When he was done with that, he made cuts in a number of places with a hatchet, and then together we forced the ribs apart. We cut around the anus, cut open the chest cavity, down the diaphragm, peeled off the membrane down to the backbone...
“Out you come...” He grasped the hog’s trachea and esophagus and pulled them towards the back end. All its guts came out at once in a single mass. He was efficient at this.
At this point, it looked quite a lot more like “meat,” the kind I’d seen frozen and hung up in movies and on TV in my previous life. I faced the hog’s head we’d removed and put my hands together in prayer.
I’m sorry. And thank you. We won’t waste what we’ve taken.
“You’re a real believer, aren’t you?” he said playfully, gently shrugging his shoulders. “Mmkay, as agreed, one shoulder for you.” He skillfully inserted his machete into a joint of the meat which was once a boar and sliced off just its front shoulder. “And that does it for portioning.”
“Yep.”
With a blood-soaked hatchet and a short machete in our hands, we exchanged smiles in recognition of each other’s hard work. “Guess we better eat the liver though. It goes bad real fast,” he said.
“Ah, I’ve got a pan.”
Fresh liver is delicious.
We’d been working in the cold, winter river, so my hands were already frozen stiff. While Silver-hair was away collecting driftwood, I gathered together some dry twigs and quickly set fire to them with a whispered Flammo Ignis. I thought I’d better keep it a secret that I could use magic for now. It wasn’t that I thought he couldn’t be trusted... although that was possible. I just didn’t know enough about modern society. Magic may have been accepted in Gus’s time, but I didn’t know how society regarded it today.
“Brrr... Gods, it’s cold.” I took off my boots and warmed my hands and feet beside the fire.
After a while, Silver-hair came back. “Freezing,” he said, tossing some driftwood into the fire. Then he took up position beside me. We grinned at each other for some reason.
“Okay, here’s what we’ve been waiting for,” I said.
“Ya.”
I held the pan over the flame and put in some hog’s fat. Once it had amply coated the bottom of the pan, I put in the strips of liver which I’d already cut up, then shaved off some rock salt and sprinkled it over. A sizzling sound accompanied the gorgeous smell of cooking meat.
I closed my eyes and put my hands together. “Mater our Earth-Mother, gods of good virtue, bless this food, which by thy merciful love we are about to receive, and let it sustain us in body and mind.”
“Damn, you really are hard-core religious.” The silver-haired half-elf was looking at me incredulously. It seemed he wasn’t the type to have much belief in these things.
But thinking about it logically, I was the one with memories of a previous life. Wouldn’t it have made more sense for me to be the one impatiently waiting to eat, and him to be religious? Despite being in the middle of prayer, I was amused by how backwards that felt.
“For the grace of the gods, we are truly thankful.”
“Awesome. Let’s eat.”
He may have been impatient, but he was at least polite enough not to ignore my prayer and start eating before me.
After I finished praying, we each took a knife that we’d washed and cleaned, jabbed it into a piece of cooked liver in the pan, and lifted it out. Steam was rising from it. I stuffed it into my mouth.
It was hot. And so delicious. The strong flavor of liver with just a pinch of added salt filled my mouth. Gods, it was good. I caught myself wishing for a cold beer.
Even the wrinkles on Silver-hair’s forehead had loosened now. Meals eaten after hard work really were delicious.
Before I realized it, the sun had almost set.
“Huh? You want to know... the way? What?”
When I asked him the way after we’d finished eating, he looked at me strangely, just as I’d expected.
That was when I knew I’d been right to leave asking this until the end. The question was a little dangerous. It invited queries that would be difficult to answer. Such as—
“Seriously, where’d you even come from? I’ve never seen you around here.”
“Well, that’s... hard to explain. I’m not sure what to say.”
If I were one-hundred-percent honest with him and said, “I was brought up by undead in a ruined city, fought the god of undeath, and set out on a journey,” he would find that story so crazy that I had absolutely no confidence that I could get him to believe it. Not having a way to prove who you were made things very difficult, no matter the society. Humans have no way of proving themselves harmless on their own; they can only ask other people to vouch for them. In my previous world, that came from social systems like the family register and ID cards, and in this world, it seemed to come from your relatives and local community. My not having those was equivalent to declaring to the world that I might be a dangerous person. But a sorcerer who uses Words can hardly afford to lie... so for the time being, I decided to be somewhat vague so I wouldn’t have to lie outright.
“I came from the south, how’s that?”
“The south? Brother, there is no ‘south.’ This is as south as it gets.”
“What do you mean, there’s no south?”
“This is the southernmost point. Mankind’s frontier. You’re in Beast Woods in Southmark.”
Beast Woods. That was a pretty intimidating name. Maybe there were a lot of ferocious creatures. That boar certainly was one. I was going to have to be careful.
How was I meant to explain this, anyway? I seriously had no idea.
“I did come from the south. It’s complicated...”
“Ohh... Are you... one of those adventurer types? A ruin-hunter?”
A ruin-hunter... Now that I thought about it, there had been ruins dating back to Mary and Blood’s time dotted about on the way here. Maybe excavating those kinds of places was an occupation for some people? If so, my own situation wasn’t so different. After all, I myself was trying to subsist off only what I’d gained in that ruined city.
“Yeah, it’s sort of like that...”
“And you got lost?”
“Umm, I guess... that’s kind of it...” I replied, sounding almost dejected.
“Oh, boy.” The silver-haired half-elf sighed in apparent despair. “You’re the most oblivious adventurer I’ve ever seen. Ehh... whatever. Just follow this river downstream. A couple of days and you’ll be at a little town. It’ll probably work out from there. Good luck.” The tone of his last two words told me clearly that he was done caring. It looked like the good will I’d fostered by working with him was rapidly disappearing thanks to the very suspect conversation I’d started.
“U-Um, I understand it’s unreasonable to ask this,” I started hesitantly, “but if there’s any chance I could stop by the settlement you’re a part of or anything...”
His eyes turned incredibly sharp. Breathing a long, exasperated sigh, he looked daggers at me.
“I don’t want to get involved with you for a fig second. Don’t make me spell it out.”
“I’m sorry...”
I couldn’t argue. He was totally right, and I knew it. If I were in his shoes, I wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with me, either. I was an armed soldier of unknown identity and affiliation. Who’d want to invite someone like that into their community?
“So don’t follow me.”
I noticed that the sun had almost set, and it was getting a lot darker.