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Stories from the Verse
A Dozen Verses
Chapter 64: Slade 272
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Cooper 93
After breakfast, Slade took Shella out for a walk to the well up near the footpath. The sky was overcast as always, and the cool wind blew across the white wastelands. Slade looked out, and thought, and Shella waited patiently.
“I think we need to go talk to the nobles that rule this valley.”
“Start with the lower ones or go straight to the top, the one they call the High Planner?”
“The top.”
“There is a lot wrong with this place. Not only the way that Rudolph is so afraid, but the lack of proper farming, and the dangerous beasts he has talked about. Also, the Shivering Tree fruit,” Shella said.
“That’s the biggest of the problems, but the others are bad too,” Slade said. “The High Planner is not going to like it when we show up and tell him he’s doing a bad job.”
“Probably the best thing we can do is to get him to offer us some land, and we build up a district to show everyone else how it's done,” Shella offered, and Slade nodded.
“We can hope for that, but I expect we might be starting a war.”
Shella stood up, and spoke firmly.
“M’lord, I would say to them, we come in peace, but if you want war, we can do that too.”
“Perhaps such a bold statement will cause them to rethink the issue. It's just, I can’t leave these people suffering like this in ignorance and fear.”
“In war or peace, I am your wife, m’lord.”
“Freya could not have given me a better one,” he said, and she smiled as she came up for a kiss.
“Don’t you forget it.”
A few minutes later they parted from Rudolph and Dog, who both seemed genuinely moved to see them leave. Slade told Rudolph of his plans, and he could see the peasant was quietly of the view of ‘there goes a hero, a dead man, but I liked him.’
Digging into his pack, Slade pulled out his grappling hook and cut from it a bit of the heavy rope, about fifteen inches, and picked up the jaw bone from the jumpig.
“I sharpened this with my dagger, but you can use a stone to do it. Take the rope and the hoe,” he asked Rudolph for the purely wooden hoe who gave it to him doubtfully. “Tie it tight, like this, simple, but firm, and untieable and re-tieable.” He showed Rudolph how to do the knot thrice, and mentioned that dried gut woven into braids could work as well. Then he had Rudolph do it five times. The hour passed and Slade had taught Rudolph how to make a bone-bladed hoe, and how to hide the bone blade and especially the rope in case nobles came by. Testing it out, Rudolph was delighted with how much better it scraped the soil than his purely wooden hoe. Slade remembered using a metal hoe with a wooden handle in his parents’ backyard garden, and how much better that had been than this crude contraption. But to a serf with a wooden hoe, a jawbone hoe was a major technological advancement. It would make Rudolph’s life easier, and it was all they could do. If they gave him a steel dagger, the next noble to come by would surely steal it if he saw it, and probably kill Rudolph in the process.
Shella kissed the serf on the cheek, and the two left with many calls and Dog chasing after them until Rudolph summoned Dog back. The footpath took them away.
Two hours later, they came to a small village of similar huts. A four foot high thornbush barrier encircled the village. The gate was sticks tied together, and there had been a guard but he ran off as soon as he saw them.
Slade lifted the three-foot high gate to the side and let Shella in. She curtseyed and entered. The footpath was twice the width here, and he could hear people hiding in the huts, but no one came out as they walked from one end of the village fifty yards across to the other end. On the far side there was no gate, so Slade leapt the ‘wall’, and hoisted and tossed Shella over, catching her in his arms as she fell.
Leaving the nameless village behind with a girlish giggle from Shella, the two walked onward into the late morning. By nightfall, they had passed two more such villages on the footpath with equal success, and they took wood from a nearby canyon with its creek. The fire that night warmed them, and when fear wolves came Slade boomed out a laugh, and the wolves let them be.
The next morning, they dined on bits of a bird they had killed in the canyon’s creek. It was a sparse breakfast, but neither Slade nor Shella wanted to kill a jumpig and waste so much food. A few miles on a footpath joined theirs, but Rudolph had said that ‘keep on going to the farthest you can’ was how his great-grandfather had described the trip to the High Planner’s great castle. So they pushed on.
There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with eleven other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #529: Characters in Action. Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter. It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
