by Robert Bevan
“Seriously man,” said Julian. “That's not cool. He's in pain.”
“It's for him,” said Cooper. He looked over the carcass, grabbed one of the forepaws, and held it up. He looked back at Dave, and then down at the paw, nodded to himself, and then jabbed a hole as close to the shoulder as he could. Blood ran slowly and smoothly from the puncture. Then he sawed at the hole, cutting all the way around the leg. He pulled it down over the leg like a sock turned inside out. Julian closed his eyes and breathed deeply until the urge to vomit passed. He went and sat next to Dave, whose arm still had at least some skin left on it.
Dave took in a deep breath, held it, and then spoke. “What is Cooper doing?”
“I don't know,” said Julian. “As far as I can make out, he's just mangling that leopard corpse.”
Cooper made another puncture in the skin, and cut around the circumference of the joint just above the paw. He sawed away until he had completely separated the tube of flesh from its former owner. He dipped it in the river, and wiped away the blood. Then he turned the tube inside out, and gave a self-satisfied nod to the finished product. He walked back to where his friends were sitting.
“Hold him still,” said Cooper. Dave closed his eyes tight, continuing to hold out his injured forearm, and Julian held it steady by the elbow.
“This may sting a bit, Dave,” said Cooper. And without another word, he shoved the leopard's leg skin as hard and quickly as he could over Dave's fist, down his arm to the elbow.
“Aaaauuuugggghhh!” Dave screamed.
“How does it feel?” asked Cooper.
“It hurts like a bastard.”
Cooper frowned. “Oh.”
“But it’s not half as bad as it was before.” The spotted, furry skin fit snugly down the length of his forearm. He opened and closed his hand, just to make sure that he could, and looked at his forearm muscles move under his new sleeve. “Thanks, Cooper.”
“It looks bad ass,” added Julian.
“Do you think it’s really okay?” asked Dave.
“It’s skin, ain’t it?” said Cooper. “All it needs to do is keep your blood from leaking out until tomorrow morning, and then you can heal yourself.”
“Why does he have to wait until tomorrow morning?” asked Julian.
“He has to pray for his spells every day,” Cooper explained.
“Why can’t he pray for some spells right now? It’s not like we’re busy.”
“He needs to choose a certain time of the day to pray. He chose dawn.”
“You mean he has to schedule an appointment with God?”
“Something like that,” said Dave. “Look, I know it’s only mid-afternoon, but we ought to see if we can’t get some sleep right now. I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to sleep. The sooner we sleep, the sooner we can go after Tim.”
“I’m fucking knackered,” said Cooper.
“I’m not actually tired at all,” said Julian. “Well, that's not exactly right. I am tired, very tired as a matter of fact, but not what you'd call sleepy.”
“Good,” said Cooper. “You can take first watch.”
“What should I –“
“Just stay awake and keep your eyes open for leopards and shit. If there are any problems, wake us up.”
“Oh, all right. I can do that.”
Dave fell asleep almost immediately.
Cooper stayed up for a while with Julian. He tried to skin the rest of the leopard, and had better success with some parts of it than with others. He left behind a mutilated carcass that neither of them cared to look at. Then he cleaned the bits of skin he thought were salvageable, and threw the carcass into a clump of undergrowth.
“Do you think we should take a look and see how bad he's hurt?” asked Julian.
“Christ, no,” said Cooper. “Let the guy rest. You think he's going to be able to sleep if we try to pull that leopard skin off his arm?”
“I wasn't talking about looking at his arm.”
Cooper looked at him quizzically.
“I meant maybe we should take a look at his character sheet.”
“Oh, right,” said Cooper.
“I mean, if that's okay. I don't know the rules. Are you supposed to look at one another's character sheets?”
“We're beyond the game. And beyond the rules of etiquette. We should take a look at Tim's as well. See how he's holding up.”
Dave's sheet revealed that he had lost a total of six hit points.
“That's not so bad, is it?” asked Julian.
“Well, it's more than half of his life for an arm wound.”
“Sounds worse when you put it that way. How's Tim doing?”
“Not so hot. He's at two points below zero.”
“Does that mean he's-”
“No,” said Cooper. “It's still all nonlethal damage.”
“But I thought he was supposed to gain that back over time. He's worse off now than he was before.”
“Yeah. He probably woke up, and they kicked him again or something.”
“That's not good,” said Julian, not at all comforted by Cooper's speculations of what Tim was going through.
“If they've kept him alive this long without doing any real damage to him, he should be okay until we can get to him. It's probably better for him to sleep through as much of that as he can.”
There was a certain logic to that, and Julian guessed it was better to think about things that way than to worry, considering the amount of good either option was going to do for Tim.
“Hey!” said Cooper in an unexpectedly bright tone of voice. “I just thought of something.”
Julian looked at Cooper expectantly.
“We just fought a leopard!”
“Well done,” said Julian. “I seem to have a vague recollection of that myself. You say you only just thought of that?”
“Fuck you,” said Cooper, much to Julian's relief. He was still Cooper. “We should look and see if we got any experience points from it.”
Cooper and Julian each looked at their own character sheets.
“I've got 875 points,” said Julian. “Is that good?”
“Yeah,” said Cooper. “That's pretty close to second level. “I've only got 725.”
“Why do you have less than me?”
“Because you had your nose up Mordred's ass at the beginning of the game.”
“Oh.”
The afternoon was beginning to fade into evening. Cooper stretched out his huge gray arms, and thumped himself on his broad, bare chest. “Well, I'm going to turn in. Go ahead and wake me up if you get sleepy. Let Dave get as much rest as he can. If you hear anything out of the ordinary, though, wake us both the fuck up right away.”
“Okay,” said Julian. “Good night.”
Julian walked around the camp, looking for something to occupy his mind with, and came up short. He sat down on a rock and his eyes fell upon his bag. Maybe there was something in there worth looking at. He looked inside and found a large book and a small draw-string leather pouch.
He opened the pouch. It was full of something that looked like birdseed. Was that some food that he had forgotten buying? He took out a pinch of it and put it in his mouth. He spat it out immediately. He had never tasted birdseed before, but always imagined it would lean more toward bland than outright offensive to the tongue.
Hopefully the book would offer more in the way of time-killing opportunities. He took a seat on the ground under a part of Cooper's canvas shelter. As if he had his own personal alarm system, Cooper farted at him. Julian's eyes stung and watered, but he was determined that he was going to have a look at this book. It might be something important. He opened it and found a bunch of hieroglyphs on the first page.
“Great,” he said glumly. “A bag of shitty tasting birdseed and a book I can't read.” He looked back down at the page, and found that the glyphs weren't entirely unfamiliar to him. The longer he stared, in fact, the more familiar they got. He stared for about a full minute
before he was able to start forming words in his head. It was an instruction manual of some kind, but the instructions themselves looked far too complicated to remember and follow. It was full of words he wasn't sure he'd be able to pronounce properly and gestures that he was almost certain he would never be able to do. At least not right now. He was too tired for this shit right now. He'd have another look at it in the morning maybe. He closed the book and walked back over to his bag. Just birdseed now.
Julian jumped when he heard a muffled noise come from Cooper's direction. Something moved in Cooper's bag, like a small animal was stuck in there. Poor thing. Bad enough to be stuck in anything belonging to Cooper, but when you consider what he was keeping in there, a... Shit! That's what was moving. The soldier's head. Mordred?
He opened Cooper's bag and picked up the head by one ear. The face didn’t look happy. It took a deep breath in. Into what, Julian had no idea. It wasn't connected to any set of lungs that he could see. Its eyes darted back and forth until they met Julian's. “Scratch my nose?” it said.
Julian punched it in the nose. He couldn't get a lot of force behind the punch without risking either losing hold of the ear or ripping it off entirely. But he got his point across.
“I suppose you think I deserve that,” said Mordred.
“What do you want?” asked Julian. He considered demanding that he bring them back home, but suspected he knew what kind of answer he was likely to get, and didn't think he'd be able to resist smashing this head into an unrecognizable pulpy mess upon getting it.
“Just want to help a bit,” said Mordred. “You being new to the game and all, I thought you might have some questions.”
Julian couldn't resist. “When are you going to let us come home?”
“Uh-uh,” said Mordred. “I mean game-related questions.”
Julian considered punching Mordred in the head again, but decided that he'd better take whatever kind of help he could get. To avoid any further temptation, he placed the head in a tree, where a branch forked upward from the trunk.
“Fine,” said Julian. “How do we get Tim back?”
“That's up to you.”
“Well then fuck you.”
“Nothing else you'd like to know?”
“Like what?”
“Like what's in that little pouch, for instance?”
Julian looked back at his bag, and then at the head in the tree again. “The birdseed?”
“Did you buy birdseed at the beginning of the game?”
“No.”
“Then why do you think you have a pouch of birdseed?”
“Because I fucking looked at it, shithead.”
“What did you buy at the beginning of the game?”
Julian thought. “I bought a longsword, and a tent-”
“Yes,” said Mordred. “Go on...”
“And a backpack, and some arrows.”
The head in the tree rolled its eyes. “Yes, of course. Mustn't forget the arrows. Where would you be now without those arrows? What else?”
“Nothing else,” said Julian. “I couldn't afford anything else. I was so broke that you just went ahead and gave me-”
The head smiled. “That's right,” it said. “What did I give you?”
Julian thought. “I don't remember.”
The head sighed. “Why don't you look on your character sheet?”
“Okay,” said Julian. He pulled out his character sheet, and looked at his inventory. It wasn't a long list, and he soon ruled out everything but... “Bag of Magical Shit?”
“That's all you wrote down?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you remember what it was for?”
“No,” said Julian. “But I remember it was supposed to have been expensive. 100 dollars or something.”
“Gold pieces.”
“Whatever, dude. It's fucking birdseed. What kind of finicky-ass birds do you have around here?”
“Just spread it around on the ground and see what happens.”
Julian went back to his bag, grabbed the pouch, and dumped it on the forest floor. He looked over at the head. “There. Satisfied? Have I completed the mission? Can we go home now?”
“Look!” said Mordred.
Julian looked. The pile of seed glowed with a faint green light.
“Shit!” said Julian. “It’s radioactive? I put some of that in my mouth. Am I going to be okay?”
“It's not radioactive,” said Mordred. “It's magical. Just watch it, all right?”
Julian watched. A chipmunk scurried out from behind a tree, looked at the pile of seed, looked up at Julian, and then back down at the seed, as if he were assessing the amount of danger he would be getting himself into by coming too close. In the end, he decided it was worth the risk. He approached the pile, nibbled a bit, and then ran off. It appeared to have a similar opinion of the taste of the stuff as Julian had.
“It tastes like shit. I figured out that much for myself.”
“Shut up and keep watching.”
A rat came up and sampled a bit.
“Oh shit,” said Julian. “There are rats out here?”
“Don't like rats?”
“No,” said Julian. “Who the hell likes rats?”
“Fine,” said Mordred. The rat scurried away.
“What do you think about snakes?” As Mordred spoke, a tiny viper slithered up to the pile, and licked at some of the seed.
“Hate them,” said Julian.
“Toads?” A fat, brown toad hopped up to the seed, shot its tongue out, and plucked a little from the pile.
“Ew,” said Julian.
The head sighed. The toad convulsed, inflated its neck, and spit out the little bits of seed it had taken in. It hopped off.
“I think I'm going to throw up,” said Julian.
A black bird flew down from a tree, landed next to the seed, and stared up curiously at Julian.
“Do you hate ravens too?” asked Mordred.
Julian shrugged. “No,” he said. “To tell you the truth, I've never given them too much thought one way or another.” He stared back down at the bird.
“Good enough for me,” said Mordred.
The raven stepped closer on his skinny black legs, rose its wings up defensively, and let out a small caw. Julian crouched down, enamored with the bird, and hoping it wouldn't fly away. He smiled. “Go ahead, little guy. Give it a try if you want.”
The black bird pecked at the seed. To Julian's surprise, it didn't immediately fly away. In fact, it seemed to actually like the stuff. It pecked down again and again. It flapped its wings furiously and buried its head inside the pile.
“Jesus Christ,” said Julian. “When's the last time this thing had a meal?”
The bird went on eating and eating, and the pile of glowing seed grew smaller and smaller. It didn't seem possible for it to eat so much food in one sitting.
“It's ravenous!” said Julian. He shut his eyes tightly in a disgusted expression. “Oh my God. Did I just say that?”
“Good one,” Mordred chuckled. Julian was glad that he was the only one awake to have heard it.
The raven kept pecking away until every speck of seed was gone. It stared up at Julian with shiny black eyes. Then it fell on its back and started to convulse. It kicked its legs and flapped its wings in a frenzy. The wing-flapping had the additional unnerving effect of throwing its body back and forth on the ground. It cawed sharply and twisted its neck from side to side.
“Oh shit!” said Julian. “It's dying.”
“Give it a second,” said Mordred.
The bird seemed to calm down after a moment, still twitching here and there, but maintaining enough control to stand upright once more. It spread its wings out and its body shivered. All of its feathers stood up simultaneously. It opened its beak wide, but no sound came out. A couple of feathers flew off of its back into the breeze, and it gave one last horrible convulsion. Feathers flew everywhere. It lowered its head and flapped its wings
as hard as it could without leaving the ground, surrounding itself in a cloud of discarded feathers. As hard as it flapped, and as many feathers as it rid itself of, it never seemed to run out of them. It was as if it were growing new ones. Actually, it wasn't just growing new feathers. It was growing... just growing. It grew to half again its previous size. It was more like a black falcon now. It stretched out its wings one more time, opened its beak wide, and burped.
“Feel better now, big guy?” asked Julian.
“Indeed I do, Master,” said the bird. “Thank you very much.”
Julian jumped. It wasn't exactly the fact that the bird spoke to him that startled him. He had been through a lot in the past couple of hours. A talking bird just seemed par for the course. What threw him off was the way that it spoke to him. It sounded... British?
“Did that bird just...” he turned to look at the head, but fell silent when he saw it. It was as lifeless as one would expect a severed head in a tree to be. Mordred was gone. The head in the tree sat staring through glazed eyes at nothing. Julian gave it a light punch in the nose, just enough to knock it out of its position in the tree and onto the ground. He once again lifted it by the ear and carried it back to Cooper's shelter. His initial intention was to put it back in Cooper's bag, so they wouldn't forget it. But when he considered the likelihood of them forgetting it if he placed it in the line of fire of Cooper's ass, and weighing it against the likelihood of it coming back into being as Mordred just as Cooper was farting, or even having an involuntary shit in his sleep, he was willing to take that risk.
“You can talk?” Julian asked the raven when he returned.
“Of course, sir,” responded the raven.
“What's your name?”
The bird gave an ear-splitting caw, followed by two small chirps.
Julian cringed at the sound. “I don’t think I’m going to be able to pronounce that.”
“I’m yours to command, sir,” said the bird. “Call me by whatever name you like.”
Julian thought for a moment, but the idea at the forefront of his mind wouldn't cede a runner up. “What do you think of Ravenus?”
“Very clever, sir!”
“No, it's really not,” said Julian. “I just thought-”
“No, I get it, sir,” said Ravenus. “It's a play on words. I'm a raven, and when you saw me eat all that food, you must have thought I was ravenous. It's brilliant.”