Erida - 20
Two days later, Erida noticed...
Welcome to the continuing heroic fantasy story, Erida. Use the buttons below to easily navigate to any part of the story. A new segment is published each Thursday (usually).
In the previous segment, Erida tried to avoid interacting with the young laundresses but bowed to their instance that he accept help fetching water. Although he got the feeling that Lesa might have more than altruistic motivation behind her offer.
Two days later, Erida noticed Matrick watching the last of Arno’s lesson with him. When Arno left, Matrick approached Erida and asked, “What was that all about?”
Erida repeated what Arno had told him. “He wanted someone to practice with. None of the other guards were interested, and no one else was good enough.”
“So, he picked you?” Matrick’s expression made it clear that he did not think Erida was good enough either.
“He said he was bored. If I’d stick it out he’d teach me just to have something to do.”
“Are you going to stick?” said Matrick.
“I like it. It’s work but not work. I got more than I can handle with the stable. The staff is different. Even though it makes me sore in places I didn’t know I had, it gives me part of the day that’s my own before Tristan takes the rest.”
Matrick shook his head. “I think I’d rather sleep to sunup than swing a stick in the dark.”
Erida thought that he might agree if he had a better place to sleep. He ran for water, fetched hay, raked straw, and brushed horses non-stop each day. Too tired to care, he collapsed each night at the back of Midnight’s stall. Each morning, after one more night in scratchy straw with the mice and rats, he vowed to do something about the cot in the tool room. Then he practiced with Arno, ran for breakfast, and kept running all day, ignoring the tool room until it was too late to do anything about it.
“You’ve got things on your mind, and I’ve got a horse to hitch. See you later,” said Matrick
“Oh. Ya, sorry. See you later,” said Erida. He slipped into the corral behind Matrick when the wagonmaster opened the gate.
At the tool room, Erida breathed through his mouth. He laid his staff along the base of one wall and grabbed onto the mattress that rested atop the cot. He drug it outside where he could breathe again. The odor from the mattress assaulted his nose. He had to do something about it. He shook the soured mildewed straw out of the mattress, much of it black with mold. He loosely folded the mattress cloth, picked up his two water buckets, and took everything to the eastern corral fence where he left all of it on the other side before he ran to breakfast.
Erida washed down breakfast, a combination of bread, cheese, and walnuts, with a crockery mug of milk. He swallowed his last mouthful as he jogged outside. When he reached the well, he found his two buckets filled and sitting beside it. Stooping to pick them up, Lesa’s words interrupted him.
“Next time you want to leave a girl a fragrant gift, try flowers.” Lesa stood with a mock-serious expression and both hands on her hips. “I don’t know what you did to that cloth, but burning would be too good for it. Did you expect us to wash it?”
“Isn’t that what you do?” replied Erida.
“We do the laundry. We also clean rooms when guests leave. But we do not scrub every piece of filth you happen to find laying around the stable yard.”
“But it’s the mattress from my cot,” said Erida.
“You sleep on that?” Lesa wrinkled her nose in an expression of disgust.
“No, I don’t. I mean, I would, if it didn’t smell of piss and worse.”
“Boys,” muttered Lesa as she turned away and walked into the laundry.
Torn between asking what she meant, and the need to get water to the horses, he decided on the later. Lesa disappeared into the laundry. Erida resigned himself to sleeping on loose straw. By tonight, he’d be too tired to care anyway.
Thanks for reading this segment of Erida. There’s more to come.
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