Yes—I had no way of proving I wasn’t a threat. And even worse, I didn’t belong to a community. Therefore, I couldn’t even provide the name of someone who could vouch for me. That meant I had no way to prove my character. In my previous world, cultural anthropologists had warned of the dangers of accidental first contact with unknown people. Tension and wariness ran high in this kind of situation, and it was possible for that to develop directly into a lethal fight.
My heart rate was creeping upwards. The hunter was still deciding how to handle this situation, but I could tell that they were as tense and on their guard as I was; the sharp stare being cast over my equipment from the depths of their hood was proof. They were being pressed to make a decision between fight or flight.
The hunter dropped their hips a tiny amount. The tingling sensation on my skin grew stronger.
This was bad. Just really bad. At this rate, we were going to end up fighting to kill each other.
As I desperately searched for the right words and turned my eyes to what the person was carrying, I suddenly realized: the bow the presumed hunter was carrying—I’d seen that style of bow before, in Gus’s natural history lectures. Yes, that was—So I should—
Panicking internally and moving very slowly so as not to trigger an attack from my opponent, I placed my right palm on the left side of my chest, and pronouncing every word as clearly and carefully as possible, I spoke—
“‘The stars shine on the hour of our meeting.’”
The hooded person before me went wide-eyed. “Old Elvish...?” they said with a tremor of shock in their voice. It was a beautiful voice as clear as a bell. “You have a connection to the elves?”
“No. But I thought you might.”
I had a memory of that type of bow. According to Gus’s lectures on natural history, Rhea Silvia, the free-spirited goddess of water and greenery, had as her minions a race of beautiful and long-lived people descending from the greater fae that had been created long ago by the Progenitor. They were a race called the elves, and it was to them that this bow belonged. So I thought that using an Elvish greeting might help to loosen a little of the tension.
“Keh!” the hunter spat out disdainfully. “Well, you’re not wrong.”
I’d guessed right. The hunter’s voice had softened a little, but this time it was my turn to be surprised: despite having quite a musical voice, their tone sounded pretty rough. I’d heard that the elves’ long lives made them a patient and very graceful race...
“Eh. Whatever.” The hunter relaxed their posture and pulled off their hood.
The first thing that caught my eye was the silver hair. Furrowed eyebrows, sharp eyes of jade, a slender nose, elegant chin line, and tight, thin lips. From under the hood, the face of a boy with a somehow feminine beauty was revealed.
His ears weren’t the long, pointed ears I might have expected, but were short, about the same size as a human’s, and only a little more pointy. If I remembered my lessons correctly, that was characteristic of a half-elf, a child of mixed race born between elves and humans—
“Better question,” he said, cutting across my thoughts. “You do that?” He pointed at the hog lying on the ground and then at the blade of my spear, wet with blood.
“Yes, that was me.”
He frowned. “That’s an old way of speaking...”
I was confused for a moment, but after thinking about it, I realized that about two hundred years had passed since Blood and Mary’s time. That was more than enough time for a language to change, even if this world did have races like the elves that lived much longer lives than humans. I must have sounded old-fashioned. Maybe even archaic. In terms of English from my last world, I might have sounded like I was speaking using words like “thou” instead of “you.” I’d have to listen to how current people spoke and fix my speech to match so I wouldn’t make people wary of me.
“Sorry. It’s kind of a habit.”
“Weird, but whatever. So this thing,” said the silver-haired half-elf, turning the topic back to the hog. “This was mine.” He pointed to the arrow sticking out of it.
The arrow’s feathers were white, the same as the other arrows in his quiver. The fact that there hadn’t been much time between me killing the hog and him turning up also indicated that he probably wasn’t lying.
“You butted in and killed it,” he said bluntly.
The reason he was practically accusing me of stealing his kill was probably because he was wary of exactly that happening to him. He wanted to stop me before I got the chance.
The urge to say sorry was almost instinctual, a habit from my past life, but I avoided it. “Yes. It came charging at me, so I was forced to do it to defend myself. But—” This was, in fact, a matter for discussion. It was time for negotiation tactics. “I did finish it off, so I assume I have at least that much right to it.”
I was hoping that this might lead to me finding a settlement—though whether that would be an elven one or a human one, I had no idea.
The negotiations went on in depth for a little while.
The silver-haired half-elf was quite the skilled negotiator; I, on the other hand, had no real-world experience in negotiating and was pretty much at his mercy. He appeared to be in the same age bracket as me, but elves and, indeed, half-elves who shared some of the elven blood were said to live longer, so for all I knew he could have been considerably older than I was. Despite this, I somehow managed to hold my ground, and we eventually settled on a deal where I’d get the shoulder on the side I stabbed in exchange for helping to butcher the hog.
Butchering a wild hog takes a good deal of work.
To start with, we had to carry it to a river, bleed it out, then clean it down together. Its fur was covered in mud. It had probably been wallowing in it somewhere.
“Ahhh, the feckin’ thing’s in bits,” Silver-hair said, looking at the head of the arrow he’d pulled out of the wild boar. It had broken to pieces. It must have hit a bone.
I watched him detach the arrowhead and carefully stash it away in his pocket. It looked as though metal items were pretty valuable in this area at the moment. “We’ve gotta dig out the fragments,” he said. “If someone bites into one of those after this thing is meat, they’re gonna have a bad time.”
We made use of a flat area of rock by the river to carefully take out the fragments of the arrowhead, then started work on butchering the hog. I’d developed some level of skill at this thanks to Blood, but Silver-hair was even more efficient than I was. The subcutaneous fat was delicious on wild hogs, so the test of your knife skill in this situation was how close to the skin you could cut. And he was terrifyingly precise and fast as well.
“Now then.” He stuck his knife in under the hog’s jawbone and cut all the way around its neck. He looked to have reached the neck bone, so I held the head and twisted it around to dislocate it.
“Heh. You know your stuff.” He threw me a grin, so I smiled back. Then, with a few little movements of the knife, he cut through the flesh and sinew and separated the head entirely.
I laid the hog’s carcass on its back and held it in position, and he started cutting down its belly all the way from its throat to its back end, being careful to only cut the skin. Cutting in deeply would cause damage to the internal organs, which would result in... um, what’s a nice way of putting it... the contents of its intestines, bladder, and reproductive organs spilling over everything and making a huge mess. With this approach, there would be no need to worry.