Raymond Feist - Talon of the Silver Hawk

T ALON SNEEZED.

‘Too much pepper,’ said Leo.

Talon wiped away the tears in his eyes with the hem of his apron and nodded. He had been working in the kitchen for a year now and over the last four months had come to feel at home there. He still served elsewhere at Kendrick’s discretion, but most of his time recently had been spent with the cook.

Four months earlier Leo had walked in one day and beckoned Talon to his side, showing him how to prepare dishes for baking pies, a simple task involving lard and wheat flour. From there he had moved on to washing vegetables and fruits. He then worked his way up to preparing simple dishes. In the last few weeks, Talon had learned the basics of baking, cooking meats, and was now being trained how to make sauces.

Talon smiled.

‘What’s amusing you, young fellow?’ asked Leo.

‘I was just thinking how much more there is to getting food ready to eat than what I learned as a boy. My father and the other men of my village would sit around a large spit upon which a deer turned, talking about the hunt or crops or which son was the fastest runner, and the women baked bread or cooked stews or soup.

‘My mother would have gawked in wonder at the spices in your cupboard, Leo.’

‘Simple fare can be challenging, too, Talon. A spit of beef must be dusted lightly with salt and pepper at the right moment, then graced, perhaps, with a kiss of garlic just before presentation.’

Talon grinned. ‘My mother would never have understood presentation.’

‘You’ve only seen the barest glimpse of it, boy,’ said Leo. ‘What we do here is wasted upon commoners for the most part, and even those lords and ladies who stop by on their travels would count our fare rustic compared to the tables at which they’ve dined in the great cities.

‘The noble tables of Rillanon and Roldem are each night piled high with the efforts of dozens of cooks and hundreds of kitchen whelps such as yourself. Each plate is graced with just such a portion of this dish, just such a portion of that delicacy. There is an art in this, boy.’

Talon said, ‘If you say so, Leo. Though I’m not sure what you mean by “art”. We have no such word in my language.’

Leo stopped stirring his own reduction sauce and said, ‘You don’t?’

Talon was fluent in Roldemish and now found himself being corrected only on pronunciation and occasionally on his delight in profanity, which seemed to amuse Leo, irritate Robert, and outrage Martha. The Orosini were comfortable with sex and other natural body functions, and Talon found it oddly amusing that describing defecation or the sex act was considered ‘bad’ in Roldemish society.

‘No,’ said Talon. ‘The closest the Orosini tongue can get is “graceful” or “beauty”, but the idea of doing something just to do it is … not something I grew up with.’ Talon had come to terms with the destruction of his family over the last year. Rather than the terrible pain it had given him, now it had become more of a dark memory which haunted him from time to time. The desperate anguish was gone, for the most part. Learning to do new things was part of the reason; and Lela was the rest.

‘Well, then,’ said Leo. ‘You learn something new every day.’

Talon agreed. ‘We have –’ he corrected himself, ‘– had art in some of the crafts the women practise. My grandmother made patterned blankets that were prized by everyone in the village. Our shaman and his acolytes would make prayer … you don’t have a word for it, circles of patterns of coloured sand. They would chant and pray while they worked, sometimes for days, in a special tent that they would put up and work inside. When they were finished, the entire village would gather to see the work and to chant as the wind took the prayer to the gods. Some of them were beautiful.’ Talon paused. ‘Those paintings Kendrick hangs in the dining room …’

‘Yes?’ asked Leo.

‘I wish some of my grandmother’s blankets or the sand prayer-circles could be remembered like that, hung on a wall for people to see. They were beautiful.’

‘An eye for beauty, young Talon, is a gift.’ Leo said.

Just then, Lela walked into the kitchen.

‘And speaking of beauty …’ muttered Leo with a grin.

Talon glanced at the girl and smiled slightly. His people could mask their feelings around strangers, but he felt now that the kitchen-staff were his family and everyone knew of his relationship with Lela. He had slept in her bed almost every night for the better part of the last year. Close to sixteen years of age, a man by the standards of his people, he would have been wed and a father by now had his village survived.

Lela returned his gesture with a smile.

‘To what do I owe this pleasure?’ asked Leo. ‘Is the washing done?’

‘Yes,’ she said pertly. ‘Meggie and Martha are folding the last of the dyed bedding and I came to see what needed to be done here.’

‘Of course you did,’ said the cook with a chuckle. He moved Talon gently aside, dipped a spoon into the sauce the young man was preparing and tasted it. He stared off into space reflectively for a long moment, then said, ‘Simple, yet … bland.’ His fingers danced across the small jars of spices before him, picking up a pinch of this, a dash of that, which he added to the sauce. ‘This is for chicken, lad, and slowly roasted chicken. It is a bland meat, not full of flavour like those lovely partridges and turkeys you bring home from the hunt. Those require a simple sauce to bring out the bird’s taste. This sauce needs to give the bird flavour. Here!’ He poked the spoon at Talon’s lips. ‘Taste!’

Talon did so and nodded. It was exactly the sauce he had been trying to make. ‘So I should have used more spices, Leo?’

‘By twice, my boy, by twice.’ The cook put down the spoon and wiped his hands on his apron. ‘Now, be a good lad and go and help Lela wash vegetables.’

Talon nodded and went over to the large wooden sink attached to the rear wall of the kitchen. It had a drain that cleverly went out through the wall and emptied into a small culvert that ran along the base of the building, then into a pipe under the ground and eventually into the cess pit Kendrick had dug beyond the outer wall of the courtyard. He hefted a bucket of cold water and stood there, pouring slowly while Lela washed the freshly-dug vegetables. It was the first of the spring crop and the thought of fresh carrots, radishes, and turnips made Talon’s mouth water.

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