67: Ambush

This is the Parable of the Bees. There was once a gardener who took great pride in his garden. He would sit in it, in the sun, and enjoy the flowers that grew there, and eat the fruit that grew there. Everything was perfect in his garden except there were many bees which buzzed around and annoyed him.

So the gardener consulted a local apothecary, and the apothecary gave him a poison which would kill all the bees, and the gardener put the poison out in his garden.

And the next year there were no bees, and so the gardener could sit in the garden, in the sun, and enjoy the flowers that grew there, and eat the fruit that grew there, and everything was perfect. However, the year after that, there were no flowers, and no fruit.

Back on the North Road, the woodsman stepped out of the forest and asked us for help. He said his name was Hans and his friend Erik had broken his ankle, and he had another friend called Bertrand with him. He needed us to go into the forest with him to help Erik. It wasn’t very clear why he and Bertrand couldn’t have helped, and if that sounds a bit suspicious written down here, you can imagine how it felt to us in the middle of the night, on the forest road. Of course, Otto, who likes to think the best of everyone was happy to go with them.

Solvej demanded some money to help, which was typical of her, and Kurtis wasn’t interested, but would have been the first to volunteer had there been a big crowd to watch. Konrad disappeared into the woods, and I didn’t see him go, but I suspect he was hiding behind a tree keeping an eye on things, to make sure Otto was safe.

In the end Solvej went with Otto, and I’m not sure whether that made him feel more or less safe. They reached Erik, who was lying down with his supposedly broken ankle and Otto did his best to heal it. And Erik did say that it now felt much better. They brought him back to the road where we planned to put him on Buttercup and take him to the next inn.

I had a quick look to see how well Otto had done, but it was clear to me that Erik’s ankle was perfectly fine and wasn’t even bruised let alone broken. I probably shouldn’t have mentioned this to Solvej because she quickly stamped on it, making sure it was really broken. Erik lashed out in pain with his dagger but Solvej dodged the blow and stepped on his ankle again.

If things hadn’t been suspicious before they were very suspicious now. Kurtis was checking out the forest and he spotted a couple of people watching us from the other side of the road. He declared it an ambush, drew his sword, and went off to confront them. He called Solvej to go with him, and the watchers retreated into the forest. Meanwhile Otto was looking after Erik and put his dagger to his throat and told him he was a rat. Erik was increasingly frightened now and called for Hans and Bertrand to help him. But there was no sign of them.

Solvej managed to track them to a stream near a waterfall and as she was crossing the stream, she was surprised by one of them hiding in a tree. He told her not to move but she did move. The man shot his crossbow at her, but missed. Solvej replied with an arrow from her bow and hit the man wounding him badly. Meanwhile, Kurtis heard a voice behind him saying, ‘Kurtis I presume,’ and he turned round to see a big burly man in armour, swinging a huge zweihaender sword at him. Kurtis managed to dodge the blow. ‘I am Kurtis,’ he replied, ‘and I am going to be the last person you see.’ At least that’s what he told me he said, afterwards. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was too concerned with his life to think up pithy quotes during the fight. He probably just screamed a bit.

While the crossbow man was reloading, Solvej turned and shot at the zweihaender man saying, ‘No one messes with my ex-husband except for me.’ I’m not sure about all these witty comments during a fight, but I suppose it was nice to see the pair of them getting along again.

Kurtis replied he didn’t think they were divorced, which was nice to hear, especially as Shallya considers them still married. But Solvej asked if he didn’t think they were divorced why was he dating again, and I think she had a good point. Kurtis, slashed at the zweihaender man again and killed him, and when they went to finish off the crossbow man, he had gone. Solvej tried to track him again but he had fled through the stream leaving no trace.

Solvej declared how much fun she was having and Kurtis admitted that he had enjoyed it too, although I think he was probably more frightened than he let on, and just didn’t want to lose face. They wondered whether the guy was a bounty hunter and when they searched him, they found a wanted poster, and another, different, pamphlet. And of course, Kurtis took the zweihaender.

Meanwhile, Otto was questioning Erik. He seemed genuinely frightened and insisted that he, Hans, and Bertrand had had nothing to do with the two bounty hunters. It seemed like a bit of a coincidence that they had all arrived on the north road in the night at the same time as us, but I was inclined to believe him. As we had broken his ankle, we said we would give him a ride to the next inn and drop him off there.

I managed to fix the ankle as best I could but he wouldn’t be walking on it for a few weeks. And Otto gave him a few pennies. Sometimes I think we’re a bit too soft, but then I look at Solvej and Kurtis.

All the while, Konrad had been keeping an eye on Hans and Bertrand who had been watching us from the shadows but decided that they didn’t offer much of a threat.

When Kurtis and Solvej got back they threw the pamphlet at us, a bit upset by it, but it seemed like the pair of them were getting genuinely famous, and Kurtis was probably enjoying the notoriety more than he let on. Someone had been writing all this about them for a reason, and we needed to find out who and why.

So we dropped Erik off at the Huntsmen’s inn a few miles up the road, and warned him not to tell anyone what had happened. And Otto put the word about that the man had had a bit of a fright and was talking gibberish in any case.

As Solvej and Kurtis were so wanted and well known we decided we needed to play up the bounty hunter ruse. We wanted to bind their hands and tie them to Buttercup. They didn’t like the idea of being so helpless, so we compromised by tying them so loosely they would be able to escape in an emergency, and leaving their weapons handy, on the mule.

The journey for the next few days went quite uneventfully. I read the new pamphlet a few times to Otto. Although most of it described the same sort of salacious beast worrying of the previous one, Otto was named in this one. Apparently, he was a magical creature who did Solvej’s bidding and who would change between man and beast at her command. This worried him and so I had to explain it was just a story. It did make me wonder whether I might make an appearance in the next pamphlet. I decided we needed to put a stop to this before I became infamous. Whereas I think Kurtis and Solvej enjoy the attention, I didn’t want my career in the Order of the Chalice to be jeopardised.

After a few days we went through a small village where there was a bit of a commotion. There was about a dozen people stood around a large rock, and on the rock sat some sort of hermit or priest. And around the rock, the grass looked like it had been burned. We asked what was going on and someone explained that it was a shrine to Saint Brita. I recalled reading about her. She had been burned as a witch hundreds of years ago. Afterwards, the grass around the site had never grown back and always appeared blackened and burned. And then a Sigmarite enquiry had decided that she was not a witch after all, but a devout follower of that god, and the burned grass was a miracle. And so, Brita had been made a saint for her devotion and sacrifice.

I explained this to Otto, and he said that he and Schnitzel had often been misunderstood, too. Otto engaged the hermit in a theological discussion, and I’m not sure which of them I felt the most sorry for. Otto gave the priest a few pennies and he told Otto all about the story of Saint Brita, which was a waste of time, because I had already told everyone. It’s not that good a story, anyway.

Then the priest noticed Solvej and Kurtis and asked whether that was Solvej and Kurtis. We had to admit that they were. I found it quite surprising that a hermit priest who was devoted to a nine-hundred-year-old saint, in the middle of nowhere, was up on the news enough to recognise Solvej and Kurtis. Their infamy must really have spread.

Pretty soon everyone in the village was talking about them and getting out their pamphlets and waving them around and taunting our prisoners. Solvej was getting a bit upset about it, and Kurtis was too, kind of, but I think he was just pleased with the attention. If you can’t get the attention, you crave singing crappy folk songs in a cheap dive in Ubersreik, then at least you can get it as a fornicating beastman lover in the middle of the forest, I suppose.

Someone said they’d heard he was better looking than that, which annoyed Kurtis and he made a lunge towards the mob, but discovered that although Erhardt had promised not to tie their bonds very tight, so they could escape any time they needed to, that in fact, over the course of the journey he had been making them gradually tighter (with his shadow magic probably) and so now the pair of them were genuinely captive. We decided to quickly leave the village.

We travelled for the rest of the day and as night was drawing in, we spotted some bodies on the road ahead. We quickly untied Solvej and Kurtis and Erhardt left his body to check out the scene. He saw that the bodies looked like typical travellers and had been killed as if in some sort of murderous ambush, but also cut up and mutilated. I looked into the dark forest and could see a figure sat very still as if it was meditating. It looked like it was wearing a fur coat and some sort of horned helmet. I felt like it might get dangerous so handed Otto a Potion of Vitality and told him to drink it is things got dangerous. He looked worried and thought I might be trying to poison him again (I wasn’t trying to poison him the first time I’d made a potion, or cooked that soup).

Kurtis had been in a bad mood for most of the journey, having had to pretend to be tied up and then really being tied up, and he quickly grabbed the zweihaender from Buttercup and strode towards the mysterious figure. We heard the figure say, possibly in ours heads, that we must ‘pay the toll.’ Asking what the toll was, it replied ‘a pound of flesh.’

Erhardt cast a bolt at the creature, and we could see that it was actually a large beastman, and it just seemed to shrug off the magical attack. Otto asked if that was the thing that Solvej had fornicated with, and I tried to explain that those pamphlets were just stories and not actually the truth, in the same way that Otto was not actually a half man half beast that changes shape when Solvej commands him, which seemed to confuse him, but we didn’t really have the time for a full explanation.

So we charged into the forest to fight the thing, and managed to hurt it, but it went straight for Buttercup and cleaved its neck, killing the poor mule instantly. Then it tried to drag its carcass back into the forest. It didn’t get far before we managed to kill it.

So that was that, we thought. The beastman had killed Buttercup and we had killed the beastman. But as it lay on the ground, it seemed to become covered in magic, and its dead flesh moved of its own accord and came together again and soon the beastman was whole once more.

I thought this might be a never-ending fight, but the beastman returned to the forest and assumed the position we had discovered it in, and no amount of violence could make it dead once more, as, I suspect, it had already been dead, all along. So there was nothing we could do but warn the travellers who came after us, and Ehrhardt wrote a couple of notices warning anyone passing that there was a beastman in the woods. And I drew a picture of a beastman to help those who couldn’t read, but it was crap.

The incident with the magical undead beastman was very strange, and I think it left Kurtis looking a bit shaken. So I did my best to put his mind at rest. He had not exactly been the most devout follower of Shallya, only invoking her when it was convenient, and I’ve heard him invoking Sigmar and Ranald, and who knows which other gods. So, I told him he really needed to want to accept Shallya in if she was to help him. And he said he really did, but I feel like he was just saying it and didn’t mean it. But I still prayed my best for him.

In any case, the incident had left me shaken, too, but no one seemed to even consider that. No one ever thought about me. I’m always there to deal with everyone else’s problems, and bring the power of Shallya to them, protecting them from injury and mental scars, and corruption. But none of them ever think about me and how I might need protection, or how I am dealing with the horrors we meet.  No one has ever even asked me how I’m feeling about it. I’m always there for Otto and Kurtis and whoever else needs my help (probably not Solvej, to be fair), but are they ever there for me?

And when there are no longer any bees in the garden, what will happen then? There’s not going to be any flowers, and there’s not going to be any fruit. I’m not saying I’m leaving the group. I’m just saying perhaps I won’t be around forever, and one day they might have to fend for themselves without me.