We were a comical sight as we strode onto shore. Apparently, I was not the only person afflicted by land sickness as several of us wobbled and listed our way up into town. My inner ear was telling me one thing and my eyes were letting me know my inner ear was wrong. It pissed me off that Aleyda and Bowen didn’t seem to be having any trouble. She had blown chunks on several occasions when we were out at sea but back on land she was steady as a rock. The snide comments and jeers of some of the people that we passed didn’t improve my morale either. By the time we made it up near the town’s buildings, I was seething. I wasn’t going to do anything about it, of course. Getting into a fight with impaired balance and coordination sounded like a terrible idea, or an average Friday night at many bars back home.
As we moved into town, I tried to pay attention to my surroundings. After making our way past the storage yards full of stacked and tarped material, we reached the area where slaves, others of my kind, were quartered. The newly captured slaves were kept in a variety of conditions. Some sat despondently near the roadway, shacked together in a column. Others resided in large iron cages or holding pens with high wooden walls. Guards kept careful watch over their charges. Although there were many newly captured slaves, there were fewer than I expected. I didn’t know whether that was because these were only the ones waiting to be loaded onto ships for transport back to the mainland or they just weren’t as numerous as the stories led me to believe. Of course, these might just be the tip of the iceberg. How many other humans were kept as chattel behind the walls of the company compounds, the companies not ready to ship them back just yet?
My initial impression of the small town that had grown spontaneously around the port was fairly poor. I had thought that Westfield was in dire need of some city planning but this place was worse, so much worse. The roadways were rutted and uneven. In places, the topsoil had been eroded until dark volcanic rock peeked through. Trash was strewn everywhere, mixed in with a melange of human and animal waste. The place stunk to high heaven. I saw people butchering monstrous creatures, tossing unwanted offal into piles on the ground. There were flies and other insects everywhere, and I spent quite a bit of time swatting at them and brushing them away, trying not to get eaten up.
The buildings themselves housed a number of businesses of the type you would expect in such a place. Obviously, not everyone who had come to the island was an adventurer. Enterprising merchants had set up bars, smithies, a tannery, and a general store or two. There was even a brothel. Some female orcs and humans sat out in front of it calling out to people on the street offering their wares. None of them looked very clean and they skewed older, likely trying for one more big payday before they aged out of the profession. There was even a small area set aside for a market, the goods on display almost exclusively raw resources harvested from the island.
“You sure know how to treat a girl,” Aleyda said to me. “You take me to all of the nicest places.”
My only response was a low growl as I walked carefully, trying not to trip and get up close and personal with the muck at my feet. Of course, this just made Aleyda laugh at me and that did nothing for my mood.
We were most of the way through town when Caider stopped us. Under the low roof of a structure without walls, there was a large parchment map of the surrounding area. It was covered with scribbled lines in many different sorts of ink, obviously drawn by dozens of different hands. He stood there, studying the map intently.
“It looks like all of the areas close to the port are already claimed,” he muttered.
No shit, I thought. You believed we were going to waltz in here and get some prime piece of real estate close to town? Frankly, the farther away from town we ended up, the happier I would be. This place stunk, both literally and metaphorically, and the people we passed as we walked on the street didn’t seem like the most friendly sort. Few as we were, the less contact we had with others the better I would feel. Of course, there was a downside to increased distance. We would have to move all of our supplies to wherever we set up camp and I hadn’t seen a bunch of wagons for hire. That would be backbreaking work.
Finally, after peering at the map intently for a few minute as if he were hoping that that markings would somehow change, his finger stabbed down.
“I think I found us an unoccupied place next to a small stream half an hour or so towards the mountain,” he announced. “It’s not perfect but I think it will suit us just fine.”
And a hiking we did go, leaving the town behind us. We walked on what once must have been a game trail but the passage of hundreds of feet had widened it considerably. At irregular intervals, other paths and trails intersected it, obviously leading to the compounds of more prosperous companies. We passed several encampments along the roadway, large and sprawling affairs. Many but not all were surrounded by log palisades. Peering into the unwalled ones, I saw what I had expected – lines of tents or haphazardly constructed shacks and barracks, prominent areas set aside to house slaves, and storage and other support infrastructure. As we moved out into the forest, the terrain slowly ascending, the trail became less well-traveled and the number of camps sparse. Eventually, we intersected a small stream flowing down from the mountain.
“We turn here,” Caider announced. “The place I picked out is a couple of hundred yards upstream.”
Of course there was a problem with his plan. As time passed, I came to understand that there was usually a problem with his plans. There was no trail in the direction he indicated and the forest was fairly dense. We would have to forge our own way through the trees and underbrush, and that would require tools. We had suitable tools --machetes, saws, axes and the like. The problem was, they were back on the ship. We hadn’t brought them with us as apparently his motto was “hope for the best and plan for the best.” So, we had to sit there at the side of the road for a couple of hours as Tikter and a few other orcs turned and made their way back to the ship to retrieve those tools.
We were far enough out from the other camps that things started feeling isolated and fairly creepy. On more than one occasion, I heard things crashing through the brush. By crashing, I mean crashing, not the innocuous rustling of some small and harmless woodland creature. There were big things out there moving through the forest and we were not close enough to other encampments to find safety in the company of others. I imagined there was a lot of guard duty in my near future.
Thankfully, we were not attacked as we sat beside the trail. We weren’t the only ones using it, though. On several occasions, small groups of people moved past us with nary a word. A couple of the groups had captured slaves, and the curse of tongues let me understand every word of those people’s plaintive cries.
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“Where are you taking me?”
“I want to go home. Please let me go home! My family will be so worried!”
“I am so thirsty. Can I have some water.”
The people who could cry out were the lucky ones. One time, I saw a pair of orcs carrying an obviously injured young man between them trussed to a pole like he was some sort of game animal. He couldn’t cry out because he wasn’t conscious. It looked like he hadn’t gone down without a fight, as one of the orcs was limping as they all shuffled past us. Good for you, kid. Good for you.
I felt so fucking impotent. My brain knew that I couldn’t save everyone. The best case scenario was that we could free a few. What the brain knows and what the heart wants are sometimes very different, though. My already dark mood deepened.
Sitting by the side of the trail did have one positive effect. As time passed, I could feel the vertiginous feeling of still being out at sea fading as my body adjusted to the land again. Although I wasn’t back to normal yet, I viewed that improvement as a good sign. Maybe I wasn’t one of the unlucky ones after all.
Finally, Tikter and the others reappeared toting a variety of tools. Of course, there weren’t enough for everyone but I was issued a wood axe and Aleyda and Bowen got a long two-person saw. Caider and Tikter spent their time supervising. By supervising, I mean they pointed us in the right direction, told us to follow the stream and then sat down at the side of the road to watch other people work. That was an interesting decision, because once the brush and trees were cleared there were plenty of tasks for idle hands clearing the fallen trees and brush off the trail. Apparently, though, they were above it all. If I had acted like that back at the farm, someone would have beaten me senseless. That temptation certainly existed but I knew I could not act on it. At least not right now.
Sawing, chopping, and with a lot of quite inventive cursing, we started cutting a trail into the forest. Without clear directions about the trail’s required dimensions, we started with a width of about four or five feet. Of course, that wasn’t good enough for those not doing the work. Caider got up and indicated he required a width of almost twice that. Then, he went back out to the trail and sat back down. I wasn’t the only one sending him dark looks as he retreated. Some of the orcs realized what was going on and they didn’t seem very happy about it. Supervising must have been thirsty work because Caider and Tikter passed a skin of some sort of presumably alcoholic beverage back and forth, talking and laughing with each other.
There wasn’t much laughter among those actually doing the work. Clearing an eight or nine foot wide trail in the forest was hard labor. We didn’t route the trail in a perfectly straight line in order to avoid some of the larger trees and other obstacles. Foot by painstaking foot, we forged our way deeper into the woods. The sun was getting fairly low in the sky by this time. I didn’t think there was any way we would make it to the planned campsite before dark. Did that mean we were going to retreat back through town and spend another night out on the ship? Of course not.
Caider, appearing a little intoxicated, stomped back down the trail and cussed us out for our lack of progress. I don’t know what he expected. We were working as hard as we could, or at least I was. I was already in a crappy mood and I couldn’t help myself.
“Another couple pairs of hands would make this work go faster,” I said.
“Unfortunately, we don’t have any more workers,” he replied obliviously. “Just clear enough to get us through. You all can widen the trail tomorrow.” Then, he stomped back down the trail to resume his own little happy hour.
After he had departed, I noticed that Dumbuk, one of the frequent attendees at our dice games aboard ship, was nearby. I called out to him.
“Has he always been this lazy?”
“Ever since he got promoted in the guard,” Dumbuk replied.
“And to think, when he gave that speech back on the ship about how hard we were all going to have to work, I thought he was including himself,” I responded.
“No. I could have told you that he thinks hard work is for other people to do.”
“Fucking awesome.”
Then, I went back to swinging my axe. We started pushing deep into the forest, making a path that the largest of our company could barely squeeze through. Eventually, about the time it was getting too dark to see very well, the trail broke out into a small meadow covered with thigh high grass of some sort. Stomping into the grass, those of us with appropriate tools started clearing some of it while the others hauled the grass away. After some time, we had an area clear large enough to bed down for the night. I noticed that Caider and Tikter had joined us at some point.
“We are going to have to work harder tomorrow if we are going to stay on schedule,” Caider announced loudly.
I wondered who this we was he was talking about.
Dinner that night was trail food, jerky and dry bread washed down with water from the stream. Then, we bedded down for the night without the benefit of shelter in the clearing that we had just made. I got lucky on the watch schedule. I had the last shift just before sunrise, so I fell into a restless sleep. The ground wasn’t very comfortable, a few inches of soil above hard volcanic rock, but I was so tired I didn’t care.
The night passed and I was woken to stand watch. The temperature dropped during the night and I was fairly cold, so I spent my time on watch pacing back and forth and rubbing my arms. Something about my arms didn’t feel normal but it was too dark to check them out.
Within an hour or so, the sun started to rise and I could see well enough to determine what was going on with my body. I peeled back my sleeves and noticed that several black dots were embedded in my skin. I pulled on one a felt a little resistance before it finally gave way. Glancing down at it, I realized it was a tick. I was covered in them.
Yeah, fucking awesome.
I spent the rest of my time on watch pulling loose the ones that I could reach, including some on my face, neck and scalp. I would have to ask Bowen to check my back and the other areas that I couldn’t reach. I didn’t know whether tick-borne disease existed in this world or whether it could overcome my enhanced healing powers but I didn’t want to find out.
The clearing continued to brighten as the sun crept higher in the sky. People started stirring, waking up for another day of hard labor. I noticed Caider was up and around and he strode over to me.
“Any problems during your watch?” he asked.
“No, it was very quiet,” I replied.
“I knew this would be a good place,” he said. “Just listen to me and we’ll all do very well.”
While he was talking, I had to fight the urge to laugh because he was visibly covered with dozens of ticks, too.