Page 75 of Elvenbred

She stood up, and while her body was sore from the fall, she didn’t see or feel any of the injuries that a headlong fall from thrice her height should have brought. And apparently Rock had even put the cot back. She looked at that for a long moment. How? It had no hands that she could see.

She stepped down the two short steps and crossed over to where Rock rested, taking up about a third of the cage.

“So,” she said conversationally, “if you can put the cot back, then you can get your own food? ….” She trailed off, realizing then what does it need me for? She moved quickly to a thread that didn’t suggest her disposability. “Thank you for that. You can heal. I split my skull, the blood on the mattress tells me that, but I’ve no wound, so you fixed that.” She paused, thinking a moment. “You … must have healed me when I was sick … somehow. I realize you might have done that for your reasons, and not mine, as you need me to eat.” She winced at the clumsiness of it all, but was the best she could do to remind it that it needed her. “But, I’m still grateful.”

She did want to remind it she had done it a service as well. “Well, let’s have a look at you.” She tried to assess how intelligent it might be. So far, it had shown no capacity (or inclination) to communicate directly, so she worked to assess it based upon what it had done. Even a human slave could form a plan to get fed, and execute simple steps when directed. They had a rudimentary intelligence …. Rock’s actions so far put it on that level. Much like humans, intelligent enough to do basic problem solving to get something they wanted.

Still, she had a debt she needed to clear. A good turn for a good turn. She walked a quarter way around its bulk, then backed up far enough to see where she had removed the rod. The ichor still streaked its side, but instead of the stinking matter that flowed before, she saw some kind of milky fluid welling up. She couldn’t really see clearly, but it seemed to be crystallizing around the wound site.

She looked around for the control rod she had pulled out. It had dropped some distance from where she had fallen, and had rolled up against the bars. She went over to it and picked it up. It looked to be nearly five feet in length, long enough to touch her chin. The shaft had the weight and heft of bronze. One end had a square point with a short barb, while the other end had a blunt, round head. The top of it looked smashed down and split, a bit like a mushroom cap. It took her a moment to realize that had been the end that the hammer had struck repeatedly, driving the rod deeper into Rock’s back. She knew bronze to be a soft metal, as such things went, but this had been done with enough force to deform the end struck by the sledge. It looked … brutal.

She looked over at Rock, who waited patiently near the hopper. She heard what she thought might be mouthparts moving, stone on stone.

“Hungry?” she asked. “Well, if anyone deserves dinner, it would be you.” She looked around, trying to think of a place to hide a five foot long bronze metal rod wider than her thumb. The cell presented a few choices. The obvious choice would be the cot, and the first place where a search for anything would start. She looked around. Something less obvious. Her eyes settled on the hopper full of straw and manure She walked towards the manure bin, thinking to slide the rod into the dried dung. She seriously doubted a guard would look there. Rock shifted a bit, trying to edge away from the rod. She looked at it, then the rod, and understood. “I’m sorry,” she said and placed it on her cot to deal with later.

Rock clacked its mouthparts as she got her shovel and started spreading the dried mess out in front of it. The work kept her hands busy, making the slow circle of feeding it, scraping the ash, and filling the bucket. Her mind, freed by her hands’ monotony, whirled with thoughts and implications of what had taken place.

The fall had confirmed that Rock could heal her if it … “it” doesn’t seem right, definitely some kind of animal. Time to throw a dart, and hope I hit a gender. It was named Rock, and Rock feels more like a male name, so “I’ll simply assume” … Rock is male.

He had picked her up, dusted her off, set her insensate in her cot, and cured her hurts … not once, but twice. She had already gleaned an intelligence from its actions, but now she started to revise upward how smart it might be. She slowed a bit as she thought through the implications of that. A horse could not have done that. A dog … might have. A human slave, given the chance for a kind of revenge against the masters, might have let her die. So it might be as intelligent as a human slave, but it seemed to be much less inclined to hold a grudge.

Or it can tell the difference between a fellow captive and a master. So what had the others done to get squashed?

Well the answer to that was under her bed where she had put it on arrival and not touched since. The rod to make it move. She hadn’t used it once. So … it hadn’t squashed her, and didn’t have a motive to get back at her for hurting it.

And then I pulled that festering rod out, and it recognized that I was acting very differently from its previous keepers. Just have to hope that the message it received was the same one I tried to send.

Or so she reasoned, anyway.

She stopped and leaned on the shovel as it … he … methodically ground through the trail of matted straw and dung. The actions in caring for her suggested comprehension, motivation … intelligence. Perhaps not a lot, by her standards, but enough to see a bloody, cracked skull or a fever fit to roast meat that needed to be tended if it was to have breakfast.

Intelligence. From a house-sized piece of stone that looked like a cross between a cottage and the world’s largest oyster-shell. Her stomach rumbled and she went to fill it with water again. That helped, but only a little. Her belly grumbled a bit, not really filled, but now it did have something to work on.

If it was intelligent, then could she communicate with it? Talk to it? She realized she had been talking to it, carrying on long one-sided chats as she had tried to keep her mind busy. Rock now knew all there was to know about culling slaves, training gladiators, selecting horses, dodging the attentions and occasional affections of matrimonially determined elven lords, and the sequence of stupid mistakes and casual arrogances that had led her out of the cooking pan and into this particular fire.

She wondered now whether more cooperation, a dollop of humility, and possibly a soupçon of collaboration might have taken her down a different path. Haldeen had plans for her world, that much seemed true, and a more careful, more clever Triana might have harnessed that, made a deal. Why go to the trouble of conquest when you can come in, turn the tide in the war with the human slaves, put the slaves back in their place, and be welcomed as the new er-Lords? I’ll help you, and in return … well, I can help you navigate the petty jealousies, well-nursed grudges, paybacks, and wary alliances of convenience. Or perhaps … well it really depended on how those pestiferous humans reacted, but …. My cousin sided with them. Others have too. Maybe it would have been smart to suggest that the Lords here throw in behind the human faction …. Use them as stalking horses, expended to exhaust the elven lords. Two birds. One throw. The human vermin and the elven lords are both depleted, and Haldeen’s people take over … with a nice reward for the woman who made it all possible.

Then she laughed, and gave the whole fantasy up as a bad idea. She had seen the weapons Haldeen’s people had used on the first day she had arrived, the metal monsters spitting fire as the dragons were rumored to do, and casting flaming shot from some kind of engine. To Haldeen’s people, hers were little different than the human vermin.

Haldeen made it clear how much he held her and her people in contempt, and she could not imagine the others felt any differently. So there was not a chance in a million that the kings here would decide to ally with her folk against the humans and their allies. Given that the Lords and er-Lords of her world were arrogant and convinced of their own superiority, why should these Lords be any different? After all, her people had fled from this lot at least in part because of how they had been treated.

She let those thoughts chase each other around as she fed Rock, and gathered the ash that bought her dinner. She hadn’t quite worked out whether they needed the ash for some other purpose, or if it was just a measure of work that she had completed. I’ll need to ask his Pisswater Haldeen, the next time I get the chance. And smiled mirthlessly. After the last encounter, she very much doubted there would ever be a need pressing enough to make him force himself to deal with her.

She entertained herself with improbable methods of escape and payback … escaping the cell, overpowering the guards, making it to the Gateroom, taking Haldeen hostage, and forcing him to make the Gate work, so that she could get home. She took out different parts of her fantasy, and worked at them, trying to work them into something that was less fantastic-tale and more escape plan. She recognized the effort seemed futile now, but she had nothing else to do, and in time, they might slip up. She remembered her father talking about one of his enemies …. “He has to get it right every time, Triana. We only have to get it right once.”

Better to have a half-baked and wildly optimistic plan in case the moment came, rather than to miss the chance through indecision.

She heard the stable doors open. She had nearly gotten the bucket filled, enough for the ash to rise up over the rim, but not quite enough for it to be mounded up enough to survive the settling. She felt nearly faint with hunger, and cursed herself for her slow work. She had let herself drift, and now wouldn’t eat. She tried not to cry as he approached the cell.

It was the taller of two, Gelbert. She looked for the shorter one, with the voice full of gravel. “Just you?” She tried to keep her eyes away from the canvas satchel that he set down by her feet. Her next meal.

“Yeah,” he replied. “Smiley is down sick. Got breakbone fever.” He shrugged. “Had it as a child, I think, or he’d be dying. As it is, he’s just wishing he were dead.”

“Breakbone?” she replied, softly, trying not to stare at the bag with the food. She noticed he hadn’t asked her to stand on the step. She started to worry. Two guards. One to watch Rock, and one to enter the cell. The Watcher with his rod, ready to drop her if she so much as moved from the step. One guard … would that mean no food? She felt weak and famished. Her right knee shook of its own accord.

“Yes,” he replied, ”breakbone fever. Looked like you were sick with it. You must have gotten it as a child, and had a mild case, or we’d be shoveling you into the latrine hole.” He stood well outside the bars, outside dagger throwing range … not that she had one to throw.

“No,” she replied. “I’ve never been sick before, until I got that child’s disease upstairs … shortly after I first came here.”