The Adventures of Duncan & Mallory: The Beginning

by Robert Asprin

  The only plus seemed to be that the mad dash to disperse the scaly varmints from his person had also gotten rid of most of the sand. He headed back to his “camp,” happy that he hadn’t taken his boots off to sleep till he felt something twitching in his left boot. “Ahhhhhh!” he shrieked, and flopped on the sand. He jerked off his left boot and threw it. A snake crawled out. It turned, gave Duncan a dirty look, and slithered away. The would-be adventurer then pulled his right boot off and threw it. There hadn’t been anything in there, but he didn’t care.

  Struggling to catch his breath he looked down at his hands only to find them covered in what had been all over his boots last night. He rubbed his hands in the sand to remove it, but when he brought his hand up to his nose for a quick check, he quickly pulled it back. Then he got a whiff of his feet and couldn’t decide what smelled worse.

  Suddenly he felt filthy, and given what he’d been through in the last couple of days, it was more than a feeling.

  Duncan retrieved his boots. As he put them back on—careful not to touch the bottoms—he thought about the river, a bath, and clean clothes.

  It wasn’t that far away but once he got there he’d have to go downstream away from both his people and the Centaurs. One thing was sure, he was going to stay off the road for a while. He didn’t want to tangle with the Centaurs again. If he followed the river he should get…somewhere. Eventually.

  He picked up his sword and used it to shoo the remaining creepy crawlies away from his things. They slithered away, and he started to wonder if any of them were good to eat. His belly was rumbling again. As if recognizing his hunger, the reptiles doubled their pace before he could pick one to go after. In seconds all of them were gone as if they hadn’t been there at all.

  Wrapping his belongings in the blanket, he threw the rope strap around his shoulder and put his sword on. He started towards the river wishing for some kind of cover. Duncan was a big man. Bushes with hardly any leaves, spaced twenty or thirty feet apart, and no more than three feet tall, weren’t going to cut it. He took a wide berth around the town. Finally, in an attempt at camouflage, he cut a small bush and held it so that it was between him and the town. It wasn’t very good cover, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. He hoped if anyone saw him they would kindly pretend they didn’t. Or at the very least not come kill him.

  A couple of the lizard dogs appeared on his right. He drew his sword, but they didn’t even try to approach him. In fact, they cowered away, not even bothering to growl. He realized that they probably wouldn’t have come after him at all if he hadn’t been wearing what was basically a meat-scented shirt. Now they kept their distance then turned tail and ran, and he never harbored the notion that they were afraid of him or his sword. They wanted food. Now that he didn’t smell like any food they’d ever eaten he wasn’t worth messing with.

  It sort of added to his sense of worthlessness to think that scavenging lizard dogs didn’t think he was worth eating.

  When he came to the road he ran across it quickly to duck behind a clump of bushes. He looked around to be sure he hadn’t been spotted by the Centaurs before he moved on again, gripping his bush more tightly than ever.

  His mind turned to the guys who had dropped him off in the Centaurs’ knowing full well what he was and how they would react to him. Duncan started to get mad at them, but then he remembered he had burned up most of their hay crop. However any remaining guilt he might have about that left him. They were even now.

  Still, Duncan would be sure he never accidentally burned anything again.

  The walk to the river was longer than it looked. He had run out of water and it was as hot during the day as it was cold at night in this strange land. He wound up taking off everything but his boots, his underwear, and his tunic—which was fine because it was a long tunic after all.

  Duncan was enjoying his adventure less and less. He was tired of freezing at night, burning alive during the day, starving, being thirsty, having lizard dogs eating his clothes and Centaurs trying to kill him. And his seat still hurt from that wagon ride.

  He was sure he would die of thirst before he reached the river. With every step he took, the river seemed to get farther away instead of closer. Was there actually sand on his tongue, or did it just felt that way because his mouth was so dry? The sun was baking his skin, so he wound up wrapping his trousers around his head and holding the legs out in front of him to keep the sun off his face. Of course doing this made his arms cramp.

  He was almost starting to wish he’d just gone up to the front line and died like his father wanted him to.

  “It wouldn’t have been so bad. A quick, mostly-painless death. Nothing like this,” he mumbled to himself. “All I had to lose was my life and looking at it now it just isn’t worth that much. Maybe death isn’t so bad. Like an eternal nap.”

  He finally reached the river. He didn’t stop; he just walked right in and started drinking off the top. Who would have ever thought that water could taste so good? His decision to follow the river seemed like a better one by the minute.

  He’d be in the shade. There would be plenty of places to hide and he wouldn’t run out of water again.

  When he got out and started walking again he wished he hadn’t worn his boots into the water. He’d emptied the water out of them and wrung his socks out, but he still squished when he walked and his feet were starting to hurt. He kept walking because he needed to get out of the Centaurs’ country and he wasn’t really sure where it ended. He was guessing it would be when the dirt wasn’t purple.

  He walked till the sun started to set and found a nice, flat spot not far from the river. He cut the small trees and shrubs away with his sword, and then he took a branch and carefully raked all the leaves into a pile.

  Gathering rocks, he built a fire pit around the leaves and brush. Using his flint and steel and after several tries he managed to start the leaves on fire. He carefully added wood, only leaving to gather more after he had a small, steady fire going. When he returned he put the wood he’d gathered a good, safe distance away from the fire.

  While getting wood he had found some berry bushes and he gathered the berries in his cup. He ate while he picked, and when he’d filled his cup he went back to camp. Sighing he unpacked, washed his clothes out in the river then hung his stuff on branches to dry. He could almost hear what his father would say if he knew Duncan had gotten his chain mail, leggings and knee cops wet with anything but sweat or the blood of their enemies. He started to move the chain mail closer to the fire so it would dry quicker. Then he held it up, looked at it, and smiled.

  The want-to-be inventor found several big rocks down by the river moved them into a semi-circle about three feet from his fire pit. He ate the rest of the berries. By now, his clothes were mostly dry so he put them back on—all except his boots, which were still soaking wet.

  He was still hungry, but no longer starving. His sunburn was bad in places but it could have been worse, and he had water and a good fire. Hopefully, the rocks had been absorbing the fire’s heat—maybe they would block some of the wind and help keep him warm through the night.

  He threw more wood on the fire, and then he threw one of his leggings over the rocks, resting on each side across the fire. He then carefully draped his chain shirt over it to make a little chain-mail tent over his fire. It wouldn’t smother the fire but it would stop any embers from blowing out of it. Feeling very clever he lay down, covered up and went to sleep.

  When Duncan woke he could just make out the first lights of false dawn peaking through the trees—which weren’t all burned up. Sitting up he pulled his blanket and cloak around him. He was cold, and his blanket was damp from the dew, but he wasn’t freezing and he wasn’t covered in hundreds of reptiles, so it was the best morning he’d had since he’d left home.

  Of course he hadn’t really left home. No he’d been kicked out. His belly rumbled, but he knew where there were some more berries and he was by the river and the river meant fis
h. Catching fish was something that he could do while sitting, so he’d always been good at it. Of course, he’s always had a pole, line and hooks, oh and bait.

  Anyway, for the first time since he’d been kicked out of his home he really felt like he could say—if only to himself, “I don’t need any of them. I’m fine on my own.”

  That good feeling lasted till about midday, when learned that eating too many berries and nothing else sent him off to a distant tree where he was forced to squat for half an hour till his knees shook.

  Discarding the stack of leaves in his hand, he straightened up with great effort, jerked his pants into place, and then stumbled over to the river to wash. Four fish dashed away as he bent down, as if taunting him.

  If I had some tackle I’d have plenty to eat, he thought. Even as he thought it he got an idea. He dug through his pile of stuff to find his knife. He used his sword to cut down a small tree. “Boy would this tick the old man off.” He found that whenever he did something that would “tick his old man off” he felt immediately better about nearly everything. Each time his blade slammed into the tree he felt a little thrill pulse through him.

  He sat down on his rock wall and hacked the smaller branches off the sapling with his knife. When some of the branches fell where he’d been sleeping the night before, he had another brilliant idea.

  “See, they were stifling me. I’m a great inventor. That’s what I am. Without them around me to bother me I just come up with one idea after another.”

  Stripping the leaves from the limbs he piled them up for a bed. It wasn’t nearly enough, but there were plenty of leaves all around him. However that could wait till he had a fish in his belly.

  He took a piece of the twine and tied his knife to the stick he’d just stripped. Then he quietly made his way back to the spot on the river where he had seen the fish. There were two fish swimming around, so he pounced like a jungle cat…a jungle cat that had bad eyesight, missed the fish, and fell into the river.

  Duncan broke the surface spitting out a mouth full of water and splashed around till he found his spear. He crawled out of the water and walked down the river till he saw a school of fish close to the bank. This time he was more patient. Drawing back his spear he waited for the fish to get used to him before he struck.

  This time he hit a fish, but it wasn’t a clean hit, and the fish was mostly just dazed and swimming funny. Of course while trying to scoop the fish out of the river Duncan fell in head first and lost his spear again. But when he came up he had that fish in one hand and his spear in the other, so he didn’t care about being soaked or anything else. He felt triumphant.

  Once again he said out loud, “I don’t need any of them. I’m just fine on my own.” Then the fish jumped out of his hand and swam away. “I’ve got to quit saying that,” Duncan mumbled. He decided that being in the water might actually make spearing fish easier.

  Like a statue he stood very still, his spear close to the surface of the water, and waited for the fish to come back. He was starting to think he’d cursed himself when a fish came right towards him. This time his aim was true. The spear hit the fish and it was a big one. He’d speared it right through the middle. He felt really triumphant again, but this time he kept his mouth shut about it.

  Grabbing the fish by the tail, he pulled it further onto the knife, then threw his make-shift spear and its catch onto the bank. He pulled himself out of the river, grabbed the fish, and headed back for his camp whistling a happy tune.

  The champion fisherman took his catch off the blade and laid it on his mostly-dead fire on top of the chain mail. He stripped his wet clothes off, wrung them out for the second time in less than a day’s time, and hung them in bushes all around his camp. He quickly put on his other pair of pants. Then he cleaned the fish, piling the guts on a big leaf he’d picked for the purpose.

  Setting the cleaned fish to one side he removed the chain mail covering from the fire, stirred it to embers, and threw on some wood. It didn’t start blazing so he wondered what the fish would taste like raw. He stuck it on a sharpened stick, raised it to his mouth and took an experimental nibble. He quickly decided he could wait for it to be cooked.

  The fire finally started blazing and he held his fish over it. It wound up burned to a cinder on the outside and nearly raw on the inside, but he ate it anyway, wishing he had some salt.

  When he finished eating he picked up the leaf with the fish guts and the bones he’d added to the pile, carried them over and dropped them into the river by where he’d seen the fish first. It was close but still down stream from where he was getting his water. He was baiting a fishing hole. They’d done it before back in Spurna. If you got the fish feeding in a certain part of the river, pretty soon you could drop in a line and be sure of catching a fish.

  His belly was full, and he was feeling really good again, so he started gathering leaves for his bed. He would hold a branch down and strip the leaves off and then go to the next till in just a few minutes he had a nice bed of leaves about six inches deep.

  Having done this he decided to go back to the river and catch another fish—which he did rather easily this time. He gathered wood and took care of this fish as he had the first one.

  Just before full dark he fed his fire well, put his fire cover in place, put all his clothes—which were gratefully dry—on again and curled up on his new bed. He was full, he was warm, and he was comfortable. This wasn’t such a bad life.

  Of course he had no sooner thought that than it started to rain. Not a light mist. Not a minor puddle-maker or even a downpour, but what they’d always called on his part of the world a frog strangler.

  His blanket, his cloak, and he were all drenched in seconds. His fire died soon after that leaving nothing but smoke. He couldn’t see his hand in front of his face, so he sat on his rock wall covered with his wet blanket and prayed for a quick and merciful death.

  There was no sleeping. He nearly froze. When the rain stopped and the first light of dawn started to seep through the trees and it was still misting rain he was annoyed that he was still alive.

  When the sun came out he wanted to sling a rock at it; by the time the rain stopped altogether he was wetter than he’d ever been in his life. He wrung out everything he owned and tried to find some wood that might burn. But nothing was remotely dry, and there wasn’t a single hot ember left in his fire. He stacked the wood he gathered on his rock wall hoping that off the ground it might get dry enough to build a fire in a few hours.

  Looking around him at the wetness of everything he felt completely defeated.

  The bed of leaves had seemed such a good idea, and it had been so comfortable, but it hadn’t kept him dry. Now it was just as drenched as everything else. He bent down to cart the leaves off and that’s when he noticed that the ground underneath was dry. The leaves had kept the ground dry.

  This gave him an idea.

  He chopped down some small trees with his sword and with every chop he was sure his father was getting madder and madder—which made him feel better and better. Then he cut down two fairly largish trees and cleaned them till he had two forked poles about four feet tall. He chose a ridge pole and tied it to the forks with strips cut from the bottom of his cloak—because after all it was already too small anyway.

  Putting the “ridgepole” out about four feet in front of his rock wall he then started lashing small sticks to the top to the ridgepole with what was left of his twine. The sticks he ran to touch the ground just behind his rock wall in the back.

  Using his other legging as a shovel he started to pile dirt on the sticks at the bottom. “See this, Dad? See this? Now I’m using my armor to move mud. Mud because there is no dirt because it rained. But what’s a little rain? Fire, the wagon ride of death, hungry lizard dogs, angry Centaurs, hunger and thirst, too cold and too hot… Wet is nothing. Bring it on!”

  It was odd to be fighting with his father when he wasn’t there, but it was a lot easier than fighting with him whe
n he was.

  He added sticks to his structure till it was quite tight, and then he covered the sticks with six inches of leaves. He covered the leaves with more sticks to hold them down and brought still more leaves to make himself a new bed.

  By the time he got done, the surrounding woods were looking pretty bare.

  His wood had dried enough that he finally got a fire going and then he went fishing. Even though it had rained enough to wash away all of the fish guts and bones he’d thrown in there was still a bunch of fish hanging out. He speared a couple and went off to make dinner.

  This was when he decided that talking to himself made perfectly good sense. After all, even if it was crazy, it didn’t matter because no one was around to hear him. If they were… Well they shouldn’t be listening to his private conversations.

  “Maybe this is what I was born to be—a hermit. Just me alone in the wild with no one to judge me or tell me what to do. I come and go as I please. Who cares what anyone else thinks of me? After all there’s just me, and I don’t judge. I don’t have to work for someone else or meet anyone else’s expectations of me.”

  And it was good he felt that way because he didn’t see anyone for the next four days. The river was quiet and he started to remember how seldom a boat actually came to his home town of Spurna.

  He spent the days picking and eating berries and catching and eating fish. The more he baited his favorite fishing spot the more fish there were and the easier they were to catch. So the hermit decided that not only were fish very tasty but they were also horribly cannibalistic and really stupid. It was like they ran and told the other fish that there was food, and then everyone came to get the food, and they didn’t seem to really notice when one of them got stabbed and pulled out of the water.

  Well, they did, because they all ran away but a few seconds later they’d all come back again. He imagined a little fish conversation that went something like this: