Chapter 3: Chapter Three

Sadrahan was true to his word. He got up in the morning a few minutes before his wife, went out to their well and turned the fire-hardened wooden crank until the bucket came up filled with water, and dumped it over his head for an instant bath. The cold water ran over his hard body, washing away the remnants of the night before.

As an extra precaution he repeated the act twice more before he went back into the house, threw on his pants, shirt, and boots, and made his way directly to the home of their village chief. The advantage of living long lives and with the same people for a long time was that you sooner or later learned everyone’s routines, and the chief was no exception.

Sadrahan scratched the claw of his forefinger against the bear fur covering the entrance to the chief’s home, the mild noise caught the attention of the chief’s wife, and Sadrahan was quickly called within.

The old chief and his wife were of the goat variety of demon, with thick, fur coated curved legs with hooves in place of feet, slender but muscular bodies, and horns which sprang from their foreheads, and both had short beards hanging from their chins. “What do you want here so early in the morning? Shouldn’t you be in the field already?” The chief asked from the table, a wooden cup full of milk lay waiting by his hand, but he didn’t touch it until Sadrahan spoke.

“My wife is really worried about the lack of a wall here, all the stories… Midas the Younger has brought some of the goods from the human not-village settlements… what did he call them?” Sadrahan asked.

“Forts.” The chief grunted and drained his cup in one go before slamming it down on the table. “Bah! Damn foolishness! Who builds a village that isn’t a village and doesn’t make anything? Who would give them anything for nothing anyway? The humans aren’t dangerous, they’re stupid.”

Sadrahan suppressed his urge to sigh, “I know it sounds strange, but it wouldn’t hurt to be cautious, what do we lose by going ahead and building a wall?”

“The security of trust. They’ve lived over there for a long time and have never hurt us. If we build a wall, we tire ourselves out, waste time, and we look like we don’t trust them.” The chief retorted. “Good walls don’t make good neighbors.”

Sadrahan pursed his lips tight and thought of what else to say, “What if Midas and the other merchants to pass through aren’t just telling tall tales? What if they’re telling the truth? That last one talked about empty, burned out ruins where demons used to be.”

“They’re just stories, who would burn a village down, then who would grow crops and who would they trade with? Going in and killing people you could just trade with… it’s just dumb. You get a lot of things right then, but then nothing tomorrow. You can’t milk the goat after you’ve butchered it.” The chief’s wife chimed in as she set another cup of milk down for each of the pair.

Sadrahan took it with a grateful nod in her direction but retorted, “It seems that way, but if you say the humans are being stupid about one thing, maybe they are being that kind of stupid too? We just don’t know what’s happening, and what if what we don’t know comes here?” Sadrahan finished the cup in a single gulp and jabbed his forefinger’s claw into the center of the table between himself and the chief.

“What exactly do you, does your wife want?” The old chief asked.

“Just a wall, for the whole village to put one up, not everybody is strong enough to fly anymore and we need to protect them. The humans don’t come this way, they haven’t since before my wife conceived. If they don’t come here-” The chief cut Sadrahan off.

“Then we’ve wasted our time.” He pointed out and crossed his white hairy arms.

“I was going to say, ‘then they can’t know they should be offended,’ but if they do, and they come as not friends and not neighbors, at least we’re prepared.” Sadrahan argued.

The chief turned that over in his head, “I’ll talk to the other family heads.”

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It was as good as a dismissal, and Sadrahan rose to his feet, the claws of his fingers dug into the wood as his wife’s fears became ever more real in his own mind, he looked down at the table and said, “Thank you for your time, and for the milk, I need to go out to the fields and get to work.”

“Bah.” The old chief said with a dismissive wave of his hand, “It was no trouble, your wife is just worried, she’s at that stage. It’s perfectly natural, just keep her calm and everything will work out.”

Sadrahan left the house, sweeping the cloth aside with more force than he intended, he returned to his land, not to his home to explain to his wife the failure he was already certain of in his heart, but he went instead to the forest.

‘If nobody else will listen, then I will do it myself.’ He said as he stood before a thick tree and used one of his skills. [Cutting claw] he activated it, and began to swing his arms against the thick tree. Bark and chunks of wood began to fall away until the crack rang out and the tree began to list. Sadrahan stepped aside, and it fell with a crash beside his feet.

Rather than drag the damn thing back as it was, he went to work on it where it fell, cutting away the branches and turning it into a single long straight log, and once it was rendered down to half again his height, he grabbed one end of it, hefted it up, and shuffled it sideways. From there, he got in the center and began to push, rolling the log across the field and over toward his home.

His wife heard him coming, and he saw the knowing look on her face when she saw what he was doing. ‘No, the chief didn’t listen.’ He thought, well aware that she knew his thoughts as if they were her own.

For the next few days Sadrahan split his time between the field and the forest, rolling logs over to his home, where he dug holes in the unforgiving ground and began to shove the logs into place.

It became a village joke. “So worried about your wife you have to wall her in? Or are the walls for you?”

The jokes were not good ones, and Sadrahan did not laugh, nor did Lamash, and the jokes soon stopped when his work did not, and a wall encircled his small home with space enough for a dozen or more demons to stand side by side with arms outstretched.

And seemingly because he took the worry seriously, the reality of the wall brought others to rethink the situation as well. As if the wall itself demanded their belief in the danger they previously mocked as mere fanciful tales from wanderers.

Which was perhaps why several neighbors appeared at the entrance to his home one morning. “We help you finish your wall, you help us with ours.” The spokesmen for the six demons said.

It was a quintessential village bargain, and with seven strong backs, the wall was finished as Lamash entered the final days of her pregnancy.

She lay with him the night of their wall’s completion, her claws raking over his chest, “Thank you for doing this, I know it was hard, being the target of their jokes over me, but at least it’s done, and nobody is laughing now.”

“No, no they’re not, but I hope they have reason to when it turns out to be useless.” Sadrahan answered and kissed his wife, her warm lips parted and their sharp tongues dueled with one another for minutes before she answered…

“Me too.” And the rest of the night was a heady blur between them until sleep claimed them both.

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