by Robert Earl
Dannie’s frown deepened. His mare was a stolid old thing, and it wasn’t like her to jump at shadows. The last time she had been so nervous had been before the orcs had fallen upon them in the mountains, the day before he had found his caravan.
“All right,” he said, not wanting to dwell on that particular memory. “Let’s go, quietly though.”
He whispered something soothing into his mare’s twitching ears and stroked her neck, and, eventually, she consented to walk on down the path.
They had gone for no more than a hundred yards when both men heard the first sounds of the danger ahead. There was a slow, drawn-out crash that sounded like a falling tree, an explosion of fleeing birds from the surrounding forest, and a chorus of wild voices.
Without exchanging a word, both of the Strigany slipped from their horses, and led them off the track. Mihai tied their reins around the branch of a tree, the slipknots perfect for a quick escape. Dannie, meanwhile, disappeared into the undergrowth.
He stooped down to crawl beneath the briars on his knuckles and knees. The detritus of the forest floor was cold and wet. It soaked through his breeches, and scraped his fists, as he made his way up to the top of the nearest hill. He paid no heed to the discomfort, though. As he moved through the tangled undergrowth, all of his senses were straining to make sense of the uproar ahead. At times, he wondered if it was an illusion, that perhaps he was imagining voices in the windblown forest, in the same way that he had once heard the sea in a conch shell.
Then he crested the ridge that marked the end of the forest proper, and, in the grasslands below, he saw that this was no illusion.
His eyes widened in disbelief at the sight below, and, for a moment, he froze. Then he slowly lowered himself on to his stomach, and, ignoring the things that wriggled below him, slithered forwards to gain a better view.
“Sigmar’s balls,” he whispered.
“You can say that again,” Dannie whispered back. He had crept up to lie beside his friend, and, although he knew that there was no need to whisper, or even to lower his voice, he whispered anyway.
The creatures they had found were maybe three hundred yards away, and even if the wind wracked forest hadn’t been so loud, the things would have been deafened by the noise they were making.
“What are they?” Mihai whispered, his voice even softer.
Dannie just shrugged. Their was no doubt that the sound they had heard had indeed been that of a falling tree. A dozen of them lay on the pastureland below, scattered behind the creatures that had torn from the edge of the forest. Their branches were still clothed with the russet colours of autumn leaves, and their roots were still clogged with fresh soil.
Three hundred yards beyond the last of these splintered trunks a great canvas encampment sprawled out across the grass, a whole city of tents, shelters and bivouacs. The organised chaos of these disparate shelters were grouped into little islands, separated by muddy streets, and, in the centre of each of the hundred separate encampments, there fluttered a pennant, each of which was more garishly decorated than the last.
Some were topped with gilded carvings. Others with the skulls of unrecognisable beasts, or great sprays of coloured feathers. One even had what seemed to be the remains of a man still locked into an iron cage. Men moved among the tents, as busily as ants in an upturned nest. They were tending cooking fires, sharpening weapons, smoking and gambling, and doing any one of the hundred other things that encamped soldiers do.
Dannie had no interest in the mysterious army, at least for now. He was interested in the things that were busily pulling the forest apart, as casually as children weeding a vegetable garden.
There were two of them, and they were massive. Despite the fact that they were slouched so low that their heads were held no higher than their shoulders, both stood as tall as the oaks they were felling. Apart from the shapeless loincloths, which they wore swaddled around them, they were naked, and, despite their terrifying stature, they looked scrawny and malnourished. Ribs as big as ships’ staves showed through the grimy skin of their chests, and the bones of their joints could be seen white in their elbows and wrists.
Malnourished or not, there was no mistaking the sheer, blind power that the creatures wielded. The Strigany watched, as they clumsily tried to loop great cables around two more trees. Their piggy eyes narrowed in concentration as they did so, and their sloping foreheads were furrowed.
Threading a cable around a tree was obviously as mentally challenging for them as it was physically easy. One of them pulled the mess of knots it had made, and the whole lot came crashing free of the branches.
It roared with frustration, the cry booming through the forest with a bone-rattling depth. The noise seemed more like a force of nature than a voice.
Despite himself, Dannie felt his pulse accelerating in instinctive terror, and he pressed his body further into cover, as the creature stamped down with one bare foot. There was a crash of splintering timber from the wrecked mess that surrounded it, and a branch as long as a wagon was sent catapulting through the air.
Dannie watched its trajectory, and, for the first time, he noticed the crowd of men who were watching from the edge of the camp. They yelled with surprise as the piece of lumber spun towards them, and scattered as it thudded into the ground.
The creature, whose fit of pique had almost been the death of a dozen of them, paid no heed to their complaints. Its head cleared by the sudden violence, it had managed to loop the cable around the trunk. It looked ridiculously pleased with itself as it stood there, and, when the men’s howls of protest gave way to a mocking cheer, it smiled and drooled with pleasure.
“So, these are what giants look like,” Dannie said. “As moronic as they are massive, it says in the lore.”
“Giants!” Mihai echoed.
Dannie turned and looked at him, one eyebrow raised.
Spurred on by its fellow’s success, the second giant had managed to secure its tree, too. It had wrapped the cable three times around it, and was struggling to remember what to do with the ends of the ropes. It looked to its fellow for inspiration. There wasn’t much there. Content with the job it had done so far, the first giant had lapsed into comatose contentment, its eyes vacant as it stared over some far horizon.
“Not the sharpest tools in the box, are they?” Mihai whispered as, fumbling all the while, the second giant finally remembered how to wrap the ropes around its wrists. The circlets of bruised skin that ringed them showed that it had done the same thing many times before. Even so, it took it a few attempts before it managed to wrap the sackcloth around its limbs.
Only then did the crowd of spectators part, and the giants’ handler, a man resplendent in an ankle-length leather jerkin, step forward. He held a great pewter cone in one hand, open at both ends, and a jug of something foamy in the other. He took a long swig of it before raising the loud hailer to his lips and speaking.
“Ungrol!” he bellowed. The sound of his voice was loud enough, even for the hidden Strigany to hear, and the first of the giants turned in response to its name. There was a wild cheer from the gathered men, as well as some booing. Ungrol looked vacantly towards them, and both the cheering and the booing stopped, so suddenly that they might have been cut off by a guillotine’s blade.
“Belnar!” the man bellowed, and the second giant looked around with a dazed expression. He too had his supporters and detractors among the gathering, and they risked another roar of cheers and catcalls.
“Get ready,” the man with the megaphone bellowed, raising his voice above the hubbub around him. Both giants turned back towards the oaks they had secured, looking surprised to find themselves attached to them. Ungrol raised his hands, and examined the ropes that he held as if he had never seen them before. Belnar just broke wind. It was a spectacular rip of sound that set the watching men howling with laughter.
“Pull!” roared their handler.
Nothing happened, and the crowd’s laughter degenerated into a
storm of advice, most of it disgusting. The man with the loud hailer turned to them, and, waving the pewter cone around like a marshal’s baton, he cursed them into silence. Only then did he turn back to the waiting giants.
“Pull!” he bellowed again. “Ungrol. Belnar, pull! Pull!”
Ungrol, inspired by some flash of wild genius, pulled hesitantly on his rope until he met some resistance. He paused, and then, with a sudden, deafening howl of irritation, he flung his weight back against the rope, and, shoulders bulging, started to pull on the oak.
For a moment, his fellow simply stood and stared at him, something that filled one half of the spectators with as much rage as it filled the other half with glee.
“Pull, Belnar!” the man in the great coat bellowed, sounding suddenly nervous as several enraged spectators started to close in on him, “pull!”
Whether it was the pleading tone in the handler’s voice, or the example of his fellow that did it, the giant did pull. He shifted, his bare feet pushing up great mounds of soil and turf as they slipped about, and he began to emit a deep, tidal growl of exertion.
Muscles bulged beneath the giants’ grimy skin, and the cloth mosaics of their loincloths slipped and shifted unnervingly as they strained against the stubborn resistance of the trees. The oaks, Dannie noticed, were at the prime of their lives. They must have stood for generations, weathering storms, fires and diseases, and they weren’t about to give up now.
The giants obviously lacked his philosophical nature. After only a few minutes, the resistance of the tree’s deeply buried roots, and the shouts of encouragement and scorn from the watching crowd, became too much for one of the giants. Its grunts of exertion grew in volume, until they were loud enough to drown out even the hundreds of voices of the spectators. Then its temper snapped. Abandoning the dubious benefits of technology, it dropped the cable, and charged the tree with a snarl that sounded like an avalanche. The ground thundered beneath its feet, and as its body crashed against the tree trunk. It seemed that it had won.
Although the oak bent back, it neither splintered nor broke. Instead, as the giant stood back, it sprang back up, and whipped its topmost branches across his face. The giant, outraged by the treachery of this attack, screamed with fury, and grabbed the tree trunk with fingers the size of hams. Its contorted features flushed bright red as it squeezed and shook the tree, apparently trying to strangle it.
“As massive as they are moronic, you say?” Mihai asked, raising his voice over the commotion.
“Almost,” Dannie said. Then he winced as the giant slipped. Its sliding feet threw up great gouts of mud and turf, and, tearing off the top of the tree, it crashed to the ground.
The Strigany could feel the impact of its collapse reverberating through the ground beneath them. The tree, which the giant had been trying to strangle, sprang back up in ragged triumph.
The giant struggled to sit up, eyes blinking and mouth open with surprise. It looked at the tree, and then at its hands. Then its face screwed up, and, wrapping its arms around its knees, it leaned forwards, and started to howl.
“I don’t believe it,” Mihai said, as the giant rocked back and forth, “it’s crying.”
Dannie was about to disagree, when he saw the tears that were sheeting down its face.
“So much for the mighty and terrible creatures, descendants of the sky folk,” he said.
Mihai sniggered. As the two watched, the second giant dropped his ropes and lurched over to where its fellow sat. It stood over him as he blubbered. Then it reached down, and, with a blow that would have crushed an ox, patted him on the head.
“Sympathetic fellow, isn’t he?” Dannie asked.
“More than can be said of the crowd,” Mihai replied. He was looking beyond the giants to the near riot that had broken out among the spectators. Fists had already been raised, and, whenever the weeping giant paused for breath, a storm of invective could be heard.
“Why do gamblers always take disappointment so badly?” Mihai wondered. “It’s not as though they ever win.”
“Not against us, perhaps,” Dannie allowed, “but when they gamble among themselves some of them must win. That big fellow with the pink face and the drawn sword, for instance, I bet his luck’s in more often than not.”
“It’s the one with the loud hailer I’m interested in,” said Mihai.
“Not doing him much good now, is it?” Dannie said.
Nor was it. The mob’s disappointment at the giants’ lack of professionalism had found an immeasurably safer target in the form of their handler. He was backing away from a knot of angry men, his hands waving as he tried to reason with them. Eventually, he retreated behind his loud hailer and bellowed something about all bets being off.
It was a mistake. For a moment, the cries of outraged sportsmanship grew so loud that they could be heard above the fading sobs of the giant. The man in the leather coat, who was obviously no stranger to such controversy, made the right decision. He turned and ran towards the relative safety that could be found beneath his charges’ mighty fists.
“Bet you a penny he makes it,” Mihai said, as, leather coat billowing, the man sprinted away from his pursuers.
“No,” Dannie said. “Look at that turn of speed. Anyway, look. They’re already dropping back.”
“I reckon that’s enough spying for one day.”
Dannie and Mihai turned to ask what the other had meant. Then they looked behind them.
There stood half a dozen men. The black-tarred steel of their scale armour, and their well-oiled leather harnesses marked them out as soldiers. So did the stealth with which they had come upon the two Strigany, and the solid, unadorned crossbows that they were aiming at them.
“We were just going,” said Mihai.
The soldiers’ leader grinned, and stood back, as two of his men stepped forward to bind the Striganies’ wrists.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Sometimes, opportunities are as fleeting as trout in a mountain stream, and to seize them you have to be as swift as a heron’s beak. Others are waiting, as clear and as solid as a seam of gold, for somebody stubborn enough to come along and claim them. The best opportunities of all are the ones that kick in your wagon door, stamp towards you with mud all over their boots, and won’t leave until you take them. All you need for opportunities like that is luck.”
– Petru Engel When it came, it was a short, one-sided fight. Dannie and Mihai had both played their parts perfectly. Their eyes had widened in fear as the guards approached, and they had allowed their weapons to be taken, and their hands to be bound, without any sort of struggle. When their captors had led them off, they had followed meekly, speaking only when it was necessary to cover the cracking of their wrists as they slipped their bonds. After that they said nothing until they were reunited with their captured horses.
It was Mihai who broke their silence, and when he did so, it was with a sudden, wild ululation that took everybody by surprise. Mihai’s guard jumped, swore, and then punched him in the chest.
“Shut up with that noise,” he snapped, but it was already too late.
As soon as the horses heard Mihai’s call, they reacted, violently and instinctively. Their ears flattened along their skulls, their eyes rolled in fear, and they reared up onto their hind legs, nostrils flared and hooves flashing as they vented their terror. They were not seeing men anymore. When they looked at the soldiers who milled around them, they saw the carnivorous forms of monsters, and instead of leather and human sweat, they smelled the mildewy stink of hungry orcs.
The soldiers cried out a warning as they stumbled back from the crazed horses, but, for one of them, the warning had come too late. He had been holding Dannie’s mare by the mane when Mihai had cried out, and she had lifted him clean off his feet as she had reared back. As he fell back down and turned to stumble away, one of her hooves caught him on the back of the neck. There was a wet snap, and he collapsed, his vertebrae shattered.
Although he was
the first to die, he wasn’t alone for long. As the soldiers retreated from the horses in confusion, Dannie and Mihai sprang into action.
They were unarmed, but that hardly mattered. The distraction that their panicking horses provided was weapon enough, and within seconds they had both killed. Mihai had twisted his man’s head back with a sudden, lethal snap that the shepherds of the caravan used to slaughter lambs. Dannie, meanwhile, had snatched a dagger from another soldier’s belt and had then returned it to him, stabbing between the armour plates of his hauberk, and into the liver beneath. He twisted, and retrieved the blade along with a spray of blood, and the soldier screamed and collapsed onto the forest floor.
Before the other soldiers realised that the main threat was no longer the deadly blur of the horses’ iron-shod hooves, it was already too late. Neither of the Strigany needed to be a marksman at this range, and, as soon as they had snapped the locks off of their victims’ crossbows, they fired, the bolts thudding through flesh and bone to skewer two more soldiers.
The final man, the sergeant, saw his men falling on either side of him, crossbow bolts sprouting out of them. He looked through the windmilling hooves of the horses and saw the others that lay at the feet of their captives. Then he ran.
“Calm the horses,” Dannie yelled at Mihai as he dodged past them to follow the fleeing soldier.
Mihai hesitated. Seeing that their mounts were already bleeding from self-inflicted wounds, he started singing another charm to still their terror. As the illusion he had inflicted upon them melted away, they quietened down, to stand, their chests billowing in and out, and their coats wet with blood and foam.
Meanwhile, Dannie was haring after his prey. The sergeant was weighed down by his harness, and unused to moving through the tangled confines of woodland. He was close to panic, too. When he looked back, his eyes were as wide as the horses’ had been, and when Dannie grabbed him by the ankles, he cried out in terror.
