Indomitus Est (The Fovean Chronicles)

by Brady, Robert

  “Here, lad,” he said. “That rich food is going to make you puke if you don’t settle it.”

  I wondered at his logic but drank the beer. It was delicious and I drained it.

  “Ah, I know a good, fat wife for this one, Garret,” Elle said as she bustled around a low, wide sitting room, the first floor of their four-story hostel. I counted ten tables that she waited with the help of a skinny girl of about twelve in a white dress like hers. I sat with several dark, quiet men at the bar. “He will need her to feed him!”

  Fat Garret slapped his one hand down on the bar and laughed toothlessly. “You’re in trouble now, lad,” he told me. “My Elle has a bead on you – you will be a bachelor no more before your month is up.”

  “Your Elle will have to run faster than me,” I told him between bites. I felt her smack the back of my armor. It surprised me that the two had adopted me so fast. Iron Jack had been everything that Rourke had said, a competent smith more than able to handle Blizzard. After the huge stallion had mule-kicked four planks out of the back of his stable, Jack had shackled his ankles to four posts in a special stall and commenced to shave down his hooves and shoe him, dodging bites almost without thinking. He had then walked me into the hostel, the Great Eagle, and introduced me to Fat Garret and Elle as his best customer.

  I knew they wanted something – I had no clue as to what.

  “You would be surprised to see how fast these skirts come up if I am after you, Rancor,” she told me.

  “Now that is the kind of woman you can introduce me too,” I told her. The skinny girl blushed crimson and Fat Garret smacked his hand down on the bar again, laughing. I felt Elle’s fingers grab my earlobe as she playfully shook my head. I turned on my stool to look into her brown eyes.

  “Now, don’t be telling me you think I will help you with some boyish whoring,” she warned, half-serious. “And I think your teeth are long for such, anyway. I can double that rent you pay, you know!”

  The man sitting next to me at the bar, a skinny, greasy-haired fellow with sallow eyes and a long nose that gave him the look of a depressed weasel, gave a bark of a laugh. “That you already did, Elle,” he said.

  “Hush, you,” Elle warned him. “Kark Frinfeld, I was not talking to you, though I could as well be talking to your poor wife of the amount of time you spend here.”

  Kark poked me in the armor. “Hey, now – you would want to know that the sign over the door says a silver a week, no?” he asked.

  “I might at that,” I said, trying to look shrewd as I polished off my second bowl. Fat Garret started to look nervous. “I am getting stable for my horse and two meals a day, though, friend Kark.”

  “And should you be leaving your horse to wander the street, then?” he asked me, by which I assumed he meant that the horse should be stabled free. “And as for meals, that’s a couple of pennies at most. As I see it, meals should be two or three silvers, and eight for board, which is nine silvers of change you didn’t get.”

  I did the math – twenty “silvers” to one of my gold coins, and if 56 meals at two pennies each were two or three silvers…

  Elle had stopped dead in her tracks and Fat Garret’s hand lay still on the counter. I had known that they were too friendly, though it disappointed me that Rourke had sent me somewhere to get ripped off. More likely they had gauged the armor and the size of my pouch and figured correctly that I would pay it. I could see the embarrassment now and knew that this would be an issue in my stay here.

  I could likely get my money back and go somewhere else, but it was late. I could ask for the change now, or I could do something to help them out of this situation.

  I ran a risk, in that these obviously weren’t honest people. Likely they would take what I could give them and do nothing more than they had to.

  So I picked the middle road. “I take it you haven’t seen my horse, friend,” I told him.

  “So what about your horse?” he asked.

  “He is an eighteen-hand stallion,” I told him. “Do you know stallions?”

  Kark snorted. “I am a horse trader, and yes, I get what you mean now. Eighteen hands, hmm? There are no bigger on the Wild Horse Plains. Where did you come by him?”

  “Wait now,” Fat Garret said, saving me an explanation for a moment. “What of it that he rode in on a big horse.”

  Elle smacked his shoulder. This seemed to be how she interacted with men; though based on where she worked I could hardly blame her. “It means, you lummox, that he will kick hell out of the stalls every time a mare in rut comes within a block of here. And that is going to be every day until he leaves or until the end of Life.”

  Fat Garret looked at me. “Hey now,” he began.

  I felt tempted to lay my hand on my sword but didn’t. I just looked at him with an eyebrow raised. We stayed like that for a moment, and then he slammed his hand down on the bar, not laughing this time.

  “I could be tempted to help you reinforce the walls around his stable,” I told him. “Seeing as I am a carpenter, and all – but you would have to buy the wood.”

  Elle smacked him again. I had started to actually like that in her, though I don’t know why. Something about a five foot, three-inch woman, bigger around than tall, beating up on all of these big men appealed to me.

  “Have him moved to the corner stall, Garret,” she hissed. “The roof there is dipping anyway. He is a carpenter, by Law.”

  Kark shook his head, and took a long pull on his beer. “They are still getting the better of the deal,” he said. Garret seemed to agree and the deal was done.

  I hadn’t known that about seasons and mares in rut, actually. I negotiated for another beer and got that too. As I drank it, I wondered if his being so mean would be a factor, which is what I had meant. In a reinforced stall, I doubted it.

  Oh, well.

  It occurred to me right then that I had made it through this whole event without hitting anyone. I could honestly say that, before my time with the Simple People, I would have smacked Fat Garret in his toothless mouth and stomped out of here with my money just to prove what a tough guy I was. Maybe my interview with a God called War, or my time spent training with a little man who could kick my ass at will until he showed me how to do it better, had given me another way.

  Then again, I might be getting long in the tooth, like Elle said. That isn’t so bad.

  Garret looked at me and shook his head. “Elle, you get this one a real fat wife,” he said. Then the four of us laughed.

  Ok – so here is my definition of a carpenter:

  You go down to the local Home Depot, Lowe’s or Grossman’s, and you buy a bunch of wood planks, all cut for you, and a bunch of screws or nails, all forged for you, and maybe you buy a hammer and a drill, pre-made for you, and bring them home, and you plug in what you have to plug in, and you make what you have to make.

  Here is the Fovean carpenter: you start with a big tree and some iron ore…

  Ok, maybe not that bad, but close. I woke up with the sun and Fat Garret pounding on my door to ask me if the whole day had to pass before he got my promise out of me.

  I walked out of my room in thong sandals, my leather pants and no shirt. Bleary eyed and cranky (because, once again, these people had no idea what coffee was), I shuffled down to the stables with Garrett buzzing like a fly behind me.

  I saw a pile of hand-cut lumber tied in a bundle to the side of the stable. The odds of any two pieces being of uniform size, thickness, and length – why calculate them? They wouldn’t be. That is a marvel of modern technology, not a sawmill where the machines ran at the speed of the river beside it.

  Iron Jack had already pulled 30 feet of wire (which he had made himself) to cut us a pile of nails, and had also seen fit to attach heads to them. That had taken one of his apprentices all morning. Their hammer consisted of a lump of iron on a stout branch – barely more.

  “You have a plane, at least?” I asked Garret. “The joints won’t fit unless I have a plan
e.”

  “What plane?” he asked me, as if I was crazy. “You want to go out onto the plains to build this? No – build it here.”

  Crap.

  Jack looked at me like this was the funniest thing he had seen all morning. He was probably right. “You don’t know what I am talking about, either, do you?” I asked him.

  He shook his head.

  “Well, how to you make the planks fit up along side each other?”

  “I thought you were a carpenter?” he asked me.

  “I am.”

  “So you don’t know how to make paste from dust and water and some fat?”

  Oh, man – that had to suck! Forget that it is all you can eat bug buffet that is going to leak, wear out, stink – you name it.

  “What do you use to write with?” I asked him.

  He looked at Garrett, who looked at me, then at him, and shrugged. The one-armed man went back into the Eagle and returned with a chalkboard and a lump of chalk.

  With this I sketched him out a plane, essentially a wooden handle and case to hold a metal blade. I showed him where the knob should be, and how you adjusted it.

  “That cuts the wood?” he asked me.

  “On the side, yes – just enough to make it smooth and flat.”

  Garret asked, “Can you make that?”

  He shrugged. “The blade in about an hour. I have a block of wood and a chisel for the thing around it. I don’t see where you would want it, but I can make it.”

  Garret nodded. “Make it. I want to see it.”

  Between the two of us, it took all morning to make a plane. It was crude, and the first time the knob wasn’t tight and the blade slipped, but we worked out a way to thread a hole into the wood and that made it tight.

  Garret played with it on the side of a board while I ate a simple lunch of bread and beef chunks in a bowl. He worked the side of one board, then another, then marveled at how he could make the two boards fit together.

  “You would barely have to do anything to this,” he said. “You could just nail them to a frame, and you would be done. The white wash would seal it.”

  “That’s the idea,” I said.

  He nodded. I started lining up boards to plane. He held them while I worked, and I showed him how a simple ‘T’ square made sure that the plane stayed level.

  The sunlight had grown dim by the time we had rebuilt the frame where the roof of his stables dipped. All of the wood had rotted from the weather and needed to be pulled out. We upset a nest of carpenter ants and got bitten for our efforts. We decided to eat dinner late, although both of us were starving, and finish so that we wouldn’t have to come back to it tired.

  When I start a job, I have no problem sticking with it to the end. I hate to come back to it, though. In that, I am lazy. Once I put my tools down, I am thinking of my next job, not my last.

  So the sun had set and we were seeing by lantern light when I banged the last nail. I stood back to admire my work with Garret.

  “That is something,” he said.

  By tying two shovels together, I had made a post-hole digger and sank two four-by-fours four feet into the ground. That left them with about eight feet exposed, and from here I built the frame for my walls. I tied it to the ceiling with an angle iron that I showed Jack how to make (a 90 degree bend in a piece of metal, with holes in the end to bang nails through). Some crossbeams between the four-by-fours and then our planed planks on top of that on both sides, and the job was done. Garret could make someone else paint it.

  Blizzard took his place inside. He reared as soon as he saw the gate shut, hit his head on the ceiling, screamed in anger and then mule-kicked the wall I had just built. It didn’t even flicker.

  “A kick like that would kill a man,” Garrett commented.

  “If he was lucky,” I agreed. “Might just break his legs, his hips and his back.”

  Garrett nodded. He looked at me, the older man at the younger.

  “So,” he said, finally.

  “You’re a carpenter.”

  Chapter Seven

  Foreign Relations

  The bed felt warm and comfortable as I awoke in it. I stretched beneath the one comforter, from the tips of my fingers to the tips of my toes, and groaned. From the one small window I could see pink light to tell me that the sun had just risen.

  The tiny arm around my waist, light fingers on my skin, soft breath on my shoulder, had more than the sun rising. Elle has been half true to her word – she had only waited two days before she formally introduced me to Aileen. Aileen had pretty blonde hair, a full bosom and a flat stomach, blue eyes like mine and fine, white teeth. She had grown up here, the daughter of a brewer who did a good trade with The Great Eagle. She wore a gold chain around her neck with a pendant hanging from it; a closed fist made of gold. It symbolized the god Law, of whose religion she was a proud daughter.

  Not so proud that she hadn’t surrendered her virginity to me, though. Law’s daughters were supposed to save themselves for marriage. I had taken her out to dinner and a walk along the Llorando, away from the city’s foul smell. She had wanted to ride Blizzard but the stallion wouldn’t let her. She settled instead on feeding him an apple, which he ate with his back turned to her. Later she had dragged me into a temple on Law’s holy day, Firstday, but I had felt profoundly uncomfortable and not gone back.

  My God wouldn’t be a friend to Law. I knew without knowing how that I should stay out of Law’s church.

  After that she had grilled me on which God I worshipped, and had decided that, as a warrior, it must be War. I had stayed closed-mouthed. Like Elle, when angry, she pounded me with her tiny fists and I laughed, making her even angrier, and that had been such a time.

  “It isn’t like man and wife always worship the same God, you know,” she had told me. I didn’t miss the hint. I also didn’t comment on it. More pummeling.

  She ran her fingers through my chest hair. Blond hair isn’t good on a chest – dark hair stands out thick and, well, dark. Blond, like mine, was hard to see and too fine to give character. The lifestyle I lead had added a bit more muscle and my stomach, chest and arms were even more defined. Elle’s food had put no less than another five pounds on me. Aileen loved the chest and blond hair.

  She was a natural blonde, as I learned by the river that night. She had walked me to a little grove by the river, where a screen of full, green trees and low bushes hid us from any passerby, and given me her best “kiss me” eyes. When I had, she pressed her body into mine and I knew what we were there to do.

  I would love to act like the great bull-stud warrior, but although it wasn’t my first time, it had certainly been a long time. I had let her know that, afterwards. She made sure to get her dress and undergarments (skirts, petticoat, a girdle, a slip, a bra – how and why women do that, I have no idea!) off and folded neatly so she could leave the grove with dignity, and mine so that I wouldn’t betray her. She took the top, her big breasts rubbing my face, my hands on her well curved behind as she settle down on me, whimpering and biting her lower lip. She hadn’t ridden long before I exploded up into her. Still she continued until she, too, had been satisfied. Then she spoke with me, kissed my lips, neck and chest, joked and teased until we could do it again. That time took longer and, from what I could tell, she enjoyed it.

  “Hey, blondie,” she said into my ear. Her pet name for me. I pretended to be asleep, a smile on my lips, and she punched me in the ribs. I grunted and she hit me again. “Up already, big man!”

  I opened one eye and looked at her. When I closed it she started all over again. Finally I took her in both hands and rolled over on top of her in bed. Her legs were apart immediately, her hand guiding me where she wanted me. She had taken lately to scratching and biting, as well as hitting, kicking, insulting – I am guessing Volkhydran men are big and brutish (certainly the ones I knew were) and their women treated them that way.

  I knew Aileen considered herself my woman as soon as she introduced me to
her father. He looked at me like anything else he might find on his shoe. I weighed about the same as he, but stood a foot taller with a body in a lot better shape. Her brother was a skinny, long-shanked blond. He would inherit the lucrative business and acted like he knew it. He had informed me of his status as one of the best swordsmen in Myr and had wanted to spar immediately. I had been sidestepping him ever since.

  I sank into her. She was hot and hungry as always. For a virgin, she knew a lot, certainly more than I did. She had taught me how to kiss without breaking her lower jaw (which is something I assume most guys never learn) and how to give her as much as I took when we made love. She had slept here twice, bringing even darker looks from her father and more insistent challenges from her brother.

  I didn’t want a woman. More importantly, I didn’t think that War wanted me to have one. She and I had discussed a little of that, as well – she knew a lot about religion. War had been among the strongest of the gods. With Destruction and Chaos, and allied temporarily to Desire, He had put every Fovean nation, including southern Toor and the Slee nation, at each others’ throats. Bodies had been piled high at city gates and the world about to destroy itself until Law had asserted Himself. Allied with Order, and supported by Adriam, He had created the Fovean High Council. Even when Power came in on the side of War, Law and Order had prevailed with a mandate that there would be a restriction against international fighting and that all national borders would be fixed for all time. Law and Order were then able to attract Power and Desire to their side, and Adriam had been able to step back, leaving the gods War, Destruction and Chaos in defeat.