Five prophecies. Chapter 1. Rudolph the Lucky (2)

Soon the city heaved into view. It did not seem too big to me, but old and sturdy. The lofting stone houses were mostly two-floor. I saw the light stones of the brick roads of the city centre, brownish walls, pointed roofs and little balconies on most of the second floors. The streets were surprisingly wide and green from wild rose bushes and cherry trees here and there. There were a lot of trees – rowan trees, sycamores, chestnut and maple trees. I vaguely felt something familiar and close to heart in this city, beautiful in its ascetic simplicity. Chestnut and cherry trees, brownish and grey stones, pointed roofs and the unhurried pace of life – the town was not that small, but I felt calm and free in it. It was old… Where and when did I drift off from my observations to either daydreams or vague memories, I could not recall, and came to only when Mengor took me by the shoulder.

“Get down, mate, here we are.”

“Here as in where?” I wanted to ask but decided that everyone had had enough of my dumb and awkward verbosity for that day. Even given my predicament – whether a rope hit me on the head or that was a stone on the seashore – the guards were not entitled to endure such stupidity. As in where… as in city guard headquarters, an imposing looming building darkened from time and crowned with a pair of small towers. Lower building were cramped behind it – an armory, living barracks, healer’s chambers… there it was.

That was where I was led to first and foremost. Healer’s was as usual – I was pretty sure they looked the same all over the world. Off-white linen and cotton, light curtains, the smell of soap and herbs, and of wet freshly-scraped clean floorboards, and recently made milk porridge. The healers – an older lady and a man of undecipherable (and most likely not particularly young) age – examined me, gave me some potions to drink, treated my scrapes, cuts and bruises with ointments and ordered me to sleep to my heart’s content and not to goof around. I heeded their words, put on a washed-out shirt I was given, tore off the clothes full of sand and slipped under a nettle blanket. Weirdly enough, I could not sleep.

The smell of millet porridge was haunting me – weak but persistent. Milk porridge, definitely. Was it salty, with herbs, or with dried apples and honey? I tossed around, feeling either nausea or ravishing hunger because of it, but could not decide which one exactly, so I stuck my nose into the pillow and fell asleep eventually.

When they woke me up – I have slept for either more than a day or just half a day – they brought me a bowl of that very porridge and a drink of rose hips, honey and red wine. The porridge was salty, with cheese and cinnamon, and rather stale, but the drink was warm, almost hot.

I was starving, so I gobbled up both.

Also someone had tightly bandaged my chest while I was asleep – looked like I had broken a rib after all. Apart from that, I was feeling pretty good.

As soon as I finished my meal, I got another piece of news.

“Hey, Lucky! You, from the ship! The commander of the guards wants to talk to you, and Mengor’s here, are you coming with him?” The healers’ apprentice, a boy named Jean or something, peeked into the door.

“I am,” I nodded. Looked like fate had bestowed a new name upon me.

Jean gave me my clothes – it had been cleaned and mended, but still I felt raggedy. Having dressed, I went out on the front porch. I glanced at Mengor who was waiting for me, dressed all neat and clean – and cracked a joke along the lines of joining the guards for the sake of new clothes. He only shrugged with a good-hearted look.

“Why not then? Can you handle a sword and a bow?”

“I can,” I said, a little surprised at realizing that I, indeed, can. And added more confidently, “And a spear, and a double-edge sword even. Anything else – I might need some training, I guess.”

Mengor eyed me, either with surprise or with approval, and nodded.

I did not mean to decide on anything yet though. Why on Earth did I blurt it out about the guards, I did not quite understand. I’d better remember if I lived here or not, and what I was doing at all. Fencing skills likely indicated nothing in particular.

Nevertheless, the talk with the commander of D’Lagrena guards ended up muffed – I could probably tell him next to nothing, he pulled my vague musings out of me like a fisherman would’ve pulled out salmons, one by one, and in the end he gave up and offered me a couple of places where I could try my luck with finding a job and some accommodation to start with, if I decided to stay in the city, that was.

The choice was not exactly impressive: a greengrocer who needed help with heavier gardening duties, a shop requiring someone to do the accounting, a tavern in need of a security guard… and all of that sort. I’d thought at first I did not care what to do – but it turned out that I did.

I’d wandered around the city aimlessly for a few days, getting to know it along with the not exactly breathtaking opportunities to find a job in it that Lord Galvain had offered me – he was both the commander of the guards and a member of the city council. And the longer I stayed there, the more familiar the city seemed again. I had likely lived either here or somewhere very much alike D’Lagrena indeed. Alas, my memory refused to give me even a hint about whether I was on the right path. Even the name of the city stirred nothing in me – just as almost all city and country names I’d heard since I’d came to on the seashore though. I spent a couple of days on loitering around and eating from time to time, often forgetting I needed to eat at all – and on day three I came back to the guards.

I realized that the joke that I’d cracked to Mengor was more than a joke. For some reason, of everyone I’d met I trusted Lord Galvaine and him most. And say what you please, I actually had nowhere to go. And I did not really want to. This “don’t want” part worried me some, to be honest. I guess some of my apathy had to do with me not only having brushed the very line between life and death, but having not known for too long what to do with my skills and myself so that I would have been… needed? Useful? Doing something necessary for everyone else? Probably. And if that was the case, another guard would’ve come in handy. At least I could fence indeed. And my ribs were going to heal soon, I was going to get out of my bandages till the next moon, and then I’d happily be off to chase bandits on country roads or whatever, just to have something real to do.

So, I was sworn in and changed from my raggedy clothes into a uniform. Now I wore a dark grey tunic, brown pants, sturdy high boots and a two-colour, half blue-grey half dark, woad-blue hood with a wide cape covering my shoulders, which was decorated with a city crest patch.

I started my duties on the very next day – getting to know the city for reals, as Captain Mengor joked. And our acquaintance started with a watch shift on the city walls.