“But it’s just a bit of grain, how could eating some crumbs kill you?” I asked…
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“Oi! Alister! Come here, I have need of you.” Ryzard shouted.
I screamed at the sound of his voice, but he made no response. The walls must have trapped the sound. For they were just walls once more. There was no blood. The fire pit was just the few meager embers I had lit earlier. The sigil drawings on the walls were once more cracked and faded. Their colors, so brilliant only a moment ago, were again mute in the dim light from the chimney hole. My entire body shook as I crawled out of the little entrance as fast as I could and stood up. I whirled around. The settlement of the savages was about me, with all of its dinginess. The sky above was stark blue, and empty as it had been that morning. Everything was as it had been. Ryzard called out once more, and I walked over to another nearby hovel, sucking in breaths like a man as I went.
I found his feet sticking out from the entrance of another of the mud huts. He was too large to fit entirely inside of this one.
“Oi, once I get miself unstuck, have a look inside this one Alister.” Ryzard called me.
“I would prefer to stay out here, the confined space…does not agree with me” I said for I knew not else I could say.
“Agh, you’re right, best not breathe in this rank air too much, much like a tomb, isn’t it?”
“Yes”, I mumbled back to him as he wriggled about to get his bulk free of the entrance.
“A tomb.”
“What did you see in those large jars, ey Quartermaster?” He asked me, as he at last extricated himself from the hole, dragging his ever-preset satchel bag out with him.
“It… appears to be…some kind of…grain” I responded haltingly.
“Yes. A finely ground meal. I have heard they mix it with water and flatten it into little patties and cook it around a fire for a bit, to make a kind of flat bread.
The thought of food suddenly dispelled my dizzyness. I was famished.
“It is grain then! There are two large jars of the stuff in that hovel, with that alone we could–”
“I found 2 other jars full of the stuff in that hovel.” he interrupted and pointed at the hut whose entrance he’d just plugged up with himself. We spent that afternoon searching through the several dozen other little domed buildings and found jars of the grain, most of them full, in nearly all of them. I was giddy with excitement over all this, but Ryzard’s countenance remained sallow.
“Calm your enthusiasm, boy. We are not saved just yet. You must stay close to me now, and run back to the caravan if anything should happen to me.” he said flatly.
“Wh…what do you intend to do?” I asked, bewildered at his sudden fatalism. What on earth could he be talking about?
“I need to discern if this is edible” He said as he pulled a small handful of the sandy grains from his satchel, and rubbed them against the skin of his inner arm. Holding his arm up to his face, he stared at the spot where he had rubbed the grain with a look of intense concentration, as though he expected his flesh to suddenly blacken and fall off. He tapped and pinched at the flesh where the grain had been applied over the next several minutes, like a man inspecting a side of beef.
“Why are you mangling your skin like that?” I asked.
“I am testing for a reaction, but there is no change in the quality of the skin. No mark, no bumping nor bruising. That is a good sign. Now the real array begins” he said and with that he grabbed a single crumb of the grain from his bag and extended his tongue, pressing the flake to the very tip of it, like a small child being given a new food it has not tried before. He pulled his tongue back in and sucked at his cheeks, as though trying to imbibe the flavor.
I turned back at the little hut I had just been in, leaving him to his nonsense. Had I just dreamed what had happened there? Has my hunger made me delirious? I had eaten no food since we had left the caravan that morning, and our daily allotment had already left me hungry most of the time as it was. Perhaps there was some foul miasma in the little buildings, something left over from the unwashed savages that had caused me to–
“Alister! Pay attention to me please.” Ryzard barked and I wheeled around.
“I am proceeding to the next steps of my assay. If I should have a…reaction and become incapacitated, you must run back to the caravan as fast as you can. Tell them to forget this place and carry on with the mission. Hopefully I am not misjudging the signs” he said. There was a note of fear in his voice that I had never heard from him.
“What are you going to do, rub it on your face next?” I asked.
“No you fucking fool. I am going to eat it” He said and he took several bits of the grain and placed them carefully between his back teeth which he proceeded to grind and then he spit a great heap of saliva on the parched dirt before him. Squatting down, he stared at the little dark spot it made on the bare ground, eyeing at it with the intensity of one reading an augur. Should I tell him what I saw? How would he respond? If he believes I’m going mad, will he tell the Polemarch? Would they perhaps confine me? Or abandon me and leave me to die out here to save food?
He stood back up and stared at me with a weary eye and then tossed several of the grains into his mouth, chewed and swallowed them, and sat down cross-legged on the bare ground. Pulling his satchel over his shoulder, he gestured for me to take the bag from him.
“What am I to do with that?” I asked absently, my mind veering between what I had just seen in the hut and the healer’s peculiar behavior unfolding before me. I felt light headed, as though even the sun bearing down on us could have been proven false at any moment. I thought back then to my time petitioning the margrave at the court. That same sense of the world not being entirely real was present in this blasted place too. How is this so?
“It contains our prepared medicines. Take it back with you if I die.” He said and he threw the satchel at me and I barely caught it.
“But it’s just a bit of grain, how could eating some crumbs kill you?” I asked.
Anger flashed through his eyes for a moment but was then replaced with something else, a deeper, resigned look. He heaved a great sigh
“There are forms of poison that are latent, Alister. They only make themselves known when brought into the body. Like those berries I showed you a ways back, the little blue ones, if you recall. A thing can be safe on the outside, even to put in one’s mouth and chew on, but upon meeting the body’s inner humors, it can turn into something deadly. I have known apothecaries who died from mistakenly eating a small bit of mushroom that contained some latent toxin.” he said.
“A man can die from eating a mushroom?” I asked, incredulous.
“If it is the right kind of mushroom, yes. I have an inkling of what this grain is, but an inkling without certainty can be enough to get a man killed, especially in a place like this. We have no animals we may assay with, the horses are too valuable. So I am checking it by degrees myself” he said, looking up at the whole world about us, his eyes blurry and far away.
“What…what are we to do, if you should die?” I asked, and I spoke the word ‘die’ in a squeak, as though afraid the air itself might hear, and make it so.
“I pray that I am right. If not, you must all leave this place. Survive as best you can” he said. He was silent for a few moments and then he closed his eyes and fell to weeping. I reached into my tunic to once more caress the sigil where it hung above my chest, expecting to feel the warmth pulsing within it that I had felt in the hut. The copper was as cold and as still as the air about us. It was nothing. A delirium brought on by hunger. Naught else.
I turned once more to look back at the little hut where I had gone mad for a moment, but I realized that I had gotten mixed up at some point in talking with Ryzard, for I could not tell which one of the hovels I had been inside. They were all of so uniform an appearance without. I sat down on the ground opposite Ryzard, rubbing my head and waiting with him in silence.
It was past noon when he finally opened his eyes, checked the position of the sun in the sky and stood up, breathing in and out furiously several times. He turned to me and broke into a wide grin. “That should be enough. It has a slightly sweet taste to it. Quite pleasant” he said.
We spent the rest of the afternoon loading several of the grain jars into our empty cart. The wooden bed sagged greatly under their weight.
“You’re the quartermaster here, but by my reckoning, there is enough of this grain here to keep us fed for several months at least” Ryzard remarked as we tallied up what we had found after searching the final hovels. We would return the next morning with the caravan to claim the rest of the grain. “This place has been deserted for a long while I think. They are ours for the taking.” Ryzard said.
We returned to the Caravan late that afternoon, just as the sun started to set. As soon as we explained what we had found, Ryzard pulled out several handfuls of the grain from the jars and mixed it in with water, kneading it together until it was a thick consistency, almost like bread dough. He formed several little balls from the gluey lump and placed them flat around a fire the caravan had made while we were away. The smell as it cooked wafted through the camp and caused every man to start up, and gather close around us.
Ryzard took the first one off the hot stones when it was ready, sniffed it carefully and bit into it with his mouth open, blowing on the hot dough even as he chewed and swallowed it. “Not very much flavor, but it tastes like heaven after what we’ve been eating lately” he announced.
He explained the condition of the settlement, and how much of the life-saving grain we had found. The Polemarch immediately ordered his troops at the ready. He intended to march them in in full arms and secure the settlement, so that we could take on the grain for our supply.
“We shall occupy and fortify that village and give the men and the animals several days of rest to recover their strength before we proceed. You have both done excellent work today. I shall see that you each receive an imperial commendation when we return” he said.
For the first time in months, there was a hopeful note in our leader’s voice. The grain we had discovered had saved us. Rather than retreat back west, our mission to find the embassy could proceed on new footing. We would, for a time, not simply traverse the wastes, but take up residency within them.
Alister’s journey continues here
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