, but he held his tongue and at the last moment said, “I would have, if you owned more than the one outfit.”

That earned him a playful slap, but soon enough, they were feasting. Their meal was still rustic and in no way compared with the dinner they’d had at the count’s, but it was the first meal they’d eaten at a table with utensils in a month, and that, as much as anything, made all the difference.

That night, they shared a pork roast with roasted potatoes, crusty bread, and a sweet berry pie, and they did their fair share of drinking, too. They started with a bottle of red wine, but after that ran out, Simon had several more beers besides as they traded jokes and talked about futures.

Well, about her future, anyway. Simon didn’t mention that his future was in the mountains, in that portal he’d found while searching for firewood. Still, he was more than a little jealous of hers.

He allowed himself to silently acknowledge that if he ever completed the Pit, this was the sort of life he’d like to have. A peaceful land, few neighbors, and all the room in the world to do whatever the hell I want, he thought wistfully.