#63 - Another Word for Hardened Water

“We should have stayed in that little village,” Didara complained swaying back and forth, her trunk curling up and down.  Her be-jewelled tusks were now wound with bright yarn, which she thought was a bad compromise but she didn’t want her carved tusks to crack in the wildly swinging temperatures.

Jagunjagun leaned up against her and swayed with her, Ologbon lying on her back and neck with a feather quilt over him, looking like a blue and white checked bump on her boiled woolen coat.

“This weather is making me vastly less curious! I’m almost not interested in yet another type of water in a hardened state!”

“It will be all right, Didara!”  We’ll get to this Innéth place and the stag people say they have big indoor spaces for their horses that are heated!”

“And their horses won’t go crazy when they see us?  It took days of training before these animals stopped jittering and they aren’t even really horses.  Deer and a couple of horses and mules and the mules are suspicious.”

Jagunjagun pressed harder against her as she complained.  There wasn’t much wind and the shelter seemed safe enough but the ribs creaked and complained as the ice… another word for hard water – built up on the outside.

It was another Cylak shelter spot, opened up out of season as the rain began, a short day away from that village they called Mud.  The land had flattened out and there were no nice hollows or old quarries to be half the shelter and have chimneys and latrines.  Though this one was normally a rounded bump on flat land they’d not sealed it down tight like the first.

Jagunjagun could see out through the bare trees and in the setting sun the branches were black.  It was just rain falling but when it landed it hardened and hardened enough to become instantly slick and tremendously dangerous for both the elephants and for everyone else too.  They’d opened the shelter with the rain falling and the ice growing and Didara had nearly fallen, straining her forefeet.

The pattering sound was soothing though and it was warmer in the covered space.  But her feet hurt and the ice just kept getting thicker and they weren’t going anywhere anytime soon.  They’d hoped to find the military road that led to White because the path they were on was become a muddy little track that had washes of freezing muck overflowing it here and there.

Jagunjagun didn’t flinch when an explosive ‘bang’ echoed.  They’d gotten used to the bursting tree limbs over the past few hours.

“Everything’s grey and dirty and cold and sometimes freezing and cutting my feet and it’s all black and nothing pretty, nothing to rest my eyes on,” she complained, lifting first one forefoot, then the other.

“Little mother,” Ologbon said from his nest on her neck.  “What if you raise your feet and rest them one at a time, let me rub some warming cream into them and wrap them up in wool?”

“You have something?” Her trunk curled up and patted him.  “Bless you, iti-igi, bless you.”

“It’s a rug from the city Queen.  I’ll get it mucky but I’m sure it will be washable.”

“Tuck my coat under my belly and I’ll lie down,” Jagunjagun said.  “It will warm me up, while you do that.”

“All right.  Why don’t you move around so that you don’t lie down in that stream of water?”

The floor of the shelter was hardly a dry space.  Everyone was muddied, the deer and the horses to their bellies, even after grooming.

“I don’t know why I’m so cranky,” Didara said.  “This place makes me afraid and unhappy for some reason."

“It’s probably the weather.”

**

“Hey, boss, we can’t get to them while she rain like this.”  The bandits were wrapped up tight like balls of wool, hunkered together with a slicker blanket thrown over them all, the weight of the ice building up.  Occasionally they'd stretch and groan and shuffle around so that the outside got to the warmer middle and the ice would crack and slide off.

“They can’t move neither.  Not to worry none, Saikrie.  Nobody knows we here t’all out of the swamp.”

“I wonder if them monsters is as good eatin’ as deer?” His question had them suddenly hungry, drooling at the thought of fresh venison rather than more gator, or another frog stew.

“Donno, Saik.  Guess we’s about to find out, after we strip off them shinies.  When we kin move again.”  The way the rain'd settled in it could be a couple of days.

“Yes, boss.”