Tauren Tale, Chapter 8
#8 of Tauren Tale
Kazbo ran after the Tauren, down, down into a depression in the desert floor. At the bottom, he found the pair in deep scrub brush. Sanja was climbing a scrawny tree - the only one without thorns that they had seen since entering Desolace - and Jorga circled underneath her, holding the pack open for her to drop things down into it.
"What is that tree?"
"It's a jacao," she shouted down at him, dropping another large pod down into the pack.
The Gnome picked up one of the jacao fruit from where it had fallen into a scrub. It was bright yellow and the same sort of size and shape as a tangerine.
"Don't eat that!" Sanja shouted. "Jacao fruit is poisonous. It might not kill you, but you'll get... well, you could end up dying of dehydration. I doubt we could find enough water to keep you alive."
Kazbo dropped the fruit and wiped his hands on his blood-stained shirt.
"So the beans...?"
She wagged her head from one side to the other. "Poisonous too, actually. But you can bake them in the coals of a campfire until they scream."
Jorga looked at him and made a quiet eee! noise to imitate steam escaping.
"Then you can eat them safely."
The Gnome made an unhappy face. He wasn't sure which was better, cactus that tasted like "green," the haunch of a dying man, or a poisonous nut that should be safe to eat.
Sanja was busily cutting pods away with her knife and dropping them into the bag. She paused for a moment and looked down at the Gnome. "Kazbo, tell me, what is your favorite thing to eat, in all of Azeroth?"
"My favorite?" He tugged on his bright, pink beard. "Well, in Stormwind, there is a tavern called The Golden Keg." He used some Common words, since he knew no Taurahe translation. "The owner, a human named Colin, he makes quail, and he stuffs it with mushrooms and nuts."
He closed his eyes, remembering the beautiful aroma and the glistening beads of fat on the perfectly crisped skin. "I do not know if anything could taste better."
"Well, our favorite food is The Sleeping Calf."
Jorga nodded in a wildly exaggerated manner.
"It's a piece of warm flat-bread, smeared with a huge glob of jacao, and sprinkled lightly with salt." She looked down at the little man and gestured with her hand. "You tear the end off of a baked pod and squeeze the nut paste out like... well, into a glob. Before you spread it, it looks a little like a calf on a sleeping mat."
"It looks a lot more like poop!" Jorga laughed but then grew somber. "If you say that, then adults say something like, 'I guess you won't want any.'"
"Yeah. We don't have any bread or salt, but I bet the jacao still tastes good without it."
"So these trees grow in Mulgore too?" Kazbo asked.
Sanja shook her head. "Definitely not. The only way to get jacao in Mulgore is to trade for it. Orcish traders like Thurg, Elizabeth's owner, gather it from Desolace and bring it in."
"Trade?" Kazbo tried to imagine what a people without technology could possibly have to trade. "What do they trade for jacao?"
"Well, pottery, of course," Jorga responded. "That's all traders ever want."
"We always make extra pots, just in case any traders come through." Sanja added.
Kazbo scratched his head. "So, Orcs love pottery? I never would have guessed that. They just seem so..."
Sanja laughed. "Oh, I doubt it. They just sell it to Goblins."
The little man sat down in the sand. "Hey! There's water here!" he shouted suddenly.
Sanja leapt from the tree and began digging in the sand beneath the scrub brush. "You're right! There's a lot of water."
"Why is it... orange?" Jorga whispered.
"The stream must flow under the ground, through a large... deposit of iron ore." he completed in Common. "Rust should not make it poisonous."
Sanja studied the edges of the puddle for a long while. "I see insects!" she shouted in joy. "It must be safe."
Both of the Tauren dove face-first into the puddle and began to lap it up.
Everyone was thirsty. They had been rationing their water carefully since the beginning of the journey.
Kazbo waited patiently and stared at the twin tails drawing lazy figure-eights in the desert air. He eventually started to wonder if the Tauren could be related to camels.
When they could drink no more, they rolled out of the way and laid on their backs.
"Tastes yucky," Jorga said.
"This is the best day..." Sanja started to say before stopping herself. "Well, this day is getting better. A lot better than yesterday, at least."
They built a small campfire and rested, thankful that they could finally take their time without fear of being spotted by Centaurs.
"You're going to burn your mouth," Sanja admonished, but she couldn't really blame the boy for not waiting until the jacao pod was cool. Everyone was hungry.
Kazbo cautiously slurped the warm meat out of the singed jacao pod. It was the nuttiest flavor that he had ever tasted. Smooth, buttery, and a little sweet. He swished it around in his mouth a long while before swallowing.
"So?"
"I do not think this is quite as good as quail," he said at last. He closed his eyes. "But I can imagine it on top of bread and sprinkled with a little salt. That must be... amazing."
The Taurens nodded in unison.
The trio laid back and stared up at the stars. "So the Tauren make pottery. I did not know that," Kazbo said casually. "Do you know who is crazy about pottery?" The siblings looked up, but didn't speak. "Draenei." He nodded his head.
"Draenei can never get enough pottery. They hang it on their walls when they run out of shelves." Kazbo had gotten into the habit of shifting seamlessly to Common whenever he did not have a translation for a word. Quite often, he found, when Sanja did not know what a Common word meant, that no amount of description would help explain it.
Kazbo sat up, suddenly. "In fact, I have a Draenei friend - a big fellow, named Belenkar - who gave me clay bowl as a gift. Can you believe that he once sailed all the way to the Goblin city of Booty Bay just to..."
The Gnome's mouth fell open and he stared at the Tauren.
"Is... is Tauren pottery brown and have black and white lines on it?" he stammered.
"I like to draw circles on them sometimes!" Jorga volunteered. "Circles are more fun than the lines."
Kazbo was silent for a long moment. "How could I have not seen this earlier? The bowl my wife keeps fruit in must be Tauren-made!" He laughed and slapped his knee. "It would be so bizarre if your family made my bowl!"
Jorga smiled, but Sanja looked confused. "What is a 'wife'?"
"Oh, sorry," Kazbo said. "My mate."
Sanja's brows furrowed. "Gnomes mate in the summer?"
He giggled nervously. "Well... um... heh..."
"Tauren mate in the fall," she explained.
"Oh! Well, Gnomes take a mate for life. I call her my wife, and she calls me her husband."
"So you have a calf?" Jorga asked.
Kazbo laughed loud. "We have two sons, but they are grown up now and have families of their own." He smiled at the boy. "One has a daughter who is about your age. She turned seven before I left on this voyage."
The pair stared at the Gnome in silence.
"How can your granddaughter be seven?" Jorga asked.
"Do you mean, seven summers and summer winters?" Sanja added.
"Yes, she is seven years old," Kazbo said, confusion evident on his face.
The girl scrabbled in the dirt for a moment and then put seven small stones into the Gnome's open hand. "Seven?" she said, making sure she understood correctly.
"Yes, seven."
"But how can that be? My grandmother, my father's mother is only eight."
"Eight?" Kazbo gasped. He picked up another small stone and poured the pile back into Sanja's hand. "Eight years old?"
The Tauren nodded in unison.
"So, then how old are you, Jorga?"
Jorga looked to his sister and then back to the tiny man. "All Tauren are born in the spring," he said as if it were obvious.
"You were born this year?"
When he nodded, Kazbo shifted his gaze to the girl. "And you, Sanja?"
"I'm a yearling, of course. Why, how old are you?"
"I'm..." the Gnome hesitated, suddenly uncomfortable, "one hundred and six."
"But no one lives that long!" Jorga shouted.
"Gnomes do," Kazbo explained. "I've met a Gnome who is over two hundred and fifty years old."
Sanja scratched her head. "You know... Elizabeth had told me that she was sixteen and I thought that she must be lying. The oldest Tauren in our tribe is only fifteen." She started nodding. "But I guess not every race lives the same length of time, do they?"
"No, they do not," Kazbo responded. "In fact, the Night Elves were once immortal."
"My father said that once. He said they were 'eternally youthful and that they never aged, no matter how many seasons passed,'" Sanja said, "but I couldn't believe him."
"No?"
"Well, how could that be true? Every year new calves are born and some of the oldest Tauren die," Sanja explained. "If the elders stopped dying, then there would be a whole lot of Tauren.
"So, I told the elders, 'If the Kaldorei were once immortal, then why are we not up to our horns in Night Elves?'" Sanja nodded her head, purposefully.
Kazbo smiled. "You are a very clever young woman. So what did the elders say to that?"
"Bo thought that perhaps most of the Night Elf bulls did not know how to impregnate Night Elf cows. This made all of the elders laugh." Her face turned angry. "No matter how I asked, no one would explain why this was funny."
The Gnome stroked his beard with one hand and worked to stifle his own mirth.
In the morning, the trio returned to the road with a full water skin and a backpack that brimmed over with jacao pods. They hiked north at a much more leisurely pace and stopped frequently to hunt for for rabbits and to let Kazbo rest.
To the Tauren's surprise, hunting in the desert was much easier than it had been back in Mulgore. Instead of hiding in deep holes, Desolace hares would run into nearly impenetrable cholla bushes. This defense would work perfectly on most predators, but the spines offered little protection against Sanja's spear.
Water was scarce, of course, but there was actually some to be found if you were not in a hurry. They were certainly not, and were all too glad to let Theodore get way, way ahead of them.
They did not see him anywhere, and he was far from missed. They once stopped at a campsite near the road that still had the remnants of a campfire.
Sanja picked up a piece of firewood that had not burnt completely. The rubbed the charred tip and looked at her fingers. "Theodore probably camped here," she said, showing her blackened fingertips to the others. "This was probably burned within the last few days."
She dug briefly into the ashes and shook her head. "No warm coals. Good. He must be over a day ahead of us."
The three stayed awake until all hours, laughing and sharing stories. Kazbo never told the siblings to go to sleep and Jorga reveled in his new-found freedom.
The boy got homesick at times and even cried once, but there was nothing that could be done for it. The road was a lonely place.
Kazbo grinned like a child when he spotted the clay banks of the oasis. He grabbed a pointed stick and plopped down in the mud without worry for his nearly-ruined clothing.
"Here, look," he said to Jorga. "Three little lines beside each other... that represents the 'hhh' sound."
Jorga looked to his sister and then back to Kazbo's impressions in the mud.
"A triangle, that's the sound 'orrr'. And then a slash, that's 'nnn'. And finally a dot. That's the 'sss' sound. Put them all together and that spells hhorrnnss."
The Gnome grinned stupidly. "Get it?"
Jorga shrugged. "Why?"
"Well, it would not have to be here in the mud. I could make these marks anywhere and they would still say 'horns'." He studied the boy's blank expression. "I could carve these in a tree, or put it on a piece of paper, or write it anywhere, really. And if you saw it, and you knew what each symbol sounded like, then you would know that I was telling you 'horns'. Get it?"
"But why would you tell me 'horns'?"
Kazbo shook his head and waved his mud-covered hands. "It would not have to be just 'horns,' why if you knew the symbols, then I could write any message and you would know how to read it. And you would know what I was telling you."
Jorga nodded for a moment and then started to shake his head. "Wouldn't it just be easier to tell me?"
The Gnome pointed up with a single finger. "Ah, but something wonderful happens when you can read. If I can write something down, then you can read it later. We don't have to be in the same place at the same time."
The boy shrugged, not really understanding the significance of this, or why it would be worth the effort to learn a bunch of symbols.
"Oh, I get it," Sanja said. She knelt behind the boy and put her hands on his shoulders. "So if everyone could read and write, then storytellers could save their stories, and you could hear them whenever you wanted. You wouldn't have to wait for someone to tell it to you."
Jorga looked up at his sister.
"So you could hear the story of the Hammer and the Knife, and I could hear the story of the Warrior and the Butterfly, at the same time." She grinned wide. "And I wouldn't have to listen to that stupid, impossible story you like ever again."
"Hey!" Jorga shouted. He turned around and gave his sister a shove. "The Hammer and the Knife is funny. It's way better than the stupid butterfly story."
Jorga started prancing around in the mud. "Oh look at me. I'm too sad to fight a war! I wish I were a stupid butterfly."
Sanja threw the first glob of mud.