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The Mermaid's Tale

Page 11

by D. G. Valdron


  “Arrah,” I barked.

  There was a second Hobgoblin with a club, and behind him, a third. They rushed me. I feinted to the side, slashed under the swing of the club. I backed away limping, towards a wall.

  “Little fathers,” I grunted, glancing around. “You’ve chosen poorly.”

  There, a fourth. I pretended to take no notice of him, snarling instead at the others, as he approached.

  Then I wheeled and rushed him, carrying him on my knife with me to the wall. The Hobgoblin convulsed, his blood spilling from his mouth.

  I cursed. I only wanted him hurt, not dead. Hurt, he’d scream and plead and melt their strength. Dead, there was nothing for them to hesitate at. I dumped the body to my left, and crouched with my back to the wall, staring at them.

  One Arukh did not fear a single Hobgoblin. But three? Three were dangerous.

  Wild Hobgoblins, I could see that. Scrawny and dirty, dressed in rags and pieces of leather, with none of the finery or style of those who served the Mothers. These were simply rats.

  I barked at them.

  “Little Fathers,” I told them, “go away or I’ll kill you all.”

  No reply.

  The largest of them, a squat redhaired brute, had a heavy club. My hip throbbed from the touch of that club. I stared at them. Their eyes were flat and glassy. Their ambush had failed, but they didn’t have the sense to withdraw.

  “Come on then,” I whispered. “I’ll kill you all.”

  The first had only knives. The last had a half spear with a wicked tip. Him I counted most dangerous.

  They spread, closing in on me. What would they do? Probably a rush from knives or club to distract me, and the spear coming from behind. Knowing that didn’t mean it wouldn’t work. Guts tightening, I tried to crouch further back against the wall. Lips pulled tight, I grinned and showed them fangs.

  Suddenly, with a fierce whoop, the little Arukh from the lodge was on top of the club wielder.

  Bad choice, I thought. She’d lost surprise and he struggled. They rolled around for a second before she tore his throat open with her knife.

  I leaped for the knife-wielder, smashing him down with vicious blows.

  The spear-carrier watched for a second and fled.

  It was only the work of seconds. I sucked great heaving breaths, staring at the bodies.

  The little female crowed happily as she began to loot the body she’d killed. I didn’t bother, I could tell they had nothing.

  Why had they attacked? Were they just rats who misjudged their prey? Or was there something more, I wondered, remembering their silence and glassy stares. I rolled the one I’d killed over with my foot, staring at his face. Was there a suggestion of a running nose? Of drool from trickling down the side of his mouth? Magic?

  Had they been set upon me by Copper Thoughts?

  I shook my head. The little Arukh looked up at the motion, watching me.

  “You’re following me,” I grunted at her.

  She froze.

  For a second, we stared at each other.

  I snarled, deep in my throat.

  She whined, shaking her head.

  Then, over her shoulder, I saw the young Troll, heading back toward the Lodge.

  If it was Shaman’s work, I’d be safe enough near the Troll.

  I called to join him. Warily, he let me walk near him.

  The little one followed at a safe distance.

  The Young Troll flipped me a bit of copper.

  I plucked it out of the air.

  “Tell me something,” he said, holding up another piece.

  I grunted questioningly.

  “Why did you fight, back there, the girl and the two males?”

  “Uh?” I grunted. It took me a moment to think what he was talking about. The rape.

  I glanced back. The little one was still skulking after us, but not within earshot.

  “She made too much noise,” I said, “it irritated me.”

  “And the males?”

  I grunted again. “They caused the noise.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Arrah,” I replied. He flipped the coin to me.

  He seemed disappointed, as if he wanted something more from me.

  But what more could there be? I considered that if I could figure it out, I could lie and perhaps extort another coin.

  We walked along in silence, as he considered this.

  “There is a lot of noise,” he said finally.

  “Hers was very irritating. I didn’t like her cries.”

  “There’s more to it than that,” he said.

  I knew it, I thought. He was looking for something.

  “Iron Pants...” I began. He looked blank. So he was known to the Trolls by some other name? I hadn’t thought of that.

  “The big Troll,” I began again, “he tells you that it happens all the time. There are no reasons. It just happens. That’s all.”

  “I think that there is more to it,” the Troll said.

  He held up a gold coin.

  “Give me the gold,” I said, “I’ll tell you everything.”

  He laughed.

  “Troll not stupid,” I said grudgingly. Not that stupid.

  We walked along some more. I thought.

  “I’m a good fighter,” I said finally. “But there are many good fighters in the Lodge. Sometimes, they get confused. They might think I am weak. I can show them I am strong, hurt them. But good fighters fight, easy to get hurt, who knows?”

  He listened.

  “You show them you’re strong,” I said. “They don’t get confused. Pick someone, hurt them. Everyone sees. They think ‘strong fighter, we leave her alone.’”

  “Why pick on the rape?” he asked.

  “Everybody watched it. Everyone paid attention. Afterwards, Arukh keep watching, nothing else happening. Maybe something more will happen. I pick them, everyone watched me.”

  “The girl?”

  “She’s weak,” I told him. “Exhausted and worn out. Can’t fight. I kick her around, show everyone I’m strong. No risk. No danger.”

  “She follows you?”

  “She does what she wants. So long as she doesn’t come close. I don’t want a slave.”

  “Why?”

  “Arrah,” I grunted irritably. “Ask her.”

  “The rapists? Why attack them? Why not just the girl.”

  “They’re weak too. All tired out from fighting her. They have more strength. But I hit hard, hit fast. They go down. Everyone watches. Everyone sees I beat three Arukh. No one wants to fight me. Everyone knows I’m strong.”

  I glanced at him.

  “Give me gold now.”

  “Did it bother you?” he asked. “Did the rape upset you?”

  I didn’t like the question.

  I shrugged carefully, to show him it didn’t matter. “She made too much noise.”

  “Did it ever happen to you?”

  “No,” I shook my head emphatically. “Never happened to me. I’m strong. I make them afraid.”

  He waited a few heartbeats.

  “What about when you were small?”

  “Arrah,” I snapped irritably. “You ask too many questions. Keep your gold.”

  He flicked it at me anyway, smiling. I caught it and turned a sour look on him.

  “Why do you ask so many questions?”

  He just smiled at me.

  I threw him a bit of copper. He caught it with a graceful swatting motion.

  “I study Arukh.”

  I snarled.

  I hate the Trolls.

  The morning sun was unpleasant, but not too bothersome. It hung low in the sky, a great burning ball.

  I was restless. I decided to wander bac
k to the Selk territories. At least I wouldn’t have to worry about Copper Thoughts there. No street shaman would intrude on a Kingdom not of his race. He was only dangerous in the borderlands.

  I put on my great coat, shrugging into the shoulders, and headed out.

  I came to the Mermaids’ dock and shied away. There probably weren’t any of them there. Instead, I headed further downriver. Selk stared at me curiously. There were a lot more of them than when I’d come at night.

  I stopped to watch a group of children play, until their mothers, disturbed by my presence, swept down to shoo them away.

  I kept walking. The ground was soft beneath my feet. The buildings and houses all seemed like boxes, wooden frames lashed together, with the sides woven in. I stopped to peer at one edifice, an elaborate confection of beams and weavings and saw it rested on top of the ground, not in it. It was tethered loosely to three large poles, sunk deep into the earth.

  I shook my head.

  Why would anyone tether a building? It couldn’t run away, could it?

  And if so, why leave the tethers so loose?

  Mysteries onto mysteries.

  Out on the waters, were the great lodges of the high Selk. Only the low castes lived on the land, I decided.

  Still, everyone I saw seemed healthy and happy. They stared at me, and I stared back frankly. I didn’t see anyone but Selk. I was startled at how numerous they were.

  Before I’d come here, I’d hardly seen any.

  They congregated together, I realized. Other races outgrew the borders of their kingdoms, their peoples mixed and wandered. Not the Selk. They clung close to the water, and to each other.

  The seashore formed a great boulevard, with perhaps a thirty-yard gap between the houses and the water. People walked back and forth, chatted or bargained. They worked at odd tasks. I passed a stoneman, chipping out flint edges, sitting in a grassy nest. His materials were all about him.

  He looked up at me, startled.

  “You find flint here?” I asked.

  He laughed. “I buy it, I just like to work here, where I can see everything. I only have to make sure that I take all my leavings with me when I go.”

  “Why?” My brows knit in confusion.

  “So that nobody steps on it and cuts their feet.”

  So what? I didn’t bother to ask, I moved on.

  Strange people.

  I passed a group making a boat, weaving supple branches in and around a frame. Next to them, another band weaving a net. The weavers worked with such concentration they didn’t even look up as I passed. The edge of the water was dotted with watercrafts and docks and structures I couldn’t identify.

  The docks grew larger and heavier, extending further out onto the water. I walked down one so large that Vampires could drive cattle along it.

  Along the side, fifteen or twenty fishermen had tethered their boats and were pulling nets up. They stared at me, pausing. I grinned. Other Selk could ignore me as I walked past, confident that I was not there for them. But here I was on the dock, it was harder to tell each other I was just passing through. I made them nervous.

  Good.

  There was a whispered conversation among them as some stared openly, and others tried to ignore me.

  Finally, a middle aged Selk, naked but for a loincloth, walked up to me, his smooth body rolling with easy strength.

  They were like otters, I thought again. You couldn’t see the muscle, but it was there.

  “Greetings,” he said.

  I grunted.

  “You are Arash?” He gave the word a hissing sound.

  Grunt.

  “The one the Elders summoned... for the Mermaids?” I noticed that he didn’t refer to the killing.

  “I am.”

  He seemed relieved by this. He turned to his companions and shouted, “It is the Arash, the Elders’ Arash.”

  This seemed to relieve them. There was a small chorus of greetings. Even the ones who’d been consciously ignoring me relaxed visibly.

  He turned back to me.

  “We’re bringing the nets in. Would you like to join us?”

  I shrugged. He seemed to take this as a yes, and lead me over to the fishermen, rattling off names of introduction, which I didn’t bother to remember.

  The fishermen scuttled in and out of the boats, and in and out of the water. I wasn’t going any further than the edge of the docks. Someone handed me a rope.

  “What do I do?” I asked. The Selk on either side of me had ropes.

  “Pull on the rope, and we’ll pull the net in.”

  Simple enough.

  I pulled. There was almost no weight to it. I pulled harder, drawing the weight onto myself, feeling the satisfying tug of mass. On the sides of me, Selk scrambled to keep up.

  “She’s strong,” someone said.

  I grinned.

  The next net came up even more quickly. I was sweating though.

  “You must be very hot in that coat,” a near-naked fisherman said.

  We pulled in a third net, just me and a couple of Selk. I noted that it took six or seven Selk to pull in a net, normally, and we did it much faster.

  I took off my coat, going bare armed with tunic and leggings and armour. The Selk stole wide-eyed glances at me.

  The fourth net came up. The fifth and sixth nets I pulled in alone, as they all stopped to watch.

  And that was it. I backed away and sat down heavily, panting harshly. A couple of them were sorting fish into baskets. They moved near me and set their baskets close.

  “Asok here, whites there, bigmouths in this.”

  Fish rapidly flew from the nets to their designated baskets.

  I picked up a fish. It floundered in my hand and I slammed it against the dock to quiet it. I stared at it. Asok? White? Bigmouth? It looked like a fish.

  I threw it into a basket.

  It was simple, I picked up a fish, guessed, and threw it into a basket. Sometimes, with an apologetic smile, a Selk would move one of my fish into another basket.

  The Captain, the older Selk who’d spoken to me first, came and sat beside me. He brought another, younger Selk.

  “I thought you’d want to meet Jerva,” he said, casually flipping fish into baskets, barely glancing at them. I stared at my fish. It was sort of white, but it had a big mouth. I chewed my lip.

  “Yes?” I said.

  I tossed it into a basket. The Captain took it out and put it in a different basket. When the baskets filled, one of the Selk would drag it aside and bring a fresh basket.

  “His sister’s a Mermaid.”

  I looked up at Jerva, staring hard. Looking for a resemblance. He had two legs and he looked like a Selk. They all looked alike. I wondered how they told each other apart.

  “Really?”

  “Oh yes, the family is blessed. His grandfather’s brother, mother’s side, was a Mermaid too, and one of their cousins was a Mermaid.”

  “Jerva’s so holy,” someone laughed, “he hardly needs to get into a boat. He can just walk on the water and pick up the fish as they tickle his feet.”

  Jerva blushed.

  “Yeah, but his baskets sink, so he needs us after all.”

  He put his hand on my arm. I went still. The others noticed a tension.

  He took his hand away.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just that our people like to touch.”

  “Arrah,” I said quietly, grinning. “My people like to touch.”

  I meant it differently.

  He extended his hand. I held up my bare arm, covered only on one side by a laminated wooden forearm guard. His fingers danced along my flesh, crawling like insects.

  “Hairy,” he said aloud, for his fellows. “Thick, but not as thick as dwarves. Strange skin, smooth but not smooth,
and thin. It’s like there isn’t anything but muscle under the skin, hard muscle like wood.”

  He withdrew and stared at his fingers, as if I might have rubbed off on him.

  The rest of them were staring. I bobbed my head at them, baring my teeth in the widest grin so that my black lips were stretched thin and my heavy fangs were plain to see.

  “Ara... Arukh,” the Captain said, pronouncing it carefully. “That’s a Goblin word, isn’t it.”

  “Yes.” I let go of the grin.

  “What does it mean?”

  “Unwanted.”

  “Aah...” he said. He paused for a second, pretending to study a fish.

  “I’ve heard the Dwarves use ‘Hagrik’”

  “That’s what they call us,” I said.

  “What does that mean?” he asked.

  “Oh,” I thought for a second, putting words and sounds together in my head. “Abomination. It means ‘lesser abomination.’”

  There was an embarrassed silence.

  “Hagrara means ‘greater abomination’” I offered.

  “I saw one of those once,” a fisherman said, a few baskets down from us.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “When I went with the Dwarves on that delivery during the flood, about two years back.”

  “I remember.”

  “It was big, like a Giant, maybe bigger. But ugly, it had features like a Dwarf, but more so, all hairy and poke nosed. It was all twisted up, one foot deformed, and it had a hunch back and only one eye, because its face was sort of scrunched on one side.”

  “Kahugrakar,” I said.

  “You know it?” the Captain said surprised.

  “Only by reputation, there aren’t that many Hagrara. They call them Ohgra or Ogre in the trade speech.”

  “The trade speech is hard,” a Selk volunteered. I was surprised, so much of the trade speech seemed to be Selk that I had hardly any trouble speaking to them. I just avoided the parts and words that I knew to be from Goblin or Dwarf tongues.

  Which was odd, now that I thought of it. The Selk kept to themselves. How was it that everyone used so many of their words in the trade speech?

  “Yeah,” someone else said, “all those kakaka and tatata, it hurts the throat.”

  “Dwarves,” the one who’d seen the Ohgra said. “It’s how they talk, too. I was in the wagon with Dwarves, when I went out, and all of a sudden, they started talking. Kukukuk Akakak kukuku. I thought they were all dying. But they just kept on that way.”

 

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