The Guided Journey (Book 6) (20 page)

“Here’s your soap,” Mulberry announced as she returned.  “Take him to the river.”

The path led them back to a pool between cataracts, and Kestrel decided it was time to stop and remedy the problem of the yeti’s smell.

He put his things down, and removed his clothes, while the yeti watched with interest, then he stepped into the cool water of the river.

“Come in friend,” Kestrel motioned to the yeti, encouraging it to join him in the water.

“Hand me the soap, Mulberry,” he directed the imp as the yeti obeyed and splashed into the stream.

“Here now, be a good boy and get all wet,” Kestrel directed his companion.  “Do you want to come in and help with this?” he asked Hampus expecting to receive no assistance.

“No, I’m sure you’ll do just fine,” the elf said from his seat on the river bank, as Kestrel laid down in the water and motioned for the yeti to do the same.

The compliant animal responded and laid down.  Kestrel accepted the fragrant bar of soap that Mulberry had held ready for him, and began to rub it upon the chest of the yeti.  The monster was startled by his touch and reached up with startling speed to grab his wrist.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Kestrel assured the animal.  “This won’t hurt.  Be a good boy and stand up and let me clean you up,” he spoke in a soft tone.  He pried the animal’s fingers loose and stood up, then urged the yeti to do the same.

“Now, let me wash you some more,” Kestrel told his companion, as he gently rubbed the bar of soap across the muscular chest and up and down the right arm of the yeti.

“That’s a good boy,” he kept repeating in a reassuring tone as the animal continued to observe his actions closely.

Kestrel lowered his gentle scrubbing down to the yeti’s stomach, and the creature suddenly convulsed and flailed, its arms striking Kestrel so hard that he was thrown ten feet through the air, and landed in a sitting position in the water.

He looked up at the yeti, which held its arms over its stomach.  “Bad boy!  Bad boy!” Kestrel said firmly.

“You are being too harsh!” Mulberry spoke up.

Kestrel looked at the imp in shock.

“You were tickling it,” she explained.  “It reacted when you started to scrub its belly and sides.  You have to be gentle when doing that, or it will tickle.

“And you need to stop calling her a boy,” Mulberry added, as she swooped down and took the soap from Kestrel’s hand.

“What?” Kestrel asked, totally confused.

“Come help me,” Mulberry called to the other imps.  She broke the soap into several pieces, and all of the flying beings swooped down and took the soap from her, then began to approach the yeti from all angles, cautiously moving in to scrub its shoulders, legs, and back simultaneously.  The animal giggled, but accepted the attention, patiently standing still as the imps gently attended to their works.

Mulberry flew up and started to massage the back of the yeti’s skull, cleaning its scalp.

“See frien
d Kestrel, this is how it’s done.  You must make a woman feel pampered and pretty,” she explained.

“How do you know it’s a female?” Kestrel asked.

“Look down between your legs, oh exhibitionist elf, then look between hers, and think about the difference,” Mulberry said impatiently.

Kestrel blushed faintly as he waded back to the yeti.

“What kind of soap is that?” he asked as he got an arm’s length away.  The yeti now smelled flowery and sweet.

“It’s the queen’s own soap.  She was busy doing something else, so I took it from her own bath.  I’ll let her know that I took it at your request,” Mulberry told him.  “Doesn’t it smell nice?”

The soap was heavily scented with flowers.  The yeti smelled like a garden in full bloom.

“Let’s get it rinsed off,” Kestrel suggested.  He sat down in the water, and motioned for the yeti to do the same, then he splashed water upon himself and upon the yeti, setting off a water fight that left them both thoroughly rinsed a few minutes later.

“Now you’ll both smell better,” Mulberry said mischievously.  “I’ll let the queen know that you put her soap to good use.”

“I am in her debt,” Kestrel said as he stood up.  He mockingly bowed to the imp.

“Is there anything else you need from us, Kestrel-cleansed friend?” Stillwater asked.

“No, Stillwater-enabler, you have solved my problem once again,” Kestrel replied.

“What is your new mate’s name?” Mulberry asked.

“Mate?” Kestrel repeated in confusion, as he began to get dressed.

“The one we just bathed for you,” the imp said mildly.

“This yeti is not my mate!” Kestrel said heatedly.  “You’re trying to stir things up.”

“Perhaps you should take the yeti as your mate, since the princess rejected you,” Hampus spoke up.

“The princess did not reject me either,” Kestrel said in exasperation.  “I’m the one who stayed away from Center Trunk,” as soon as he said it, he knew that he shouldn’t have.  He did not want Hampus returning to the palace and spreading tales about his assertions.

Just then the topic changed, as Mulberry dropped down to the level of the yeti’s face.  The two of them looked at one another.

“So tell me, sister, why are you ruining your reputation by taking a bath with this unsavory elf?” the imp asked the yeti.

The monster gave a grunt.

“It’s your choice, but know that the other yetis are probably going to shun you now,” Mulberry advised.

“What is her name, Kestrel-friend?” the imp turned to Kestrel, who was getting dressed.

“I haven’t given her a name,” he replied.

“Perhaps it’s not your place to give her a name.  Perhaps she already has a name.  Do you, sister-friend?” Mulberry asked, peering back at the yeti once again.

The yeti gave a warble in reply.

“She says her name is Putienne,” Mulberry announced.

“That’s an awfully fancy name for a yeti,” Kestrel protested.

“She says, if you become her friend, you can use her nickname, Putty,” the imp glibly replied.  “But I’ll warn her never to allow herself to become putty in your hands.”

“Do you need our wisdom, assistance, and guidance any further?” Mulberry asked.

“No, no, I think you’ve done enough,” Kestrel said in a bemused tone.  He pulled his sword belt on to finish dressing.  “Are you ready to move on Hampus?” he asked.

“You really mean to continue to travel with this deadly creature?” the elf asked in a resigned voice.

“We’ll leave now.  Farewell,” Stillwater spoke, and the three assigned imps left the vicinity.

“Are you ready, Putty?” Kestrel turned to the yeti, who gave a grunt.

And with that, they resumed traveling.  Kestrel considered the stop a useful one, a small expenditure of time that had made the members of his small traveling band a tiny bit more comfortable with one another.

“Those imps, they’re real?” Hampus asked as they continued the descent down from the plateau.

“Absolutely,” Kestrel confirmed the obvious.

“And they have carried things to you?  And they help you?  They’ve even carried you to other places?” Hampus asked.

“Yes, yes, yes,” Kestrel agreed.

“Could they carry me too?” Hampus asked.

“Would you agree to give them your first child?  Can you perform the black arts?” Kestrel asked in return, seeking to discourage the question that was bound to come next.

Hampus paused as he considered the questions.  “Is that what you had to do?”

“I rescued their queen from a wolf, and later I rescued their king and queen from captivity,” Kestrel answered.

“I haven’t done anything like that for them,” the elf commented thoughtfully, then said no more, and they journeyed on through the mountains.

They found themselves in a river valley, and they followed it for several days.  As they traveled, climbing over and around rocky terrain and thorn-covered brambles, Kestrel found that all the travelers were undergoing changes.

Hampus was growing less whiny, and more able.  He no longer expected Kestrel to make every step of the trip as easy as possible, and he no longer completely discounted Kestrel’s towering reputation for heroism, after seeing the part-human kill a yeti and consort with imps.  He became a better traveling companion in Kestrel’s eyes.

Putty the yeti also changed, as Kestrel adapted to the idea of a friendly and docile monster as a traveling partner.  He began to try to train the yeti in everything from personal hygiene to manners.  Putty proved to be a surprisingly adept student, making Kestrel wonder just how intelligent the race of monsters really was.

And Kestrel himself was changing too.  He no longer saw the journey as a chance to embarrass and exhaust Hampus.  He began to enjoy the trip strictly for the sheer pleasure of exerting himself physically as they made the grueling journey.  He found the work and effort left him tired every night, and he slept well.  He didn’t dream or worry about Oaktown, or Center Trunk.  He simply lived each day for the adventure of seeing how far they could travel.

Two weeks after Putienne had joined them, the river valley began to change.  Other rivers had joined their waterway, making it grow larger, to the point of being navigable.  Kestrel remembered floating upon a river, probable that very one, when he had journeyed through the mountains before.

Chapter 20 – Battle with the Miners

Two weeks later the trio was following the river valley still, as the river grew wider, deeper, and more established.  They had maneuvered around cataracts and waterfalls, and continued to make progress in a westerly direction.  Kestrel and Putty had envied Hampus, who had not hesitated to run elven-style atop the water through several difficult sections of the river, while Kestrel had loyally accompanied Putty by climbing around, over, and down the cliffs and obstacles that littered the unpopulated valley.

They were approaching the end of the emptiness.  Kestrel estimated that within a day they would reach the region where he had first encountered settlers when he had passed through the mountains on his last journey to the Northern Forest.  He worried about the reception that Putty would receive, and how he would protect the growing adolescent monster from attacks by frightened humans and elves.

He had grown fond of the yeti during their travels.  Putty had been curious and eager to please all throughout the journey.  Kestrel attributed the inexplicable friendliness to the use of his powers when he had bonded the two of them together.  It was unnatural for a yeti to be friendly, but it was the fact that he faced.  It was probably just as unnatural for an elf to be friendly towards a yeti, he realized, and grinned.

Putty was ready to take directions from Kestrel, especially direction
s related to hygiene and personal space, which Kestrel emphasized.  Even he was uncomfortable when he awoke and found the furry arms of the monster wrapped around him.  He had talked to Putty, and she had listened attentively.  He wasn’t sure the words mattered, but the demonstrations and physical redirecting of actions were attended to.

Hampus was cordial enough towards Putty, and the relationship was mutual, which was all that Kestrel asked.

Hampus was growing less obnoxious in Kestrel’s eyes as well.  While Elder Miskel may have intended for the arduous trip to drive the princess’s suitor to quit the journey, and thereby lose status as a hero, Kestrel had been surprised to see that it had produced different results.  Eventually, primarily after the battle with Putty’s mother and the adoption of the yeti as a companion, Hampus had stopped whining.  Then he had begun to actually be productive, occasionally hunting for the food they ate along the way to extend their dwindling supply of dried travel foods.

So now, Kestrel felt confident that they would face no more serious problems than convincing people and elves to accept Putty’s presence among them when they returned to civilization.

The river turned in a great bend, changing its flow from westerly to northerly, a signal to Kestrel that they were relatively close to settlers, and only a couple of days away from their arrival at Narrow Bay, the human city they would transit through to take a ferry to North Harbor, and then to go on to the North Forest.

As he and Putienne, moved around the outside of the bend, Hampus glided atop the river waters on the inside of the river’s wide turn.  The elf’s route was shorter in addition to being easier, and he regularly stopped and waited for the other two to draw even with his position, or he went on ahead to look at the landscape that awaited them.

“Kestrel,” he called late one afternoon, as he turned around from an advanced position and came racing back to his companions.  “There’s a plume of smoke up ahead.  Are we close to that city?” he asked, referring to Narrow Harbor.

“No, not close enough to see smoke,” Kestrel answered, hurrying his own steps.

“Don’t try to follow me,” he turned and told Putty.  “I’ll come back to you after I check this out.”  And with that he went scrambling up over the rocks and beached tree trunks and other river debris, then sprinted out onto the surface of the river.

He heard the yeti warble in surprise and distress as he left the creature behind, while he skittered across the water and rapidly departed from the land-bound yeti.  He wondered what Hampus had seen and misinterpreted – perhaps a low hanging cloud, or perhaps some freakish local fog, he guessed.

Seeing Kestrel approach, Hampus reversed course and returned to a location from which the smoke was evidently visible, then he ran up onto the shore and waited for Kestrel.  The distance involved in running atop the water was farther than Kestrel expected to be able to run, so he veered towards the shoreline early, and walked along a sandy stretch of beach.

As he approached Hampus, his angle of view pivoted around the trees that grew inside the bend on the river, and he suddenly caught sight of a distant, dark pillar of smoke rising into the air several miles downstream.  It appeared to be in a location that Kestrel surmised was in the middle of nowhere, and he was baffled by the sight.

“Perhaps there’s a forest fire?” he ventured when he reached Hampus and stood next to the elf.  “That can’t be Narrow Bay; we’ve got to get out of the mountains first.”

Putty called out, and they turned to see the yeti attempting to scramble over the riverside debris to reach them, progressing slowly as she went.  When she reached her two companions minutes later, they resumed their journey northward.

As night started to fall, they set up a camp site atop the banks of the river; they were nearer the still-dark column of smoke, but not close.  Kestrel built a fire, while Putienne and Hampus were hunting in the nearby forest.  He heard a distant scream, a man’s voice, and then a wailing scream a woman’s voice.

Kestrel jumped to his feet, and listened intently.  There was no further sound for several seconds, then the woman wailed again.

“Hampus!  Putienne!” Kestrel called, and repeated the names.  There was no response, and then the woman screamed again, for a third time, and Kestrel decided to act.  He stooped to pick up his staff and felt for his knife on his hip, then ran to the river, leapt out onto the surface of the water, and under the darkening sky, he ran atop the river for several hundred yards, then returned to the bank and ran more slowly atop the sand and stones as he recovered from the exertions of water-running.

Ahead he could see a ruddy glow reflected off rocks, and he faintly heard a woman’s sobs.  He approached the scene of the glow for several minutes, until his legs felt recovered, and then he took to the water again.  He ran atop the water as he approached cl
ose to the illuminated scene, one in which he could hear not only the woman crying, but the murmur of several men talking as well.

He swung in close to the shore as he ran by the spot where he could peek around the rocks to see the fire.  He looked to his left and saw the flames of a large fire, build at the base of a mound of large blocks of stone.  There were a pair of groups of men on either side of the fire, partial curves that were like parenthetical remarks bracketing the flames. 

Those men were the ones who were talking, motioning to one another with great animation as they conversed.  Near the base of the fire he saw a figure slumped on the ground, and the woman who he had heard appeared to be stooped atop the inert figure.

“What’s that out on the river?” someone called suddenly as he swept by.

“Probably just a bird, if it was anything,” Kestrel heard another voice respond.

Kestrel turned, his legs tiring once again, and ran to the river bank, where he jumped up onto the sandy shore, then collapsed to his knees in exhaustion.

“Stillwater, Stillwater, Stillwater,” he called as he gasped for breath.

“Kestrel friend, what are you doing here?  Are you okay?” the imp asked a moment later as he emerged in the darkness.

“I’m just out of breath,” the elf answered as he stood up, his hands on his hips.  “I heard screaming from the people around that fire over there.  Could you fly over it and see what they’re doing?”

“Certainly I will,” Stillwater answered immediately.

“I heard a man scream, and then a woman, and I think I saw them by the fire,” Kestrel advised, as the imp rose into the darkness and disappeared from sight.

With another deep intake of breath, Kestrel began to stalk across the rough terrain of the strip of land that lay between the river and a short, stony cliff.  As he approached the pile of boulders that had fallen from the cliff and created the shelter for the people around the fire, Stillwater came flying back.

“The man is tied up Kestrel, and the woman is crying.  The others are building something from wooden sticks by the fire,” the imp reported.

“Do they have any weapons?  Any bows or spears?” Kestrel asked.

“I saw clubs and knives,” Stillwater replied.

“Okay, I‘m going to go see if they can use help.  I think they’re hostile, but I’ll find out for sure.  If I run into trouble, I may call for help,” Kestrel advised.

“I will keep an eye on you from overhead, and assist you if I see problems,” Stillwater answered.

With that rudimentary plan in place, Kestrel gri
pped his staff and his knife, then walked to the opening among the rocks, the river to his back, and stepped into the fire’s illumination.

“Is everything okay here?” he asked. 

“Who’s there?” the men around the fire were startled, as one of them shouted the question.

“Help me!  They’re going to kill him!” the woman screamed.

The men from around the fire seemed to move as a single unit, suddenly advancing towards Kestrel.

“Stop!  Stay back!” Kestrel warned them.

They failed to heed his advice, and he flipped his knife at the closest of them, striking the man in the chest, and making him fall, dead.

The crowd reacted in astonishment, then anger.

“He killed Petre!” one of the men shouted.   They rushed past the woman and her inert companion, moving as an angry mass towards Kestrel.

“Lucretia, return!” Kestrel called, and the knife struggled to dislodge itself, then floated back to him.

It was slow, slower than the original enchanted knife had been, the wonderful weapon that he had received from Kai, and though he felt pride in his accomplishment in creating his copy of the enchanted weapon, he could see that its slow pace was not going to enable him to significantly diminish the score of men running at him.

As soon as he felt the knife in his hand he flipped it at the men, then stepped back and grabbed his staff in both hands, ready to fight.

“Stillwater!  I’ll need help,” he called.

Just as he finished his shouted plea, he saw an attacker fall with an arrow in his shoulder, and then another fell too.

There was a sudden roar, a chilling, monstrous threat, coming from the darkness off to Kestrel’s left.

A trio of imp pikemen suddenly charged down at the men attacking Kestrel, swooping down from the dark sky above and spearing the right flank of the attacking force, then veering away.

“Lucretia, return!” Kestrel called.

Another arrow flew from the stones on the left and sent another attacker tumbling to the ground.

There were suddenly less than a dozen men left, between Kestrel and the fire.  A large shaggy shape appeared on Kestrel’s left, as Putienne lumbered into view.

“Stop right there!” Kestrel shouted, suddenly feeling confident that the arrival of so many allies had turned the direction of the battle.  “Stop and sit down; if you do, no one else will get hurt.”

Three men sat down in place immediately, while the others remained standing, stunned by the incomprehensible actions occurring around them.

“Putty, come here,” Kestrel called, starting to walk towards the men, and waving to his companion.

“Have you ever tried to fight a yeti?” Kestrel asked the defiantly standing survivors as he approached them.

Putienne fell into step beside Kestrel.  The yeti had grown over the course of their journey, he suddenly realized.  She now stood taller than him, taller than she had been when they had first become acquainted.  And at the moment, illuminated by the flickering red and yellow fire light, she looked more intimidating and dangerous than he thought he had ever seen her before.

Two more men sat quickly.  There was a scuffling sound behind the group, and Hampus sprang down from his perch, his bow held ready to fire another arrow.  The imps came down and hovered just inches above the ground as well, their pikes pointed menacingly at the attackers.

And with that, the last of the men took seats on the ground.

“Wait here, Putty,” Kestrel directed the monster.

“You men stay still, or the others will attack,” he shouted at the sitting group.

“Hampus, Stillwater, friends,” he switched languages, “thank you all for your help.  You made it very dramatic!” he laughed, as he walked in a wide arc around the prisoners to reach the woman who sat upright next to an inert figure.

“What words were those you spoke?” she asked, then looked at him more closely as he approached her and knelt beside the wounded man.

“My gods!  You’re an elf!” she exclaimed.

“Mostly,” Kestrel agreed.  “What’s happening here?  What’s wrong with him?” he motioned to the man on the ground.

They hit his head; they knocked him out.  They want to sacrifice him in the fire, as a sacrifice to their god, to please him,” she answered.