Chương 62: Vol 1. The Long Quest For Brisket: Part 10

The craftswoman fiddled with her spectacles as she analyzed the piece of parchment paper the three women had given her. After a couple of moments of this, she turned herself in her chair, slowly took off her reading spectacles, and stared at the three young girls.

"So… you wish me to produce this machine that makes… Texas Smoked Brisket?"

"That would be great."

"In the next few hours," she said evenly.

"That just sounds incredibly reasonable."

"Exactly!" Rava said jubilantly, not understanding the clear sardonicism in her voice. The craftswoman took a deep sigh, pinching the bridge of her muzzle, her tail swiping in exhaustion.

"Well, this is a request from the Serans themselves, so I suppose I have no other choice."

"Correct," Rida said evenly, for which Tavi felt like nudging her, but, exercising her better judgment, decided not to; she liked being alive. Silence.

"Right," the craftswoman said.

"Of course." After muttering some profanities under her breath, she put back on her spectacles and flattened the parchment against her table.

"Now, according to this, uh… lovely drawing, there are two chambers."

"That is correct," Rava said.

"The first one contains the fire."

"Correct."

"The other one contains the actual meat."

"Correct." The craftswoman wrinkled her muzzle incredulously.

"Why?"

"I think," Tavi said cautiously, "the smoke is supposed to, uh, travel up into the other, maybe?"

"Oh, I get it!" Rava said. She stood beside the craftswoman, who did not seem to particularly like how squished up Rava was against her, any notion of personal space having been defenestrated.

"You start a fire in the bottom portion, and the smoke will rise into the second chamber."

"Okay, I can understand that—but again, why?"

"What do you mean?" Rava asked.

"What is the purpose of doing that when you could just roast the meat and get it over with quicker? Cooking it with nothing but smoke and hot air would easily take half a day." Rava shrugged.

"Apparently that is how the people of this Texan Realm like their meat."

"They like meat that has been cooked with hot air for several hours?"

"Apparently."

"And they love it so much they have machines specifically designed for making this?"

"I guess so." The craftswoman shut her eyes.

"These Texans sound more troubled than the Orcs." You might be right, Tavi thought. For the next hour, the craftswoman meticulously placed bricks she had bought from the mason atop one another on the side of her shop, which luckily only faced out into an open field.

Bricks scraped against one another as grey mortar squished between them; dust clung to her claws and fur; at one point, she had asked the other women if they could lend her a helping hand to complete the construction faster, but gave up on that notion after countless mishaps from Rava that left her previous efforts null and void.

When she was finished, in front of her lay two brick chambers, one dedicated to holding firewood and another for holding the meat, with a chimney on top, and four brick poles, one on each corner, that held the other chamber in place. Rava looked over the sketch and back.

"Yeah, that looks about right."

"Wonderful," the craftswoman said, "now…"

"Actually," Rava interrupted.

"We need iron." The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

"What?" Rida said.

"Uh, it looks like we need some iron bars, like on windows, to hold the meat on the inside."

"You could not have told us this before we assembled the machine?" Rava shrugged.

"Didn't seem necessary."

"I think I found the best cut of meat from here to Veyrath," Rida said.

"Oh," Rava said innocently.

"Where—" She yelped as Rida pounced on her and began to roll around and paw cattishly.

"Um," Tavi asked the craftswoman nervously.

"How are we supposed to get the iron bars in there… and take out the meat?" The craftswoman mulled it over for a moment.

"I could possibly cut open an opening in the side, then place a trapdoor; I think the integrity of the structure won't be too fragile from that."

"Alright," Tavi said.

"Do you wish for me to get the iron?"

"Hey, it is your machine." #"That should be simple enough," the blacksmith said.

"But what do you need this for?"

"House Seran requires it for something."

"Oh!" the blacksmith said.

"You didn't need to say more than that!" And so, the blacksmith got to work, heating, hammering, and bending the wrought iron until she had an iron rack and a trapdoor.

Tavi lifted them into her paws—making a little oof sound as she did so—and slowly, laggardly, sluggishly, painfully—oh, horribly, horribly painfully, the weight of the metal pressing down through her small body and into her knees—made her way all the way back to the craftswoman's shop, where, upon stepping in front of the machine, she let the iron fall out of her grip with a clang and fell onto her back. She huffed and puffed.

"Why do you look so tired?" Rava asked. Tavi was not going to dignify her with an answer. # It was time to test the contraption. Rida fed a few pieces of hardwood into the smaller chamber. Rava—non-consensually, mind you—grabbed a flint and steel from the craftswoman's house, and after a few strikes, sparks flew into the chamber. Flames came to life, hot and low. A thin grey tendril curled up into the cooking chamber, then out the mouth of the chimney. Another followed it. Then another.

The craftswoman's ears flicked. She went over to the iron door and opened it. A wave of smoke was released into the surrounding air, and through the thick billows of grey, the craftswoman could see the smoke passing through the newly fitted rack and out the chimney. The air around them now smelt of ash and wood.

"Huh," she said.

"This is an interesting design, I have to say. Still useless, in my opinion, but interesting nonetheless."

"I suppose it is time for the hard part," Rida said, looking at Rava, who just gazed into the low, billowing flames. Rava flinched when Rida punched her in the arm.

"Huh? Oh, right." # Rava had gone to the butcher and gotten a chunk of cow breast that was nearly as tall as Tavi. She had asked the craftswoman if she could use the dining table inside her shop's apartment for the next part of the process. Rava did so anyway, even after the craftswoman had vehemently said, quote, "you absolutely may not in—hey, where are you going?" Rava took out her spices.

"Okay, everyone, he was VERY clear on this: I got to treat this like it's my new husband," she said as she spanked the meat.

"Ugh, gross," Rida said. Tavi didn't let Rida see, but she had a little smirk on her face. Rava pressed the salt and pepper into the surface of the meat, rubbing her paws over the top, one over the other, like a masseuse. She unsheathed her claws ever so slightly, scraping subtle patterns into the ruddy surface, zigzags like canyons, then pressed the salt and pepper into the canyons and folded and pressed the sinew together to trap it inside.

"Okay, I think that is enough," Rida said.

"Oh," Rava pouted, "but we were just about to—""Get it in the machine!" The three women helped each other lift it up into the chamber, failing until the craftswoman, shaking her head, just lifted it herself and put it in the chamber.

"And now all we have to do is wait," Rida said. Tavi collapsed into the grass.

"I do not know about you, but I will be sleeping." Rida sat down as well.

"I could use some rest as well." Rava sat down.

"Me too." And so the three girls all fell into one large cat pile, having a real moment's rest for once, with Rida on the bottom, Tavi curled against her side, and Rava sprawled gracelessly across both of them. The afternoon sun beat down upon them, warming their fur. Spring grass tickled their legs. Somewhere overhead, above the roof of the craftswoman's shop, the songbirds were chirping their elegant hymns in hopes of attracting a love interest.

Behind them, the odd Texan contraption quietly went about its work, smoke filling up the cooking chamber as moisture soon gathered inside. The fresh pale mortar had darkened around the firebox; soot stained the opening; the iron door grew too hot to touch; the chimney was now coughing billows upon billows of smoke instead of little tendrils. Crackle. Pop. A bead of fat slipped from the brisket and banged against the iron pan with a faint ssssssssss.

There was a pungent aroma escaping the chimney now—not the bitter ashiness of hardwood smoke, but the rich smell of pepper, salt, roasting fat, and beef. The craftswoman, who was sitting in a chair fiddling with some doohickey, stopped. She sniffed. Her ears twitched. She looked back at the smoking brick contraption.

"… Huh," she thought aloud. Upon hearing the sound of a client walking through the front door, she got up and went inside. And in her backyard, smoke continued to curl above the sleeping girls and into the blue spring sky. They had several more hours to go before the brisket would be ready.