The house is finished, but no one has lived in it yet, and it frightens me more than any barn I have slept in.
There is no fire and yet the room is warm, warm as a July field, and I cannot find the cause. The walls hold heat like a fed belly holds bread, and I did not chop a single log to earn it. That is the first wrong thing.
The second is the quiet. In my village a house speaks: the beasts in the low room, the babes, the old ones coughing out their last winters, the wind arguing with the thatch. Here there is nothing. No breathing but my own. A man alone with four whole walls and no soul to share the warmth.
In my whole life I have never once been alone under a roof. We sleep piled like pups, for warmth and for fear of the dark, and no lord ever gave a peasant a room to keep the silence in.
There is a bright box that glows without flame in the small room, and it holds cold water that runs when I wish it. I did not carry it from the well. It simply comes, obedient as a whipped dog. This is either the Lord's great mercy or a bargain someone made with something that will come collecting.
I knelt on the bare floor and gave thanks, for a man ought to. But I will tell you plain: to have so much and no one to want it beside you is not a blessing.
It is a fine, clean, well-lit way to be forgotten.