6. The Campfire
I made fried mushrooms on toast. It’s virtually impossible to fuck up fried mushrooms as long as you start with edible mushrooms. I did pay particular attention to the ones that Jethro said needed to be well cooked. I put them in the pan first, as soon as the pan started to smoke, and only added the others once they’d sweated a little.
Someone else had already donated parsley and wild garlic to the communal meal so the mushrooms were even better than I’d hoped. There wasn’t enough for everyone to fill their bellies but it was a great accompaniment to the stew and it made me more popular than I’d ever been. If only I’d known that the key to popularity was mushrooms.
The people of the camp had various forest-based careers. They all introduced themselves and I, of course, instantly forgot their names because apparently not even waking up in another world will save me from my awkwardness.
There were a couple of charcoal burners who were working on a big order for a Blacksmith in the nearest village. One of them traded me a blunt old knife for the promise of a string bag once I’d sharpened the knife, whittled a crochet hook, made more twine and crocheted the bag.
There was a bodger. I’d seen the word in the career list and thought it was a misprint but it turns out that bodgers are specialist wood-turners who live in the woods and make components for wooden furniture. He promised to show me his lathe if I needed to turn anything which didn’t seem like a euphemism but I couldn’t be sure.
All the while I was cooking and chatting and getting to know bodgers and charcoal burners I was watching. I watched as Jethro had several hushed conversations with Agnes. She went to her tent between these conversations. She was gone for a while each time and once I thought I could hear her murmuring inside. She had a couple of much shorter conversations with the grey-hairs of the camp.
I asked as discreetly as I could about these older people she’d spoken to. I thought maybe they had some official role, the Elders of the camp perhaps, but everyone I spoke to just said that they were the oldest of the regulars.
Eventually, after everyone was fed, and Jethro had gone off to his bedroll in his sturdy looking brown tent, Agnes came back to me.
“We need to have a quiet chat,” she said. “Would you join me in my tent?”
I was suspicious but I followed her to the tent anyway. Either she was going to answer some of my questions or try to kill me. Either way I would find something out. If things went badly she would find out why lions don’t fuck with hyenas.
Although, come to think of it. The main reason that lions don’t fuck with hyenas is that hyenas typically have a 3:1 numerical advantage. Oh dear.
#
Inside the tent it was dark and cosy but actually not as dark as I’d been expecting because she had lanterns hanging from the tent frame. Agnes’ tent was big, maybe bigger than it had looked from the outside. She had actual furniture in there. Including a bed big enough for two.
The lanterns overhead didn’t flicker like I expected oil lanterns to. I turned on the spot, taking in all the details, the thick rug beneath my feet, the table and chairs, the huge crystal ball on the table casting a soft glow onto a fine bone china tea set.
“How much of this is magic?” I said.
“See, now, that is the kind of question you need to stop asking for your own safety,” said Agnes. She looked worried rather than threatening.
She pulled a long hat pin out of her hat and put the hat down on a thing that I’d taken as some sort of decorative head sculpture but I realised now was a kind of hat form. She skewered that hat in place with the long pin, sat down at the table, and motioned for me to sit across from her.
“Jethro says that you’ve never levelled up before today?” she said.
“Yes.”
“And that you said you had a cooking skill at level one but that you used to be a good cook?”
“He also told me not to talk about it,” I said.
“You’ve got sharp eyes. You’ve seen me talking to him.”
That was when I snapped. I really think I’d been very reasonable up to that point. “Goddammit, just drop the exposition on me.”
“So you are an Outlander then,” she said.
“If Outlander means ‘not from around here’ then yes. But that should have been obvious when Jethro found me in a clearing with no gear and wearing nothing but my underwear.”
“The fact that you think that proves that you’re an Outlander. A lot of groups like to set their young on ‘the path of the hero’,” she said with about as much sarcasm as I have ever heard someone put in a phrase, “by dumping them in the middle of nowhere in just their skivvies. Of course they usually pick somewhere temperate with plenty of food around and less than a day’s travel from a settlement. The only thing that's unusual about you is that it’s a bit early in the season.”
So she probably wasn’t going to try and kill me then. She seemed far too practical to pull the Supervillain ‘but before I kill you allow me to explain my evil plan’ thing.
“Can we stop circling around things? Just tell me whatever this big secret thing is. Why did Jethro want me to hide that I’m an Outlander?”
“Ah,” she said. I didn’t like the sound of that. “I can’t explain the big secret thing because I don’t understand it. Jethro can’t either. He understands even less than I do. We can tell you where to go to find out more but you’re going to have to be patient. You’re not ready yet.”
“Oh come on. You’ve got all this cool magic stuff and you’re going to pretend that you’re just a simple country witch?”
“I am a simple country witch. I’m just very good at it, and I maxed out my commerce skills, and I’ve been able to buy all this cool magic stuff,” she waved vaguely at the lanterns, the crystal ball and possibly the tent itself. “I make some money selling medicines and a lot of money selling ways to get extremely altered.”
“You’re a drug dealer?” I said, and immediately regretted it. Being rude to a drug dealer didn’t seem like it was good for the life expectancy.
“I have heard that phrase before. I didn’t know it was an Outlander thing. Yes I deal in drugs. Medicine for the body, medicine for the mind, and entertainment for the easily bored. I am choosing not to take offence that you meant it in a bad way. I’m sure you’ve had a tough day.”
“Thank you. But can’t you tell me anything? I mean what’s the point of the crystal ball if you can’t tell me stuff.”
“Set dressing and instant letters, mainly,” she said. “Honestly you can’t rely on them for the future, it’s just too chaotic. I can tell you what the weather is going to be like tomorrow and where to look for the best mushrooms but the farther I look the less accurate it is.”
“Instant letters?” I said.
“C-mail,” she said. “It’s really helped with magical and alchemical research.”
“That’s how it begins,” I said, “Have the unsolicited penis images started yet?”
“What? No!”
“Unless someone works out a way to block them from being transmitted then it’s probably inevitable that some people will send images of their private areas. It’s way more common with penises than other private areas. Unless people here have significantly more self control than they do where I’m from.” I tried to sound hopeful about the self control. Judging from her expression, the people here weren’t significantly different to the ones I knew.
“Sorry to be the bearer of bad news,” I said.
“Don’t worry about it. Maybe I can do something useful with the information.”
We sat in silence for a while. Agnes was probably considering the horror of unwanted penises jumping out of her crystal ball at her. I was considering my options. There didn’t seem to be many. I could stick around the camp, power level with Jethro for as long as he would have me and wait for Agnes or Jethro to decide that I was ready to learn more. Or I could leave the camp, follow the road in either direction, and hope I got somewhere before thirst or exposure got me.
“What am I going to do?” I didn’t mean to say it out loud. I certainly didn’t expect an answer.
“You’re going to stay in the camp tonight,” said Agnes. “I persuaded Aldo and Fred to stop pretending they’re both still single and just share a tent. You can use Aldo’s tent tonight, probably for a couple of nights until you have some proper shelter of your own. I have some blankets to lend you, just until you’ve got your own bedding. Tomorrow you’re going to get back out into the woods with Jethro and level up some more. I’ll try and find people to tutor you in other skills so you can level as many as fast as possible. When you’re ready to know more about Outlanders we’ll help you get where you need to be. But until then you’re not going to talk about it with anyone but Jethro and me.”
“This again, with the not talking. Why not?”
“Because Outlanders are valuable and I don’t mean someone valuable like a hero, or royalty or something. I mean something valuable like a book or a wand. Valuable like something that you lock away to keep anyone else from using. I’m not worried that people will kill you. I’m worried that people will manipulate you, or imprison you, or try to control you. There’s some nasty magic out there and I can’t protect you from all of it.”