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The Broken Lands: Chapter 3
🕑 Added 2021-11-08 22:10:02 +0000 UTCxxxxxxxxx Chapter 3
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We didn’t grow wheat, we have to trade for it, and we only use it for bread during holidays and feasts. But just a little bit of wheat flour, turned into gravy, really improves the usual meal.
Our basic meal is beans, if we have the time to set up a pot. Otherwise, it’s already cooked corn pone. Dense and hard. It’s usually just parched corn meal and water, with, and I mean hopefully with, some salt, some butter, and lard. Corn bread is better, but you need table soda and egg, and ideally a little bit of honey, to make it. Not stuff we usually had on a hunt. But we do have some mouse lard, and we do have some flour.
For ease of use during the hunts, we had little leather pouches with pre-mixed materials in them. Trying to measure a cup of corn meal during flight is not fun, and don’t get me started on the problems when you’re not in gravity. It also removes a lot of fiddly bits from cooking.
Just fill the pouch up with water, knead it around real good, and squeeze it out into a greased tin pan, which goes inside the iron pot and gets a lid. Easy. The cast iron pot evens out the heat the firestones produce and makes a pretty good oven, so the corn pone comes out cooked all the way through without any burnt bits.
We’ve only got one stove, but I started preparation in the skillet so it’d be ready when I pull the pot off. Mostly, that just involves putting a chunk of giant dormouse lard in the skillet, and chipping up some old potatoes and mushrooms into it. I also take some dried mayorsfoot fungus we grow and soak it in the water I’ll add to make the gravy. We grow a number of types of mushrooms but mayorsfoot is the best for soup stock when dried.
I’ve got a specially made knife with a carved, twisted handle that fits my hand and helps me keep it steady when I’m cutting things, so I’m not impossibly slow at the task.
Meanwhile, Conrin delivered two goose heads with the tops sliced off, an entire heart, and a big slice of goose liver, dropping it into one of my tin pots. I scooped out the eyes first, which got spiked on twigs sourced from the bushes, rubbed against the lard in the skillet, and placed on the corners of the stove.
Mica is a sophisticated crow, with sophisticated tastes.
Brain got scooped out and set aside, and then I went after the bits of meat available on the heads. That mostly meant the tongues, which in geese have these weird teeth like combs, and the cheek muscles. The tongues have to be skinned, but it’s still good meat.
I didn’t get up until I’d got as much of the meat as possible off the heads, including the little bit from the muscles at the base of the skull. Then I walked over and gave the skulls and beaks to Granarrik, who swallowed them whole. He’d probably get more nutrition out of those bones and feathers than I did out of the meat.
Of course, my big bird was also eating all the viscera Conrin gave him, thirty pounds at a gulp. Yes, we could, and in some situations would, eat those viscera ourselves, but I don’t like lung or tripe. Heart, liver, and kidneys are good, but they wouldn’t keep from spoiling long enough to make it home, and Gran does need to be fed. It works out.
My mentor didn’t do anything besides gutting and draining the birds. The feathers were useful, and the skin would help protect the meat while we flew home. Only the two heads were removed so we could enjoy our victory meal. Even the blood was drained into a collapsible canvas bucket and poured down Gran’s all-consuming gullet, though some was saved for us three smaller folk.
Later in my life, I learned that most people are a lot pickier about their food than I am. Don’t get me wrong, I have taste buds, I know what tastes good and tastes bad, and I much prefer the stuff that tastes good. But I remember the time when all our crops and animals were killed in a flood. We were hungry, occasionally starving, for four years before we could get everything repaired and new crops and finally ate enough to be healthy again. Sometimes, you eat what’s there, even if it does taste like rancid guts.
The skillet was ready to start the gravy, and I was just laying strips of heart and liver on the top of the cast iron pot, which had a raised lip that turned it into an almost skillet itself, when I heard a sharp ‘POK’ from somewhere else on the island, followed by the skitter of rocks tumbling on rocks.
Mica, of course, had his moment of fright, but it quickly faded as we realized what had happened.
Sky islands have a kind of invisible, intangible boundary that separates their ‘sky’, the air near enough to their surface that it’s affected by gravity. The rest of Air does not have gravity, and things float aimlessly, blown by the wind. If something flying past the island crosses that border, it is suddenly affected by gravity, and falls.
Since we never saw what it was, and based on the sound, it was most likely a small rock, which hit the island as if it fell from high up.
“I’ll keep watch now, go see if you can find anything,” I told Mica.
“On it!” he replied cheerfully, taking wing.
It probably wasn’t anything of value, but it never hurt to check. The hope was that it was a piece of fulgurite, a rock that was hit by lightning. Storms and elementals generated lightning, and some, like the great storm elementals we call cloudwhales, tend to kind of sweep along and gather lots of small rocks and boulders. When they eventually rattle around hard enough to escape, they’ve been turned into especially potent fulgurite by the massive electrical storm inside. Fulgurite is valuable as a magical component.
While Mica searched, I took his role of watching the sky, only briefly looking down to make sure nothing was burning.
It actually didn’t take long, maybe five minutes, and I felt a burst of triumph and pride from my crow. He quickly winged back with a small stone in one foot.
“Fulgurite,” he said with a cheerful squawk. “Small, but crackly-popply!”
“Great job, Mica! This trip is turning out pretty nice!” I accepted the stone from him, and it immediately zapped me with a static pop. “That’s some pretty strong stuff,” I said, examining it. The stone was kind of irregularly rounded, melted from the lightning, though a corner had broken off, probably when it hit the island. Most notably, and why Mica had been able to find it so soon, was that it had tiny little electrical sparks running over its surface, which indicated a nice, strong piece. “I bet this is enough to make a lightning javelin. Seriously, great job, Mica." I stuck it in a pack.
He puffed his throat up proudly and bobbed on my shoulder, then hopped off. “I’ll watch now. Maybe more will fall!”
Conrin came over soon, his hands and forearms bloody, and I cleaned him up with the minor cantrip scour. We weren’t low on water yet, but we would be if we used it for things like cleaning.
“You watch, I’ll cook,” he ordered.
I nodded, and leaned back on the ground, looking up. Since I had better vision than him, it made sense to switch. My stomach growled as the scent of cooking meat started to intensify.
Mica hopped over to sit on my chest for pets as we watched the sky, our shared senses of hunger multiplying as the food cooked.
Once the corn pone was done, he pulled the pot off the stove and rearranged it for the skillet, which he put on top. The tin of corn pone was pulled out to cool, and the partially cooked heart and brains were dumped into the hot pot along with the mushrooms soaking in water, using the residual heat as he started the gravy in the skillet.
Once the lard had melted and the bits of meat, mushrooms, and other bits we had thrown in were sizzling nicely, he slowly stirred in flour and browned it, and then dumped the whole thing into the big pot with the water.
Meaty gravy with mushrooms, potatoes, liver, and brains. It smelled so good.
Mica’s skewered eyes get done before the rest does, and he ate two of them before ours finished. They’re not nearly as big with all the fluid roasted out, so he still had room for more.
And then it was ready. The corn pone was divided and the meat and gravy was poured over the top. We’d last eaten two day old pone, and the only thing that’s worse than that is three day old corn pone. This meal though, made up for a lot of hungry boredom.
It wasn’t a good idea to get too stuffed, but I couldn’t help but eat more as we cooked three more pans of corn pone for the trip home. We were satisfied, tired, and sleepy, stuffed with warm, nutritious food.
Should have known better.
I was still watching the sky. If you’re outdoors, you never stop watching the sky.
And I saw a dot move.
“Conrin, something’s out there.” I felt a flash of fear from Mica.
Nearby, Granarrik made a soft croaking sound, and stood up, ruffling his feathers. His eyes are bigger, and he sees farther than I do, but he’s a lousy watchbird because he’s not impressed by small stuff like madkites.
Mica’s fear got worse as he saw it.
“What is it, Mica?” I asked, sleep forgotten as I scrambled up and started quickly packing stuff away. The dishes weren’t done, but they could be packed dirty. The real problem was that the stove and pot were still hot, with the last pan of corn pone still cooking.
“Don’t know,” he replied, fluttering anxiously. “It has wings. It’s big and a long way away.”
“Leave the stove, we’ll come back,” Conrin ordered.
I winced but didn’t argue. There was a certain unspoken ‘If we can’ corollary to that. A good cast iron pot, plus the stove and firestones… and we have to leave the geese. It’d take a hell of a lot more than an ounce of fulgurite to make up that loss. Hopefully we could come back and get them. I set the pot off to the side so the pone wouldn’t burn, and extinguished the firestones. Hopefully, since it was all inanimate, nothing would mess with it.
“It’s moving slow,” Mica announced as we tied our gear back to the saddle. “Very slow flaps. But very big wings.”
Granarrik never took his eyes off of the thing, and shuffled nervously, eager to get into the sky. That alone scared me, but it also reminded me to check the rest of the sky. Fortunately, the rest of the sky seemed clear of threats; though there was a swirling mass of darker clouds that looked like it might be rain.
“Rain over there, I think,” I told Conrin. “Should we hide there?”
“Mmm. Let’s see what it is, first. Keep the island behind us, it might have bad vision.”
“Ah. Right,” I agreed. Most things were good at spotting movement in the distance, but it was harder picking out a moving thing against another thing. Some things could, some things couldn’t.
Once we were back in the saddle, only then did Conrin pull out a brass spyglass and turn it on the thing in the distance using his one working eye.
“Mmm,” he mused quietly, and then handed the spyglass to me.
He wouldn’t share his thoughts on what it might be until I’d formed my own, to avoid confirmation failure.
I peered through the glass, twisting it slightly to adjust the focus, and found the distant flyer.
Even with the magnification of the spyglass, it was still a long way away, and it was hard to make out details, but one thing jumped out at me immediately.
One of the wings wasn’t flapping right. As it tried to beat, it would fold at an angle that was all wrong compared to the other wing. Then on the upstroke it would straighten, but never all the way. And it kind of looked like it was spinning slowly, which a broken wing would explain.
It was also definitely moving slowly; probably no faster than the wind it rode on.
“It’s big, but that’s definitely a broken wing,” I announced. “It’s just spinning aimlessly, probably just drifting on the wind for all the good it’s doing.” I paused. “Big, big wings, big body. All the color is washed out by the sky, so probably pretty far away. I don’t see any legs, so it’s probably either a native thing or something that tucks its legs up like a bird. A bigmad? Some giant bird? If it’s a lot farther away than I think, maybe a roc?”
Accurately judging the distance of an unknown object with nothing else to compare it to is kind of a guess, unless you’re using a navy biscope. It might be small and close, it might be titanic and a long way away. The best you can do is judge it based on how much color has been washed out by the distance, but even then you need to know the color it should be.
“Too early,” Conrin replied. “Take us up, let’s check it out.”
I grinned. He’s right! A broken wing means it can’t catch us. And if it can’t catch us, we can check it out however we want! Even kill it if we need to!
“Up!” I commanded, and Granarrik launched us into the sky.
