A Free Moment

The sky was a brighter blue than photographs had ever promised.

In the garden sat a man, who was not one you might call a man, polishing a sword that was not quite a sword. In truth it was a sort of choice, both his weapon and reason for being: one taken in hand, the other released; a sailor fallen from his boat at sea midst a violent storm, who’d given up his grasp on the courageous first mate lest he drag the boy to the depths in his desperate kicking. It kept him adrift, the sword, and he clung to its onyx-frosted metal for dear life like a broken plank. Like him the weapon was foreign to this new world, in design if not in purpose, drawing from the market crowds fewer wide-eyed oglings than his own appearance had.

With a knotted green hand he uncorked the squat bottle, wrinkling a flattened nose as he poured grey, cloudy mineral oil along the blade’s length. Four empty vessels lay in the grass at his feet. Another bottle, still full, awaited use. The liquid he’d become accustomed to was perfume in comparison. These concoctions reeked of crushed bugs and rubber; indicative of potency. The sword drank the oil greedily. Three coats are all your demon will need, the merchant had proclaimed, no small amount of quaver in his tone. Frowning, the not-man picked up his cloth and resumed the work, letting his mind wander to happier fields as the monotony trundled on. With a blade longer than a man’s body, equal in width to his clenched fist, thickness of a steel ingot, underestimation had been likely.

Even with this potential dampener, the day had been a productive one. The bedsheets and clothes had been washed, now left to dry on their hangers in the midday sun along the side of the house. (House, he thought, was not fitting. Neither was dwelling or cabin. He decided on “hovel.”) He’d cooked breakfast without burning the food – “breaking our fast,” the girl had called the act – though the meat could have been more tender. Salt-preserved meats were new territory. He likely hadn’t washed enough out, though the flavors were still rich in herbs and spices with alien names. He’d picked vegetables, planted seeds, sown fresh earth. He’d brushed the braying donkey in its stable. In the markets he had learned the new world’s currency, purchased inks and papers, sausages and alchemical reagents, leather and fabrics for the making of clothes that fit him; his own flapped alongside the others, drying. Given their size compared to his hosts’ own, it would be some time before dry enough to wear them comfortably.

He had finished reorganizing the study: a mess in no small part from his summoning. Documents had been scattered, piles of books toppled like trees after a hurricane. Dust glittered in the air for hours afterward. Inside the hovel had been the thickest of fogs, only this one sent the hosts sneezing mad until their swollen red faces and dripping noses painted them victims of plague. The barrier erected by the summoning circle had shielded him from the worst, instead allowing him bear witness to their suffering from within a fishtank. Or a demon-tank.

He had cleaned the chamber pots.

A bead of sweat rolled down his forehead and caught a strand of hair before vanishing into that waterfall of black. Next week that task would become another’s duty.

Maintenance on his sword was the day’s final order, after which he would be free to enjoy what remained of the day as pleased. Until another task became pressing, of course. Free time. His polishing slowed to a crawl. For a moment, you’d be forgiven for thinking it had halted entirely. He peered up at the sky again, the endless field of blue one could dive into stretching out to the horizon, hills of cotton-white swimming by. It was not so late that the colors were darkening to violet, the sun still hung lazily above, unblinking. His eyelids drifted shut as the wind’s cool breath picked up in strength, gathering hair in its tender hands and scattered stray leaves in the garden, winding them through the breeze across the grass to disappear down the trail leading into the forest at the field’s border.

The not-man decided: he would watch the clouds. It was a good day for that.

---

“Demon, I need your height!”

He had not even heard the hovel’s door unlatch. The not-man’s eyes snapped open to find the first host before him: a young girl, barely past his knee in height. No tusks grew from her lips, and the rat’s nest atop her head was a shade of sun-baked soil. Ears yet to taper to a fine point wiggled in the light, slightly translucent. Among his people she’d have been considered a toddler but that was not the case here, in this world, where growth patterns of these pinkish people may as well have been a dead language; he had no hope of understanding it. That she was young had only been established by one who was clearly along in her years.

“Grandmama needs help reaching the shelf. Go help her!” She pointed a stern finger at her home, her pose radiating strength of intimidation the most weathered military generals could never hope to outmatch. He dropped his gaze to the blade in his lap, trying to avoid the sight of the girl’s raised hand, at the black script of runes dotting her flesh like stars between fingertips and wrist.

He stared at his still damp sword, then to the last remaining bottle of oil without which it would blemish in an unattractive manner, and started to sigh.

Tightening around his throat cut the sigh in half. His stomach gurgled with a frightening viciousness as though he had eaten rotten fish, and would soon suffer their wrath as it flooded unmentionable contents in both directions without remorse. The runes covering the girl’s hand glowed an unearthly hue of sapphire, growing in intensity as his afflictions worsened. He rushed past the girl with a hasty apology while air still remained in his lungs, bursting through the door as the magic loosened its grip.

“Ol-Lozen, you look shaken, love.”

The not-man, Ol-Lozen, gasped for air and bodily stability, taking in the sight of a woman who had forsook the latter in defiance of her advanced years. He took her precarious situation in all at once, hands flying to his temples in the sign of shock that, thankfully, remained universally constant.

“Are you,” he started, counting the number of books in the stack. One, two, three, four – “Are you insane?” – five, six, seven. His last word trailed off towards nothingness.

“Not so, not yet. All of my faculties are very much intact,” she replied, straining. “Thank you very much.”

Ol-Lozen stared at the woman, leaning on the tips of her toes off one edge of the pile of thick volumes, one hand grabbing a beam of the rafters so she could lean further out into open air and give the other the extra inches necessary to be several inches short of reaching a rolled-up scroll atop the bookshelf, and shook his head. If she fell, the few layers of shabby rug would do little to pillow the solid wood floor beneath.

“Here, Daigay, let me help.”

“Nonsense,” she snapped back. “Stretching is –” She paused, looking for the word. “…Jubilant…nerves…skeleton, almost… bones! Stretching is good for the bones. I am not some fossil bound to her bed. Not yet.”

“Sorry, but I don’t have a choice.” He reached up a hand for the scroll. She turned to him with a biting comment on her tongue when her eyes fell on the dim ring circling Ol-Lozen’s throat, and the words slipped back down.

“No. I suppose you don’t.”

His fingertips searched the bookshelf’s roof, tapping around where he thought the scroll should be, grazing the rolled yellow document and inadvertently pushing it out of reach. “Maybe I do need help after all.”

“Just lift me by the waist. End this struggle for us both.” He nodded, following her instructions. When Daigay cried in success, he returned to the woman barely a head taller than Mouse to safety. She gave Ol-Lozen an appreciative pat on the cheek – once he bent down so she could reach – tossing the scroll into a basket of similar looking documents rolled tight with varying colors of cloth.

“Now, if you’ll pardon me, I have a daffodil’s petal to twist.” Her smile twitched below the eye. “Mouse!” she shouted. The child practically leapt in, ignorant of the danger, swiftly finding her ear pinched between two cross fingers. Words Ol-Lozen had no reference for erupted from Daigay’s lips. With a perfunctory cough, he slipped out the hovel with all the stealth a green, muscled giant could muster.

“You needed help!”

More words.

“Grandmama, he’s here for that purpose! To help you!” Mouse waved her runed hand as though she were trying to muster a spell to change Daigay’s mind, but the aged magus remained steadfast, youthful blustering a magic she had already prepared defenses against, and refused its sway. Ol-Lozen stood in the sun as the bickering continued, listening, a smile at play on his uneven features. He thought of his own mother, his own family, fighting as his hosts did now over matters small and easily forgiven.

“Families are the same no matter where you stand,” he said aloud to no one but himself. An uncomfortable emotion rose in him; an unwelcome sour not of fruits or candy that burned his throat. He wiped the wetness from his eyes and returned to the blade, now warmed from its time in the sun, and was as dry as bone, slight grey discoloration at its furthest edge, sheared off by design as to be flat, without the purpose other blades were forged to possess.