Haruhime popped over to my tent and brought me some lunch. It seemed Matilda encouraged her to go with me, giving her the rest of the day off. I decided to press the issue a little.
“Is that normal for Matilda to do something like that?”
“No.”
“Then she’s playing matchmaker no doubt?”
Haruhime shrugged her shoulders.
“I’m not complaining, are you?”
I shook my head as I ate the stew. That stopped a potentially uncomfortable conversation, she could easily become a politician with that smooth talk.
“Well then, we’ll be going as soon as you’re ready?”
We headed out the gate without any problems, the guards just waved us through with big smiles on their faces. I knew exactly what they were thinking, no doubt they'd been instructed by the supervisor already.
“Geez guys, you really need to get a hold of yourselves.”
That of course led to a tirade of comments from them.
“Hey Haruhime, what’s the only hard thing that gets between an orc and a naked Shane?”
She just shook her head and laughed.
“A rock! Bwhahaha.”
“That’s not even funny.”
I shouted back at them.
“Bwhahaha…”
I decided to leave them alone because I was just fuelling the situation. We continued through the clearing and around the camp and towards the forest path. As soon as we entered the forest, it felt so much cooler in contrast to the stifling heat of the camp. Because a palisade log wall surrounded the camp, it obviously added security but excluded everything else like airflow. The result was a sweltering camp where even the thought of closing a tent door flap at night caused people to break out in a sweat.
We walked along the narrow earthen trail, winding through the forest in between small thickets. As we walked, the aroma of fresh air mixed with the potpourri of decaying leaves and damp earth. After my run in with the ogre general, I couldn't help but feel a bit more wary, constantly scanning through the forest trees expecting hordes of vengeful ogres to pop out from behind every big tree. Common sense said it was highly unlikely I would bump into an ogre again and statistically the chances were almost non-existent. But that didn't stop me feeling apprehensive and probably spoiling what should have been a pleasant walk. Pleasant weather, a good walk and good company, what more could I want?
Perhaps that short plant that suddenly caught my attention. I knew about that plant, but I'd never seen a fully grown specimen like that before. My friends knew the end-product well enough. But if my mom ever caught me with something like that, I'd never hear the end of it, and I didn't want to disappoint her. There was a lot of expectation on me, especially since mom had to go and earn a salary as well. There was no way we would survive if both of us didn’t work and there was no charity from uncle either, not that we asked for it.
Each bushy plant leaf had five thin army-green leaves, each boarded by jagged edges. It was the quintessential forbidden leaf I had no intention of using it for any other reason than medicinal uses which in that world could be greatly beneficial. Haruhime watched me in puzzlement as I started pulling out all the specimens I could find by the roots. The smell left in my hands from the plant oils erased any doubt in my mind as to what I was pulling up.
“Eh? What you doing that for?”
“I think this herb could be useful in cooking.”
I said while ripping the plants out the ground one by one. It was a half-truth because technically speaking, I could use it in cooking come to think of it.
“That's strange, I've never seen anyone use this herb before.”
I just shrugged my shoulders, avoiding the subject as best I could. Luckily for me, she didn't push the subject and just left it alone. After I tied up a few of the plants into bushels I left them at the side of the path ready for me to pick up on the way back. We then continued until we reached the stream from before. I resisted the temptation to jump into the water again, it looked inviting, but I had a job to do first.
“Haruhime, we need to follow the stream down a bit further. There's a rock that I found the last time, and I want to collect it.”
We retrieved the two pieces of broken rock, and only once we returned to the pools near the path did we give ourselves an opportunity to relax. There I explained to Haruhime what happened on that day. Surprisingly, she didn't ask me too much about it, and it was just as well because I couldn't resist jumping into the water again, although that time, with all my clothes on. I got the distinct feeling, Haruhime was a bit disappointed at that. I needed to wash my shirt, so I just pulled it off while sitting in the water and started to wash it, thoroughly scrubbing it using the same shirt in my hands.
“Why don’t you wash your pants too?”
“Really, how am I going to do that with you watching?”
“That wasn’t what I was expecting idiot. Just sit in the water and take them off, then put them back on again when you’re done.”
“Oh, for one moment there I thought you wanted to see me fully naked.”
“Why would I want to do that? I bet you that ogre died from fright when he saw you naked and as a cover you made up a story about hitting it on the head with a rock.”
We laughed at our dumb jokes while I washed my clothes in the stream.
“Perhaps I should wash my clothes in the stream too?”
Haruhime’s comment made me pause for a moment until I realised she was just pulling my leg.
“Please don’t, not that I wouldn’t mind, but I need my focus on my job for now.”
“So, what about my focus?”
I started laughing because she had a point. Besides, I already had my pants on again and the show was about to end, even if she only saw me topless.
“What are you wearing?”
She was referring to the green pendant and the three rings that hung around my neck, clearly seen, since my shirt was off.
“Those I got from the ogre.”
Looking at the items closer in my hand, I could pay more attention to the details on them. The green octahedron shaped object, the more eye catching of the four items, wasn’t a peculiarly beautiful object. Other than the fact that it looked like a piece of jade cut into two pyramids with their bases glued together, there was nothing else going for it. It looked like an old ornament, perhaps an ogre ornament of sorts? Yet, despite its old look, I couldn’t see one rounded corner or surface chip. The miser in me though that perhaps I could sell it for some money. On the other hand, it was one of the first items I got from a monster subjugation, and I had to admit there was an emotional attachment because of that. It was worth recognising that in a world where there was money, the lack of funding could seriously hobble me. As much as I appreciated having a job out in the woods, if possible, I preferred a job in a town. My focus shifted to the three rings that each looked as Hamish as the other, but before I did that, I handed the chain to Haruhime who could hardly hold her curiosity any longer.
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“This is the first time I’ve ever held personal items from an ogre.”
“It’s interesting that an ogre would hold those rings in the first place.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because none of those rings would fit on an ogre’s fingers.”
“Do you suppose these rings once belonged to someone…someone human?”
I shrugged and added,
“There were a few kingdom coins we recovered too. I don’t imagine ogres are in the habit of going out on shopping sprees.”
Haruhime looked at the rings in her hand in a new light. They were plain looking rings, other than the fact they seemed to be heavier than normal rings their size, there was nothing else notable about them. Why would an ogre keep something like that she wondered? Deciding not to hold onto them any longer she handed them back to me, I wasn’t particularly worried about previous owners. Personally, Haruhime didn’t like the thought those rings may have belonged to other people at some stage. People who more likely than not, no longer lived. It gave her shivers thinking about it.
“It’s probably time we went back.”
She said tersely. The wonderful atmosphere before, had dissipated for her. I realised that something imperceptible changed in Haruhime, but I wasn’t too sure what had caused the shift in her. I suspected that the idea of the rings having previous owners may have spooked her a little, but I didn’t protest and just followed her back to the camp. There was little meaningful conversation until just before the camp gate.
“Thank you, Shane.”
“I enjoyed the day as well.”
“No. I mean thank you for killing that evil monster.”
Huh, where exactly was that coming from? I mean monsters are what they are, I didn’t realise they were particularly evil.
“Why do you say that?”
“The thought of that evil monster killing people is abhorrent to me. I thank you for making sure that thing will not hurt humans again.”
And with that she walked off. My unease about her past rose within me. My view on monsters was perhaps different to others because I didn’t grow up with the consequences of their existence on society. I had to be careful when judging her picture on life, that I didn’t paint over it using the brush of my past.
That evening we were witnesses to an extraordinary event in woodcutter history and I was solely to blame as the camp descended into what can only be described as pure mayhem. That the monsters didn't decide to attack us that night was a serious miscalculation from their side because everyone from the camp guards to the kitchen staff were uselessly stoned off their rockers.
I kicked myself for not being more alert, because unbeknownst to me, somehow Haruhime decided to collect some of those 'herbs' for herself and test them out for our dinner. Luckily for me, as soon as I tasted the food, I recognised the taste and realised what she had done. So, I didn’t eat anymore and became the only sober witness to the chaos. The predictable result was a camp full of incredibly happy people. I never realised how potent those ‘herbs’ were until that night. Along with a lot of other information about people’s behaviour they preferred stayed in that camp, no one uttered a word about the weird phenomenon. Only the camp supervisor was permitted to bring limited amounts of alcohol into the camp. He didn’t issue any alcohol, nor did anyone drink a single drop of alcohol that night. Yet everyone behaved as if drunk on a perfectly normal evening.
The mass embarrassment the following morning after everyone’s minds cleared up, created a strange atmosphere in the camp. They even pardoned the guards for abandoning their posts since apparently everyone suffered from the strange malady. I didn’t say a word otherwise.
With no surprise the camp supervisor called me over to his tent later that morning.
“I’m sorry Shane that I need to ask you this. I know it’s embarrassing. I’ve asked others, but they couldn’t explain what happened last night. Do you perhaps know what caused the ruckus last night?”
I claimed ignorance, instead detracting from my situation by pointing to everyone else’s strange behaviour. Afterwards, no-one referred to the incident again. As far as I could tell, everyone thought the cause of the sudden festivities that night was a mystery. If Haruhime knew any better, she kept wisely mum about it and of course, never used those ‘herbs’ again. I mean just how much of the stuff did she use? Luckily, none of those guesses included the food, I think they didn’t dare blame the ladies from the kitchen, besides, I was probably the reason they happened in the first place.
Despite the events of the previous night, I still wanted to preserve the plants. As a small distraction, I carefully placed the bundles of ‘herbs’ behind my tent letting them dry out on the ground. After that, things became quiet again and we didn’t experience another bout of madness.
One night while sitting around the campfire, a breath-taking set of white and blue crescent moons lifted above the horizon, their craters and canyons clearly visible. Having come from earth, I expected to see a moon in the sky, but there was something clearly alien about seeing two of them rising over the horizon. The white moon was slightly smaller than the blue moon because from my perspective I could see the blue moon lay some distance behind the white moon, yet they were the same size from my perspective. The white moon partly eclipsed but remained permanently parked in front of the blue moon. I had enough astronomical sense to realise the moons were moving at different speeds relative to each other. Because they were in different orbital distances, the blue moon was no doubt moving faster than the white moon. From my perspective, the moons seemed stuck together by some cosmic glue. As soon as they appeared over the horizon, their size diminished over the following weeks as if the moons moved away from the planet. It seemed to me that the moons followed an ecliptic orbit with a distinctive perigee and apogee. The apogee, being the furthest point away from the planet, diminished the moons’ sizes by at least three times while considerably slowing down their travel in the sky. Then over the same number of weeks the moon would return as if on a cosmic bungee cord and when the moons reached perigee, they filled up a fifth of the sky, moving through the sky far quicker than earth’s moon. From my first observations, the monthly lunar cycle I knew on earth held no relevance to that world. When I asked Grenfell about monthly cycles, he had no idea what I was talking about. The earthly terms of weeks and months were alien concepts to them. He only knew about moon cycles and summer seasons. Their equivalent of months and years respectively. Each moon cycle held about forty days and the end of each summer season represented a year.
While I pondered those sorts of things in the evenings while sitting in front of the campfire, I continually shaped an ogre tooth as an ivory handle for my knife. One ogre tooth was long as my hand and as thick as two and a half fingers. I sawed the tooth into three longitudinal layers. Using the two outer layers, I created the handles that would fit on either side of the blade. I managed to make a temporary whittling knife from parts of a kitchen knife far beyond the point of repair. Carving a criss-cross pattern into the handle made it easier to grip. Grenfell helped me heat two pins for the handle, insert them, and then hammer the pin ends to make them flange. It required quick work which was why Grenfell’s experience and help at that moment was immeasurable. At his recommendation I countersunk the hole in the ivory handle to be able to make the metal pin flange flush with the handle. The final product was a particularly good, practical knife that would serve me well.
“Have you ever used a bow or a sword?”
The supervisor asked me in his tent one day. He’d called me in as I passed by and asked the question.
“My dad taught me how to use both, we used to practice often enough.”
I wondered why he was asking.
“I would like you to do guard duty for us tomorrow. The guys always like extra hands to help with the duty shifts because it takes the load off them, you’ll start on gate duty during daylight. Don’t worry, you’ll have another guard to help you out and I’ll let Grenfell know you’ll be out of commission for a day.”
“No problem, I’m happy to help.”
Even I could appreciate that when the next day, armed with a borrowed double-edged sword, I stood at the gate and watched how the other gate guard checked the inventory parchments. We inspected carts on the way in or out and checked inventory of incoming and received goods. We were glorified stock checkers, making double sure no one was fixing the system.
Initially my reading skills were non-existent, since I only recently understood the language through some strange circumstances, I didn’t hold too much hope in learning it anytime soon. However, through my interactions with people over the last days since I arrived, I found that instinctively I started to understand and even write basic wording. So, when the gate guard explained what he was doing by showing me the parchment I was absolutely stunned, I could fully understand the writing. I realised there was a fundamental natural law I was living under that seemed to differentiate me from others, because I knew seemed to do things no one else could. Even I could appreciate that learning to read and write a language within days just wasn’t normal, along with speaking and hearing it. I didn’t want to even start with what happened the other day with that knife blade. Heck, the guys from the tent were still looking at me with suspicious looks. No one said anything further about it, and I wasn’t going to either since I had nothing to make the situation any clearer for them. I would only cloud the situation further if I tried to explain it away.
For some reason, perhaps because I was a new guard, the kids tried all sorts of ways to get past us that day. I almost spent all my time trying to stop owners of little feet getting past me. I swear the other guard looked the other way because he was taking a day off from the weary duty of discovering them. One kid even managed to hold onto the axle of a loaded cart as it wheeled its way out. Something instinctively told me the little blighter was there, as if he were different to the makeup of the cart. Without looking under the cart, I shouted down instructions.
“Come you little blighter, get out from under there. Don’t make us come get you.”