by V. Moody
“Erm, well, what about something with a sharp point? If I could stab it in the eye or the ear I might get lucky and kill it in one shot.”
He nodded. Apparently he knew what I meant even though I was making it up on the spot. He moved over to a box on a table and clinked and clanked through it until he found a metal rod. It looked pretty old and worn, about the length of my forearm. A railing from a garden gate or something like that.
Over the next half hour he heated up the middle of the rod in the forge, pulling and twisting either end so the glowing red part got thinner and thinner until it finally split into two. He doused both end in the bucket of water and now had two shorter rods with pointed ends.
He inspected them both and selected the one with the more pronounced point. Then he heated up the other end, bent and curved it as it became more malleable, until he curved it right over so it looked like a cup handle.
He did this using large pliers. He didn’t have any gloves on or goggles and ignored sparks that splashed onto his bare arms. Health and safety would have had a field day.
Once he had cooled it all down in the all-purpose bucket of water, he took it over to a large grinding stone set up like a spinning wheel, with a pedal to get it up to high speeds.
It occurred to me that if they had invented the pedal and wheel already, chances were someone had also come up with the bicycle. Maurice would be devastated.
Bright, white sparks flew in all directions as he ground the end of the rod to an even sharper point.
When he’d finished, he handed over what was basically a spike with a handle. He hesitated momentarily, but then let me have it.
“It’s made of scrap, so it won’t be missed.”
I turned it over in my hand. It was certainly better than my stick. I pricked my finger with the point and a drop of blood bubbled up immediately.
“By the way,” I said, deciding to press my luck, “do you have any more scrap I could have?”
“Like what.”
“Old nails, lumps of lead, wire, anything like that? Doesn’t have to be in good condition.”
He didn’t look too keen on giving me any more handouts.
“What about the stuff on the floor?” I pointed to a rusty iron nail wedged between the floorboards.
He grimaced at the idea of me wanting trash, but shrugged and said, “Help yourself.”
I got on my knees and quickly grabbed every little thing I could find before he changed his mind, or his boss turned up. I pulled up the bottom of my shirt and put everything I found in the fold. Once I had picked the floor clean I stood up and thanked him.
“You are a strange man,” he said. I couldn’t help but feel pleased he saw me as a man, strange or otherwise. “What is your name?”
“Colin.”
“Co-leen. Even your name is strange. I’m Kizwat—” yeah, I had the strange name “—if you do manage to kill a superior beast, I will keep my part of the deal.”
I nodded. The chances of me killing a regular beast seemed very low, so a superior beast probably wasn’t even a possibility. Still, if I did manage it somehow, I would definitely come back and get this guy his hammer. My own personal blacksmith would be pretty cool.
“One more thing,” I said. “Where would I find rabbits to hunt?”
“If you go east out of town, beyond the wheatfields there are wild meadows. There should be plenty there.”
“Okay, thanks. And, which way is east?”
He pointed over my head. I could see him regretting his decision to help me already. Having got him to the point where he was actually getting annoyed with me, I decided not to push my luck any further and left.
Instead of heading back to the shed, I snuck down the side of the smithy and over a fence into a small piece of scrub land. I dumped the content of my shirt on the ground and inspected my acquisitions.
There were six nails, each at least the length of my finger, half of them crooked and all of them rusty. I did a little foraging and found a fist-sized rock which I used to pound the nails through one end of my stick. I took as much care as I could not to splinter the wood but the nails still had sharp points and went through surprisingly easily.
The result was a fearsome weapon, with vicious-looking barbs. If the nails didn’t kill you, tetanus probably would.
Excited by how well I was doing, I moved on to the leather scraps. I took a square about the size of a large stamp and poked holes in either side using the spike I’d got off Kizwat. I tied a long strip to each hole. It made a little hammock. I grabbed a handful of small stones off the ground and placed one in the cradle.
Spinning it around worked well. Getting it to release proved a bit trickier. My first attempt stayed firmly in the cradle and smacked me on the top of my head. Painful. A few goes later I got it to fly out at considerable speed. In the wrong direction, but still, it would be an effective weapon once I got the hang of it.
I estimated I had enough material to make three more. It was so straightforward I could probably make another couple using the rags left over in the clothes box back at the shed.
The other bits of metal didn’t seem to have an obvious use right now, but I wrapped them up as best I could and headed back. With my rusty nail cub and my sling of infinte ammo, I felt ready to strike fear in the hearts of rabbits everywhere.
18. Lock And Load
Just before I walked through the shed door, I had a sudden urge to make a sharp 180 and go off on my own. Whenever I played an MMO on my computer, I chose to play solo. Online games are designed to be a social activity. You can speak to people as you play, plan out and coordinate your attacks, chat about this and that. You share the highs and lows, the laughter and the tears.
Not me. I liked to explore alone and try to deal with monsters on my own. It took longer but it was just a lot less stressful that way. Of course, I would occasionally join a group to do a dungeon or a raid, but more often than not you’d run into a bunch of arseholes.
People who took the game too seriously, swore and screamed at anyone who made a mistake or didn’t already know the mob attack patterns, and generally used the game as their personal venting platform. And then there was the whining when it came to rolling for loot…
Playing solo meant you could do what you want, make as many mistakes as it took, and generally enjoy yourself without relying on anyone or having anyone rely on you. Much more fun.
But I wasn’t here to have fun. On my PC, if things got hairy I could just try again or logout. Or even complain to the GM and get them to rollback my character. In this world, there was a good chance game over really meant game over. If I wanted to survive, I’d need help. People watching my back, ready to offer me a helping hand when I came up short.
I wasn’t too sure if the idiots I was stuck with would turn out to be those people, but I didn’t think being on my own would have many advantages right now.
I walked through the empty shed and out into the courtyard. The other groups had left. Where they’d gone, I had no idea. My group sat around our now smouldering fire. Maurice cleaned his glasses with the sleeve of his onesie. Dudley hugged his knees while rocking back and forth like a disturbed child. Flossie had a fixed smile on her face, the kind nervous people have when they don’t want others to think they’re feeling nervous. And Claire scowled as she poked the remnants of the fire with her stick.
Perhaps going solo needed some serious reconsideration?
“You’re back,” said Claire, sounding angry. “I thought you’d gone off and left us.”
“Must have been a hell of a dump,” said Maurice. “You took ages”
I ignored them both and dropped my recently acquired items on the ground. Leather scraps, metal junk and some pebbles. I expected them to look at me like a nutter who had brought them trash, but they all stared wide-eyed with amazement.
“What did you do to that?” Maurice pointed at the stick resting on my shoulder. I lowered it to the ground, spiky end down, obviousl
y. The rusty nails looked nasty.
“Upgrade. Should scare off a few critters. Probably do myself an injury if I try to actually use it in a fight. Flossie, lend me that knife a minute.”
She didn’t hesitate for a second, just took out the dagger and handed it over. How was I ever going to turn this bunch into the cynical, jaded bastard they needed to be to survive?
I used the knife to cut off a piece of leather and gave it to Maurice.
“Use this to fix your shoe.”
He had a broken clasp on his left sandal. He quickly tied it together making the shoe ten times more secure.
“Thanks, man. Really.” He grinned at me. Amazing how the little things make you feel when you have sod all.
“Okay, I want to show you something.”
I picked up my sling and a small stone. I loaded the sling and spun it around my head. I had managed to make it work earlier, but with everyone watching my heart crawled into my throat and the sweat in my palms threatened to let the sling slip out of my grip. If I screwed this up I’d look a right fool.
Fortunately, when I whipped the sling to release the stone, it flew out in the right direction. It went up at a forty-five degree angle so only a good shot if we ever went giraffe hunting, but still good enough to demonstrate the weapon’s use.
The others burst into spontaneous applause.
“Marvellous. Absolutely marvellous,” said Dudley. I think they were his first words since introducing himself.
Their impressed expressions only embarrassed me more. “Er, yeah, anyway, obviously it’ll take practice to get good, but with something like this you can hit the target from far away. A lot safer than hand to hand fighting.”
Using Flossie’s knife, I cut up the other strips of leather and made some more slings. Together with some rags from the box of clothes in the shed, I was able to make one for everybody. They stood there, each admiring their new toy. They didn’t see them as tools of death, but they would.
“Right,” I said. “I reckon we’ve got quite a bit of daylight left. Let’s go hunting.”
19. A Hunting We Will Go
We left the shed and headed east. Everyone was very impressed I knew which direction east was, but I told them how I found out, quickly lowering their expectations.
I could have let them believe I had an innate ability to know where I was going, but then they might have started relying on me to tell them what to do. Some people like that sort of thing—being looked up to, asked their opinion, admired. Best way to make yourself look an idiot, in my experience.
We quickly came to the fields of wheat Kizwat had mentioned, ringed by a wooden fence. On the way into town, Grayson had made it clear fields were to be walked around, not through. Apparently, only in movies is it considered acceptable to run through a field trampling all the crops.
It meant it would take us longer to get to the other side, but we needed the time to get used to the slings.
The person who had most problems was Flossie. She would get it whizzing around her head and then be unable to get it to stop. She would try to fling the stone out, but after failing a couple of times and nearly ‘lamping’ herself (as she put it), she would start squealing and try to run away from the strap whirling overhead, even though it was attached to her hand.
Or she would release the whole thing, sending the sling flying off into the distance. And then we’d spend ten minutes looking for it in the undergrowth.
Everyone else soon got the hang of getting the pebbles to shoot out, if not the ability to control where they went. It didn’t matter where you stood, you were in the firing line. In fact the safest place seemed to be directly in front of whoever was shooting.
Still, the little stones did ricochet off the fence posts with enough force to suggest they’d do some serious damage if they ever hit flesh and blood.
We weren’t very good, but the challenge of learning a new skill was quite entertaining. Even Flossie eagerly tried again after each failed attempt. The only person who didn’t appear to be enjoying the training session was Claire. She wasn’t that bad, managing to get the sling to work most of the time—although she did smack herself in the leg occasionally (as we all did)—but her face indicated she really didn’t want to be doing this. Or possibly it was the thought of what we planned to do with our new skill.
“You know,” I said, “even if you don’t want to kill any animals, you should still learn how to use that thing properly. For self-defence.”
The others were all spread out. We needed to keep a decent distance between us to avoid smacking each other on the arms with wayward spinning (something we learned the hard way). Claire had taken to strolling along, whipping her empty sling against her palm.
“Why?” she said, like a surly teenager. “What good will it do against an ogre?”
“It isn’t just monsters and beasts you have to watch out for. This is a primitive society and you’re a girl. I don’t know what it’s like for women here, but I’m pretty sure there are men who treat them like crap and force them to do things they don’t want to do.”
Somehow I found myself talking about something I wasn’t very comfortable with, and trying my best to avoid using certain words.
“Yeah, well I doubt I’ll have to worry about that.”
I stopped and looked at her. She stopped and looked right back at me. She had a thin face, but very clear skin. Her eyes were a pale grey, which was unusual, and her hair was straight and long, a mixture of brown and dark blonde streaks. The nose, of course, was unmissable. Not crooked, just large with flared out nostrils. She wasn’t pretty, but she wasn’t a gargoyle either.
“Are you fishing for a compliment?” I asked her.
“No. What are you talking about?”
We had entered some kind of race to see who could sound more annoyed.
“You’d be happier if men considered you worth raping, would you?” She’d made me use that word, which annoyed me even more. “Because unless you have a detachable vagina and you left it back home, it’s as likely to happen to you as anyone else.”
“Fuck you. That’s not what I’m saying.” We were about even on the annoy-o-meter. “I don’t even know why you’re bringing this up. It’s horrible. Not all guys are like that.”
“No, not all guys. But enough of them so that you should be careful and learn to take care of yourself. You can’t rely on us to come save you if some evil bastard drags you into the bushes. This is like a third world country. Not the ones where you go on holiday and get beautiful silk scarves for super cheap. I mean the ones where they have child soldiers and genocides and drug cartels running towns. And you know what all those sorts of places have in common? They treat their women like shit.”
The others had started to walk towards us, probably thinking we’d stopped to have some kind of meeting.
“What are you talking about?” Claire raged. “How is this place like that?” She opened her arms wide indicating the world around us; the golden wheat swaying in the breeze, the forest trees in the distance dappled with sunlight, the fluffy clouds innocently floating by. It certainly didn’t seem to be a place full of horror and despair. “You don’t know anything. You’re just trying to scare me so I’ll do what you say, learn to hit things with this stupid contraption.”
She spun the sling around her finger, first one way then the other.
“Claire,” I retorted with no intention of backing down, although I really have no idea why it had become such a big deal to me, “this is a world where you have to kill to survive. It’s not much of a leap from using violence to get the things you need, to using violence to get the things you want. And for a lot of men, one of those ‘things’ is women. Why not? What’s anyone going to do about it? Call the police?”
The other three were now standing around us, looking a miffed by the conversation they’d walked into.
“So you’re saying I should watch out for all guys, including the three of you? Once you get used to
using violence to kill small animals, you might decide to use it to get some action in the bedroom?” She wiggled her hips suggestively, playing up to the audience, her face twisted with sarcasm.
“Maybe,” I said calmly, refusing to rise to her baiting. “I don’t think any of us three is the type, but who knows? Same with the rest of the guys that came here with us. Any of them could turn out to be a massive douchebag.”
“And yet you sent that girl back to the biggest douchebags of all.”
She was talking about Jenny, and I was sort of pleased she thought of Golden Boy and his cronies as douchebags, but she had a point. If Jenny liked one of those guys and hooked up with him, it would probably keep her safe. But if she rejected them things might get iffy. At best she might get thrown out of the group. At worse… I really didn’t want to think about it.
