John Ringo - There Will Be Dragons

Finally one side of the dust cloud spit out a badly mauled Rotweiler, which disappeared into the distance. As the dust settled Azure was revealed peacefully cleaning a spot of dirt off of one leg. After a moment he stood up, stretched, then wandered over to the patch of sunshine the Rottweiler had previously occupied.

Checking the area for signs of threat, he turned around a couple of times, dug at the ground to prepare it to properly accept his personage, and curled up in a ball. In a moment he was, apparently, sound asleep. But one ear was cocked vertically and twitched back and forth as if it were a doggie-search radar.

Herzer awoke with a feeling of disorientation and it took him a moment to remember that he was back in the dormitories in Raven’s Mill. He had been sleeping out for so long, or so it felt, that the dimness of the interior was startling. He felt in his pockets for his chits and was relieved they were still there. After bathing the night before he had hung around with Courtney and Mike through dinner, then afterwards had wandered around the town. The entire population of the surrounding area seemed to have descended upon the town in anticipation of the free-day. The town was filled with groups of people, most of them sitting around talking. Almost no one had anything in the way of cash or trade available to them so while there were some merchants offering wares, there was very little in the way of buying.

Herzer ended up buying a small leather pouch to hold his coins and tossed a few more of those coins to a redheaded female fiddle player who had staked out a spot by the stream and was playing mostly traditional Celtic ballads. But the privations of the previous month had taught him the importance of always knowing where your next meal was coming from so he was careful not to run through his spare change too quickly.

After a moment he sat up, rolled up the fur blanket and stuffed it in the wicker basket, grateful for both of Bast’s gifts. After the previous week he had become used to the relative comfort of a bed made of spruce boughs, especially compared to hard packed earth. But the blanket had enough cushion that it mitigated sleeping on the ground again. The part that annoyed him was that he had no place to leave anything; if he left the basket and blanket in the dormitories it was sure to disappear in an instant. That thought extended to the fact that except for his clothes, basket, blanket and now pouch, he had nothing of his own . Mike and Courtney didn’t even have that. He had stepped in one moment from a life of wretched affluence to complete lack thereof. He realized that he wanted a place of his own, even if it was just a bed and… a place to store his blanket in relative security.

He walked out into the town wondering abstractedly if joining the apprenticeship program was really the best thing he could have done. He had skills related to this technology level. He knew he could fight, if he could get his hands on some weapons and equipment. There were things to be gathered in the wilderness; he remembered June’s comments about clothing and how nobody had anything. There were deserted homes aplenty in the wilderness. He could find them, somehow, and pull out anything of value. Surely that would mean more than a couple of extra chits a week and bleeding hands from cutting trees.

On the other hand, some of the homes belonged to people who were right here in Raven’s Mill. And how would he feel if someone went into his bungalow and took all of his clothes?

He thought about that for a little longer and contemplated, for the first time in his life, the whole subject of looting. All the games he had played had assumed an ethical indifference to it. Kill the orcs, take their gold. He suddenly realized the games never included hungry orc children when their crops had been burned.

Even a bow. He knew next to nothing about hunting but he knew that he could hit what he aimed at. He wondered for a moment if he should go look up the guard force and try to enlist. Did it make sense to waste another twelve weeks of his life learning things he would never have a need for? He knew he wasn’t going to be a maker of charcoal or a woodcutter or a tanner. There had to be something more than this.

These gloomy thoughts carried him through his morning ablutions, peeing in the public jakes and washing his face in a font of water diverted from an uphill stream. He walked over to the community kitchens looking anxiously at the sky. The sun was well up. He had slept through the majority of the morning and he was afraid they might have already closed to prepare for the lunch meal. His stomach was rumbling and it would be unpleasant to wait.

They were open, however, and the smell from the kitchens made his mouth water. He handed over his chit to a pleasant-faced girl holding down the entrance and walked over to the serving line. To his amazement there was far more than a bubbling pot of mush. The mush was there but so were eggs to order, fried potatoes, rounds of a golden, rich-looking bread, jam, butter and piles of steaming sausage being kept warm in pans by the fire. Instead of the usual roughly formed wooden bowls there were slabs of wood.

“This is nice,” he said to the server, giving her a warm smile.

“The council decided that a rest day should mean a day of celebration,” she replied, smiling back. “So they allotted extra food for today.”

“And better,” Herzer said. “What can I have?”

“Take anything you’d like,” she said with a vixenish grin. “But eat everything that you take.”

“Hmmm…” he replied.

“How would you like your eggs?” she asked, picking up a frying pan.

“Eggs…” Herzer said, shaking his head. “I have no idea.”

“Fried? Scrambled? Over?”

“Over I guess. Uh… whites cooked.”

“No problem,” she said. “It’ll take just a moment.”

He picked up a piece of the bread. It was baked brown on the outside, not much bigger than his hand, and emitted a rich, buttery aroma. He broke it open and the interior, instead of being white, was a light golden brown. He took a sniff and a nibble, then ripped off a large piece and stuffed it in his mouth, chewing happily.

“Iff ig goob!” he muttered, his mouth full. “Iff ig erly goob!”

The two cooks laughed and the server who was doing his eggs flipped them over and winked at him.

“That’s just about the oldest known recipe for bread in the world,” the girl said. “We’ve just now been able to make enough flour for it.”

“Wug ib it?” Herzer asked, then cleared his mouth. “I mean, ‘what is it?’ ”

“That’s the bread that built the pyramids,” an older woman answered. “Egyptian bread. Heavy, doughy, chock full of vitamins and minerals.”

“Bread and beer,” he said with a nod. “I’d heard of it, but this was not what I expected as the ‘bread.’ This is a meal in itself.”

“That’s what they say,” the server replied cheerily. “They built the pyramids on bread and beer with a little fish and, on a holiday like today, a bit of meat. And look what they did.” She looked somber for a moment as she flipped his eggs out of the pan and onto his slab of a plate.

He leaned forward and laid a hand on hers.

“Someday they’ll look back on us and say the same thing,” he said with a nod.

She smiled back whimsically then leaned sideways and speared one of the link sausages.

“Sausage?” she asked, raising one eyebrow.

So how come it took the end of the world for women to start to notice me? Herzer thought. The term that came to Herzer’s mind was “saucy wench.” She was nicely, and unfashionably, rounded, and had somewhere dredged up a period dress that was just a tad too small for her up top; it showed a more than ample quantity of her limited bosom. Red curls peeked from under her cap but that was all that could be seen of her hair. Another memory floated to the surface and he smiled at her.