More Tales of MU

…or, Weed The People

We’d decided that while lunch and dinner weren’t terrible, Missy had been right that it really only made sense to go to the dining hall for breakfast.

Fast food breakfasts are always shit, but for the rest of the day we could go to the food court and get hot sandwiches, burgers, chicken baskets or whatever with fries and a drink for the cost of a meal punch.

With each punch working out to fifty copper there wasn’t enough for dessert, but it worked out that none of us were really big on sweets. We would have to dig out our coin pouches if we wanted to get everything large or get a lot of extras, but that wasn’t a big deal.

For breakfast, though, it was hard to find fifty copper worth of food that anybody would want to eat. I could see just popping into the convenience store if the weather was shitty and we didn’t want to go outside before we had to, but there was no way it’d be worth walking over to the union for a greasy square tater tot and a little sausage disk on a dried-out bun.

Inside the dining hall, I loaded up a plate with sausage. Bacon was tasty, but hard to fill up on. I was going through some serious cravings for toasted animal-flesh, especially as I’d just gotten back from my grandfather’s place a little over a month before.

Elves are not vegetarians—it doesn’t take a bow and arrow to bring down the wild carrot—but they don’t raise any animals for food, and regular trade with humans is too “new” in their minds for beef and chicken to form a regular part of the elven diet. Instead, there are small game birds, and sometimes venison, and even more rarely wild boar. Meat is usually only eaten with the midday meal, and only in small portions.

At home, my mother served meat more often, but still in smaller portions than I liked, especially after a summer of going mostly without.

The Harlowe crowd was rowdier on Monday morning. Despite the group being mostly girls, there was a lot of pinching and groping and people sitting on each other’s laps. Marlot, pointing again, reminded me of her assertion that college girls are all bisexual.

“Are you?” Missy asked her.

“Soon as I grow three more inches,” Marlot said. “I can really only work on one thing at a time.”

“Um… please don’t call me a whore,” Missy said, giving Marlot a sideways look, “but do you speak elvish, Jamie?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It was my mom’s first language. She still has a bit of an accent, when she speaks Pax.”

“Elves have accents?” Missy asked.

“A lot of them don’t, just because they’ve spoken the language for a hundred years or more,” I said. “But my mom’s only in her fifties. She’s still ironing it out.”

“Are you going to live for hundreds of years?” Missy asked.

“Probably not,” I said. “She might reach two hundred, though.”

“I plan on living to be one hundred and seventy-three years old, exactly,” Marlot said. “On my final birthday, I will fall stone dead and land face first in a bowl of soup, splattering the esteemed guests and completing a complicated plot for revenge against whatever wrongs they might have done me.”

“What if they haven’t done anything?” Missy asked.

“Then it will just seem to be an unfortunate accident,” Marlot said. “That’s why this plan is so perfect. Plausible deniability.”

“Oh,” Missy said. As usual, she didn’t seem to know quite how to take Marlot. Very few people did. “Um… anyway, Jamie, would you mind saying something in elvish?”

“Um, okay,” I said. I had to concentrate for a moment. It was hard for me to “just say” something in elvish. If somebody else was speaking it, I could answer or jump into the conversation. I could ask my mom where she’d put my axe in elvish. Just up and saying something, though, felt weird. “Hello. This is something in elvish.”

“Oh, Khersis, that’s pretty,” Missy said. “I mean, it’s sexy.”

She had meant pretty.

“You guys both taking eighteen credit hours?” Missy asked.

“I am,” I said.

“I’m only doing fifteen,” Marlot said. “There’s pretty much no way I can get everything I need in four years, so I’m not going to kill myself trying and then have to do a summer session for a couple of classes or something lame like that.”

“I had teachers in high school who told us that they had to give us hours and hours of homework every night so we’d be ready for college,” Missy said. “But my brother told me that’s bullshit. None of his classes give as much homework as high school did, because college professors don’t give busy work.”

“I’d guess it probably varies,” I said. “I guess we’ll find out.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Missy said. She gave a shaky laugh. I think we were all nervous, but she was showing it the most.

“Well, I should probably get going,” Marlot said. She’d finished her omelet while I was still on my first plate of sausage, and sat patiently while Missy finished her cereal and I had seconds. “I’ve got to get way the fuck across campus.”

“How’s your leg holding up?” I asked. When we’d visited it before, I’d been concerned that the spread-out nature of the campus would end up being a deal-breaker, but Marlot never said a word about it.

“Fine,” she said. “It’s fine.”

“What’s wrong with your leg?” Missy asked.

“Nothing’s wrong with my leg,” Marlot said. “It’s fine. It’s so fine, in fact, that its sheer level of fineness threatens to overwhelm any lesser leg exposed to it.”

“I didn’t mean anything,” Missy said.

“It’s fine,” Marlot said. “I’ll talk to you guys later. Lunch at eleven-thirty?”

“Sure,” I said. My morning classes were at nine and ten-fifteen, so that worked out.

For my first class, I had to double back around and go past Pelinor and Harlowe to get over to what was called West Campus. It wasn’t actually a separate campus except insofar as a Provincial Road cut it off from the rest. An iron footbridge with some impressive scrollwork in the guardrails led over the road.

I caught up with the stream of students heading west at this bridge, and filed across it with them. The traffic on the road below mostly seemed to be long-haul wagons.

The trees on West Campus had not been thinned out nearly as much as the ones on the rest of campus, and had been allowed to grow in around the buildings. There was a clear space around the equestrian building and the animal husbandry barn, and for the archery range, but the rest of it had a nice, woodsy feel.

This was where my first two classes–basic herbalism and field herbalism—met. I didn’t yet know what I wanted to study, so I’d picked classes that matched my interests. At first I’d just planned on taking one or the other of the entry level herbalism courses, but after looking at a map of the campus I’d decided to take them both to make the “morning commute” worthwhile.

My first class was in a vine-and-moss-covered building called Wexler Hall, which looked a bit like an elegant dollhouse built to resemble a castle, or vice-versa. The interior was a bit sparse for a house, but didn’t much resemble a school building, either. There was a large front sitting room that was apparently just a public lounge. The classrooms were numbered, but not laid out in any particular order.

I was supposed to be in room number seven, which turned out to be an addition built onto the back.

The room had fifteen work tables in three columns. By the time I’d gotten there, most of the tables were occupied by one person and some of them had two. The back row was empty, except for one table, which had the centaur I’d seen on Friday. At least, he was a centaur, though I’m pretty sure it was the same guy.

I wanted to be somewhere near the middle, and the left-hand table in the third row had an empty spot. I went up and asked the dark-haired, wiry-muscled guy who was already there if he minded if I worked next to him.

He gave me a quick glance and then said, “Knock yourself out.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’m Jamie.”

“Louis.”

The centaur was the only non-human I could spot. Then I noticed the three undersized desks in another row in front of the front row, and then I noticed there were gnomes at them, two boys and a girl.

One of the boys was definitely a wood gnome, the only kind I’d met. The green clothes and pointed cap of folded leather was a bit of a giveaway there.

The other two looked like burrow gnomes, or at least what I’d always assumed burrow gnomes looked like: plainer clothes in earthy tones.

I realized that the professor, a gnomish woman with an unusually thin face and triangular mass of curly auburn hair on top of her head, had entered the room at some point and was pushing a stool over to the front table. There was a cardboard tray with little brown sacks in it on top of the stool. When the stool was right up against the table, she moved the tray over, then climbed up.

She took a moment to smooth out her long dress and apron before clearing her throat, twice.

“Good morning, class!” she said cheerily, startling those who hadn’t yet noticed her. “My name is Bryony Swain. I know the course catalogue lists me as ‘Professor Bryony’, but that’s just because I haven’t been able to convince the dean that gnomes have last names. I’ll answer to Professor Bryony or Professor Swain, as you like. I’m not fussed.”

She raised her leg and put a furry foot on a pile of papers on the corner of the table.

“This here’s your syllabus, course notes, and worksheets, all in one,” she said. She bent down and picked up the tray, holding it with one hand “And these in the tray are bags of dried fruit and nuts, and my special blend of strawberry rosehip tea. I’m going to take the roll. When I say your name, you come up, we’ll shake hands, and then you can take your booklet and packet.”

“Mr. Bowman, James” was the second name on the list, right after ‘Ms. Alhandra, Athene”—a muscular, tan girl with a face that was more handsome than beautiful and a mass of orange braids.

“Mr. Bowman,” Bryony said, pumping my arm enthusiastically as her hand disappeared inside mine. “We have each other all morning. I expect I’ll be sick of looking at you before too long, eh?”

She winked.

“Probably,” I said.

She held out the tray and I dutifully took a packet, then took my booklet and returned to my seat.

I learned that the centaur’s name was Cleon. Bryony climbed down off her desk before she called any of the gnomes, and then back up on it once she had shook their hands and given them their treat bags. She made them each take two, and asked the burrow gnomes what shire they were from.

When the girl, Honey, said that she was from Longfallon (or something like that), Bryony asked her if she was a Calloway.

“Yes, ma’am,” Honey said. She sounded pleased. The professor insisted she take a third bag.

I looked at my booklet. The top sheet was the syllabus for the course. Up at the top, it proclaimed the course goal: “To learn how to recognize and evoke the inherent properties of plants, and how to combine them to the best effect.” It broke down the grades, with fifty percent of the grades coming from lab work, thirty percent from quizzes, and ten percent each from a midterm and final exam. A line at the bottom warned that “Lack of attendance may result in missed snacks.”

Professor Bryony Swain was evidently a big believer in snacks.

“Are these for class?” one girl asked, as she took her baggy.

“They’re my gift, for the class,” the professor said. “I believe in being a good hostess. You may eat them now if you’d like, or save them for later, but you’ll have to put them away for the second half of the period. I only have two rules for food in class: bring enough for everybody, and there’s no eating when herbs are out. When the weather gets colder, I’ll bring in my teapot and we can try out different blends. I’m afraid the buildings over here are a wee bit drafty compared to those in Campus Main. This is a newer addition, you see, but most of those buildings have been rebuilt completely at least once. These are all the originals.”

Once everybody had been called, she sat down on the edge of her table and got down to business. Well, first she asked the people who were eating what they thought of the snack packs, and how they liked the scent of the tea bags. After that, it was all business.

“For the first quarter, you’re going to be handling dried herbs that have been screened and selected for their quality,” she said. “By mid-term, you’ll be ready to handle fresh herbs, which are more potent but also more delicate, and you’ll know how to select the ones that are most viable. If all goes well, we may get to live herbs, which aren’t really part of this class, but it’ll be a good preparation if you’re going on to the higher level courses. Now, there are some trays over on the side counter. If you’ll go over one row at a time and take one, we can begin.”

She held up her hand to stop the second row—the first row of humans—while the gnomes went over and collected trays from a bench that had been set up next to the counter.

“Now, you should all have a copy of A Country Cunning-Woman’s Guide To Plants,” the professor said as the rest of us went over one row at a time. “If you’ll open it to Appendix A, you can try to match them by their appearance. As you gain more experience, you’ll find other ways to identify herbs. If you think you’ve found one, raise it in your hand and I’ll call on you.”

I recognized the vervain immediately, before I’d even gotten back to my table. I held it up.

“Mr. Bowman,” the professor said.

“Vervain,” I said.

“Correct,” she said. “Also known, among human-types, as the tears of Khelaine. Bit obvious, but I’m not out to stump you all on the first day. Vervain has uses against the undead, as well as staunching blood flow and enhancing the potency of other herbs. The month Verbena takes its name from this plant.”

I let other people identify the red clover, morning glory, and angelica, which I also recognized, and spent some time looking through the appendix for the others. Cleon identified one as orris root, which was apparently just the root of an iris. The last one had everybody stumped, myself included. It was a dried flower, with the stem and leaves preserved. I knew what it looked like, and that had been distracting in my attempt to find out what it actually was.

I gathered other people were having the same difficulty. Finally, Professor Bryony told everybody to close their books and actually look at it.

I realized my mistake at the same time as several other people.

“Is it… a dandelion?” a girl in the second row asked.

“It is,” the professor said proudly. “The humble little dandelion, or as we sometimes call them, ‘pissabed’. The greens are more nutritious and better tasting than spinach. Parts of the plant can be made into coffee, wine, or tea. It treats warts and insect bites, and repels mosquitoes. It is also, as you might guess, a diuretic. You’ll deal with loads of more powerful plants in this course, but you’ll have a hard time finding one that’s more useful. Now, for the last fifteen minutes or so of class, I want you to fill out the first worksheet with entries for these six herbs and how you would recognize them in the future. You could just copy the characteristics from the book, but you should focus on what sticks out to you. It can even be a feeling, if you have one. We’ll talk more about that on Wednesday.”

That was about it for my first class. Louis took a look at how I filled out my worksheet before doing his own.

“Plants aren’t my thing,” he said. “But I couldn’t get into the lab I wanted, and some of this shit’s actually useful in alchemy.”

“I took it because it sounded easy,” I said. That hadn’t been the only reason, but I felt a little defensive about my decision to take an herb class, voluntarily and on purpose.

“Mr. Bowman,” Professor Bryony said from by my feet, making me jump. “If you don’t have anything pressing between classes, would you mind terribly sticking around and carrying a few things for me?”

“Oh, um, no, I don’t mind,” I said.

“Wonderful!” she said. “We wouldn’t want things to be too easy for you, after all.”

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