Ch 8: THE SHEEP FARMER'S WELL
Breakfast was a plate of jammy toast and eggs with apple oatmeal and a mug of tea, all served generously and steaming hot. Marten picked at his, cautious despite his growling stomach, until he was certain his earlier nausea wouldn’t rear its head. After the first few bites, his appetite flared, reminding him he’d subsided on scraps since locking himself in that wine cellar, and hardly better than that beforehand, and he barely kept himself from wolfing down his portions.
Fionnobhar, meanwhile, took his plate to a private table in the corner where he sat facing the wall, seemingly impervious to the others’ baffled looks, and scarfed his down where no one could see his face. His helmet stayed on, though Marten assumed he raised the visor rather than shovelling forkfuls in through the slats. But he couldn’t be sure.
When their plates were cleared, Marten and Fionnobhar followed the disgruntled farmer from the inn to his respectable-sized plot growing tubers and root vegetables at the height of their harvest. The damage done to his field was obvious. The cause of it was less so.
“How exactly do you think your neighbor has been digging these furrows?” Marten asked. The grooves and trenches winding through his fields were long and deep, and impossible for a single man to dig by hand overnight in secret.
“Clearly, he’s attaching some contraption to his plow and doing it that way,” Reb replied.
“What does your wife think?”
The man frowned, his beard bristling. “She buys his story, that it's some manner of beast. I think the two of them are playing me. You’re a knight, though,” he added to Fionnobhar. “You can put a stop to all this, can’t you? This is clear damage to my property. It can’t be allowed. If I see him at it, I’ll kill him myself. I’ve just not been able to actually catch him in the act.”
“We’re going over there right now to ask him about it,” Fionnobhar promised.
“Why don't you stay here,” Marten suggested to Reb. “If you confront him again and things get heated, he's more likely to double down on his wyrm story.”
The farmer grunted, clearly unimpressed, but he waved them off and headed to the farm house to resume his day’s work.
“Does this strike you as the work of a man and a plow?” Marten asked Fionnobhar as they made their way across the field of potatoes towards the neighbor’s property.
“Fuck no. If this isn’t a wyrm, it's something else just as good.” Fionnobhar sounded excited at the prospect, and Marten felt a little shimmer of excitement to mirror him.
The neighbor was a sheep farmer called Jon, who glowered at them fiercely until they explained that they weren’t coming on behalf of the potato farmer, but simply from his property. When Fionnobhar said he wanted to hear the story about the wyrm, the sheep farmer lit up, ecstatic at finally finding a sympathetic audience. He had fair, woolly hair not unlike that of his livestock, and round eyes and a fluttery, overexcited demeanor that made Marten privately understand why the other villagers assumed he was embellishing, if not outright inventing, his stories.
“Now, if I was making it up for attention, that’s one thing,” said Jon, leading them through his fields, which bore similar damage to his neighbor’s, if not worse. “But why would I make it up as an excuse to damage Reb’s farm when mine’s in even worse shape, and why would I be killing my own sheep? How does that stick it to him?”
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“He didn’t say anything about your livestock,” Marten said, picking his way up a rocky hill where a flock of sheep grazed around them.
“Of course he didn’t. Because he won’t believe a word I say! When I try to tell him about it, he accuses me of butchering my own flock and planting the evidence. He says the sheep are old or sick, or the ones I’m going to sell in town anyway, like he knows a damn thing about sheep. Just look at this.”
Reaching the top of the hill, they looked down the other side to find the remains of a sheep at the bottom. The animal was mostly eaten, little more than its head and spine left intact.
“Did I do that to one of my own animals?” Jon demanded.
“It could be a wolf or bear kill,” Marten offered.
“Or,” Fionnobhar said gleefully, “it could be a wyrm. Have you actually seen this thing, or are you guessing?”
“I’ve seen it,” Jon said with grim vindication, “and I can take you right to its lair.”
According to the sheep farmer, the wyrm had taken up residence in an old well in the far reaches of his furthest field. Neither the well nor the field had been used since his father’s time, grown over and neglected. The grass was waist-high and yellow, dotted with scraggly, wispy wildflowers, with tangled brambles and stinging nettles encroaching from the borders. The well itself was raised on a small platform, its walls made of lopsided stone and crumbling mortar. A cover was fixed in place over top of it, rotting planks of wood tied down and bolted into the ground on either side. The surrounding field looked undisturbed.
“It came in from beneath,” said Jon, stopping some distance from the well to glare at it with folded arms. “It's a burrower, this wyrm, like a great terrible earthworm or some such. It only surfaces when it wants to grab our crops or livestock. The rest of the time, it’s down there. Underground.”
“Have you looked inside?” Fionnobhar asked, sidling up to the well.
“Course not,” Jon said with a snort. “What am I going to do about a great bloody wyrm? I’m not a knight. It took you long enough to turn up to deal with it. I’ve been complaining all summer!”
“I guess you weren’t complaining to the right people,” Fionnobhar said. “But I’m here now, and whatever’s down there, I’m absolutely happy to kill it for you. Now, grab the other side of this thing, and let’s take a look.”
Fionnobhar cut through the ropes holding the cover in place as easily as swatting a cobweb before he and the farmer hefted the cover off to the side. Immediately, the smell of damp stone and cold soil rushed up from the hole, joined by a slower waft of rotten meat.
Marten covered his nose and mouth with one sleeve even as he crept up to join the other two on the platform, leaning over the side of the well to look inside.
There was something at the bottom, yards and yards below the surface. It gleamed wetly, hidden in the darkness except for the occasional flash of scale as it shifted and caught the light. Disturbed by the sudden intrusion of sunlight, it stirred, its enormous bulk rasping against the well’s stone walls as it coiled in and around itself like an enormous snake restlessly tying itself in knots.
“That,” said Fionnobhar, staring down into the depths, “is definitely a wyrm.”
“I knew it. I knew it!” the farmer crowed. “There it is, the bastard! Making me out to be a madman since the lambs came, but no—there it is! Vindication!”
“How are you going to get it out?” Marten asked, staring rapt at the shifting coils.
“Don’t let it get back into the tunnels,” Jon warned. “It’ll only wreak more havoc!”
“Have you got a grappling hook?” Fionnobhar asked, still staring intently down the well. “I can hook it like a fish and drag it out.”
“No hook, but I’ve got plenty of rope in the barn. Maybe you can lasso it?”
“There’s neither head nor tail visible,” Marten countered. “Even if you brought a sheep over for bait, I don't see any way for it to scale the walls and come out on its own.”
“What’s one more day of damage to your fields?” Fionnobhar asked, and picked up a rock to chuck it into the well like a boy tossing wishing-coins.
The stone pelted into the wyrm’s coils with a thud, and the beast’s restless shifting became intent, a hissing scrape of scales as it writhed, locating the cause of the pain. One pale, round reptilian eye stared up at them from the darkness before the creature gave a mighty shiver and wriggled out of the well-bottom and into one of its many tunnels, disappearing deep under the soil and bedrock with a flick of its thick, wormy tail.
Jon gnashed his teeth. “Dammit! There's no telling where it’ll resurface now.”
“You must know of at least one opening where it’s come out before,” Marten said, clutching the side of the well, anxious now that the creature was out of sight.
“Lately it’s been favoring a spot by the shearing pen. Hurry, and keep your sword at the ready.”