For the last hour of the dying day they had prepped in the darkened amber-lit field under the autumn-glow of the harvester moon—countless feet heard shuffling, sacks dragging down footpaths, holding the spuds for the winter crop, for the turnips that kept famine at bay after the oats had been eaten by horse and the rye by man, long after the last crusts of summer wheat bread had been stirred into porridge, in the long shadow of the cold moons, when only barley—long ago brewed into beer—remained to nourish the lowly.

Then, from beyond the Holy Pale, up from the Mountains of Christ—deep in the Devilish East—the sun rose as the amber moon sank in the Dreaming West, and the true workday began, with them all, in their tiresome multitudes, planting spuds as the bells of church, abbey and priory rang out across Christendom. For the length of the Holy Hour of Dawn, as the bells tolled ever more softly, ever less frequently, according to the holy cadence decreed by the Hymnals for that particular daybreak—one great gilded book to each of God’s four seasons—work was not permitted at full toil, but at a deliberate pace, a church law long ago decreed by the Pontiff, to prevent soul-drivers, merchants, lords and croppers from employing the Savior’s waking hour for their noxious gain.

But, as Father’s second, smashing punch in the head forewarned, as the last bell whispered its languid toll and the great merchant horn boomed, announcing the arduous hours of Goodly Toil, the life of the serf of the field and of the servant in houses and shops, was now cruelly in the grasp of the hands of those that God—in his infinite wisdom—had placed above other men. Not until noon, and the bells of the Saint’s Hour tolled mercifully, would the common man once again be in concourse with God.

Then came the long afternoon—the “cropper’s portion” of the day, when the pace must quicken yet more, as any serf still in the field at sundown must be ready to haul sack and cart for hovel or hut. For when the bells tolled in their highest notes, the hour of Holy Mother Church would be upon the realms, and no toil might be practiced, save the forging of sanctified arms and armor, in the hours of night. The night belonged to God, and the witch-hunters and demon-slayers of Holy Mother Church, alone, might be upon the roads once the sun had fallen and been swallowed in the Dreaming West for the first hour of moonrise, when the crimson-splashed sky illuminated the world from that quarter as the Blank Moon rose as a mirror in the eastern sky, before catching fire in its own right. Any serf caught on the road after the Lighting of the Moon and the true fall of night, was in danger of being mistaken for a witch or a demonancer.

The spuds were sinking easily into the spiteful soil as David Able Saul recovered from his father’s punch and pressed with all his might, sinking the spuds of the winter crop a finger deep as his father liked them sunk, all the while imagining that each hole, poked by his sister, Doris, with the sinker stick, was instead the eye-socket of his snoring father, the patriarch of his misery. Doris he dotted on, her being a year younger than David, and already blooming, bringing queries from prospective husbands and merchants, enhancing his fatherly status by association and the unspoken thought that a daughter so comely must have sprung from a mother of uncommon beauty.

Seeing that David was gaining on his sister, Father snarled, “Doris, darling you must keep a pace of Sprat and poke more swiftly, girl, or I will make arrangements with Cropper Trent for a housemaid, and that old bugger will be doing the poking with his pusser.”

David had indeed crowded close to Doris, who drove her poker down into the back of his left hand without so much as a pause in her work. The retrieval of the iron end of the poker from his hand did leave something of a stigmata, from which blood up-welled, as if he had just suffered the first portion of Jesus’ lot at the hands of some Roman military carpenter. Father thought the hole in his hand was a great funny joke, and slapped David on the back so hard that it drove the wind from his little lungs.

Father’s voice then ground out floridly, “My boy might a mere sprat be, but my girl might make of herself a woman called ‘he’! Ha—to work, Sprat, to work!”