Surviving Arkadia

I didn’t actually hear that ding sound before I met Jethro, but it was close. I could feel it in my bones.

Jethro was waiting for me sitting on the corner of a fountain outside the front of the Council Building. It was a huge, blocky stone building with a bunch of surface ornamentation added to make it look like something other than a glorified box for keeping paperwork and civil servants in.

Lunch was warm and wrapped in waxed paper. When I unwrapped the food it turned out to be a thick spicy sausage in a split crusty roll.

“I got you onions and cabbage, is that alright?” said Jethro.

I peeled open the roll and found that the inside was full of pickled cabbage and caramelised onions.

“I love onions in every form. Never had pickled cabbage before but I definitely would have said yes to it.”

I bit into the sausage. It was spicy and firm, a bit like currywurst. I tried a bite of the whole thing. The juices from the cabbage and onion had turned the inside of the roll to mush, but the crusty exterior held firm. I wasn’t a huge fan of the softened bread but I loved everything else about it.

“This is good,” I said. “The Market is growing on me.”

“I’ve got some change for you,” said Jethro, and passed me back two of the tiny silver coins and a handful of slightly larger copper coloured ones.

“Okay, now I’m worrying about exactly what kind of meat was in the sausage.”

“Whatever the animal was, I bet we’d never recognise the cut,” said Jethro. “It was probably mostly lung and bits of gristle”

“I’m not even angry,” I said. “I don’t mind eating the ugly bits of an animal if it tastes this good.”

#

Of course I dropped bits of onion on my freshly laundered shirt. I tried to clean it up with water from the fountain. It worked a bit, but not enough, so I had to button my leather jerkin up over it, even though the weather was much too warm for it.

“Hello my friends!”

I turned to see the familiar face of the Councilman and was appalled to realise that I had no idea what his name was. He must have told me at some point during our pub crawl but the information had disappeared into the same void as most of my memories of the night.

Jethro shook his hand enthusiastically. When the man reached out to me I tried for a firm yet reserved handshake and said, “It’s nice to see you again, Councilman…”

“It’s Councilman Wagner,” he said,”Frederich-Leon Wagner, but you can call me Lee. All my friends do. Do you remember much from last night?”

“Not after you started buying the drinks I don’t,” I confessed.

“Did you get that achievement you were hunting?” he said.

“It was called SHOW ME THE WAY TO GO HOME,” I said.

“Excellent. And now we have shared an achievement and surely we are friends.” He seemed to be asking a question but before I could reply he warmed to his subject. “Jethro, you are a very responsible drinker. I saw how you looked out for Petra and also for me. Petra you are a brave drinker, ready to try anything and you fear no man. I would be proud to drink with either of you again."

“I will absolutely drink with you again,” I said, “Should I ever have the money to buy my own drinks.”

Councilman Wagner seemed pleased enough with that answer.

“On to less pleasant business,” he said. “I believe that my colleagues are ready. We’ve all had time to at least skim the diary and I think we all understand the gravity of the matter.”

I did not interrupt him to say that I did not understand the gravity of the matter. I had a strong feeling that our friendship would be greatly improved by me not contradicting him. Politicians, even mostly good-hearted, local politicians, tend to think you’re a brilliant conversationalist if you’re mostly silent with brief breaks during which you agree with them.

We followed the Councilman inside the Council building. The uniformed guard on the door nodded to the Councilman and glowered at Jethro and I. So did the smartly dressed functionary at the top of the stairs and the civil servant who let us into the Number One Committee Room.

I assumed there was some kind of grand Council Chamber where the Council did its public business but they seemed to be treating this as something to be dealt with more discreetly. This committee room didn’t look big enough for all the people in it. I supposed that normally a committee doesn’t have the whole of the council sitting on it. That’s the point of a committee. You take an annoying issue and shunt it into a side room to be dealt with by all the weirdos who actually care about all the details of the issue and will only make it difficult for the whole group to discuss it.

The Council sat, too close to each other, around the outside of the room. In the centre of the room was a large crystal ball on a small table and a woman in dark robes wearing a battered pointy hat. There were also a couple of seats that Councilman Wagner shooed us into.

“This is Mistress Magdalene,” Councilman Wagner introduced us. “She’s agreed to try to contact Mistress Agnes via the Crystal Network, though she’ll need you two to help her attune, since you’ve recently been in touch with Mistress Agnes.”

Mistress Magdalene smiled at us. “Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s not as impressive as it sounds, I’ll just need you both to hold my hands and remember Agnes as vividly as you can.”

“But first,” this came from a grey-furred, vulpine looking beast-kin man in the centre of the press of Council members. He wore fine looking clothes and a golden chain of office, “We must discuss this matter as a council. We can’t go running to every hedge witch in the Black Woods to make our decisions for us.”

“Yes, Franz, so you keep saying,” this was from a tall dark skinned woman with salt and pepper hair and a long purple dress, “I’ve yet to hear you actually suggest any course of action though. No one will think less of you if you listen to what the experts suggest and then pick from those options. You don’t always have to be reinventing the wheel.”

Franz, who I assumed to be the Mayor or equivalent, bristled at her words. I don’t mean metaphorically either, his visible fur stood on end until he started smoothing it down with one hand. He looked down at the sheaf of papers in his other hand. “Now you must be Jethro and Petra,” he said looking towards us and pointedly ignoring both the tall woman and the witch. “Now I don’t seem to have a note of your family names?”

“Tollmann,” said Jethro. “Two Ls and two Ns.”

The Mayor wrote that down and then looked toward me.

“Just Petra for now, thanks. My family dumped me in the middle of nowhere with no gear and no warning. I’ve gone off the whole family name thing.”

The Mayor frowned for just a moment. “An unfortunate predicament to be sure but you do seem to be thriving on it. Now I understand that you two stumbled on the town of,” he looked down at his notes again, “Rotveil?”

“Yes,” said Jethro. We’d agreed that it was better if he did the talking as much as possible. If I talked too much they’d be sure to peg me as an Outlander. “We were clearing fallen trees and Petra spotted a sign pointing towards it. Neither of us had heard of the place so we thought we’d go and have a look. Just in case we could sell them any of the wood we were cutting. And it wasn’t a town, really, just a collection of houses. I’ve seen big farms with a larger population.”

“Well now,” said Councilman Wagner, “Everywhere has a larger population than Rotveil now.”

“I really think,” said the tall dark-skinned Councilwoman, “That now is not the time for such pedantry.”

“It was just a little joke,” said Councilman Wagner, holding up his thumb and forefinger to demonstrate the meagre size of the humour.

“It’s definitely not the time for jokes, Leon,” said the Councilwoman.

I caught Mistress Magdalene’s eye and we shared a look of deep frustration, the look shared by anyone who has ever had to sit in a local government meeting, waiting for the politicians to return to the vitally important matter at hand, when you have other stuff that you could be attending to.

“So, as you clearly already know,” said Jethro, “there was no one in Rotveil. It had been abandoned. It seemed to us that it had been abandoned in haste but not in a panic.”

“And you brought us this diary,” said the Mayor.

“We brought it to mistress Agnes and she told us to bring it to you.”

“And she did well to,” said the Mayor. “Now I understand that you’ve both been working in the woods for a while now?”

“We’ve been levelling some core skills.”

“I imagine that you don’t know about the current outbreak of the Fever then,” said the Mayor.

“I don’t know anything about the Fever beyond what I read in the diary,” said Jethro.

“Surely you remember the last outbreak?” said the tall Councilwoman.

“That was more than twenty years ago,” said Councilman Wagner. “Jethro would have been a baby and Petra probably wasn’t even born yet.”

“That’s right,” said Jethro. “My mother talked about it a little when I was a child. My older brother was quite ill and one of my cousins died. She said that I was lucky to be too young to catch it. That always seemed odd to me. Come to think of it, my brother told me once that he had to go to a Fever hospital for months, that the hospital was full of children, and that he was stuck in bed for nearly half a year. My mother didn’t talk about it like that at all.”

“It has been remarked upon,” said Mistress Magdalene, “That the Fever seems to have cast a very inconsistent shadow. The people who were directly affected by it, those who got very sick, or lost people close to them, or nursed the gravely ill are left with a powerful impression of it and a desire to prepare for the next outbreak. Most other people appear not to have strong memories of it, in spite of the massive disruption that they lived through. It’s as if the Fever is trying to erase itself from our collective memory.”

“Surely a virus can’t do that,” said the Mayor, sounding irritated at the interruption.

“We’ve been over this before Franz,” said the tall Councilwoman. “The Fever is not caused by a virus.”

I wondered if we were about to hear some superstitious anti-scientific bullshit.

“It’s not even a disease,” said Mistress Magdalene. “That was discovered two outbreaks ago.”

“Right, yes,” said the Mayor. “How could I have forgotten that?”

“Maybe because the Fever is trying to remove itself from your consciousness?” said the tall Councilwoman.

I shivered. The thought of something that acted like a disease, that kept coming back, and erased the memory of itself so that people couldn’t fight it horrified me on a deep and visceral level.

“Or maybe he’s just going senile?” said Councilman Wagner and his tone made it clear that he intended his words to be taken as a joke.

“Perhaps it would help to consult Mistress Agnes at this point?” said Mistress Magdalene. “She has had more time to think about this than the rest of us.” Without waiting for a response she flicked the Crystal Ball with one fingernail. It rang like a bell and took on a faint glow.

“Now if you would just take my hands,” Mistress Magdalene said, reaching out towards Jethro and myself. We each took a hand, and instinctively reached for each other with our free hand.

I had barely formed a mental image of Agnes’ face before she appeared in the crystal before us. She was slightly distorted by the curve of the glass but the connection was far better than I’d expected.

“I’m not sure how long this connection will hold so most important things first,” said Agnes, her voice muffled and distant and with an undertone of the ringing sound of the crystal. “You need to prepare your city to defend itself.”