Daniel Jackson stepped out into the middle of the road and waited for the next cart to trundle his way.
The members of SG-1 had heard it coming, creaking and grinding along the road. Daniel was elected, being the one among them with the most facility in languages. He stood in the middle of the road and tried to look un-threatening. The sound of the whipped reins carried to him in the almost ethereal silence of the forest.
Daniel waited patiently, spending his time by trying to work out what Earth based society supplied the root-stock on this planet. He reviewed the cart design and the colours in the man's clothing. He considered the colouring of the man's skin and his hair and he also noted that he turned the cart down a side road and failed to come any closer.
"Damn," muttered Jackson.
*
Jack O'Neill watched the approaching cart with interest. So far, they had seen two of them come along that road and they had both turned off before they could make their past where SG-1 were camped. They were few and far between.
SG-1 had settled in for the wait and even broke out their rations, taking advantage of the time they had on their hands for a spot of lunch.
The cart that O'Neill had spotted was still some way short of the turn off yet. It would probably follow the others, but you never knew.
"What have you got?" O'Neill asked Daniel Jackson.
Jackson opened his sandwich and catalogued the contents. "Salmon, mayonnaise, lettuce, cheese, tomato, and a bunch of green and yellow things that I can't identify. What have you got?"
O'Neill stared at a sandwich that seemed to be cheese and gherkin. "The short straw," he said. Perhaps there was something in the cart. He peered over his shoulder. It was still a ways short of the turn off yet. "I'll swap you," he offered Jackson.
"That was a good try," conceded Jackson and then bit into his own sandwich.
O'Neill turned his attention to Samantha Carter. "What have you got Sam?"
"Hrmph, gnaphfl," she said around a mouth full of grilled ham and pineapple in a savoury bun. "Amdfl myfn."
"Teal'c," O'Neill asked.
"Chicken salad," Teal'c said. His lip curled up at the sight.
"Damn," said O'Neill who was still contemplating which was worse, hunger or gherkin. Hunger still looked like a good option.
"Would you like to have it," Teal'c said. His lip wouldn't come back down out of his sneer until he closed the lid on his sandwich. "The idea of consuming flesh is repulsive."
"Each to their own," said O'Neill hurriedly and almost snatched the sandwich out of Teal'c's hand. He took a bite that was almost the size of half of the first triangle he managed to get near his mouth. "Goob paff gooff," he said.
Teal'c settled down to consume his sandwich with a more subdued expression on his ebony face.
O'Neill hadn't checked on the progress of his cart for a while. He glanced over his shoulder to see where it was up to.
It passed the turn off and continued on in the direction of SG-1.
O'Neill considered punching the air, but restrained himself when he thought how it would look to the others under his command.
"I suppose that I'll speak to the goatherd over there on the cart," Daniel Jackson said. He was about to put the unconsumed half of his sandwich back on the ground near where they were sitting and then saw the expression on O'Neill's face. He had second thoughts.
"The what?" O'Neill said.
"The cart? Down there. Can't you see it?"
"No. The other word. Goatherd?"
"Oh that? Job peasants used to do once. They herded goats. It's hardly something that needs a room temperature IQ to work out."
With that behind them, Daniel stepped onto the road and began waving at the man driving the cart. He still had his sandwich in one hand and took another bite.
It took the man about a second to spot Jackson, sum up the plethora of weaponry suspended on his person, note the dishevelled and dirty appearance of the man and then put two and two together. The cartwright worked out that it was a bandit. He heaved on the reins and implored the horse to accelerate along the roadway so that they could avoid the meeting.
Naturally the horse thought this was a great time to rear up and wave it's fore hooves about threateningly.
Daniel Jackson might have had guns hanging off either side of him, but his first reaction upon seeing half a tonne of horse intent on stomping him into the gravel was to dive for the underbrush. He acted on the impulse without further thought. He landed with a heavy thump that knocked the wind out of his lungs and caused his diaphragm one of those convulsions that make it difficult to draw your next breath.
The cart rocketed past his position with a rumble and a rattle, bouncing uncontrollably for a while, until the horse got it's rhythm back. It rounded the bend in the road and dropped a crate full of melons onto the gravel, where most of them broke into red fleshed watery shrapnel. Of course one of them remained intact and it rolled all the way back along the road until it came to rest against Jackson's foot.
Throughout the frantic flight, Jackson had not noticed the melon catastrophe, being occupied with the difficult task of jump starting his breathing again and it was left to Jack O'Neill to kick the melon away. Of course it smashed open onto his boot thus adding its syrup to the rest of the road dirty that was marring his spit and polish.
O'Neill thrust a hand toward Daniel Jackson and said, "I think that went about as well as could be expected."
Jackson looked down at the wreckage of his sandwich, lying scattered all over the road, and frowned in disappointment.
*
The phone that Janet Fraiser had so negligently left resting on the table beside her, rang a second time, thus interrupting the flow of Teal'c narrative just when it had started getting interesting. She had the good grace to look embarrassed.
Every one loves a good pratfall and that was one of the best. All eyes in the room whipped around to glare at the telephone malevolently.
"Answer it Doctor Fraiser," General Hammond instructed.
She had been wearing one of those 'I can't believe this is happening to me expressions' that people wear after they forgot to turn their phone off when they were boarding the plane and it rings half way along the runway.
She listened to the blowfly voice on the other end for a moment and then her eyes sprang open wide. "You're sure?" she asked, breathlessly.
She waited a bit longer while the fly-voices in her ear rattled on a bit more about something that no-one else could make out. The entire conference room's compliment of military brass waited on her words, hanging there with bated breath. There were eight people in that room and you could have heard a pin drop. (And they still couldn't make out what the voice on the other end of the phone was talking about no matter how hard they tried.)
"I'll be right down," Janet Fraiser said finally, before she closed the phone.
"News?" General Hammond implored.
"That was the medical monitoring team," she said simply. "They've found a major anomaly."
"Find out the details and let me know as soon as you know what is going on."
Janet gathered her phone and excused herself from the table.
"Carry on Teal'c," General Hammond suggested.
*
Daniel Jackson tried first contact, a second time, but without the weaponry this time. Things went much better.
He faced another cart full of goats, except this time there were no melons hiding back there. The cart contained five goats, smelling up the local environment and looking around at the world with an expression on their face that said, man-this-place-is-complicated---they-expect-us-to-breathe-and-eat-at-the-same-time---bummer. They stared at Jackson for a while before deciding that he wasn't edible, and then went back to their major preoccupation, converting food into fertiliser.
The goatherd pulled his cart to a halt and gave a visible start. To Daniel Jackson it looked as though the man hadn't seen him step onto the road. The horse had stopped the cart before the man had reacted. Obviously the brains of the outfit was in control of the vehicle. And there it was, standing indolently at the front of the cart, the horse regarded Jackson with an expression that seemed to have more intelligence behind it than the man holding the reins. For his part, the rein holder stared at Jackson as though waiting for him to do something amusing. They regarded each other from a distance of five metres for a while. No one spoke.
Jackson wasn't sure what language he should try first. Something European, Russian perhaps?
The goatherd appeared to be debating how it was possible for a person, one that he did not recognise, to exist in the world. He had the sort of inbred look that you would expect from someone with that approach to life. His eyes were too close together, his ears were too far apart, his forehead sloped back from his eyes and his teeth had long since begun finding other places to live.
For good measure, the horse commented on the situation by dropping a load of fertiliser onto the roadway. The air was that little bit thicker and hay fever was a viable option for Daniel Jackson. It was a great pity because he had been blessedly free of allergic reactions for the last hour or so, since his antihistamine tablets had kicked in.
From nowhere a flock of flies appeared. They made a fly-line for the new batch of fertiliser, except for the one that decided the investigation of Daniel Jackson was a much better idea.
"Hello," Daniel Jackson called to the man behind the reins of the cart. He felt the need to sneeze growing as a tickling at the back of his head.
The man's brain took a few moments to catch up with current events. It would not be unfair to say that he would need to watch CNN all day every day, to catch up with what day it was. Assimilating news required another plane of intelligence altogether.
He stared at Jackson suspiciously, but at least he hadn't run away. It was a major step forward in the development of Jackson's interpersonal skills.
His mouth dropped open, as though he was about to speak, and then he stopped, consulted the manual on the use of vocal chords, and tried to puzzle the whole process out. The index proved a significant challenge.
Jackson held his hands up in what he hoped was the universal gesture of surrender, or at least and attempt to convey the whole, 'see I'm unarmed and my hands are where you can see them' speech without resorting to words. The guy had obviously not seen an Arnold Shwazenegger or Bruce Willis movie, because if he had, then he would not have relaxed upon seeing this, knowing that the guy must surely have a gun strapped to his back somehow.
"What do you want sir?" demanded the man in the cart. He obviously lacked the brains to be suspicious about all the metal that had been hanging off Daniel's webbing. With another brain, he might be dangerous. This is what he was thinking; Jackson didn't have a knife or a sword or a cross bow so he couldn't be a bandit. That was the sort of logic this guy used. They hadn't had any of those things when Jackson and O'Neill took out Ra.
They did have a five kilotonne nuclear explosive though.
The language the goatherd used was familiar to Jackson. It was a variant on German, probably rooted in Romania, or perhaps Hungary, from sometime in the early Middle Ages. It had diverged from the root, but only slightly. Yet another sign of the Goa'uld, Jackson thought. Continuity of language was a trait of more developed civilisation than they had seen any signs of so far.
"We seek directions," Daniel hazarded.
The cart-riding goatherd seemed puzzled by Daniel's awful pronunciation. His mouth moved while he translated it into German from garbled.
"Whence to sir?" He asked.
"Your local lords abode," suggested Daniel.
This was the sort of thing the goatherd was hoping for, an opportunity to refer this little conundrum to a higher authority. It had just started to dawn on him that speaking with a stranger on the road might not have been a good idea when it came to the self preservation stakes, and that there were ways to fashion weapons that need not use highly stresses pieces of timber.
"Atop yon hill sir," suggested the cart man.
"And, ah, how far would it be?"
"That would depend on the manner of your transport sir."
"Afoot?"
"Why that would take ye most of a day sir. I would offer you the use of my cart, should I be travelling that way, but as you can see I am not." And have no intention of doing so for you, was implied by his body language.
"Then we had best be on our way then," Jackson agreed.
"There be a group of you then sir?" the goatherd managed to work that out from the use of a collective pronoun, thus producing an extraordinary feat of cogitation given the processing equipment that he had been issued by genetic chance.
"Some, yes."
"Then there is not such a need for my warning, but I give it to you freely. Be careful as you go sir. Those woods are full of daemons and nightwalkers. A man alone is much at risk. I would not be out at night if I were you. Be on your guard should you still be on the trail after dark."
Daniel Jackson was an archaeologist. There was probably no curse that it is possible to mouth, or no obscure warning about monsters that could be uttered, that he had not been told, read or suffered at some time in his life. He grinned to himself before asking; "Of what manner of monsters do you refer?" He asked.
The goatherd gathered himself back to together after taking a long look into the depths of the woods. "Daemons, and night walkers as I said sir. They are a bad lot sir, not behoved to the laws of man are they. They answer to our Lord and that only barely. When he sleeps they are free to roam and they are the devils own spawn."
OK so that was nothing new, thought Jackson.
"Thank you for the advice. Good day to you."
The cart rolled drunkenly along the road heading slowly in the direction that SG-1 did not want to go.
*
Teal'c paused and took another sip from the glass by his side. He looked at General Hammond in mild inquiry, hoping for guidance on the manner of his story telling.
General Hammond nodded acquiescence.
Everyone enjoys a good campfire and a ghost or demon story (even if it is spelled with an 'a') and the entire conference room team had perked up at the possibility. Everyone knows that a story that includes a peasant making dire warnings in first contact means that the team will scoff at the idea and march ignorantly onward toward certain difficulties.
Inside the conference room where Teal'c held his audience in the palm of his hand, knowing looks were exchanged. There's an element of suspense missing in this instance of course because the debriefers already knew that bad things happened to the SG-1 team. For them the mystery centred around what it might have been that befell them.
A few of them sat up and paid more careful attention.
"Go on Teal'c," prompted General Hammond.
*
Daniel Jackson stared after the man and his cart for a moment. Well actually what he did was stare at the empty roadway and the lingering dust, but in his mind's eye he was still reviewing the conversation, and little things like the signal that his brain was receiving from his ocular sensory organs were being ignored for the moment. Jackson was digesting the information and tasting the nature of the warning. "Daemons?" he asked himself out loud. "Goa'uld perhaps?"
It seemed likely. He rubbed his hands together. Now they were talking.
As soon as the cart was out of sight, Jack O'Neill stepped from the underbrush and up to Jackson. He waited for a moment for Jackson to return to the real world. People who dealt with Jackson on a regular basis have developed a unique set of skills in the art of patiently waiting for Daniel to notice that you are there and are keen to interact. O'Neill employed his version of those skills, he whomped Jackson a big one on the shoulder, almost knocking him off his feet.
"What did he say?" O'Neill asked.
"He said there was a castle up that way," Jackson replied, putting his glasses back on the bridge of his nose with one hand while simultaneously pointing along the road from which the cart had rolled toward them, "and the lord lived there."
"All that," O'Neill said and waved his arms around, encompassing the cart and the world and the road and the long conversation between Jackson and the goatherd, "for that?"
Jackson had allocated more of his processing power to the conversation with Jack O'Neill realising that the input/output buffer was filling up while the processor was busy running a speculating routine with the goatherds warning as the seed for it's simulation study. He even managed to focus on Jack O'Neill's face and give a passable impersonation of someone who cared what O'Neill thought and what he had to say. "Well no, there was warnings about monsters and demons and other things that went bump in the night."
"You get that," O'Neill said and nodded his head sagely. "It seems to happen everywhere we go."
"He seemed very insistent," Jackson said. His tone was disquieted. Inside the nasty confines of his head, the simulation routine had finished delivered it's preliminary findings. The output method it chose to convey the results of that study was to produce stomach acid and make Jackson's bowels twitch. This combination of sensory impressions leaves the recipient with the impression that bad things are coming their way. Metaphorically speaking of course. It's the job of the optical sensors to let the central processing unit know that something physical was actually approaching, although the audio receptors have been known to undertake this task from time to time.
O'Neill gave him one of those 'god how can you credit this crap' kind of looks. "Wild animals?" he asked. "Renegade Goa'ulds?"
Samantha Carter and Teal'c stepped out of the undergrowth and stood on the track to better hear the conversation between Jackson and O'Neill. They weren't eavesdropping, they wanted to join in.
"I suspect he actually meant wild animals," Jackson agreed. "He suggested getting a move on so that we get there before dark and then, to be on our guard."
"Sounds good to me," O'Neill agreed. "Sound plan, OK, let's move it."
"Not like the Goa'uld to allow another organism to be competition to their slave species," Carter observed. "If the lord is a Goa'uld, he wouldn't leave any thing out there that might interfere with his slaves."
"I got the impression that the system lords are not so well in charge here," Jackson said.
"They do not alter their methods for any one Daniel Jackson," Teal'c judged.
"In what way?" Carter persisted, posing the question to Jackson.
"Only vague references," Jackson said. "Nothing really concrete. It's just that the locals seem to think of them as, you know, slightly better than human, not as gods as you normally hear them described. The description was no more awestruck than any peasant in a feudal society."
"Perhaps they're not the same," O'Neill said. "Perhaps we're not talking about Goa'ulds."
"Oh, come on Jack," Daniel said. "Look around you. They're as human as you and me. Only the Goa'uld carried men to other stars to act as their hosts. Why else would they be here?"
O'Neill nodded, agreeing again. It was disconcerting. "OK."
"Shouldn't we be moving?" asked Carter.
"Yep let's go," O'Neill instructed.
SG-1 set forth.
*
Janet Faiser paused for a moment before commencing the autopsy. She refused to look at the body on the table. It had already upset her composure more than she wanted to let on.
She pulled the second of her latex gloves on with a snap, giving her two layers on each hand. She was dressed in a environmental isolation suit, and breathed air from a medical air supply delivered from a bulk pressure cylinder behind one of the walls.
It always paid to be careful when you were dealing with alien organisms.
OK, she was ready. Her assistant was poised by the table. Her shiny stainless steel and nickel plated implements were arranged in neat little rows beside the table. She stepped over and pulled the microphone down from the ceiling.
"Subject 119. Delivered from planet," she had to check her notes to find out what they were calling this one, it was the same unimaginative P4****. They were interchangeable as far as she was concerned.
"The subject is a male human, cause of death…" she paused. "This is going to be a real no-brainer."
She pulled the sheet off the body. It had been propped almost a metre clear of the table surface like a tent. The sheet tangled at the last moment and had to be tugged a second time to get it clear of the tree branch that was sticking out of the man's chest. There were even a few leaves still hanging from unbroken twigs. They waved in the breeze from the forced ventilation system that isolated the autopsy suite from the rest of the SGC compound.
"He appears to have a mall tree growing out of his chest, having pierced his lungs and heart between the third and fourth ribs. I'm going to removed the 'stake' now," she struggled with it for a few moments, and managed to wiggle it around, but it wouldn't come free. "Give us a hand," she asked her assistant. Between the two of them they managed to widen the hole where the stake had punctured the guy's chest but only enough to loosen it a bit. Janet was wary of doing too much damage to either the tissue of the guy's lungs or to the stick for that matter. Once it was free, she raised it slowly.
The guy's eyes flicked open and then focussed on Janet. They glowed from within.
She had seen that trick before. It might win you a few free beers at the local pub, but it carried no weight with Janet Fraiser. She watched him warily for a moment while he decided how to behave. His chest rose and fell. She waited a bit longer. His face took on a nasty snarling aspect. She looked at him once more and then pushed the stake back into his chest. He was still.
"OK," said her assistant. "What do we do now?"
"I'm going to make a phone call," Janet said. The microphone pick ups built into the environmental isolation suits could tie into the local phone network. She dialled a key pad and waited while the ring tone buzzed into her ear.
"General Hammond, it's me Janet Fraiser," she told the microphone. "Can I speak with Teal'c for a moment. Thanks. Teal'c, yeah it's Doctor Fraiser. Is there anything I should do before I remove the stake from this guy? Uh huh. Uh huh. Is that really necessary? It sounds a bit drastic. Well if you're sure. That difficult? OK, no we have tools for that sort of thing. Thank you."
"What do we do?" her assistant asked.
"Can you just duck out the back and get me the chain saw?"