We stand in a line, in the belly of a house that shakes like a threshing floor, and we wait to make water.
I have queued for bread in the lean months. I have queued for the priest to lay ash upon my brow. Never did I think to see men and women queue for the privy, patient as sheep, when the ditch stands empty not thirty paces off. But there is no ditch here. Only a door, and behind it a chamber that swallows filth without a nightsoil man to cart it, and clean water that leaps up cold at the wave of a hand, no bucket, no well, no drawing of the rope. Sorcery, plain as day, and none here cross themselves.
The women go two and three together, whispering, holding one another up, and come out laughing at nothing, their cheeks wet, their eyes red as if from weeping or from smoke. There is a girl before me who has been shaking her little glowing tile at her own reflected face for the length of a Paternoster, saying words to no one. Bewitched, poor creature. I would fetch the priest, but I do not think the priest comes to this place.
They are not hungry. That is the thing I cannot put down. Not one of them is hungry, nor cold, nor working. They have drunk themselves witless and paid good coin to do it and now they wait, in their fine thin garments, for a warm room to be free.
The good Lord gave us the winter to teach us what waiting is for. These have forgotten. They will remember.