First-Time Experience by wind rider

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First-Time Experience

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First-Time Experience

 

I.

 

Kía frowned petulantly at her father. “Why can’t I go with you?” she protested vehemently. “I wish to sell my wares myself. It is yet peacetime, and there are a lot of guards for this caravan.” When her father glowered with displeasure at her, she glared back. Behind him, his friends chuckled heartily and winked at her behind her father’s back, their braided beards quivering with amusement.

 

Perhaps sensing the winks and the meaning of the chuckles, her father at last capitulated grudgingly. So she hurried back into their house, promising to be back soon. And true to her promise, she went back out only in a handful of moments, huffing and puffing but with happiness and excitement in her eyes, shouldering a pack and carrying several rolls of cloth in her arms. She was finally going to see what the buyers of her masterpieces would say about her work!

 

“Are you sure you want to sell that one, daughter?” her father asked her uncertainly, torn between incredulity and confusion. He jesticulated wildly in place of words, staring wide-eyed at the particularly-lurid orange cloth-roll peeking among the bundle.

 

Kía glared and ignored him as best as she could. She could not help being flustered all the way to the waiting wagons of the caravan leading out of Belegost though. What was wrong with selling, buying and wearing something orange? She had painstakingly prepared the die from a recently-discovered secret recepy of her own, and she had just as painstakingly spun the cloth in a very long time (her father and mother had finished three chainmails when she finally finished it). It would stand wear and smudging and fading by water and dirt and wind – something the above-grounders must be concerned of, given the weathers. It would also be good for the under-grounders, especially blacksmiths like her parents, but oddly her friends had politely rejected buying the garment when she had first shown it to them…

 

It was not fun too to be the laughing stock of people, instead of laughing together with them. She grumbled and transfered her glare at her father’s friends when they chuckled at – well, it must be – her awkwardness. (Or perhaps the colour of the cloth-roll she intended to sell to the above-grounders?)

 

II.

 

As over-protected as she had always been, Kía had never traversed the road leading to the outside, aboveground world. Thus excited, she sat by the window of her father’s wagon and faithfully watched the changing views as the caravan trundled along the wide, winding way sloping up and paved neatly with cobblestones. It was interesting, how the familiar tunnels and halls of her homeland abruptly ended and changed into numerous trees and sunlight, and how different the world smelled then.

 

Before she could assimilate herself to this new environment, though, the shifting air carried a foul smell to her nose. “What is that, Father? Do you smell that?” she called to the front of the wagon, even as she pinched her nose to bar the foul odor from inhalation.

 

Her father did not reply. Instead, he manoeuvred the mountain goats moving their wagon around, and they went hurriedly back to the tunnels and halls familiar to Kía. Their wagon had been the last on the caravan discounting the one for the rearguards, but now they were the first, and other wagons were close behind, trundling with the same haste that had not been there when they had firstly set out.

 

When they had been back on the hall where they had firstly set out, Kía dared ask her father again. “What was that? Why did we come back here?”

 

Her father sighed and stared regretfully at her. “It was no ordinary smell, my love,” he said. “I wish you would never have to smell that. It’s the stench of orcs. It would be a big and needless folly to persist on our way when we knew they were waiting to ambush us.”

 

She stared wide-eyed at him. As over-protected she had always been, there were a few aboveground facts that her parents had not been able to shield from her. The presence of mindlessly-wicked, stinking, flesh-eating orcs was one of them.

 

And then the implication in her father’s words set in, and her eyes widened even more. “So you have been ambushed before because you didn’t smell the orcs?”

 

Her father nodded, and she gasped in horror. But he was quick to soothe her this time. “We didn’t lose much, and nobody was hurt. Who dares to challenge the children of Mahal and lives, after all?”

 

She arched a weak smile. Afterwards, she forcefully busied herself lamenting the fact that she had not been able to sell her garments all the same, pointedly refraining from thinking that her father could have been killed in one of his ventures aboveground by the orcs whom she had caught the stench of in the shifting air.

 

She wished to cherish her beautiful romances above the world outside her homeland and how the above-grounders looked and spoke.