Chapter 06

My hands ached as I scrubbed the clothes and linens against themselves trying to get the dirt and stains off of them. Beetle, standing beside me at the laundry trough was working in contented silence, occasionally giving a grunt of satisfaction as a particularly tough stain came loose. It took the two of us the better part of two hours to finish scrubbing the items in the trough and then haul more water to rinse them in but at last they were clean and hanging upon a line in the sun to dry. Pausing for a moment to stretch my back I look up and see Beetle is already hurrying along towards the front of the house.

“Hurry up Dung, we don’t have any time to waste if we want to finish our chores by the end of the day” Beetle called out over his shoulder as if I had been lazing about instead of only pausing for just a moment. Breaking into a jog I tried to catch up to him despite being out of breath and sore from hauling water with the magickally enchanted bucket that seemed to weigh an extra forty pounds at least on top of the weight of the water and wood. Catching up to him I found him on his hands and knees inspecting the grass in front of the house. Watching him for a moment it seems as if he had dropped a contact lens on the ground except that such things did not exist in this world. After a few moments he reached delicately forward with two fingers and plucked a single blade of grass from the soil. Showing it to me he said “look carefully, see how this one is slightly thinner and longer than the rest? This is a different breed of grass and if left alone it will change the consistency of the lawn. If we don’t pluck each one that sprouts each day Master Silvan will beat us for failing to take proper care of his home” as Beetle turned away and began looking for more strands of this slightly different grass I almost missed it when he muttered under his breath “I just wish that dick Silvan wouldn’t plant the damn seeds himself.”

Grasping the extricated blade of grass that Beetle had shown me I carefully began comparing it to other blades of grass in the lawn one by one. This was a painstaking and tedious work that resulted in my back aching horribly from crouching down too much and after it was finished Beetle had to go back and redo my portion because I had missed several of them. I was beginning to feel like most of the jobs given to us as slaves were pointless and only assigned as tasks in order to make them suffer.

After the lawn was finished Beetle led me away from our master’s house and into the city. As we walked, he explained to me that now that we had washed the laundry and tended to the lawn our next job was to procure a protein for our dinner. Our master’s dinner would come from a local establishment as he would never trust humans with his food. Because he believed humans did subpar work in all things and were generally lesser beings than elves, he would not trust a human to prepare food fit for an elven palette. Because of this, obtaining ingredients for and preparing our master’s food did not fall within the realm of our duties. Eager to see what kind of meats we could select at the butcher’s shop I followed behind Beetle as he waded his way through the foot traffic moving through the town. As we passed by the market area of the city I got excited thinking of eating something more substantial than thin gruel but soon became confused when we did not stop and instead kept going all the way through the market area.

“Hey!” I called out to Beetle when I realized that we had left the market area behind. “We passed the market; I don’t know where things here are yet but even, I can tell that much.” Laughing, Beetle continued onwards, waving for me to hurry up. Putting some effort into my stride I worked to catch up to him. Once I was once more abreast of him, he began talking. Did you think that master Silvan who cares so much for the human slaves he loves to torment would spend money to feed us? Oh no, we will have to hunt for our supper, and we have limited time to do it before he returns and has other things for us to do.

I looked over at the wiry old man as he laughed at the look of shock on my face. Even then however I was not fully prepared for the reality of my situation. Exiting the city gates we soon found ourselves in the grasslands immediately surrounding the city wherein my master resided. As I looked around hopefully for animals to hunt or some sign of them, not that I would know what to look for, I suddenly saw Beetle burst into motion with more speed than I would have thought possible for such an old man. After only a few seconds he was two-hundred feet away and pouncing on something at ground level. As I ran up to see what he had found I arrived just in time to see him grab a small mouse by it’s tail and bash it against the ground, breaking its spine. As I looked on in revulsion, Beetle put the dead mouse in a small cloth bag he had hidden under his sack clothing and winked at me. “There’s nothing much bigger than this that is close to town and master Silvan won’t allow us to go further because it would take to long so we must hunt as many mice and rats and any other rodents that we can in order to fill our stomachs and maintain our strength.”

I was not able to do much more than stand by and watch in awe and revulsion while Beetle ran around the grassland pouncing on rodents and smacking them against the ground before bagging them. He moved like a man possessed, trying to get as many as he could in the window of time open to them and then all of a sudden, with no clear indication of long he had been doing it he suddenly stopped mid-stride and said it was time to go back. Without another word, Beetle led me back to our master’s house with his gruesome prize.