Nugar
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The Broken Lands: Chapter 2
🕑 Added 2021-11-08 22:09:00 +0000 UTCxxxxxxxxx Chapter 2
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It took us the better part of an hour to pull in the birds, time in which Gran slowly flew back to the island. I mean, I know how to clean and dress animals in free fall, but it’s messy.
Very messy.
The bird I hit with the crossbow is dead in minutes, with that lingering twitch-flop thing they do lasting about ten more. The others take longer. Conrin actually used his bow on the other one I hit, putting three arrows into it point blank to kill it fast. He only used a partial draw, but he still ended up muttering imprecations under his breath when one went all the way through and out into the sky.
That’s where Mica comes in handy again, grabbing the slowed arrow and bringing it back. I tell you, if you’re going to live in the sky, having a bird to help you is better than a third hand, and sometimes I seriously wish I had a third hand.
That’d be a significant polymorph spell, the kind of thing that would be hard even for Mom. I may never get to that level, not with my gimped up hands, but I haven’t given up yet.
The other two are reduced to weak struggles while we truss up mine, but it still takes Conrin some serious effort to drag them close and hold them still long enough for me to kill them with a hammer. A sword or knife would probably hit wrong and twist out of my hand, but a hammer is a glorified club and it doesn’t take much to kill a goose, even a huge one. It doesn’t matter that the head misses, and it’s the shaft of the handle that hits and breaks the neck. The only tricky bit is you don’t want to hit the skull; you want the first vertebra down so you don’t waste the brains.
Lots of good nutrients in the brains. That’s a tasty treat you generally only get on hunts. I’ll share one with Mica.
So, three hundred and some pounds of greatgoose is a heavy load for Gran, but doable, and not as much effort on him as you’d think. Again, someone’s got to pay the bill, but it doesn’t have to be you. We stack the birds, wings outstretched and overlapping, and lash them together, then Granarrik uses the wings like pot handles and grabs them in his feet to fly them through the air.
Sky islands, as fragments of the planet my people originally come from, still have the aspects that they did when together. Down is down, gravity is gravity, and the sky near them is theirs, affected by that gravity. While the height their sky reaches before it loses to the endless sky of Air can vary, depending on various magical properties as well as island size, no sky island’s gravity affects anything past the edge of the side. So all we have to do is fly up past the edge from underneath, and at an angle. As soon as gravity grabs Gran and his load, he can let it go and momentum and gravity will let it land on the island, from the equivalent of a very short fall. All it takes is precise timing by Granarrik.
One of the most important things to know about bannari like Gran is that they’re not like regular eagles. They call them bone eagles because that’s one of their main sources of food. Although they have a hooked beak and will hunt, they lack the wicked crushing and piercing talons of an ordinary eagle or owl. Their feet are quite strong, but they have short, blunt talons better for holding on than killing. On the prime material plane, or in certain sky islands here in the endless sky, the normal sized ones live in vast, barren regions with little prey. If they can find something, they’ll happily kill and eat it, but just like my people, it’s too hard to find food to let you be picky. They will eat carrion, but so will every other bird of prey. No, the main thing is, food is so scarce that by the time they find a carcass, it’s usually been stripped of meat.
So they eat the bone, swallowing pieces so large the ends might stick out the corner of the mouth for a few days while the other end is digested. But for a regular sized bannari, that’s not always enough. A yak or large deer leg bone is going to have the most marrow and nutrition, and be too long to swallow. So, forced to be cleverer than the usual eagle, they learned to break them. They grab the bones and fly them up into the air, then drop them onto rocks, shattering the bones into swallowable pieces. They’re stronger and able to carry more weight than an eagle of equivalent size, they’re clever enough to find food where others can’t, and, amazingly, they’re really, really good at aiming.
It doesn’t come up much in the sky, but we trained it regularly. Granarrik could put a two hundred pound boulder into the village well from five hundred feet up. It’s harder to hit a moving target, and I admit we still occasionally had a miscommunication when trying to pick out a single target in a group, but he’s really good. I have this fantasy where we fly to one of the normal worlds, where the sky ends and it’s the land that stretches forever, and herds of animals run across the ground.
Herds of goats, and cows, and deer, and antelope, and yaks, and bears, and camels, and hippopotami. Elephants. I want to see if one of the famously mighty creatures can take a boulder to the noggin, or if it’ll splat like everything else.
And then, we’ll eat it. A whole elephant, imagine. And more on the hoof. We’d never be hungry again. Leg bones so massive that even Granarrik will have to drop it on a rock before he could eat it. Not that I’d give him only bones, of course. I’d feed him a whole cow a week if I could. He’d be so strong.
I might be hungry. I’m looking forward to some goose. Even as we worked, and I kind of fantasized about hunting, I never took my gaze off the sky. Same with Mica, and Granarrik, too. He’s big, but there’s plenty out here that could kill him. Only Conrin is better served focusing on what we’re doing, because even his good eye isn’t what it once was.
Conrin and I will each get a brain, though I’ll share a bit with Mica, and we’ll get some liver and sweetbreads too. Organ meat goes bad too fast unless you can preserve it, and we don’t have the stuff in our packs. All of the offal, and the organs we can’t eat fast enough, will go to Gran. We’ll hold off on cutting up the meat until we get home, and then he’ll get the skeletons with bits still on.
It kind of makes me mad when I see bannari referred to as ‘bearded vultures’. He’s not a vulture; he doesn’t have a bald head and a stench of carrion. Like I said, every bird of prey will eat carrion, and so will all of the other so called ‘noble predators’, like lions or wolves. I’ve never seen one in person, but I bet they lick their ass like a cat or dog. Gran doesn’t lick his ass. He preens his feathers like a clean bird, and he does it a lot. Even if you don’t use the term bannari, they’re also called ossifrage, or lammergeier. Not a vulture or buzzard. And it’s also more of a mustache than a beard, with black hair like feathers hanging down from the top of his beak, not the bottom.
That’s why Conrin dubbed him Granarrik, actually. Sir Moustache Eagle, in dwarven. It could also be translated as ‘lord’ and also implies things about said lord when combined with the term for moustache. An only slightly insulting way of referring to a dwarf too young and inexperienced to have a great beard, but who’s rich and vain enough to spend lots of time primping his moustache. Which sounds worse than it is, at least to humans, but since it still implies beautiful facial hair, it’s more of a backhanded compliment among dwarves. Call it cliché, but facial hair is a big deal to dwarves, and it’s never a real insult to say someone takes care of theirs, even if it is vanity.
And Gran was vain. Very, very vain, though he’s right to be proud. He had the profile of an eagle, with a big hooked beak, black wings, and strong feet, so you know he’s majestic. Also, though, bannari use makeup. Their legs, breast, neck, and head feathers are naturally white or cream, but they find deposits of red clay or dust, and rub it in their feathers. They’re happiest when all of their white feathers are stained a rich red, but they put the most effort into their head and neck feathers. I buy him pigments now and then, and help apply it. I also cheat a little and use some alteration magic to even out and enhance the color. Also, though they don’t do it themselves, I wax and style his moustache into the tapering, flowing curls of the imperial style. A little beeswax, a little magic, and it holds up well even in flight. He really does look like a handsome eagle knight. By bannari standards, he’s stunningly beautiful, not that there’s any other bannari around these parts.
My beautiful, majestic, and smart bird releases the bundle of dead greatgeese right as he crosses the edge of the island, letting them land with a soft impact six feet from the edge of the island, and himself a single step on the other side.
Conrin and I both sag a little as gravity grabs us. We’ve taken gravity breaks on various small sky islands throughout our hunting trip, but most of the time has been spent floating in the saddle, or hanging on as Gran flies. We’re strong, though. I’m only sixteen years old and I’m a woman, but I can take a cask of water on each shoulder and walk with it. Conrin, being a dwarven man, is even stronger. It’s easy to lose strength in the sky, so even though it might seem a foolish waste of nutrition to lift weights at home, we have to train or we’ll end up weak. Just normal farm work won’t do it, even if farm work is even harder for us because we don’t have any oxen or horses and have to do everything with our own effort.
Once we got down on the ground, that’s when our tasks diverged. I know how to clean a kill, and I can still do it, but I’m slow. Conrin was an expert, so he got the geese. I got a pack down from Gran’s saddle and started setting up cookware.
“You want your brains cooked?” I asked Mica.
“Cooked!” he replied, bobbing his whole body in happiness, so his grass cloak rustled and flapped around him. “Toast some eyes, too!”
“Okay. Keep watch, Mica.”
“I know. Always be watching!”
Wonderful familiar. Very diligent. I love my birds. I feel Mica’s love and pride pulse back along our mental connection as I unfold a travel stove.
With land scarce and trees scarcer, unless I wanted to denude this little spot of land of its bushes, and kill any chance of them growing up to be something worth harvesting in the future, our fire has to come from something else. In this case, a quartet of small magical firestones my mom made.
Every elemental plane is easier to access from another elemental plane. Even opposite elements, such as if we needed to call up an earth elemental, are easier here than they would be on the prime plane most worlds reside in. So, fortunately for our civilization in general, reusable firestones are the solution for our general lack of fuel. Mine are small; two could fit in my hand.
Wrought iron, tin, and a few pieces of thin pumice insulator form a nifty little travel stove, and you can set it up in a couple different ways to act more like a roasting rack or an oven, with the stones either underneath a grill, or on all sides of a pot. We’ve got a good cast iron pot with a lid, a cast iron skillet, and a couple of tin pots and plates. You don’t even need to be a wizard to use the firestones, though it helps.
Most of what we eat on hunting trips is stale corn pone, beans, mushrooms, and old boiled turnips or potatoes, which can be heated up in the folding stove, even on Gran’s back. That’s why it’s got the pumice stone insulation. Sometimes we have some goat cheese, too. Every once in a while, if the chickens are doing well, we’ll bring some eggs. For a treat, a crock of pickled squash, or a bunch of fresh carrots. Jerky would also be nice, but we almost never have jerky to spare, that’s part of the point of the hunting trips. For seasonings, we usually have goat butter, salt, mouse lard or goat lard, mushrooms, and peppercorns, but not generally much of any of it. You can’t do much cooking on Gran’s back, mostly because of the difficulty in cooking when there’s no gravity to orient yourself.
That being said, we do bring uncooked food to prepare. Beans and corn meal, mostly. Basic corn pone starts getting pretty stale after the first day, though we usually cook enough for three days at time, just in case. Three day old corn pone is nasty, even covered in beans.
Nasty food is better than no food.
But you know what’s better than even fresh corn pone with hot potatoes and mushrooms?
Adding gravy and meat.
