lukeoutbelow | Do not be afraid of light

Do not be afraid of light

They smelled the battlefield long before they saw it. The apprentices and little Sisters who hadn't been on this kind of excursion before covered their noses and exclaimed. Vena didn't. As the child of a camp follower she would know to expect this, but her tread slowed and she looked repeatedly at Sister Lashan, especially as the sound of incredible numbers of crows cawing grew louder.

"Nasty, isn't it? Decay is part of death which is part of life," Lashan said firmly, if not totally without sympathy. How young had she been, the last time she was upset by the aftermath of battle? "There's armies that immediately turn around and sort the living from the dying from the dead and take care of that then and there. Not here, they're leaving it for the locals to handle or not and we're local enough. If you fight, you may well fight for people who'll leave you if you fall and move on. Make sure you at least have friends who'll look for you." They pressed on with their wagon. The donkey put its ears back but did not balk.

It wasn't as bad as it would get over the next few days. The bodies - it was now academic who had belonged to which side of whichever meaningless conflict this was - were not much bloated and decayed yet. Flies were not yet overwhelming. Right now the field of bodies was mostly attended by carrion birds, and various other birds that were willing to take advantage of the bounty before them. Finches among them, tiny beaks dipped red. A few other people could be seen picking their way across what had been a perfectly useable pasture. They kept clear. Lashan tasked girls to keep watch for them anyway, pretended not to see the ones who were being sick, and oversaw as dead men were loaded onto the donkeycart. They'd take them away a distance, say the rites, strip them of useful things, get them buried, and come back.

She paused. Something... like a sound. Not a sound. Lashan was hearing something with her mind, closer than the pickers. A threat? She stood like a sentinel and paid attention.

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At this hour, in the transition from evening to night, there's only one other person there, a bedraggled parent with a not-quite-toddler dozing in a sling on their back, wearily cleaning exactly the kind of linens that end up soiled at unusual hours by small children. They do this over by the drain and the outflow pipe, so there's no unfortunate downstream to negotiate, and while there's a moment of perplexed stillness, parenthood proves too exhausting for his presence to cause much concern and they return to work.

Over their shoulder Vena trots carelessly into the dark forge. If Guts pays attention he'll see her crouching by some floorboards and prying them up but otherwise it'd be hard to tell. After a few minutes she comes out with a cloak-wrapped bundle that's probably supposed to look like the cloak is just rolled up longways and no change in expression or demeanor, and veers off towards the refectory and out of sight.

The parent washes their hands, hangs their linens up on a rack with various other damp articles, and hesitates... then very shyly offers Guts a piece of cloth with a mumbled "To dry with."

He gets a glimpse of Vena slipping away from the forge with something, but isn't able to get a good look before he is offered a linen. It was a small gesture, but Guts prefers this to being stared at like a wild animal.

Wordlessly, he finishes his task. The clean plates are piled up where he spotted a few other ones near the trough. It does not escape him that the girl was taking a while to 'come get him' as she suggested. His first thought was wondering if she'd lied - promises meant nothing, after all - and she'd just gotten out of her assigned chore while he stood around like an idiot. He feels annoyed with himself, wondering if he'd really been duped by some kid.

With that embarassing thought on his mind, face slightly flushed, he gives back the linen. He still manages a curt and grateful 'Thanks' while avoiding proper eye contact. He decides to saunter off in the same direction to see where the girl had gone.

A dozen or so children of various ages from younger than Vena to girls older than Guts, all types who'd get really bored and fidgety during evening service, are congregated around the kitchen half of the refectory whispering and giggling and just in general being shady as they pass food around. It's after normal serving hours and this is one of the buildings that has a door that locks, but helpfully - one might say conveniently - there's an open window that smallish girls can be boosted up into, and a little light flickering inside.

Tiny Nerine of the rope tricks hauls herself out with her hands and uses them to hop out, bringing her legs up in time to land rather gracefully and is swarmed by even smaller kids. It's not light enough to be sure of bruises but there's a split across her eyebrow. She reaches into pockets and passes what appear to be bread rolls out only to see Guts and go furiously rigid. Various of the others follow her gaze, with mixed reactions.

Then Vena tumbles out the same window with much less poise as a chiming sounds from the direction of the temple, and children scatter. Vena mock-screams and hikes up her skirt to sprint scullery-ways, looking back as if someone leaving the temple will see and pursue her. If he doesn't watch it she is going to run full tilt into Guts and end up on the ground. There are some different mysterious lumps about her person, nothing that could be a sword.

It was dark, but he was fairly certain he recognizes one of the ankle-biters that had been hounding him in his fight with Lashan. Well, if she had something to say, she can say it to him directly!! But no time to worry about the swarm in front of the window, because there goes his partner-in-crime.

Guts spots her early on enough to think of stepping out of the way and maybe scruffing her by the back of the blouse again. But no, he was annoyed enough that he just lets Vena bounce off him and spill the misbegotten bread all over the ground. No treats for liars!

"You didn't tell me about this part," he says stiffly, arms crossed. This didn't look great in front the other children, but his business wasn't with them. This little twerp made a big deal about her honors and her stupid swears!

"Oof!" He's like hitting a brick wall! None of the softness you get from what by now she thinks of as 'normal people'. Vena stares up at Guts in stunned incomprehension for a moment before she scrambles back up, all huffing indignation. How dare he! Has he never stolen anything before?

"It's called," she hisses, with what she considers great dignity and gravity, "sub-ter-fuge, stupid!" Remembering her own priorities she darts a glance around - her friends have gone but yes, people are starting to come out of the temple. Vena scowls and picks up the rolls she can see, even if that's tricky with a back stiff with outrage. It's just ground food, it's still perfectly fine.

With her utmost sarcasm she says, "Let's just get back, to the infirmary" and jerks her head. Obviously she didn't forget, and obviously she's too smart to be seen carrying a sword near the most obvious non-Sister here since Ilse tried taming a leucistic elk.

“Hurry up, then. You left me waiting back there.”

He looms above with an unamused expression on his face. Annoyed, but not in any particularly serious way, he reminds himself that kids were easily distracted and that’s most likely what happened here.

Regardless of whether or not the heist worked, he’d have to make it back to the infirmary before Lashan gets too suspicious of him.

So once the girl gets back up on her feet, he will make his way back with her. He lets her take the lead, retracing his steps all the while, and giving a good eye at the forge when they pass it. He’d have to learn this place inside out whether he was staying or planning on escaping. His sword was in there, somewhere.

Edited 2022-06-26 07:39 (UTC)

"Because I didn't know how long you were going to take! Why am I supposed to know everything?" Vena grouses, using outrage to hide a bit of intimidation. Guts is big and having him mad at her, even a little bit, is worse than him following closer behind than she expected. She raises her chin and trots back towards the infirmary, refusing to look back.

Here in the summer most work involving high heat is done in the morning and late afternoon, avoiding the hottest part of the day. A stultifying warmth still radiates and there is a dim glow of banked coals from the forge. What can be seen in that dim light in passing is that it's definitely larger than most village smithies, with space and tools for multiple smiths. The most prominent anvil is on a taller base than the others. If his sword is there, it's not somewhere obvious.

Even with the slatted windows and door allowing air to move through it, the infirmary is stuffier than outside. Vena starts working on using a taper to light some ceramic oil lamps with bright metal backings that cast pretty good light considering. It's hard to treat someone if you can't see them. As the darkness lifts it becomes possible to see that one of the beds has had something long hastily shoved lengthwise under the covers, like it's a patient.

Guts quickly gets over the girl's antics by the time they make it back to the infirmary. Weapon or not, it was nice to have a stroll outside in the cool air. The breeze he misses almost immediately as he gets hit with stuffy scents of an enclosed space.

"How'd you have time to run back here and go get treats?" he asks incredulously, looking at the poorly-hidden sword under the sheets. So she hadn't been taking him for a fool, after all. Guts had an idea for how to store it more securely, but first he wanted to examine what it is she brought from the forge.

Unwrapping a bit of the cloth where he can feel the hilt, Guts pulls a few inches of bright steel free of its scabbard. The edge looked good. The handle was a little more elegant than the riveted metal and fabric on his preferred weapon. The blade was on the smaller side for him, but that was perfect for keeping it hidden. This would do wonders for his nerves.

He doesn't stare for too long, resheathing the sword and parting the linen of the mattress where it was stuffed with straw. He slips the sword inside near the bottom, sandwiched between layers of thin fibers, where it was least likely to be discovered while they changed the sheets. All he had to do to pull it free was reach inside.

Vena has a response to the question but it's made incomprehensible because after lighting some of the lamps she's peeled a hard-boiled egg and crammed the whole thing in her mouth. Whenever she's stolen food and has the chance she eats it as fast as possible before someone can take it from her. Despite herself she does have some misgivings about Guts drawing the sword and looks away.

Some of the girls yesterday had carried short swords almost exactly like this one, shorter than Lashan's old longsword. In the lamplight the live steel is faintly veined or marbled like woodgrain, a mark of the many small pieces of metal that went into making it without simply being melted completely together. It's very new, no chips or scratches in the blade, the leather-wrapped wood of the grip pristine. The materials are common and the ornamentation is minimal, including on the very new and beltless scabbard, but there's a certain moderately expensive quality to it.

He doesn't hold it for long enough to activate any of the particular effects, though those are meant to be hard to really pick up on. It's dangerous to call attention here by selling overtly magical items, though the affinities associated with Lashan's work do still compel higher prices from those who know about them.

"She's gonna sell twelve of those at a market in the fall," Vena says around a mouthful of sausage roll, glancing at the door as if expecting the old woman to have appeared in it. "Does it every year. These're the most expensive things we sell to anyone."

“Fancy.”

She didn’t have to go up and get him the nicest sword. If there’s only twelve, Lashan may notice one of them was missing. Hopefully he won’t be around long enough for her to check.

Still - even if he wanted to steal this, such a nicely crafted weapon a felt a little out of place. Decently reliable steel was good enough for something that would be beat to hell and bloodied on a frequent basis.

He sits on the bed, getting comfortable. They shouldn’t spend too much time speaking about the sword aloud.

“Went through all that trouble for an egg.” he muses, mostly to himself. He doesn’t think to ask for her food.

"Mph, mm-hmm." Vena would like to boast about the swords, but she's remembering the don't talk about magic thing. Even if he takes hearing about a pagan religion like the Twins with indifference he's probably not going to believe something like 'these don't rust', let alone any of the rest. Also food's going to come out if she keeps trying to talk. She chews rapidly and swallows.

"This's the best place to steal food. They always leave that window open and they don't even beat you when they catch you! You just gotta do kitchen duty in your free period and then there's even more food." What suckers! her tone says. "Master says it's because the rule is really that you don't hoard food 'cause pests and everyone should be able to eat when they're hungry and we can also just ask when there's not services and everyone's not asleep but raids're more fun."

That all comes out in a burst before she dusts the most obvious dirt off a round of bread and jams it in. It's getting kind of awkward to be making her way through her spoils while someone is just sitting there, not eating. But she did also get Guts a sword that's a much bigger deal, and he was mean, and - it's annoying. Vena scowls and finds the other hardboiled egg, with a cracked shell because it broke when she ran into him, and pitches it his way.

"The rule where I came from was you get fed if you earn your keep."

He catches the egg, observing with muted bafflement her explanation of the village rules. Gambino would make him pay, one way or another, so he never got much habit of stealing. Nothing good came out of giving other mercenaries a reason to be angry with you, by stealing or complaining of hunger. Plus, he was eager to please his teacher, to get any positive attention at all, and was given a rather straightforward way to do so. Be useful, earn money.

He realizes he must be the odd one out, being so obssessed with his sword, never really indulging in play with other children. Not that he ever saw any children in camp. Only in passing, and then in villages when he was older.

Of course, it wasn't all bad. He wasn't typically left hungry, because he wouldn't be of much use sluggish and weak. And when he was the one in the kitchen, he had ready access to whatever rations were around. He wordlessly picks open the egg, eating it with a thoughtful deliberation. This whole day had been incredibly bizarre.

Vena has worked her way down to just a raw turnip. She realizes now she shouldn't have taken a raw turnip, it wasn't on one of the trays of easily grabbable things. They're edible raw but not good, she thinks, rolling the root between her hands, and also that's a big sign that she's never really hungry anymore.

"I've just been here and at the soldiers' camps." She doesn't think of them as belonging to a particular lord who commands the soldiers. It was never relevant to her. "There's the men who fight and get all the best food, and the women who do all the cooking and cleaning and forning to keep them happy. And the kids underfoot, until something happens or their parents leave and take them. It was better when my ma was alive. She always shared and wouldn't let her men touch me. After that I had some aunties but, it wasn't the same."

Vena shrugs. She is not going to get into it all. Almost no one in the Sisterhood had had a happy life before coming here, or they wouldn't agree to live somewhere like this; all the stories have bad things in them, so hers doesn't stand out. She's not Lashan, with that burning awareness that the world should be better and that sense of betrayal that it's not. Frankly, it seems exhausting. "Do mercenaries do it different?"

"There were mostly prostitutes. Sometimes the men brought their wives with them, or nuns from the church would stick around to treat the wounded. The troop never stayed in one place very long."

His world had been so centered around Gambino that he never formed particularly close relationships with the other women in the company. Shisu died so long ago that he barely remembered her, though he does remember that they were nicer to him than the men.

"Mercenaries only care about money, so you don't really see kids. If you're there, you work and you earn your place. That'll mean cooking and cleaning if you can't fight. With all the wars around, the loot and money never ran too short, so..."

There was a practical nature to it, in a way. War was business, and business was plentiful. Unlike a lord's army, they always had the option to turn away an unfavorable task and be hired by someone else. They weren't obligated to follow their employer's whims without good reason, and no noble wanted to anger a mercenary company wandering around in their territory. One way or another, they got what they wanted.

"Beats living in some village as a peasant," he decides.

"If there's prostitutes and wives, they're getting pregnant," Vena says pragmatically. "Maybe mercenary camp followers are better at getting rid of them, or not getting pregnant, and there's not kids. Mostly women in a camp don't want to be pregnant or having babies, or taking care of them. Or I guess you could just leave them behind when you go somewhere else."

She holds the turnip up to peer at it and idly wonders which of the four Twins she'd call on to work magic and make it into something better. Hunter beforehand, for finding a different thing. Crafter for cooking it. Maybe Healer for turning it into a carrot? Vena's not actually going to do any of those, obviously. Doing magic in even small ways is tiring and can go wrong.

Plenty of Vena's Sisters come from villages and there are unhappy stories from them, too, but she doesn't buy it and casts Guts a skeptical glance. "Hunh. You mean, it beats being a girl."

“Dunno. I never asked them.” he replies, admitting his own ignorance on the matter between the soldiers and their women. “Guess they must’ve been really good at getting rid of them.”

There was always that fear, wasn’t there? Of being unwanted and left behind. And how it was lorded over him, how he’d been taken in. Even when the unspeakable happened.

Clenching his fists, Guts decides he was thinking far too long about that part of his life. It’s better to keep it in the past where it belongs.

“Forget about it. I don’t know why I brought it up.”

He stares blankly at the floor, away from her. Better to bring that wall up before the kid touched a nerve.

Vena had meant the mercenary men would move on and leave the women behind, but she would've nodded at the idea of babies being left, unhappily but without particular feeling. Life in a soldiers' camp is cheap for most people and she's known some bad things to happen to little kids, sometimes even on purpose. It only bothers her so much. She doesn't want to think about it and be bothered.

"Yeah." She shrugs. Vena's not doing mind reading right now - after the way things were so loud on the roof even with just two people she wants to rest that sense - but she doesn't have to be to tell there's some kind of sore spot there. Doesn't matter. Not getting into peoples' pasts when they shutter them off is just expected here.

The only thing worse than eating a raw turnip, Vena decides, is wasting food. She gnaws off a sliver and chews on it. It tastes like dirt and crispiness. She makes a face.

It was very likely a grim mix of both. The burdensome, if burden enough, get left behind.

But Guts is eager to let that topic die, so the awkward silence hangs in the air for a good minute after Vena speaks. He was glad she didn’t push. He might’ve snapped back with something he’d regret later.

Instead, he watches her wrestle with the ungainly vegetable, and manages a little smile.

“Hey - if it’s that bad, then I’ll take it. There are worse things to eat than a turnip.”

"Turnips are horse food before you cook them," Vena complains, aware that this is a tension-breaker and totally fine with it. "I don't even know why they were in the kitchen with the small stuff, they should be in sacks."

She gets up to hand it to him instead of throwing it this time. She kind of wants to ask if he'd had any friends in the battle. Instead, Vena gives Guts the turnip and says "You're welcome."

He bites into the turnip like an apple, pulling off a big chunk of it with his teeth and chewing.

“Hm.” he adds. “Tastes like dirt.”

After a moment, he goes for a second bite. Guts made the commitment now and doesn’t plan on giving up. He’s eaten much worse foods, besides.

"Eeeeew," she says, and laughs when he takes another bite.

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Do not be afraid of light

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