20: Altdorf Again

Hello mum. We’re in Altdorf again, now. So far it’s been slightly better than our first visit, but that’s not saying much. I’m just going to go over the last part of our journey here, even though nothing really happened.

Remember, we were still in Weissbruck having rescued Elvyra Kleinestun from the red barn. Before we went to bed, Willow was wondering whether we should invite her to come with us to Altdorf, but after her behaviour in the red barn, I think the rest of us were reluctant.  Dreamy didn’t want to tell Willow that Elvyra had killed one of the defenceless kidnappers by pushing him out of the hayloft. I understand why he wants to protect her from the dangers of the world, but not sure he should be so keen to protect her from hearing about stuff like this. It seems to me that she should probably get used to how life is rather than staying with her idyllic and innocent view of things. Still, I expect she will learn things the hard way (I am writing this, you know – Willow).

But then Blume told Willow what Elvyra did, anyway, because I think she enjoys upsetting Willow. And Willow was clearly confused about it all, so Guido got Blume out of the way by asking her for some feedback on his military plan for the liberation of the red barn. And of course, Blume complained about that, too. To be fair, she probably had a point about him leaving her in the hay while he went round to support us halflings. But she was in no danger.

Then Blume said that she thought that the way Elvyra was behaving, and the fact that she wouldn’t help with any of her afflictions, meant that she was probably a con artist and not to be trusted. And Guido agreed that she knew more about the situation than she was letting on and her silence might put others in danger.

And Guido asked Blume about her seeming problem with Renate. Blume said she did have a problem with her because she was… (I’m not writing that – Willow). Guido didn’t see it, but Blume said that if he was a woman he would understand (I don’t understand, either – Willow). Blume said that Renate was too good to be true. Guido said that some people were simply good, but Blume disagreed, which I think is a very strange thing to disagree with, mum.

Then we had a long chat with Guido about his dream. He tried to describe it again, but I don’t think these holy visions really lend themselves to being described like this, and I didn’t really understand what he saw, except we were in it, and they were vivid enough to lead him to us, which was quite a feat in itself. Then we got bored with talking about Myrmidia and I think Guido found it quite difficult answering some of our questions. Perhaps he will be better at it when he finally becomes a proper priest. So Willow told Guido all about Esmerelda, Josias, Hyacinth, and Quinsberry. And to be fair to Guido he seemed genuinely interested.

And we eventually went to bed, because I told everyone we had to be up very early to enter the Weissbruck canal and meet with the river wardens. Even then Dreamy didn’t come to bed straight away, he stayed up gazing out over the balcony at the Boegen flowing by, for a long time. And Willow said she thought Dreamy had seen too much. And I said, yes, he had seen it so that Willow didn’t have to, although I’m not really sure what that means.

Anyway, we got enough sleep because Dreamy and Guido got up early and did their usual preparations for the day. I think they do very much the same thing what with looking after their armour and their weapons, but Dreamy does it for practical reasons, and Guido does it as a sort of worship.

Blume helped with the washing up again without even being asked, which was nice of her (I think it was only because she was trying to get that purple off her hand – Willow). And after scramborridge we set off, and Willow was supposed to be on lookout again, but was sat in a coil of rope reading one of the books Elvyra had given her.

I was doing a lot of the work on the boat again, I think, but that’s kind of how I like it, but Guido said I should try to delegate more, and he said about how in the military the art of a good general is knowing how to delegate. But Dreamy said that when he was in thew army the generals just made the captains do everything, and didn’t do anything themselves, and then the captains made the sergeants do everything, and so on, and Guido got a bit upset at this and tried to explain how all the roles were fitted together and how the generals should be respected. So while Guido and Dreamy agree on a lot of things, they disagree on the details quite a lot, too.

Blume was flitting about trying to find stuff. I think what happened was that she wanted to make a bookmark for Willow, but to get some good leather she had to cut some out of the captain’s chair, which was my chair, which I wasn’t pleased about when I noticed. And then she got some wool and made some streamers for it. And then she left it on the bed for Willow to find.

Then we went into the lock and joined the canal, it cost eighteen shillings. While the lock was filling up Willow told us a ghost story she had heard about how the lock gate was haunted by the spirit of an ancient chieftain who had been buried under the lock, and how he was disturbed when they built the canal, and had to be placated by gifts of money and explicit adult reading material. It was a ridiculous story, but kind of funny.

After only a few minutes of canal travel, we saw the river wardens. They say that the Weissbruck Canal is the safest stretch of water in the entire Empire, so it was not a surprise to see them. And so I landed behind them and Willow hailed them. The captain came aboard with half a dozen of his wardens. They all had mail shirts and pistols, so were a bit better equipped than the Mootland wardens, but I was wearing my Mootland uniform, anyway.

Guido said that if I kept my cool and didn’t do anything silly, then I’d have my own boat in a few minutes. Which was kind of true, although it wouldn’t really be my boat, I’d be holding it in trust for its owners. The captain told me he recognised the boat as it came through there quite often, and said that the captain was Fritz Segel, and the boat was called the Seaward. He asked why we had changed the name and I told him it was just to remind us of the old country, which he was fine about.

Then they inspected the bodies of the river pirates. I wasn’t sure whether we were allowed to call them mutants or not, so we kept it to pirates, and the captain said that if we dumped the bodies ashore, he would make sure they were burned, so that was a weight from us. It wasn’t much fun having the bodies of beaked, and maw-bodied, and bird-legged mutants just lying there on top of your boat. And the flies were pretty terrible.

The captain asked how we had come by the boat, of course, and I delegated that to Guido. And when Guido told him about Renate he decided he wanted to talk to her so took her ashore for a quiet word. While he was doing that the wardens were looking all over the boat, and I had to remind Blume to put her gloves back on so they didn’t see her purple palm. I assume they were looking for smuggled goods, but if the old crew had been smuggling goods, we hadn’t found any of them. One of the wardens did give Blume a hard stare and he was wearing a purple neckerchief, but he didn’t signal to her, so I’m not sure what that was about but it made us feel a bit uneasy.

Whatever Renate said seemed to satisfy the captain and he made us a writ of salvage and signed it and sealed it, which meant the cargo now belonged to us, and I promised him I would do my very best to look for the true owners of the vessel. And Dreamy paid him three crowns for the paperwork which was nearly all the money we had left.

So, after the wardens had all gone and we sailed off, Guido suggested we have a feast to celebrate our writ of salvage, but we realised we didn’t have very much food left at all, and hardly any money, so the rest of our voyage was going to be a bit austere. Renate had shown me the captain’s fishing rod, so I resolved to catch some fish for the feast. Once we had got used to canal sailing, which is a lot easier than river sailing, I went to my cabin to try. No one really knew what the balcony at the back of the cabin was for, but I decided that it was an ideal place to fish from.

And I noticed that someone (probably Renate) had left a nice new fly on the bed so I tried some fly fishing, and I was quite successful and managed to catch almost enough fish for a meal for the entire crew. And Willow had some capers and some dill so we made some fish soup, but it wasn’t much of a feast, to be honest. (I later found out that the fly was really a bookmark that Blume had made for Willow, so I’m sorry for using it to fish with, but it made a really good fly, though.)

To cut a long story short, mum, which isn’t very easy for me, it took us three days to get to Altdorf. I think everyone was very sick of fish and dill soup by the time we got there, but at least we didn’t starve. And thankfully, for everyone onboard, Blume started feeling better and didn’t need to visit the head nearly so often.

Dreamy got out his fiddle and played a bit, which just goes to show how nothing happening for a few days was such a change of pace. I don’t recall the last time Dreamy had a chance to get out his fiddle, but it must have been before we stayed at the Coach and Horses all those weeks ago.

Blume got upset with Willow for not thanking her for the bookmark, and of course there was a bit of a misunderstanding because Willow had never got the bookmark because I had been using it to catch our dinner. Anyway, we worked out what happened in the end and Blume and Willow had a nice hug about it, although Blume said she couldn’t be bothered to make a new one. But then Renate said she would make Willow a bookmark, and quick as a flash Blume changed her mind and started cutting some more leather out of my captain’s chair.

When we arrived in Altdorf we went to the docks where we had first seen the Berebeli. I scraped along the side of a bigger boat when I docked, and I thought I might be in trouble, but the docks were so busy and there was so much going on, no one seemed to mind, and so I got away with that one.

We all had things we wanted to get done. Willow and Dreamy needed to visit Aunt Amanita, which they hadn’t had time for the first time we were here. And I think Guido might want to stay here for some time at the temple of Myrmidia, but we shall see.

And of course, most importantly, I think, we needed to sell our sacks of wool, so we could afford to buy some more food, especially if we were going to go to Grissenwald. And I felt like we were obliged to go that way to check out this Etelka Herzen character because she was definitely nefarious. Dreamy had lots of ideas about money, and Guido had things to say about trading, but to be honest, the buying and selling doesn’t really interest me. Hopefully they will be able to sell the wool and buy some other cargo. I will be happy to sail the cargo, but I’m not that interested in the rest of it.

I think we worked out that Guido would be in charge of what cargo to buy, because of his family’s experience, and then Dreamy would be in charge of finance, because he is good with numbers, and then Willow would be in charge of making the deal because she is deceptively (very deceptively, to be fair) good at driving a hard bargain.

For example, when we went to see the harbourmaster, or more likely one of his assistants, and he said it would cost us ten shillings per day to dock here for three days, and that was even with the long-stay discount. But Willow said that she would knit a hat for him, and so he put it down to eight shillings per day. And then she went and got the hat she knitted for Blume, and that Blume never wears (because we bought her a nicer hat) and knitted on some ear flaps and gave that to him. So, I think she got us a bit of a bargain.

Bume hadn’t been wearing her hat but she had been keeping all the letters she had written to her father in it. And I think having to give up the hat made her think about finally sending the letters. So she managed to find a messenger boy, and she gave him some money to take the letters to the spice islands, or at least take them to a boat that was going to the spice islands, or at least take them to a boat that was going somewhere they have spices, or islands. I don’t think she’s going to get a reply.

Willow asked the harbourmaster’s assistant about someone who might buy wool and he pointed her in the direction of a Herr Hohenzoller, so she went to see him with Dreamy. She turned out to be an excellent wool merchant and sold him on the quality of our cargo, and he agreed to buy it all for eighty crowns. And when Willow came back she was beaming because she was so pleased with the job she did and the money we had got (I did do a very good job – Willow).

On the way back from Hohenzoller’s however, Dreamy spotted a wanted poster which seemed to have the likeness of Brandy on it, who is a very distinctive looking halfling. And he was wanted for murder. And to be fair, he had killed that nasty big in the Boatman inn, the last time we were in Altdorf. But also, Dreamy was on the poster, and he was wanted as an accomplice, even if the likeness wasn’t as good of him, and in the picture he was carrying a crossbow and not a bow. But even so, it was enough to worry Dreamy, and he decided it would be wise to stay on the boat and lie low as much as he could while we were in Altdorf.

Guido questioned him about the ‘murder’, and Dreamy told him it hadn’t been a murder and, in any case, he hadn’t done it, and I think Guido believed him. Guido did have the idea that Dreamy could hand himself in and the case go to trial by combat, which I think Guido thought he could win. But I’m not sure that’s how they do things in the Empire, and I’m not sure I would want to trust Guido with my life, even if he does practice fighting a lot.

Dreamy decided that Willow still needed to visit Aunt Amanita and asked Guido to look after her instead of him, so I think Dreamy must trust Guido rather a lot because I don’t think he would let me look after Willow like that.

And Blume decided she wanted to revisit the Koenigsplatz where she had first been signalled at by the purple people, and the house that they had disappeared into, and she convinced Guido to go with her. On their way up there they talked about universities, because Altdorf is where Blume goes (I think she’s been chucked out – Willow) and Guido wanted to show her round and then he told her how good the one he went to in Estalia was, and so, of course, Blume had to explain how her one was even better.

Anyway, they managed to find the place and discovered it was unlocked and so they went inside. It was smoky and smelly and after going into the darkness discovered it was a sausage smokehouse. I think Blume would have stolen a few of the sausages, as well, had Guido not told her not to, for some reason. They went all the way through the smokehouse and came out into a butcher’s shop. The butcher wanted to know what they had been doing in his smoke house and told them not to let all the smoke out.

Then, Blume decided to take her glove off and show the butcher her purple palm, and she also made the signal with her finger and her ear. I think the butcher was a bit confused by it all and told her not to touch his sausages with her gammy hand. So whatever Blume thought she was going to find up in Koenigsplatz, she didn’t.

And while Blume and Guido were gone, Hohenzoller turned up with his gang and they took all the sacks of wool and handed the eighty crowns over to Dreamy. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that much money in my dreams, mum, let alone in Dreamy’s hand. We said we would go to the Empire to find our fortune, and we did. I’m not sure what we’re going to do with it, though. There’s something to be said for buying some more cargo and making a business out of this boating thing, but there’s also something to be said for just having the biggest feast imaginable (or buying a load of fuggleweed – Willow). I’ll let you know what we decide in my next letter, mum.