Hirt sat on the edge of the bed and listened to the silence.
That was the part he could not get used to.
It wasn't the ache that had moved into his shoulders, nor the way his fingers stayed half-curled even when he laid them flat on his knees. It wasn't the grey grime he kept finding in the creases of his knuckles no matter how long he scrubbed.
It was the quiet.
A shepherd's home was never far from the gentle chimes of the bell on the lead ewe. He heard it even when asleep. A soft clonk when the ewe grazed, a longer swing when she raised her head, nothing at all when the flock had settled to sleep inside its part of their shared house. He never needed to rise and look. The bell told him everything.
The iron bell at the mill told him nothing.
It commanded.
It hung over the long shed by the river, the size of a butter churn. When it struck at first light it struck for men and not for beasts. You came when it spoke. You stopped when it spoke. Between the two strokes you belonged to the machines.
Suns, how they turned.
The first morning, he had thought that he was being given a flock after all. Rows of them down the length of the shed. Squat wooden frames crowded with spindles, each drawing down, pulling fleece fine as smoke. A whole herd, standing in their pens as he walked between them.
But a flock breathes and shifts and leans toward you. A flock knows your voice and smell. These only spun. The waterwheel out in the river drove them all to spin at the same speed, in the same direction, for as long as the water ran. They never strayed. They never lambed. They never sickened in the cold rains of spring and made a man sit up the whole night with them. They never once needed him to love them or stroke their soft fleeces.
Hirt looked at his hands in the tallow-light.
He could shut his eyes right now and be back on the high pasture.
He did it sometimes on the walk home, when the second Sun was going down behind the bluff, flashing across the great rings in the sky.
Up there the green ran on forever. Proper green, the wet living green of new grass after rain, not the dull green and brown they steeped the cloth in for the soldiers.
Up there the only thing that kept a rhythm was the wind. And the mountain wind often changed its mind. He'd had the whole vault of the sky over his head, a dog who understood him better than most men did, and time enough to watch a single cloud drag itself across the sky.
Up there he'd had everything but coin.
That was the sum he did most nights on the edge of the bed.
He set the green hills on one side, and on the other he set Greta, asleep in their bed with both hands laid over the swell of her belly.
A man could love the hills and feed no one.
The mill did not ask him to love it. It only asked him to come when the bell rang, and in return it would see his wife through her birth, and his son or daughter into a world with enough food to fill their belly and make them grow tall and strong.
On the stool by the door lay Trudi's clothes for the morning. He reached over and touched them unthinkingly. A heavy tunic and a pair of hose, both cut from the same sheets that went up to the soldiers at Lord Karl's castle. Maybe it was exactly his line that the cloth came from.
It was a sweet thought, that his daughter would wear something he made.
Once again, she had come in from the castle with chalk on her fingers, and made him admire her name scrawled across a thin piece of paper, every letter in its place. Around a mouthful of bread she told him all about how the spinning frames made the threads run all by themselves. He was a bit embarrassed that she knew more about it than he did, the one who actually worked there, but the way she spoke about it—as though it were the finest wonder in the world—made him listen attentively. She no longer asked about the lambs. But she talked about machines the way he had once talked about a clear morning on the high pasture. She had found her own flock.
He smoothed Trudi’s tunic flat and at last lay down beside his wife.
The day’s aches settled over him like a fleece.
As his breathing steadied, he could hear it.
Somewhere in the distance the river rushed toward the wheel, patiently waiting for the bell.
Beside him, Trudi turned and murmured.
He wondered where she roamed—the high pasture, or the long shed she would grow up beside. He had given her the hills in stories. The mill would give her everything else.
He wondered too, as sleep took him, what he would dream of tonight. The green hills, with the gentle wind and the wandering cloud and the little bronze bell going clonk in the dark. Or the long shed, and the wooden flock that never strayed.
Whatever each of them dreamed, the bell would wake them both.