Bennath 28th - (In the village) 24th entry

Bennath 28th

-We reached the town today. It is not as small as I had been expecting, but the presence of so much livestock and crops leads me to believe that it is still mostly agrarian in nature.
The houses and shops are tiny and quaint in a way that is unfamiliar to me.
There are no great walls around this town. It is all open to the rolling fields of crops and pasture.
No great architecture of stone towers overhead and there are no aqueducts that carry in endless flows of fresh water. Instead, they have little wells built around a couple springs where water bubbles up from the ground itself.
I’ve not seen anything like it before.  

I do not speak much of the Common Tongue that is spoken here, just enough to make myself understood. I’ve never needed it before now, as the language used within the Temple and most of Senntisten is the Infernal Tongue. Some here speak it, but not nearly to the extent as at home. They are better versed in their own local dialect.
Some of them know bits of the languages from other Empires as well, carried to them on the back of the trade wagons.
The Saradominist language is just plain weird sounding.

We unloaded the wagon fairly quickly with the help of many eager hands. The horses and mule were put out in a pasture and we were shown to the rooms that would be ours during the stay.
Palkeera says that we’ll start work at dawn so that we’ll have plenty of time for all of the ceremony. I think it’s going to take most of the day to complete. We have to set up the new alter and bless it so that our Lord Zaros will be able to absorb and hear the prayers spoken unto it, and I know that alone could take hours.

A couple of kids my own age caught me outside during my evening walk. They barraged me with their questions, most of which I couldn’t understand with their funny way of talking. Many of the words they use are corrupted or placed wrongly within the sentence. I answered what I could as best as possible.
Then they took me to a field where the cows were being milked. I’ve never actually seen as cow so close that I could touch it.
They are big animals that leak from both ends and their tongues are almost always up their noses. I like them. They have big brown eyes that watch the whole world with a look of dignified patience befitting a priest, though I’m sure the Mahjarrat would have a problem if I compared them to cattle.

Riding a cow is not so difficult. You simply have to wait for one to wander past a fence so you can quickly climb atop their backs. The cows don’t even seem to mind when you sit on them, though they are not at all like a horse in that they do not go faster and clearly have no intention of going anywhere that you want them to.
If you sit on the big flat spot on their hips it is just like sitting on a big flat chair.
It is a good thing that we have horses, if all we had were cows then the cavalry charge would be all but obsolete.

I got to milk one of the cows. The whole thing is absolutely ridiculous. I wasn’t very good at it. The children and the women all laughed at me, but it was my fault for forgetting to put a bucket down first.

Palkeera had already started her report by the time I got back to our rooms, several young human children sitting on her lap. They are watching her write the beginnings of her essay.  
Palkeera likes children, she loves how curious they are. She finds their inane questions to be endearing in a way that isn’t nearly as much so when adults are asking them.

I am sitting on the bed writing this entry and now have a young child sitting on my lap as well, watching me write out the Infernal Language. It does not bother me too much, except for when he runs his finger over the wet ink, trying to trace and memorize the curve of each glyph. Half this page is now smeared, though legible enough. He doesn’t mean anything by it, however, as I think he cannot be much older than four.

I’m tired, so I’m going to go put this child on Palkeera’s lap and go to bed.