Blood Of The Wizard (Book 1) (6 page)

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’ highlands 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. 

S
adly, 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 inc
lined 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!”

A
t this, the pub hushed, and every eye turned to us. 

Then I saw something I would not have guessed at in a thousand lifetimes.  A woman.  A
chubby human lady, gorgeous in a tight dress of purple and silver, filled our flagons.

“
Here!  Here!” Gilli said to her, then turned and said the same to all who looked at us.

A few mugs were raised, but not one soul returned his greeting.  This place was a wonder,
I mused.  The shelves piled high with cheeses, smoked fish, newly baked bread, salted pork, and a barrels and barrels of ale, all of which was served by some of the prettiest dwarf maids I had ever seen.  And yet there were no chuckles, no fights.

Is this how folk behaved when you get a little bit out of the mountains?

I doubted it.  There was something amiss here.

As they turned back to their conversations,
I reached for a small loaf and had my hand slapped away by the woman who said the cakes were for Mayday. 

I smiled. 
In Goback, Mayday was one of the biggest celebration of the year, a whole week of food and ale and mead and fights and laughter and drunken dwarves vomiting in the new grass.  There would horse races, wrestling matches, competitions in throwing spears, axes, and rocks, and, my favorite, the bare naked women, so helplessly drunk that their legs would not work but to wrap around me as we go moaning and thudding like a pair of spring rabbits.  But I doubted these fellows would be doing any of that.  There was an undercurrent of sadness to this place, which got deeper the more you looked, and I could feel it now as sure I could have felt a cold stream.

I saw Jickie watching the
m too, wrestling with the same thought:   Had folk here fallen prey to the wyrm as well?

Fewer fires were lit than
Goback, I suddenly noticed. Dwarves were talking low.

“
Harvest time,” someone said in disgust.

I turned. 

“What?”

It was the
woman.  “They call this the season of the dragon,” she explained.  “Just before the greening of the land, the Thunderwyrm takes its harvest.”

I cocked an eye, inviting her to sit in my lap.
  By some miracle she nodded, hiked her dress a bit, and obliged with a shrug. 

It was a shock. 
But I could pay no attention to those ripened, soft buttocks as they sat on my knees.  I watched an old dwarf maid, who was for reason I sensed was the woman’s adoptive aunt, eyeing me.  Yet the woman in my lap did not notice, or else care.  She braced herself with an arm around my neck, her left breast almost removing my memory of the fact that I was a man on a mission. 

“
Oh?” was all I could manage.

“
We are a town in our prime,” she said, “and we intend to stay that way by not incurring the Black One’s wrath.”

I waited for Uncle Jickie’s thunderous response, but none was given.

I asked, “And every able dwarf is supposed to be unnerved and moody?”

“
Nay, but they say it is laughter that draws it—draws it like rats to cut barley.”

“
Which…” Halvgar began, but had to cut himself short.

“
Come,” I said to her.  “Walk with me, won’t you?”

“
Walk?  We are to
walk
?”

The
dwarf maid that was watching us laughed.  “Easy, Dhal!  That one looks like he’d fall in love!”

“
Oh!  Just let him try!” was her answer, which only made the dwarf maid laugh all the more.

I was about to offer Dhal my arm to escort her from the pub when I heard the woman calling once again. 
“Ye fool lad ye!  Ye blundering idiot!  Dhal’s a hungry wolf-child!”

At which the rest of my party had a good chuckle
.

“Aye?  Careful, my lad!” was all my uncle with only to say.

While there was a break in
the rollicking, which was perking up the whole pub now, I strode quickly out.  She was just behind me, chuckling with the glossy eyes of a drunk as she gathered up two flagons of mead.

We ran down to the river, and seeing that our vessel was fine, took a path through the greening willows.  We fled along a trail beneath the cliff till the shouting of the guards for me to
“Watch that one, man-lad!” could be no longer heard. 

Finally, I turned to offer her my arm
.  “Permit me,” I said, offering my damp sleeve to her as if she had been some grand madam in the drawing room of a lord’s castle.

“
Thank you—but I’m afraid I can’t,” she said. 

“
Oh,” I said, remembering she carried two flagons of mead.

As I finally remembered to help her carry them,
I did not like that embarrassed feeling that came over me, of course, but I did need to find out if the town had been visited by the wyrm.  And I continued on, walking past the cliffs to a spot that rose like stone steps back away from the water.  We trudged up through the dark to a quiet place. 

Then I heard a strange noise on the wind, like a low sigh or a silent weeping, and I turned to find her laughing. 

“Do you know, master, that I am completely unaware of your name?”

“
Indeed, madam.   I am quite aware of that.”

Her eyes widened.  “Well then.  I suppose it isn’t necessary to name a stray, so long as they come when they’re called.”

“
Feed them well enough, and they may even leave without biting.”

I was hoping to add some sense of puckish mystery to the night.
Instead, there was a sudden, awkward moment. 

I could only shrug and tell her,
“That was not very clever was it?”

“
Yes,” she said, with no emphasis on whether she meant yes, it was clever, or yes, she agreed with me.  And I suddenly realized that I had been silenced by the very game I’d started.

I grunted, then pulled off a plaid blanket from the top of my pack
.  When I placed it on the ground, she looked at me sternly.

“
I am not in the least bit inclined to sit,” she said, then went cheeks-deep into her flagon.

“
Please forgive me, Miss Dhal,” I begged.  “I’m such an animal—I assure you, my intentions were purely sexual.”

At which she spit beer all over
me, laughing.

“
A stray dog indeed, sir!”

“
I quite agree with you.  Though you should probably at least name me before you offer me any food.”

She strode forward and pinched my arm,
then gave a little interested grunt.  She bent down and traced my face with her hand, grabbing a handful of check, which she pulled back to inspect my teeth.  Then she put a finger to her lips and looked me over. 

“
What kind of urine do you brush with?” she asked.

“
Cow.”

“
Hmm.  Interesting. ”  She turned me sideways and looked at me, her head tilting.  “Favorite food?”

“
The brisket.”

She glanced down at her own chest, then eyed me
sternly.  “Odd.  I took you for a lover of the hams.”

Who doesn’t like hams?  I was about to ask her as much when she made a motion with her finger. 

“Turn around,” she demanded.

I was awkwardly conscious of myself as she walked around me. 

“Sturdy.  Well fed.  A bit of pooch here in the middle though.  You belonged to somebody once.”

“
Really?” I said, strangely thrilled at the odd witchery she was making me feel.

“
Oh yes.  The body, the posture, the gait, the voice… They all tell an interesting story.”

“
Story?”