“You’re a human girl?” I marveled.
Rielly nodded. “I am—or at least, I was. I don’t suppose I’d be called ‘girl’ now by many.”
“Where are you from? How long have you been here?” I had so many questions.
“I’m from Inverness, and I’ve been here twenty-five years, I think. It’s hard to tell when those around you never age,” she said, motioning at Gavin.
“Are you the only human here?”
“Why don’t you come and help me with some of the daily chores?” Rielly asked. “That way you can ask me all the questions you want, and we won’t bore poor Gavin here to pieces. Gavin, the hunting party has come back. Go listen in on their report.”
Gavin looked at me. I had barely nodded for him to go before he was halfway through the yard. Wow, he wasted no time in getting away from me, I thought sourly. Just then, he turned back and gave me a crooked smile. Our eyes locked, and my heart jumped.
Rielly and I crossed to the western side of the village and approached a croft. It was much more open than the others I’d seen so far: only three sides were walled, the roof slanted away from the front, and inside, the space was filled with high tables, pottery of all shapes and sizes, and food.
“So, angels don’t just eat at festivals then?” I asked, looking at the crocks of ground wheat and root vegetables.
“Yes, they eat, they drink, they dance, and all the rest of it as wee Cassidy explained.” Rielly began organizing bowls and crudely carved spoons. “When they are on earth, angels are like humans in almost every way, except they have supernatural powers, and they can’t be killed by mortals.”
“Well, why don’t the angels just kill all the demons and be done with it?” I asked. “Rid the earth of them. Isn’t that what they’re supposed to do?”
“It’s not quite that simple,” Rielly replied, taking a wooden pitcher from a shelf, and pouring what looked like milk into a knee-high, narrow cylinder that sat nearby on the dirt floor. “There are a lot more demons than you might think. When Lucifer was cast out of heaven, he took a third of the angels with him.”
“A third?” I said. “How? How did he convince them?”
“Evil is contagious,” she answered simply. I had never really thought about it that way, but it did make sense.
She continued, “Since demons are fallen angels, they are physically weaker than angels, so demons avoid open conflict with good because they know they will lose. Even a young lad like Gavin would slice a demon in two soon as look at him. Demons would rather mess with humans.”
I felt a ripple of pride for Gavin, hearing him praised by someone else.
Rielly stopped talking, and looked at me strangely for a minute. Then she shook her head as if to deflect an annoying insect. “Here,” she said, directing me to sit on a small stool next to the bucket of milk. She covered it with a donut-shaped wooden disk and shoved a stick in the hole. She motioned for me to move the stick up and down, which I did.
“Is Gavin really two hundred eighty-three?” I asked. “How is that possible? I thought Gavin said angels didn’t age.”
“They don’t, not really,” Rielly replied. “They’re created, but as baby angels, sent to live with other angels to learn the ropes.” I was right! I thought, remembering Gavin mocking my belief about baby angels. Well, sort of . . .
“That’s why you see the younger angels around here. They’re all apprenticing, as it were. Once they reach a certain level of maturity, they get their assignment—Guardian, Warrior, Governor, Record Keeper, Messenger—and choose the human age appearance that best suits their job.”
“What about Archangel?” I asked, trying to prove I had a least some knowledge of heavenly hosts.
“Archangel isn’t an assignment,” Rielly replied, “it’s a promotion.”
I wondered if it was Gavin’s goal, to be an Archangel, and why he was so devastated at being demoted. Because of me.
After what seemed like hours of pounding the wooden stick, Rielly lifted the lid of the bucket and showed me the results: a light-yellowish cream.
“Butter?” I asked, crinkling my nose involuntarily at the not-so-fresh smell.
“Very good,” she answered.
She lifted the bucket with one hand, and deftly emptied the gooey butter into a larger wooden barrel. She poured wax over the top of the spread, and then used a rock to pound the tight-fitting lid in place. She wrapped the barrel in rope both horizontally and vertically, flipping the two-foot-high tub as if it weighed nothing, even though it had to be over fifty pounds. When she was finished looping and tying the rope, I saw she had woven two even handles, one on each side. She slipped a long, thick stick through the loops.
“Grab on,” she commanded.
I stepped forward and lifted my end of the stick, as she did the same. The barrel was crazy heavy.
“Where are we taking it?” I asked.
“To the bog,” she answered.
CHAPTER 12
By the time we finally stopped walking, my arms were shaking with exhaustion. As we set the barrel down, I began vigorously rubbing above my elbows.
“Do you do this every day?” I asked Rielly.
“Aye, and usually by myself,” she answered. “You’d be surprised how strong you are when you have to be.”
“So this is the bog,” I said, looking around. I’d learned about the famous Scottish bogs in my Rural Studies class at Kingussie, but actually seeing one up close, I wasn’t impressed. Our teacher told us they were like swamps that could suck you down like quicksand, but all I saw in front of us was wet grass and mud.
“’Tis,” Rielly said. “The bog itself is technically outside of the village boundaries, but it’s the nearest one, and we need it.”
“What do we do now?”
“We bury it.”
“By the bog?” I asked.
“In the bog.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Keeps the butter nice and cold. Preserves it for, well, for forever, if I fancied a guess.”
I realized that they didn’t exactly have refrigerators in the village, or electricity. I also noticed we didn’t have anything to dig with.
“How are we going to bury it?” I asked. “I’m assuming, as humans, we can’t walk over there, and besides, we don’t have a shovel.”
“No need.” Rielly smiled. She untied the rope we had used to carry the barrel and fastened it once around the barrel’s middle. She laid the end of the loose rope on the ground at her feet, lifted the barrel over her head like a comic strip character, and heaved it into the bog. It fell with a resounding thunk about three feet away, stuck in the mud, but definitely quite above ground.