Chapter 34: The Wooden Buckets
Next, we visited a dusty sundries shop and bought two wooden buckets. This transaction was much simpler. Cloaked and anonymous, we were no longer just a pair of urchins; we were paying customers. The shopkeeper barely gave us a second glance as he took our twelve copper coins. With the buckets in hand and the towels slung over our arms, we looked almost legitimate, much like any other citizen on their way to the bathhouse. All that remained was the filth on our faces, a problem we were about to solve.
As we walked, a strange thought, a piece of incongruous logic from my old world, struck me. The towels had been cheap, a mere two coppers each. But in my world's history, the process of making a towel—growing flax or cotton, spinning the thread, dyeing it, and finally weaving it on a loom—was far more complex than making a simple wooden bucket. A cooper could knock out a bucket in an hour from a fallen tree. A towel should have been a luxury item. But here, the towels were soft and cheap, true textiles, not just squares of rough-spun cloth. This meant they had textile mills, proper ones, spitting out cheap cloth on a massive scale. It meant a complete industrial pipeline, from raw material to finished product. Furthermore, the buckets we bought were bound with sturdy iron hoops, not crude wooden ones or simple rope. Unless every cooper had a special arrangement with a blacksmith, it meant that ironworking was also common, perhaps even mass-produced. I thought of the monstrous factories, belching their white smoke into the sky. Perhaps they were not just for power, but for production, for the textiles and iron that formed the very fabric of this strange, contradictory world.
My thoughts were interrupted as we arrived back at the water tower. It served not only the bathhouse and the tenements but also had several public spigots where people could draw water, free of charge. The sight of the clear, clean water flowing from the tap… it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. My throat tightened, and for a moment, I thought I might actually weep with a relief so profound it felt like pain. After days of filth and the visceral memory of that corpse-tainted canal, this was a vision of paradise. Jared and I each filled a bucket. I couldn't wait. I cupped my hands under the spigot and took a long drink. The water was cool and clean on my tongue, with a faint, sweet, mineral taste. It was the taste of life, untainted.
“Now that we have buckets, we can fetch water from here every day,” I said with a relieved smile. But my relief was short-lived. After just a few steps with the half-full bucket, my arm ached, the weight too much for me. Parula’s body was so terribly, frustratingly weak.
“It’s alright, I’ll carry the water from now on,” Jared said, taking the bucket from me without a word of complaint. “Don’t strain yourself.” He had been forced to haul water for MacDuff’s entire gang of ruffians. Carrying enough for just the two of us, he said, felt like a holiday.
We took the buckets to a quiet corner and, using our new towels, began to wash our faces. The moment the wet cloth touched Jared's face, the dirt streaked, turning him into a comical, piebald mess. He looked even dirtier than before. I fared no better. After scrubbing my face three times, the towel was black, and the water in my bucket, once clear, was now a murky, swirling grey—the physical evidence of the filth I had been living in, wearing, breathing. And that was just my face, usually the cleanest part of the body. My hands and feet, my very bones, must be stained with the city's grime. But our goal wasn’t to get perfectly clean here, merely to become presentable enough to be allowed through the hallowed doors of the bathhouse. If there had been no bathhouse, this clean water alone would have felt like a miracle. But now, I was no longer satisfied with just wiping away the surface layer of filth. I wanted more. I wanted to be clean, truly clean, for the first time in this new life. I wanted to wash this entire world off me.
Comments (0)
Please login or sign up to post a comment.