Chapter 7

Boyd was surprised by just how well he slept that night.

He roused early, just like he always did. It was a sheer pleasure to bounce out of bed and feel no pain. He even found himself going through an old stretching routine that he had learnt while in the Army. It was wonderful to have full mobility of his legs again.

Next, he checked his cupboards for some underwear. He had always slept naked, so he hadn’t bothered looking for any when he got back to his room after the meet and greet the night before.

He was delighted to find some rather short-legged linen shorts with a drawstring in the waist. He chuckled when he tied them up as they reminded him of the old short-legged Stubbies he used to wear back in the seventies. They just didn’t have the pockets.

At least his privates were covered, and the chance of chafing was reduced. He pulled the plain white tunic on over his head. He was grateful that they had planned to find a tall male as they had made his tunic longer than the one Emily had worn the night before.

He chose to wear the thongs rather than the sandals with the long straps that he had no idea how to do up. He wondered if these people had decent boots to wear if he was going to be working on construction sites. He would also prefer to be wearing trousers and a long-sleeved shirt if he was working out in the sun.

He headed downstairs and found the house was still fairly quiet, so he let himself out through the front door to look around. He set off around the house on the path provided and decided to go look in the barns and fenced areas. Two long and wide barn-like structures were on either side of the house.

He found a large vegetable garden out the back and could see a large orchard up on the hill. He noticed they had a rather large pool between the two rear wings of the house that was fenced off from the outer areas.

A gate from the path he was on led into the garden-like area around the pool. His room was in what he determined was the east wing. It was a huge house, and he could only guess how many rooms it had.

He peeked in each barn as he came to it and determined that they milked their own cows or whatever they had that passed for cows. On the front of that barn was storage for hay and feed.

It was easily accessible by the wide road that ran between the path he had used, the vegetable garden and each of the barns. He guessed the paved road went around the house and back to the road leading to the property.

The barn beside the milking shed was obviously set up for the horses and could house at least thirty of them. A room for the tack and saddles for the horses took up half of one end, and a small forge for shoeing the horses was in the other half.

The third barn was on the other side of the house. It held the carriage he arrived in the afternoon before as well as two others. The second third of that shed was set up as some sort of workshop and storage area that he guessed they used to fix the carriages and other machinery. All of the tools looked old fashioned to Boyd.

The final shed was split into three sections. One section held cut and uncut lumber on racks on one side. A timber saw and bed was on the other side of the room, and the large floor area between them was clean and empty.

The next section held a grinding mill. Bags and barrels that held seeds, cracked grain, or flour, were stored in the two side rooms. The last set of rooms in the third section stored all sorts of merchandise. He even noticed one set of shelves with trays filled with a wide variety of nuts, bolts, nails and screws.

Boyd wandered back to the mill and inspected it. He soon determined that some sort of electric motor and a gearbox were used to turn the grindstone. He had no idea what voltage they used here as there was no nameplate on the huge motor to help him.

He also realised that the lights in the house were also electric, but he hadn’t paid attention to this fact the night before. He could only guess that familiarity breeds contempt.

These people were an odd mix of old and new as far as he could determine. He then realised that he hadn’t noticed any small appliances in the house. He did wonder if they had at least developed washing machines since they mostly wore white.

He wasn’t going to go find out at this point.

As he walked out of the mill room, he was met by Mathus.

Mathus was some 10cm shorter than Boyd and one of the pink-streaked blondes. He was slim and well-proportioned but not skinny. Boyd had noticed that obesity did seem to be a problem here. While some of the people he had seen the day before were built more for comfort than speed, none were excessively overweight.

“Do you run in the mornings?” Boyd asked.

Mathus frowned for a moment and then replied, “You mean for exercise?”

“Yes. The last time I looked this good, I did regular exercise every day to keep my body looking this good.”

Mathus nodded in understanding. “I guess then that you wish to do this exercise every morning?”

Boyd grinned, “Well, most mornings, I do like to sleep in on Sundays.”

“Ah, yes, your world uses a seven-day week. When we came here, we determined that this world wasn’t Earth. One of our kind was a High Mage and was able to open the portal. We believed she had the potential to become a wizard, and that was why it let her.”

“Unfortunately, we also learnt that this world had some creatures that found us tasty, and she died while trying to fend off a pack of what we called Hyenas. While we have since learnt that the animals were more reptilian than mammalian, they are still ugly and ferocious.”

“We have since decimated their numbers on the main islands. Be that as it may, once we were more established and started monitoring how this world worked, we decided that a six-day week like our ancestors, the Keltrians, used was more appropriate.”

“The Romans who influenced our society before we were able to escape Earth had named the days after the seven celestial bodies they saw in the sky. Those names were not appropriate for here.”