Chapter 4: A Change of Scenery

Sadly, I was mind-fogged. Nobody had told me that making love with elves emptied your body of all sperm and your mind of almost all thought. I did not remember much about that night at all. I do know my balls were completely and totally drained. They ached as if they had been drained many times. I am such a man whore.

The last thing was that the two had removed my magic contraceptive ring last night. One or both was likely to become pregnant, and soon. When I woke, they had left me a brief note of explanation. They had come to me so that I could lend my magic to their babies.

I put my ring back on.

They had each paid me a full silver to ride me last night. I was a manwhore now.

I stayed at caravaning and fucking my way across whatever this world is called ‘Here’, for over two years. I had to call it something other than just ‘Here,’ since the natives had not bothered to name the planet. I never did come up with a name that made sense.

I must have screwed well over a thousand pussies in all that time. I must be blessed, since I’ve never had VD ‘Here’. Maybe they don’t have it here. I had not heard of any bestiality or other perversions, for that matter. Maybe that’s the root cause of VD? I have no personal idea.

Anyway, I eventually got tired of being on the road. Feeding and hooking up the oxen and unhooking them got old. I was tired of it, and I wanted to take some time off.

I sold my wagon and oxen to a trader. He did not want the chairs or the cubbies, so I pulled all that out. I could tell he was not inclined to use it as I had.

I rented a house in medium size town called Pale Bridge.

The house had a large parlor in front, and, not wanting to entertain people, I stacked the chairs in the parlor’s corner. I went about furnishing the rest of the house.

I joined two regular bed frames together to make a large bed. I contracted a seamstress to make a big feather mattress to fit the thing. The house had an extra room at the end of the hallway that I did not furnish.

I did have to buy all the extra crap required to outfit a house, like linens, kitchen things, and hibachis for cooking.

For the time being, I was eating in the local dumps. Nobody seemed to be able to cook worth a damn in this town. One morning, as I came out of my door, I stumbled over a teen girl who should not have been sitting on my front stoop. I looked at her dirty, disheveled face. She had fear in her eyes. I made a snap decision.

I said, “Girl, can you cook?”

Head down, she said quietly, “Yes, Master.”

I said, “Good, you are now my cook. Here are two silvers. Go get cleaned up at the bathhouse, and then buy a pretty dress. Come back, and I will show you to my kitchen.”

I had been forceful. I learned that when I used a more forceful voice, the other person or people did exactly what I asked. It may be magical. They seemed to remember what I said better when I was forceful.

I no longer needed to work. The second mage had a ratty-looking bag that turned out to be a real find.

I finally checked it out of the squalid rooming house after buying and moving into my new place. That’s when I renumbered the second mage’s things. His possessions were innocuous-looking for a reason. It has a secret bag of holding. The bag has an ‘ignore me spell’ and an ‘invisibility spell.’ Those spells worked only weakly on me.

Inside that second bag were several dozen gold pieces. Most were the large size coins. That dumb ass mage that tried to rob us before White Brook had been fucking rich. This was probably his share of the robberies. He must have taken a lion’s share of the booty.

This much gold should weigh a lot and keep the bag stretch downward. It was indeed a very special bag. I was already moderately rich after my years of driving my passenger wagon. Plus, I also had the pocket money the two mages had.

I found out ‘Almona’ was my new cook’s name. I thought she was a young teen.

A few nights later, it was cold, and she snuck into my bed shivering. In the dim light, I noticed she had a full patch of ash-blond hair down below. So, she’s not a young teen. She’s almost hair-suit down there, so she’s obviously not a teen. Damn, her body was cold!

Over the next few days, she put on weight, her complexion improved, and her hair began to look nicer. She had bought a sleeping pad and started buying things to care for herself. I paid her a small silver coin every two days. Riches for a poor girl. She continued to sneak in with me when it was cold.

I never asked her why she had been so destitute; she never volunteered why she had been that bad off, and did not talk about her past.

In a world of privation and violence, there are too many stories of displaced or screwed-over people. I could not help everyone, but I did need a cook. Keeping her was cheaper than eating out all the time, and the food in my home was better.

She did not excite me for some peculiar reason. She never came to me for sex, which seemed odd. We were just roommates. It was odd that it did not bother me. I easily got laid, and often, by my female customers.

One day, she was cutting small purple potatoes when she sliced opened the fatty muscle of her left thumb. She cried out when she did it. I went in and saw her holding her bleeding hand.

I rinsed it in water and held the cut together while I muttered a healing spell that came to mind. A memory I got from reading the spell book? I had read the first mage’s book from cover to cover several times. I think the second mage I killed was illiterate; he had no book.

Almona held her hand gingerly and looked up at me after I let her hand go. She looked down and saw that her hand was healed and with only a thin, pink scar. I soon had a 100-pound girl hugging me tightly.

I had discovered something here. Women have midwives to help them have babies. Almost all medical care is handled by midwives. It’s not like a union, it’s more like a clique of healers. There is no medical school anywhere on planet ‘Here.’ They are self-taught.

Healers did stitch up cuts, but they knew nothing about cleanliness or bacteria. Often, their meager doctoring results in an infection. Then comes the slow removal of body parts as one infection begets another one from that cut.

After all, who wants to clean the blood off their little knives? Why bother? Dirty bandages were also common.

I knew I had something here. Nobody knew I was a mage. I could use magery to be the best healer this town or area has ever known.

I did not need to do anything. Almona was so happy I had fixed her hand that she told every female at the market what I had done. Soon, women began coming in for healing.

If I could see it, I could fix it. Evidently, there is some limitation; if I can’t figure out the problem, I can’t help. I did not know everything, just much more than midwives and other healers. I was able to help 80% of my customers.

The healing soon brought in other medical problems. I became popular because no one ever got any infections from my doctoring. Even the jealous midwives were sending me work or coming to me for their own problems.

I charged a nominal two coppers for a normal healing. If you had provoked a sword fight and gotten cut while doing it, I charged more. I charged at least a large gold, and sometimes higher, for real assholes.

Not long after opening shop, a guy decided to pay a midwife a small silver coin to sew him up. The idiot got the Green Fungus in the cut.

Lucky for him, I could cure it. My curing it cost him 3 gold for being stupid and going to a midwife instead of coming to me. I pretended it took longer and was harder to do my magic. 3 golds were a year’s earnings. It was expensive for him, but he did get to keep on living. Green Fungus is pernicious and almost always fatal.

They don’t have newspapers or the nightly news in this world, bless their hearts. They DO have a serious grapevine here; women.

If one woman knows something, they all do within a day or two. We don’t have TV or social media ‘Here.’ Females gabbing to each other at the food market spreads the news. They do much better than any newspaper ever has.

The food market is run by women and almost entirely visited by women. Women spend an hour or two there daily getting their supplies. Can you believe it, much of that time is spent gossiping?