‘He’s a wizard. He’stesting me. Two can play that game!’
‘The Lady would notwish this creature’s life to be in vain. I will accept your offerto share its flesh, if you let me prepare it. They remain tough andinedible unless cooked carefully in a druid’s ground oven for atleast two hours.’
‘I thought you mightlike it raw, like the dog you ate on our last meeting.’
She ignored hisquip.
‘I don’t eat while onthe hunt. It makes my senses more acute. I hadn’t eaten for twodays at that stage and I was very hungry. Normally, I cook the foodI eat and I like it tasty and tender. There are many fruits,berries and fungi that can be found in the jungle which can addgreat flavour to a meal. Druids may live a rough life compared toothers, but we have very refined tastes. The Lady requires that welive amongst her creatures, but in doing so supplies us with anunlimited bounty of things to eat.
‘Druids can’t bepoisoned, except by vile magical concoctions created by wizards;hence we taste and eat many things that an ordinary person wouldpale at. My favourite is a red beetle that lives under the bark intrees far to the north. I often saw birds and lizards scouring thebark of these trees for the beetles. One day I tried one anddiscovered why. It gave the most pleasurable taste sensation that Ihave ever experienced. Since then I always collect some when I’mnearby.’
‘You’ve convinced me,’said Aquitain. ‘I’ll leave the cooking in your skilled hands.However, can we get a move on; just the thought of it is making mefeel hungrier than ever.’
Miranda felt pleasedwith herself. She had defended the honour of the druids and couldnow get to work. She was hungry herself and hadn’t tasted thesucculent flesh of one of these creatures for a year or two. Shefirst went for a walk up along the stream and returned with severallarge fronds removed from some nearby palm trees, then dug a holein the dry sand two paces wide and one deep, and lined the bottomof the pit with fronds.
‘Let me show you how tofind plates and a knife on a beach like this,’ she said, andAquitain followed her to the seawater line near the entry point ofthe stream.
‘Watch the waves as thewater recedes. See that slight depression in the wet sand? Buriedbelow you will find large shellfish. Come, stand over them andwiggle your feet back and forth like this. When you feel somethinghard and sharp under your feet, stop and uncover it.’
They both stood andwiggled their feet. Aquitain felt a bit silly at first, wonderingwhether this might be some type of joke perpetrated by druids onothers, until he felt a shell under his right foot. He quicklyburrowed down with his hand and retrieved the most enormousshellfish he had ever seen. It was a hand span wide and very flat,with serrations around the top edge. He looked over to Miranda todiscover she had already retrieved three more of them.
‘Four should beenough,’ she said ,and walked back to the pit.
‘How do you get themopen?’ asked Aquitain.
‘I could ask them toopen,’ she said with a grin, ‘but that would be a misuse of theLady’s gift.’ And she sat on a palm frond and stood all fourshellfish upright in the sand beside her.
Next she opened thepouch on her leg and emptied out the contents onto the palm frond.She sorted through her small treasure collection, finallydiscovering what she was searching for, a metal needle and a smallvial of buff coloured powder, stoppered with a cork.
She uncorked the vial,dipped in the needle and ran it along the edge of each of theshellfish, then returned all the contents to her leg pouch. Secondslater all four shells opened.
‘By the Powers, whatwas that stuff you used from the vial?’ asked Aquitain.
‘It is a poison used tocoat the arrow tips of the Barra people, who live in the jungle twohundred leagues from here. It will paralyse the largest creaturesvery quickly, and is safe to eat provided that the meat is cooked.It comes from the root of a small plant that grows nearswamps.’
Aquitain watched as shepicked up the shellfish and took them down to the water’s edge towash off any residual poison, then returned.
‘The edges are ourknives and the body of the shells our plates. The flesh of theshellfish is pleasant, but gritty with fine sand. Come and selectwhich cuts you wish to eat.’
He examined the beastall over and cut it open, but in the end decided that one of thesmaller six tentacles would be more than enough for the two ofthem. So they sliced the best looking one into strips of suitablelength, washed them in the sea and returned with them to the pitwhere she placed them in layers with palm fronds between. She thencovered the top layer with the remaining fronds, and the frondswith a light covering of sand, and built a fire over the top.
Aquitain sat down towatch the fire as it cooked their food. Miranda opened the pouch onher leg again, and pulled out a ball of fine cloth almost likespider's web. He saw her mouth a word of magic as she shook theball, and it sprung out into a robe that she could have donned, butinstead she sat on it on the opposite side of the fire to him.
‘Tell me a little aboutyourself,’ she asked purposefully
‘I thought you saidthat you wouldn’t be interested in anything a metal box would haveto say,’ he teased.
‘I’ve changed my mind.Turtles don’t usually slip out of their shells and shape changeinto newman forms,’ she replied with a smile.
‘Well it's prettysimple. A few weeks ago I was a newman male working in a magicworkshop, and then my body started behaving strangely. I found outthat I had inherited this ability to shape change from my father. Iwas scared at first, but my grandfather hired a Logicon wizard into help me learn how to control it. We used wizard spells to helpme learn how to modify my shape and swapped spirits between ourbodies so that I could get the
