Chapter 3: The Village of Sandy Isle

I lay on my side in the morning, watching the sun come up through a glassless window. Its awning had kept some of the rain out before it had ripped away in the wind. What had gotten in formed a puddle on the floor and was slowly dripping through the cracks.

It was chill in the little shack, the charcoal long since burned out. I was pressed close against Nevianne’s naked back, enjoying her body heat, my arm around her waist but careful not to touch anything that would get me slapped or worse; I had no idea what the sexual mores were of these people except for having my hand slapped away. I needed to use that chamber pot, but I didn’t want to get out of the sack for it before absolutely necessary.

Instead, I used the time to think. I was far from home even though I was close to the spot where I started. Returning was going to be a hit or miss proposition, with way more misses than hits. I was also intrigued by the idea of the “Dark Lord,” and impressed beyond measure by the willingness of my hostess to sacrifice herself for all eternity to help her neighbors. That seemed extreme. I could maybe, kinda sorta, see it for as long as it took the demon to solve her problem – whatever it was; a week or so, maybe a month. In exchange for eternity seemed kind of lop-sided.

The situation was silly, of course. You had to believe in magic to take it seriously. The thing was, Nevianne and her coven did believe in it. They had tried conjuring an actual demon, and not just one of the small fry demons, an imp maybe; they had gone for the top tier, an actual personification of (capital E, 32 point Medieval-style typeface) Evil. I had to respect that, the fact that it was nonsense notwithstanding. They didn’t believe it was nonsense.

“What ponder’st thou, Lord of Rage?” my blanket companion asked out of the blue, removing my hand from what could have been cleavage if she’d been dressed. I hadn’t even realized she was awake. I hadn’t even realized where my hand had wandered. Well, maybe I had, kind of.

“Different things,” I told her, contenting myself with her soft little belly and her round little butt rather than her feminine protrusions.

“As?” she asked.

“As in wondering about your ‘Dark Lord.’ While I’m considering him, I’m thinking about filling the chamber pot, brushing my teeth, then having a bath, then breakfast. Clean clothes wouldn’t hurt. While I’m pondering all that, I’m enjoying how warm and comfortable you feel. You have a very pretty bottom, among other things. And I’m noticing how hard this floor is under me.”

“Truly thy mind works’t under heavy load. Find’st me thou thee pleasing?”

It took me a couple seconds to unravel the way she used the dative case. You don’t usually hear it without a preposition, at least the way she was using it with the archaic diminutives. I thought “thyself” would be more grammatical, but she’d been speaking the language longer than I’d been deciphering it. “Very pleasing,” I told her after untangling the verbiage and parking a part of myself between comely thighs. “You’re a cute girl.”

She was, too. She was a natural blonde – the carpet matched the drapes. She had a pretty, heart-shaped face, good teeth that weren’t perfect, and enormous blue eyes. She could hold entire conversations with those eyes, without bothering to open her mouth. She looked something like a Kewpie Doll, only with high cheekbones, furry underarms and slightly hairy legs. And she had really nice frontal protrusions. I may have mentioned that before.

“It pleaseth me that thou like’st me,” she told me. “Thou, too, hast æn comely ærse.”

She insisted I use the pot first. I took a deep breath before getting up. It was chill from the rain and the fact that it wasn’t quite June yet. I ran some water through my hose and then turned away, getting dressed while she emptied her own bladder behind me. She wore the same dress she had the night before to empty the pot out back on a covered, fragrant manure heap – a niter pit like the Confederacy used during the Civil War. Her dress was a light bluish color, purplish at the seams. It may have once been dark, before many washings in strong soap.

“Ye maiden cometh tomorrow med wasser für ye bad,” she told me when she came back, “if she cometh at alle. Thou musst wait until then.” While she was talking, she was squatting by the charcoal stove, relighting the fire.

“That will have to do then,” I told her.

“Mine tooth brush ist thær in ye wasser closet.”

I hesitated a second or two, then overcame my fastidiousness. Before the invention of the plastic toothbrush, most families shared. Hers was of about the same design, the handle longer and the brush a bit shorter than my Oral B. It was a whittled wooden handle holding a boar’s bristle brush. She had some tasteless dentifrice powder to use with it, and there was water in a two-gallon urn. The water was flat but there weren’t any wiggly things in it, nor was it green. The dentifrice was mildly gritty. My mouth still tasted much better after I’d brushed. I’m prone to dragon breath in the mornings so I was grateful for it. I used her comb to put my hair into some semblance of order, as I was overdue for a cut. The comb was shorter than what I was used to, and hand-carved, but it did the job.

“Förgive if thou will’st,” she said after her own trip to the WC, which was actually the size of a closet. Her teeth fairly sparkled when she reappeared. Her long hair was combed, parted in the middle, loosely braided, and caught up in a bun behind her head. Its color was somewhere between ripe wheat and gold. She produced a half loaf of bread, a chunk of crumbly-looking cheese, and a half bottle of dark wine for breakfast. She had a little square table of rough-hewn wood, and three stools around it. “Ic thought not to have thee as a comer. Ic thought ne’er to see mine poor hut nor mine folk again.” A “comer” was a visitor in Chaucer-speak, I recalled.