This is the 17th story in a series. Click here to read all parts from the beginning.
The drawer underneath Ira’s bed stank of weird herbs that might’ve been something like mothballs, keeping bugs out of the furs that he usually stored in there. Or maybe just keeping bugs out of his bed, who knew. It wasn’t as if I’d had time to ask. The marauders already were pounding on the cabin’s front door.
I wasn’t in total darkness; light seeped in through a small knothole and reflected from the shiny surface of my fire suit. Ira had thrown the suit in here, removing evidence he’d had a visitor, before shutting me into the drawer. The angle of the knothole didn’t give me any view out, so it just looked creepy, as if some alien creature inside the drawer had turned to stare at me.
(Creative Commons image via flickr)
The front door creaked, swinging open.
“Welcome, friends! Come in and drink with me!” Ira raised his voice louder than normal, slurring his words. He hiccoughed twice before adding, “It’s always much better to drink with friends than alone!”
If I hadn’t known he was sober, Ira would’ve fooled me for sure. One of the marauders muttered something that I couldn’t quite hear under Ira’s gabbing. Heavy footsteps told me at least three intruders had entered, maybe four.
“Strong cider for all! I have a barrel here, the best.” Mugs clanked, and the tap on the barrel burbled. Ira went on to say, even more cheerfully, “Everything I have is yours!”
That last sentence got the chuckles one might expect from a gang of robbers finding a clueless victim. Before they’d finished laughing, however, Ira’s voice dropped smoothly into a cadence I recognized from the night I’d arrived in his cabin.
“Strong bonds of friendship, never broken; life’s threads enduring, tightly woven. The gifts we bring, the food we share—they all come back with more to spare.”
After a moment of silence, in which I imagined the marauders looking confused, Ira plonked the full mugs down on the table. “That was a little blessing my mother liked to say before meals. She worshiped the forest god, who brings luck to the hunt. Let us all share hunting stories, along with tasty baked fish! Each of the furs on my floor has a story.”
Plates rattled as Ira continued, in an apologetic tone, “I don’t have enough chairs for all of us, but some boxes will do.”
The marauders seemed unaware that he’d put a spell on them. I heard boxes being dragged heavily across the floor, toward the table. Nobody was yelling about sorcery or doing anything violent. As far as I could tell, the entire gang had been pacified into unnatural serenity, much as I’d been when Ira used his friendship spell on me.
“Have you ever slain an ice serpent?” Full plates thumped down on the table as Ira launched into his first tall tale. “The creek near here is full of them. Ice serpents don’t make good eating, but their pale skin is excellent for lantern covers, and the meat can be used to bait traps for other beasts. I’ve hunted them many times. When I caught the fish you’re eating now, the water looked perfectly still right up until the moment when, all at once, it erupted into huge spiky tentacles reaching higher than my head…”
I figured Ira was making up every word as he went along. His audience greatly enjoyed the show, exclaiming at the unlikely details and banging their mugs on the table for more. Ira obligingly went to refill drinks so many times that I lost count.
By now, I would’ve been totally sweltering in the long fur coat I’d had no time to take off, except that my feet were still wet and freezing in soaked shoes after tromping through slush. The mothballs, or whatever they were, reeked so strongly that I couldn’t even smell the fish dinner I was missing. As the afternoon dragged on, the light around the knothole slowly faded.
At least I was still alive, though.