A Horse Is Not A Home

[Sweet Polly Oliver]

Solo quest.
Soup is good.

In fact it’s one of the best things in the world, Polly reflected, as she looked into calm green surface of the bowl of pea soup in front of her. It reminded her of a lake or a still ocean. For a moment she imagined herself as a sailor, traversing the waves of soup on a boat, dodging dangerous carrot-sharks, living free and eating soup all the time! Delicious! Daring! The life of a soup pirate for me!

“Polly?” someone said. She started in her chair as if waking up and snapped back to reality. Yet again she’d gotten stuck in a daydream and lost touch with the outside world. Whoops.

“Um…yes?” she said.

“I just asked if you wanted a pork chop.”

“Yes please!” Polly said. She gnawed on a chicken leg and washed it down with some milk. For the first time in months and months, she was having a real dinner, and it was wonderful. She’d been on the road traveling the countryside and farmlands of Corone for so long that she’d forgotten what real food even tasted like. As it turned out, how it tasted was good. Her only traveling companion all this time was a sparrow, and a god besides, so it wasn’t like he knew how to cook anything.

And that wasn’t even to mention the smells! The warm aromas of bread and the rich scents of meat wafted together over the dinner table in the cozy farmhouse and made her even hungrier. It was just heavenly.

“Thanks again for letting me stay the night, Mrs. Wallace,” Polly said. “The food’s awful nice and I do sure enjoy the company.” She really was very thankful of the farmer’s wife and her family. They’d come across Polly walking across their property and simply insisted that she stay for dinner and spend the night in their barn. They wouldn’t even take no for an answer!

“Oh, it’s no trouble at all, trust us,” said the farmer. His name was John, the wife’s was Joan. Polly had managed to mix their names up twice already, much to the consternation of her hosts.

The fourth person at the dinner table, the farmer’s daughter, cleared her voice and spoke. Her name was Rebecca. “Um, there is one thing…”

“Mmmm?” Polly said. Her mouth was stuffed to its maximum capacity with cornbread.

Joan shot her daughter a dirty look. “Not now, Becca, it ain’t polite. Wait until dinner’s over.” She looked embarrassed and shrugged, as if trying to excuse her daughter’s rudeness, but Polly didn’t understand. “Anyway, Polly, what’re you doing traveling around for, hon! We don’t get much adventurers stopping by here.”

Polly swallowed the big gulp of cranberries she was eating and burped in an extremely unladylike fashion. “Uh, well, y’see, I’m a missionary of sorts. You know, spreading the word of god and whatnot. Mostly I just do adventuring here and there.” She shrugged.

“Oh, that’s very interesting!” Joan said, in exactly the same tone of voice in which people say combination harvesters and their second cousin’s minor job promotions are ‘interesting.’ “What religion do you preach? We’re Oisían ourselves.”

“I’m a, um, Passerian,” Polly explained. “Passer being the God of Sparrows, o’course.” She took a big bite of corn. “He’s follows me all the time,” she complained.

“I’m sure he does,” John said. The conversation had now taken on the cautiously condescending tone typical of amateur theology. “What with watching over you and whatnot.”

“Yeah, he watches over me very closely,” Polly agreed. “Even a bit too closely at times, you could say.” She thought she heard an indignant bird chattering from outside the window at this point, but it could have just been her imagination.

“I suppose that would explain the bird on your armor, then?” Rebecca chimed in. It was only the second time she’d spoken the whole evening, and her mother looked at her oddly again.

“Yep!” Polly said. “That’s the reason for it.”

There was a silent lull in the conversation, and the farming family looked at each other knowingly. Polly continued to stuff her face with gratuitous amounts of food.

“Polly…there’s something we’ve been trying to tell you all evening,” John said. He looked at his wife.

“Ummm,” said Joan the farmer’s wife.

“Ummm,” said Rebecca the farmer’s daughter.

“Ummm,” said John, the farmer.

“Ummm,” said Polly, joining in because she didn’t know what else to do.

“It’s like this,” John said. “You have to marry our daughter.”

The beets Polly was eating fell out of her mouth. “What?” she said. And, in case she hadn’t gotten her point across the first time: “What?”

"You have to marry our daughter," John repeated. This time his voice was wavering, as if he was about to cry. The Wallace family shuffled their collective feet awkwardly. Joan opened her mouth and broke the silence.

“Well you see, it all started with this prophecy on the day Rebecca was born…”

[Sweet Polly Oliver]

Polly bit her lip.

“So. Let me get this straight,” she said, completely confused. “Some old lady claiming to be a seer came to your house on the day your daughter was born, and claimed that Rebecca would have to grow up to marry someone with a knight with a bird on their armor.”

The Wallace family nodded in unison.

“And I have a bird on my armor,” she said, pointing to her breastplate, on which was painted the silhouette of a sparrow. “So therefore…”

“You have to marry our daughter,” John and Joan said together.

Polly bit her lip again. Her brow furrowed as she thought about it. She glanced over at Rebecca, who was really quite pretty when seen in the right light, despite a sort of awkward boniness. Then she glanced at the delicious corn muffins on the table, and realized that she had the chance to keep eating these for the rest of her life. “Ummm,” she said. The family looked expectant. Then she grinned. “Okay, sure, I’ll do it!”

This time John was the one biting his lip. No one was eating now. They all sat around the table awkwardly, and no one seemed quite sure what to do with their hands. Joan had them folded demurely in her lap, Rebecca was covering her face (perhaps in shame), and John kept scratching himself. Polly couldn’t decide what to do, so she settled on some mixture of all three.

“Well, the thing is…you’re a girl,” John pointed out hesitantly. “We weren’t expecting that.”

“I wasn’t expecting this whole thing at all!” Rebecca said. “I never asked for this, you know.”

Joan shoved her chair out of the table and stood up. She looked furious. “Young lady, I have had just about enough of your backtalk!”

Rebecca and her mother began shouting back and forth, and Polly sank lower and lower into her chair and pretended to be invisible. Watching someone else’s family fighting made her extremely uncomfortable.

Just think about the soup pirates, Polly, think about the soup pirates! she thought, trying to calm herself down.

“Oh, now look what you’ve done, you got her all upset,” Joan said.

“I got her all upset!?” her daughter shouted. “Are you kidding me!”

The mother and daughter continued fighting, while the father remained silent. He edged his way around the table to Polly’s side and spoke out of the side of the mouth. “They’ll keep going this way for another hour at least,” he muttered. “I’ll just take you to your lodgings, okay?”

What the two female Wallaces were fighting about now was unclear, but Polly caught the phrases ‘heartless shrew’ and ‘dumber than a sheep’s bottom.’ This seemed serious.

“Kay,” Polly said nervously. She followed John out the farmhouse and to the loft of their family barn. The hay was cold and scratchy, but most of all it was quiet, which was a welcome relief after the disaster dinner had erupted into. The Wallace family seemed like a pile of dry straw, and Polly was the kindling about to cause it to erupt.

As she lay down to sleep, she pondered the situation. John and Joan seemed to have divided minds as to what they wanted—on one hand they felt like they had to go along with the prophecy; on the other, they didn’t want their daughter to marry a girl. Polly wondered why they were so dead set on making the seer's words come true...perhaps there was more to the story than they had let on. Rebecca, on the other hand, didn’t want any part of it. But what did Polly want?

The moonlight shone in through the bar rafters and illuminated dust motes floating about the loft. Polly supposed that Rebecca was very beautiful—and probably about exactly her age, too. More than that, though, was the promise of having a permanent home to stay at. She didn’t want to live with her parents again, but all this traveling was already beginning to tire her. Staying here didn’t seem like a half bad idea. Plus the food was really good…

She drifted off to sleep thinking these thoughts, and ended up dreaming of the lovely Rebecca. Some of these dreams were scary, some were romantic, and some were downright inappropriate.

By the time she woke up, she was certain that she wanted to marry Rebecca Wallace.

[Sweet Polly Oliver]

Most people consider waking up to the sound of birds chirping to be a pleasant thing. In fact, poets have written about it as being the best way to greet the day, up their with the rosy red dawn light and other poetic nonsense such as that. In Polly’s case, being able to understand the speech of birds made her think that most poets didn’t know what the heck they were talking about.

“That’s my worm! Mine! Mine! Mine! My bug! Mine! Mine!” the little birds shouted at their brethren repeatedly.

“HAVE SEX WITH ME! HAVE SEX WITH ME!” the songbirds normally beautiful call was translated to.

Worst of all was the little sparrow perched right next to her face and lecturing her. “Polly, you can’t just do that, agree to marry some random girl! That messes up all our plans! You don’t even know her! You can’t just—”

Awake for all of thirty seconds and already she had a headache. What a life. “Would everyone please just shut up!” she shouted, tired of this. There was a momentary lull in the cacophony, and then the birds went back to bragging about how colorful their chest feathers were and how all the lady birds ought to mate with them because of it.

“Polly, are you even listening to me?” said the sparrow perched by her head. Polly sat up, brushed the straw out of her hair with her fingers, and sighed.

“I am,” she said, resigned by now to being awake. She looked into the little black eyes of the Sparrow God for some sympathy to her tiredness, but found none.

Passer, god of sparrows, followed her around very closely and kept an eye on her affairs. When she told Mrs. Wallace that he watched her very closely, she wasn’t lying. Polly’s family was the last remaining group of believers in the Sparrow God, and she was the only one among them who could actually see him. If she stopped believing, he would probably cease to exist, so Passer made sure to take a personal interest in her life.

“Look, you can’t just do this,” Passer said. His voice was stern and harsh. Polly wasn’t really intimidated, though, even if he was her god. It’s hard to be intimidated by someone four inches long with only the power to summon enough static electricity to smite your hair into being slightly messy.

“Do what?” she said, feigning innocence.

“Marry that girl! I know you intend on doing it, I can read it all over your thoughts!” Passer shouted in his high pitched little sparrow voice.

“So, what do you care?” Polly said, every bit the rebellious teenager now. She started getting dressed.

“Well…you can’t! If you do that, you’ll have to stay here in this town, and then you won’t be able to convert more people to believing in me like you’re supposed to. Besides,” he added, “Passerianism doesn’t allow girls to marry girls.”

Polly strapped her gauntlets on. Her face was expressionless. “I think you made that last bit up,” she said.

“You’re right, I did,” Passer admitted. “I don’t really care about that. But still. You shouldn’t marry her.”

“But I love her!” Polly protested.

“No, you don’t.”

“You’re right, I don’t,” Polly admitted. She slid down the ladder from the loft of the barn to the floor. “But I do love those corn muffins. I love those corn muffins a lot.”

“I don’t think that’s—” Passer began to argue, but he was interrupted by John Wallace bursting through the barn door.

“You’re up?” he said gruffly. “Good. Come on out, something's happened. There's another.” With that said, he left the barn. Polly thought for a second, grabbed her spear (just in case), and followed him out the door.

She wondered who the "other" could possibly be...

[Sweet Polly Oliver]

“My name is Sir William Blakemore, and I am the best person in the world!”

Polly rolled her eyes. This guy was ridiculous.

William Blakemore was six feet, two inches and a hundred and fifty pounds of gorgeousness—or at least so he’d say. Polly thought he looked a bit more like five feet ten inches and a hundred sixty pounds of jerk. He claimed to have won Radasanth’s “Most Handsome Man” contest four years running, although Polly doubted there even was such a thing. None of this would have been important if he didn’t have a golden eagle blazoned across the front of his armor, and if he hadn’t rode up to the Wallace’s house at eight o’clock this morning.

John and Joan leaned against the side of their ramshackle house and shot each other worried looks. Polly wasn’t surprised. If there were two knights with birds on their armor, who was Rebecca to marry? Well the answer to that was, in Polly's opinion, obviously Polly. William, however, seemed to disagree—and somehow he’d already known about the prophecy, too.

At least the weather was nice. The air outside was filled with summer warmth, but wasn’t hot enough to be uncomfortable. The Wallace’s little farm reminded Polly of her family’s own. Suddenly she felt awfully homesick.

“Little girl,” William said, with a big grin on his face, just above his perfectly chiseled jaw (something he also wasn’t hesitant to point out). His teeth were also perfect and white. Of course. “You cannot possibly marry Rebecca. That’s what I’m going to do.”

Polly fumed and stomped her foot childishly. “I was here first! Y’all can’t just come and take my place like that!”

“Oh, my little darling—”

“Don’t call me darling!”

“—I’ll call you darling if I want to, darling. Just because you showed up here with a little pigeon on your breastplate doesn’t mean you can marry her. That’s just ridiculous!” He flicked a hair out of his face with an exaggerated motion and looked thoughtful for a moment. Or at least, what he probably thought made him look thoughtful—he really looked like he’d just smelled something bad. “Except you’re a girl, so it’s more like breasts-plate than breastplate, am I right? Am I right?” He laughed at his own joke. No one else laughed.

Rebecca, who’d been quiet this whole time, was scowling. “I don’t want to marry either of them!” she insisted. “I don’t even know them! This whole thing is insane.”

“I think we should just tell her the rest of it, Joan,” John said. He had his hands in the pockets of his overalls and his face was grim. Even more grim than usual, anyway. Farmer John seemed to have the sort of face that only dusts off on brings out a smile on rare occasions, like holidays or birthdays.

“I thought we agreed not to, John,” Joan said, with meaningful inflection. Polly was just confused. Which one was John and which one was Joan again…? She couldn’t remember for the life of her.

“Well it’s about time time she knows, dear. It’s important,” John said with a sigh. “Rebecca, there was part of the prophecy we didn’t tell you. The seer said…well, she said…”

“If you don’t marry the right person, you’ll die before you turn twenty one,” Joan finished his sentence for him.

“WHAT!?” Rebecca shouted. Polly noted that she looked even prettier when she was angry. The way her jade green eyes flashed daggers at her parents…Polly wasn’t a poet, but this girl would inspire poetry in anyone. “You didn’t think it was important that I know that?”

William looked triumphant. He put his fists against his hips and gave that same grin as earlier. He probably thought it made him look handsome. To other eyes it might have—Polly was just disgusted. “So you see, have to marry me!” he said. “Marry me, or else you’ll die!”

“No, she should to marry me,” Polly said. “I was here first!”

“Now now, children, there must be a better way to settle this,” Joan said. “Only one of you can be the person the seer foretold. We have to settle this like mature, intelligent adults.”

William and Polly walked up to each other and stood face to face. Or, given that Polly was almost a foot shorter, Polly looked up into William’s face. Their expressions were of pure hatred. If the tension had been any fiercer, actual lighting may have sprung up in between their glares.

“We’ll fight!” Polly and William exclaimed at exactly the same time. “To the death!”

[Sweet Polly Oliver]

“I’m hot,” Polly complained, although she scarcely needed to say it. Sweat poured down her face in a practical waterfall, and she was panting like a dog. “Why did the battle have to be at noon, huh?”

“Tradition!” John Wallace said. “Always gotta have duels at high noon!”

“I suppose you get a lot of battles here, then?” Polly said, without a hint of sarcasm in her voice. She looked around the place that had been chosen for her duel with William. The ‘arena’ was a circle drawn in the dirt that made up the town square. Except it wasn’t so much a town square as a town triangle, what with it only having three sides and all, Polly supposed. Ragweed was a tiny little town, the sort of place that only exists because, well, there has to be something there to fill up the space on the map. There was a tiny saloon, a general store that sold replacement parts for broken farm implements, a little church to the Thayne, a handful of houses, and that was about it.

Polly had asked why it was called Ragweed, and gotten a couple of hostile stares from the villagers before someone finally explained. Apparently all the nearby villages were named after plants or flowers. There was Rose Town, Goldenrod Village, and Maple City. The founder of Ragweed, however, had apparently not quite grasped the concept and just named the place after the first plant he saw. “Oh,” Polly had said when told this story. She didn’t really get it. Ragweed sounded like a fine name for a town to her!

“Um, well not exactly, no,” John said. He looked thoughtful for a moment, and he stuck his hands in the pockets of his overalls. “I reckon this is the first fight we’ve had since…well, probably since old Rumblin’ Robbie made his rounds, and that was twenty years ago now.”

The two were silent for a while. They stood in the shadow of an oak tree, just waiting for the sun to reach its high point. After the terms of the duel had been set, William had vanished off to god knows where. Rebecca had chosen to remain at home, and her mother had stayed to keep her company. Overhead, some clouds went past, and one went by in the shape of a circle. Polly thought it looked a bit like a pea, and it made her think of soup.

“What’s that story about?” Polly asked, out of curiosity and looking for a way to pass the time.

John was silent for a moment. “Who, Rumblin’ Robbie?” Polly nodded. The farmer sighed. “Well, I was a young man when all this happened, so I suppose I know the story as well as any. It was right around the time of Rebecca’s birth, actually. The story goes something like this…”

With that, John started to sing. His voice was low and rough, but (strangely enough) beautiful to hear. What he sang was this:

Though young Rumblin’ Robbie was scarce twenty-three,
He smoked and he drank and he pissed a whole sea.
A shepherd by day he tended his sheep,
Every night a new lover, he never did sleep!

Most of all though, Rumblin’ Robbie did fight,
He’d break a man’s jaw o’er the smallest of slights.
In one hand he’d carry a bottle of rum,
The other a’punching a man in the gum!

“I’ll fight every man, woman and child in Ragweed,
And I’ll beat every one of them, yes yes, indeed.”
So it was that the challenge was set,
Robbie beat every man without breaking a sweat!

The women he fought with the gentlest of hands,
Even when they did hit him with their frying pans.
The children all just ran away shouting,
In the end, of Robbie’s skill none were a’doubting!

In only a week, just one villager remained,
A young woman by the nickname Plain Jane.
Fierce Rumblin’ Robbie brought his best to the fight,
But soon as he saw her, ‘twas love at first sight!

Although any man Robbie sure could defeat,
Or winter snows, or summer’s great heat,
In the end it took just a small thing,
The sign of love’s bond, a wedding ring!

“Wow,” Polly said, after it was over. “Is that all true?”

John shrugged. “It’s a folk song, of course it ain’t all true. The gist of it is, though. Robbie was the last great brawler that this town had, and he only stopped after getting married. It’s a sappy story, but a true one in this case.”

“I think it’s a pretty nice story,” Polly said cheerfully. “You’re a good singer!”

Again, the farmer shrugged. “Not particularly,” he said. Then he changed the subject. “Looks like your fight’s gonna draw a crowd.”

It was true—a small group of farmers and their wives were now congregating in a rough circle in the town square. William had shown up, and appeared to have spent the whole time shining his armor—it gleamed in the sun. He looked fancy and handsome, and more than a little bit intimidating now. Polly began to wonder if challenging an experienced warrior to a fight to the death had been such a good idea.

“It’s almost noon,” John said in his typical solemn tone. “I think you better go fight now. Good luck, Polly. For what it’s worth, I sorta hope do you win.

“Thanks,” Polly said, slightly worried. She made her way toward the town square, and towards the duel.