Fish Guts

I woke up to pipe smoke in my face and a throbbing headache. I coughed the first away, but I seemed to be stuck with the second even as I swilled some stale water and tried to rub some of the ache away. The bruise was hot under my hand. What had Aemilia put in that pipe? Lead?

“Good. You’re finally awake.”

I squinted through the smoke. Duran was still snoring. Apis was darning a sock (how had he saved a needle! And yarn!) and Balbinus was sprawled out asleep in the corner. “I’m the second one awake,” I said. “And you have a weapon. You could have just….”

Aemilia exhaled another passel of smoke into my face. At some point in my distraction, she’d gotten close enough to touch. “It matters not,” she said. “Everyone has a flaw. Yes, you are weak and unprepared. But the goddess chose you, so I suppose we must work on the blade.”

“Wait, the blade?” Instead of following her, I glanced down, just to make sure she hadn’t stolen it in the night. Sure enough, the Abyssal blade was still on my hip, poking awkwardly into my belly as I sat up on the ground. It was gleaming. It was golden.

It was awkward and cursed, too, but who was counting?

“You’re going to go straight to the blade? No testing me to make sure I’m right? No more throwing furniture at me?”

I couldn’t see her figure through the smoke anymore. This couldn’t be safe- in fact, I was sure it wasn’t. I coughed, then stumbled over to try and open a door. She smacked my hand off of the handle.

“First, we test your attentiveness.” She flourished something wooden. Was that a chair leg?

“I… the Blade is very sharp,” I said. “You probably shouldn’t…” I had to dart back as she tried to hit me with the chair leg. Right. She had been very good with her aim. I should assume she was good at this, too.

By the time I managed to get the Abyssal Blade out of the sheath and begin fighting, my arms were sore from light blows of the wood. She wasn’t hitting to injure anything but my pride, which made it worse.

“I’m a grown woman,” I said, fending off one blow but going too high and catching it with my knuckles. “I can manage a few blows!”

“Maybe later.” She tapped me on the top of the head. “For now, try to hit me. Just once will do.”

“It’s a dangerous blade!” I swung and went wide. She dodged easily. It didn’t help that the Abyssal Blade was much slower than her chair leg- she was swinging in half the time, if not less.

She got me in the ankle and I ducked under her next swing as she executed a complicated manuever. I didn’t hear her feet moving, but I did hear what sounded like bones in her back cracking.

“That cannot be good for you,” I pleaded, giving the blade another wide swing to try and intercept her. She ducked under it and tapped me on the elbow.

“On the contrary! Keeps me limber.”

Another swing just barely grazed her robes, leaving them swinging, as she hopped over the blade and pointed the chair leg in between my eyes. I tried to elbow her, but she dodged away from that too. It was really starting to get on my nerves, actually.

How hard could it be to hit one woman?

Two parries and a last-ditch attempt with the pommel later, and I decided the answer was very hard.

“Don’t you have any advice?” I said, panting, as she came up and hit me on the shoulder again. I had fought her back, towards the opposite corner and away from any furniture she could hide behind, and yet she was still dodging. As we spoke, she hopped over Apis’s bent head like he was nothing more than another chair. He didn’t even look up, just adding another stitch in the heel of his sock.

“Move faster!” she said. “The blade is like a reed. You should also be like a reed.”

“What?”

“Well, you should be. Right now you’re more like a dying flower,” she said.

I dodged her next swing, then turned to hit her- only to see her toppling over. Apis had extended his leg. Not much. Just enough to trip her.

I reached forward and poked her with the edge of the blade. “Well?”

Aemelia pushed herself up. It was like all of her age had collapsed on her at as soon as she’d stopped moving. But her pipe was still between her teeth. An ember glowed as she raised her brows at me.

“Well,” she said. “I did say you only had to hit me. Never mentioned cheating. Help me up, girl. We’ll work on some finer techniques after I have some tea.”

It wasn’t until she was out of sight that I was willing to risk glancing over at Apis. His head was back down, faking innocence, but I could see a smirk.

~*~

I held the fish out. As I rotated it, it flopped, scales wet in my hand. For a moment I was irrationally taken back to when the lawyers had first come to speak to Duran. The fish had been a little bigger then, though.

“What did you want me to do with it?”

I ran a hand underneath the gills. It didn’t smell too bad. “Could make some grilled fish, if we could find something to grill it on,” I said. I cast an eye around. Where had that plate mail gone? If we could get a fire hot enough-

Aemelia smacked the back of my knuckles. I yelped instinctively and pulled back. We were standing behind the tower of furniture. Beyond, Apis and Duran had gone on a walk to ‘check that the latch was still closed’. I had no idea where Balbinus was, but he’d managed to disappear as soon as he would have been helpful.

Once again, I was abandoned completely.

“What was that for?” I said. I gave her a glare and pulled my hand a little farther out of range.

“That fish isn’t for eating,” Aemelia said.

I glanced down at it. “It doesn’t look like it has worms. Right number of eyes. Won’t feed everyone, sure, but if I filleted it-”

“Useless woman! Is your head just full of recipes!”

Well, she didn’t have to put it that way.

“You can’t just give me a fish and expect me not to cook it!”

She reached forward again and I darted away, expecting her to try and grab the fish. As I rotated it away, however, she reached to the other side of my body. With a flourish, she drew the abyssal blade from the sheath. In a matter of a few flashes of the blade, I watched as one fin fell away, then another- then, with a neat trick, the belly of the fish flicked open and the guts spilled on the stone at my feet.

I stared at her, still holding the fish away. “This is… some sort of exercise?”

“I’ve got another fish ready,” she said. “Put that down and come here. It’s about time you learned a little style.”

“Where was all this fish when we were making stew last night?”

It was the only thing I could manage. She’d pulled open the door of a wardrobe stacked catywampus on the pile, and within were just… fish. Piled scale upon scale, dead eyes reproaching me for intruding. I was almost tempted to close the door again so they would stop staring at me.

“We could bread them,” I said. “Fry them. Grill them. A better stew, this time, more fish than broth…” Last night had been a dismal showing. Even Duran was usually better than that.

Aemelia tossed the sword back at me. I was so busy being annoyed I managed to catch it, mostly out of self defense.

“I’ll hold up the fish,” she said. “You’ll gut it. I presume you know how?”

She didn’t even give me time to acknowledge before she began holding up fish after fish. The first few were large and stinking, easy to target. The next few got smaller and smaller, harder to target with the large, heavy blade. It was beginning to make my arms ache, too. The blade felt like an extension of my arm I wasn’t used to- it was too long, heavy, and the point never went where I wanted it to. I tried to picture the axe-woman’s face when I finally crushed her in battle. It was losing some of its savor. Maybe I could poison her.

When I finally started to get the technique, Aemilia started dodging.

“Hey!”

“Fish in the wild swim,” she said, swishing the fish to the left as I tried to gut it. “Go on, then.”

By the time we’d gotten through three or four fish, my arms were aching. I had carried heavy pans, sharpened a lot of knives- but my muscles were working in a new dimension, and they hated me for it with a passion. I forced myself to take deep breaths. Surely we were nearly done.

Aemelia was rummaging around in the bottom of the wardrobe, humming to herself. The pipe was, inexplicably, still lit.

When she turned around, I lost my patience. “You have to be kidding.”

It was a fish barely as long as my smallest finger. It dangled, silvery and half-hidden in her smoke.

“There’s no way,” I continued. She was just grinning at me. “You need a small knife for that kind of fish, this blade would smash it.”

“It’s very sharp,” said Aemelia.

“I don’t care how sharp it is!” I waved the sword. “This is giant!”

“Your goddess has chosen you for a-”

I reached forward with the blade and sliced the fish in half. “The goddess and I barely get along,” I said. “And if I ever need to be able to have this amount of fine technique, I expect her to pick up the slack, because I’m certainly not going to be able to manage.”

“Well!” She looked down at one half of the fish, then the other in her hand. “Well!”

I shoved the blade back into the sheath. My shoulder was starting to ache, too. “I’m checking on the others,” I said.

I would apologize later. For now, I needed to get away from the stink of those rotting fish.