Arthurian Cultivation

Some two weeks had passed since we had set out. It was transitioning from late spring to early summer and the weather was stunning. I found myself riding at a steady pace along a road through some low forest, a mere handful of days from Alka, our first destination.

The woods were lush and green, the grasses awash with flowers in a medley of colours. The bees were buzzing about their work, and the birds sang their songs from every branch. It was a truly perfect day, made all the better by how I spent it.

I rode atop Elphin, who casually navigated for me, leaving my hands free to strum my lute. I was in my bardic gear, serenading Percy and Maeve. They rode behind me, sitting demurely in side saddle in dresses fit for maidens of any court from Albion to the Thousand City Sea. They smiled merrily, and all was watched over by Gaz, who alone rode in full armour, even his face covered in steel.

This is what my cultivation was about. Not sitting in one place fussing about politics or considering dire prophecy. No, it was making music and exploring a most beautiful world, seeking inspiration as I delighted audiences across the lands. I sang a serenade to the two ladies, who smiled in appreciation. They alone appreciated the hidden depths I wove into the tune.

Oh lasses fair with cheeks aglow,
Like dawn on burnished blade and bow,
Thy laughter rings like silver chimes—
Yet echoes deep in darker times.

Your fingers trail on goblet's rim,
So soft, so pale, so delicate—slim…
But I have seen, behind such grace,
The glint that sleeps in shadowed place.

Oh damsels fair of silken guise,
What secrets dwell behind those eyes?
What songs are sheathed 'neath silken lace?
What edges lie in thy embrace?

I woo with harp, with honeyed word,
But wind and branch speak truths unheard—
The hush of steel, the breath of war,
A sweetness baiting something more.

So let the suitor take his chance,
And dance the damsels' dainty dance—
For those who touch the blossom's cheek,
May find what hunts behind the meek.

And when the trap with beauty springs,
The rose shall show her hidden wings—

Not angels' white, but silver-bright,
Knights in bloom, amid blood and might.

"They've taken the bait," Gaz's voice whispered in my ear, the glamour carrying it silently over the strumming of my lute. My mood sank. It was getting depressing how effective this particular strategy was proving.

I continued playing but shifted myself subtly. While most bandits avoided shooting arrows first, afraid to wound our valuable steeds, there had been incidents before. I rarely got involved in the doling out of justice aspect of the work, but when one of the bastards had shot Elphin in panic, I had decided to involve myself directly.

We came to a dense copse of trees that would block our options for fleeing, and lo and behold, as I turned a corner, placed in the centre of the road was a tree trunk stuck with spikes to block our path. It was kind of pathetic. Every one of our horses could have jumped it with ease, and that was if we got to it before Maeve could whittle it down into mere wood chips.

Standing in the middle was a man dressed in mismatched armour. He grinned, levelling a blade.

"I'm Edgar tha Red. Surrenda now n' we'll make this quick. Youse all surrounded. Beg for our mercy," the man bellowed.

"Oh deary me," Maeve said, her tone sharp and threatening. Her acting hadn't improved in the last few weeks. At least she had stopped shooting off the evil eye at random. She did not appreciate acting as bait.

"What scoundrels, such terrible luck!" Persephone fanned herself as if she were some wilting flower set to collapse. Her hand settled on her lips to cover the wicked smile she wore.

"He's bronze, and there's one other behind us. Thirteen in the woods, mostly mortal, four of them of wood," Gaz's voice whispered in my ear, carried on a thread of sound glamour. "Stall for a minute so the others can catch up."

"Knight, thars just ta one of you. We'se got five cultivators here. Youse dead if ya so much as twitch! Nah reason this has to get bloody, we're not savages. We'll just take yar horse, armour n coin. Nah point in falling in a pointless battle." The man was lying. I could smell the blood and worse on his body. Then there was the cruel way he eyed the two 'damsels in distress'.

Gaz raised his hands carefully, trying to come across as non-threatening, a challenge for a man in full plate. His body language spoke of barely contained fury, as if this was the greatest indignity he'd ever been forced to suffer. It was an improvement over the time he'd burst out laughing.

"Mr Red, sir, please don't hurt my companions and me, we will comply if you guarantee our safe conduct," I whimpered, dismounting Elphin. The horse was the worst actor of us all, watching Edgar with utter contempt. Once I was down he headed over to a patch of grass to graze, utterly unfazed.

"Given yar dressed like a fool, is good to see wisdom from ya. Behave 'n' this'll be sum sore memory." The man lowered his blade a touch, and from out of the forest his men started to appear. They were all dressed in rough clothing, many had only simple daggers. This was the part where I felt a little guilty. It was like watching a flock of pigeons pick a fight with a ballista. Behind me I felt Maeve and Percy tense.

I needed to buy some time, however fleeting. It wasn't that we were in danger. Even I could take on this motley crew. The main threat here was that they'd scatter the second things started. That would eat up our time something rotten. Especially with Alka so close, none of us wanted to be stuck on mop-up duty hunting down the remnants. So I decided to improvise.

"Mr Red, I have a question for you." My voice was meek and quavering, the accent foppish and spoilt. The man had an ego and seemed to enjoy having some rich idiot bow to him, so rather than doing the sensible thing and cutting me down, he smiled and leaned forward, shifting his blade and resting his hands atop the pommel like it was a common walking stick.

I heard a disgusted tut from Maeve at the poor treatment of the weapon and I knew that our time was nearly up.

"Speak boy, youse want promise of yer safety or some such?" That got a chuckle from his group. I paused as if marshalling my confidence extending the time brought, my face pinched by worry. Then I felt a shadow pass over me, like a wayward cloud across the sun. I grinned, time for action. I took some small delight in seeing Edgar frown at the sudden change in my demeanour.

"I just want to ask you a question. Why is it that all you bandits always assume that these women aren't cultivators? I'd just like to know." It was a question that genuinely bothered me. Was it that none of the bandits were ever women?

"Wot?"

"Ah, fuck." One of his men, who clearly had more brains than his boss, started running. Behind me I heard the now familiar sound of armour settling into place after being summoned from storage rings.

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I watched as the shock and disbelief chased the cocky authority from the man's face. "Youse arrogant bastards, let's gets bloody lads! They don't call me Edgar the Red for nothing. Fight me, you bastard!"

The bandit leader recovered admirably, showing a terminal case of excessive ego. The peak bronze cultivator surrounded himself with flames, wasting time he could have been attacking with pointless grandstanding that made me think he'd missed his calling as a bard. "Stand n' fight, prove yar mettle!"

"Don't look at me, I'm just the bard!" I replied. He snarled, readying a technique on his blade. His armour wreathed in flame, he had the potential to be an actual threat. To the horses, that is.

Then with a hiss of wind, a pair of talons coated in flowing water clamped down on him, plucking him from his barricade and flinging him into the forest.

Archimedes soared overhead, crowing in triumph.

"Come on, Elphin, let's look after the horses," I muttered, grabbing his reins and the others. Tuning out the sounds of battle around me, I led the horses out of the clearing, away from the distant sense of glamour being fired off. I questioned how the bandits and five groups before them had survived long enough to meet us. It was clearly suspicious. Three richly dressed souls on spirit mounts and their lone guardian just casually strolling through their territory?

It was a shockingly reliable way to bring the bandits to us. Any time we passed through a town, we'd listen out for word of bandits. If we heard of a group, we'd detour to catch them. We'd quickly found, though, that if we rode through in our full glory, then the bandits just went into hiding. Even with the two fliers it made it difficult to find them, eating up days.

So we experimented. We tried a lone rider to tempt them, but we were either not worth their time or suspicious enough that they left us alone. So we'd honed the current approach over the last two weeks to maximise the efficiency of what the others called 'the rat catching'. We'd learned that keeping Maeve and Persephone as our 'damsels' worked best. Kay didn't have quite enough of a ladylike air, and Lance needed to remain on Gring.

Gaz worked best as the guard. Bors was intimidatingly huge, while the public version of Tristan was so foppish that we looked too weak and vulnerable and therefore suspicious. Arthur would've been a great option, as his ability to sense emotions would've rivalled Gaz's sound glamour. However, the man spent the entire time glowering at me, which seemed to make the bandits nervous. So we'd settled on the current formation.

Some bandits had shown a bit of sense and at least treated me as a probable cultivator, but for some reason I couldn't fathom, the average bandit just assumed that the women were simple mortals. It was immensely stupid. There wasn't anything stopping women rising up the ranks. Maybe it was a mortal concern. Mortal men did tend to have better access to the money and resources to become cultivators.

What I was certain of, though, was how entertaining it was to watch the shock and horror crash over them as the two 'damsels in distress' that they were leering at leapt off their steeds, armour forming around them, blades in hand.

As I pondered this, I noted the setting sun and led the horses over to where the smoke of some guttering fires told me their camp was. It was, to my surprise, a well-ordered space. It seemed that Edgar actually had an element of discipline to his little bandit troupe. It was a good space, beneath a huge outcrop of stone that offered a roof to keep off the rain and sun. It was a handful of paces from a gurgling stream, and they'd even dug a proper latrine.

I would rank it top out of all the bandit dens we'd broken up so far.

As I got a fire going and started to prepare a simple dinner of bread and stew, I was glad that I didn't have to take part in the slaughter. It wasn't that I couldn't kill the bandits. I just didn't feel the same zealous rage that my knightly companions felt. My path was that of the bard. There was not an ounce of hesitation to defend myself or defend others amongst my company, but I sensed something twist when I considered hunting down those who tried to assault us.

It was in part the death glamour. I didn't appreciate the way that part of my soul thrummed with anticipation whenever blood was spilt. I resisted it, focusing on cultivating only those whom I happened to slay, which tended to be whatever idiot stepped out to make their demands. It wasn't the most efficient way forward, but it was the safest.

Even if I understood the method of cleansing death glamour of the residual will that would've quickly sent me mad, I could still fall to the more insidious addiction of quick and easy power. My intuition told me that pursuing power through killing others would be a quick path to unbalancing the power within my hearth. I'd grow in power quickly but at risk of losing myself to the very same force that propelled me forward.

Thankfully there was no lingering death glamour in the camp—far better than some of the earlier ones we'd broken up. There was one where even my usually even temper had frayed as we came across a pit with an entire caravan's worth of corpses piled within it. My remaining moral issues with exterminating bandits had evaporated like dew before the summer sun that day.

As the stew bubbled, the others returned in dribs and drabs. Some went to wash and scrub in the river first, others were still pristine. They took a few minutes, in which time I'd got out some bowls and bread.

"You know you don't have to do all the cooking for us, Taliesin?" Bors said, accepting the food as he sat beside me, helping pass out some tankards of beer that he pulled from a small keg in his storage.

"We are not letting you cook again, Bors!" Lance growled from across the fire.

"Are you certain you're not a poison cultivation?" Kay chimed in. She'd slowly settled into the banter over the last couple of weeks.

"My mother has shown me a lot of poison cultivation, and that chicken was worse." Lance muttered.

"It's not my fault, it's different to fires at home." Bors defended himself with a grin.

"I'm just baffled about how you managed to get the outside so burnt, and yet the inside raw?"

"Look, there's a reason I didn't follow my parents into cooking, alright?"

"Are you suggesting you became a cultivator because cooking was harder?" Gawain chimed in. Even he had to relax from time to time.

"I mean, that's not the only reason," Bors replied, which got a laugh from the group. Easing the tension of the battle, try as they might, killing bandits did weigh on them, even if the key concern was the lives the curs had taken before we found them.

"Well, I for one am looking forward to having someone make us fresh food for once. A couple of weeks on the road and I'm already missing proper beds." Gaz stretched out.

"You have a bed in your storage ring," Lance elbowed him.

"It's not the same! Besides, it still gives me the creeps. Who knows what that bandit did on it?"

"Then can I borrow it?"

"No, get your own."

The group then devolved into an argument about what to do with the ill-gotten gains of the bandits. Some wanted us to drop everything off at the next town. The general consensus was that we should do our best to return what we could. We'd already decided several encampments ago to prioritise returning the bodies of the innocents when we found them.

That had been something we'd made a unanimous decision on.

The Order so far had been mostly harmonious. Arthur was a bit out of tune, but even his general scowling had eased with time. I'd initially doubted the point in spending these two weeks doing something as simple as bandit clean-up. Not that it wasn't an important service, but given the looming threats, it had seemed like something below us. Instead, it had given us time to get used to each other, time to get used to the road, and a challenge on which to test ourselves.

We were slowly being forged into a unit, the burrs scraped off, and a layer of polish added. When we entered a town now, I could feel the awe of the residents. Their attention, the way they drank up the songs I was singing about the Order, made my hearth glow cherry red. I couldn't wait till we got to Alka and our mission started in earnest.

While I'd been musing, I noticed the argument around the fire had risen to new heights. Kay had the knights discussing what to do in specific scenarios, and as usual one of the situations which called for subterfuge was provoking an argument. Those whose honour was more flexible clashed with the more rigid among us. Still, no one was threatening or insulting anyone else. It was at most a friendly squabble and at worst a philosophical debate.

I chuckled as I heard Bors complain that his reticence to be involved in 'dishonourable skulduggery' came less from a moral opposition and more from a functional inability to sneak. Lying back, I played a lazy tune on my lute, letting the conversation wash over me. This is truly what it meant to be out on an adventure.