Ch 10

I was sitting in the grass outside of town as Beetle hunted rodents once more. We had finished the laundry and hung it to dry and then plucked the new growth from the lawn as the day before. This time I noticed as Silvan and Teka left the house, walking up the path past us while we worked and also noticed that as soon as they were out of sight Beetle picked up his pace, suddenly in a hurry to complete his task. No sooner had he finished his portion of the lawn and much of my own then did he begin to quickly walk into town again, like before I followed him and thus ended up here watching him jump around agilely looking for all the world more like a wolf spider than his namesake of beetle.

Taking this opportunity, I was resting my sore body, having exhausted every single muscle the day before between hauling water from the well and then having to cut down a magick tree with a magickally dulled and weighted axe. It was hard for me to understand how Beetle could have so much energy after having done the same activities as myself on top of hunting for rodents but all I could assume was that after many years of enduring the ridiculous demands of the elf Silvan his muscles had grown to accommodate the extreme amounts of weight he lifted on a daily basis. Despite looking thin and wiry he was actually quite strong and made me look weak by comparison.

After watching Beetle run and jump around the grass for a while, catching rodents and placing them in his bag after quickly breaking their spines for a while, once again he suddenly terminated his hunt in mid-stride and began heading back into the city while stashing his bag once more under his sack-clothes. As he moved through the crowds this time I did not have quite as much difficulty keeping track of him as I did the day before but it was even more difficult to keep up as the time I had spent resting while Beetle hunted had allowed my sore muscles to cool and now they were screaming at me with renewed vigor as I pushed myself to try to keep up with this wiry old man.

Once we had passed the crowded parts of the city and there was less chance of being overheard, I jogged to catch up with Beetle and while panting for breath lightly tried to ask him a few questions. “Hey Beetle,” I began, “we aren’t supposed to be out here right now, are we?” He shot me a dark look and I thought that he wasn’t going to answer me but after taking a moment to think he answered simply “No.” As Beetle continued to move I considered my next question, not truly being shocked with the answer to the first after Beetle had both hidden the game and then warned me not to tell anyone we had eaten it later that night. Eventually I settled on what to ask next “What happens if we get found out?” I asked with some trepidation. Again, Beetle paused for a few moments before answering. “We will be beaten until master Silvan decides that we have suffered enough and then he will work us to the limit without giving us any opportunity to feed ourselves again. Also, there is a chance that if you truly displease him, he may decide to give Teka a break and fight YOU in the arena for a while.”

I might have continued asking him questions but at that time we had arrived at the home of Silvan and needed to get busy working lest he arrive home from the slave arena and decide that we once again needed some more work to stave off laziness. When Silvan and Teka arrived back at the elf’s residence, Beetle and I were hard at work scrubbing the porch where the dried clothes and linens would be deposited, us not being allowed in the main house. Neither man looked up as they walked past us, acting as if we did not even exist. To be fair, this was the treatment that I had come to prefer from my master, but it was starting to gall me that Teka did not try to interact with any of the other slaves as if he was better than the rest of us.

After we finished that task Beetle again took me over to the side of the house where the tool cabinet was built into the side of the wall where we had gotten the axes from the day before. As we approached, I groaned a little, thinking that we had once again come to chop down trees despite not having been ordered to today, but Beetle surprised me by pulling out a pair of daggers and throwing one to me. I tried to catch it but without having ever practiced such a thing and without a covering on the blade it was inevitable that my fingers would close around the edge to prevent it from plunging into me.

I was surprised again immediately following this when at first I did not understand why I had not been cut but then started feeling the now familiar pull of a magickally weighted item realized that this dagger had not cut me because it was literally incapable of cutting anything due to the edge being rounded off. This was nothing more than a training dagger but the weight I felt holding it in my hand made it difficult to even hold it in one hand let alone raise it. “What are we doing with these?” I asked Beetle after I realized my fingers were not about to fall to the ground and I was not bleeding. “Simple, since master Silvan likes to fight slaves in the arena and bet on them, if we finish our main tasks and are not assigned a punishment, we are to practice with these daggers in case his current fighting slave dies.” I was about to ask what happened if a fighting slave got old or sick but when I saw the look on his face I understood, the only way Silvan’s fighting slaves ever stopped fighting was when they died. Not if but when.

Without another word I tried to raise my dagger in front of me, deciding that it was likely that one day Silvan would send me to the arena. When that day came, I needed to be as prepared as possible. With this in mind I kept bringing my dagger up to block again and again as Beetle came at me, my shoulders and forearms screaming in pain from trying to wield the too heavy dagger. Beetle kept me at in until I collapsed and then as before wandered off to retrieve his game bag and build a hidden fire to cook the dinner that we would share. I felt a strange sense of relief knowing that even if the others did not leave anything at all in the morning I would not starve with Beetle as my mentor.