Michael Mathias - Kings, Queens, Heroes, and Fools

The passage through the humid undergrowth was far slower than Hyden expected. Brady had to hack and slash every foot of their path. Birds, and other things, cackled and cawed from everywhere. Undergrowth shook violently as large creatures fled their intrusion. Clouds of yellow flies swarmed around their heads, and sweat poured from their bodies by the bucketful.

“This is not as fun as it sounded like it was going to be,” observed Phen.

“Aye,” half of the group said in unison, but nobody laughed.

Hyden didn’t have it quite as bad as the others, at least not when Talon was perched on his shoulder. The presence of the hawkling seemed to deter the pesky flies. Phen noticed this, and with a piece of dried meat devilishly lured the bird to his shoulder for a while. Behind them, the sound of Oarly’s labored breathing, and his constant grumbling competed with the buzz and hum of the insects. A persistent cry, shrill and angry, resounded from somewhere above. Whatever it was kept shaking the tree limbs, but was never seen.

Around midday they came across a clearing that had been formed by a fallen tree. They stopped and rested, eating a meal of dried beef, sliced cheese, and sea biscuits. All of them drank plenty of water, enough that Hyden began to worry if they carried enough. They didn’t stop very long. The persistant yellow flies seemed to like them even more when they were still. A few grueling hours later the flies suddenly went away. Phen was the first to say something about the welcome relief.

“Oarly must have shit,” he called to Hyden and Brady ahead of him.

“What?” Hyden chuckled back over his shoulder.

“The flies have gone,” Phen giggled. “Oarly must have shit his britches again and fogged them away.”

“I heard that,” the dwarf said behind them. “It’s more likely that your foul breath grounded them.”

Phen, and a couple of the seamen laughed, but they were all startled to silence when Brady shushed them.

“Can you hear that?” Brady whispered at Hyden.

A deep buzzing sound was resonating up ahead of them. It sounded like a swarm of something far larger than the yellow flies. Talon leapt from Hyden’s shoulder and flew ahead. All eyes watched Hyden’s concentrated expression, searching for a hint of alarm or fear.

Hyden saw the same thick jungle flora ahead of them: huge heart-shaped leaves, long dangling vines, and clusters of bright blue flowers that grew out of patches of thorny brambles. Talon followed the sound, fluttering from branch to branch as he went, taking it all in. Subtle alarms were going off in the hawkling’s mind, the instinctual warnings that all creatures seem to have built into their consciousness, but so far curiosity was dominant. Hyden felt the alarms too, like tiny voices saying, “Not good. Fly away. Go around.” The hawkling ignored them bravely, and eased forward as Hyden bade. Then from a stone’s throw away they saw the source of the sound. Talon perched on a limb and froze in place just long enough for Hyden to see what it was. Then he fled back to the group, as quickly as he could fly through the dense jungle.

It was a nest of hornets, Hyden saw in that moment. Not ordinary flower-buzzing bugs, but huge red hornets the size of cucumbers, with finger-long venomous stingers sticking out of them. The nest was the size of a pavilion tent, and thousands of the creatures buzzed here and there through the trees. The skeleton of something lay near the hive. Another hump of something even larger seemed to undulate with the wasps as they swarmed over, feeding on its flesh. Hyden hadn’t been able to make out any more. Talon’s instincts had thankfully taken over and forced him to fly away.

Trying not to alarm the others, Hyden pointed to the left of the line they had been traveling, and spoke in a near whisper. “Let’s go that way for a while,” he suggested. He ignored the barrage of hissed questions from the others. He didn’t want to tell them that no bow or sword would save them if those things set upon them. He doubted there was even a spell that might let them escape so many poisonous flying things. There was no other choice but to skirt well around the nest. Later, he might tell them exactly what he’d seen.

After a long while, he had Brady circle them back around toward their original course. He kept Talon ahead of them, searching for signs of anything that might be a danger.

“Look,” Phen exclaimed, pointing off into the trees. When Hyden saw it, his heart nearly stopped. A lime-green snake, as big around as a man, and easily thirty paces long, slithered away through the lower branches just beside their trail. When it was about a hundred strides away, it startled something in the undergrowth. Whatever it was growled fiercely and rattled shrubs and leaves as it darted away from the snake directly toward them. Phen stood open-mouthed and wide-eyed as a dark shadowy form bounded straight at him. He raised his dagger feebly when the cougar-like creature revealed itself. Teeth bared, it leapt at him. It was covered in quills like a porcupine, and Phen could do nothing as it pounced. Just before tooth and claw found Phen’s flesh, the creature sprouted two more quills, each with fletching on the ends. The alert seaman behind the boy booted him to the ground just in time to avoid disaster. Both Hyden and Deck Master Biggs had loosed arrows at the creature. In the leafy shrub where it crashed down, a wicked-looking spiked tail thrashed about a moment before stilling.

“Well theres be fresh smeat for sssupper,” Oarly said cheerily. The slur of his speech betrayed the fact that he had taken more than a sip or two of Biggs’s brandy during the day.

“It’s a blasted overgrown lyna,” one of the seamen said as he looked closer at the kill.

“Could be,” Master Biggs nodded.

“I’m not sure we want the smell of fresh meat close to us in this place,” said Hyden as he helped Phen to his feet.

“ ’Tis true, Hyden Hawk,” Oarly replied robustly. It was obvious that he had overcome his seasickness. “These Island creatures won’t be smelling fresh meat around this dwarf, lad. They’ll be a smelling scorched meat, from a raging fire, and they’ll fear the smell of it too.”

Hyden had to agree that the smell of scorched flesh and a huge fire would most likely dissuade anything from snooping too close to the camp. It would probably keep the bugs away too. The thought of the huge hornets swarming them in the dark made him shudder.

With speed, and precise skill, that seemed as out of place as it was surprising, Oarly beheaded, gutted, and skinned the creature. Within moments the feline thing was tied by its legs to a limb that the dwarf cleaved from a tree with his axe. Phen took it upon himself to put one end of the spit on his shoulder while Oarly took up the other. It was an awkward looking rig, as the dwarf was easily a head shorter than the boy.

“You’ll want to pick a campsite well before dark, lad.” Oarly told Hyden. “We’ll need plenty of time to find wood and set up alarms.”

Alarms? Hyden asked himself as they started back under way. He found himself wondering, not for the first time, how Oarly had earned the title of master, and what he might be a master of. He was finding himself glad to have the dwarf along, though. He would never have thought of setting up alarms around the camp, and if he had, he wouldn’t have had the first idea of how to go about it.

Later, when Oarly suggested they stop, Hyden didn‘t argue. It wasn’t a clearing by any means, just a place where the trees were farther apart than elsewhere. The group was surprised when Oarly shrugged out of his packs and went to work.

“Stand back,” he said. He sipped from a flask, put it away, and wiggled his brows cheerily at Phen. With his axe held out he began spinning around and around in counterbalanced lurches of speed. Teetering and tottering as he went, he used his sharp blade to mow down the undergrowth to a manageable level. When he was done, he leaned on the haft of his weapon and stumbled in place for a moment. When his eyes rolled back out of his head he pulled a small shovel from his belt and threw it three feet wide of Hyden. “Dig us a fire pit. I’d let Brady do the honors, but he’s wore from swing’n that machete all day. You two come on,” he barked at a couple of the seamen, and off they went into the jungle. The two men took turns carrying back armfuls of dead fall that Oarly was chopping into manageable chunks. After a fire was going, and the meat was spitted over it, Oarly took out a pack that contained a sizable ball of twine and what might have been a dozen little bells.