There is a small chest that keeps a demon, and my lord has set it beside his own bed on purpose.
All the day it sits quiet, patient, its little face marked like a sundial that has swallowed the sun and hidden it inside. I asked what feeds it. No one could say. It wants no hay, no coal, no wick, no water. It simply waits.
Then, in the black hours before the cock has even shaken the dew from his feathers, it screams. Not the scream of a beast in a snare. A screaming with no throat in it. And my lord, groaning, reaches out and strikes it, and it goes still, like a struck dog, until it decides to scream again.
This is the part I cannot make sense of. A man wakes when the light finds him, or when the ox lows, or when his belly gnaws, as the good Lord ordered the world. But my lord has bought himself a captive rooster made of nothing, so that he may rise even before there is toil to rise for. He rises into the dark. He rises for no harvest I can see.
I have known men to pray for one more hour of sleep the way a starving man prays for bread. Here is a man who has more hours than he knows what to do with, and he has built himself a little iron devil whose only work is to steal them back.
God keep me poor. A poor man is woken by his own suffering, which at least he understands.