The Grey Bastards_A Novel

by Jonathan French

  Before the cavaleros could spur their horses forward, their gazes snapped up to stare wide-eyed. A voice rang out from behind Jackal’s head.

  “Think twice, you prickly lipped eunuchs!”

  Jackal smiled. The voice was ill-humored, commanding, and familiar. The cavaleros were lowering their lances, every mouth agape.

  “Perfect timing, Fetch!” Jackal called over his shoulder. He gave the men a gloating smile before turning around. A moment later, his own jaw fell open.

  Fetching stood upon the roof of the brothel with a stockbow in each hand, both loaded and trained on the riders. She was stark naked.

  “You’re bleeding, Jack.”

  Jackal managed a grunt and a nod. He had known Fetching since childhood, but neither of them were children anymore.

  Her pale green flesh was flawless, lacking the ashy grey tones found in most half-orcs, and smooth save where it rippled with muscle or swelled with curves. She had both to spare. Her dark brown twistlocks were unbound, falling to her shapely shoulders. She held the heavy stockbows steadily, the points of their quarrels unwavering between the prods. It was an impressive sight. And based upon the stunned silence behind him in the yard, the cavaleros thought so as well.

  Clever Fetching, always using every advantage, though she needed few.

  “You’re bleeding,” Fetch repeated, “and I am awakened very early. Someone is going to die.”

  Garcia had managed to stumble toward his fellows and pointed with a quivering finger.

  “You filthy ash-coloreds!” he shrieked through his swollen lips. “You will all dangle from a gibbet! Take them, men! Take them!”

  “That one,” Oats grunted.

  “That one,” Fetching confirmed, and shot Garcia through the eye.

  He fell backward stiffly, the fletching of the quarrel blossoming from his left socket. The cavaleros cursed and struggled to keep their shying horses under control.

  “I got one bolt left,” Fetching announced. “Who would like it?”

  There were no volunteers.

  Jackal spun on the cavaleros.

  “Before any of you say anything fool-ass, like, ‘My father will hear of this!’ remember—no one cares a fig for you back north in whatever civilized jewel you called home. If they did, you wouldn’t be here.”

  Jackal swept every man with a steady gaze, noting which ones looked away.

  “What are you, third-, fourth-born? At least one of you is likely a bastard. You were all fobbed off here to be forgotten. To patrol the borderlands and watch for orcs. You have no station, you have no privilege.” Jackal tossed Garcia’s lance onto his corpse. “He forgot that. Don’t make the same mistake. If you want to survive your first skirmish with the thicks, you best begin to look kindly on us half-breeds. We are what keep you safe. Bermudo’s right. We claim this land as our own. But we aren’t the only ones. The orcs call this land Ul-wundulas. They think it’s theirs. You won’t prove them wrong by believing you’re better than they are. Your fathers can’t help you here. The king, whatever his name is, can’t help you here. Only we mongrels can help you here. Welcome to the Lot Lands.”

  Stepping back, Jackal gave Oats a nod. The brute picked the unconscious form of Captain Bermudo off the ground as if he were a child.

  “Didn’t take more than a bucket of water for you, ’Mudo,” he said, and slung the man over the back of his horse. He handed the animal’s reins to one of the cavaleros.

  “Take him back to the castile,” Jackal told the men. “Tell Captain Ignacio that Cavalero Garcia defied Bermudo’s orders and struck him. He fled on horseback rather than face discipline and was last seen heading into centaur territory. The Grey Bastards have volunteered to go searching for him. But we’re not confident he’ll ever be found. When Bermudo comes around, he will want to remember it that way. You all will. Unless you want a war with the half-orc hoofs.”

  No one responded. Each face had gone pale and placid.

  “Now is the part where you all nod!” Fetch called down from the roof.

  Every helmeted head bobbled up and down.

  Jackal extended a guiding arm toward the track. Within minutes, the cavalcade was a shimmering smudge on the horizon.

  Jackal found Oats staring at him and shaking his head.

  “What?”

  “Nice speech, Prince Jackal.”

  “Suck a sow’s tit, Oats.”

  Jackal probed at his nose while Fetching jumped down from the roof, the well-developed muscles in her long legs absorbing the impact.

  “Next time you go out to make pretty words with the frails, don’t forget to bring a thrum,” she said, tossing Jackal the spent stockbow.

  “And next time you come to our rescue, you should wear that,” he retorted, sweeping a hand at her nakedness.

  “Lick me, Jack!”

  “Didn’t one of Sancho’s girls already do that?”

  “Yes,” Fetch replied, turning her back to head for the door of the brothel. “But like all the whores, she would rather have had her head between your legs.”

  Jackal stared brazenly at the dimples above Fetch’s pert backside until she disappeared into the shadows of the whorehouse.

  A cuff from Oats on the back of his head brought him around.

  “We need to get back.”

  Jackal scratched at his chin. “I know. See to the hogs.”

  Before Oats could head for the stables, the same door that had so recently enveloped Fetching now disgorged the brothel’s proprietor. The pleasant swell in Jackal’s cod immediately withered.

  Maneuvering his corpulence through the jamb, Sancho came heavy-footed into the yard, his small mouth held in an oval of witless alarm. What little hair the man had left was already soaked with sweat, a slick black stain across his head. Sancho stared at the cavalero’s corpse and shook his head slowly, causing his ill-shaven jowls to jiggle.

  “I’m ruined.”

  Jackal snorted. “Don’t tell me that this is the first man to die here, Sancho.”

  “The first cavalero!” the fat man said, his voice sounding choked. “And not even one of Ignacio’s commoners, but a fucking blue blood! What have you done?”

  “Rid you of a future troublesome guest,” Jackal told him. “Fair wager, that piece of hogshit would have beaten your girls.”

  “That I can handle! But the body of exiled gentry is not so easily managed.”

  “It is. Contact the Sludge Man.” Jackal gestured at Garcia’s sprawled carcass. “Let him dispose of our deceased friend.”

  The whoremaster’s large, moist face went pale at the mention of the name.

  “He and our chief have an understanding,” Jackal said before Sancho’s panic fully took root.

  “You sure you want to involve him?” Oats put in, an uneasy look on his bearded face. Jackal wasn’t sure who he meant, their chief or the Sludge Man, but he didn’t bother to clarify. This was the way through.

  He kept his attention on giving Sancho instructions. “Send a bird. When he gets here, give him the body and the horse. Tell him it’s for the Grey Bastards.”

  “And what about me?” Sancho demanded. “What do I get for being your agent in this?”

  Jackal took a deep breath. “What do you want?”

  “You know,” Sancho told him.

  “I do,” Jackal conceded. “Fine. I’ll tell the chief.”

  The whoremaster eyeballed him for a moment, then nodded. Giving the cavalero one final, grudging glance, Sancho stomped back inside.

  Oats clenched his jaw. “Claymaster won’t be pleased.”

  “Our days of pleasing him are almost over, so he better start getting used to it,” Jackal replied, breathing out hard through his sore nostrils. “Get ready to ride.”

  Chapter 2

  The day was hot long b
efore the sun was high. Jackal rode point, setting a quick pace to allow the air to flow across his skin. Hearth was well rested and eager to run, so Jackal gave the hog his head, gripping the bristles of his mane in one hand. Keeping his heels tucked and gripping the barrel of the animal with his thighs, Jackal kept an easy seat, settling into the rhythm of Hearth’s trot.

  The rugged, sun-bathed plains of Ul-wundulas spread out in every direction, each boulder and piney shrub passing by with a whispered rush of wind in Jackal’s ears. He tried to imagine the time, not so long ago, when the hoofs did not exist, when half-orcs were slaves and the hogs they now rode were only beasts of burden. Those years were not so far gone, only a few decades past, a handful of years before Jackal’s own birth, yet he found them difficult to picture. He lived for the ride, for the feeling of a strong beast beneath him, huffing like a bellows and chewing the leagues into a dusty cloud behind pounding hooves.

  Hearth was a formidable pig and bred for speed, generations removed from the cumbersome beasts who were yoked to wagons and watermills during the Orc Incursion. The Claymaster and the other old veterans said those first hogs were tireless and keen, but their strength was meant for the pulling of great weight. The great bearded deer-hog, that is what humans called these animals, but amongst the half-orc slaves who tended them they were affectionately known as barbarians.

  The name had stuck, but the barbarians now ridden by the mongrel hoofs were true mounts, no longer draft animals. Only three-quarters the height at the withers of a Hisparthan stallion and shorter of leg, they were less swift than a horse over short distances, but unequaled over longer runs in rough terrain due to their frightfully compact and effective musculature. They were all but hairless from the flank to the shoulder, possessing only a crest of coarse bristles along their spine, sprouting from the mane growing about the neck and dangling from the lower jaw. A pair of tusks emerged vertically through the skin of the long and tapering snout, eventually curving back sharply toward the beast’s forehead. These tusks never stopped growing, and wild barbarians of advanced age had been found with the tusks beginning to penetrate their skull. Through careful breeding, they were made to sweep back sharply toward the rider. Dubbed swine-yankers, these tusks could be gripped and used to direct a hog’s head in desperate circumstances, though even a domesticated barbarian would resist such manipulation, requiring a rider to be no weakling. Certainly, few humans were capable and stuck with their precious horses. Frails on foals, as Warbler had often said.

  Another set of tusks protruded upward from a barbarian’s lower jaw and were the animal’s most vicious form of attack. Hearth’s were particularly long, a source of pride for Jackal, along with the hog’s golden-hued hair. Far comelier than Oats’s lumbering, mud-colored mount, aptly named Ugfuck.

  Just after midday, Jackal called a halt at a broad, glittering tributary of the River Lucia to rest and water the hogs.

  “What’s the matter, Jack?” Fetching said as she dismounted. “Delia and the new girl drain your balls so sore that you can’t make an uninterrupted ride home?”

  “We’re not stopping for me,” Jackal replied, smiling. “It’s so Oats’s fat sack of a pig doesn’t expire from the heat.”

  “Don’t you listen, Ug,” Oats said, kissing his hog on the head before urging him to the water with a swat on the rump. Snorting noisily, Ugfuck joined Hearth and Fetch’s unnamed hog on the bank. They were trained not to wallow while wearing a saddle, but they sucked vigorously at the flowing water.

  While the barbarians drank, Jackal squatted beside them and dipped his kerchief into the river. After wringing it out, he tied it back over his head to keep his hair from his face. His brigand was still tied in a roll behind Hearth’s saddle. It was against the code of the hoof to ride without armor, but Jackal hated the weight of the vest. Once, he had painstakingly removed all the iron plates riveted between the leather. When the Claymaster found out, he forbade Jackal to ride until he repaired and cleaned the brigands of every rider in the hoof. Still, when away from the Kiln and out of the chief’s sight, Jackal preferred to ride bare-chested.

  Oats’s considerable shadow fell across the riverbank and Jackal turned without rising. The brute never rode without his brigand on. His stockbow was held low in both hands. A quiver hung from his belt at the hip, his tulwar opposite. Oats had also tied a kerchief about his bald head and stood gazing across the wash. Fetch was equally equipped, but she had stridden knee-deep toward the center of the river to fill her skin.

  “She did good this morning,” Oats said, careful to keep his voice low.

  Jackal nodded. Amongst the hoof, deserved praise was usually voiced openly. But not to Fetching. She never responded well. No matter that she had ridden with the Grey Bastards for going on four years, she still saw everyone as pandering to her. And maybe, sometimes, they were. Amongst the eight half-orc hoofs in the Lot Lands, she was the only female rider. Her place was hard fought, and well won, but she had reasons to be dubious of kind words. That was why she never named her hog, worried it would be viewed as weakness, no matter that they all did it. Hells, Oats had named his first hog Gorgeous, and Polecat still rode a sow called Lavender.

  “Fetching!” Jackal called out across the water. “You ride point when we leave.”

  Fetch acknowledged this by raising her stockbow.

  “Nice gesture,” Oats said.

  “Nah,” Jackal said, standing and smiling at his friend. “I just want to look at her ass some more.”

  Oats grinned behind his beard. “You really do want to die young.” They both laughed. “What was that shit with Bermudo? Couldn’t tell who was giving the orders. Don’t think the captain could either.”

  “Sounded like that Garcia had a way out of the Lots for him.”

  Oats hummed an agreement. “Not anymore.”

  A question came to Jackal’s mind, sobering him.

  “What were you doing in the yard unarmed, Oats?”

  The brute shrugged, not relaxing his vigil as he spoke. “Woke up hot. Went to the well for a dunk.”

  “Never thought to go back inside, get your thrum? You had time.”

  Oats shook his head, his gaze going back across the river.

  “It could have been centaurs, Oats.”

  The thrice-blood dismissed this with a wrinkle of his lip. “We haven’t gotten a warning from Zirko yet.”

  “They don’t just ride during the Betrayer Moon, half-brain.”

  “It was daylight in Crown lands, Jack.”

  “It was sloppy!”

  “Sloppy?” Oats growled, turning a glare on Jackal. “And who else came out without a thrum? Certainly wasn’t Fetching.”

  “No, I just came out without a stitch,” Fetch said, stepping out of the river. Jackal hadn’t even heard her approach. “You two get any further in each other’s faces, you’ll be kissing.”

  Jackal and Oats both turned their heads to glower at her.

  “Well, go on.” Fetch smirked. “Always knew the pair of you were hard for each other.”

  Jackal laughed first and was rewarded with a companionable shove from Oats, which nearly sent him sprawling into the river.

  “Can we get moving, then?” Fetching asked. Not waiting for a response, she gripped one of her hog’s swine-yankers and pulled him away from the river. The barbarian loosed a few agitated squeals, but Fetch coaxed him away with one arm and swung herself into the saddle. Jackal and Oats were astride their own mounts within moments.

  “Careful not to drift too far east when we reach the Lucia proper,” Jackal warned Fetch. “Last thing we need is to trespass on Tine land.”

  Fetch flashed him a grin. “You afraid of elves, Jack?”

  Before he could retort, she put heel to hog and rode swiftly away from the river.

  Oats snorted a laugh.

  “Come on, you ugly fuck,” Ja
ckal said.

  Oats stroked between his hog’s ears. “I’m the only one who gets to call him that.”

  “I meant you.”

  Despite her flippancy, Fetching did a fine job leading them, not once straying into elven territory. Still, Jackal kept an eye eastward as they rode, certain that behind him, Oats was doing the same.

  The war had left much of Ul-wundulas denuded, as the armies of man and orc felled timber to fuel their fires, build their defenses, and replenish their weapons. In the thirty-odd years since the battles ceased, wildfires had prevented much from returning. What forests remained clung to the high places, nestled in mountain valleys where the fighting had been sparse. After the war, when Hispartha had awarded vast portions of its reconquered southern kingdom to its allies, the elves managed to draw much of the rare woodlands, claiming large swaths of mountain range in the doing. The lots were supposed to be random, but the elves’ spellcraft had no doubt played a part in their luck.

  As Fetching picked their trail south, Jackal frowned at the brooding peaks of the Umber Mountains to his left. Somewhere deep within the Umbers was Dog Fall Gorge, stronghold of the elven hoof. Miles of garigue and shrubby foothills separated Jackal and his friends from the range, but the Tines patrolled their lands jealously and were swift to descend on any who set foot on even their farthest borders. Fortunately, they encountered none of the rust-skinned savages on their eerily silent harrow stags.

  “Doesn’t mean they aren’t there,” Jackal said to himself more than once.

  He breathed easier when, nearing dusk, Hearth splashed across the Winsome Ford. They were now back in Grey Bastard lands. Jackal eased his hog’s trot until Oats drew alongside and together they caught up with Fetching.

  “Jack,” Oats said, giving Jackal a pointed look.

  “What?”