Chapter 4: Widemouth

After a week or so of exercise and training for me, research and analysis for Shelly, and discussion of plans and options for all three of us, Eric accepted a mission to go recover one Leslie Clerk. She was a Cassandran woman being held in a tavern, a Damsel in Distress. Simple enough.

The Damsel wasn’t likely to die soon, but she was in great pain from all the locals who were trying various home remedies to see what worked. Even if the locals weren’t raping, beating, or otherwise abusing her, sooner or later one of their ideas would poison her. Or, just as bad, it would poison one of her captors, since if one of them died they’d probably just give up and kill her even if it wasn’t her fault.

The mission’s expected duration was a week or two, as the tavern was toward the middle of a big island, several days’ ride inland from the nearest access point. That was a seaport, a town of a couple thousand people. The town was large enough to have a bank, and the bank itself held the teleport portal.

There were several other available quests that didn’t seem possible with his resources, like the three Damsels still being held in the Brotherhood’s main fortress, or the two captured by pirates and being taken God knows where. Shelly recommended this one as a good training exercise for me.

Once Eric had decided to rescue Leslie Clerk, he and Shelly dove into research about the area while I continued my exercises. Eric had never been to that island before. All of his previous missions had been on the mainland, far from the sea. The sea shouldn’t have any effect on this mission either, but if there was a problem on the island we might have to take a ship over to the mainland. Eric was thinking that if we had to take ship somewhere, my seafaring experience might help.

Eric and I had both come to Crossroads wearing typical American clothing. Our shirts may have been acceptable if no one looked too close, but our pants and shoes weren’t, and our underwear wasn’t acceptable either. We were allowed to wear it if we insisted, but anyone who saw it would have unanswerable questions. It was better to dress completely in clothing that would fit in.

Almost everything was leather. A cloth shirt and shorts were first, then a soft leather vest, a tougher leather overshirt and trousers, and finally leather boots. No socks. Leather thongs to tie everything in place. The shirt and shorts were the only things that could be washed. Washing the leather clothes would eventually turn them into hardened leather armor. Maybe helpful at times, but miserable to deal with the rest of the time and nowhere near as good as leather armor made by someone who knew what they were doing. For wet weather, we had oiled leather cloaks.

That was it. No weapons, no tools, no money. We entered the portal room with what we were wearing, carrying our cloaks and holding hands. Shelly closed the door, and we found ourselves in a small room with plank walls. It was actually pretty good workmanship, if plain. These people had good wood-workers.

This was, apparently, a room in the bank at Widemouth. Widemouth probably started as a ferry across the mouth of the Wide River, then some people stopped to build a tavern on one side of the river and sell stuff to travelers, and it became a village. When it grew enough to deserve a name they called it Widemouth. Did women from here get called “Widemouth women”?

Nowadays, according to the briefing, Widemouth was becoming a proper city. It was still mostly on one side of the river, with two ferries crossing it to connect the road on the other side, but there were stone buildings in every direction and someone had dug out a tidal channel to give the town a moat.

Shelly had told us that, at the equator, the tidal difference was about two feet. Since Hunter’s Island was farther north, the high tide at the mouth of the river was about a foot and a half higher than the low tide. Two miles up the river at the town, the afternoon high tide was about a foot higher than the lows, just enough to keep the moat from becoming completely stagnant.

It wasn’t much of a moat, being tidal, but it would be messy and muddy on the bottom and not something that a soldier would want to slog across while wearing a bunch of heavy armor and carrying a heavy ladder as well as several weapons, all while being peppered with arrows. There was supposed to be a fairly nice wooden bridge across the moat at the main coastal road, and another smaller bridge on the river-road headed inland.

Eric pulled me away from a table, then stuck his finger in a little hole. Immediately, a large box or chest appeared. He’d warned me about it, but it was still surprising. The chest held all of Eric’s locally-produced equipment.

Even though Eric had never been to Widemouth, his storage chest was here at the Widemouth bank. Someone was managing this production. Someone with pretty advanced technology. If they could do stuff like this, why was Chaos still stuck in the Middle Ages? Neither Eric nor Shelly had answers, although it was clear that they didn’t really care. Shelly had her Hero, and Eric got Shelly as well as getting to go on adventures that ended with a very grateful beauty asking him for a baby. They didn’t care how or why the show’s producers set the stage this way.

Eric pulled out about the smallest saddle I’d ever seen, two sets of saddlebags, a couple of packs, two swords, several knives, and a bunch of camping gear like tents and cooking equipment.

I tried to help, but mostly I was just holding a pack or bag open while Eric pulled some stuff out, rearranged other stuff, and put more stuff back in. When he was done, he closed the lid to the chest and it disappeared again. “Now, we gotta carry all this stuff around until we can get some horses.”

We both ended up wearing a sword and had a couple of knives in odd places. One knife was where it could be easily seen. A throwing knife went down our boots. He liked having a holdout weapon hidden in his shirt, while I hung mine on my back inside my overshirt. He could scratch his belly and draw his. I could scratch the back of my neck and draw mine.

We put our packs on, slung bags over our shoulders, and I carried the saddle while Eric led me out of the room.

Aside from the smell of unwashed humanity, the bank wasn’t anything to talk about. There was a divider made of wooden slats between the customer and the banker. Everything here was made of wood, if at all possible. Metal was rare and hard to process, and therefore valuable. Nothing would be made of metal unless it was important enough to be worth the cost. Weapons, of course. Some other stuff.

The banker and the customer could see each other, but the divider was set on a bench that went across the room. The bench separated them by several feet. A robber would either have to have a very long sword, or he would have to break down the divider before he could get to either the banker or his ready cash. This turned out to not be as much of an issue as I thought, but I didn’t know that at the time. I was just thinking that as long as the banker kept an eye on the customer, he and his money were pretty safe. I did see a guy standing in the corner watching everyone. Maybe he was a guard.

Eric led me across the room and outside. Man, if I thought the bank smelled bad it was nothing compared to the street! The street outside was an absolute pigsty. It clearly doubled as a sewer. There was mud, garbage, animal droppings, and other unrecognizable stuff just lying in the mud. I could smell the sea so I knew it was close, but that was almost drowned out by everything else. This was far worse than Naples or Venice or Izmir. I don’t think that even Karachi was this bad.

Eric stopped outside to look around. He smiled when he caught me gagging. “So, lunch first, or horses?”

“I don’t think I’m going to be able to eat for a while. This is really bad. I know, you warned me, but Jesus!”

“Yeah. Look, it’s not their fault. It’s not that they don’t care about sanitation, it’s more that they don’t even understand the concept. But, yeah, it takes some getting used to. Okay, Jason, we are now in ‘Injun Country’, okay? The two of us trust each other. We don’t trust ANYONE else here. We’re gonna go see if we can get some horses first, so we don’t have to keep carrying all this stuff. By that I mean that I will talk to people and negotiate. You will stand back, try to keep your back up against something solid, and watch my back while I’m talking. Meanwhile, we are clearly very wealthy people and there will be those who think that the world would be a better place if they owned all our wealth instead of us. Keep your eyes peeled. Don’t start shit, but if shit starts finish it as fast as you can while continuing to cover my ass. Remember that sneak attacks from behind are the safest way to attack an armed man.”