A dozen souls, and every one of them pedals a cart that goes nowhere.
I stood in the doorway and could not make sense of it. In my village a man on a wheel is a man carting turnips to market, or hauling stone, or bearing his sick child to the abbey. There is a road under him. There is a reason. These carts are nailed to the floor. They spin and spin and the room does not move and the turnips are not carried and no child is saved.
The air is thick as a threshing barn in August. They sweat as I sweat at harvest, faces red, mouths open, chests heaving like men who have run from wolves. But there are no wolves. There is no field. There is only a shouting woman on a raised cart, driving them the way the reeve drives us, faster, faster, and they obey her gladly. They have paid coin to be driven so.
I have paid coin only to the priest, and only to be spared the fire.
The strangest of it: at the end, they stop. And nothing is done. No sheaf is bound, no wall is mended, no beast is fed. All that good sweat, wrung out and left upon the floor to dry. In a hard winter a family could have lived on the labor these dozen spent for naught.
God gave us strong backs to keep us from starving. These have strength to spare, and spend it turning a wheel that grinds no grain.
Truly they are blessed, and truly they do not know it, and I fear for the day the Lord asks them what they made.