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She came out of nowhere;
Savara 3rd, 1125 Dom.
I woke up the next day early in the car with the coffee still percolated with bubbling fury on a dimming fireplaces and where looking out into the open field, the groggy men with their drooling faces wandered like zombies tent to tent. I ran walked past the kitchen, where Old Chet sat in half-asleep watch, one eye-slit open and the other closed. At one second, his head falling and in the other, the sudden jerk of it rising again. Old Chet, sat and perched in between a sack of carrots rolling past his feet and a nest of potatos around his wheels.
“Good bye, buddy.” I said.
Stay a week? In this place? Like hell I was going to stay a week longer.
I came to town. Wandering the wooden-barred barns towards the growing pale concrete roads. The day rolling as I rolled through. Flat topped homes, construction workers still working out the dark-oak flooring and walling. Big sectioned off land being built on old dirt field. This was on the outskirt, the people with brown and dingy clothes. Beyond them though, deeper in the heart were the towering many-storied buildings with balconies and white spiral balustrades and where the soil was pliable, and the conrete floors loud against the hooved horse clops. I wandered. Trying hard to keep mental note of every story and every place, because in my pocket were the two hundred silver.
Yes. Two hundred. Given to me by Vincent, of course. Oh, Soveros had made a scene of it all.
“You’re giving him how much?” And what toss he’d made out of the tent, screams that were heard throughout the camp.
“We’ve got a hunt coming and you’re wasting time and money on him?”
God bless Vincent. Or Gods bless him. However many
It was a little before midday when my shadow was its most elongated.
So's here I was in and about the busy dirt road with the horses trailing around me, trying to dodge the faces of all the Flock members as I slipped and hid through alleys. There were clothing lines running across the rooftops and long lines of stores and homes and stables where the hay mounds were the size of small huts. I kept my hand to my coin purse and kept it close to my waist. Now, I didn't know much of currency here but I figured I had a good amount. Felt heavy, at least. Everyone in front of the stalls, the ones with hanging fish or baskets of fruit or piles of sheathed weapons bought with bronze. The idea then, was that I must have had someone better. Something more. Bronze. Silver. It doesn't take a genius to know which one was worth more.
The road gave way to streets of wood, not quite the opulence of brick but not quite as gauche as the black ground dirt.
A little wooden flap swung above me with a giant ham etched into it. I turned into the shop to a man with rotting carcasses behind him.
What was it Vincent said I needed? Defense. Horses. And food supplies. Food.
My stomach grumbled. I’d feed myself today and tomorrow and for however long it’d take me to get to Lao Lo. Which was hopefully quick enough to avoid the Flock themselves from arriving. That’d be awkward. But like Vicentius said. It’d take them an extra month. That was the whole point if it all, right? Like hell I was going to wait a month, to live amongst those animals another month and god knows how many weeks.
"Alright, what can you give me?" I dropped the sack in front of him. His eyes widened. "I'll need about three weeks worth of supplies. How much can this buy me?"
The string atop the bag undid itself by the growing width of the coins that leveled out and they flashed for a moment like hundreds of small little gems. The reflection glistened off his eyes and he smiled. He had one hand on the table that tapped wildly at an imaginary piano. The place reeked of old meat and the woodsy herbs like rosemary and thyme. When I turned my face away from one scent, in came the rank smell of another. Cheese, foot and maggot scented.
I kept my face forward, towards the smiling butcher.
"You'll need food that won’t spoil. Sausage, cheese will do ya." He walked away and behind the counter, to a little door out the back where boxes and metal things dropped and where he screamed and cursed. The noise settled. He stomped about and came out draped, smiling. The dried meat hung around his neck and his arms. Cheese clung by a stringed sack by his waist. Jerky in the husks of corn. (I’d seen it grown from outside, near the camp and cows).
“Here’s some fine Gwai meat.” He said
"Gwai meat?" I asked. "What's a gwai? Is it a cow?"
"Cow? No. Much better than cow. It’s a massive four legged furred thing that clings to the edges of Solvengrad a ways north from here. It’s peculiar to the berries there. Eats them, suck them in like little pellets.” He made slurping noises. “Heavensberries is whats makes its meat so sweet. But it’s lean. Dries out. So we make sausage, jerky. We shoot in some tallow and marrow from-”
"Alright. Alright. I get it.” I said. “How much for all that?"
My fingers ran through the gallery. The cheese, the sausage, the crumpled and crumbling jerky with a sheen like lacquered wood.
“Fifty silver.” He licked his lips, his wide jowls shaking as he did. Then swallowed. My eyes narrowed, he set down his meat and fixed his small round-lensed glasses on his nose.
“Is that too much?”
“It’s. It’s.” I forgot how to say bullshit. “It’s shit is what it is.”
He looked up like I'd just caught him, like the cage was rigged prematurely and the rabbit done gone escaped.
"I'll take twice what you’re offering for that much." I said.
"I can give you two more extra pounds of each. That's it." He said.
"Five pounds. Of sausage, of the jerky and of the cheese." I leaned closer, hands against the table. He leaned in too, so we were facing each with our breaths contaminating the airspace with an acidic scent. It almost clouds. We certainly had static.
"Fine." He nodded his head. "Five more pounds then, that's it. You're not getting anything else."
"Uh, uh, uh." I picked up a bottle of red liquid in a vase shaped flask with a bottle top with a small mound around the rim where it so desperately wanted to pop out. I pulled the cork with a thump and put the smell against my nose, that nose burning nail-polish scent of sour berries. “This too.”
"It took me three years to age that bottle.” He said. “You can’t be serious, you’ll kill my business.”
I looked around with my arms expanded to the loneliness of the shop. Sheets of meat that dangled in silence, dried fruits tangled on a wall like vines. No one here but us.
“Old man.” I drew my arms back. “I am your only business.”
"Take it." He shook his head. "Just rob me then."
I dropped the forty silver and had two fat sacks with me now. One over my shoulders, bulging and smelly, the other dangling by my waist.
I thought I was slick, I won't lie. Like just walking I could feel my swagger drag down my pants. I leaned my back and drew my legs forward and put my hands in my pocket, smiling for once and looking at all the horses and people that couldn’t keep their curious eye from me. Me, walking center of the street. Uncaring.
I turned a corner, a crossroads that separated four quadrants of the city. The brick roads, the muddy roads, the wooden roads and no road at all, but a green path. Each a different direction, each a different section. I could see the farms, I could see the roads leading in wards towards more Flock members and I could see where I came from. Four shades so stark it looked like a colorblind tapestry weaver had jumbled this whole scene together.
I turned towards the muddy road, I’d seen some stables there. I took five steps and felt a thump on my stomach. I tripped, fell on my knees and plastered dirt across my clothes and face. Not that my long sleeved rags were anything worth getting mad about.
A child’s head rose. A small girl with a pony tail and a lazy eye.
I don’t know why but it made me a little sad. Like a hole was in my stomach, and over the next few seconds of looking at her something cold had come to fill in the vacuum.
I swallowed my spit and blinked, my eyes had gone dry.
“Sorry.” I said. Sorry, that’s right. Sorry.
This child who had struck my leg and my abdomen blinked, right eye before the other and mumbled the noise, mhm.
She flashed her teeth, not necessarily a smile, because there weren’t enough teeth to form one. Her tongue stuck out from the gap in between her front tooth, a girl who must have been no older than fourteen.
She walked past me and away into a growing crowd where the chaos of chimes sounded off. I saw her back, briefly, as she squeezed in between an old woman with a basket of breads, towards vendors with the bells in their hairy palms. Another child disappearing. My eyes couldn’t keep off, my throat went dry.
The old woman walked past me, one end of the long loaf hitting her flabby cheek. She looked down, then around her waist.
“Where’s my money?” She said.
It shocked me awake.
I moved my belt. No rattle. I looked around my waist, no string or bag. My face went cold.
What the fuck? I went in circles looking as if it’d be there, the silver, all scattered on the floor and waiting for me. Oh, stupid me who misplaced my only money. There was no displacement, not of my own doing at least. No coins on the floor. No fucking bag.
The girl.
“Shit. Shit. Shit.” I spun faster. My hands shook.
"Hey, punk." I screamed in the direction of the vendors.
There wasn't a word for punk in their lexicon. Paoga was good enough.
Paoga. Paoga.
“Punk. Punk, get back here!” I ran towards where I’d seen her in the group of wandering people.
So's there I was looking for the poago, the girl with the blond ponytail and bangs to her neckline and the toothless smile and, as I remembered, the lazy eyes.
"Where's that little bitch?" I ran now. No concrete, no wood, no dirt even. The path past the vendors had given way to a grass less funnel. Just grass and pits full of water and mud. My boots made splashes in the gross streets. Shit, puddles, it all kind of blended so that whatever sploshy sound I made stepping could have been either or.
The people were too damn thick though, they just blurred in and out of my vision. The horses, shitting as they went on with their slow tread.
"Hey kid." I shouted. Until I realized it’d do more harm because if she was smart enough to pickpocket, she was smart enough to run.
The people thinned at last, or maybe I’d outrun civilization because wherever I was, the place where I finally leaned over and breathed heavily and dropped my sack of food was something destitute.
The buildings were in half-ruin, old brick and wooden capsized homes or shops with holes moldy or crumbling.
I spun. All day it felt like I’d been spinning.
I breathed heavily in the fringe of Canthus in a already dying, where small eyes peered through the shadows of the ruins of the city former. The poor left to rot in this forgotten section of town - and rotten they were, but never truly killed. Only worsened.
I just wanted a horse, for fucks sake. Now I needed to find the girl.
