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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"Good, you'd be shit at it. It takes years to learn and there's not space in my smithy for someone as big as you're going to get," she says. He has to find his own way, regardless of what she thinks would be better for him. Regardless if it means going and getting himself killed, she doesn't have the right to decide for people. "Not without pushing someone out, and they wouldn't appreciate that."

They really wouldn't. If she's too old to go fight she's too old to make enemies of friends. That's always exhausting and much worse than ending up with normal enemies.

Guts has enough brains to take the question seriously, at least. She scratches under her throat, grimacing a little as her nails encounter a bristle.

"A bear's fat and hide are thick enough to be a kind of armor. It absorbs blunt impact well and can foul up and tangle a blade. 'S why people hunting bears usually bring spears." And why she'd told him to stab it. Lashan's sword has enchantments on it to keep it from sticking in a body and to preserve its edge, and that had made some difference. "If you can thrust fast enough with that steelbride - well, that's not a tactic I'd expect anyone else to use, but you're not anyone else. Might work."

Behind her the Sisters wrestle the big sword back into the fire to reheat. This weather is making the metal cool fast enough that they can't work for as long at a stretch as the other day ago. "Don't worry, you'll have it. It's too late now to break it into scrap. This is a learning experience. We're too used to ploughs and shortswords."

Edited 2022-10-18 15:22 (UTC)

Going to get? It perturbs him when Lashan speaks like she knows him, or knows the future, somehow. Maybe wisdom like that simply comes in exchange for being old and shriveled. He briefly considers how much of a pain it'll be to get new armor and weapons if her prediction comes true.

"Wasn't doubting that." he says, in response to her assurance to the completion of the job. "You blacksmith types are more honest than mercenaries and nobles, and I did my end of the bargain."

Usually. He'll still give the sword a good examination.

"But sure, next Bear'll get a lot more thrusts than slices. The little cuts only seemed to piss it off."

On a human, the injuries might have slowed them down quicker. The big bear had more blood to lose without abating its pursuit. He would have been in trouble if he didn't catch the edge of its ribcage when it reared up. It was easier to gauge where its heart was, then.

"If I want to find more weak spots, I'll have to take a closer look at that corpse."

At the veins and arteries and entrails, in particular. The neck was an obvious option, always, and the chest. He is fairly certain if he could split open plate, he could do the same with an animal skull too, if he had his heavier blade. But if there were spots in the arms and legs he could sever, some big artery somewhere that can kill it faster, that'll spare the edge of the greatsword.

Surely Guts doesn't think he's done growing. It's very clear to Lashan, when he's not covered up by armor, that he's very young and has a lot further to go. Despite being this muscular he's really at the gangly stage.

She laughs. "Such faint praise. Blacksmiths do actually have to be effective and do as we've said, or we don't eat." Lashan's got a pretty dim view of nobles as a whole. Mercenaries, her opinion is a bit higher, but she lived that life for long enough, and maintained merc contacts long enough after that, that she doesn't have illusions about it. There are halfway decent ones, even of companies who take care of one another. She's picked up rumors of another one of those recently. But they're not like war bands from the Plains at all.

Not that those had always been as good as she had been brought up to believe, of course. Still.

"By now it'll be fully stiff, hard to poke around at. And another miserable ride to get there." Not to mention that there will be more men crawling around - that thought will not dissuade a boy like this.

Vena comes up with a short stack of half-sharpened metal, the blades distinct from the long tangs. They're grimy, but even polished up wouldn't have the faint ripple evident in Lashan's swordblades. "Look! They're stock removal, so, there was a broken sword and I cut them out of it. With help," she adds, looking at Lashan, and then back at Guts. "The scraps are getting forged together! I can't do that yet. Here, look at them, aren't they nice?"

Lashan shifts slightly, swallowing the urge to tell him to ignore the flaws in the work - of course she sees some - and be polite.

Guts’ thoughts about the future tended to end a few days ahead of his present. He had enough on his plate trying to figure out how to stay alive the following week, and seemed to be satisfied keeping his mind there. Beyond that, it was all rather nebulous.

Distracted from the thought of revisiting the bear by Vena, he takes a look at all the shards of metal being hammered into vaguely knife like shapes. It looked a bit rough, but so did most pieces of metal before being polished up.

He wasn’t a master blacksmith, he couldn’t see all the mistakes Lashan could. He just sees some works in the rough that will surely be refined into something worthwhile by all the skilled artisans here.

“Looks like you got a good head start. What’re they for?”

Vena tries to press the stack of small proto-knives into his hands and wipe her own hands off on her already exceedingly dirty child-sized apron. More iron-smelling gray smutches are moved around.

A little distracted, she says, "Um. They're for everyday, like, for food or carving stuff or string -"

"Preparing fish and small game," Lashan puts in, though as she says it she has the sinking feeling that no one's ever sat Guts down and showed him how to remove the last joints of the limb and the skin and the entrails before cooking a given small animal and at this point he might find such niceties needlessly fiddly.

"-yeah, and nails and hair..." Vena trails off, frowning, and then gasps a little as she realizes what was wrong, her face openly dismayed. "I forgot! Guts! Your hands are really big!"

Sister Lashan exhales sharply through her nose and turns her face away, clenching her jaw; do not laugh, do not laugh.

"No they're not. Are they..?"

As if to accentuate her point, the entire bundle of knife-shaped metal nuggets fits onto his outstretched hands, though he never thought of them as particularly huge. He would never admit that his rather solitary, wandering lifestyle did not leave him with many points of reference.

He begins to put two-and-two together (why was Vena making the knives anyway...?) and realizes she was up to something.

"You don't have to make one for me. I already have a dagger."

Guts looks at Lashan, questioning: "You brought it back, right?"

“They’ll probably get bigger,” Lashan says sotto voche, regaining control of herself. “Boys usually stop growing at, oh, anywhere from nineteen to twenty-one.”

Blade and tang together, the not yet knives could all balance in a stack along one of Guts’ hands.

“Yeah, we brought it back, though it was tempting to just leave it,” Lashan grumbles, carefully not touching the still-pink scar at her jaw. “It’s good to have more knives. Different tools for different jobs. A smaller blade’s better for precision and not cutting anything you don’t want cut.”

“I want to give one to you,” Vena wheedles. “It’s my first time! She’s just had me on nails before. Though, I did make one into a sword… Anyway, if I have to finish one quick then I’ll know better finishing the others and I can give them to Rauri and Andel and-“ she names some other friends -“for the solstice! It’s okay if it’s too small? I can make a bigger hilt probably?”

'How does she know? It's all girls in this village.' is the annoyed thought floating around behind his disgruntled face. He doesn't appreciate the restrained laughter! What was so funny to Lashan anyway?

He's brought out of the mood by Vena, who kindles a feeling of... warmth? Appreciation? Guts may be a hired killer, but he wasn't so heartless as to reject a gift like that. His expression softens. Kindness from the world wasn't a thing he got to experience often, so he's quiet when she insists. It seems like he would aquiesce without a fight.

"I'm used to blades on the larger side, but small knives can be useful too." he says, echoing Lashan's sentiment.

Guts isn't going to nitpick a present. He just can't imagine why Vena took such a liking to him when they've only known each other for a week. They were still practically strangers.

Stars, Lashan does not miss being that age, or the bristly paranoid loner period she'd had some years after that. Children!

Vena, peering closely up at Guts, is relieved. She'd thought arguing that it wasn't going out of her way and would actually help her - and really, knives had been in the planning before they saw him so it's not a lie - would be more convincing than insisting that she wants him to have something to remember her and everyone with. Or that it feels grown up and cool to have a mercenary going around carrying something she made and none of her friends would be able to say the same. But hey, she doesn't have to argue!

"Can I have one of the claws? I bet I can put it in the handle! It'll just take, you know, some carving and glue, I guess," she says, frowning with concentration as she tries to work out how to implement that sudden burst of inspiration.

"I wouldn't overuse the glue," Lashan advises her. "Think about grip and positioning. Would it make it harder to use?"

"Ummm." Vena rubs her face in thought, getting smudges everywhere. "Maybe the sheath instead. Or... along the spine of the handle? But the wrapping would hide it, huh..."

Edited 2022-10-20 22:05 (UTC)

"You're gonna have to get claws from that girl hovering around that doctor's tent. She wanted to prepare the paw for something."

Other girl... Guts realized he never got a name. He figures Vena is gregarious enough to hunt down the claw she wants in a compound this small, though.

"Bet she'll be off to tan the skin once the rain stops."

Guts follows the conversation idly, picking through the roughened knives in his hand. The tang just about fits in his palm for the time being, though he really didn't have trouble manipulating a small blade with two or three fingers. In an unusual moment of levity, he plays with one a bit while they talked shop.

"This'll end up pretty bloodstained at some point." he remarks, eventually. "Better not to make it too fancy."

They're quite rough blades now, still bearing some burrs and irregularities from being cut with hammer and chisel and hammered out. The edges are all quite blunt, very unfinished.

Vena's a little crestfallen to think of having to put aside any elaborate, fanciful plans. She rallies. "Do you have a favorite color anyway? I wanna know. Here, look, mine's blue, but blue leather's not a thing, so Master Lashan made me one with a fascinum. Look!"

She has a rather tinier knife, extremely sharp, with a long handle and a blade only about three inches long in a sheath carried around her neck by a braided cord. Vena draws it and holds it up. There's a short loop of a thin leather strip on the end, bearing a blue bead with white eye rings, like the beads on Lashan's temple regalia. Guts has probably seen it in passing before, a small knife is indeed useful day to day.

"It's pretty." he admits, leaning forward to get a closer look. His eyes remained fixed on the blue bands of the bead, surrounded by enough mundane colors and patterns to stand out particularly well.

And then he pauses, having been asked for the first time what his favorite anything was. He was never particular about color, so he thinks of things that are pleasant to be around, to look at. His world wasn't only dirt and gore. At times there were fields of pink wildflowers, the bright yellow of birch trees in autumn, a deep blue sky above. All of these kindled some warmth in him, made him wonder at times if there was some other path he could tread.

They only ever ended up being brief respites, but they were respites regardless.

"Why don't you make it blue, so if I find something out there to bring back, I'll remember what color you like?" he says, figuring that'd be more useful to say than 'I don't know.' It was stupid and sentimental, but she was just a kid.

"And they'll match."

It's unlikely they'll ever see each other again, after this. She'll forget it in time. But at least he can humor the girl. That is what he figures.

Lashan turns away while he’s considering so neither child will see her face tense as she hides her reaction, the anger that shields how profoundly sad that is. Never asked about what he liked! Why have the gods sent her a child like this now, past the point where she can do something about it?

It’s the wrong question, she knows. Outside of old tales the gods are nothing like that involved and personal and she’s not a hero to get that attention anyway. Even their messengers have long gone silent. The closest anyone is to the divine anymore are the lykeblades, and if they have answers they’re not sharing.

Lashan walks off to get her girl a roll of birchbark from a rack of them. It will be useful in designing this knife.

Vena, not snooping, nods sagely. “It’s hard to pick! I like a lot of colors but the Plains people really love blue, it’s all over the inside of the temple and it’s so beautiful there.” It’s the color of magic and associated with spirits and the Twins, though each has their own other colors too. She brightens to think Guts will come back. “Yeah! Sure! Do you like dragonflies? Sometimes they’re blue.”

Edited 2022-10-23 06:14 (UTC)

“They’re alright, for a bug.” He wrinkles his nose a little, thinking of the flies, wasps, and other insects that plagued the hot summers. He wasn’t entirely devoid of some youthful irritation with the world. Dragonflies get a slight bump up in the rankings for not biting him on those warm and humid months.

“Well then, blue it is.” He agrees with her easily, ignorant of Lashan snooping in on his thoughts. He does notice the old woman had sauntered off, and cranes his neck to get a look at her.

“Well, since you’re not about to fall apart, I’ll stay out of the way.”

Guts was not a picky client, it seems. He will leave the blacksmiths to do their work and occupy himself with something else. Probably training agility again, once the rain storm clears.

"I like dragonflies. They're so fast! But not my favorite bugs really," and Vena would be quite happy to continue in this vein indefinitely but she can recognize wrap-up talk when she hears it. And she does also enjoy the work in here, and Lashan's close attention in teaching it to her. She'll wave before he turns away.

Lashan makes an exasperated noise, deliberately reaching into her irritation. "I'm not as decrepit as that, boy. Eat something, or do whatever else is an option in this rain." Food and rest are always part of healing, whether that's working the magic or having it worked on you, or just waiting for the body to recover. She would've told someone else that age go play - lots of teenagers would be annoyed - but really doesn't want to consider if Guts hasn't or doesn't, even by himself.

He can get something to eat, the refectory isn't serving right now but someone will give him something if he comes by. They are industriously preparing for the next meal and can spare him some probably raw vegetables and cheese or a bit of grain porridge. Otherwise the enclave is rather quiet, people mostly staying in shelter. The rain has gentled and lightened and is almost warm but it's hard to go anywhere without tracking mud or going through puddles.

There are some raised voices and yelling out by the stables. Quite a number of the younger Sisters, from small children to a few in their early twenties, have aggregated there. Little kids have been, and some still are, digging holes with sticks and making mud pies. There's a wallow full of footprints and deep indentations where girls had been wrestling, and those girls can easily be picked out by how absolutely coated in sticky wet dirt they still are. The major attraction, though, is that most present have divided into teams and are hauling opposite ends of a thick, knotted rope, shouting with excitement.

Edited 2022-10-25 13:12 (UTC)

A mischeivous grin pulls at the corners of his mouth when Lashan starts to grumble. Guess she was doing better than she looked, all covered in the dark soot of the smithy as she was.

"Eating ain't a bad idea," he says, grabbing onto that excuse for an exit and taking it. "Catch you later."

He'll leave the Blacksmiths and their honest work to them, trusting the metal will be honed and heated to a clean edge. Even in the rain, the outdoors felt like a more fitting place for him, anyway. So he wanders out into the sparse drizzle, now well used to walking towards the refectory after Vena had shown him the route a dozen times.

The Sister at the refectory was willing to relinquish a bit of food up, and he takes whatever bites of cheese they had to spare by the window. Lunch would be here soon enough before his stomach would start to bother him. The reception growing warmer with each visit was an interesting detail that the opted not to think too hard about, even if he did notice. He takes the small portion with a simple thanks before continuing his path forward.

His initial plan to sequester himself in his usual haunting ground is interrupted by the bustle of activity around the stables. Rain in a mercenary camp meant more work than play, especially if they had to move locations in the miserable weather. His most vibrant memories are of struggling with slippery rope, wood wagons, and the horses that pulled them. Miserable and ankle deep in mud. Plate mail caked in a horrible mess in the aftermath - who else to be stuck with cleaning but the youngest of the lot? The rivets did a good job of wedging in as much crap as possible between sheets of steel. That detail was the most vivid of the lot.

Even though he'd seen children play enough times in villages, it always felt strange and distant. Like a disembodied version of a childhood he never knew himself. So he watches the games as an outside observer, leaning on the wooden fenceposts as the girls play amongst each other. Some tossing each other to the ground in mock-fights and the others caught in their tug-of-war. He was down to two pieces of cheese.

Several girls see him, he's not hard to miss, but in the excitement as one side starts to get an advantage on the rope - the yelling increases - Guts goes largely unacknowledged at first. Largely.

Galli looks more robust not soaked to the skin and lit only by blue witchlight, though right now there's drying mud all along one side of her face so she's not totally unrecognizable. She's a big, sturdy, round-cheeked girl, maybe half an inch shorter than Guts is, and when she approaches him she laces her dirty fingers together to keep from fidgeting.

"Hi. Um, I'm sorry about yesterday, and... thanks for helping that old woman out." That last part is in a lower voice, a tone adjacent to bafflement. "I didn't mean to be out that late and I wasn't expecting anyone to come looking. It's... why did she do that? She doesn't know me!" Definitely bafflement.

There is also a much smaller girl with a very worn rag doll, but she doesn't have any commentary, just watches him as unblinkingly as a cat. Probably picking her nose.

"That old lady's soft, even if she doesn't show it. 'Course she'd worry."

It seemed obvious to Guts, or maybe it was the only explanation he could muster for the kindness Lashan had shown him. If she could do that for an enemy that tried to kill her, why not for one of the other enclave girls?

"Anyway, it ain't a big deal. We had an arrangement sorted out, and that was part of it. Wasn't going out of my way or anything."

Exchanges and contracts made things less complicated in Guts' world. He was just doing another job. Paying back the food and hospitality.

He didn't want Galli to think she owed him anything. He didn't want to make the mistake of letting her get too close, either. More than anything, he wanted to continue onward before growing any fonder of this place. He wanted his sword back in his hands.

Edited 2022-11-27 03:32 (UTC)

"I get you," Galli complains, fully ready to accept not owing Guts anything in particular. Debts are always uncomfortable. "You make sense! That old witch doesn't. There's all these crazy stories about her, I don't know how she's lived to get old if any of them are true. She's not sick now or whatever, is she? That's the last thing I need."

Someone hasn't gotten the memo about not telling outsiders anything about the magic practiced here, though Galli knows and has seen so little anyway that she still thinks of it as witchcraft, it hasn't sunk in that they use other terms for magic here. The enclave puts a lot of stock into oaths and they say some weird things that she's not sure even work, mostly.

The rope has been allowed to go slack as more girls notice Guts standing there. A very tall young woman with some prominent burn scars twisting one side of her mouth into a permanent sneer holds the hands of a pair of littles and watches him uncertainly.

"Hey, bear-boy!" He brought back Safflower wet but unharmed, so the stable girl from yesterday isn't going to have to find a way to kill him. "Come do tug-of-war! It's good exercise."

"She's as stubborn as ever."

Something did seem to be slightly magical about this whole place, Lashan included. It was something not typically seen in the kingdoms of the Holy See, but that thought is interrupted by the invitation to the game between them.

"You pull ropes in the rain for fun?" he retorts with a little teasing. At the same time, he presses his fingers to his sides, testing the bruising near this ribs. The pain had lessened a good amount from the bath and the medicine, but he hadn't gotten a good look at himself since the night prior. Guess he'll find out in short order how much better he's really doing.

He jumps the fence to join them, hopping to Galli's side. No streak of pain, yet. May as well join them, if he was just going to exercise himself anyway.

"All right, then. Which side?"

Radley the stable girl looks pleased. Others aren't, though they tend more towards unsure than angry or afraid. He is big and there's that new story about what happened just last night, and they're not Lashan to have a sense for how young he really is. Galli doesn't seem bothered by the idea though, which helps. Still, girls are dropping away from the closer end of the rope, leaving one to awkwardly offer it in both hands. This side, apparently.

"I'll be on your team," Galli decides immediately. "I'm not getting yanked off my feet! Have you played tug-of-war before? You're trying to get the first person on the other side dragged over the line but it's really just about the pulling. And that is fun, you'll see." There was a line drawn in the mud but it's so well trampled as to be indistinct.

The burned girl turns her head a bit, trying to hide her bad side from a stranger. A number of the littler kids have clustered around her, tugging her skirt and babbling. "How strong are you, Mister Boy?" She winces a little the moment she says that, mister boy, but she can't take it back. Keep talking, move on! With her twisted lip her speech is a little unclear. "It should be as even as possible. Can we start with... six girls opposite you?"

Several small children volunteer immediately. Hesri is forced to amend. "Six big girls and one little one to start." They'll all get lined up pretty quickly.

There’s a painfully awkward silence between them after she forwards the question. Mister Boy?

“Sure.” he says, after what felt like forever.

Guts knew he was strong, but he measured it in the force of his swing, and ultimately in how effective he was at killing an enemy. He didn’t really have a good answer to give her to make the teams even. They could always add more if the six were mismatched.

Before taking up the rope, he tugs at the shirt collar and starts to pull it over his head.

“Lashan’s gonna run out of clothes if I keep messin’ them up.”

Despite the bizarre reaction from last night, he’d rather deal with that than be stuck cleaning mud out of clothing. And perhaps, there was a grain of actual guilt for ruining another hand-me-down that he was never really owed.

So he sets it on the nearest fencepost, away from the action. The bruising from last night looked unpleasant, but the red had darkened to a more faded blue already. He grips the side that Galli had wandered to. The rules seemed simple enough.

Hesri reddens in the pause, absolutely chalking it up entirely to having said a nonsense name - not that 'Guts' is any better - in her cheerful getting-little-kids-to-do-something voice. Some of the girls smother laughter and are elbowed by others if they don't do it well enough. Then he gets his shirt up over his head.

"Oh..." Just who says that is unclear. There are gasps, there is craning to see and a giggle or two along with a general quiet commotion. A few who miss the subtext for whatever reason take this as a cue to get their own shirts off and are stopped and participate in hushed, furious, but it's not fair! discussions. Usually in the summer plenty of girls are running around without shirts or tunics or even breast bands, for those to whom that's not painful. The rain has things a little cool for that right now but wrestling and exertion warm a body up.

Regardless, six fighter-type teens and a small child take the rope opposite Guts. Galli goes behind him, which isn't at all so she can look at the muscles of his back and have any feelings about them whatsoever.

"Wrap your hands around the rope, not the other way around, or if something goes wrong you'll get hands like mine," Hesri says, rallying with an anxious laugh. Her hands absolutely didn't get like they are from a rope, not that she's offering them to be examined. Rope wrapping can result in losing fingers if the rope is pulled hard enough. "Let's be good sports everyone! Ready, steady... start!"

The cool rain was a nice relief from last nights’ battering. He wraps his hands firmly around the rope as Hesri announces the first round.

Somewhere in his upper back and shoulders he feels a burn as he begins to resist. Fighting last night will leave him aching one way or another, though his legs were still in good order. Stubbornly, he digs the heels of his boots in and begins to step back.

It’ll take a while to wind up, but soon enough, he’ll keep tugging along as if he were helping to pull a stubborn horse out of a ditch with Galli, the effort showing the most in his forearms and shoulders. He could tell right away that his legs would be doing most of the work, and so he lets them, easing some of the burn.

It was less an explosive yank and more a steady pull backwards, occasionally set back by a small slip in the mud.

Galli realizes in a quick panic that it would be way too easy to touch him accidentally if she stood close - the girls on the other end are overlapping each other and do touch often - and That Will Make It Weird. So she puts a few knots between them. Totally normal. Yes. She can totally give it her all from here and not breathe on anyone.

The slow start builds confidence for the other side. They know the strategy for playing this game as a team, how to brake with their feet and add their collective weight to the rope when Guts is pulling, saving their strength for when he has to pause and then pulling all together. They coordinate easily, yelling out "Hang!" and "Pull!". But there's only so much traction to be had in the wet, churned-up ground and The Boy is, in fact, very strong. Even as sturdy farmer's children who train in physical tasks and low-level swordwork, they inexorably start to get brought forwards, yelping and protesting.

Fresh girls add themselves to the other side of the rope to reinforce them and Hesri has to tell them "Two at a time! Hey!" Some of them are absolutely ones from Lashan's party a week ago and Guts does kind of get glared at, but it's not really in the same way as when he first arrived.

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