(This is only the second draft of the book Worthless. Expect typos, plot holes, odd subplots and the occassionally wrongly named character, especially minor characters. It is made public only to give people a rough idea of how the final story will look)

Chapter 40

For once, arrival was a bit merciful, likely from the jump being short. The slam on every molecule in the body was lighter, feeling more like a very powerful fart going through than actual harm. The heat vented quickly, slipping out through the slits and gaps in the old jumpsuit. And it was old, that was no mistake. It had gone through a lot, and it wore the damage from it with a sense of pride, one might say. But then again, one might also say that it was just a piece of flame-retardant cloth. Practical and durable, but not irreplacable. Maybe it was about time. But that would not be now.
Klaus had been good enough to find some local clothes and drench them with cold water before sending them along for the ride. The fashion of 1701 was, after all, not that different from the one in 1668, and although the clothes likely were not as fireproof as the jumpsuit, the water took the brunt of the heat, disappearing as a handy pylon of steam that showed where the different pieces had landed. The clothes had appeared at the same time, but landed in a slightly different direction. It felt a bit weird, stripping out of the jumpsuit and standing with not a thread on in the middle of nothing, before putting on the slightly rougher clothes. But nobody was watching, and it came with the job. It wasn't the first and wouldn't be the last time.
The nearest dirt road was easy to find. The landscape was rather open, and even more, trees lined most edges of the fields. And the way to town was found by doing what any townie might do if lost: Looking for the church spire!
It had to be spring. Klaus had never specified what their time machine had aimed for, and walking along the trees made the thought surface that maybe, just maybe, that would have been an important detail. 1668, sure, but arriving in deep winter or the middle of summer was two very different things, especially this far into the past! A heat stroke or, even more likely, blistering cold could easily be a death sentence. Town was far away and the roads were hardly overflowing with people, unlike the early 21st century. Falling over from the elements would mean staying there. That was rarely a good thing.
Then again, he had dictated to the young men what kind of clothes to gather from their storage. Even though no women served at the fort, the clothes were meant to service any time traveler passing through, most of whom were female. And while it was hard to be completely certain, the simple dress seemed to be meant for spring, with good circulation of air and only a single layer of fabric. The sleeves were full length, but they were easy to arrange, and rolling them up to bare some forearm seemed not too daring. Even though the air was still a little cool, the walk would get the blood pumping, and when the heat from the trip was gone, the heat from the exercise would still continue!
Nakskov began like it always did, with a few scattered homes not too far from the road, though in this case far enough to warrant small roads leading from it to each home. Bricks were some time off, existing somewhere but not the most common to find in use. The white and black patterns of wattle and daub made the farmhouses look like paintings from afar, and as town houses began to pop up, the medieval feel, even a few centuries later, was very strong.
And still, something looked wrong. Houses had odd kinks in them, like a puzzle made partly from the pieces of another puzzle entirely. Like shards of a broken vase put back together just slightly wrong. The farmhouses seemed immune to this odd deformity, but it was immediately visible in town, and only moreso as town became denser and denser.
The air also became denser. Out by the fields, the scent of tilled earth and in some cases, manure, was dispersed by the wind. In town, the smell of animals lingered. It felt thick, also viscous, clinging to the clothes and in the nose. It wasn't horrible, no worse than smells of industry or damp clothes in closed rooms, but it was a stark contrast to the salty seaspray smell that had surrounded and, to some extent, filled the fort.
In spite of it, the town was fairly clean. Dirt was the one constant culprit, with every street seeing low piles of it scattered around, no sweeping efficient enough to force it away before more arrived. Of course, the dirt roads on the outskirts made it look fairly natural, but the cobblestone streets farther in made to layer of brown soil stand out.
People were cleaner. The future always liked to present or describe people of the past as primitive and dirty, but what folk walked the streets wore clean clothes and had clean hands and faces. A few people actually doing manual work was an exception, of course, and here and there was someone, many times someone old, who did less to care for appearances. But in all, the place was clean. Which made the buildings stand out even more.
Granted, it was far from every building. Most of them were just wooden or wattle and daub structures like any others, some looking almost pristine and others in various states of repair. But every now and then, anothre mismatched puzzle house appeared, its component parts all good but looking like they belonged in different buildings entirely. A few even mixed designs, having a sturdy wattle and daub building suddenly have half an upper floor of slightly crudely cut wood. It was hard to tell if these buildings looked sloppy, or if the makers of them had simply had a crisis of identity during construction!
"En wat es for?"
The words came from a small boy, who had suddenly decided that he was going to walk the same way, and close by. He repeated the line, which very much sounded like some kind of question, and looked a bit hurt when he got no answer. He wore what looked like a very simple sailor suit, just a restrained blue blouse and trousers, small hat on his head finishing the ensemble nicely. His mother grabbed him quickly by the arm, giving im a few stern words before dragging him away and saying some things with a smile, likely excusing her son's unexpected attention. The child complained a bit, but followed his mother down the street in the opposite direction.
Hearing the boy's words drew attention to what others were saying. Klaus' young men had had a strong accent, or more likely, dialect, and had been impossible to comprehend. What people said here was impossible to follow fully, but there were more traces of something recognizable. A stray word, a sentence with familiar tones. It was dialect, for sure, and with powerful accent, but it hinted at something that might, just might, be understood with time and attention.
The streets gradually became broader and the houses more plentiful. Little carts in places sold a few things, like vegetables and horseshoes, and a few stores began to show up. The town was no bustling trade post, though, and there was an air of inhospitality floating about. People seemed polite, on the surface, but all with glances and the smiles that appeared and disappeared like masks put on to seem friendly. There was something uncomfortable about the place, lurking behind a nice exterior. The purpose of being there was not to make friends or even carry some simple favor with the locals, of course, but it was impossible to not notice the strange aura hanging over the place.
As for what the purpose was, the best place to start down that path seemed to be a meeting place of some sort, a place to get a quick look at a handful of local people without seeming too nosy. The nearest tavern offered one place to start. It looked fairly frequented, light and voices coming from its heavy wooden windows even on just a cloudy afternoon. The name on the sign was a bit long and very nearly impossible to read, but the door was open, in a welcoming manner.
Inside, things gave off a less welcoming feel. The lights that could be seen were candles along the wall, burning at a low flame to keep corners of the place from falling into complete darkness. From the outside, they had seemed stronger, perhaps because they were only visible through the windows. Those same windows looked a lot more narrow from the inside.
But what really put the hammer to the nail was the clientel. As people overall, they likely were no different than any crowd from any tavern, bar, bodega or the like found in any time that had such. Apart from the obvious physical differences and the specifics of their clothes, they might fit in just as well in the futuristic bar in Yuna's time. It felt like a movie scene with a record scratch, their world briefly put on pause because of this strange new arrival, standing in the doorway. Of course, the record player would not be invented for anothertwo centuries or so. But the effect would fit, for those who knew it.
Behind the small counter that seemed to be the equivalent of a bar, though nobody sat against it, a woman was standing, doing her best not to stare like the rest were doing. All of a sudden, she said a string of clear, rapid words, some remark that she seemed to expect a response to. And her eyes made it perfectly clear from whom she expected that response! A few words and what sounded like gruff remarks from the regulars had already been spoken, but none of them seemed to expect any answer. She sounded friendly, and she wore a smile on her face, one that seemed fairly sincere, but she clearly expected some form of answer. And suddenly, the rest in there were staring even more!
The Embassy had training programs and procedures for first contacts. Technically, this was not a first contact, but it had a lot of the same challenges, one of them being language problems. Standard methods included a whole string of ways to start communicating, ways to make oneself understood across language barriers and learning words and basic phrases from there. All of that, of course, hinged on it being a planned first contact, an actual effort to meet someone in a new age and place. Waving your hands over your ears and making an incoherent sound was definitely not a standard procedure of any kind, and it was, admittedly, brought on by panicked improvisation. But after a few repeats of the motion and the sound, and with a few remarks from the other patrons,  she seemed to catch the basic message.
Her first reaction was surprisingly powerful. Her face changed from confused to highly sympathetic, and she began to speak very slowly, making gestures. She clearly wanted to know if there was anything she could get, anything to drink or eat. Klaus had been foreseeing enough to put a few bills that were old enough into a small leather pouch, ith nothing in it but water, to keep the paper from igniting during the jump. Tight leather and wood seals had kept air from reaching the paper, too, and kept them from being soaked and possibly ruined. It was a lot of work for a meager amount of money, even when ignoring the need to have money severaldecades old around, but it was better than arriving dead broke. The tavern keeper looked at the smaller of the bills and smiled wide, waving her arm at several things behind the counter. It was impossible to tell what any of them were. She did understand a slow and clumsy word, though, and went to get water.
What little The Embassy taught about spying on others could be boiled down to a few simple pieces of advice. One was high on the list: Make others underestimate you! Thinking that they were sitting around a deaf stranger, the locals at the tables started chatting loudly, and they made little effort to hide about whom they were chatting. The language was still an obstacle, though, as was the murky sea of voices, over a dozen easily. But they became very confident in their privacy, thinking they were not heard, that much stood out clearly. One word kept standing out, though, and if it meant what it sounded like, it was"Swedish".
As the woman placed a large glass of water on the table, she looked around at the crowd, then made a nod at someone at the counter before she sat down. Her eyes were full of compassion, to the point that she seemed about to cry, and she began to speak very slowly. What she said exactly was hard to know, but it was a question, and she was pointing around. Answering "north" with a very strong accent, to the point of sounding mentally ill, seemed to be enough. She then made the same gesture, the wave at the ears, apparently asking about the claimed deafness. She didn't seem skeptical, but simply interested and sympathetic. As she spoke along with her gestures, likely not even giving it a second thought, her slow and clear use of the language made bits and pieces of it possible to guess at. All it took to answer was knocking at the table and looking to tell her that the deafness was not complete,  that simple noises got through, and the waving motion with a verbal rumble to make her understand that the deafness was a droning noise. Even if the language had been easy to comprehend, it seemed unlikely that they had a word for tinnitus yet. She made fist flying slowly through the air and smacking the table. Cannonball. Was the deafness from a cannonball? That explanation seemed as good as any.
The reaction was instant! The woman said a few words to the nearest people, and they went into a rage-like swirl of voices, a lot of them repeating bits and pieces that seemed to be about Swedes. The year matched. It was between two major parts of the Swedish Wars, the Karl Gustav War over and the Scania War not yet begun. The hate for the Swedish was likely at a high. Seeing a stranger that didn't speak the local language right away made them wary.
"Ravnhild," said the woman, placing a hand on her own chest. She spoke very clearly and almost comically loud, to the point that someone near the table laughed at her. Flinching at the laugh was impossible not to do, but all it took was a confused and slightly frightened look around to the woman, at least, more concerned about the sound being frightening than the deafness being false.
"Ravnhild. Ravnhild." She nodded at hearing the name being repeated, slowly and with every false speech impediment imaginable. "Marie."
The woman smiled, revealing teeth that had taken some damage over the years. But the smile was warm as she reached out a hand and put it lovingly on the wrist.
"Marie," she repeated, nodding as you would when being overly polite as you exchanges names with a child. She proceeded to point out the windows, asking a slow question, a bit longer than the last one asked. But somehow, in spite of being longer, or perhaps because of it, the words were becoming easier to understand. She wondered what brought a deaf woman to Nakskov.
Even more so than the wave over the ears, the idea of pointing at the stomach and rubbing it, making a cradling motion, was honestly a sudden impulse. It worked wonders, though, the woman immediately proclaiming to everyone that this strangerh amongst them was pregnant. Bit by bit, the words were falling into place. The vowels were rough and deep, and consonants so snappy they disappeared completely, but the language was Danish enough that it might become understandable before long!
"Who is the father?"
Quite surprisingly, through the thick accent and the use of a few odd words and strange grammar, the question made sense even without gestures. To keep the act going, of course, it was important to still seem confused. She turned to a nearby table and clearly asked them how to make the question a gesture, and with a laugh she regretted it as one of the men stood up and, smiling wide, held his fist at his crotch and extended the middle finger, then pointed to the baby that he couldn't know didn't exist! The remark lifted the mood in the place in an instant!
Over the next hour or so, Ravnhold did her best to make the conversation work. She accepted that the fathre's name was still a secret, but the other patrons, now calmer and even a bit nosy, began to ask her things, which she gestured onward. The language did become easier to catch, but never became as clear as it could, always several words that seemed to make no sense or were turned around in odd ways. The Embassy had linguists trained for cases like these, and had it been a planned detour from the original travel plans, things would have been different. It wasn't, and they weren't.
The afternoon patrons slowly became the evening crowd, about half replaced and more added. Some made an effort to come over and talk, but both the language barrier and the need to keep up the act made it hard. It was clear from the talk that others carried on the topic of this pregnant stranger, though, and nobody seemed to be troubled by the story. When finally closed eyes on tilted made Ravnhild point out an empty room, she even refused to accept any of the crumbled bills for payment. It took a bit of trickery, but she explained that it was her gift to the baby. It was hard to hide the feeling of guilt about being treated so nicely for a lie.
In the small chamber upstairs that Ravnhild so generously offered, the sound of the life downstairs could be heard through the floorboards. There was a simple bed and a nightstand, little more, but the sparse furniture and limited place was not only fine for a free stay, it was likely what many of those still enjoying each other's company below had to return to, as well. Until winter, they likely spent the vast majority of their time outside the four walls of home, and even when winter came, less space meant less to keep warm.
The jumpsuit, having been crammed into a small lamb skin bag ever since the change of clothes, came out of the bag as a wrinkly clump. It was becoming more and more impossible to ignore how bad its condition was, but it was still the best option available from The Embassy. Every new recruit had his or her own ideas about what to wear during jumps, what was safe enough, what was modest enough, what was practical enough. What few wanted to admit, but what the veterans that trained them knew all to well, was that it was simply one of the few things that a time traveler could exert some actual control over. Missions came and went as needed, time travel was always a chaotic experience, and no age came without its own difficulties. Letting a time traveler, especially a rookie time traveler, at least feel clever about their choice of attire was just one way to give them a feeling of some say in their own destinites. It was a very limited way, but to many of them, it made a world of difference, at least in their minds.
As the evening crowd became the night crowd, it became harder and harder to find an excuse to leave, or a way to sneak out. The stairs went to the tavern below, the beds all behind doors in a single hallway. Ravnhild had been kind enough to pick the bed near to the indoor lavatory, making a trip to the outhouse no good as an excuse. And as the patrons downstairs continued their chatter into the night, opportunities ran out. It was dark outside, very dark, and in spite of the impatient frustration, waiting became a sensible alternative. Waiting, and sleeping.

There were stars in the sky outside when loud noises came through the floorboards. Angry voices, talking loudly about what sounded like a Swedish soldier, were making the rounds, their words repeating more or less the same hard to understand questions to patron after patron down there. One voice that answered with a mix of fear and resentment was Ravnhild. Then, the footsteps came from the stairs!
It felt like a horrible idea when looking down the side of the tavern. Cobblestone below would not break a fall, but might definitely break a few other things on impact, and the window itself seemed to nervously refuse to just stay open! And yet, with no better choice in sight, the bedsheet was tied to the bedpost. They began knocking on the door soon after. From the street below, the sound of them breaking down the door still sounded loud and brutal!
Like most jumpsuits, this one had nothing for the feet. The Embassy had its options, but few modern shoes could stand the heat of time travel. Rubber souls melted, as did many of the synthetics that didn't just catch fire outright. There was a touch of irony to the fact that many choose leather shoes, often a simple design. Shoes that, unlike the jumpsuit, fitted well into this age. The clothes that Klaus had been nice enough to supply were still in the room, now likely in the hands of whoever was hunting Swedish troops in the inn. They now likely thought that they were hunting a naked and perhaps pregnant woman!
The town was lit with candle lamps here and there, but no more than enough to see where to go. It was easy to cling to the walls, making very little commotion for these unknown people to chase. A few walked the dark streets here and there, a drunk leaning on a wall, an old man obsessively sweeping a stretch of cobblestone, that sort of random folk. None of them made much of a sound when a stranger in odd clothing slipped by in the dark.
The town feltfamiliar. It looked different, it looked like a museum come to life, but there was something familiar about it. A turn, a corner, the way three streets met. It was Nakskov. Another Nakskov, a smaller, older Nakskov, but Nakskov. And the objective was east. Had to go east, had to go east!
When bells suddenly rang, lights sprang to life in window after window! Small bells, alarm bells, not the ones in the church. Bells the size of a human head, hanging above doors and on corners here and there, for a guardsman to sound alarm. The men that had forced their way into Ravnhild's tavern did not seem like guardsmen.
Beyond the denser town center, the streets began to return to dirt road, cobblestone streets being a luxury too costly in the town's outer parts. It was dry. The dirt was compacted by hundreds, if not thousands, of animals hauling loads. Had it not been, there would be tracks from the last wheeled wagon going through. Wheels dug into dirt. But there were no tracks. The dirt was sturdy. That meant good footing, perhaps even better than the still somewhat uneven cobblestones!
The lights seemed to come on in a blastwave, spreading from the town center and outwards. To see them almost racing by was terrifying. The town was catching up!
And then, the forest was there. A thick, black mass of what were likely trees, but looked in the darkness of night like a still image of Hell rising. Black branches, the light from town blocked before it hit them, reached out towards the starlit sky,  forming a monstrous silhouette, that threatened to swallow up anyone that entered. And there was no other choice but to enter.
The forest was like a wall, an invisible wall that parted human life from nature. Sounds changed instantly, the noises of people waking from the sound of bells being ripped away and replaced by the clacking, humming and hooing of animals and of branches rubbing together. But more than the sound, the forest was black. Not dark, not dim. Black. It was impossible to hold up a hand and actually see it. The dirt road was there, it could be felt, flat and firm, but it was impossible to actually see it. Running was suddenly out of the question, and leaving the road to hide amongst the trees was basically suicide. There could be anything beyond the edge of the road.
The town, in contrast, was now lit up, or so it seemed. Men with lanterns had gathered, their rough shapes in the glaring light only just possible to see without getting blinded. Their voices cut through the night, reaching into the firest and managing to drown out the noises of nature. Language was still a hinderance, but they clearly called to one another about the Swedish spy escaping into the forest.
Then, the calls began to fade. A word or two, perhaps a brief sentence, could be heard here and there, but a strange hush went over the band of pursuers as they set foot outside the comforts of town. The forest didn't just start at a point where the town ended, the two grew together at their border. But after a shared space of loose brush and shirt trees, the forest became all there was. And as the men ventured beyond that point, they seemed to change, too. The rough and hardened men became frightened little boys, the light from their lanterns becoming shaky as their hands began to tremble slightly. They feared the forest. Odds were, not without reason.
It was a strange sight. In the pitch black of night, the lanterns, many of them given blinders to light up only cones ahead like flashlights, would make the darkness dance. Shadows amongst and from the trees wrapped through and around branches, trunks, rocks and whatever else was part of the forest. Hills and hideously uneven ground made waves of the dark spread along the path of the light, one set of shadows mixing with another as cones crossed. It was a puppet show, even though not a single puppeteer pulled a string.
The sound of two men passing by was like a knife to the throat. Running made no sense, the sounds would be too easy to follow, and they had the light. A run in the dark would be a death sentence. But as the shine of the lantern grew closer and stronger, it started to seem no less risky to remain quiet.
A few rules were taught to any new recruit at The Embassy, many of them the first time they were even told that time travel existed. One such rule was to never kill in the past. It was a rule that, like any other rule, was occassionally broken, but those that did would be held very responsible for their actions. Time was, in many ways, like a river. It would flow around a small rock thrown in. But the death of a random person in the past was a slightly bigger rock. They might never have a child that was meant to be, or a living child might see its life changed drastically, making a different person with a different impact on history. Most people never made much of an impact, not on a scale of centuries or millenia. Social and political movements and the path of society were all things guided by masses, not individuals. The famed butterfly effect was real, but it only applied to everyone for a short period of time, likely the lifetime of the person and anyone close. Beyond a certain time, the lives of all that came before blended into a mass of averages, and changes to many could easily disappear. And those that did not disappear on their own were often fixed. Changing history on a great scale was near impossibly hard. But even a single death could send a few strong ripples through several decades. That made a lot of things harder.
Distraction was a better tactic. The two men passed close by the tree, the shadow on the ground making an easy guide to stay in the darkness. And the sudden swipe of a large branch drew no attention, only startling the one who got briefly struck. They were afraid of the dark in the forest, so the dark was what they looked at. He never noticed his flintlock pistol slip fromhis belt. The other was even easier. One pistol to his throat and a whisper in his ear to keep quiet as he lost his own weapon was enough to make them both be still. When the one who lost his first drew a knife, all it took was a swift strike of the pistol butt to his face made him fall in line, and let the knife fall to the ground. The other, now revealed by his companion to also be armed with blades, followed suit. As they hung the lantern on the stub of an old branch and went quietly back, all they ever saw as the finally turned was a vague figure slip back into the darkness. If they expected a nude woman, they would be very disappointed.
Once at a safe distance, not much considering the poor aim of a common flintlock, they started yelling. A few words stuck out, old words for ghosts and spirits. The lanterns that could be spotted through trees and brush reacted, their lights stopping, then changing the direction of their movements. A few hesitated, but shouts back sounded mocking, even scolding, those in charge of the band no doubt angered by frightened superstitions.
The model of the lantern that had been hung on the tree was surprisingly clever. It seemed made by request, strong signs of manual beating of the iron. Even in this age, many parts were made with clever tools, leaving few or no signs of the person shaping them. In this one, an array of sliding blinders, perhaps eight or so, were carefully crafted to let the user control the shine of the light. As it hung there, the cone was set to slip through only a small opening, perhaps a sixth of the lantern circumference. They had been looking ahead, focusing the light. But it was easy to open it to three quarters, bathing the nearby growth in the light of the soft, orange flame.
Figures immediately came to life in the forest. One was an animal, the size of a large dog but frightened and quick to run away. It had likely been trying to hide in the dark, but the dark was quickly disappearing. Even more than the hung lantern, the now gathering band brought their own, and the place became as clear as on a very foggy day. It was still easy to hide in the quarter of the lantern light that was obstructed by blinders, the quarter that remained dark. The othre lanterns flickered and waved, casting highly irregular light that still came from  the same rough direction. The directions of shadows obeyed that, and were perhaps not easy but still possible to navigate carefully. Running was still not an option, not with the many vines and tangled plants in the undergrowth that just begged for some careless soul to get snagged and fall into it.
They never gathered entirely, apparently too trained or too sensible to put every member of the group in one place. If they thought there had been time to set traps, they were, of course, sorely mistaken. But they seemed more unwilling to turn many small and difficult targets into one big and easy one. They knew about the two flintlock pistols, and they were taking precautions. That reeked of military background, though it was impossible to say who was veteran, if any.
When the shot rang out, they nonetheless went on the defensive. The flintlock had been loaded with gunpowder but not a bullet, so all that came out was the noise, but they did apparently not know that. Each pistol had two barrels, eah barrel had been preloaded with the powder in what had to be a sturdy, flammable sack. Four chances to spook the crowd. It was hard to tell if the guns were custom, like the lantern, or if they were merely of a common model that could hold the powder in while sheathed and carried.
As expected, the initial scare was followed by a carefully orchestrated new search. Like a small swarm, they spread out and moved in the rough direction of the sound, forming a line that moved forward like a giant human lawnmower. Lanterns became more steady as nerves did, and they regained a very disciplined demeanor.
The brief chaos and the darkness, however, had been enough to slip away, and it took very little cleverness to deduce where their outmost man would walk. In following their military training, they had essentially outflanked themselves. A thick branch stabbed at his stomach and his head pulled into the trunk of a tree brought him down like a wet rag. When he caught his bearings again, his pistol and lantern were gone. In the shouting that ensued, none of them could hear footsteps slipping away in the direction of the dirt road, which was still just slightly illminated by the lantern that still hung from the tree. The other stolen lantern fit nicely behind a large rock, the flame put out to make it invisible in the dark.
The men were in disarray. Their voices told the story of each and everyone. The one in a panicked frenzy, shouting the same words to his comrades in an angry voice, over and over again. The one whose voice had cracked from fear, calling out short sentences on the verge of crying. The sturdy but unsure one, who gave a few commands but wavered and never quite got the others rallied. And at least one who made long but calm protests, repeating a word over and over that sounded very much like he wanted to go back.
They stood for a very long time on the dirt road that they all found their way back to. From counting lanterns, they were seven, likely making nine with the two that had now lost theirs. When they finally left, one was ordered by a deep and bitter voice to go fetch the lantern that still hung from the tree. The forest fell quiet as they all held theirs up to perhaps see if their friend would be taken by the forest demons before reaching the lantern.
And then, they were gone. The shine of their lanterns became a dusty orange and then a faded yellow in the distance, before darkness crept in again everywhere.
The sounds of nature returned quickly, simply waiting for the sound of men to leave them alone. The lantern still lay by the rock, still a little warm. Kneeling on the ground so as to not drop anything far, it took a bit to get the flame going with the flint and steel tied to it, but in the end, some dry leaves added helped the wick sputter to life.