Chapter 11: Press Block to Avoid Grievous Injury

After the altercation with the Flitchaye, Ripfang's crew experienced a rather peaceful journey. They were still leagues off course, but they were gradually drawing closer to Redwall, and their eventual prize.

After a few days, as the sun neared its zenith, they passed a modest house, deep in the forest. Though it would not matter to the crew for long, the house was occupied by a small family of moles, a father, mother, and two daughters, who made their way through life harvesting the berries and herbs in the region and tending to their humble property with care.

As is the case with many such stories, I'm telling you all this background information so you'll feel remorseful when they all die.

Naturally, Vrox was the first to smell the beasts hiding inside. He gestured at the house and nodded to Ripfang. Confused, Ripfang just nodded back. Vrox took this as permission, and loped off to the hovel. With a blood-curdling growl, he shouldered through the door and disappeared from sight. Ripfang waited a few moments, considering the ramifications of this unexpected action, then decided to find out for himself what was going on.

He motioned to his crew to hold position, then padded over to the house, an expression of mixed boredom and irritation masking his curiosity and mild trepidation. He reached the doorframe just in time to hear an anguished cry escape from the mother mole, before Vrox plunged his sword through her heart (and, due to the flat tip, most of her upper torso as well). The rest of the family lay slain around the cabin; not one was spared from the fox's hungered rampage.

Vrox turned and grinned at Ripfang, blood coating his muzzle; it seemed he hadn't even bothered to finish the hunt before partaking in the prey. Ripfang met his crazed expression with an annoyed glare. "I did not authorize this behavior," said the Rat Admiral. "This is murder."

"Oh please!" laughed Vrox. "Like you are any better, pirate."

"I do not murder. I operate cleanly and with integrity, without needlessly spilling the blood of creatures that have done nothing to me."

"And yet you take no issue when I slaughter Flitchaye?"

Ripfang narrowed his eyes. "The Flitchaye are cannibalistic, primitive creatures that lash out violently at any and all outsiders. They are not worthy of comparison to civilized creatures."

"Ha! You think yourself some moral paragon! At least I do not discriminate between preybeasts."

Ripfang scowled, but remained silent. Vrox returned to cleaning his kills. After some time, he heard the rat pad silently out of the cabin. He grinned to himself. Coward!

Vrox finished the cleaning and wiped the blood off his implements. He scoured the house for anything useful: blades, valuables, cooking spices and garnishes, and so on. He took one last look at his handiwork, stepped through the doorframe, and stopped.

Ripfang was waiting outside, one paw held up in an open-pawed gesture. Behind him, roughly a score of archers stood with arrows nocked and bows aimed directly at Vrox.

Ripfang began speaking with an eerily level tone. "Your actions today spit in the face of our code of honor. Your senseless killing is an affront to this crew and a detriment to your species, and it is my honorable duty to ensure you do not slay another innocent creature."

He clamped his paw into a fist, and Vrox only had time for one last look of absolute rage before a flurry of arrows sent his body to the ground. Several of the archers broke off from the group, collecting the valuables he had removed from the house, while others set about rigging the house to burn.

Ripfang pointed at the fallen fox. "Remove his haversacks and put them in the house, then deposit his body in the woods."

"Shouldn't we just burn him with the hut?" Switch asked. As one of the youngest members of the crew, and as a disabled lady, she tended to get away with questioning orders far more often than the other crew members.

"No," Ripfang replied. "He does not deserve the honor of a funeral pyre. Leave his corpse for the scavengers." He stamped off, still seething with undirected rage.

Evil-dog looked up in Switch's general direction. "He sounds much calmer."

"No kidding. That crazy badger got to him a lot more'n he's letting on."

'Crazy Legs' Agate had, in Smack's mind, the most absurd home he'd ever seen. The abode consisted of two stories, although the second floor was only half the width of the first. The entire first floor, and the leftover space above not occupied by the second floor, consisted of a single open room. On one side of the massive room, a mirror spanned the entire wall; the other was lined with racks upon racks of weights, dumbbells, and - strangely, for such a peaceful city - weapons.

Agate stood in the middle of the room, thoroughly thrashing a training dummy with a quarterstaff. The same finesse she put into her footwork during the dance competition was perfectly translated over to her current combat; she leapt around the dummy with a fatal sort of grace, striking blows from multiple angles in quick succession.

When she noticed Smack and Amity in the doorway, she leapt backward, executing a quick turn in the air, and assumed a neutral stance. "Didn't see you there, Amity. Who's this?"

Smack meandered over to peruse a shelf filled with practice swords. "Just a friend of Mako's who's been waylaid here for a bit," Amity replied.

"Well, any friend of his is…" Agate put a claw to her chin. "Well, at the very least, someone to pay attention to."

"No clue what Mako saw in him, though."

"I heard that!" Smack yelled. Amity only sniggered in reply.

Agate laughed a bit too. "Well, in any case, he's-" Her ear twitched, and her attention snapped over to Smack "Watch out!" she shouted as she launched forward, jumping athletically over Amity's head as she went. Smack looked at her with a bewildered expression, the sword that he had removed from the back of the shelf still in his paws.

She landed behind him, then grabbed him by the arm and flipped him over her shoulder. Then she leapt back, as the now unbalanced shelf came crashing to the ground right where he had been standing. The force of it hitting the ground shook the other shelves, sending various pieces of equipment toppling to the ground.

Smack rolled off his stomach and sat up, one paw cupped over his bleeding nose. "How did you…"

"That shelf has had issues with balance for a while, mostly due to an unsupported floorboard under one of the front legs," Agate explained. "I've managed to mitigate the issue for the longest time by putting the heavier items towards the back, opposite the poorly supported leg, but it's only ever been a temporary solution. In fact, I have a contractor coming over tomorrow to fix it. Gods only know how you managed to remove the one item that would totally imbalance it."

"But how did you know it was going to fall right then?"

Agate fixed him with a dead gaze. After a few seconds of measured silence, she responded, "There are some questions best left unasked-"

"Agate, FOR FUR'S SAKE, stop giving him the runaround!" Amity yelled.

That alone was enough to break Agate's cold expression, and she fell into a fit of laughter as Smack looked on at a loss for words. "I'm just having some fun with ya, kid." She held out a paw to help him up, which he gladly accepted. "To tell you the truth, I've been training in observation, in addition to more common workouts. Hearing is difficult to practice, but not completely impossible, and I've gotten quite good at listening to the sounds most beasts would miss."

Now, we'll step back a few seconds, because something very important was happening outside of everybeast's observation. The shockwave from the shelf hitting the ground caused many other objects to tumble down along the equipment wall. A barbell and a dagger crashed to the ground, and a quarterstaff landed between them with one end wedged under the dagger. Over time, a dumbbell sitting above rolled slowly to the edge, then tipped off and fell on the raised end of the quarterstaff. The makeshift lever pivoted on the dumbbell, tossing the dagger into the air and straight at Smack's face.

At the last second, Agate shot out a paw and caught the blade. The cloth wrap around her paw protected her from getting cut, and while she hadn't the strength to completely stop the projectile, her intervention turned what would have been a grievous injury for Smack into a moderate backpaw blow to the nose."I've also been working on my peripheral vision," Agate added.

Smack cupped a paw over his once again bleeding nose. He let out a string of profanities, which soon descended into unintelligible muttering.

"Ah, don't get too worked up over it," Agate chided. "Coulda been a lot worse." She then noticed the shield that had rolled off to the corner of the room. "Hey, that yours?" she asked, pointing at the discarded tool. Smack nodded, and retrieved the shield. "Hey, since it looks like the world itself is trying to kill you, why don't I show you a thing or two about using that?"

"Erm… yeah, sure. Not like I've got anything better to do here." The confusing prophecy that he had received with the shield weighed heavily in his mind, but there was no way he could actually fulfill it. Not with the world trying to kill him, anyway.

"Well, let's start with what you can already do." Agate selected a long sword-like device from the wall. "Back where I come from, they call this a 'bota'. It's a few pieces of thick reed, formed into the shape of a sword; they use it for contact training when there's still a chance of contact." She passed it to Amity, then turned to Smack. "Right, Amity's going to give you a few simple strikes. Try to block them as best you can. Begin!"

Immediately Amity was away, hacking and slashing with the fury of a moderate spring breeze. Though her attacks were slow, she had the advantage in height - namely, that Smack had trouble getting his shield low enough to block - her strategy leaned towards the unpredictable, and every strike she landed stung like a whip.

Finally, Agate called Amity off. "I have to ask, are you even trying to block?"

Smack grimaced, cradling his knee. "Of course I am! You think I like getting hit?"

Agate cupped her paws over her snout and stared at the ceiling. "Fffh, okay, we got a lot to work on." She took her paws off her nose and rubbed then together, then laced her pawfingers and pushed her palms outward. "Right, let's get started."

By the end of the day, Smack was exhausted and could barely feel his legs anymore. Despite that, he felt more accomplished than he had in a long while. The day had been entirely occupied by training, and for the first time he felt like he'd actually learned something meaningful.

He wasn't the only one in high spirits, as the three of them exited the studio; Agate had an exhilarated smile plastered on her face. "Man, I haven't taught kata in seasons! Hey, how long are you in town?"

"Well, my crew's back in Mossflower, and I don't expect they'll be picking me up, so unless somebeast else lets me sail with 'em, I'm here for good."

"Great! Meet me here day after tomorrow, and we'll get started on some more advanced first-level stuff." She patted him roughly on the elbow (she would have patted his shoulder, if she didn't have to fully extend her arm up to do so). "I get the feeling you're gonna go far, kid! You've got almost all the basic kata down in one day; I haven't seen that kind of dedication since before I moved here!"

With that final compliment, she turned and headed back inside her studio. Amity grabbed Smack's paw. "C'mon, I'll take you to my place. Tomorrow we can talk to some of the city officials and find you a way to earn your keep."

Smack scratched his chin. "Earn my keep?"

"Yeah. We have a monetary system here, to organize trade and keep things running smoothly. Barter doesn't work so well in trade centers; you need a standardized measurement of value that won't change too much over time." She pulled out a pouch of coins and held up a few for inspection. "You've got cubes, sickles, and bergs; 100 cubes make a sickle and 50 sickles make a berg. Sickles are worth about a day's salary; it differs depending on what job you get, but even the lowest of jobs will net you over 90 cubes a day."

"And everybeast uses these here?"

"Yeah; standard currency around the Artygian Ocean."

"The what?"

Amity gave him a shocked look. "The ocean. That Sampetra is right in the middle of."

"I've never heard that name before."

"Then what the hell do you call it?"

Smack scratched the back of his head. "Just, 'the Western Ocean', I guess."

Amity stared at him blankly. "...well that's just plain lazy."

"What the fur is 'Artygian' supposed to mean, anyway?"

"Gelida told me she started using it ironically to mock a pirate 'king' by the name of Artygos, who had claimed that the ocean was his domain. It caught on eventually, and now everybeast calls it that."

"So, I guess Gelida lost?"

Amity laughed quietly, but cast a furitive glance around. Her voice dropped to barely above a whisper. "Heh, yeah, but keep your voice down if you're gonna say stuff like that. Gelida's a bit unstable at the best of times, and she wouldn't take kindly to that notion if she got into one of her moods."

"Don't worry; I won't tell!" The new voice stopped them both in their tracks. They slowly looked up to see one of the batfolk watching them with interest from the rooftops. The strange creature took to all fours and crawled down the wall like some sort of lizard, pushing itself up to its hindpaws as soon as it arrived at ground level. "Ain't seen a foxy round here in ages! 'Course, I seen you all day, so mebbe it hasn' been that long!"

Smack looked down at the batling, which only stood slightly taller than Amity. His muzzle was seemingly permanently twisted into a childish grin, exposing a set of misaligned and chipped teeth. He was dressed in a simple pair of reddish-brown overalls, leaving ample space for the wings sprouting from his back, in addition to his normal limbs. A tool belt filled with random implements hung loosely at his hips; presumably, it didn't connect in the back, due to his wings, and had to be attached to the overalls themselves.

"You've been watching me… all day?"

"'Course I have! How else d'you esspect me ta do my job?"

"What, are you gonna tell the Queen I've been learning how to use a shield all day?"

"'Scuse? Naw, I tole ya I won't gon' tell; 'sides, dat ain't even my job!" With that he procured an object from behind his back. "I'm an 'abadasher!"

The item he produced was a hat, the kind of hat that warranted its own paragraph of description. If a bicorn had two points and a tricorn three, this was closely related to a quadricorn. However, the crown rose out of the center much like the "stovepipe" hats of Riften royalty. The base was a rich, deep black fabric, accented by red bands that swirled around the high cylindrical crown in a subtle pattern that closely resembled random placement. A pair of bright red feathers graced the left side; their hue was highly indicative of some sort of dye, as that tone of red couldn't possibly be natural. To top of the whole ensemble, about halfway up the crown on what would be the front corner of the hat was a polished jet crystal, set in a frame of red leather (also probably dyed).

The batling wasted no time in fluttering up and placing the hat on Smack's head. Amazingly, it was a perfect fit; even his ears were accommodated for, with small holes hidden by the curled brim allowing them to sit comfortably to the sides of the massive headgear. "Um, thanks?" Smack said, caught off guard by the gaudy accessory.

"No probbem! I like makin' hats, I just cann'elp it when I sees a new beast, I gotta get a hat on 'em!"

Smack took off the hat to inspect it. "Well, it's certainly…" Okay, it was a major fashion disaster, that much was indisputable. But it did have a certain sort of ingenuity to it, a flair of creativity. The seam work was well done; assuming it was cared for, this hat could last for generations. Every edge was neat and well planned; every ribbon was attached diligently on both sides. The embroidered pattern on the leather frame had been perfectly balanced, and that jet was flawlessly cut.

And this little batling had made it for him without being asked, for no other incentive than that he wanted to do it. He had poured so much effort into it, in less than a day's time, simply because he wanted Smack to have a hat. Nobeast would have done that for him back in the horde; Hellgates, even his dozens of families from his childhood seasons weren't this generous.

It brought a tear to his eye and a smile to his face. "I love it. It's amazing." He secured the hat back on his brow. "And who do I have to thank for this?"

"ME!"

Okay, could have been worded better. "Yes, but what's your name?"

The batling suddenly became very interested in tapping his claws together. "Oh, um, I ne'er had a name before. Ne'er needed one." He tapped his chin. "Uh, you can call me, um, um, oh!" He assumed a heroic stance, fists on his hips and chin held high to the side. "ZARGOTHRAX!"

Smack stared, processing the name. "Um, what-"

"Okbye!" Zargothrax turned around, put his claws to the wall, and shot up to the rooftops and out of sight. Smack gave a bewildered glance to Amity, who merely shrugged.

Fun Fact: Mercury was used in the production of felt in 18th and 19th century England. As felt was one of the most common materials for hats of the time, hatters (or haberdashers) were frequently subject to mercury poisoning. One of the prevalent symptoms of mercury poisoning is dementia, and the association of this condition with hatters led to the phrase "mad as a hatter", and possibly the inspiration for the Wonderland character as well. The More You Know!

Now, as for this chapter… Eh, might as well say it. I'm not entirely happy with this chapter. Everything here happened exactly the way I've laid it out, but I'm still not liking the way it came across. I'm not the type to avoid writing in absurd situations that will only make sense with information from way later in the story, but this chapter still felt a bit too forced in my opinion. Nevertheless, I've waited too long to put out the next chapter, so here it is in all its unexplained glory.