by Thomas Head
For a long moment, the wonder of the encounter hung in the air. She kissed his ear often. She squeezed his hand as they walked.
“I love you,” she said.
He told he loved her, too, and that when this was done he wanted to bathe her in milk, then spend an evening lapping it off of her.
She giggled, and something in it seemed like the first giggle of her life.
They walked away from the sound of the halfling’s laughter, rising wildly behind them.
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The inner-workings of the king’s caravan were make-shift edifices of timber, set up within the vast line of carts that brought them. And at the edge of all this was fewer men but more things. More stuff. More wood, more canvas. Walking through, Cullfor found himself in a corner of the meadow under the ridge that lined the river valley. The morning air was cool, and the sunlight was bright and inviting. Terrible weather for war, he mused. Then, suddenly felt inexplicably dumbstruck and hollow, and was working to push the sensation out of his mind when he understood what it was. It was a reality that had been inside of him for some time…
Halflings were already talking about going back to Brickelby, or Real Brickleby, Arway’s capital.
But he knew, for him, that would not happen.
He also sensed something else. A presence he had not felt since he had felt on the trails outside of Gintypool. He could sense a dragon. Bhiers, the Dwarf-King. He was coming, he knew it as sure as he knew his own name. Before morning, they would face an enemy far larger and more powerful than even the vast army that surrounded them. Soon he would face an enemy most men could not begin to fathom.
But he also knew could not hope to convince them of this…
When he focused his mind on Bhiers, what he saw instead was that black thistle helm, somewhere on the river, and when he focused more, all he could see only a ghost-like cluster of bats. Perhaps it was just a symbol of what was, perhaps not, but somehow the strange mass of smaller creatures formed together into a visage of some happy, pale-eyed beast of a dwarf, his vivacious life force vibrating in that crown like a small sun, his great ghost lifting his dull red shirt and chainmail cloak more so than sinew and muscle. Now, squalls of his laughing voice encompassed the monstrous vision, emanating from somewhere deeper than the river they surely traveled on.
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Cullfor shuddered. He gathered Bunn’s hand, and together they went back into the crowds to sit near a long mead bench.
Laughing without knowing precisely, sitting with a woman he loved completely, he kissed his exnun on the neck and instead of asking her if she sensed it too, he just smiled. None of this will be believed. Even in watersheds where certain lords tell tales of dragons, his tale of this day will be marked as some esoteric nonsense. A table-tale told by drunken rabble and old plowmen.
And he didn’t give a damn.
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Soon, they were sitting near the king, laughing and drinking across from him at the head of the mead bench. Cullfor watched him, drunkenly, laughing as he bolted up from the bench across a stony slip of limestone at the back of the table. He was racing toward some plump porter-women lugging their heavy kegs of beer. The king assaulted them with rough swats across their bottoms until they let him help. Two more helped.
And Cullfor, who wanted nothing more than silence, so, silently, he leaned over to the king and told him that the dwarves are coming.
But he was right. No one believed him, or wanted to. And soon, the mead-benches downhill from him were alive again, rocking with laughter again. Then talking.
Then snoring.
Before he realized it, Cullfor was drunken and overstuffed too. It felt as though mere minutes had passed before the red bars of dusk were stretching down the stony hills.
Cullfor and Bunn found a high, secluded spot to rest. They could look down through the trees at the king’s great caravan. There were slow and aching preparations for departure already. But they could have been making ready some measure of a camp.
He turned and kissed Bunn. She combed his hair with her fingers, then she held his face and turned to him. She rubbed his chest and pulled him down alongside her. Her mouth and eyes were bright.
He pulled one of her breasts free and suckled at it like a babe.
“What brought you to become a nun?” he asked, still suckling.
“Oh,” she said with a surprised noise. “It’s an inglorious tale, husband.”
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Early in life, she tell him, she thinks she has figured out what is wrong: She has simply made life too complicated for herself. Thinking she knows a thing or two of the world, she sets out. She does what it takes to be happy. To live freely. It all boils down to simplicity. On leaving her sister, she becomes her, or like her, rather. Whoring is like an ongoing war. Days of thunder, dark and crazy dusks. Perhaps there are no entrails of screaming combatants floating in blood so thick in the ditches a man could swim. But there is strategy. Avoiding traps, and sometimes seeking them, and a misery the like of which he only just knew was possible. There is real joy throughout those days, and days of abject pain. There is always fear. There is more joy than pain, though the joy comes in dollops of conversation, and the pain is as pervasive as time. Perhaps that is why the joy is greater.
Perhaps not.
In primordial moments, where not even payment is guaranteed, making love is not unlike single combat. In the field, she has no trouble holding her dignity in tact atop fat farmers with heavy lances. It would be foolish to say this is done with ease. But it down nonetheless. Yet she dismounts lords with shame in her heart. At times it is not the nearly the impossible thing that it seems, but sometimes the worthlessness creeps in.
For the most part, Bunn enjoys it, frankly. Until the Gray Sunday. Until she learns that near-invincibility can haunt a woman as terribly as losing. Until she meets the Frog Knight.
He pays her travel all the way to the borderlands.
The frog, she has heard, is warty and squat, armored, and necessarily barefoot because of his distorted skin. She has heard he is an unstoppable wrecker. And a terrible thing to behold in light.
They are alone in a high fertile ford between two mountain valleys, waiting. This is the way, sometimes. A man has the right to some time, to soak her in once he has paid in advance, to arrange things in his life before he alters it forever with adultery.
At dusk, he disrobes, and the man is quite something again. He worse than the stories. He is a nasty thing from another world, and an aquatic fiend whose holdings rival that of a king. She recoils at the bald and reticulated head. The throaty movement resembles slithering. The eyes are rolling, focusing on her as they roll around in that improbable head.
He tells her to undress.
Soon she stands before him nude. Both of them, nude. Her milk-perfect skin a mockery of the animal before her.
Turn around, he says.
But there is something in the command that frightens her. A crisp, living emptiness. Now she see something even worse. The frog’s family, his wife and two teenage boys have come. They are watching from the edge of the meadow.
They will be the ones to kill you, the frog whispers.
It is somehow even worse that they scream in glee as she spins and impacts her forehead against his face. It is only a grazing blow, but the impact shakes the brain. His nose bursts. As she lands in the frog’s fields, he vomits and roars. The frog spins to his feet and now she shoves him again and picks up his belt, beating him, then strangling him, and as he falls, kicking his ribs.
The frog is gulping, hard, kicking those nightmare feet. Screeching now, his improbably pretty wife is telling him to get up. Puking down his chest, he can breathe, but not well. All instinct is countered, and she runs, runs past her horse. The beast follows and when she sees the family running after her, she snaps. She has no sense of direction. Unconscious for a flash, she wakes to find herself off the horse, choking the wife. Sweaty.
She has hurt herself somehow. Her back. This is the first squeeze on her lower back that will haunt her now throughout life.
The woman’s neck is askew. The eyes still bulge under the force. They stay open as the blood sheets down the side of the neck. Even killing her, she cannot believe the absolute lack of authority she commands. The woman is hurting her with her pretty face. The freckles make her see her cousin in her forehead. Her hair is up high atop her head. She has a plump tummy, and that she has sired anything to the creature on the ground on the other side of the meadow is another thing that amazes her as she stands, naked, looking at the boys.
She glances at the biggest, who is gathering their packs. Eagerly.
And she get back on the horse, and a week later arrives at the nunnery, naked, dried fleck of rust-colored blood about her wrists.
She would tell the nuns she was raped.
And it feels like the most honest words she has ever spoken.
Until she tells Cullfor she loves him
Cullfor is her home. And suckles love from her, and looks up at her, suckling as three halfling are burning their dead horses in a nearby brushpile. Neither she nor her husband lord will ever have this moment again. Ever. Never even mention it.
The three halflings secretly watch Cullfor’s masterful mouth at work with their graceless, secretive gazes.
How odd that some are born with the skin of a frog, but none are born with hooves.
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The moon was rising over the trees as Bunn looked down and smiled. He liked the way her neck looked so chubby, and he wanted to fall asleep beside it. But the mechanisms of his mind were too far in motion for him to cease his thinking. He leaned back, his eyes closing as his mind gripped the mane of a wild rush of her memories, and he dreamt of the frog.
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When Cullfor woke up alongside Bunn, he was still a bit drunk. His arm was damp with sweat where they had held each other. He pulled his arm free, then let her sleep.
He yawned, trying to focus.
The moon was high but veiled in a cold, thin haze. Through the trees below was a great sluggishness. The king’s caravan appeared ready to depart, and yet again it was difficult to judge.
Cullfor stood, leaning against a tree. Even the two or three priest he saw wore tunics of mail and open-faced helms. He watched as they guilted a few younger folk into submission, showing them how to pack the Holy Implementia properly, how to place them in consecrated blankets, and how to roll them, setting them gingerly into reliquary chests. Then the boys were chased off toward eight drafthorses. The mounts were carted and sloppily laden with the king’s cargo, which was manhandled by three dozen more scurrying boys who had piled everything hog-wild. Hundreds of things were all bundled and lashed on with some several lengths of rope. And hundreds more. Smaller bits of luggage: eating tools, some oil and whet stones for the swords, some cloth from wives are whatever those women who had wondered here and there throughout the camp were. He saw the long war bow here and there. Together under the high gray afternoon, the thousands gathered and organized a half a million small things, then began either walking southeasterly along a tail that wound away from the river.
Most, however, were still folding sparse packs.
It was wonder, Cullfor thought, that a king ever makes it to battle.
In all, fifty horses would come. Maybe half of them were knights, the rest were archers, scooting along now out of the far end of the valley.
There was a growing calm in Cullfor’s mind. In watching the horses, a beast worth five acres and a cottage these days, and all the rest of the nonsensical, he felt the same decadent sense of abundance he had felt spanking the witch who trained him. It was difficult to describe the bizarre happiness that it brought.
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Before the carts of the king’s wagons started moving, there was another hour spent redoing packing and barking orders, but eventually the carts squeaked across the fields through winding ways that stretched upward through the boulder-strewn slopes and onto the road above them.
Cullfor looked back down at Bunn, then again at the meadow. He felt as if a great snake had come and tried to swallow him and was slithering away now.
She was still sleeping.
He crawled next to her. And he began drinking again.
They were leaving, but there was no sense telling them to turn around. No one would believe him if he were to say that, in less than hour, they would be rushing toward the river .
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Cullfor cocked an eye, steadying himself.
After a moment he lifted Bunn with one arm to wake her. Behind them, the morning’s sun was brilliant but unseen, burning from under the horizon’s crisp edge. Smart greens of the forest along the either side of the road began to come alive. The king’s caravan had only just pointed itself south east when they heard, somewhere near the water, deepening, smokehouse horns of Dwarven damnation.
The army of halfling halted.
And for the moment, the hardy Watershed Folk, so good at war they rarely had to engage in it, smiled.
Chapter 98
“Dragons may or may not exist. I have only seen two of them.”
—Lord Uncle Fie Wyrmkiller.
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The castle was not the most austere in Arway, nor were its defenses the sturdiest. But as Cullfor passed its safety, past its defenses, moving toward the dark river beach, he felt an uncomfortable buzz in his soul. It felt like standing before the Gates of an ancient afterlife.
It was hard to say how much time had passed before he stood ankle deep in the river, but it was still sometime in the thin and grayish pale of the morning light.
He heard the sound of dwarves barking in the distance. Then a clap of thunder underscored a distant commotion: the sound of marching warhorses, and the subdued echo of voices.
Narrowing eyes scanned back down the beach, at the enormous stones of a road that crumbled against the water. From here, a half a mile away, the road was beautiful the way a rock garden is beautiful. At a riverward bend of rocks, succumbing to more and more waves, the road congested around some cliffs, then thinned again into fields, which rolled distantly and softly across the southern sweeps of stone. The whole of the scene was full of his countrymen, capped by the morning’s thin fog, which was sprawling thinly, blowing away against the greening and gray light of the sea.
Then he heard distant horses again.
He looked back at the beach, at a scattering of borderland men who were climbing atop rocks and ramps to look off into the distance.
And he looked again at the king’s halflings.
This time, they seemed panicked, and they were pulling great, crude catapults down to the beach.
.
Chapter 99
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The morning was still was gray, and living fog crawled low across the bottom of the sky, swirling with high river fog.
Along the rock-strewn beach, an army came. The army of Bhiers, Dwarf-King of Yrkland. They halted at a wide, riverside field beyond the Broken Road. There were perhaps five thousand dwarven nights behind him. They stretched a half mile, four deep, and there were, all of them, as damp, cold, and silent as snow.
For a long, brutal moment, the men and halflings nearby said nothing. There was just the silence, save the break of the pewter-colored ocean.
Then, distant fat splashes began to envelope the sounds of thin screams.
Suddenly, arrows whisked over their heads.
Every man and halfling looked in the direction of the dwarven company of archers, unseen across the river, then looked again at the arrows, watching them fall harmlessly in the fields past the beach.
Then a roar from the catapults behind them resounded, the machines groaning free of their burdens. When the death-freight was launched, there was only lethargic vapors, creeping and rising like ghosts of the shore and sky. Then, splashes, some of mud, some of river water. An
d the distant yelps atop a great, watery noise.
Two more flights of arrows came from across the river, flying overhead, less accurate than the first.
The archers behind him let their enormous bolts fly, this time down the beach, toward Bhiers’ Main Army. But as the arrows landed, his stomach lurched, and a wind came like the howling of giants. A strafe of wind bit into his face. The cape began whipping audibly. Soaked hair snaked across his chest as he raised a raw hand and watched at the dwarven army began to approach. His hand stayed raised as more arrows from the fog of the river.
A screaming, collapsing house noise roared as the catapults launched again. The stones hurled, ferociously quick. The noise as they left, again and again, was like a banner in fierce wind.
Ahead, mud already barked. Water roared, rising in great plumes. Dwarves flew in pieces out into the frigid water.
The halflings beside him were smiling.
The catapults launched again. The spittle of giants soared, raining in every direction. Life extinguishing in gruesome squalls, the dwarves flopped sideways, or they exploded in great bursts of blood and armor. The jarring splashes sent up massive sheets of water.
A great flock of missiles swooped again from the river, but before he could send up a shield, the thin shafts fell and dropped Arwegians everywhere along the shore.
And now, dwarves yet splashing in the air, the army of Bhiers’ came and began to encircle them, running at them from all sides. There was only three thousand halfling and borderland men, and he and they form a circle their on the wet rocks.
And now the dwarves had come.
Cullfor cut at the tips of two pikes the weaponless, wet enemy had taken from the fallen. A third thrust glanced his neck. He ducked. He grabbed the weapon and pulled it from the dwarf’s grip. The first two dwarves stuck again, missing him as he charged them with his sword high.
