6. The Toxinstruction

It wasn’t strange that somebody knocked on her wagon door. It was strange that they did so while the wagon was driving, around midnight.

Chef tapped the door ajar using her tail. She already felt Minneka’s eyes on her, always alert.

A brown-black swine, a peccary, ran next to her wagon. A young one, she could tell from the small back and tusks. When the door opened, he immediately jumped into the wagon and sought support from the walls, panting. The scent of wet earth, and a bit of blood, traveled with him.

“My my, I was afraid I would never catch up to you!”

Peccaries are also not from around here, but from the desert, she thought. Do animals really travel this far just to reach me? She felt that pressure again. Those expectations. Her paws flew to her cauldron, where she lit the fire with the aid of flintstones and added some more ingredients to her recipe.

“You had an assignment for me?”

“Chef,” Minneka hissed at her back. “My assignment is more important. Send him away.”

“Maybe it happens to be on our route,” Chef whispered back. “We can at least hear him out!”

“My name is Perzwa.” He grunted after saying his name. Maybe that was the Swine translation for it. “I am connected to the pyramid builders of Floria. In those pyramids, we want to keep a number of invaluable treasures, which means we want to keep out any burglars. My my, well, what a problem. Until we realized that you might know some invisible poison or plant that made animals go insane.”

“I use my knowledge for food and healing,” Chef said instantly. “Not turning animals insane.”

“My my, I understand, I understand,” Perzwa stammered without pause. “But the pyramids will house food too! We will only use it to keep out criminals, understand?”

Chef frowned and tapped her recipe book with her fingers. It had already overheard the conversation and found a page with a simple toxin.

“Look at it this way,” the swine kept chattering. “Nobody likes fighting and war. Swords are sharp and blood makes me faint. But if someone were to attack me … my my, I’d be very glad if a soldier came to defend me!”

She looked at the bubbly creature before her. There was something adorable about him. Surely it wasn’t too hard to take a slight detour along the Poison Belt? Those waters were still slightly toxic from the Poison Explosion from centuries ago. In small doses, though, it would not be deadly.

Lost in thought, Chef had almost forgotten her cauldron. Just in time she stirred and blew a long breath to change the intensity of the fire. She looked over her shoulder.

“We’ll take a tiny detour past the Poison Belt. Will only take us a few hours, it will, and then—”

“You are truly insane,” Minneka growled, as she kicked open the wagen door and walked away.

“Sorry, erm, she sometimes, erm, has mood swings. I will talk to her,” Chef said, as she stepped into the darkness herself. A short distance away, with Perzwa still inside her wagon, Minneka rapidly turned around.

“We have no time for this.”

“We practically drive right past the Poison Belt on our way to Traferia!”

“You don’t even know the swine! As I said, you’re far too naïve. Trusting anybody who stumbles into your wagon.”

“Just like I trusted you immediately as well? Was that wrong too? Otherwise we would not be here now, we wouldn’t, with half the recipe already gathered.”

Her wagon moved from left to right. Even young swine were quite heavy and didn’t exactly walk with grace. She just hoped Perzwa didn’t destroy anything.

Minneka sighed. “I am advisor to the King of Lions. Maybe the most important creature in all of Traferia! Perzwa is a nobody asking for poison.”

“Is that so … Minnekeria?”

Her ears pricked up and her tail slammed the floor. She opened her mouth wide, but shut it again and sniffed.

“So you studied my passport. Good. You’re learning distrust.”

“That’s not good at all!”

Her wagon door opened. Perzwa hung halfway out of the opening.

“Are you accepting my assignment or not?”

Chef didn’t know what to say. Where to look or whom to disappoint. “Wait, calm down, let me think, I have to—”

The swine screamed and fled her wagon. Behind him, a steaming hot waterfall flowed through the doorway and bent the wooden planks.

Chef’s cauldron had boiled over.

With a mighty jump, she returned to her wagon. She climbed over the walls, away from the hot liquid, until she was able to grab her silk towels. As she tried to save her wagon, she extinguished the fire.

Minneka and Perzwa looked at her with a hint of guilt and shame.

“I will help you both. Because that is what I do.” Chef screamed as if she wanted to wake up all of Esprante. “And we will arrive in Traferia on time. That is my decision, that is, and you’ll just have to live with it!”

Minneka lowered her head. She held a towel between her teeth and used it to dab a few of the soaked spots. “My apologies, my behavior was improper.”

Perzwa breathed a sigh of relief and hopped back inside.

“My my, well, nobody told me that the Good Chef had such a temperament!”

It took an hour before her wagon had been cleaned and dried enough for usage.

Then, Chef found Perzwa studying her beautiful veggie patch. Awed by every bit of it, but surely by the new plant she invented herself.

“How … how do you do this? Mama told me that a goddess of nature lives within the planet, and she makes plants grow. But these are inside a wagon!”

Chef smiled. She missed no opportunity to explain her passion. “Plants only need a few things. Water, sunlight, and a few particles that help. With just those ingredients, they can grow from a tiny seed into a gigantic plant holding fruits and food. It is magic!”

“It is photosynthesis,” Minneka muttered. “A proven process of—”

“Yes, yes, and yet it is magic, it is. Photo means light. Synthesis means to make. Plants make more of themselves out of sunlight! Magic, right?”

The swine mucked around in the dirt. “And the water? And the particles?”

“Plants normally take their water from deep inside the planet. I can’t do that with my wagon, so I have to water the plants myself each day. Those particles, though, are the hardest. Sometimes I’m lucky and a few birds poop on my garden. Otherwise I have to search for plant food myself.”

Perzwa backed away. “My my, maybe the farmerly profession is not meant for me!”

He’d already noticed a new toy: her recipe book. “And this one? Did you write all these pages yourself? They almost seem …”

“No. I received that book when I still lived with the Primas.”

Minneka scampered. “Received? As if they’d ever give away such a valuable object. You stole it, you have to.”

Chef frowned. Minneka was right, though. Once, Chef was a young chimpanzee with a passion for food, and one day she suddenly saw a book that knew all recipes. Of course she secretly took it with her one night, though the Primas still blamed the Wolves.

But how did Minneka know this?

“The book is writing of its own accord!” Perzwa yelled. The page changed back to one about the Turnbacktulips—the next part of their medicine—but added something this time. The location of a trader nearby, like a small blinking dot on the map of Esprante.

In a few hours, they’d pass the dot and also the Poison Belt. Chef couldn’t be in two places at once, though. And yes, she felt like she missed that ability every single day.

“I will go to the Poison Belt. I know a safe way to collect poison. You two meet that trader and buy some Turnbacktulips.”

“I am not going anywhere with that swine,” Minneka stated.

“My my, how friendly.” Perzwa stepped forward. “I’ve been running around the world for a year now to negotiate for the pyramids and everything. I can do it alone just fine.”

“Alone?” Minneka was angry about everything. “Are you going to let him do this important task alone?”

“I have to. We must move on.”

That sentence shut Minneka up.

It was already afternoon when they left the car and walked to the Poison Belt. Minneka carried a bag with empty jars, while Chef followed her nose to find the perfect spot. As she scooped some blue-green water into the jars with her wooden ladle, the desert fox started to talk softly.

“My real name is Minnekeria,” she said. “Because I am a demigod. A daughter of Feria. She bore a child with a desert creature long ago, and those are my ancestors. A bit of her magic still runs through me.”

Chef turned around and almost stumbled into the poisonous water herself. She smiled broadly. “A demigod!? I am traveling with a god?”

“Sssh.” She pressed her paw against Chef’s mouth. “Can you, for once, not scream secret information into the forest?”

“Mhm—so—mm—ry.” Minneka let go. “Why aren’t you proud? What do you even need me for?”

“It is a dangerous time to be a demigod.” She shook her fur with a look of regret. “It is always a dangerous time to be a demigod.”

Chef’s curiosity won and made her ask. “What is your power? I heard all demigods have a bit of their ancestor’s power.”

“That’s the problem. I never discovered it. But as soon as others discover what I am, they won’t hesitate to abduct, banish, or kill me.”

“Oh no, don’t talk like that. Animals love demigods, they do, and—”

“You’re naïve, Chef. The animals killed the godchildren because they didn’t want them to rule Somnia. Then they discovered there were hundreds of demigods and targeted them before they even had the opportunity to use their magic and rule Somnia.”

Minneka gritted her teeth until they sounded near breaking point. “You really think things will end well for the demigods?”

With regret, dear reader, I must admit her fear was not unfounded. It allows me to understand Minneka and tell her story. But it doesn’t justify her attitude against the world. If only I had visited her once, if only I had talked to her once, this story might have ended differently.

They walked back to the wagon in silence. When they arrived, the door was wide open.

Perzwa hopped from left to right. He knocked over the cauldron that was fortunately empty now and tried to discover how the steering wheel functioned.

Chef only had eyes for a bundle of flowers on the windowsill. A white ball with a pointy end, on top of a slithering green stalk covered in thorns.

“Turnbacktulips! You did it!”

“I am a good trader,” Perzwa claimed with pride. “They only cost 500 Soliduri.”

“What?” Minneka was so close to throwing the swine out of the wagon. “That’s all the money I had!”

Perzwa shrugged. “My my, no worries, I will pay you back using some of the pyramid treasures.”

Chef did worry. She carefully placed the jars full of poison in her cupboards and separated the stalks from the Turnbacktulips.

Only the Fishfool now. We’re already in Traferia, closer and closer to the Lion Palace. And I still have no clue how these ingredients should be combined.

In the end, exhaustion won the battle against her worried mind. She fell into a deep sleep.

When she awoke, another day had passed—and her recipe book had been stolen.