The Green's Tale

A mundane, a magocrat and a mapmaker sat at a table, a bag of rice between them, a glass of water in front of each of them.

Plin, the mundane, lifted the glass to his lips and drank from it, gesturing to the mapmaker.

"Well? If you can't divide the bag into thirds, we can't share it."

Duk, the magocrat, without twitching a muscle in his body, opened the bag and withdrew three grains of rice. He placed one in front of him, dropped one in Plin's water and settled the other on the mapmaker's head. The mapmaker snatched it away in shock.

"Indeed, as my good companion implies, split it into fair shares, or I vow far greater commodities than grains of rice will launch themselves upon your forehead." He waggled his eyebrows.

The mapmaker stared at the two of them.

"What is this, some kind of test?"

Plin tapped the board nailed up on the wall behind him. The mapmaker read it again.

"Moondane, *M*A*G*O*C*R*A*T* seek mapmaker. Tryoust today." He looked at them again. "Tryoust? What's that supposed to mean? I gotta prove to you I'm a mapmaker?"

Duk nodded. "Your insight is most rewarding, yet you fail to allocate the food. Remove yourself from our presence."

"Huh?"

Plin leaned forward. "He says he's bored with you, and so am I. There're other mapmakers out there, and we haven't got all day. Now, shoo."

The mapmaker stood, his brow furrowing in amazement. "You guys are a coupla freaks, you know that?" He left the table.

The next mapmaker in the queue sat down and quickly emptied the bag onto the table, chopping the resulting grains into thirds with his dagger. He gave the largest group to the magocrat, one to the mundane, and kept the smallest for himself. He looked up, smiling earnestly at them.

Plin gaped. "Why'd you give the biggest one to Duk? Get out of my sight!"

The mapmaker's hopeful grin faded, even as Duk's magic took all the rice and placed them back in the bag. The bag hovered before the mapmaker's face, who stared at it in fascination, then slapped him in the face.

"Truly, as my dear friend advocates, fair shares does not suggest one upright personage is to be held with more respect than another. Leave us, or I promise lightning to strike you from the very clouds that made it!"

The mapmaker wandered off, sulking.

The third one sat down, took the bag of rice out of the air, put it in his pocket, stood up and ran out the door.

Plin and Duk exchanged glances. There was no one else in the line.

"I told you this was a stupid idea," Plin said. "Tryouts! Ha!"

"In what fashion would you compel us to engage the services of a daydreaming trail-gazer?" Duk asked. "Our last two ..."

"We could pick'em up like we got the last two. By saving their skins from near death." He sighed. "So. How many mapmakers does it take to get into this joke?"

The former green guard for the Dux of Flasten, Percy — enlisted to infiltrate the top rings of what his penultimate superior, Tejun, chief warden of security for Flasten, called "the most heinous crime ring in the duxy, no, the world!" — slipped into the room from the back, behind the mundane and magocrat. He had cast off his bright green cloak for a dirty brown one. He dabbed at his sweating brow with a handkerchief, then boldly approached them.

"You misspelled ‘tryouts,'" he said in a squeaky voice, cursing himself for not being more manly..

Duk and Plin turned, and looked at the young man standing uncertainly near the board. His face was red, but he took the charcoal and, using the sleeve of his cloak, erased the word "tryoust" and wrote in "tryouts."

"And ‘mundane,' too." The charcoal scritched across the board.

"Who are you?" Duk asked.

"Perc ... er." The clean-shaven mapmaker looked down at his boots, blushing. "Er. Carl. No. Socral. No." He glanced the vacant expressions on their faces, sweating. "Oscar?"

"Oscar, huh?" Plin said. "Something about you looks familiar."

"Nothing about me is familiar!" the boy said with almost miliary fervor. "I am here only as a mapmaker and only for the tryout!"

"Ah! An enthusiast!" Duk said. "Admirable are your words. Tell us, do you know the road to Domus?"

Oscar nee Percy came around to the front of the table and sat, upright, stiff and uncomfortable. "Everyone knows the road to Domus, sir!"

"We seek a ..."

"Wait, wait," Plin said, cutting Duk off. The magocrat briefly looked offended, then his face took on its usual mellow grin. "Let's hear his story first, all right? We agreed we'd hear their tales, if they passed the first test."

"Ah, you are correct, fair magicless fellow," Duk said. He gestured to the mapmaker. "Inform us, at some length, of what roads you have traversed and what experiences your encounters have unleashed upon you."

Oscar stared at them. "You want me to tell you what I've done?"

"Leave nothing out," Duk said.

"And it better be good," Plin said. "Real good."

********

When I was barely one year old, my family — my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, my three cousins, my sister, my two brothers, my mom's dad and my dad's mom and my mom's mom's sister — packed up our home in Domus to move to Flasten.

We never made it.

We were caught in the remnants of a weather pattern from the southwest, funneled by high pressure area in the north deep into the heart of Marrishland. This was also during flooding season from the east. We were already in a boat, but the rain was so heavy the boat filled with water faster than my family could bail it out, and when they accidentally bailed out grandpa, things started to get really hairy.

By the time the sun broke the next week, I was alone, placed in a raft of weeds and straw my mother had dropped me in during a particularly violent surge in the water.

I found a tree growing tall out of the water, one of many really, but this one was small enough that I could grab onto a branch with my young hand and hold on, crying for my mother and sister, and father and grandpa and grandma and great-aunt Helleatine, who gave me sweets even if I was a bad boy. But not my brothers really, they were annoying brats who kept stealing my dessert.

I clung to the tree until the water receded, and found myself alone and crying on the ground when a beaver approached me. It sniffed me, then started chewing on my moldy diaper. I cautiously petted it, and then saw another one. And then a third. By this time, the last remaining clothes I had on were removed, and I was a poor, naked baby alone in the wilderness surrounded by conscientious beavers.

They took me back to their home, a dam off a tributary several miles from where I stood. Quite a bit of the flooding, I learned later, was caused by their dam. They fed me, and kept me near a litter of their own pups, and slowly all of them grew to accept me. So they raised me, for many years.

By the time I was four, I could outswim almost all of them.

By the time I was six, I could forage all day with them.

By the time I was nine, I had felled my first tree using only my teeth.

And then I turned 10. That was when the settlers came, and another bad rain storm happened during flooding season, and the area magocrat learned of the dam, our home, and had it destroyed. Most of the beavers, my family, died. The mother beaver's dying words to me were, chirp, chirp, gnahahahahah, chirp, guh-nahahah. I had no idea what she was saying, but I vowed that I would avenge the senseless, brutal murders.

I had an encyclopedic knowledge of the region, as the beavers forced me often to find my own way home. I knew of the danger of the water and mud, of the plants and the animals. I knew where to walk, what to avoid and which plants could be bribed. I used all of my skills and most of my resources, but eventually I found the magocrat's household.

They were eating dinner, the magocrat, his wife, and two healthy, loud, robust sons who reminded me vaguely of my two dead brothers. Rage swelled inside me as they devoured their evening fare, and I quickly gnawed my way through the wood walls of their house and crouched and stared at them.

Imagine what I must have looked like at that age: I had never worn clothes or spoke the language. I had never bathed or wiped myself. I could chop down trees using my teeth. I had lived in a tiny, homemade den with a dozen beavers for 10 years.

The woman fainted. The two boys sneered at me.

The magocrat stood, his hand in front of him in case I actually did anything, but I knew I couldn't. It didn't seem right to kill him when I couldn't tell him why. I guess that part of me was still human. So I waited, suddenly afraid that all my preparations for vengeance would vanish in an instant when the magocrat fried me.

But he didn't. Instead, he took me in, and treated me like some kind of experiment. His wife hated me, and so did his sons. But slowly, I was taught to speak and bathe. I was taught to walk upright, and told not to swim or play in the mud. I was treated like a freakish cousin, brought out to show his friends from the academy, and all the while, his sons beat me and his wife professed bloody murder.

Eventually, though, they all accepted me. Especially after I made them a new, larger house using the skills I learned from my beaver family.

When I was 16, shortly after the house was finished, I ran away, laughing, because the wood I had used as the main supports in the house was a favorite for termites and grubs, and the roof would come crashing down and kill them in their sleep soon enough. It was a joyous moment, and I shouted at the sky, chirp, chirp gnahahahah, chirp guh-nahahahah!

********

"You were raised by beavers?" Plin said, increduously.

"Yes. Not having a broad, flat tail was a detriment, but I made a tool I could use."

"Smile for us," Duk said, encouragingly. "Show us your pearly bucks."

Oscar hesitated, then smiled. His two front teeth were missing.

"I knew it!" Plin said, leaping to his feet. "You're Percy, the green guard! He was missing his two front teeth as well!"

"Who-o?" Percy said, sweating again. "My, this table-top has quite a remarkable grain, wouldn't you say?"

"Duk! He's the green guard who escorted the dux and his two lackeys to interrogate us!" Plin shouted. "We should kill him! The dux might find out everything we know!"

"Patience, Plin, and listen to my counsel," Duk said, staring thoughtfully at Percy. "Perhaps the dux has graced us with a fortunate happenstance upon which we can divest our interests in volume."

"Yeah," Plin said, "but he's a spy!"

"One we are conscious of," Duk said.

Plin sat down again. "You mean ..."

"Yes, we can utilize his insider occupation to gain — dare I say it? — a home for our pots."

"What?" Percy said weakly. "You know I'm not a mapmaker, but you're going to hire me?"

Duk looked at him. "Your voice sings out the very truth we would have you provide. The spy shall be doubly the spy."

"But ..."

"Tell us the truth," Plin said, smiling maliciously. "Really? Beavers?"

Copyright 2005-2006 Eric Zawadzki and Matthew Schick. All Rights Reserved.
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