Chapter Five #2
That night, Bait watched the village from the edge of the wood.
Her impressions were these:
Everyone looked the same. There was Big Neb, Hairy Neb, Bald Neb, She-Neb, Old Neb. All the same shape, all the same size, all the same faces. In the Dungeon, everything was a riot of form.
It would be nice to be under a ceiling again, shielded from the terrifying sky, but the thatched roofs seemed fragile to her. Everything here seemed fragile and temporary. There was no sense of stone-laden centuries. The whole place might vanish in an eye-blink.
The firelight was nice, though. Fire was a luxury in the Dungeon, and Bait had grown used to being cold all the time. Even at this distance, the dancing red light and the smell of woodsmoke were a comfort.
She crept closer.
“Who’s there?” A harsh shout, and she ran, bolting as if the Squinter was at her heels.
Like Neb, Bait was still piecing together her understanding of the world. For all she knew, there might be monsters in the village.
*
Time went by quickly and obviously in the surface world, days and weeks marked by undeniable signs.
The sun, for example – you couldn’t miss that.
Bait grew used to the glare, and welcomed the warmth during the day, for the nights were growing cold even by the standards of the chilly Dungeon.
The weeks brought autumn to the forest around her, the leaves changing to match Bait’s hair, then withering and falling in great crunching drifts.
As a veteran Dungeon explorer, she assumed this was part of some trap, that the trees were scattering caltrops so foes couldn’t sneak up on them, and she amused herself by learning to walk through the woods without stepping on a single leaf or twig until she could ambush the wariest oak.
Some days, when Neb found some excuse to sneak out into the forest, he would seek her out, and they would play together, mostly in mutual bafflement.
Bait studied him, trying to understand how humans behaved, and he watched her in wonder, unsure if she was a fellow child or something eldritch and enchanted.
Plenty of tales warned about the dangers of eldritch and enchanted things, but as the days went by and she showed no inclination towards cannibalism or sacrificial rituals, he decided that the tales might be inaccurate.
In Neb’s absence, Bait told herself that she was preparing for the next stage of her journey.
Follow the River to the town of Lastease, the minotaur had told her.
She followed the Buried River for three days, then climbed a tall hill, and from its summit she could see the town of Lastease in the distance.
But the town, with its tangle of buildings all crammed on top of each other, reminded her intensely of the Dungeon, and she was struck by an intense feeling she could not name or contain.
She ran back down to the river and threw stones into the water until the feeling went away.
On another occasion, she circled around Neb’s village to the border keep.
I had described the castle to Bait, although I admit I lingered on the less appealing aspects of the place – the unrelenting cold wind, the frequently relenting cold food, the grinding boredom of service in the watch.
Bait’s attention, though, was captivated by the flag that flew from its topmost tower.
The same image was on the obverse of the silver coin that bore her father’s face. The soldiers here served him.
Tell them who you are, the minotaur had said. Tell them Sir Peledon sent you. Tell them to bring you home.
Instead, she went back to Neb’s village.
It struck her that Neb didn’t have a coin like she did.
On one hand, he didn’t need a coin to know who his father was – Gyul, or Big Neb as she thought of him, was right there, hewing and gathering and all the things that Neb should be helping with instead of sneaking off into the woods to play with her.
But coins had other uses. Humans, for example, traded them – presumably, much like the goblins traded interesting stones and shiny bits of glass.
They hoarded them, too, like dragons. Maybe they slept on them.
The goblins used coins as bait, leaving little trails of gold along corridors, one two three four PIT TRAP. She would not do that to Neb.
But in the bag of supplies the minotaur had left her, there were a few more coins.
Not the ones she’d found on the adventurer’s corpse; they’d all gone back to the manticore sisters.
These Sir Peledon had found in the depths of the Dungeon on one of his mad crusades.
He’d claimed them, and given them to her, and now she could give one to her friend.
Indeed, Neb was so pleased when she gave him one gold coin, she decided to give him all of them, all but the silver.
Events then accelerated.
Being a good boy, Neb passed on the coins to his parents.
He’d never seen a gold coin before in his life, and even silvers were a wonder to be glimpsed only at the big feast-day market at Lastease.
He had no idea how much the coins could buy, but he vaguely imagined a roasted haunch of meat, and a few sweet cakes each, and new clothes for everyone.
He had secret plans to ask for an extra cake, which he would smuggle out to Bait.
His father seized him and shook him, and demanded to know where he had found the money?
Had he stolen it? Had he brought trouble down on them?
All his carefully planned explanations and deceptions crumbled – Neb would never have made a good wizard, or a good liar – and he admitted that Bait had given him the coins.
Who was Bait? An apparition. A phantom. A stranger who lurked in the shadow.
A knife-wielding phantom who knew the secrets of the underworld, and tried to lure young children into the darkness with forbidden – and likely cursed!
– gold out of some ancient tomb. Half the village gathered in Neb’s parents’ hut.
The boy was examined for bites, witch-marks, curse-brands, traces of spell-craft or vampirism or possession.
One old woman even cut his finger with a knife and squeezed out a few drops of blood to make sure it was still the right colour.
Younger men lit torches and patrolled the edge of the village, spears in hand, searching for intruders.
Why, hadn’t Harald seen something in the shadows only a few days ago?
The flickering firelight made trees into trolls and conjured monsters just beyond the reach of the light.
Old stories of the Dungeon in the mountains, and more recent tales of dragonfire at Uthgard were dragged out, fears piled on fear.
At daybreak – obviously, with all the slavering horrors that must be lurking in the woods, it was too dangerous to travel by night – the villagers sent Harald as a messenger to the keep, begging for deliverance.
Eggs. Bacon. Black bread. Tea.
The master of the keep was Sir Rudyard, and by these tokens he warded off chaos.
He had been appointed master of the keep five years previously as a reward for loyal service.
True, others had been sent to this fortress on the edge of civilisation as punishment for unspeakable crimes, but Sir Rudyard was a man who believed that if one simply did the proper thing at every turn, even when it was patently foolish or even impossible, order would bloom.
He would tame chaos with mannerly siege warfare.
His predecessor as commander of the keep was a veteran with skin like a dried lizard carcass, voice like he was swallowing a dried lizard carcass, personality of et cetera et cetera.
The old warhorse took one look at his replacement – all bristling moustache and ruddy round cheeks, like a repressed hamster – and prophesied Sir Rudyard would not last a month.
The old master was very much of the “hard men making hard decisions” school of border-guarding.
He had come by his desiccation honestly, through long years of standing athwart ramparts in the howling wind and rain, or ranging out in the sullen watchful woods on patrol, rocks for a pillow, darkness and bitterness his companions, no comfort save the warming ember of self-sacrifice.
The sentries and servants who remained at the keep after the commander departed held the same opinion regarding Sir Rudyard’s prospects. So, when Rudyard gave his breakfast order to the castellan on that first morning, it went about as well as Bait’s first meeting with Neb.
“Eggs,” said Sir Rudyard. “Bacon. Black bread. Tea. Please and thank you.”
“Ain’t no eggs.”
“Well, I shall make do for today, but see that there are eggs tomorrow.”
“Ain’t no bacon.”
“ ‘My lord. There is no bacon, my lord.’ Try again.”
The servant’s face twisted. “Ain’t no bacon, my lord.”
“See that there is bacon tomorrow.”
There was no bacon the next day, nor any eggs – nor tea for that matter.
Nevertheless, Sir Rudyard repeated his commands that day, and the next, and the next – and his unyielding polite insistence worked like alchemy.
Guards were reassigned from keeping watch on the empty hills to hunt wild pigs in the woods, and lo!
there was bacon. More folk from the north settled in the hitherto abandoned lands around the keep, and where there are people there are chickens, and where there are chickens, eggs.
Obviously, these changes cannot be attributed wholly to Sir Rudyard, but he did give the impression that the sun rose each morning only because the appointed time was set down in his almanac.
So: eggs. Bacon. Black bread. Tea.