by Thomas Head
We were going north, with the current. The ride was placid, and the sun was warm, despite the river’s margins being thick with ice. Once in a while her long keel would scrape on gravel, but by keeping to the outside of the river’s sweeping bends we were able to stay in sufficient water. The mast had been replaced with a river pole, so that on the outside of the river’s curves, we could slide under the overhanging trees without becoming entangled.
A few of the guards rode horses, keeping pace with us on the eastern bank. Behind us was a fleet of beast-prowed ships. This was the human army of Goback at its fullest, making damn certain we made no run for it before we paid in full.
We had gone so far north as to approach Dragonfell before the river was fully choked with ice. Crews from Delmark were working now to clear a path in it to get north to Dragonfell’s bays.
We all saw Batt on the ice, helping the men chop the ice. Here in the mountainous, rich part of the country where we lived, elf tribes had taken to living on farms, guiding for dwarves or Dellishmen, or fishing for a living along the Trollwater’s banks and marshes. But the country’s heart, wealthier still by the steady stream of timber that poured from it, was filled with tribes that were no man or dwarf’s friend—and it occurred to me that while I had brought every manner of thing to trade with them, I had no way of speaking with them.
“We need a seventh member,” I said to my uncle.
The old dwarf knew at once knew what I was hinting at. He looked up at Batt, who was hovering over a hole in the ice like a white sea bear, and “pished” loudly.
“Pish doesn’t feed the wolfhound, uncle. Someone has to mind the wind vain on the river pole. And we need someone who knows the tongues of the southerly elves.”
“He’d make a damn fine guide,” Gilli agreed behind him. “Knows how to keep that mouth shut!”
At that, Big Kenzo grunted. “Remember the bloody elves that guided us the first time—straight to the “lucky” mountain, the home of damned thunderwyrm!”
Suddenly, someone yelled from the banks, “Fine vessel, my lads! I hear that the Feisty-Goat could float on a puddle!”
I looked up from a trout, rising to a crumb I had tossed in.
“Oh? Who is this!”
Swallows, just out of their winter sleep, swooped across a familiar form. It was Delthal. He stepped beneath the naked branches of a brake of willows. Then he came wading out to greet us, crunching through the thinner ice until he waist deep in the frigid water.
“Now what’s all this!” Uncle Jickie declared.
“I’ll tell you fine fellows what all this is!” Delthal roared back at him. “This is a deathtrap! Sometimes you’ll pass a riverside settlement of thatch and timber, and you’ll think it’s an elf village. But the folks inside are fully dwarven, at least by blood. I tell you, they’ve become like them, and in many parts they are more like elves than dwarves at all!”
“Says the dwarf in the skins of the elf!” thundered Jickie.
“Nay! Says the dwarf in the mind of an elf! Trust at least this much, Master Jickie, I know them as well as any dwarf does! If you will not make me rich as your guide, then make me satisfied knowing you will not travel by day. Hide the vessel, lads. Hide it by day and glide it by night.”
“Thieves and vagabond, all of them! We are warriors!”
“Ha! They have warriors, too,” Delthal said. “Never mind the wild dwarves. I’ll admit they are not so lethal as years ago,” he added, “Back then, if you did not want to be a warrior you stayed home in the fatherland. You till the soil, herd sheep, fish the sea, but you do not take to the ships and become a Cutter. So in the first years here in Yyrkland, most every dwarf was forced to the fight. But the— ”
“But? What but? You just proved our point, by thunder!” Kenzo growled. “These days, only one in twelve dwarves has a belly for the blood of his enemy. The rest are farmers who fell to wanderlust in their youth, or who were unlucky enough to be born to mountain dwarves—the vagabond southerly dwarves will think they’re approaching dogs, but they’ll find themselves facing bears!”
“True enough. But it’s the southerly elves you’ll have to worry about. They’ll come at you by the score, Master Kenzo, each one more naked, hungry and fierce than the last!”
Big Kenzo laughed. “Lad, you’re amusing, I will grant you that. But elves? I think only one in twelve is a real warrior, and sometimes—nay most times—not even that many. But in our company, Young Delthal, every blade is wielded by a warrior!”
One or two of the oars dipped and the Feisty-Goat glided backwards.
“Aye, you’ll be as bears, my lads. Bears, growling and yelping, crying like a damned cub when you face the thunderwyrm!”
The vessel slowed.
“I saw the elves try to take it once. They brought a force a hundred times this size. They had blocked the mouth of its lair with felled trees. There were about a hundred naked elvish warriors. They had a score of bowmen and spear-throwers waiting by the blockage, ready to skewer the beast.”
For once, my kinsman fell silent.
“That was something else I learned about the elves, the joy with which they faced it. And the utter failure they were at it; I saw them whooping with joy as they leaned down to stab it, only to have teeth the size of those oars chomp them in twain. But that was not all I learned. At least it’s not all I think I learned: there might be a way to kill it with but a handful of stout dwarves…”
I watched in amazement as Jickie and Kenzo hefted Delthal over the Feisty-Goat’s prow. They began stripping him naked, then offering him more Dwarven attire.
“You’ll at least stop cutting your beard off like a damned maid, I hope,” Gilli offered, at which the others had a good laugh.
We had our seventh member.
Chapter 9
As we were embarking, young dwarves with wild hair and hungry faces scampered along to the banks, watching us as we began to paddle upriver. Dwarf lads embraced adventure like a wrestling partner. And if they could not find trouble, they made it themselves. Most had nothing but monstrous pride, battle scars, and well-sharpened wood axes, and with those things they would make whatever trouble they wanted. A few even began to hurl stones at us, hoping we would give chase. We very nearly had to pull ashore and oblige them at one point, as they threatened to sink us with larger stones for not taking them along.
Beyond that first obstacle came another.
My uncle.
Almost immediately, he launched into advice, lest we encounter unfriendly elves: “Don’t hesitate with the wild elf. Skin him, Fie. By thunder, skin him! Let him play the skinned-deer, lest he make you think there’s no need for skinning at all! Keep your own wits and work him for all you’re worth! Let him play his deceitful game! By thunder! Give the villain enough rope to hang himself! Gain your end! Then get him! Afterwards beg the heavens to forget and forgive if you like; but don’t ignore the fact that repentance can’t turn a skunk into a dog!”
I nodded silently, understanding about half of it.
And so Master Jickie continued to warn me all the way from Goback to the human Citadel upstream, mixing his metaphors the way Yrlkandic elves like to mix cow’s milk and deer blood. Of course I had long since learned not to complain against these outbursts of explosive eloquence—lest all the canons of Dwarven heritage be outraged. Growing up with a human father, and a mild-mannered one at that, I had not ever known what an outrage it is to try to teach an elder dwarf. And the first time I did, I nearly died. Or so I thought.
“What’s that, sir!” he had roared out when I had audaciously ventured to pull him up once, telling him he was pronouncing “salmon” wrong.
“What, sir! Don’t talk to me of your book-fangled man-twaddle! Is language for the use of the dwarf, or is dwarfdom for the use of language?”
I could not answer, and he looked at me in a way that set me packing.
The walls of the citadel, one of the few stone structures in all the no-mans’ highl
ands was all that saved my weary ears from more lessons. There is something about stone that quiets a dwarven soul, and sometimes it even quiets an uncle’s mouth.
There were ships like the Feisty-Goat clustered together on the riverbank, and even though it was the full light of day, fires were lit ashore. Lanky men were posted as sentries, and every warrior kept his weapons beside him atop the thick stone walls and high palisades, a line that was heavy with axes, swords, spears, shields, and war hammers.
They were saluting us with fists over their hearts.
One strange thing I must confess is this: I knew more about dwarves than I did about men at that point. The saluting was a mystery to me, so I just presumed it was normal. But my uncle whispered that this was Old Addly’s way of wishing us well.
* * *
Apart from the peppery discourses of my uncle, little happened on our first day of travel. It was the nature of the eastward sweep of the Aegian Mountains that the further south you went, the further into Yrkland you were. I had hopped, perhaps strangely, that getting out into his homeland might somehow enliven Halvgar. But it was a much more somber affair than I had supposed. He was still sitting dazed and silent opposite me.
My uncle, unfortunately, was still quite the opposite.
Jickie held with just enough bluster to make me wonder if he weren’t working to conceal his nervousness for the road ahead, endlessly going on about “skinning the elvish skunk before he lulls you into thinking there’ll be no fight” and “knocking the head off anything that stood in my way”.
I admit, it was starting to make my head hurt. I wanted to paraphrase him to show him how ridiculously patronizing he was being and tell him, “Uncle that’s the tenth time you’ve said that. The tenth damn time, and you’ve imparted no more information than the first!”
But I recalled trying to teach him how to say “salmon”, and I held my tongue.
Barely.
Besides, my head did not hurt not half so bad as my arms. My right shoulder was already burning as the sun started dropping, though we had paddled fewer than twenty miles.
Some miles upriver from that, perhaps four miles beyond where I decided to hold my tongue, the sun began to redden. We traveled now between shores that showed less and less ice and snow. We even glimpsed the first, sheerest hint of green. It was a refreshing hint of life, and somehow, it even hushed my uncle. But as we drew near a deep rift of cliffs, frosty air blew through the dank ravines, where snow patches yet lay in the shadow. And he started up again. It was hopeless.
And there was no cloth lying about to stuff in my ears.
Here and there throughout the rocks, we could smell the fresh, spring odor of dampness. There was a faint suggestion of violets, mayflowers and ferns, already bursting the cold black clods of soil.
Sadly, the odors did not have the same quieting effect on Jickie. So I distracted myself with the scenery. The purple folds of the mountains, with their wavy outlines fading in the haze of distance, lay in every direction. Everywhere were endless hills. On a few of these rested the brown shades of dwarven hamlets with chapel spires and citadels pointing above tree-tops.
Then we would pass them, ever rowing, ever listening to Jickie’s well-meaning advice.
At the end of the day, when our boat sheered once again against a bluff of cliffs, came the dull, heavy roar of a riverside village. Above the walls of rock rose great, billowy clouds of woodsmoke. With a sweep of our paddles, we were opposite a cleft in the vertical rock, where we saw the stout walls of a wooden fortification, leaning high over the dizzy precipice. The walls continued down a riverside hill until they were at a level with the lapping water.
We ended the first day of our voyage here.
The town was called Beergarden, which was not the merry place it sounded. It was a much larger village than Goback, but as we neared the banks, we saw that the roar of this place was only rapids in the water. The town itself was a darker, quieter place than our little burg
Some ships’ crews nodded to us silently, waving to the sentries atop their fortification. There was an amazing amount of effort that had gone into building these defenses—probably an amazing amount of maintenance too; the citadel’s walls wrapped the town itself, while our own was just four-walled structure on the riverside.
High above, the guards on that amazing wall gave a long, high, whistle. This was our signal that we could go in, if we like.
“I’m hungry,” Frobhur said.
“I’m thirsty,” Gilli said.
“Now what? Nonsense!” Uncle Jickie lashed out. “I told you two—leave your hunger—leave your thirst back in Goback!”
“Ah, Jick, let them be,” Halvgar said. “Let those who can, go feast, and let those who are able, be merry.”
“Here! Here!” Delthal agreed.
“I could use a maid to rub my back,” said Kenzo.
“Oh, Big Zo,” said my uncle, palming his forehead. “You too, sir?”
I thought I saw Halvgar smile.
Chapter 10
We flung three reels of copper to the fine dwarf who had motioned all’s well up to the guards. He tied our prow to the cluster of sluggish vessels in a muddy part of the riverside, adding to a mass lapping hulls, leaning masts, and gently flopping sail veins.
Gilli and Jickie, Frobhur and Kenzo, Halvgar, Delthal, and I stepped ashore with empty flagons and legs like churned butter. From the sight of us, one might expect that we had been at sea for a month, and the village of Beergarden was no place for a dwarf with watery legs. More than once we had to hold ourselves steady. The bold heights of a fort they called, rather uncreatively, Point Look, loomed up to the right. We had a time clambering up the rude wooden way to get to the plank roads. And the roads themselves were tricky. They wound in every direction, even up and down, through the hillside city.
We stood for a moment there at its edges, soaking it in. We were trying to orient ourselves in the moonlight, which streamed through the towering firs and Franklin trees that surrounded us. It added a strange, moving glow to the dull, gray wood of cathedrals, convents, pubs, brothels, smithshops, woodwrights, boatwrights and dwarf halls, turning every window on the west to smudges of yellow-white and transforming the whole town in a confusion of shadows and angles. It was no wonder, indeed, that as we progressed in all our rough warparty attire, we stopped mid-road to set our eyes on the largest stone thing in the place, a statue of the wyrm we sought.
For some reason or other, I found my own hat off. So was Jickie’s, and so was Halvgar’s. Then Kenzo spat, and we stepped once more through the strange shadows of the place in search of a pub.
It was after midnight when we found one. Nilbi’s Nest seemed like a comfortable-enough place, and they were still a fair number of horses tied to its hitching post. It was, or once was, an enormous hunting lodge, somehow as grand as it was simple. It rose some two hundred feet at its peak, sloping to either side with a mossy roof so low that a dwarf could climb atop it. It seemed, somehow, as if it had been built long ago by craftsmen in an age when magic still seemed possible. Time, neglect, and the ceaseless warring since did little to diminish its sturdy splendor. Perched high atop the roof was an enormous raven. Its thoughts seemed as though they were drifting to my own conjectures, that those old dwarves, steeped in the ways of magic, had built this place more out of hubris than generosity—a monument, as it were, to the modern dwarf’s inability to reproduce it.
As I looked to the fellows, even Uncle Jickie seemed inclined to believe it. I daresay that big Kenzo might have been thinking something along those line, for he was silent as he ran his fingers through ringlets of black hair, which cascaded down his chest like an avalanche of dead rose petals.
Suddenly, Kenzo seemed immensely thoughtful, and my mind ventured to a strange memory, that of my father and I fishing together, talking about dwarves. ‘It is the dwarven wit that compromises their might,’ he had said. ‘Not their backs, son. Not even their axes.’ I wished dwarves said that
of men, and I was in a strange mood, a mood to spend hours thinking of how, precisely, to make this true.
But as we stepped inside, there was too much commotion.
Inside were lines of spinning, dancing dwarf maids—but everyone else, save a score or so, was silent
For such svelte maids, it was a quite a display of ripple. All those shivering thighs and the great confusion of breasts and whipping ponytails was making me dizzy. In fact I was a little nauseous, and looking beyond them only made it worse—the flickering lamps made their shadows recoil and gyrate.
“Thundering hell,” I whispered.
Everyone laughed mildly as the troupe kicked their gowns up to flash their bare backsides. But I felt very much ready to leave for another lodge or tavern for a breath of night air. The overstuffed little buggers at my side, however, were dangerously rapt. Out here on a foggy night like this, a man could lose his life for distracting a dwarf from such a sight. Instead, I thought of airy fields and breezy hilltops. In my mind I could feel the wind caressing me with a buffeting of cold, aromatic meadow air. The thought of a clean, babbling brook had almost assuaged my mind when the lads suddenly went further in. They walked by men, winding single file from among the wooden rails of the torch-lit foreroom.
In the center of the pub, we sat ourselves near a welcoming fire. There, I could see how the enormous building was supported—with live trees! It was an ancient elvish construction. But I had no time to ponder the significance of this; our shadows had hardly stretched to the walls of the great dining hall before the keep called out, “Beef, lamb or pork, my lads?”
“Thunder and hell, but some pork!’ Kenzo demanded. “Pulled from the shoulder and smoked to an inch of its life in apples and hickory!”
