16 – A Snack Rich in Iron
"Cute lil bugger, ain't she," Yomi said. She grinned, tossing a chunk of dried meat in the air, and Ash leaped high to catch it in her jaws. She gobbled it up swiftly, the stub of her tail wagging. She'd eat just about anything, from my experience, and found all meat equally delicious whether it was cooked or raw.
She barked, and that bark sounded suspiciously like the word 'more!' Still a short and stubby thing, but growing more by the day.
"Well behaved too, for a jackal," I said.
"Thing about some animals is that, so long as they're fed and comfy, they don't feel much need to cause trouble. Course it helps that she's young and impressionable. Few more years and she might be a real little hellraiser."
"Maybe," I said. My focus turned back to my steaming bowl of ramen. I put the finishing touches on it. My own personal touch, at that. A few slices of fried potato, resting atop the noodles and already turning brown from the absorbed broth.
Yomi had said that most every ramen cooks tended to have a personal flourish when it came to ramen. With how widespread the meal was, people did what they could to have their recipe stand out. So I figured the potato would be mine. Like croutons in Grandad's soup.
How well they worked remained to be seen.
I offered the bowl to Mikan and tried to keep the anxiety from showing on my face. "Honest opinion," I told her firmly. "If it's bad, you say so. You owe me. Don't go sugarcoating anything if it tastes like crap."
"I will be honest," she assured me, raising her hands in mock surrender. She sighed, giving a tired roll of her eyes. "You're worse than my father was when he took up breadmaking."
She took her chopsticks up and got to work. I watched her, arms folded, and tried my best to look impassive. Easier said than done with Yomi smirking from the corner of my eye.
Mikan bore a neutral expression as she ate, occasionally making humming or hawing noises. The potato slices she gripped neatly in the sticks, dunking them in the broth, and she seemed pleased when she ate them.
The fact that she tipped the bowl back to drink the last of the broth struck me as a good sign.
"Well?" I asked.
"It's good," she told me, nodding simply. It was like a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders. "Not amazing, I've had better ramen, but it was pretty tasty for a first time."
"I told you," Yomi said. "It's remarkably hard to make bad ramen, Amon. You kind of have to try to make it bad."
"The noodles need work though," Mikan said, raising a finger like a scholar giving a lecture. "They're lumpy and the texture for them is... not ideal. And the broth could do with a little more salt, just for a stronger flavour."
"Aside from that?" I asked, leaning closer, "any notes?"
Mikan smiled at me. "I'm not exactly a master chef, Master Amon. That's the best advice I can think to give. I mean, it's how I like my ramen to be done..."
I sighed with some measure of relief, lifting Ash to the crook of my left arm. I stroked the top of her head, ignoring the bites and nips she gave my arm in return. "I'll count that as a victory."
"You worry far too much," Yomi said, shaking her head. "Still, you aren't totally clueless as a cook. Prior experience, I take it?"
"Some," I admitted, shrugging. "After I got married my wife did much of the cooking. But she and I would work together on food, from time to time. And before that, well, I did a bit of cooking around the family home."
"Ah," said Yomi. It did not need to be specified that my wife was no longer with us.
For a moment my mind wandered back to that... dream or vision or whatever from the twilight world between life and the Unmapped Lands of the Old Stranger's domain. Made my chest ache, just to think of it.
There came a thump from outside the kitchen, the noise of someone beating their fist on the counter. "Oi!" a coarse voice shouted. "What's a man gotta do to get served in this dump?!"
I narrowed my eyes, slowly setting Ash down. She was growling faintly at the door. Even at her size and age, it was a sound that would give pause to many men. Indeed, those teeth of hers were already rather sharp.
"Doesn't sound like one of your usual guests," Mikan said. "Sounds like trouble, actually... seriously, why can we not have one peaceful week in Tiode?"
"I might be at least partially to blame," I admitted, shrugging. I pushed the back door open and emerged behind the counter.
A man sat on the other side, incredible shabby with a wild mane of hair and a coarse beard that looked as if it had never once seen a comb. Or even a wash. Dressed in ragged furs, like some mountain barbarian back west, he wore a long and curved blade on his hip. He squinted at me as I made my way out to the counter.
"A westerner?" he asked in a coarse voice. "Didn't think they had shaved apes working in these parts."
"As opposed to the unshaved kind?" I asked, scanning the windswept briar of his hair. He was decently large, for an easterner. You got good at identifying criminals at a glance if you lived long enough, and the man was just shy of having the word 'murderer' branded on his forehead. A thick netting of scar tissue covered his knuckles, and his face looked as if it had been shaped by an assortment of half-healed bruises. Crime and conflict had shaped him in much the same way a potter shaped clay.
Still, who was I to judge on that front?
The man snorted his broad nostrils. "I'm stopping in this dinky hovel village for a lil' bit of supply shopping. And you get the supreme honour of feedin' me in the process," he said. He leaned forward, exposing a gap-toothed grin. "So... hop to it."
"Oh?" I asked, raising one brow. I considered myself patient. I considered myself a man who had something of a control on his rage.
That did not make me someone to suffer disrespect lightly.
"Oh yeah. You're speakin' to a proud warrior in the service of the great Black Khul. The cruellest, strongest, most dangerous man across all of Tsukio, with a blade even cultivators fear. A man you... definitely don't want to get on the bad side of."
Once you heard enough boastful speeches like that, they all sounded about the same. The cadence, the tone, even some of the words blowhards like this fool tended to use, they were all of a kind. "Strikes me as a poor idea, throwing your weight around in a town that has a barracks of soldiers only a short while away," I said, regarding him calmly.
The man grinned broader, and made his eyes very wide to give the impression he was some kind of maniac. Just made him look stupid. "I can get out of town very fast if I need to, with my horse right outside. And no soldiers would dare to chase Black Khul's men."
"Tell you what," I said, resting my hands on the bar. "You ask nicely, and I'll get some food for you." I had to at least try to be diplomatic before I pulled his head from his shoulders.
"Ask nicely?" he repeated. He turned and spat on the ground. I made a note of that and added it to his tab. "Listen here, foreign scum. Do what you're told, or else..." He drew his blade, the hiss of steel on leather filling the air. He pressed the tip under my chin.
"Oh, is this the part when you threaten me, is it?" I asked, raising one brow at the stocky bastard. I had known, going in, that it was inevitable that some dumb fool would try to cause trouble at the inn. That was just how things went in this line of work. Though it had come sooner than expected. "Well... you were generous enough to offer me a little bit of food."
"Wh-"
I leaned forward, catching the tip of the blade in by teeth. Then, with one hard flex of my jaw, I bit clean through the metal. The bandit stared in shock as I chewed a mouthful of his sword on one side of my mouth. I didn't swallow it, I wasn't that much of a maniac, instead spitting the twisted and mashed lump into the wicker bin beneath the counter.
"I'll be honest with you," I told the dumbstruck man. "You need to find a better blacksmith."