When Given a Lemon

Part 31

“Where were y’all stationed before coming here?” Cayeol restarted the conversation; asking each of us over roasted potatoes, carrots, and the stuffed bread rolls Lemon and I had earlier enjoyed. I'm eagerly digging in for round two.

Everyone took turns listing off where they had been previously. When it was Cayeol’s turn, he talked about being sent out to a coastal barracks much closer to the front that got overrun a short time later by horned and gilled merpeople. I shuddered at his very unromantic description of them; it completely contrasted with the merpeople that Nan always talked about.

These had razor sharp scales, horns like a manatee, ears and hands webbed like a duck, with a face that was so narrow it looked almost squished. He also described a bulbous sack protruding from their foreheads in place of a nose and horrid teeth as sharp as its claws. It was the farthest thing from the stories of merfolk and sirens luring hapless humans into their myriad traps that I had been told growing up.

“The only thing more vicious than the way they looked was how they fought,” Cayeol proclaimed with his mouth still full. Lemon huffed at their messy display. “The only reason why I had survived was because my squad leader broke through the paneling in the wall, enabling us to climb up behind the chimney to the roof where they couldn’t reach. A few had tried but gave up real quick when they started drying out.” He grinned, pausing before adding, “that’s when we realized their weakness and drove them away by setting part of the roof on fire! Flames dehydrated them real quick!””

Huh.

I don’t know how smart of a plan that sounds, since they had been marooned on top of the roof they had decided to light up. I would have tried to scare them off by trying to burn something other than what I was standing on. But for all I know that could have been the only structure in the vicinity, drastically limiting their options.

Whoever their squad leader had been had been seriously burned during that risky endeavor - which only reinforced my determination to never light a roof on fire that I was standing on. That was what led to their squad, and the remainder of several of the others, being relocated here as soon as reinforcements had arrived.

If that situation had come upon us, we never would have been forced into such dire circumstances, not with Merryl being amongst our ranks anyway. He would have been able to scare all of them away with the flames he was able to create! A somewhat romanticized memory of him lighting the soggy fire for us when we were stuck out in a deluge popped into my head, and I had to exercise a great deal of effort to not tell the new guy about it since it wasn’t my story, or gift, to divulge.

The night ended when a cup of hot juniper tea was somehow flipped upside down into Cayeol’s lap making him yip and jump up like an excited pup. It was the most bizarre thing!

One minute it was safely sitting on the bench next to him and the next he was yelping and pulling his hot, wet clothes away from his skin to try and escape the heat. It was pitiful enough that Denyel grabbed his wrist and dragged him away to be treated and the rest of us took that as a sign to warily dump out the remaining dredges of our own beverages and head off to bed for the night.

The next morning we were sent back up to the ghost village to continue putting it back together, working our way from the outside in, since most of its contents had been thrown there either over -or through- the walls.

Another team was there today as well working on the big house; pulling the fence and other random materials free from the broken windows and fixing the damaged siding.

Our job today was scavenging by the ice clogged stream out beyond the village for all the materials that had been scattered across the road and sandy shore.