The quiet excitement of the anticipation had filled the entire day in the Night’s Doorstep. Gourds had been carved and were now hung from the eaves of buildings, candles alight inside them, to light the way through the streets. Children had pressed their faces to the windows of the homes and businesses that had spent hours cooking, but they had resisted the urges to sneak tastes. They wanted to be ready for the communal feast that evening!
The harvest festival of Steward’s Eve was in celebration of the Good Steward, the angel Anael. Taking place at the final harvest of the season, it was a time to ensure everyone had enough food to last the cold months and a time to remember the gifts that Anael had given to the people of Terre D’Ange. It marked the end of the autumn and the beginning of the final stretch of days before the Longest Night. Initially a folk festival out in the countryside, it had been adapted for the City of Elua by the commonfolk that still found meaning in the celebration of community and caretaking. Neighborhoods across the City of Elua were gathering together for the communal banquet and revelries, but none of the neighborhoods did it better than Night’s Doorstep.
It was a chance for the lower classes of Terre D’Ange to have their fun. The nobles and royals all had their grand celebrations and balls and events. Steward’s Eve was for the everyday people, the people that worked with their hands and toiled in the field and cared for the animals. This was their day.
Once the work of the day was over, families worked to finish their preparations. The gourd lanterns were lit, the red and orange ribbons were tied off to represent the changing leaves, the roads and alleys were freshly swept. Night’s Doorstep was transformed. However seedy some people said it looked in the daylight, it was aglow now as the sun lowered. Bathed in golden light and dressed in autumn colors, it was a mystical place. Out in the countryside, the entire village would be decorated and there would be gourd lanterns lining the way to the fields and pastures. In the City, they did the best they could.
The people who lived in Night’s Doorstep all gathered outside the Cockerel. A young Tsigani boy scrambled up the side of the building to perch on the roof to measure the sun. Mothers held tightly to their younger children, they weren’t old enough yet to participate in the Reaping, much as they may want to. The older children and the youths all took bets, baiting each other and bragging about how long they would last.
“I’m going to make it all the way through the whole sunset!”
“You will not! I am faster than you, they’ll catch you before they ever catch me!”
“Look! Look, they’re coming!”
The crowd quieted as they heard the pan pipes and bells coming down the street. A small procession came toward them, five figures dressed in patches like scarecrows. A few of them tumbled along, rolling and cartwheeling while the others shook their staves wrapped in bells.
They gathered underneath the eaves of the Cockerel, their faces covered in blank wooden masks. A few of the braver children reached to try and touch them and the Harvest Men contorted themselves and shook their bells to scare the children away. A few of the smaller children hid in their mothers’ skirts, hiding their faces so the Harvest Men wouldn’t see them.
But the five Harvest Men turned their masked faces up to where the Tsigani boy was watching the sun sink toward the horizon. The crowd quieted, an anticipatory hush falling over them as they too waited. If he felt any nerves at the attention of the entire neighborhood on him, he didn’t show it. He had an important job to do and he would do it. Their own kind of horologist.
When the sun disk touched the horizon, he pulled the horn from his belt and blew it before bellowing, “Run!”
Shrieking in delight, the children and youths scattered. Pelting into the alleys and side streets, they ran as fast as they could away from the tavern. And, a bare minute later, the Harvest Men followed, racing after them.
In the countryside, this chase would happen through the fields that had just been harvested, the Harvest Men chasing the children and young adults through the winnowed chaff and empty vines and through the empty boughs of the orchards. In the City, they adapted to the alleys and streets instead.
They had the entirety of the sunset, the entire time it took for the sun disk to sink and for the light to fade, to evade the Harvest Men. Several of the Adepts and novices of the Night Court crowded on the balconies of their Houses to try to watch the Reaping, some of them fondly remembering the Steward’s Eve celebrations of their childhood.
Rosanna leaned on the windowsill of her Dowayne’s office, looking down at the lanterns and laughter in the streets of Night’s Doorstep and remembering the celebrations from her childhood. Autumn in Eisande was usually more temperate than in other, more northern, reaches of the country. The leaves changed color later than in other provinces. Nights turned cooler deeper into the season. Yet the harvest still came on time. It had to, or else the food stores would not be ready in time for winter.
Rosanna had not experienced a harvest festival in her home province for several years. Being so ensconced in the city for her House duties, this was just a fact of life now. However, as she watched the chase of children and Harvest Men from her window, she remembered what it was like.
Her father’s seat was the manor and estate of Oraisson. Comte Baphinol was expected to oversee the feast and reaping of those who tended his lands. When each of his eight children were old enough, he brought them along too. Rosanna could still see the festival tent erected by their tenants. The homemade decorations, the whole village pitching in to fill the community table. Costumed farmers pranced about like living scarecrows and young people danced with red and gold garland. Papa had made the rounds, speaking to the community leaders and showing his children how the farmers made their living. How their efforts ensured the grapes and lavender the Baphinol family were so proud of grew strong enough to process into wine and perfume.
In their lands, it was tradition for the head of the family to present the villagers with a gift. When Rosanna attended for the first time, the gift was a barrel of sweet red wine. Papa made a speech and then had her eldest sister, heir to Oraisson, hand the wooden tap over to the village elder so that the party might commence. One day would be her duty to oversee the festival and this was good practice.Rosanna remembered her childish mind thinking that she’d much rather be sneaking into the sweets than making speeches.
In the present, she had ordered a cask of her father’s wine for the occasion, specifically for those who tended and cooked and cleaned, ensuring Valerian House was always at its best. Her own way of continuing that tradition.
As Corrian watched the sun descend from her balcony in the palace she could not help but remember the Steward’s Eve festivals back in Borlean. The palace was too far from the Night’s Doorstep for her to see or hear the children run in the Reaping, but she could imagine it was much like the Reapings back home.
As the only daughter of the Comte de Borlean, she had not been allowed to participate in the children’s game, but she had loved to watch it nonetheless. After the Reaping, her parents would open the hall to the crofters and farmers and a feast was laid that did not end until dawn. It was at one such feast as a young woman that she had met Raul.
Raul was a crofter’s son and, at 16 years of age, was working the fields alongside his father which gave him a build that the young lanky lords in the city could only dream of. On Steward’s Eve, the village did not stand on ceremony with regard to rank, and it was just this lapse in rules that gave him courage to approach Corrian.
Corrian found his rough manners and dry language enchanting. He was different from the lordlings her mother had tried to convince her to court. He boasted joyfully about how he had made it through the Reaping untouched and she giggled at his antics. The horologist was calling midnight when she led him by his hand into her room, and his father asked no questions when he returned to his cottage well past dawn the next day with a smile and a secret on his lips.
It had been a fun little affair, the sort young people are wont to find themselves in, but autumn turned to winter and winter to spring. With the seasonal changes came the end of their tryst. By the next Steward’s Eve, Corrian’s mother was in the True Terre d’Ange That Lies Beyond and Raul was courting the daughter of the village baker. They would be married within the year and currently had no fewer than four children of their own.
Corrian took a sip of wine as she remembered the rush of first love and first loss.
The shrieking laughter of the Reaping echoed through the streets and alleys of Night’s Doorstep, fending off the chill of the night with the warmth of laughter and fun. And food. For after the Reaping was finished, the horn sounding again to signal the end of the sunset, the people of the Doorstep gathered in the open space by the Cockerel where the tables had been lain with the feast. Every household had contributed a little something and the table was heavy with the fruits of the season.
Fruits, roasted vegetables, stews, roasts, breads, meat pies, fruit pies, vegetable pies, sausages, cakes, baked apples, bowls of punch, barrels of beer and wine.
Night’s Doorstep celebrated long into the night, until Steward’s Eve gave way to the morning, in the cyclical nature of all things. Night gives way to day, Autumn gives way to Winter, and the days grow shorter and shorter as the City turns its eye towards the Longest Night.