Chapter 3: Town Life

You may have gathered from some of my writing that I had been educated more than many others. It's true. I was born near the sheriff's castle and took advantage of the free school. I was nearly twenty before I was studied-out. Some made a living out of it, but I never could. I loved the woods too much. I read everything I could get my hands on as a young one. The librarians watched over me. I was eventually given a chit to let me into the sheriff's own library where they kept the precious encyclopedia and the old journals. I read until my eyes bled. Repeatedly. It was there that I learned the various possible uses for the talents.

I was found one day flat on my back inside a disused blacksmith's forge, blown into the back wall of the forge after an experiment in working with metal crystals. The thing had exploded like an over-wound spring, which come to think of it, it was. It was a good turn of thought that had me wearing a heavy apron that day. As it was, the surgeon's helper spent may hours sitting on my chest with a pair of heavy forceps plucking bits of metal out of my face, neck and arms all while calling me every dirty word in the book plus a few that I'm sure he made up especially for my education. I just lay there, tears streaming down my cheeks with my teeth gritted as he tugged bits of metal out of the bones of my face. It had been one hell of an explosion.

The sheriff got interested in what happened. I found myself in a one-on-one class with the area's top blacksmith who had the same metal talents that I was trying to perfect. He showed me where I went wrong and then took me on a long tour of the museum, where I studied that fragment of a katana like my life depended on it. Then we talked about grain size, transition zones, fibrous crystals and carbides. When I made the surgeon's helper a scalpel that would cut through a dried pigskin just like a ripe tomato I was declared graduated. I spent several years meeting the other rangers, rebuilding their steel weapons and learning the trade from them. Then I got my own area to patrol. I'd been on it ever since.

She stirred after a bit. "Potty time?" She replied, "Please." I didn't have to carry her now, but I did. She did her business while I locked up the cabin. I took her into my arms once again and set off at a mile-eating lope down the path to the village. We got there a bit after they'd hoisted the main course out of the hole. A team of teens were busy filling in the hole. They were waiting for me to get things started. You see, if you worked, you got cuts to the head of the line. I had pride of first place. I brought in the pigs! I got Josie tucked right into the line behind me when I explained that she'd just done a fairly major healing the night before. She tucked into what must have been five pounds of pork, two pounds of tubers and at least a pound of navy beans simmered in sorghum. People got quieter and quieter watching her put it away. When she finally sighed and pushed away her plate they all whistled and clapped. She blushed like a little kid, then let out a belch fit to shake the leaves from the trees. We all got a good laugh out of it.

An older tall-fella lady with a light covering of gray fur came over to examine her. Josie quietly put up with the medic's laying on of hands. "Good job, young lady. You've still got some nerve damage here and there but I can show you how to clear that up. You still have some deep work to do in your hip as well, lest you get arthritis in it. Now, if you can do it, you should try to get a good picture of your entire body and keep it at the back of your mind. Look at it and re-evaluate it every single day. Make it as detailed as you can ... They walked off, the older lecturing the younger. It's not a widely-known fact, but some of the top healers can force their body images to match a template in their minds, effectively staying at the same age forever. Me? I wouldn't have such a gift. I'd go mad.

By evening most of the pig was gone but the party was still going strong. Folks had come from quite a distance to join in the festivities. Musical instruments had come out and the competitive beer tasting was going strong. The judges were getting pretty pie-eyed though. We had a place for the night. I'd wangled a billet for us. It was inside, near a stove but on the floor. I had a couple of beers, just to be friendly and all, then found my way to my bed.

I woke up with a furry rug on top of me. It had two legs, two arms and a gently snoring head. I was wearing Josie like a coverlet. I gathered her up in my arms and lay on my side, and soon was back asleep.

Come the dawn we were awakened by the cooking shift coming on. We were tucked out of the way towards the back of the stove but still the noise was enough to wake me up and keep me there. Josie slowly stretched, looked up at me then rubbed her face all over my chest. Uh oh, she was scent marking me.

We headed off for the outhouses. She needed one more than me after that meal the day before. Soon we were sitting down to fried pork on fresh bread for breakfast with big cups of tea. "So, do you know where we are?"

"Sure. This is the village of Two Rivers. They've always been friendly to us."

"Good. Now, I don't know how well trained you are or how much schooling you've got. You know that we're about a dozen miles from your homestead. All the pigs are dead and butchered. I suggest that you stay here with friendly folk to finish up your education not only in the three R's but to hone your talents as well. You've got a deep well of ability, we proved that when we changed the oak tree." She calmly looked up at me then rose, sat in my lap and hung on for dear life. I heard from somewhere below my chin, "Don't leave me alone. Please?"

I couldn't help myself. I hugged her back. "All right, little one. All right. We'll figger somethin' out, you'll see."

I'd been nothing but a drifter, in the sheriff's service for some eighteen, nineteen years, moving from village to village as I kept the peace and did my best for the balance. I'd been taking a salary from the sheriff and salting it away, living off of my hunting skills and whatever the villages gave me in exchange for being a talent finder. I did all right. All this meant that I had quite a stash of tiny little golds, each one worth about a month's labor for a skilled man--about two hundred of them. Five bought me a good stone cottage just outside of town with a sturdy work shed and a smoke-house. It was the only cottage around that I felt comfortable in--it had a ten foot ceiling and three rooms. I replaced all the wood such as the doors and the shutters with compressed oak, as I'd made the door to Josie's cabin. A blacksmith traded me a gold for what we called a Franklin stove, twelve small hinges and three six ones. He still made out like a bandit. I wanted good hinges for the doors and the shutters. The local miller broke down a gold for me so that I could buy pots, pans, bedding, bottles, jars, jugs, buckets and a couple barrels. I floated a very large barrel behind me as I made my way back to Josie's homestead where I packed up all that pork from the smokehouse and the fat in the gunny sack that I'd left behind. This was over two hundred and fifty pounds of meat, mind you. I got the meat moved into the smokehouse at my new place and got a smoky little fire lit under it to continue the curing process. There was a fire pit behind the cottage for soap-making, boiling laundry and such. I bought a big kettle, a chain hoist and a big tripod to render out the lard. Then I bought a two-wheeled pull cart and proceeded to follow Josie around the Saturday market to buy the rest of the things that made up a livable household. The only other thing I specifically traded for was a huge five-hundred pound keg of salt and a heavily-waxed multiple-drawer cabinet that I filled with spices. Josie adored it.

I used my cable to bring in over a ton of firewood, then I hunted out a newly-downed walnut tree. It was a big'un, some four feet across. I sliced out a big, thick slab of the main trunk about a foot and a half thick. Careful to keep the pressure even, I compressed it down to four inches thick and trimmed it square. The juices just flowed out of it as I crushed the cells down. When the force required to continue crushing it suddenly went up I stopped. I'd never tried it with green wood before, but it worked just fine. The surface looked something like flecked brown marble.