Today’s story is “Hero Worship” by Metassus.

Based in the wild west of Ireland, Metassus started writing some time back as part of the "Thursday Prompt" group on Fur Affinity. His work has appeared in the Anthrocon magazine, in Fang Vol. 4, and occasionally on his printer by mistake. He is particularly keen on word-limited micro-fiction, calling them "365 Word Tales". At some point he'll have 365 of them and consider his work on earth done. You can read his writings and view his photography on furaffinity.net, or on metassus.com.

Read for you by Madison Scott-Clary, whose tail is behind her.

You’re listening to The Voice of Dog.

Today’s story is

“Hero Worship” by Metassus.

Based in the wild west of Ireland,

Metassus started writing some time back as part of the

"Thursday Prompt" group on Fur Affinity.

His work has appeared in the Anthrocon magazine,

in Fang Vol. 4, and occasionally on his printer by mistake.

He is particularly keen on word-limited micro-fiction, calling them "365 Word Tales".

At some point he'll have 365 of them

and consider his work on earth done.

You can read his writings and view his photography on furaffinity.net,

or on metassus.com.

Today’s story is read for you by Madison Scott-Clary,

whose tail is behind her.

Please enjoy “Hero Worship”

by Metassus The dream was deep,

relaxing and far too rich to leave.

Damn the dawn! He huffed warm air into the fur of his arm as he stirred,

fighting his consciousness,

struggling to remain where he was.

But there was little option --

the noise from his four waking companions, noisily moving in the cold morning air,

was enough to keep Kulestes from returning to the pleasures that were already fading from his mind.

An unkind foot pushed at the small of his back and a

bad-tempered deep voice roared

"Brontesson! Damn you, ya lazy red lump!

Get your worthless hide off the ground and start the breakfast fire!"

The voice was from their sergeant.

Grummtes was surly, argumentative and

never happy with anything, which made his nickname within the militia all too apt:

Grumpy. He gave Kulestes another kick,

aiming right for the base of his tail, and the blanket-enwrapped minotaur yelped with pain.

"I told you we don't have time for this kind of slobbing around!

You're not in a fine room in your big house now, calf!"

Grumpy strode away, snorting with impatience,

targeting another conscript over the manner in which he had packed his small bedroll.

Biting back a retort, Kulestes took advantage of the respite to sit up and stretch his neck and shoulders,

before he wiped the morning's sleep from his eyes.

Slobbing, indeed. Grumpy launched into his new victim,

a freshly-conscripted youngster named Muleses, whose fast-blinking eyes betrayed his feelings of confusion

and nervousness at being sent away from his home to serve

in this awful place.

It didn't help that Grumpy was now in his stride,

merrily ripping strips from the youth with his acerbic tongue.

The assault caused the young male to become

even more uncoordinated,

with trembling hands and watery eyes.

Kulestes sighed,

wondering if he looked just as scared and dumb back when he entered service,

five years earlier.

Probably, he reasoned,

but he had Brontes' advice before he arrived,

telling him what to expect.

His elder brother had, by then, a year's experience of life in the Tarbh militia. Brontes, Kulestes smiled to himself,

was not the most tactful person when it came to the subtle arts of

'manners' or 'patience'.

His big brother was gruff,

ill-tempered and explosive in a way that made Grumpy's attitude towards Muleses seem like

that of a loving mother to a delicate calf.

He rose with a half-grunt-half-groan,

shaking himself to get his pelt to lie flat in the places where it had matted in his sleep.

Yawning hugely, he scratched his scrotum as he reached up to the branch above his head to retrieve his loincloth from where he had hung it

the previous night.

Deftly, he put it on and tied the cords together.

He was a fine specimen of his breed:

about two and a half metres tall at his head,

his gently curved and tapered horns merely added a hand-span.

Broad shoulders atop a broad and well muscled chest gave him an appearance of

strength and power.

His face was calm and thoughtful, and his

kindly brown eyes were set wide apart in his bovine face.

As he inhaled a deep lungful of the crisp air, his nostrils flared on his soft pearl-pink nose pad.

The loincloth he wore was a light tan-coloured leather

that contrasted nicely with his dark reddish fur.

His hands were articulate and dextrous,

fingernails short and worn,

as might be expected from one living in the wilderness most of the time.

Strong, powerful legs ended in feet with five toes

—not hooves. Kulestes had heard stories of distant cousins in strange far-away lands

who had cloven hooves for feet,

but he couldn't believe such a thing could exist.

It would be like walking on tip-toes all the time, he reasoned,

and that would be very tiresome.

By now, Muleses was so upset and panicked that,

far from resembling a tube,

his bedroll now looked remarkably like a boulder.

He had expertly packed his own bedroll into a small tight tube

while Grumpy finished the demolition of the unfortunate youngster, who was now in tears,

miserably hunched over and staring sadly at his blankets.

With a single kick,

Grumpy launched them into the muddy brook beside their encampment.

Muleses scrambled after them,

but it was too late. Brown muck and smelly stream water had soaked right through them.

It would take a long time to clean that

and there was no way they would be dry before the patrol made camp again,

which meant poor Muleses would either be damp,

or frozen, all night.

Seeing the smug look on Grumpy's face, Kulestes muttered

"bastard" under his breath,

grabbed his axe from the top of his pack

and moved off to get some wood.

There were few dead trees in this part of the Tauria Valley,

so the minotaur had to carefully select his victim from among the living.

With the skill of a practised woodsman,

he checked the smaller conifers in the nearest grove.

One in particular would be ideal,

as it was in the centre of six other larger specimens.

Forever in competition with its seed-companions,

its position in the middle of the stand was never going to get it the light it needed to grow tall and strong.

Kulestes placed his axe on the ground, then put both hands and both horns on the bole of the small tree,

pledging its life's essence to the Adastral while asking the deity of his people

to convey the tree's spirit to a new seed,

where it would have another, better, life.

Having touched and scented the being he was to kill,

he felled it, stripped the branches,

chopped up the trunk into uniformly-shaped logs

and cleared the felled material away so it again looked like a natural stand.

The exercise warmed him through,

his strength making the job look easy.

He was sweating heavily by the end of the task and stood panting for a while

to allow the moisture to wick away from his body and cool him.

The air was the usual temperature for this time of year

and as the day grew warmer, his breath no longer condensed.

That was good. Watching steam rise from his body made him feel uncomfortably like he imagined a cart-steer might feel,

having watched them with semi-horrified fascination for years.

His father owned four at all times and,

when angry with his second son,

threatened to render him often;

a threat that made him shiver in fear. One of the older warriors grunted a welcome when Kulestes returned to the camp with his load of firewood. Muleses was washing his blankets in a small pool of rainwater,

his round-shouldered back to the rest of the militia.

Grumpy, the great noble leader of Tarbh that he was,

rummaged through the contents of the young one's pack,

removing interesting items and commenting loudly about them, much to the amusement of the other two warriors,

neither of whom Kulestes particularly liked.

Grumpy seemed to find them far more entertaining company than the son of Brontes Argentesson,

but then, Grumpy also delighted in barbed comments about Kulestes' fine home

and his father's landholdings.

The red minotaur had heard them all before and never rose to the bait.

Grumpy pulled out a second loincloth from the pack and snorted to his cronies.

Kulestes sighed audibly and attended to his tinderbox,

getting the flint and dried grass to smoulder into flame.

"Ohhh, another loincloth,"

came the jibing comment from the leader,

"and the rest of us have to cope with just the one.

Did mother pack this for little Mooly? Huh?"

The young calf didn't react.

His debasement and hazing was traditional, and entirely normal,

but that didn't make it any easier.

The others roared with laughter.

Grumpy's sneer widened as he pulled out the last thing at the bottom of the pack.

"And what's this? A little ...

dolly! Oh, how sweet! It's a dolly for the little calf.

Aw, poor baby!" At that,

Muleses swung around to look,

his eyes like saucers,

his ears flattened to his skull.

He squealed with embarrassment and concern,

his skin beneath his brown pelt reddening to a dark red.

"I- it's my baby toy.

My m-mother must ha' put it in for me.

It's nothin', just a baby toy!"

The object pinched between Grumpy's finger and thumb was indeed a baby toy.

A small woollen bull doll, with two carved sticks for horns and a brightly coloured woollen loincloth,

it certainly was a well-loved toy ...

worn from contact and carefully patched in places with wrong-coloured thread.

Kulestes glared at Grumpy,

thinking this had gone too far, when the leader hurled the baby toy into the brook.

Muleses gasped in horror and moved to go after it,

but Grumpy's hand grabbed him by the shoulder, holding him fast.

The youngster's face contorted into a mask of hurt and loss, but,

to his credit, he remained where he was.

"Conscripts don't play with baby toys,"

sneered Grumpy in a cold voice.

"If you don't finish washing your shitty blankets in the next five minutes

they'll join your little friend there in the stream and you can freeze tonight.

It's no fun sleeping outdoors in the frost, calf,

unless you wanna be rendered and live your days as a cart-steer.

That what you want, calf? Huh?

No? Then SHAPE UP!"

He bellowed out the order.

"Get those blankets into your bedroll before I finish breakfast

or YOU will be OUR cart-steer!"

Grumpy's cronies guffawed at their leader's sport.

Kulestes, appalled and silent,

took his anger out on the tinder, creating enough in his temper to seed two fires.

He moved a small folding tripod over the fire, then stomped off to the brook with the black iron cauldron to fill it with water.

As he returned, he dropped something behind his pack,

out of sight of the others,

then poured some of the patrol’s sack of trail-grain into the water

before he placed it on the trivet to boil.

On the other side of the fire, Muleses,

misery written in every motion, rolled his bedroll,

having first squeezed as much water out of his blankets as he could.

He tried to put his few possessions back into his backpack.

Of course, Grumpy had managed

—naturally—to stand on virtually everything,

grinding them into the soft ground.

His spare loincloth was destroyed with mud,

his hand binding rolls were unwound and wet,

even his Adastral was bent out of shape, with one of the sixteen points folded over into the centre.

That made Kulestes' blood boil.

How could anyone willingly damage the sacred symbol?

Poor Muleses looked so friendless and upset. Kulestes flashed him a friendly smile, to let him know that he was with at least one friend.

Muleses lowered his shoulders and head more,

horns pointing almost at the ground,

tail hanging limp, and Kulestes realised that his smile probably got lost in translation.

Muleses must have thought the red minotaur was laughing at him,

another tormentor in a patrol filled with them.

With a heavy heart,

Kulestes served each of the militia a full bowl of hot grain mash.

The smell of the food was welcoming, and each of the warriors were grateful for their breakfast—bar Muleses. The young conscript held his wooden spoon in his fist,

played with the food,

but couldn't eat it. Kulestes

felt deeply for the young one.

It was a subconscious thing, this empathy,

and it was painful.

He couldn't deny it.

He brought his own bowl over and sat beside the sad and sorry bull.

"Muleses, lighten up, ok?"

he smiled. "You’re being hazed. We all suffer through it. It's nothing personal."

No reaction. "Really!

My brother told me that his hazing when he joined his squad was terrifying.

They abandoned him on a hill and pretended it was being attacked by a wolf pack.

He was there all night alone and his comrades prowled around below, howling and screaming.

He said he was never as scared as that in his whole life.

The following day, they all laughed about it."

Kulestes slapped the younger conscript on his bare back.

"If all that happens is you get your blankets wet;

well, that's not too bad, d'you think?"

Muleses slowly lifted his head to the red pelted one.

"My great-great-grandfather owned that baby toy,"

he said quietly. "He was given it by Bootes himself when he was a child.

All of my family have had it since,

and my mother gave it to me.

And now, it's lost.

I will not be able to pass it to my own eldest calf when I breed.

I am disgraced, Kulestes."

The young warrior's eyes were red, yet dry. Kulestes suddenly realised the depth of this youth.

He had been wrong about him.

He's not a child

—he's more concerned about his honour

and his family responsibilities!

Relief—and a measure of pride—returned.

Leaning close, he whispered conspiratorially to Muleses as he swirled his breakfast mash around the wooden bowl with his spoon.

"Listen, I took your baby toy out of the stream when I filled the kettle.

It's safe in my pack.

You can leave it there until we finish this tour,

but then I think you should find somewhere safer for it,

you think?" Muleses' jaw dropped,

then his face widened into a beam of pure joy.

Grumpy, sitting nearby, watched him suspiciously, so the young minotaur veiled his excitement quickly.

"I'm grateful, sir.

Really. I- I don't know what to say.

But what if the leader checks your bag?" Kulestes snorted a laugh.

"He would never dare.

I'm stronger than he is and he knows it."

"Oh." "I'll look after it, OK?" "Thank you, sir." Muleses looked into the red one’s face like the young calf by the foot of Bootes in the statue that dominated the Great Square in Tauria:

awestruck and full of adoration. Kulestes huffed and shrugged.

"Don't mention it.

Now eat. Don't you like my cooking?"

This was “Hero Worship”

by Metassus, read for you by Madison Scott-Clary,

whose tail is behind her.

For more stories

you can find us wherever you get your podcasts,

or on the web at thevoice.dog.

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