Chapter 4

Edwin stepped out of the bank and looked around at his surroundings. The stench was mind blowing. The frontier town was nestled in amongst a cloud draped mountain. The clouds filtered out the sunlight giving the morning a dark oppressive feel. The air was thick with moisture, thick enough to see. It was the kind of damp that seeped through clothes making them wet and uncomfortable to wear. He looked up at the clouds hoping that it wouldn’t rain, but knowing that it would.

There were a few people moving around the streets pursuing whatever important business that was their calling. Edwin, as did everyone else (including both men and women), was wearing clothes that would have looked appropriate on a mountain man, living on the western end of the North American continent in the mid-1800s. His outfit consisted of leather pants, a wool shirt, and a loose fitting leather jacket. He wore leather boots that came up to nearly his knee. The leather, supple like suede, had a sheen to it resulting from being repeatedly rubbed with oil to keep it from getting soaked in the frequent rains. Given the kind of rough terrain surrounding the town, the clothes were eminently practical.

Judging by the weapons the men carried, it was obvious that bows and arrows were favored over swords. Every man carried a substantial looking knife that was almost large enough to be a machete along with a smaller skinning knife. Quite a few of them carried a hand ax, tucked into their belt, as well. In a way, the choice of armaments made sense to Edwin. The vast majority of men in this town were woodsmen. A bow allowed one to hunt game, a knife was a general purpose tool, and an ax allowed one to gather wood with ease. Swinging a sword in rough brush just wasn’t practical.

It was still early in the day, and he had a long trip ahead of him. If things went well, he could rescue the damsel and return to town in a single day, although it would be too late to return to Crossroads. He didn’t expect things to go well. With his senses on high alert for danger, he headed towards the edge of town, along the road that would take him to the Damsel.

Almost all of the men he passed on the street performed the same mental assessment of him. He was unarmed. In that part of Chaos, it meant he had suffered some misfortune out in the woods, or he had lost a fight. Based on his overall appearance and that his clothes were not excessively worn, the conclusion that he had lost a fight was the most obvious cause of his being without a weapon.

None of the men hassled him, although all tracked his progress through town. For honest people, there were few things as dangerous as an unarmed man who might want to correct that situation by ambushing some unsuspecting person. On the other hand, no one of a criminal mindset was willing to go out of his way to attack an unarmed man, since it was unlikely that he’d have anything worth taking.

He was almost at the edge of town when he observed a woman squatting over a piss pot, located between two buildings. Without staring at her, he walked past. He didn’t think he could ever get used to seeing women urinate in public. It was a reminder that he wasn’t on Earth, any longer.

He knew that urine was a valuable commodity in medieval times. It was used in everything from washing clothes to tanning hides. He wondered what local industry required sufficient quantities of urine to have the local residents collect it like that. It dawned on him that the fur industry was probably pretty extensive in this area, and that the urine collected probably had something to do with softening the pelts.

Upon reaching the edge of town, the street he was on diverged into two roads. One road headed up towards a mountain pass while the other road led down the mountain. They weren’t really much in terms of being roads, just a pair of ruts worn down by years of wagon traffic. He headed up towards the pass where generations of bandits had made a living by robbing traders taking their goods over the mountain. The two brothers were a half a day’s walk from town along that road.

Finding a piece of wood suitable for use as a club in the woods sounds easy, but Edwin discovered that it wasn’t. Without a knife or ax to cut a branch off of a tree, he was forced to find something that had fallen. Unfortunately, this wasn’t a nice dry northern ‘old growth’ forest such as one might find in the northeast. It was a rain forest, in which any wood on the ground rotted within days of falling. Every time he found a fallen branch that was the right size and shape for use as a club, it fell apart upon picking it up.

The fact of the matter, was that he had kind of expected that to be the case. Mercedes had told him that he might have to go down the mountain where it didn’t rain so frequently to find deadwood that would make a good club. The problem was that would add at least four days to the length of the mission.

He traveled with one eye open for anything that could serve as a weapon. He came across a creek in which there were small rounded stones covering the bottom. Squatting beside the water, he searched through the stones until he found two that were about the size of his fist. He picked them up just in case he couldn’t find anything better in his travels.

Shortly after finding the rocks, it began to rain. He crouched under a fir tree to keep as dry as possible. It wasn’t a heavy rain, just a slow constant fall of water from the sky. The storm didn’t last more than an hour, but it was just long enough to make him feel damp and miserable. At least the temperature wasn’t cold enough to make him completely miserable.

It wasn’t long after the rain had stopped that he reached the area where the two brothers lived. He left the road to travel through the thick woods. He had still not found a suitable branch to use as a club. There was no way that he was going to go against two armed men barehanded. He knew it was time to improvise.

He removed his woolen shirt, to use it to create a weapon. Using the stones that he had found, he stuffed a stone inside each sleeve of his shirt. He then tied the sleeves, to hold the stones in place. He used a series of simple knots on the body of the shirt, to make it easy to grasp. He was left with two stones that were about a yard apart, with a short section at a right angle that could be used to hold the weapon. He could swing the weighted arms of the shirt using the body of the shirt.

He tested his weapon against a branch of an oak tree and watched the limb split into pieces as a result of the blow. Swinging it was awkward, the trajectory of the stones was a little unpredictable, and the range was difficult to judge. It wasn’t a great weapon, but it did extend his reach by four feet, and getting hit with one or two of the stones could put a world of hurt on the recipient. At a minimum, there would be broken bones.

He sneaked into the area where the two brothers had a cabin. He found a spot from which he could watch the cabin. The two men were skinning a doe while the Damsel sat tied to a nearby tree. Professor Jackson studied the men. Based on the way in which they were dealing with the deer, he had no doubts they could use their knives on him with equal ease.

Mercedes had told him that they were big men, but being told that and seeing them were two different things. Tim, the older brother, was a few inches taller then the younger brother, Tom. Both were over six feet in height which made them giants in Chaos. They were well muscled with arms the size of tree trunks.

He hoped that being large would make them slow, but that hope was quickly squashed when he watched the one brother toss a haunch of venison over to the other. The throw had been off, but the one man had reflexively moved to catch it with a speed that Jackson thought nearly impossible for a man that size.

It was his hope that the two men might have a reason to split up so that he could taken them on, one at a time. Unfortunately, they were never more than ten feet apart. Carrying cuts of venison, they even made trips over to a small smokehouse together.

They worked side-by-side, each pausing occasionally to check out their surroundings. Occasionally, they would pause and laugh about something. The Damsel, seated on a rough cut log, would turn her head to look in his direction when the brothers were laughing. Edwin was too far from them to hear what they were saying.

He waited and watched while the sun slowly crossed the sky. When it was thirty minutes before night fell, the two brothers grabbed the Damsel and went into the cabin. Deciding that he wasn’t going to have a chance to rescue the Damsel that day, Edwin eased away from the cabin area where he could rest without chance of getting spotted.

Hopes dashed at having a one day outing, he scouted around for a dry place to spend the night. He managed to find a little pool and drank a small amount of water. It was getting too dark to forage for some food. He spent a long uncomfortable night sleeping under a tree. It rained again during the night.

The next morning Jackson returned to the cabin hoping to have better luck than the previous day. He watched the two men step outside the cabin while dragging the Damsel along with them. After tying her to a tree, they stood there looking around for a second. The older brother nudged the younger, said something, and then the two men laughed. The Damsel looked around with an expression of misery on her face. The two men went to work splitting some firewood.

Although Edwin couldn’t hear what the two men said, they chatted while working. It was obvious that they weren’t going to split apart or let the Damsel out of their sight. The morning passed with the two men working on little errands around the cabin. Jackson came to the conclusion that they were waiting for a Hero to show up to rescue the Damsel and would put off any banditry until taking care of her rescuer.

By the time noon arrived, Jackson was convinced that he was going to have to deal with both men together. The brothers kind of took the initiative away from him when they walked in his direction. Looking directly at where Edwin was hiding,

One of them shouted, “Come on out of there. We saw you, yesterday.”

Edwin knew that he had no hope of sneaking up on the two men. He rose from his hiding spot, and feebly walked towards them carrying his weapon so that it was hanging down by his side, and dragging on the ground. The impression he gave was of a helpless old man, hobbling out of the woods, dragging his shirt behind him.

The two brothers burst out in laughter at the pathetic sight he presented. There was no way that a man who looked like that could be a Hero from Earth on a mission to rescue a Damsel. They were going to have a little sport with him.

“Look at what the cat dragged in, Tim,” he said.

Laughing, Tim asked, “What kind of critter is it, Tom?”

“Must be some sort of worm, or something. It ain’t got a weapon,” Tom said shaking his head in disgust.

Tim stretched his massive arms and said, “I’ll take care of it.”

The Damsel shouted, “Run. They’ll kill you.”

Edwin stopped about ten feet away from the brothers. Tim stepped forward in a wrestler’s crouch: feet firmly under him for balance, leaning forward with hands outstretched. Knowing that the brothers enjoyed toying with a helpless victim, Edwin knew that if he was grabbed, he wouldn’t be long for this world. Tim would pull him into a bear hug, and then crush him in those massive arms.

When Tim lunged forward, Edwin swung his shirt. Dismissively, Tim grabbed the shirt to pull the man in closer. He was very surprised to discover that the sleeve was weighted. He screamed in pain when the second sleeve, holding a rock, slammed into his wrist shattering the bones. His hold on the shirt failed. Edwin swung the shirt again, and caught Tim on the side of his head. The huge man fell like a sack of potatoes at his feet.

Seeing his brother fall, Tom screamed in anger and charged at Edwin enraged. The smaller man dove to the ground, rolled, and came up on his knees swinging his shirt. He caught Tom with a solid blow on the upper leg. First one stone and then the second smashed into the man’s leg. Even injured, Tom twisted and managed to hit Edwin in the side with his fist while falling. The blow knocked the breath out of Edwin. Tom grabbed Edwin’s leg and began to pull him in for a bear hug.

Edwin swung the shirt overhanded, and hit Tom on the man’s back. Stunned by the pain, Tom released Edwin. Edwin scrambled away. Tom’s legs stopped moving, but the man continued to pull himself towards Edwin using his arms.

Moving gingerly, Edwin rose to his feet and hit Tom on the head with his shirt. There was a dull thud when rock connected with skull and then Tom stopped moving. A pool of blood slowly formed beneath the big man’s head. The fight was over.

Edwin stood, breathing heavily, and holding his side. Each breath was accompanied by a sharp pain. He couldn’t believe how much his ribs hurt.

“I think you broke one of my ribs,” Edwin muttered at the body, incredulous at the damage the man had been able to inflict with just a single blow.