Po Pen was a busy man, possibly one of the busiest in the village. Though the busiest for sure was Chin Chin, or possibly Light Master Renk. They were always up to something. Chin never stopped farming and Renk was asleep during the day and up in that tower of his sending and receiving messages during the night. And while Po Pen wasn’t nearly as busy as those two, he was, possibly, the third busiest person in town.
Though no one knew that aside from him. No one really knew anything about Po, he rarely said a word, even when he was alone. It wasn’t that he couldn’t talk, he could with some effort. It was just that talking had only ever led to more talking, and that was something beyond Po’s abilities.
He remembered his first words. Which was a rare thing for anyone to remember, but Po had started talking when he was eight years old and it had been one hell of an effort for him to get those few words out. His mother had screamed and his brother had dropped his bread in shock and everybody had gathered around him inquisitively, encouraging him to speak even more. He did, thinking that everyone was just trying to see it for themselves, but apparently, one demonstration wasn’t enough.
From then on his mother had tried to get him to ask for everything before she gave it to him, and his brother spent hours trying to get him to say some rather strange-sounding words. Po had learned later on that those words were vulgarities, but even if they weren’t he still wouldn’t have said them. His family’s attempts had gone on for a month or two before they finally gave up and let him be. But Po kept his mouth shut for two more years before he let out another word, just in case. And by the time he was a teenager, everyone had accepted that he wouldn’t talk unless he wanted to.
Which was exactly the way Po liked it, though it did have some downsides. One of which was that people talked to him far more than they talked to others. He had seen regular conversations, one person speaking to the other, each side taking turns and involving themselves in the discussion. It was all very well managed and reasonable.
But they weren’t like that with him. For some reason, people talked a lot more with Po than they did with anybody else. It was like they were trying to make up for his lack of speech and talk for the both of them. Po would nod along, respectfully listening to the people as they went on, until eventually, they would notice how long they had been rambling and make a rush to whatever they had planned next.
Po Pen sighed without noise as he drove his cart towards the edge of the town. He passed by houses made of Ivin Wood and watched as the century-year-old buildings stood tall and proud. Po studied the structures. Ivin Wood was one of the most essential materials of this region. It originated from somewhere beyond the region, but the best of it was grown down-strip, in the Hidden Viper’s territory. The ones they had here were just the cheap cuts they managed to trade with the merchants on occasion.
Of course, with the nature of Ivin Wood, if you had it once, you generally never needed it again. You could take a two-hundred-year-old splinter, plant it in a pot of soil, water it a bit, and have a tree standing there by the end of the year. The wood just refused to stay dead. It laid deep roots, which would give any building made out of the stuff an almost unshakable foundation, and it grew long, twisting, vine-like branches on the roof to get all the sunlight it needed. Almost all of the buildings in the village were made out of them, though some, like the tower, were made of stone.
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Po slowed the horses seeing a small group up ahead of him. Kids were playing in the streets, though most of them cleared the way when they saw him approach. Some quickly ran inside and others just held their nose as he passed by. Po wasn’t offended.
He was the town cleaner after all. On his cart were large round jugs full of several hundred pounds of human feces, the solid stuff. The liquid was generally thrown into a series of small streams that ran through the town. It wasn’t comparable to the sewer system that Po had read about that existed within the cities, but it held up. The village was generally clean and the people managed to live without the stench of shit cluttering up the air.
And Po would make sure that things stayed this way. It was his job after all.
“It’s the shit-man! Shit-man!” one of the kids yelled, finger raised and pointing.
That child was a particularly mean boy, but his words didn’t bother Po. He had been teased all of his life, and a few stupid words from one spoiled brat wouldn’t do much to him. But, as an adult, Po was nothing if not a man of humor.
He reached down into a small pot he kept next to his feet. It was filled with a runny clay mixture and had a certain diarrhea-like viscosity. He scooped up a small handful of the stuff and pressed it into a sloppy ball-shaped mess. And then, without warning, he hurled it at the kid.
The boy screamed and ran, trying to avoid the throw, but it was to no avail. The brown mixture splattered on his shirt and stained his face with a very audible splat. The kid screamed, resigning himself to the floor and staring down at his shirt in horror.
“He threw shit at me! The shit-man threw shit at me!”
Po smiled as he pushed the horses to a trot. He had never liked children. A minute later he was outside of town and heading over to his place of work. It was a large barnhouse-like structure that was right on the edge of a large swamp. This was Po Pen’s domain, or as Mister Bill called it, his Septic Treatment Plant. Po Pen had always been a bit of an obsessive sort. Once he got a hold of something, he didn’t like to put it down until he understood it in its totality. It was how he was, and this job had been no different. The previous cleaners used to just take the waste and dump it a few miles out of the village, but after Po took over the main program, he reworked the whole thing from the ground up.
He had done research, which was a fairly tough thing to do when you were a mute in a medieval village. But he had done it, bothering Light Master Renk for all the books he had on the subject and bargaining with the merchants for information on certain types of plants and insects. It had taken him years of waiting and requesting certain types of plants from the traveling merchants, as well as having to pay for people to teach him things like arithmetics and carpentry for him to set this place up.
Po wasn’t old, he was twenty-eight, still young by most people’s standards. He liked women, though he doubted that women liked him, and his job was a very disgusting one. He was mute and many thought of him as stupid or disabled, and he had never cared to correct them on that. He most likely would never have children and though a lot of people liked him, he could count his friends and family on both hands.
But for all of his insignificance and trouble, Po had done this. He had set this place up. There were no longer any fields of shit in the distance. If the wind picked up, the village wouldn’t be overwhelmed with the stench of feces. Kids wouldn’t get sick playing out in the hills and it was all his doing.
Po smiled. It was little, it was small, but it was his and it was important.