Despite all reports to the contrary, it was kind of nice.
Benjen yanked hard on his makeshift fishing rod as the line tugged; from the surface of the emerald-green sea burst forth a fish with nasty-looking spines and fangs and claws on the tips of its fins. It flopped on Benjen's rock, before its four eyes swiveled onto him and the thing hissed. If not for the flora and fauna, Benjen could almost forget that he was on the coast of the most dangerous continent known to man.
"Well," said Elijah, staring at the angry fish. "You could throw it back into the ocean. Or you could do a service to the world and kill it. You'd probably want to smash it with a rock or something. From a distance, I mean."
"Yeah," said Benjen, stepping away. He picked up a good-sized rock and threw it at the flailing creature; it immediately went still as its skull was crushed. "Do you think the spines or claws are venomous?"
"No idea. But considering where we are, it might be prudent to trim them," said Elijah, and Benjen nodded. He hopped off his rock, wading through knee-deep water back to shore, dragging the fish behind him still attached to the line. Pulling it onto the sand, Benjen grabbed his knife from his campground and hacked off the spines and fins, one by one.
"Still, a pretty good haul," commented James. There was a pair of sea bass with highly armored scales, and two crabs that looked like they had crawled out from the bottom of the Seven Hells — their shells looked like someone had decided to replicate the Iron Throne, except in blood red. The Sothoryi wildlife, it had to be said, was weird.
"Yeah," said Benjen. "How should I cook it?"
"The crabs? Boil them. The fish you could probably grill them, after getting rid of the guts. Make sure to wash thoroughly, too, just in case Sothoryos has seen fit to give even fucking sea bass venom sacs."
Getting rid of the scales on the bass proved difficult, to say the least. James took the opportunity to talk about the 'Theory of Evolution' and how more strongly armored individuals had survived to adulthood and bred, while the less armored ones died before they could produce offspring; it seemed that Sothoryi wildlife had a sort of evolutionary 'arms race' that had gone wild. The same must have happened for the crabs from hell.
"It's a good thing you didn't swim here," James said. "Didn't that one Lyseni sailor at King's Landing mention a shark that had fanged tentacles around its mouth that would use those fangs to carve the flesh off its victims?"
"As nice as the ocean is, it might be better to stay in the shallows," Benjen agreed.
Benjen made his way closer to the tree line, but not quite; the skies were almost entirely clear, the setting suns leaving it painted azure in the west and indigo in the east and all sorts of colors in between, so he suspected it wouldn't rain any time soon. So, he dug a firepit into the sand, collected some felled twigs and dried leaves from the edge of the jungle, and lit a fire that sprung forth from his fingertips. It was one of the first tricks he'd learned.
Lamenting at how his father's knife would lose its edge against this highly armored bass, Benjen scraped off the scales and gutted it; he dragged the fish back into the ocean and washed them out.
Then he stuck them on sticks and planted them comfortably next to the fire. He pulled a copper pot from his backpack and hung it over a tripod above the fire, filling it with seawater, and dropped the crabs inside once it made to boil.
Benjen focused on his breathing, allowing his thoughts to feed into the flame, leaving behind a void. On a journey as long as this with only one person for company — one who was perfectly content with silence, at that — meditation and Occlumency were a good way to pass the time while still being productive. Soon enough, Benjen might start learning Legilimency, if they could find a reliable partner to test it on.
Keeping his mind blank such that any action he took felt like wading through a pool of honey, Benjen reached out and poked the fire with a stick, watching the embers swirl and dance before they burned out their brief lives. By the time he'd come to his senses, so deep had he sunk into the darkness of his own mind, the skies were dark and night was upon them, and a million stars burned bright in the sky.
There was a slight rustling from the trees, and immediately Benjen was on his feet, drawing his sword. His eyes flickered between the trees. Was he about to encounter a basilisk sooner than he'd expected? Or perhaps it was something else, some other horror of the Sothoryi jungle that had come to devour him in the night.
Then he saw it. From the same area where the rustling came, emerged two humanoid shadows; as they stepped into the light, Benjen blinked at their features. They had as many features of apes as they did of men; their entire body was covered in hair, with both pale and dark stripes all over their body, possessed long, muscular arms relative to their overall body length, and had flat faces with long, sloped foreheads. While neither of them wore any clothes (Benjen was glad for the darkness and the hair) one of them wore some sort of fang on a cord necklace, as well as a stone hand-axe, and both carried spears made of sharpened wood.
"Hello?" Benjen tried, knowing it wouldn't really get the message across.
The ape-men grunted and snorted; they shook their weapons and sneered. Benjen flinched at that display, and as if waiting for this reaction, the ape-men began to advance. Benjen held his sword wardingly in front of him, but couldn't help the fear that turned his legs into stiff boards.
"Stay back," Benjen warned, hating how high-pitched he sounded.
"I'm taking over," James whispered in his mind, and Benjen felt himself being shoved out of control, an observer in his own body. After the brief moment of panic that always followed such an event, Benjen focused on his senses again.
James-as-Benjen stood up straight, relaxed, and looked into the leftmost ape-man's beady eyes; a flash of something flew past him as the ape-men hesitated at Benjen's sudden change in demeanor. Then something else. Fragments…memories, Benjen realized; this was Legilimency. James seemed to be searching for something, as he steered his mental spear into one direction or another…
Benjen's throat and mouth were not used to making such sounds, but judging by the way the ape-men froze in their tracks, it was close enough to be understandable. The two ape-men glanced at each other, before the one on the left, with the necklace, uttered something in that guttural tongue of theirs.
James spat something back harshly, but apparently that was just how their language sounded, because the two ape-men lowered their spears and approached easily. James had Benjen sit back on the piece of driftwood he had been sitting on before, and the two ape-men sat opposite him, across the fire.
James plucked the bass from around the fire — nicely charred — and passed it to the ape-men, who muttered something, possibly in gratitude. James then fished out the crab from the pot, which having boiled for some time now had turned a pleasant pink.
"They're hunter-warriors of their tribe, looks like," James whispered to him in his mind. "It's not unoften that slavers touch this area. Usually to draft them into the fighting pits around Slaver's Bay. A half-beast half-human is a popular contender to bloodsport, it seems."
"What did you say to them?" Benjen asked.
"I told them I was an animal-hunter, specifically, not a man-hunter, and that I had peaceful intentions. Then I offered to share food, because that's how you make friends."
James graciously accepted a piece of pale white fish from the less decorated ape-man; the junior of the two, Benjen supposed. In return, James snapped the crab's legs off and offered one to the ape-man. He only stared curiously, until James demonstrated how to eat it. The ape-man nibbled, then he turned to his partner, offering some.
"I think they like it," James said. "It's not bad. Not as good as the snow crabs, but not bad."
The elder of the two said something again; James responded, gesturing to the rock pools on the coast. Then James gestured at the skies. The ape-men shook their heads and went back to their food.
"They told me where I found them, and I said I'd show them how to catch them once the sun was up," James translated. "Shaking their head signals acceptance, apparently. And nodding is a gesture of refusal."
"That's really confusing."
"Indeed. The world is wider than we can imagine, I suppose."
After their meal was finished, James signalled something to the ape-men (who shook their heads again) and lay down beside the fire. As Benjen was relinquished control of his body once more, he dwelt on the two ape-men who had joined him in sleep and were softly snoring. He had heard tales of Ibbenese, and Lengii who were so tall as to dwarf Hodor, but he'd never reallyexperiencedsuch culture shock before.
"We have to learn more about them," Benjen murmured, and James hummed his agreement.
"If you can keep me in charge," said James, "then I'll make conversation. You can write it down in your journal later. It would be groundbreaking research, I suspect."
Benjen hummed. Indeed, few Westerosi dared even set foot on Sothoryos, much less interact with their native inhabitants (most of which wanted to kill you). Judging by Maester Walys' lack of knowledge on the mysterious continent, Benjen suspected nobody — at least in Westeros — had any idea how these men lived.
He could become the second Lomas Longstrider! A second Corlys Velaryon! He could explore all over the Known World, and the Unknown portions as well, as far east as Mossovy and beyond; as far south as the southernmost tip of Sothoryos. The anticipation and nervous excitement was a tangible sensation in his breast.