by Logan Jacobs
“Would that be such a bad thing?” Theo asked.
“She tried to kill me,” I reminded him.
“You tried to kill her too,” Theo reminded me.
“That was justified,” I said.
“She thought her attempt was too. So maybe the two of you are even now.”
“Whose side are you on anyway?” I asked.
“I don’t take sides,” Theo stated. “That way I never preclude the option of friendship with the victor, whoever it may be.”
“That’s an unnecessary precaution, considering I always win,” I said.
Theo merely snorted in response. But whatever he might say or not say, my stalwart black stallion had risked his life many times before to save mine, and there was no one I trusted more.
Soon after that we came across a little stream trickling through the plains and stopped to refill my waterskin. Then I let Theo drink from his enlarged canteen. Water was much less of a problem for me than for other travelers, since I could make it stretch indefinitely as long as I was careful not to finish all of it. I always increased my stores of liquid indirectly by increasing the vessel though. My power wasn’t great enough to change the size of a river or a lake, and if I stuck my hand into one and tried to flex that particular mental muscle, nothing perceptible happened. I didn’t know whether there was actually no change in water volume at all, or whether only the water that was directly touching my hands swelled momentarily, but either way, trying gave me a slight headache so I quickly learned not to.
As the sun reached its peak in the sky, Theo requested to stop and rest in the shade.
“Why the hell not,” I said. “Whatever the source of this werewolf problem is, it’s not going to resolve itself before we get there.”
So we stopped below the leafy, spreading boughs of the next sizeable tree that we found. Instead of hobbling Theo the way most people had to do, I just said, “Hey, don’t fucking wander off anywhere,” and then I laid down in the grass, put my hat over my face, and dozed off.
When Theo snuffled me awake again, it was getting on evening and still hot but no longer scorchingly so, and the grass and brush no longer seemed to glare brightly at me. I fed Theo some oats and munched on some jerky. Luckily I’d been able to fill my belly with freshly cooked food during the festivities in Richcreek that morning, which already seemed like a lifetime ago, so I wasn’t too terribly hungry. Then we moseyed along on our way in peace without any need to exchange hardly a word.
An hour later, the crickets started up their chorus of chirping. I didn’t know whether they were singing to seduce prospective mates, or hawking miniature cricket wares, or threatening other crickets with bloody consequences if they didn’t clear out of their territory, but whatever they were all saying to each other sounded urgent.
There had been a time long ago, when I had been a different man, that my evenings had been filled with harp and lute and flute music. Now, it was fiddles and harmonicas if I happened to be in company, and more often than that it was crickets. Which was all very well by me most of the time. As long as the players weren’t too out of tune I could enjoy rustic instruments, and no matter how noisy they got I had long stopped minding the crickets. But I had to admit, the music of my old life was one of the few things that I did miss on occasion.
Once it got dark enough that turning an ankle became a risk for Theo, we stopped and bedded down for the night. I fed and watered Theo and ate some hard biscuits. Then I looked up at the stars until I fell asleep.
The next morning, I drank a draught of potencium with breakfast. It was better than coffee to wake me up, and I did a bit of stretching to get my muscles relaxed afterward.
Then we started out again. We weren’t going in any particular direction, but we tried to keep ourselves pointed in a straight line and stay true to the same non-particular direction. There weren’t many landmarks by which to distinguish.
At one point, we encountered grass with bare spots worn in it where the tracks of a train of wagons had rolled through, and the hoofs of their oxen had been stamped into the ground, but that looked to have been months past. I considered following the tracks since they probably led to more people but decided against it. We would have had to double back, at only a slight angle, and I didn’t want to throw away all the ground we’d covered over the last day and end up a few miles from Richcreek again.
For the next few hours after that we didn’t see anything more noteworthy than a pair of eagles guarding their nest, a pair of vultures pecking at the remains of some unidentifiable creature on the ground, and a patch of violently purple flowers.
Then, we heard the unmistakable sound of a rushing river. When we reached the water, it was a lovely sight, a wide and frenzied swath of silver cutting through the plains from the silhouetted mountains in the distance and disappearing into the long grasses in the other direction.
“Should we follow it downstream?” Theo asked.
“I have an even better idea,” I replied.
There was a stump on the shore on our side of the river just a few yards away. Apparently someone had cut the tree down, maybe to build a bridge or something, but whatever they had used the wood for, it was gone now. But I didn’t need any more wood than the stump would provide.
“You do?” Theo asked, this time suspiciously. He could in fact swim, and would die before he admitted to a fear of water, but that didn’t mean he liked it one bit.
Instead of answering aloud I just withdrew the miniature axe from his saddlebags that I carried with me everywhere. I had had it especially fashioned at the size of a child’s toy to make it a lighter load to carry. But as soon as I grabbed the handle and willed it to become a full size axe, it did. I swung it at the stump and hacked off a few pieces until I got one that split nicely with the proportions that I wanted. Then I picked up the flat, rectangular chunk of wood and held it up triumphantly for Theo to see while I allowed the axe in my hand to start shrinking back down to portable size.
“I don’t like your plan,” Theo informed me.
“You don’t even know what it is,” I replied.
“So it’s not what I’m thinking?” Theo asked.
“… It’s probably what you’re thinking,” I admitted as I put the now once again miniature axe back in one of the saddlebags and secured the bag.
“What if I refuse to get on?” Theo asked.
“Then first off, you’ll have to gallop alongside the river and just you try to keep up while I coast along without any effort at all,” I replied. “And second off, you’ll look like a damn pussy.”
I crouched down and set the little plank of wood that was probably a foot wide and a bit longer than on the surface of the river and held on to make sure it didn’t float away while I scaled it up to the size of a huge and heavy raft that would support the weight of both a man and a Friesian. Then I looked over at Theo.
He glared at me and huffed out a breath that made his long glossy forelock flap like a flag in the wind. But he stomped forward through the grass and clomped onto the raft. With his weight added to it, it became too heavy for me to hold in place on the water anymore, and I quickly had to throw myself on board as it started surging down the river. As I rolled my hands very briefly lost contact with the wood but then I bumped up against Theo’s hooves and slapped my hands back down again and restored the few inches that the raft had lost. Then I positioned myself on my knees with both of my palms pressed to the raft in front of me, because I had no desire to let it turn back into a woodchip and end up dumped into a rushing river alongside a very large and angry horse.
“If you can’t let go of the raft, then how are you supposed to steer it?” Theo asked. “I would offer to take up pole duties myself, but, in case you do not recall, my limbs end in lovely solid hooves, not those ridiculous wiggly flesh worms.”
“Fingers,” I said. “I’ve told you a hundred times to call them fingers.”
“You’re ignoring my question,” Theo said.
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“The river is going to carry us,” I said. “No steering needed.”
“But what if we come to a waterfall or something? Rapids full of treacherous rocks?”
“Leap for shore,” I advised him.
“Do you ever wonder why we aren’t dead yet?” Theo sighed.
“Well, it’s a combination of my martial prowess and quick-witted problem-solving, and your physical strength and conversational charm, I suppose,” I answered. The honest answer was that I did wonder that sometimes, and still didn’t really know, but I also didn’t think it was a matter worth pondering over long. The very act of questioning our remarkable luck might cause it to run out.
“Maybe we just haven’t done what we’ve been put on this earth to do, yet,” Theo suggested. He seemed to have moved past his clear discomfort with our current waterborne situation and strayed into a genuinely philosophical frame of mind. That was a dangerous place to go, in my opinion.
“You really believe in divine purpose?” I asked him. “I mean, I know my family did, but that was a fairly self-serving belief, all things considered.”
“Don’t you want to have some kind of purpose?” Theo countered.
“What’s a lion’s purpose on earth?” I asked.
“I don’t know, I’ve never conversed with one,” Theo said.
I had heard of a talking lion once that had lived near a town called Potsville. At first the townspeople there had been in awe of their discovery and had bribed the lion with meat to leave their livestock alone and converse with them. At first the arrangement worked quite nicely for both sides. But unfortunately the lion turned out to be both hot-tempered and extremely sensitive and started eating any humans who made inadvertently offensive remarks. At first the townspeople even accepted that, and watched their tongues around him, and praised and flattered him in the most pathetic manner. But then he took to prowling around in the dark outside their cabins to eavesdrop on what they said about him when they didn’t think he was listening and ate a few more people for expressing displeasure that he had eaten their neighbors. By that time he was fat since he’d been eating for revenge instead of just sustenance, and that made it much easier than it might otherwise have been for the townspeople to set up an ambush and kill him.
“A lion’s purpose is to hunt,” I said. “That’s the role he fulfills in the ecosystem. There’s no morality to it. He just does it because that’s what he’s built to do.”
“Yes, but a lion operates on instinct,” Theo argued. “You operate on reason. So you don’t have an excuse for not having an agenda.”
“Agendas are overrated,” I said. “There are humans with the humility to focus on their narrow tasks, too. Farmers who think only of the weather, and what plowing pattern to follow, how big and sweet they can grow the kernels of their corn. They don’t think of whether corn, philosophically speaking, ought to exist-- of how society has been shaped by corn, of who should or should not eat corn or why. That is me. Other people buy the corn, so I grow the corn.”
“Because you were raised to question everything and comprehend the big picture so that you could effectively manipulate the course of events, now you choose to stop asking questions?” Theo asked.
“I choose to stop asking questions if the answers don’t concern me,” I said. “My family, interfering in other houses’ or kingdoms’ affairs for abstract reasons, I don’t believe ever made the world a better place in the long run. Except of course for those individuals who were canny enough to profit from the conflict. So I have chosen to become one of those individuals.”
“You have chosen to become the tool of anyone who pays you.”
“What exactly do you consider yourself, my noble steed?” I asked dryly.
“The tool of someone I believe in,” Theo answered.
“Maybe you should have stopped believing in him ten years ago,” I said.
“Eh, he always wins his fights, and he’s not bad company,” Theo replied with a toss of his forelock.
I chuckled and had the urge to pat him on the shoulder, but of course I couldn’t, since that would involve lifting my hands off the raft.
Soon after that, a tiny settlement came into view, about half a mile downstream from us. There were probably five or six buildings. It was clearly a temporary miner’s claim.
“We’re getting off there,” I said as I pointed.
Theo backed up slightly in preparation to leap. That made the raft tip in his direction, and I nearly slid off.
“Whoa!” I shouted.
Theo ignored me, backed up one more step, and then took three running steps forward and propelled himself into the air. He sailed gracefully over the ten feet or so of churning water between the raft and the shore where the camp was located and landed in the golden grass. Then he pranced a few times, tossed his head, and snorted.
Meanwhile, the raft tipped and I had to throw myself forward and grab onto the edge and bear down with my weight to stop it from flipping over as Theo launched himself off. The raft rocked itself back into stability and icy water sloshed over me so that I had to spit it out of my mouth.
Unlike Theo, I couldn’t jump ten feet, so I waited until the raft approached a particularly narrow point in the river. Then I stood up, and before the raft could shrink itself out from under me, I jumped four feet or so and rolled onto the grass. At least it was still early enough in the afternoon that the strong sun beat down on me and kept me warm despite the frigid water that now soaked my skin and clothes. In fact the water felt rather refreshing, now that I was no longer concerned about getting swept away by the river.
Theo came happily trotting up to stand over me and snorted with what sounded suspiciously like amusement. I slapped his leg, which was the only part of him I could reach.
“You did that on purpose.”
“I could have knocked you in if I wanted to,” Theo pointed out.
“I could have knocked you in by shrinking the raft,” I replied as I stood up and swung onto his back. I dripped water onto his coat, and it made me feel a bit better.
We trotted up to the miners’ encampment. At first I thought it might be deserted while the inhabitants were off miles further up or down the river, but then a gaunt-looking man with greasy blond hair poked his head out of one of the lean-tos and squinted at us suspiciously. He had a butcher’s knife in hand. I guessed he’d been left behind to guard the place.
I tipped my hat to him to show him I meant no harm, and he glanced down at the sword at my belt. I got the feeling from his body language that if I had indeed meant him harm, his reaction would have been to flee, not fight. Probably from the look of him they hadn’t found anything much worth defending at that claim anyway.
“What do ya want?” the man asked. His rudeness clearly came from wariness, not aggression.
“Just a word or two,” I said. “Werewolves. You seen any lately?”
His nervous looking, slightly bloodshot watery blue eyes widened. “How’d you know that?”
“I didn’t or I wouldn’t have asked,” I said. “Did they rob you?”
“They ate my chicken,” he muttered bitterly.
“Just a chicken?”
“Look here, that chicken was all I--”
“I mean, they didn’t take any potencium?” I interrupted.
“Potenc… you a lawman?” the man looked, if possible, even more skittish and unfriendly than before. I realized he thought I might be a law enforcement officer, and also that he had been surprised by my reference to potencium. So, he and his fellow miners were probably digging up delphoria. And the werewolves hadn’t wanted any. They had just snatched a chicken for a snack I suppose and left these guys in peace.
“Far from it,” I said.
“I don’t want any kinda trouble… ” the man warned. He was gripping the butcher’s knife quite tightly but in a sort of embarrassed fashion.
“Neither do I,” I said. “I just want to know which way the werewolves went, when they lef
t. Can you tell me that?”
He pointed the knife at a tree in the distance. “That way. Towards Bluegarden I reckon. The town over yonder.”
“How far?”
“Four days or so walk. Faster on a horse, of course.”
“Thank you kindly,” I said. I didn’t think he was lying. I didn’t doubt that he would have lied to get rid of me, but I didn’t see any motive for him to point me in a false direction over the true one, as long as I was leaving anyway. Theo started trotting off in the direction he’d indicated. Then the greasy miner called after me,
“What do you want with ‘em? You gonna hunt ‘em or something?”
“Probably so,” I said.
“For glory?” the miner scoffed. “You’re crazy as a loon.”
“For money,” I corrected him.
“… Guess you’re at least halfway sane then,” he conceded.
I smirked to myself as I rode out of earshot and left the shoddy little camp behind.
Chapter 9
Before we reached anything that could properly be called a town, we came across another mining settlement, about three times as big as the one where we’d met that skittish delphoria miner. This one looked spookily abandoned too and when we got a closer look, that turned out to be the case.
The reason soon became clear, too. There was a three-legged skillet still sitting atop the ashes of a fire with stew still in it and flies buzzing around, and the fire was surrounded by several plates, many of them still half full of food. The occupants had clearly left in a hurry. Then I noticed that one of the lean-tos was emitting such a foul stench, an unmistakable stench once you’d smelled it before, and buzzing so heavily with flies that I suspected one of the occupants had never left at all. I dismounted, drew my sword, and peeked in the door.