Ch 11: A FIGHT IN TOWN HALL

“Could I trouble you for a change of clothes?” Marten asked, on returning to the sheep farm.

His gaze was firmly fixed on the ceiling as he pretended he hadn’t just walked in on Jon and his lady friend all tangled up in the main room. He didn't apologize—he had knocked, and it wasn’t his fault if neither of them heard him—but he didn't want to draw attention to the scene, either.

“Of course,” Jon said, clearing his throat. “There’s a pond out back where you can take your time washing up, too.”

“I’ll give your clothes a good scrub, in the meantime,” said Reb’s wife, whose name, Marten had learned just two seconds earlier from Jon’s moaning, was Lisbet. Breathlessly stepping away from her neighbor, she straightened her skirts before holding out both hands for Marten’s coat.

Jon led Marten through the fields to the pond with a bundle of clothes in hand to lend the doctor. They passed Fionnobhar by the shearing shed, having apparently abandoned his cooking duties in favor of doing something violent with the wyrm’s remains, which smelled foul.

On reaching the pond, which was small but thankfully undisturbed by the wyrm’s antics, Marten stripped, handed his filthy belongings over to his host, and waded into the water with a bar of soap and a grim determination. As Jon hurried back to the house, ostensibly to give Marten’s laundry to Lisbet, and more likely to pick up where he left off with her, Marten blocked all that from his mind and focussed on getting clean. He had washed his wound the night before, but he hadn’t properly bathed in a week, and he felt impossibly grimy. Even besides the mud and dirt and wyrm-fluid, there was his own sweat build-up to contend with, and ash from the barn-fire, all of which combined coated him so thoroughly that if he dragged a fingernail against his skin, it would come away with a thick black layer of filth underneath.

He went through his entire bar of soap, scrubbing himself from head to toe until the pond water was filmy with soap scum, and his skin was pink all over. When he had gone over his entire body three times and had no soap left for a fourth, he sat at the bottom of the pond, submerged to his shoulders, and tried to determine whether he felt any better.

He felt cleaner, anyway, and relieved at the thought of having fresh clothes to change into. He wasn’t hungry, or frightened, or fighting for his life. He wasn’t a bloodghast.

But he wasn’t cut out for adventure, either. He’d watched Fionnobhar slay a dragon, and even participated in the act, and that was more than enough for him to know that he didn’t particularly want to do it again. After the Town Hall meeting that evening, he would take a room at the inn, have a warm, simple meal, and head home to Easton the next morning to resume his life. He would take some time away from his practice—as much time as he would advise any patient to take after such an ordeal, or at least, something close to that much time—and he would tell of the knight’s heroism, and perhaps even commission a bard to pen the tale more eloquently, and that would be his debt to Fionnobhar repaid. By the following moon, he would be quite recovered, and his life returned to normal.

Resolved on that course of action, Marten pulled himself out of the pond, dried off, diligently changed his wound’s dressings and the bandage, and got dressed in his borrowed clothes, which almost fit him, though the sleeves and trouser legs were a touch too short.

That evening, as they waited on the steps of Town Hall for any more villagers to arrive, Fionnobhar seemed in good spirits, perhaps due to the enormous quantity of roast mutton he’d eaten over supper.

“It’ll make a great story,” he was saying to Marten, casually swinging his sword through a complicated series of patterns like he was doing drills, though, from what Marten could tell, his stance was all wrong for it. “It would have been better if someone had died—like some random bystander, not you—just to really ram home how dangerous the wyrm was. I don’t need a monster to put up a good fight if I’m just there to take its head, but if there’s an audience to tell the story after, then it’s better when it looks like a really worthy opponent, you know?”

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“I’m glad no one else died,” Marten replied, watching the mayor of Wickshaw poke his head out through the doors of Town Hall and look around for any late-arriving stragglers. It was uncomfortably easy to imagine his head without its body, getting stuffed into Fionnobhar’s bag of holding.

“I think this is about it,” the mayor said to them. “Sir Knight? If you would be so good?”

Fionnobhar strolled inside, heading straight to the podium at the back as Marten followed. Wickshaw’s Town Hall was a tall building of perhaps a hundred and fifty years of age, made of dark wood with a steep black roof of thick wooden shingles. Inside, the main hall was long and narrow, with benches for an audience to sit, and standing room at the sides. At the far end stood a podium on a small platform. Above, the ceiling beams were built and angled in a way to amplify any speaker’s voice and carry it the length and breadth of the hall.

There were a hundred-some adults gathered, looking curious as to what exactly Jon the sheep farmer had gotten himself involved with, and just as many children, drawn by the promise of seeing a travelling knight, and, perhaps, the gruesome remains of a monster. Jon waited with the mayor beside the podium, bouncing on the balls of his feet with nervous energy.

“Hi there,” Fionnobhar said to the assembly as he mounted the platform. “Where are we again? Wickshaw? So, you’ve all heard what’s-his-name here talking about the wyrm that’s been ravaging his farm and eating all his sheep. You’ve probably heard the potato-guy’s side of the story, too. Is he here?”

A murmur ran through the crowd as the townsfolk looked around to locate Reb, who announced himself by the door.

“You’re telling us there was a real wyrm here all season,” Reb said, glowering with his arms crossed. “Here in Wickshaw, where we’ve never had so much as a snakelet before, never mind a great bloody dragon.”

“I don’t know anything about the village’s history, and I don’t care. But you definitely had a wyrm.”

Reaching into his bag, Fionnobhar wrestled the beast’s head out and thunked it down on top of the podium, where its thick, slimy purple-blue tongue lolled out from between its many teeth to drip viscous clear fluid down the side of the stand and into a puddle on the floor. The crowd’s murmurs turned to titters and gasps as they first recoiled, then pushed forward to get a better look.

“I’ve examined the remains,” the mayor cut in, sweaty with nerves, “and I assure you, it’s indeed genuine. Not a hint of a hoax to any of it. Now, Jon here has been subject to no shortage of rumors and ridicule these past months, and the neighborly thing to do—”

“Don’t you think,” Reb shouted over the mayor and the excited chattering of the townsfolk as he stomped forward from his place by the door, stabbing one accusing finger in Jon’s direction, “that it's a mighty big coincidence that some knight, a total stranger, should show up out of nowhere just to prove him right? Our own lord didn’t put enough stock in his stories to send a man out. Because our Lord Renmore knows, as we all know, that Jon’s stories are, and always have been, hog shite!”

“You’re saying I ruined all my fields and slaughtered all those sheep just for attention?” Jon demanded. He shoved his own finger into Reb’s chest in retaliation. “Or,” he continued, with a manic gleam in his eyes, “did I do it all to convince your wife to leave you for better pastures? That's what you’ve been saying all this time, isn’t it? Well, the wyrm was real, but that little prophecy, you made happen yourself with your unneighborly behavior and your sour attitude! I was telling the truth, and I still cuckolded you!”

“Fight!” Fionnobhar shouted with far too much glee as Reb choked on his rage and threw the first punch.

“What if you didn’t, though,” Marten suggested wearily, though he wasn’t about to try to reinforce anyone’s pacifism. Instead, after watching the first exchange of blows, he sidestepped the whole ordeal, gave a polite nod to the mayor, and headed for the exit.

“You don’t want to see who wins?” Fionnobhar called after him, shoving the head back in his bag and jogging to catch up.

“I assume Jon is the winner,” Marten replied. A glance over his shoulder confirmed that Lisbet had joined the fray, though it was unclear whether she was trying to pull her husband off Jon, or strangle him. “Or, more likely, neither of them is. In any case, I’m not interested in the outcome. I want to collect my clothes, go home, and sleep for a week.”

“That’s boring,” Fionnobhar informed him, throwing one arm around Marten’s shoulders as they reached the door, where an ancient woman stood stooped over her walking stick, a mane of wiry silver hair framing her face. “I’m really not feeling the adventuring spirit in you tonight. What gives?”

“My patience, mostly. And my endurance.” Stopping just in reach of the door, Marten turned to face the knight. “I’m tired,” he told Fionnobhar earnestly, “and everything hurts. I appreciate your invitation to join you on your quest, but my adventure ends here. I’ll spread your name as far and wide through Southern Bretenlande as I can, in acknowledgement of the aid rendered to me in Drummondville. But either here or in the morning is where we part ways, with much gratitude.”