Chapter 267: Chapter 243 – Ostrich Race

"One of the odder local sights for visitors to the city of Alfheim to witness were the Ostrich races. They were one of the most popular forms of entertainment in the city, and typically held biweekly.

 

A large gambling scene naturally opened up under such conditions, and even visitors have called the races addictive to watch, despite their simple setup.

 

The races themselves involved large ostriches who were to race around a predetermined circuit, made by planting flags on the sides of the pathways between the many, many farms, orchards, and ranches around the city.

 

Some of those pathways were so narrow only two of the large birds could run side to side, others larger and allowed as many as four to six of them at once. Typically it was a race of ten laps, enough to tire the birds without risking their well being.

 

Champion ostriches were treated like celebrities, and their jockeys earned an enviable prize money. On top of that, it was tradition that when a champion ostrich passed on - mostly out of natural causes - then their flesh would be cooked and served as a feast after such races.

 

Those feasts were always extremely popular with the spectators." - Garth Wainwrought, Dean of the Levain Institute for Higher Learning, formerly professor of Socioeconomics.

As luck would have it, Cal's group reached town a scant four days before a famous attraction local to Alfheim took place. She had noticed what looked like elevated wooden seating areas built around the outer perimeter of the city proper when she arrived, but had never asked what they were for, thinking them as perhaps defensive structures.

 

It turned out, they were exactly what they appeared to be, elevated seating areas, ones that allowed those seated there to look far into the fields around the city unhindered. They were built for people to spectate the ostrich races from.

 

Each of the seating areas, which surrounded the town almost like a wall, had ten tiers of seats, growing taller the further they were in the rear. The frontmost seats were easily four meters above the ground, while the rearmost ones were at nearly ten meters.

 

Curious about the excitement that surrounded the city, Cal and her group had all bought front row tickets to the event. When the time came, an elven woman in a neat outfit checked their tickets and directed them to their seats.

 

After they walked up the stairs that led from the back of the seating area to a wide walkway in the central region, they quickly filed out and checked the seats. The back of each seat was labeled with the number of the seat behind them, and they soon found ones that matched their tickets on the railings that stood before the frontmost row of seats.

 

Once their whole group was seated, various sorts of snacks and drinks in hand - there were a lot of such street vendors near the entrances of the seating areas -, they looked down towards one of the roads leading out of the city, where nearly forty large flightless birds, each ridden by either a youth or more commonly, a goblin, had lined up.

 

Before long, the seats around them quickly filled up. Many also sat down on the walkways between the seats, though those people left a gap through which people could pass through without issue. Cal even saw crowds standing around the roped-off paths which denoted the circuit.

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"Pretty festive, isn't it?" asked Kino from beside her. Both women were munching on corn that had been popped and puffed up in a pot, and then seasoned, the same sort of orcish snack Cal once had in the orcish plains. Since there were quite a few orcs and people with orcish blood in the city, she wasn't surprised to see that they had brought some of their food as well.

 

Where Kino's snack was mixed with peanuts and drizzled with honey and molasses, a sweet treat, Cal's was savory instead. Other than the popped corn kernels the small bucket in her hand contained puffed rice as well as roasted soybeans, and they were lightly salted, then doused with plenty of good, molten butter.

 

They chatted for a while, and before long the seating area was filled to capacity, same with the other two seating areas to their left and right. There were eighteen such buildings around the city, and each time a race was held, the three nearest the location of the race would be used by the spectators.

 

An older elf, dressed in festive clothing, stood beside the line behind which the racers were lined up. He looked at the sundial on a desk near him, cleared his throat, and raised his arm. Three orbs of fire appeared in mid-air, and the racers suddenly tensed.

 

The first orb fed itself into the second, doubling its size, and the tension mounted. A moment later the larger orb engulfed the last one as well, and the orb held still for a beat. Then it exploded with a loud sound and a bright display of flames, which were nonetheless contained safely.

 

Every single racer held their reins tight and grasped their avian mounts with their thighs and calves, as the large flightless birds bounded forward with long, loping steps. They quickly picked up speed, slowing only ever so slightly when they came across a bend in the road, and ran with dazzling speed.

 

The crowd roared and cheered at the sight. Some even waved around flags with colors that matched the tunics worn by certain jockeys. Now that Cal gave a good look, every one of the riders wore one with distinctive colors and patterns, no two alike.

 

A race quickly intensified, as the jockeys jockeyed for the lead position. Even so, differences between their rider quickly manifested, as by the time they completed the first lap, as they passed near where Cal was seated, a group of seven ostriches had built a lead upon the rest, and slowly but surely widened the gap between them.

 

Amongst the seven was one black bird Cal remembered starting near the back, yet it kept up with the leading group nonetheless. The group dwindled to four by the third lap, the rest left behind, yet the black ostrich kept persevering.

 

By the time they entered the last half of the final lap, Cal saw with her sharp eyes how that black ostrich vied with another ostrich with brilliant white plumage that had started at the very front for the lead. The crowd had gone wild, some shouting the names of the birds at the top of their lungs.

 

Eventually, the two birds crossed the finish line one after another, with the black ostrich as the victor by a very narrow difference. The unexpected upset had caused most of the spectators to become crestfallen, except for a few who cheered and danced wildly instead, since they had bet on the black ostrich winning.

 

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