Page 98 of Why Cheese?
I don’t believe him for a second. Especially the way his voice scratches as he declares he’ll be fine. “Centuries? How? Why?”
“It is long past midnight. The dancing shoes are hung, the beds claimed, the glasses emptied. What else is there to do but pass tales of woe?” Roq picks up one of the bottles and slaps the bottom. “I was a shepherd.”
“Really?”
“Is it so hard to believe?” he asks, his accent getting thicker or his slurring growing stronger. I can’t tell the difference.
I stare up and down at the man who looks more like the giant eating the sheep than the shepherd assigned to protect them. “A little,” I confess.
“Ha. You’re not the first to say. Ber…” He licks his lips and watches himself bounce the bottle against his thigh. “Camembert found it hilarious. The idea of me in a smock and woven straw hat bellowing for my flock. It is more than a lifetime ago, but another man entirely.”
“What happened?”
“I resented my lot in life. It’s hardly a new concept. But there were few avenues to escape what I was born into. I stumbled upon it by accident, an old dinner forgotten in a cave after I had to give chase to an errant sheep. The cheese bore veins of blue and green through its milky white skin. I’d never seen anything like it and the taste.”
“You ate a piece of cheese you left in a cave for a few days?”
“More like months. And yes. You’ll eat anything when you’re starving. I kept bringing cheese up to the cave. Some grew those same veins with my intervention, others spoiled on the spot. All I cared about was that cheese. My sheep’s wool grew past their eyes, the fields of alfalfa rotted in the summer heat. Nothing mattered but perfecting the cheese.”
Roq takes a deep breath and tents his fingers. He stares through the triangle in his lap. “I was always too demanding for my own good. To not get it right is as good as failing entirely. I went days without meals, spoke to no one, and every time I tried a piece of my work, it wasn’t enough. I had to keep going or else…or I’d have wasted my youth.”
That explains a lot about Roq. I felt a pang of sympathy for his obsession with perfection. I didn’t have that problem, just voices reminding me of all the ways I couldn’t be good enough, never mind perfect. “Is that what caused the curse?”
He shakes his head back and forth, then drops his cheek into his palm. “There was to be a feast in our lord’s honor.”
“Christmas?”
“Small lord. Piddly thing in the scheme of the world. I don’t recall his name any longer. He demanded the best of everything. The ripest fruits, the largest nuts, the fattest hog, the fastest stag.”
“The best cheese?” I ask.
“It should be so pungent it curled his shoes. I took the challenge to heart. Not for him, but to prove to myself I could. Oh, I deluded myself into thinking it would fetch me riches, a wife, land, maybe even a title.” He waves his hand in a circle as if saying goodbye to all of those out-of-reach dreams. “But in my heart, I know I didn’t care about any of it. I needed to do it. The world’s best cheese.”
For a moment, Roq smiles like he’s holding an Emmy and Oscar in one. Then the edge of his lip twitches, his eyes fall, and he slumps back. “I worked myself to the bone, forwent sleep, ignored meals for days, did everything I could to accomplish my task. But nothing was good enough. I failed. Worse than that, I would have to accept my failure. A task I fear I struggle with even now.”
He fights to breathe deeply, but his nails claw along the floor as if he’s still fighting within. I pat his knee and scoot closer. “Is that how you created the curse? Willing it into being?”
“I dreamed, or perhaps I convinced myself I dreamed. I was so exhausted, maybe I imagined it all. A man of shadow, red eyes in a black cloak, stood before me. He was a talker like Cam. Fluffed up my ego until it was ready to burst. Claimed I was the greatest cheesemaker the world had ever seen.”
“And you bought it?”
Roq laughs. “I called him a damned fool to his face. He found that funny. I suppose that should have been my first warning to not make deals with shadowy figures in caves. He promised me that with his help, I would create the perfect cheese. Its flavor would cause grown men to weep like they’re gazing upon their newborn sons. I should have said no. I should have refused.”
He keeps banging his head with each sentence. “I should have…” Roq pauses before another hit and looks at me. “What I wouldn’t have given for an ounce of your humility in that moment.”
My cheeks burn and I stare at the ground. I doubt a shadowy anything would offer me a deal. I’m good at nothing.
“I took it. Obviously, I’m here instead of old bones a spelunker finds at the back of a cave.”
“What happened?”
“For a brief moment, it was as if I knew everything in this world and beyond. I understood the metamorphosis of life that turns milk into cheese at the subatomic level. Most terrifying of all, I knew how to control every molecule to accomplish it. When I woke the next morning, my mouth dry and head buzzing, the knowledge drained to little more than glimmers. But there it was, the perfect cheese. My salvation.”
Roq laughs and tosses his head. “Also my damnation. The shadow man left me with one rule. He asked for nothing in return for his gift, except…”
“What?” I cry out, hanging on his every word.
He spins. The drunken haze over his eyes has shifted to a terrifying focus. “I was never to try the perfect cheese. Not a cube, not a morsel, not even a crumb. It wasn’t for me to enjoy, only to create. You can probably guess what happened.”
