Bramlick the Brownie
Tales from the Woldwood - Story 11
There is a room in the Yewdeep that is neither honoured, guarded, nor even noticed, but is useful because someone makes sure it is ready. This is a story about a creature who chose routine over escape and quietly decided to stay.
A small creature slipped into the chamber from his hiding place on bare feet that made little sound, his small frame hunched and the cloth he wore patched and dark. Bramlick was a Brownie, with a body shaped by crouching spaces and long hours bent to work. A battered hat sat on his head, its brim softened and misshapen by damp.
His face held a narrow, knowing grin and bright eyes which were always checking what needed doing next. Around him was evidence of careful order, the quiet residue of a chamber maintained just well enough that no one ever thought to ask who had done the maintaining.
He crossed to the nearest basin and held his fingers over the steam. The warmth was not for him; it was for the room. Warmth drew people toward the water and made them wash. For Bramlick, washing mattered in ways those who passed through did not think about. Those he saw were afraid and lied to themselves.
He dipped a rag into a basin and wiped the rim. Dirt could be tolerated if time was short, but cleanliness was a state the room must offer consistently if he were to remain unnoticed and undiscovered.
The racks of garments along the far wall hung heavy with layered cloth and fur. They had been assembled across time, garments that had seen life, death and had stories of their own to tell. Some bore repairs Bramlick himself had done in the quiet hours. It was something to do, something he thought a useful way to pass time, for time was all he had.
He paused beneath the racks and breathed in the mixed scents of animal hide, smoke, sweat that never fully left and the resin that clung to almost everything in the Yewdeep. He could smell who had been here last, and how they had felt. Those who were calm left little behind, but those who were coiled with dread left it in the room like grease.
Bramlick reached up and straightened a cloak on its peg. A cloak that hung properly was less likely to be mistaken for the wrong size. A wrong size led to fumbling, and fumbling led to people turning their heads and searching for answers in the room. Bramlick did not need heads turning toward his corner.
He feared being seen. To be seen was to be brought into someone’s story, and Bramlick had not skipped across the Gate into the Yewdeep to become a character in anyone else’s tale. He had come because there had been an opportunity to slip through and escape the war, to find himself a use again.
It wasn’t a war of men and banners and iron. It was a war of the small folk of his realm. The Redcaps and the Hobgoblins had fought over anything they could think of. Bramlick had learned early that war did not care whether a creature wanted a part in it. War came into kitchens and sleeping hollows alike, knocking over pots and splitting broom handles into weapons.
On a night when the screams carried and the air stank of death, Bramlick had vanished. He had reappeared somewhere he did not recognise and found himself standing before a mouth in the wood that resented the effort of being a door. So he had taken a look.
A look became a step, and a step became being on the wrong side of the Gate with no wish to go back. He could have vanished and reappeared back where he came from, but the air on this side had smelled like a place that did not tolerate mess for long. So he had wandered, and the Yewdeep had permitted it. He had come upon his chamber and understood what it was, a place people used without thinking that needed someone to keep it as it should be. So he stayed, found a nook, and waited.
There was a difference between waiting and hiding. Bramlick did not think of himself as hiding. He thought of himself as being properly placed. He withdrew into the fold of roots that sheltered him and watched the doorway that opened into the passage beyond.
The first footsteps inevitably came, and a man entered, stamping his boots. His cloak was torn at the shoulder, and a thin line of blood ran from his hairline into his brow. He looked at the racks for so long, Bramlick thought he might take the whole wall with him.
Behind him came a woman, one hand pressed to her ribs. She glanced at the basins first, then at the racks, then at the sealed door beyond the landing and then a third figure slipped in last, hands tucked within his sleeves. Bramlick did not like the way that this one moved.
They did not look into Bramlick’s corner, but then people seldom did. They came into this room thinking only of themselves, that the chamber existed because it always had, and perhaps assuming it grew from the roots complete and perfect, needing nothing. Anyway, Bramlick preferred them that way. Their assumption was his shelter.
The stamping man barked out in disappointment, “This is it? This is all we get?”
The woman’s voice came less harshly. “Warm water. Cloth. Cloaks. It’s more than we had before.”
The hooded one hurried them up, “Wash. Take the heavier layers. The cold beyond bites through damp skin. Do not take what you cannot carry.”
The stamping man snapped back. “And you’ve crossed it, have you?”
The hooded one’s head turned and from the darkness under the cowl said, “Enough times to know the difference between boldness and stupidity.”
The stamping man examined the racks, grabbed at a fur drape, then another. He tried to pull both free at once. One peg held. The other came loose under the strain, and Bramlick’s hands clenched in the shadows.
The woman went to a basin and dipped her hands into the steam. She winced and shook them out, then did it again, slower. She leaned over the water and washed. When she lifted her head, Bramlick saw the exhaustion in her face and the way her eyes kept sliding toward the landing. Evidently, she could not stop thinking about what waited beyond.
“Don’t look at it,” she muttered to herself, and then, louder, to the stamping man, “Stop yanking. You’ll break it.”
“I’ll break it?” he snapped. “I’ll freeze out there if I don’t take enough.”
The hooded one moved closer, “Take one,” he said. “Leave the rest. If you break the peg, you leave the next traveller without.”
Bramlick waited. He watched them wash. He watched the stamping man scrub hard, and the woman wash gently. He watched the hooded one wash with efficiency. For him, this was just another step in a sequence that would end with survival or death, and Bramlick knew it.
They took garments from the racks. The stamping man took the fur drape and pulled it around his shoulders, and the woman took the layered cloth and bound it tight around her ribs. The hooded one chose a plain cloak, then reached for a belt laid among others on the bench, his fingers pausing over it momentarily but withdrawing.
When they were done, they moved out. The stamping man first, the woman behind him and the hooded one last, glancing around the chamber and then turning away.
As the room fell quiet again, Bramlick moved. He crossed to the basins, dampened a cloth and began wiping. He drained the water by opening the small slit near the base, which released it into the channels below. Then he pressed his palm against the basin’s pedestal and felt the warmth gather again as the trickle returned. Next, he scrubbed until the basin was clean enough that no one would think about it.
Turning to the peg the stamping man had strained, he found it had loosened. Bramlick climbed onto the bench and reached up. He pressed the peg back into its seat with both hands and a grunt. The root-wood resisted for a moment, then accepted, and Bramlick held it there until he felt it set.
He slid down and stood still, listening. From beyond the landing, there came the deep vibration of the Gate speaking to someone. Bramlick could not hear the words from here, but he understood the now familiar sound of complaint and the drag of hunger through each of its utterances. He thought hunger without labour, and yet contingent on demand, was at best peculiar and at worst intolerable, though he didn’t know mortal ways and so didn’t dwell upon it.
He went to the bench and took up the belt the hooded one had touched. The belt lay where it had been, untaken. Bramlick ran his fingers over it and looked at its shaped sleeve, then placed it back. It looked useful, but was not his to keep.
The hours passed in the way they always did in the Yewdeep. The sap-lights dimmed slightly when they did not need to be quite so awake, but the basins kept their steam, and the garments hung quietly.
Bramlick repaired a hem where a traveller had torn it with a careless boot. He re-tied a cord and scraped dried blood he had noticed from the edge of an infrequently used basin pedestal, the blood so old it had almost become part of the grain.
When the chamber was as it should be, he returned to his fold of roots and waited again.
More travellers eventually came, not always in groups, sometimes alone, sometimes with the heavy silence of those who had already decided they would not return. Bramlick watched hands shake. He watched hands steady. He watched people look warily at the door beyond the landing.
He heard scraps of talk, never enough to learn whole stories, but enough to understand patterns.
A woman with hair like straw said, “If it’s a gate, why does it groan like a dying beast?”
A man with a broken nose answered her, “Because it’s old and it hates us.”
A third voice, too young to be so hard, whispered, “Does it hate everyone?”
The broken-nosed man said, “It hates those who take.”
The straw-haired woman laughed. “Then it hates all of us.”
When the chamber emptied again, and the sap-lights dimmed into their lowest glow, Bramlick moved toward the doorway and listened. He waited until the vibration in the roots eased. Then he vanished.
It was not a trick, or magic in the way mortals spoke of magic. It was simply what he was. Bramlick could step out of a place and step into another nearby at will. The Yewdeep was not hostile to him. It permitted his slipping the way it permitted sap to move through seams.
He reappeared in the Heart Hollow, tucked behind a pillar where the air smelled of cooked meat. The space around him hummed with life. Bramlick did not belong there, but he was tolerated. There were creatures here that would have noticed him if they chose, and there were also creatures that ignored him because he was too small to matter. He preferred those.
He slipped to a low table where scraps had been left and took a piece of roasted meat and a crust of bread. Then he vanished again, reappearing in the washing chamber with the stolen prize in his hands. He ate in his fold of roots and, when he was done, he cleaned his hands with a rag and dropped the bones into the drain.
The Yew was aware of him, and he knew it. It was not affection though. Bramlick did not fool himself with such thoughts. It was permission. He worked, therefore he remained.
A change came on a day no different from any other, and it began with cold. Cold that seeped upward into the chamber itself. He pressed his cheek against the basin pedestals and felt less heat than there should have been, so he stood still and listened. Bramlick moved to the root-wall nearest the landing and pressed his ear to it. The wood was colder there, and he stepped back and squinted.
Along the base of the wall, where roots met the floor, a thin line of frost had formed, no wider than a thread. This was new. Bramlick knew every inch of that floor. He had scrubbed it. repaired it and sat on it in the quiet hours and listened to its creaks.
He took a dish of resin from under the bench and scooped a lump of it with his fingers. He then pressed it into the line of frost, smearing it along the seam where cold was trying to enter. The frost slowed, then stopped.
Bramlick went to the basins again and pressed his cheek to the pedestals where heat slowly gathered. He nodded, satisfied. It would have been enough if the chamber existed alone, but sadly, it did not.
The doorway beyond opened, and a traveller entered. He was wrapped in a cloak already, and his hair was wet with sweat. He looked over the basins, then toward the racks.
“Quick,” he muttered. “Quick, quick.”
He went to a basin and plunged his hands into the water without testing the temperature first, then began scrubbing. He splashed water over his face, leaving it wet. Bramlick watched him. Irritated.
The traveller grabbed at a layered garment from the rack and pulled it free. He did not look where he stepped and stumbled on the edge of the bench, swearing as he did so.
Then he did something Bramlick had only witnessed on rare occasions. He turned his head toward the shadows. “Hello?” he said. “Is someone there?”
Bramlick became still, but he did not vanish. Vanishing would have been movement and confirmed the man’s instinct that someone was watching him. Instead, he held his breath shallow and made himself part of the root-wall, as close to wood as flesh could manage.
The traveller waited and stared in silence until finally smiling and shaking his head, amused with himself. “Nothing,” he muttered. “It’s nothing.” He turned back to the rack, fumbled with a belt, then decided against it. He pulled his cloak tighter and moved toward the landing.
As he left, he said to the air, “Someone keeps this place. Doesn’t matter who. It’s always ready.”
Bramlick was satisfied. He had not been seen, yet the truth had been spoken. Someone keeps this place. The traveller would forget the thought as soon as his journey began, but the words mattered to Bramlick because they were accurate. The chamber did not make itself ready. The readiness was made, and everything was as it should be.
The next day, footsteps came again, and again Bramlick stayed back in the shadows. He watched hands wash, garments be taken, murmured words and practical exchanges between travellers with no energy to waste.
“Dry your face,” one said. “Don’t go out wet.”
“Don’t take two,” another replied. “Leave one for the next.”
Someone laughed, “Ha. There’s always a next.”
The words rang true for Bramlick. There was always a next. That was why the chamber existed and was why he was there.
The group moved on, and the room emptied again. Bramlick rose, cleaned what needed cleaning and stood by the basins. People, he thought, would always come through and always assume the room was simply there, in readiness at the behest of the Yew, and they were not wrong. It provided it through Bramlick.
When the chamber was clean and quiet once more, Bramlick sat in his nook and let his thoughts wander. The war should be finished by now, as wars always do, but the question was, what remained? If the Hobgoblins had won, the halls would be louder again and full of noise and movement and arguments that meant nothing beyond the next meal. There would be work there, and that was never unwelcome. If the Redcaps had won, there would be no question about it. He would be owned, bound to a task chosen for him and beaten into obedience. He had seen that future clearly enough while it was still possible to avoid it. Regardless, the tether to his realm might not return, and even if it did, the world was careful after war. It learned where its weaknesses had been.
The Heart Hollow was full of movement and voices. There were creatures there who might tolerate him, even speak to him, perhaps even call him friend. He could venture farther still, out of the Yewdeep entirely, follow other paths and see what lay beyond the roots and sap.
Bramlick considered all of this, then looked around the chamber. The basins steamed evenly. The racks stood straight. The floor was clean, the pegs firm, the drain clear. The room was ready, as it was always ready. It made no demands, because he had met them before they had to be spoken. This place did not ask him to belong or promise safety. It did not threaten him with chains or praise either. Things just needed doing.
If the way back ever opened and the work here had grown less, he might reconsider. If a better task presented itself, one that suited his hands and left him unclaimed, he would consider it carefully. Until then, there was no reason to move.
He would bide his time. Besides, footsteps approached, and the chamber was ready.
A life does not need to be seen to be lived well. Contentment can be found in choosing where one is most useful and remaining there by one’s own will. Because very often, freedom is knowing that what you do matters, even if no one ever notices.