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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For all that Guts lacked obvious enthusiasm about the drink, his cup is empty by the time Lashan starts considering another round, and he passes it back without a second thought. He wouldn't mind having another. And maybe another?

He wonders how many of them might make his nerves numb over a little. Remembering the dull pain of his shins, he finally decides to take a seat on an empty bench.

"That's all? Faster than wine."

Vague memories of traveling through warmer climes, hearing villagers talk about their harvests and their heavy wooden barrels full of rotting grapes. Let them rot long enough and it becomes something desirable again. Or something.

He ponders the question while staring at the refilled cup, watching as the airag leaves a light film on the inside. After fleeing from Gambino's camp, no stranger cared enough to ask him such things.

"Move South." he says, after a long bout of silence. "There's always someplace where the snow don't reach. Somebody'll need a sword for something."

As he emerged from his early childhood, he started to find finances to be less of a problem the more he threw himself into his career as a killer. His upkeep included food and his sword, leaving plenty to be made otherwise. The cobbled together armor had held together well enough given the beatings he'd gone through.

"Easier than making beer and there's no fooling around with stills," Lashan says by way of agreement. She's pretty sure mare's milk ferments more quickly and easily as a gift from the Crafter-twin but it may instead be attributed to her favorite of the three animals held in most esteem. Perhaps horsekind wants the humans who care for them the most to feel loved and happy and it's a secret hidden by the extra work, compared to cows and goats, required to milk them.

She dwells on that a minute as she sinks onto her bed across from the boy so she can try and avoid thinking about yet another edge of the gaping chasm in Guts' life that has him taken aback by the most conversational kindness. Acknowledging it will do neither of them any good, he's grown up around it by now.

It's really bleak to fight to live and live to fight. Lashan grunts, "Smarter than I was. I spent my first winter off the Plains thinking 'it can't possibly get colder or snow more than this' and alienating housefolk. Bet there's still places where I'm technically wanted for stealing grain and horses."

After draining her cup again, she says, "I was gonna say, come by for a few weeks if you're in the area in the winter, but remote as this is that's not likely. The snowfall here gets absurd."

Despite the town being well out of the way, despite the bitter winter making travel a far more lethal affair than usual, he doesn't consider it absurd at all.

"Maybe I will."

Another long drink from the cup. Was it wrong to get the old lady's hopes up? Two months or so is how long it took to get from here to Vritannis, the evergreen port city, if one picked up a few rides along the way. It's unlikely he'll drop by again, unless they pay was good enough. Who knows what'll happen.

The empty glass is held out to her for more. He was feeling a little warm, but not to the point of stopping yet. He could still think straight enough to mull over the future too much - can't have those thoughts staying his head.

"Did your clan really name you after themselves? Or is that somethin' you decided to pick up?" La'tchán and Lashan seemed like too much of a coincidence.

She smiles faintly and shrugs, like it doesn't matter. Really it's not uncommon for people who come to the enclave to leave it again, once their wounds have healed, once they've picked up a trade, once the quiet and the quality of the food, half-foreign half-peasant, has gotten to them. They're not usually going quite so plainly towards their own destruction as this boy who's so quiet now.

A horse can be led to water only if it accepts the human's guidance, for the horse is stronger. Trust can't be gained by main force. Sometimes there's no earning it at all. ...Or however the saying goes. Lashan fills his cup again and pours a third for herself. It's a bit thicker at this point and doesn't pour as smoothly.

"It's much like how a family of housefolk barrel-makers are all Cooper. Among my nation, a clan is a family. Children born to one clan are forbidden to, ahem, marry anyone else in it because that's incest, even if their parents aren't related. That's half of why the girls here are expected to be chaste." The other half is See-related practices and expectations, like those of the nunnery. All in all the running of the enclave is quite affected by both religions and a few others besides, even if at a glance or even a very long look the whole thing seems extremely pagan.

"La'tchán is too hard for these people to say. I got tired of correcting them," she concludes. "'Lashan' is fine. Better than some of the other ways. It's got mangled from time to time."

"Family name, then. Sounds complicated."

It sounded definitively foreign, too.

Guts never realized how straightforward his answer was with regards to names until he developed a better understanding on how surnames and titles made a difference in one's quality of life. One arbitrarily important detail decided at birth. In this case, though, it seemed more personal preference than social standing. A memory of a lost thing, from the way Lashan talked about it.

He has more questions about everything, but that deeply-learned aversion to prying keeps them locked up in his head. Pondering. Sipping the more yogurt-like end of the Airag as the comfy warmth settled in his limbs.

It was nice. The mood in the air was peaceful.

"How much more is left?"

He hasn't finished this latest round yet, but he eyes the bottle.

"There's a joke like, Plainsfolk don't use personal names because they keep changing. Not to get into it, but I'll say I had a child-name that means 'runt goat' that was wildly inappropriate by the time I shed it." She smiles sardonically at the memory. Really, the idea of keeping one name for all of a person's life seems so limiting to her. Hierarchical, but that's housefolk for you. They're as set in some kind of great chain of being as Plainsfolk are in clans.

There's a lot she could say about her names and her history and Lashan thinks about it as she nurses her little bowl. A lot of things that were very painful once have been worn small and smooth enough that they don't choke her to say, particularly with the mild, pleasing warmth of the airag in her. It still takes a level of sincerity that she has to be very careful about. For the moment she settles on, "I hunted a big old boar by myself to... 'become a man' isn't right but it's got a better ring to it. We had four paths out of childhood and the Hunter's looked the most impressive and achievable to me when I was growing out of all my clothes and had rocks for brains. Also, if you go for a boar in a Boar Clan, that just looks good."

A nod over Vena, towards the ancient pelt and yellowed tusk ornaments. The faded eyes of the tattoo across her chest show above the low collar of her shirt, as well.

She shakes the skin. With less liquid inside it sloshes more noisily and at a higher pitch than before she'd taken it inside. There are small curds in the remainder. "Two bowls if I don't fill them to the top, but it's thick. If I know I'm drinking with company I bring a bit of cow's milk to cut the last of it with." Cow's milk at this hour is quite sour, any that hasn't already been drank or used to make something else.

Boar for the boar clan. Seems like a simple enough reasoning. Explains the tattoo accross her chest and all the memorabilia.

"Is that how it worked?" he asks with a certain cavalier lightness than isn't there usually. Sometimes small talk was fine after enough airag and warmth in the belly.

"Dont know what I'd pick for a name if things were like that here. Feels weird not to just stick with what you've been goin' with this whole time."

That went for his name and his early-chosen profession, it seemed. Even if he lived life as a wanderer, he was far away from the customs of the Plainsfolk.

"Guess it'd be however 'bear' is pronounced in your country."

Following her example.

"My kinsfolk would've given me a name from that and a few other things," Lashan says with a shrug. It's an academic question these days. "It probably would've ended up something like Akalykes, since I got to participate in a lykeblade ceremony."

She waves her hand, vaguely indicating something complicated that Guts wouldn't find interesting. It would be a terrible chore and ruin the mood, to have to actually explain lykeblades to an outclan boy. "The death and veneration of an elder. It happens about once every fifty years so it looks good, to have someone in your clan with that name. But if I hadn't liked it I could've tried my own anyway."

Lashan refills her little bowl, the liquid pouring less smoothly from the spout now, without draining it all the way first. Guts can have the last of the airag if he wants it.

"Heh. Might be. I've seen a lot of weird, impressive shit, but never anything like that. You might have named yourself 'Mishe' for the bear but we would've at least joked about calling you 'bloody burial'." Or something more flattering, honestly. She can't imagine the clan that wouldn't be proud to point to this boy as one of their own. "Do you know where 'Guts' is from? I've wondered. My firebug thinks she knows, but that doesn't mean she's right."

Mulling over it, the boy scratches his head, fingers idly running through the pitch black tufts superficially similar to bear's fur. In texture, anyway.

"Dunno. The mercenary who raised me didn't really talk about that."

Speaking so openly and freely as they were didn't happen often either. It was the first time he'd mentioned Gambino to someone else, even indirectly. He didn't seem to mind cracking open that door a little, as long as the old witch didn't push any more than he wanted to.

He takes the last drops of airag in his bowl, simply because it doesn't make sense to leave the bottle unfinished.

"Whatever she guessed, it's probably right." he concedes easily. Names never held special significance to him like it did to the Plains clans, apparently. Some part of him always wonders about the curse of his birth that seemed to haunt him in childhood -
simple hearsay, he'd later decided. Soldiers' superstitions. It was an uncanny coincidence, all the same.

Edited 2023-02-09 08:21 (UTC)

"If you'd said that when I wasn't long off the Plains I would have been shocked," Lashan says with a self-deprecating chuckle. She doesn't want to scare the boy off doing new things. She also doesn't really want to talk about Gambino, a man she has already had a stupid fantasy or two about stabbing several years ago, when it would have done some good. "I think we talk about names more than we use them. But, it's sunk in by now, different people find different things important. Hesri thinks it's some version of 'Gustav'. I like the idea that it comes from 'August' but I think that kind of name went out of fashion when the old empire fell." It's still the name of a month, but she hasn't met anyone named August.

There had been a presence - Lashan had rooted around pretty shamelessly before deciding she could take a boy who'd attacked her back to a place she'd dedicated herself to protecting - in Guts' life who had been warm and caring in a way that man hadn't been. Long gone and hazy though she was, she must be the reason he'd survived infancy and learned to walk and talk and is actually capable of acting like a human being at all.

That does not mean, if she was the one to name him, she necessarily had much in mind but that's fine. Some names are just syllables or combinations of syllables that pleased the ear, even if it doesn't please Lashan's. Guts being named 'guts' even if it is literally just 'entrails' is the most neutral thing about his upbringing.

This is a nice moment. She has a sense of this half-feral boy extending a fragile degree of trust towards her. Some of that's alcohol, some is... Lashan ruthlessly controls her feelings so they don't ruin it, and glances back towards her girl, who's more deeply asleep now. That cat's eyes are slitted, too wary to fully close. "Vena's mother, if she had anything really in mind, didn't tell her. At best, it's from an old empire word that means 'hunter'." Which would be a good name and probably what Vena would say if asked. "At worst, I've heard a dialect where her name sounds a lot like their word for 'vein', plus 'a' to make it feminine."

Her laughing manages to get a smile out of him, surely the fault of the airag. He doesn't seem offended by either proposal.

"August is pretty nice. That's when all the leaves start changing color."

It kindles warmer memories in him, the loose association with the word and the fair breeze and fiery orange leaves. Sometimes, they were red like arterial blood spilled from an enemy throat. It was when war campaigns began to consider their winter plans, pausing once the bite of cold became too harsh.

In the end, he never knew why it was picked. Perhaps it was appropriate in his own way, to want to cling to the last remnant of that warm embrace that kept him alive back then. If nothing else, then a name.

He looks back at Vena when Lashan does, listening to the apparent backstory to her name. The last sips of the airag leaves him with a small warmth to his cheeks, sinking comfortably in his spot. He seems to think this was nice, too.

"Vein, huh? Guess we'd be matching, then. Who could've guessed."

"It's not bad at all," Lashan allows, and lets her face settle into a less cynical expression than is typical. The forest around the enclave is mostly towering evergreen, but the Irminsul, the sacred tree that's lent it its name, changes, as do the orchard trees and a few others in the cleared agricultural space around it. It's quite a sight, even if the change from summer to fall also means girding up for harvest time and the sometimes intense work that requires. "She won't thank me for telling you that. Ah, well."

The smile that doesn't seem like it really belongs on his face... he's not someone who's happy alone even if he prefers it to most company. She needs to not think about Guts too much, Lashan thinks, and then she has a sense that's come on more often as she's grown older. The bittersweet sense that this moment is unlikely and fleeting and will soon pass, never to be repeated. Flowing past as ceaselessly as wind.

She finishes the dregs of her airag, cheese-scented and salty, and sternly tells herself she's not going to wake up Vena just to take her in her arms or press their foreheads together or even just take her hand. If she indicated any desire to do any of that to Guts she'd spook this boy as badly as putting a halter on a feral horse. She has gotten so sentimental, it's awful.

"If you head in that direction, I know Midland will have work for you. Assuming things haven't changed radically in the past few months there's a particularly huge merc company there my contact-" she does something sarcastic with her eyebrows, indicating that 'contacts' is probably too strong a word -"likes. But I'm sure you can find something anywhere. You ever get brought on to guard a caravan?"

"Sure. Easier job than fightin' on a battlefield. Enough men with swords'll keep your usual bandits away, unless you get hit with real bad luck."

Yet, for whatever reason, he finds himself lured over by the jobs with more pain and misery and insufferable rich men. Greater rewards, maybe. Or perhaps he gets easily bored of the idea of babysitting a wagon instead of fighting.

"Is your friend looking for guards?"

His smile is gone, but he seems content to talk shop if she wanted. Midland's old civil war was staring to flare up again, that's what he'd heard. There'd be plenty of work for him by the time he gets there, for one side or the other. It wouldn't hurt to take an quieter job in between them.

Edited 2023-02-16 07:55 (UTC)

Lashan snorts. "Not exciting enough for you, huh? It does get boring. There was a route down to the south through canyon territory that always got attacked, I swear... but, that's not how it usually goes."

Maybe it's also that caravan work requires more soft skills. Sharing fires with at least any of the others hired to guard it and usually others besides, having to spend more time in proximity with drivers and caravanmasters and whoever else. Travel with others, especially when wagons are involved, is a much slower affair than travel alone and that gets hard to bear when you don't get along with someone in the party. She imagines Guts cooling his heels as mules are wrangled back into their traces, or being astonished at how slowly oxen walk.

Besides that, the same money, goods, and sometimes animals and people people that make a caravan worth protecting from bandits can also tempt a guard. Some lone merc kid without references probably only gets a job like that from someone desperate or who's got a partial complement already that they feel they can trust. No, guarding caravans is a good way to transition from a life of fighting to some other kind of life but that doesn't mean it's achievable for just anyone.

"Might be. There's some grandchildren of a man I was in a company with, back in the day. Show one of them my mark on your sword and bring me up and if you don't completely fail at a first impression they could hire you."

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Do not be afraid of light

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