It was five in the morning and Roggles had gone to bed just two hours prior when the first knock – a polite, solid, firm, socially-acceptable-yet-unshy knock – came at the door. ‘You can rest when you’re dead,” her master had told her the previous day; and indeed, almost every day.
This was something that Roggles conceded may have been true, but was still too damned on-the-nose for a coffin-maker to say.
The second knock arrived as she hobbled her way to the workshop door, and was exactly as unyieldingly businesslike as the first. She opened it and came face to face with the most authoritative knuckles she’d ever seen, on the most dutiful arms she’d ever known, attached to the most boring man she’d ever met.
“Greetings, salutations, and obeisance to your renowned and beloved master, the coffin-maker Uul,” proclaim the boring man in a voice so controlled and competent that Roggles nearly fell asleep again on the spot. “I come on behalf of my own master, whose name may in fact be known to you, whose time of departure from this world draws nigh, whose title demands respect: the Princess C-I. She would like to commission a coffin fit to stand among her ancestors in their burial city and command the respect and admiration that she is due from her peers of the past, and she would like it done by tomorrow morning, lest it be late for her death. If you should deliver this commission on time, riches shall be yours.”
Roggles looked at him and felt whole universes of thought and motion slide like glass sheets across her mind, obscuring every inch of him for beautiful amounts of time that had no name.
“Sure,” she said. “Thanks. Great. It would be my master’s happiness. Pleasure. Yes. Thanks.”
So perfected was the messenger that this was accepted with a slight and completely-sincere nod, and commission thus delivered, he departed and left Roggles standing there with several multi-faceted concepts floating in her head.
“Bed,” she decided. “No. Bed, then Uul. No no no, Uul then bed. Yes.”
“Is this the workplace of the coffin-maker Uul?” asked someone four inches away from her face.
“Yes,” said Roggles’s mouth while the rest of her disentangled itself from the burning wreckage of her brain. Her eyes reported back first: there was a warrior in front of her; unnecessarily large and unnecessarily filthy and openly wearing at least six different weapons in town, all of which were suspiciously well-cared-for and worn. She was picking her teeth with a sliver of bone.
“Good. Open up your ears and listen carefully: Caul, the bandit-lord, just died. Little Caul wants a box for his dad, a respectable one. Get it done by tomorrow and we don’t come back and cut your ears and noses off. Got it?”
“Yes,” said Roggles’s mouth, now guided by her survival instinct while the rest of her brain organized a riot.
“Good. Remember: tomorrow night, ears and noses. See you soon.”
And then she finished picking her teeth, flicked the bone-sliver into Roggles’s eye, and left.
“Aaaugh,” said Roggles.
“Pardon me, but do you think you could do me a favour?” asked a very small and washed-out man. His face looked like old clothes.
“Urgh,” said Roggles.
“It’s just that I need a coffin.”
“By tomorrow, right?” managed Roggles, rubbing at her streaming eye. “Why not. Everyone else does. What’s the big rush?”
“I am cold and miserable and alone and have nowhere to go or be or do, and I would like to not leave my remains in a mess for someone else to tidy up,” said the man. “I’m sorry to say this, but I cannot pay you.”
Roggles’s brain froze, her mouth tried to apologize, and her conscience jammed them both, resulting in a blank stare fit to age milk. Luckily the overwhelming awkwardness of the moment caused her back to seize up in such a way that made her chin nod, and so reassured, the man went on his way.
***
“Quite a racket out there this morning,” said Uul as she and roggles took their morning hot drinks. Uul sipped sparingly. Uul did everything sparingly. Uul was less extravagant than most people’s skeletons. “Have we work to do?”
“Yes,” said Roggles. “Little Caul wants us to make a coffin for his father by tomorrow or he’ll cut off our ears and noses.”
“Mmm,” said Uul. She took another sip. “Was there more? I heard more than one visitor.”
“Isn’t that enough?”
“Enough is when you’ve done everything you can.”
“Princess C-I is dying. She wants the most opulent coffin you can imagine by tomorrow so she can show off to her dead relatives in their dead city.”
“Please be quiet when you’re treasonous,” said Uul, carefully adding a single pinch of aromatic pollen to her mug. “Well. That’s quite a set of commissions.”
“There’s one more.”
“Really? I didn’t hear anything.”
“The quiet little man from down the way is going to die and wants a coffin by tomorrow. He said he didn’t want to make a mess for anyone.”
Uul put down her mug.
“Then that is what we will do first,” she said.
“He can’t pay,” Roggles said.
“Oh, we all do that eventually. He just doesn’t have any money, and that’s less important. Now bring me my tools.”
***
The small man’s coffin was made from the same timber that was set aside for the Princess and the bandit-lord. Uul was very specific about that.
“The outside may show what it pleases,” she said, “but the essence must be the same. You know this by now.”
The outside in question was kept modest. In the end, the coffin was perfectly measured, perfectly trimmed, and perfectly unadorned and undecorated. It was a coffin, absolutely nothing less and infinitely nothing more.
“Good,” said Uul, whose sleeves had begun the day rolled-up and had someone migrated farther north from there. “Now that the hard one’s over, we can do the simple things. The Princess wanted luxury, yes? Open the safe and bring me everything that’s inside it. The big one in the basement that’s sealed into the wall.”
Roggles did this and in the deep dank dark and crumbled, mildewing brick of the basement was confronted with enough wealth to blind a less groggy human. So overwhelmed was she by the luxury of the jewels and the precious metals on display that the notion of stealing any of them didn’t enter her head until half the day had passed and she was just fitting the last of the cut diamonds into a beautiful spiralling pattern in the center of the enormous coffin’s lid that had been fashioned to reflect the light of the setting sun in such a way – when combined with the gold inlay – as to make it seem aflame with inner light.
“You know, I could have stolen one of these – just one, a very small one – and left,” she said aloud, because the hot drinks had been a very long time ago and the line between dreams and reality was getting fuzzy again.
“Yes, but you wouldn’t,” said Uul. “And besides, you’d miss out on the fun part: now we’re going to build the coffin of Caul.”
This caused Roggles to remember her ears and nose, and she was at once more awake than she’d been in years.
“The thing about this coffin,” said Uul, “is that it must contain burial wealth. A bandit-lord left destitute in death will never bribe his way past the walls of forever, and a bandit-lord without a very secure coffin is a bandit-lord that will be left destitute in death in very, very short order. We will build it thick, and we will build it strong, and we will build it to be as greedy and grasping as Caul himself.”
And so they did; constructing a mighty and sturdy frame that was nigh-impermeable to blade, blow, or burning, and inside that frame Uul did things with wood and metal that turned the entire thing into a giant finger-trap that would accept a single big, bulky band-lord body eagerly into its depths but would never permit it – or its gilded wealth – to leave again.
“Now, I think that’s a good day’s work,” said Uul, stretching her arms out with an alarming series of pops snaps and crackles. “I’m going to bed. You know I’m a little slow-footed, so would you be kind and answer the door when the callers come? It’d be a shame to lose our ears and noses after we did such fine work to preserve them.” And of course Roggles didn’t say no, being an apprentice, and so she went to bed with a brain made of fizzing nerves and a soul made of lunk-lead-weariness and an honour guard of three carefully-shrouded coffins.
The last, at least, did not bother her. She’d met plenty of those, and slept as peacefully among them as a babe in a basket until someone hammered on the door less than a half-second after she’d finally begun to rest.
“AWAKE,” shouted a large voice, as a large boot kicked the door. “Caul’s getting cold and Little Caul’s getting impatient. You got the damned body-box yet?”
“Yes,” said Roggles as she surged upright and fell over and scrabbled and got up and almost fell over and caught herself on a coffin and staggered to the door and opened it and said ‘yes’ sixteen more times. “Yes. Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.”
“You’re hilarious,” said the warrior, who’d brought a small and obnoxious pony and two slightly dirtier warriors and a sturdy cart to carry the load. “That plus the box ears you your nose and ears back, lucky girl! See you next time.”
And with this cheerful threat Roggles was left standing in the doorway with a bladder full of melting icewater and a heart in her throat and a great and incredible amount of relief pouring out of her skull and running over her shoulders like liquid sunshine.
“Pardon me,” said a very small voice at her elbow, one million miles away, “but did you manage to spare a coffin for me? Even a very old or broken one would do.”
“Yes,” said Roggles beatifically. “Yes we did. Do you have, uh, anyone else to –”
“Oh no,” said the quiet small man, who had brought only an old half-broken wheelbarrow that groaned under the coffin’s weight like a dying cow. “No, no. Nobody at all.”
And he left, and with him left Roggles’s good mood, and so it was with a pensive and solemn and vaguely furrowed face that she was discovered by the officers and ministers of Princess C-I, which they complimented her for greatly.
“It is an expression worthy of a coffin-maker,” the under-official’s assistant conveyed to her as he handed over a little box containing some slips of waxed paper that were more valuable than every bit of wealth that had gone aboard the coffin itself. “Keep that up and more people will come to you than your master, someday. Uul’s craft is admirable, but her manner is light.”
“Thanks,” said Roggles, and so tired was she that she managed not to laugh while she said it, and it made her bow exceptionally deep besides. This raised her esteem in their eyes and in her own, so when Uul finally made it downstairs she found Roggles and their hot drinks in an unusually content mood for being barely-alive.
“Payment’s here,” she said, passing the exquisite little casket and its priceless cargo to her master.
“Oh, it can go downstairs later; I’m not sure I’d trust either of us on that staircase right now. I overheard our visitors, but not much of what they said in specific; I take it there were no problems?”
“No problems at all,” said Roggles, mouth full of warm brew and mind full of beautiful, slothful clouds. “One-two-three, out the door. Right in a row.”
“Two-one-three,” corrected Uul. “We lined them up at the door in order of size from smallest to largest, remember?”
“Oh fuck,” said Roggles’s mouth. Then her brain, which was a bit slower on the uptake, threw up.
***
They took the rest of the day off – or at least Roggles did, at Uul’s urging. She was no use with the shakes and she needed the rest, or so she was told.
So she slept by the doorway in her cot and slept well and truly and infinitely until she was woken in the evening by cheering and yelling and someone playing an instrument very badly and then someone stuck their head in the door and yelled “CAUL IS DEAD!” directly into her ear, to which she reacted with incredibly politeness.
“Mmmnrfuck!”
“CAUL IS DEAD!” the visitor – who was the local street-meat-maker, she hazily recognized – called again into her face. “AND HIS HEIRS, TOO! HIS COFFIN WAS SO AFLOAT WITH GOLD AND GEMS THAT HIS MEN FOUGHT ONE ANOTHER TO THE DEATH OVER IT, AND THE FEW SURVIVORS TOOK WHAT THEY COULD AND FLED! CAUL IS DEAD AND GONE, HOORAY!” And having said this he threw a meat pastry onto Roggles’s lap and left to yell at someone else.
Roggles tried to comprehend the significance of this and gave up to focus on pastry. This brought her meager success until the door opened a crack and hit her toe.
“SFHGIT!”
“Pardon the intrusion,” said the under-official’s assistant, a bit louder than he’d been that morning due to the necessity of speaking over a small war’s-worth of celebration, “but I come bearing word of Departed Princess C-I’s estate, by commission of Princess C-U.” And so saying so, he produced a small box, identical to the one Roggles had received that morning, and bowed with incredibly depth and skill, managing to tip himself almost but not quite to the point of simply falling over. “No other tomb in all the burial city boasts a work of craft as perfected as her coffin; in lacking adornment, it has granted her dignity that sets it apart from her peers past and present. There will be no mistaking her resting place for any other, nor can it be outshone by splendour, nor can it be matched in craftsmanship. Please take this paltry reward, and with it the gratitude and esteem of the Departed Princess’s estate.”
And having made this speech and having made note of Roggles’s state of comprehension and having been possessed of ears in the vicinity of the ongoing festivities, the under-official’s assistant made himself very scarce as quickly as was politely possible.
Roggles sat at the door and stared. Then she finished her meat pastry, because that was about what she could manage right now.
“Oh lovely,” said Uul, who was sneakily quiet even when she wasn’t trying to be. “Did you get a second one?”
“No,” said Roggles, emerging from somewhere deep inside herself to feel like a heel.
“Ah, that’s alright, that’s alright. Accept the treats life hands you, don’t go complaining they weren’t big enough. I take it things have worked out?”
“Somehow. Mostly. Probably?”
“Excuse me,” said a very small voice from the doorway – which the under-official’s assistant had neglected, perhaps, to close quite as diligently as he might have. “But might I have a moment of your attention, if it’s no trouble please?”
The quiet man was there.
“What can I do for you?” said Uul.
“Well,” said the small quiet man, “I regret to say that I must return your coffin.”
“Oh damn. Was it not good enough?”
“Oh no no no! Far from it! It was beautiful. Is beautiful. I’ve brought it back, if you can reclaim it. The thing is, it was too kind. I took it and myself out to a lonely place where I wouldn’t be any trouble to anyone, and I dug a small grave, and I put the coffin in the grave, and I put myself in it, and that coffin gave me the snuggest, gentlest hug I’ve ever felt since my mother passed, and it moved me to tears and made me think of the love that can be given freely even to strangers by a person of sufficient kindness. And so I have come to ask, O Uul, master-maker of coffins, if you might perhaps have the time and space to spare to train an apprentice.”
Roggles felt as though the world had very carefully moved away from under her feet and left her standing above a tiny but infinitely deep hole whose contents were entirely unknown to her.
“You know,” said Uul thoughtfully. “I believe I don’t, for I already have a very fine apprentice here who – just now – taught me a few things either of us ever considered about customer satisfaction. But small spaces to spare are part of the coffin-maker’s trade, and as for time… well, as I have said before, I can rest when I’m dead. I already can’t manage myself, let alone one apprentice; why not two? Roggles, go get us something warm from the market. More filling than fancy, please – and more grease than grace. It’s been a long day.”
***
It wasn’t until they were done eating that Roggles realized that every piece of living space she occupied was now cut in half. But it had been a long day, so that didn’t matter.