Paprika Riverweed
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You grow Paprika In A Garden
Or, “The kingdom was lost for want of a corn husk.”
“Torm… oh TORM! I lovest thee. I never want to leave thee or have this moment end.”
Wet kisses in the dark night. Bodies struggling against each other like two barges at dock in heavy seas but not yet moored because the sailors were lazy and the two barges drifted together and started banging against each other. Like that.
“Ohhhh… Blezia…. I do love thee as well… thou knowest it… THOU KNOWEST IT!!”
“I can hear thee Torm. In fact, my Elven ears are mere centimeters from thy slobbering mouth.”
“Centime… oh Blezia, thou knowest I love it when thou talkest thy Elven measurements!!!”
Humans were the last race still using the pound system. The other races had long since abandoned it for the far more efficient metric system but, after a brief attempt, the humans had declared it “too difficult for their youngsters.”
“Yes, Torm… there… right there… Centimeter. Milligram. Kilowatt.” Blezia whipped the country boy into a fury with her eloquent enunciations of metricity.
“Aaaahhblabababla…” Torm’s sexual effort reduced him to guttural carnal calls, heaving against Blevia’s much smaller frame so that she was ground into the freshly plowed rows of turnips.
“Oh TORM!! You are my ThunderTorm!!” Even amidst her throes of passion Blevia had to chuckle to herself at that clever quip. It was a quip, wasn’t it? Not a pun, for sure. Elves did not like puns.
“RrrrRRRUUUWWAAAARRR!!!” Torm had transformed into a farming fury of fornicating ferocity. He threw back his head and bleated at where he imagined the moon to be (the night sky was heavily clouded) as he prepared to fertilize the ripe Elven field below him.
“Torm… oh! OH! Torm… why dost thou bleat like a sheep?”
“BLEEURGHH!!!” There was no stopping Torm now as his silo was full and his grain ready to burst forth.
“Torm… AH!… Torm… dids’t thou use thine corn husk with which… OH!.... to wrap thyself… OH TORM!!... so that my propriety may be… UH!... protected?”
“GRRRRAAAEREREJERRRUB!”
Torm rolled off of his beauty, who was now embedded deep enough in the soft soil so that only her points peered above. They lay there in the darkness, sighing contentedly until an armadillo (attempting to root under Blevia) interrupted their post-coital bliss.
Blevia sat up, running her fingers through her tousled and quite dirty hair. She smiled as she watched Torm stagger about blindly in the pitch night, bellowing obscenities and stomping as the terrified armadillo scrambled this way and that.
She found it charming that humans could not see at night. Unlike her. Why, she could see perfectly fine. From the rows of okra plants swaying gently in the night air to the unused corn husk laying nearby.
UNUSED CORN HUSK!?
The only safe sex, my friends, is abstinence.
Several months later Torm and Blevia, in not quite as festive a mood, sat on his father’s front porch as the man paced and stormed, telling them about the troubles they were now facing. Torm’s father, Clod Riverweed by name, held a hand up through his entire tirade, his index finger pointing skyward as if signaling to the gods.
“I done tole thee Term that thee must find thee a wemin and preperly coert she until she dost agree to a marriage ceremony that we can afferd!”
Clod had always pronounced “or” as “er”, which led to him pronouncing Torm as Term and led others to wondering why the son’s name was Torm anyway.
“Daddy I dids’t not mean to bringest shame upon thy house…”
As an aside here… the Riverweed farm was in fact a farm only by the most charitable of definitions. The home was a rickety affair of planks, thatch and mud with the occasional brick or adequately shaped stone.
Clod had always assured his family that when it rained, the water would swell the planks in the roof so that they closed together, and this would keep them dry. What actually happened, of course, is that water would pour through and the next day, when the rain had passed, the planks would indeed swell shut, trapping the humidity in the already soaked house.
There was also a small livestock corral. The last hogs had died or simply left a few years back and the remaining chickens (we must not speak of the male chickens) rarely laid eggs.
The garden was fairly healthy though. Despite some flattened areas from Torm and Blevia’s trysts, the rows were small but steady, keeping Clod and Torm well fed. For ‘plantarians’. They didn’t have animals to slaughter or spare money to buy meat often so they typically just ate from the garden. A prideful man, Clod pretended this was by choice and that they only ate vegetables due to a higher calling. And he coined the term ‘plantarians’.
Blevia was from a bit more upscale family. Her father, Tenker Bael, bred and sold horses. Despite the bone-aching poverty of the Riverweeds, she found Torm, corn-fed as he was, big strapping and irresistible.
We now return you to Torm’s exposition, still in progress.
“…but was unable to resist yon beauteous Elven maiden.”
“She t’aint no elf!” Clod thundered. “She’s a half-elf!”
Blevia sat up straight in her chair and began to muster some indignation. It was true, of course. Her mother was an elf and her father a human. The interbreeding always seemed to work that way. You rarely saw male elves after human women. But Blevia considered that she clearly took after her mother and was quite happy to call herself a full blooded elf.
“So that chile of yer’n gonna be a querter-elf!”
“Father! Thou dost bring fair Blevia to tears!”
“And she t’aint no maiden neither, not after yeh done fin’shed wit her!” Clod was really on a roll now, his umbrage in full vent.
“A quarter-ellllll…” Blevia howled at the terrible realization and collapsed against Torm’s broad corn-fed chest.
“No tellin what Mr. Bael is guanna say er do! Might have yeh strung up fer soilin his derter and me alongside ye!”
“Father, Sire Bael would never string us up!” A look of panic swept across Torm’s face like a ripple in a stagnant pond. He pried Blevia’s face from his chest and looked down into her tear and snot streaked visage. “Would he?”
“Would who whaaaaaaaat…..” Blevia continued to wail, firmly in the grip of female hysteria.
“Would thy father, the honorable Sire Bael, string up me and my father for this?”
“Don’t be ridiculooooouuuuuus,” she cried. “You’re father had nothing to do with it.”
Torm’s panic deepened.
But, Sire Bael (Actually not a Sire by title, though he did stay busy with his elven wife and sire nine children, so maybe that should count.) did not hang either of the Riverweeds. Bael quickly put together a quiet and private ceremony which accomplished the dual purpose of others not knowing Blevia had become pregnant out of wedlock and preventing them from knowing she had married a Riverweed.
He then provided a nice, if somewhat small, home for his daughter and… it pains Bael to this day to say this… his son-in-law. The home sat on a nice plot of Bael’s land next to a merry stream and near a small waterfall with a waterwheel. It was very picturesque.
And into this picturesque setting arrived our little quarter-elf, Paprika.
Next time, we shall touch upon the highlights of Paprika’s youth and her decision to pursue a life of song, dance and thievery.
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The Seasoning of Paprika
A song of love, life and beef stew in 5 sonnets
Sonnet I - Paprika Overture
“Push, Blevia, push!!” Torm offered encouragement to his pregnant wife. Her sweating, pain-filled face was warped with exertion.
The slender half-elf struggled, gritting her teeth and planting her feet. “Is it coming!?”
“Yeah! That’s it, just a bit more! Get on, girl! Get on!” Torm nodded with satisfaction as the wagon wheel came loose from the mud with a lurch, the horses (gifts from Sire Bael) suddenly speeding forward.
Behind the wagon, exhausted and off-balance from pushing, Blevia fell face down in the mud.
“Haw! Haw!” Torm fell down himself, such was his mirth. And then, in a typical display of his concise observation, “Thou done fell down in the mud!”
“Torm…” Blevia gasped as she rolled to a sitting position. She clutched her swollen midsection. “The baby…”
“Yep!! We’s guanna have weselves a baby!” Torm wasn’t sure why she felt the need to bring this up. As if he wasn’t aware that they were going to have a child. He dismissed it as a female obsession and got up to trot after the horses and wagon. They needed to get that firewood to the house so he could stack it and be done with work in time to go to the town dance.
“No! Torm… the baby…”
“By tippy I knows we’s guanna have a saplin, women! Thou shouldst be patient until that time dost come.”
“…is coming NOOOOWWW!!!”
Torm didn’t make it to the dance.
Sonnet II - Paprika sings her first song
“Guuuaaaa…. Ahhh…. Aaaaa…. Nnnaaaaaaa…”
“Blevia, thy child dost wail plaintively.” Torm didn’t want to get up from his easy chair and away from the warm fire.
“I know…” Blevia hurried from the kitchen to their bedroom with a smile on her face. “It sounds as though Paprika is singing.”
Sonnet III – Paprika makes her first theft
“Eat thy carrots, Paprika, and mayhaps thou shalst have some beef stew,” Torm nodded sagely at the 3 year old. He felt good imparting the time honored moral of do-boring-stuff-first-then-enjoy-good-stuff taught to him by his own father.
“Torm, dids’t thou check Paprika’s milk?” Blevia from the bedroom.
“All farb it,” Torm grumbled, getting up and pulling the warm milk off of the wood-burning stove. He set it aside to cool and and sat back down to his meal.
He frowned at the plate. His chunk of beef was missing.
Sonnet IV – Paprika finds her destiny
Blevia moved down the row to the good seats, near the center. It was good fortune to find two together. She smiled at that. Otherwise Paprika would have had to sit up in the nosebleeds by herself.
The Tonkerville amphitheater was the only proper outdoor stage in the region. One would have to go to a city proper, probably Merudian, otherwise.
Ten years of age and quite impressionable, Paprika sat wide-eyed as the performance began. This was a rendition of Plubia’s Got No Goats So I Ate The Llamas but it could have been anything. The string music, the myriad of costumes, the changing sets and the bombastic voices and gestures of the actors were all magic to her.
Paprika wanted to do this.
“Mother, oh, mother, you were so right!” the girl gushed. “Twas beauteous it twere!”
“Mm,” Blevia smiled again. It was her mission to cultivate some culture into this child, since her father was dead set on remaining an idiot. “Tis true, dear. And be happy that thou dids’t find such enjoyment, for only those of cultured civility can appreciate the arts as such.”
“Oh, mother, I so want to do that too!”
“Do what, child?” Blevia checked her face in her Gutta-percha pocket mirror. Some cultured, civilized hunks had been eyeing her before and during the performance. Blevia enjoyed being attractive.
“To act like they, upon the stage!”
Blevia dropped her mirror with a gasp. “Paprika! Thou hast misunderstood! The performance is to be enjoyed by us, but the performers themselves are of a low class. We are above that Paprika. I and your grandmother Bael are guiding you towards high class and society. You are an elf. Remember that.”
Paprika frowned, not sure where she had gone astray this time from her mother’s ever winding road to high society. She knew better than to argue though and simply said, “Oh guan, mother, twas just jesting I was.”
But, she wasn’t. Paprika Riverweed knew then and there that she wanted to perform.
Sonnet V – Paprika’s first kill
“Paprika! Paprika!? Farb gob it,” Torm wiped the sweat from his face as he huffed around the barn. The heat of the day had been merciless in the garden but he had persevered. Now, though, upon his return, the stalls had not been cleaned for the horses.
He found the fourteen-year-old idly swinging in the hammock near the water wheel, reading one of Blevia’s books. Torm didn’t trust books. They meant stuff.
“Hey!”
Paprika squealed and sat up, causing the hammock to spill her. “I’m sorry daddy, what time is it? I was guan clean the stalls but started reading I did!”
“Paprika Riverweed, thou dost do naught daily but kill time!”
Thus unfolded the linchpin moments of Paprika’s childhood. As a teen, as we shall see next, she found more tempestuous forms of trouble.
