“Wonder what’s on the menu today?” I asked myself aloud.
Lunchtime was when I got my first meal of the day, and it was the thing I most looked forward to since coming to my new world.
Besides the porridge they gave me the first day, I also got to eat baked potatoes, fried fish, broiled snake, and vegetable stew.
Meat was high-value stuff here, meant to be food for only the most hoity-toity, upper-class people. Even though I was on the bottom of the social totem pole, I still got to eat some meat…though it was only a few scraps of bacon. More often I’d get things like snake and fish, but I couldn’t help craving some fatty, delicious cuts of the good stuff. I was out chopping wood from sunrise to sunset, after all, and even though it was simple labor, I worked myself to the bone.
It had been a little over a week since I was forced to become a woodcutter. The first few days my muscles hurt so bad I could barely move, but there’s nothing like mortal terror to get you past the pain. Now, chopping wood was no big deal for me.
There was one sad thing about all this, though. See, wearing the loincloth made me so unbearably itchy that I stopped wearing it altogether. The chafing was a nightmare too. But the real problem started when I left it on a nearby tree branch to dry in the sun. I was wiping the sweat from my brow when an errant gust of wind snatched my loincloth from the branch and sent it dancing through the air.
“Ahh! My loincloth!”
I threw my axe to the side and chased after it, my exposed trouser snake bouncing to and fro.
When my guard saw me running, he drew his sword and brandished it at me.
“Where do you think you’re going?!”
“My only piece of clothing is flying away!”
“Get back to work!”
“But it’s all I have! Sure, it itches like crazy when I wear it, but it gets so cold at night! I’ll freeze without it!”
“I told you to get back to work!”
Ice cold. No negotiations. He pointed the blade right at me, heading me off.
He’s going to kill me. You learn things when you take martial arts as long as I have, and one of those things is murderous intent. This guy was brimming with it. He was completely prepared to kill me at any moment.
We glared at one another. Taking a quick look to the side, I saw the wind dragging my loincloth through the dirt, toward—oh no, I couldn’t see it directly, but that was definitely the direction of the open door to the village chief’s manor.
“EEEEEEK!!”
And that sounded like a shriek from the young girl working for the village chief.
“I said to get back to work,” the man commanded.
“A-all right, I got it.”
“Good.”
“Look, I promise I wasn’t gonna run away or anything. I just wanted to get back the only piece of clothing I had, that’s all! If I catch a cold because I lost it, it’s your fault!”
The man just thrust his sword in my direction again. Dejected, I picked up my hand axe and went back to chopping wood.
They didn’t give me lunch that day.
✦ ✦ ✦
Whenever I finished work for the day, I was given about five baked potatoes as payment. Although lunch was usually decent, dinner was always just cold leftovers. Since I hadn’t been given anything for lunch that day, though, I was more than happy to eat whatever I got.
Oh, did I mention I never got any breakfast? Two meals a day. What a sad way to live. Speaking of food, that day’s dinner came with a bottle of some sort. It was filled with some pretty unpalatable wine, the kind with bits of grape skin floating around in it. Drinking raw water was risky in this sort of world, so I guessed this wine was supposed to be a replacement for that. More wages from the village chief.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Well, well. It looks like you’re actually doing the bare minimum for work around here.”
“Thank you for your words of praise. I must also extend my deepest and most profound gratitude for your additional gift of wine,” I said, prostrating myself in the nude as I looked up at the village chief.
It wasn’t like I was over the moon because of some crappy wine, but I didn’t get any proper drinking water here. I had to be thankful to get something to drink, even if it was made out of the dregs of leftover grapes.
“Yes, it seems you’re handling things well. Gimul! From now on, give this man a bottle of wine when he finishes his daily work.”
“Are you sure?” asked my guard.
“I just said it was fine, did I not?”
The look on the meathead’s face made it clear he wasn’t happy to hear this. So that guy’s name is Gimul, then.
✦ ✦ ✦
Every day, I returned to the stable before sundown. Whatever animals used to live there, now it was just me. Home sweet home.
Well, I guess I did share the place with a few roosters. They’d be outside pecking away at their feed during the day, but my rooster roommates were there to greet me when I headed back to the stable. I was still itchy all over and couldn’t really get a good night’s sleep, but what could I do about it?
Just as I was thinking that, the girl who (I assumed) worked at the village chief’s place as a servant came with a bucket of lukewarm water for me. Gimul—you know, the meathead guard—was there as well, of course. They still didn’t trust me not to do anything horrible, then.
Gimul did the talking. “Here’s some water. Clean yourself with this sponge.”
Taking a glance at the girl, I saw she had some kind of tattered rag with her. She held it at arm’s length, pinched between two fingers, like when you would hold something disgusting away from yourself. But the disgusting thing in question was…
“Oh, my loincloth!”
She thrust it toward me, basically begging me to take it away from her already.
“Thanks a lot,” I said. “What’s your name, by the way?” I mustered my friendliest smile again—but the cute girl just pinched her nose and ran away. I hadn’t taken a bath in days, so I must’ve been downright rancid.
I wearily turned to Gimul. “Thank you very much.”
“Get back to the stable. Also, you won’t be chopping firewood anymore.”
“Wait, hold on. Does that mean I’m…I’m fired? Am I going to be executed?”
“Hmph. We’ll see,” the man said. Then he kicked me back into my tiny stable and slid the bar on the door into place, locking me inside for the night.
I picked up the sponge and began to scrub myself in the darkness with the lukewarm water. With the remaining bit of water I washed my loincloth before setting it out to dry. No more working in the buff for me starting tomorrow.