Nine Goblins (3 page)

At the moment, Nessilka’s greater concern was
the two new recruits.

They were identical twins, which gave her a
headache, and they were young and bright-eyed and enthusiastic and
finished each other’s sentences, which took the headache to a whole
new level.

“Where are we…”

“…going, Sarge?”

“We don’t know. We just follow orders and go
there.”

They gave her identical nods.

“Will we be…”

“…fighting, Sarge?”

“Sooner or later, yes.”

Everyone stumped along in silence for a
while. The flat stony badlands were giving way to little lumpy
hills and the occasional scrubby tree, with more trees on the
horizon. The wind that came to them smelled like pine, which was a
big improvement over goblin.

The new recruits had the standard loincloth
from home, made out of the standard rancid goathide, and they both
had what passed for weaponry in the goblin army—a board with a nail
in it. Unless she managed to beat some kind of sense into them,
Nessilka gave them a week.

“So you’re twins,” she said, by way of an
opening gambit.

“Yes, Sarge!” they said in unison.

“How should I tell you apart?”

“You…”

“…don’t.”

“Not even our mom…”

“…can tell us apart.”

“We’ll fix that,” she said grimly, and
beckoned to Thumper.

Thumper would need thick-soled boots to stand
four feet tall, but he was at least four feet wide. His biceps were
the size of badgers and he had no neck. He did not use a shield,
preferring to carry two large spiked maces, both taken from the
fallen foe. When he was hitting things, there was a joyful gleam in
his eye, and when he wasn’t, there was a glitter that indicated he
was probably
thinking
about hitting things.

He had no personality that Nessilka had ever
been able to uncover—possibly it had gone off with his neck
somewhere—but he was an excellent goblin to have at your side in a
fight.

“Recruits, this is Thumper.”

“Hi, Thumper!” chorused the twins.

Thumper treated this the way he treated
everything that did not involve hitting things—he eyed it warily to
see if there was any potential hitting to be had, and then ignored
it.

“Thumper,” she said, “I can’t tell these two
apart.”

Thumper nodded.

“Fix that,” she said.

He nodded again, turned around, and punched
the one on the left in the face.

The recruit fell over. The other recruit
gaped at him.

Thumper picked the damaged recruit up, nodded
to the sergeant, and wandered off.

The unfortunate goblin swayed on his feet.
His left eye was already swelling, and would shortly be turning a
striking shade of purple.

“That’s better,” said Nessilka. “Now, then.
The first thing you should learn is to
never
tell a superior
officer what they can’t do.”

They looked at her with identical miserable
expressions (except for the swollen eye). “We’re sorry, Sarge.”

“Yeah, well…” Nessilka squelched a nagging
feeling of guilt. It was a hard world and a hard war, and the
sooner they learned it, the better. “What are your names?”

“Mishkin,” said the one on the right.

“Mushkin,” said the one with the swollen
eye.

“Right. The next thing you should learn is
how to take a punch a little better than that, but it’ll have to
wait until we stop for the night. Have you had any training at
all?”

“We had two weeks…”

“…of boot camp, Sarge.”

The sergeant grunted. “Whacked a lot of straw
men with your board, eh?”

Mishkin nodded vigorously. Mushkin nodded
rather more gingerly, holding his face.

Up ahead, Weatherby was drifting off to the
side. Nessilka could tell he was planning to make a break for it,
because he was starting to mutter to himself and tug at his
clothes. She sighed, and did what sergeants have done since time
immemorial…she delegated.

“Go see Corporal Algol and tell him that
you’ve had the basic boot camp and nothing else. And that I said to
put something on that eye.”

“Yes, Sarge!”

The twins went to find Algol, and Nessilka
went to collar Weatherby.

Sings-to-Trees’ morning began slightly after
dawn, when the hen crowed.

She was a black hen with a fine gold eye and
a blue sheen to her feathers. She laid quite large brown eggs. She
also mounted the other hens occasionally, an exercise in bafflement
for everyone involved. And every morning, she crowed.

As far as he could tell, she seemed happy, so
he’d resigned himself to getting up at hen’s-crow most mornings. He
hadn’t wanted a rooster, anyway. His farm was located on the edge
of what were nominally the Elvenlands. A small human settlement lay
less than an hour’s walk away, where woods gave way to farmland.
The humans viewed him as falling somewhere between the priest and
the village idiot, and thus required feeding either way. Depending
on the time of year, gifts of flour or cheese or bacon were always
turning up, and they dumped excess chicks on him year-round. He had
a hard enough time keeping up with donated chickens—had his small
flock been producing more on their own, he’d have been hip-deep in
fowl. So he was somewhat grateful for the confused hen, after
all.

This morning, there was a small, fresh,
cheese on the doorstep, accompanied by a small jug of buttermilk.
He took both inside. Fleabane was gone, on some coyote-ish errand
of his own, or there would have been toothmarks in the cheese.

Elf and raccoon shared a pleasant breakfast.
It was a little over a month old—the raccoon, not the
breakfast—with big, wide eyes and delicate, dexterous black
fingers, and it was shortly going to be tearing his house apart.
The destructive capacity of small cute animals was really quite
astonishing. Fortunately, after years of this sort of thing, Sings
no longer had much that could be torn apart. His furniture was
heavy wood, scarred by claws and chewed by tiny (and occasionally
not so tiny) teeth, the cushions faded by hundreds of washings, the
rugs ragged and warm and mostly colorless.

He owned quite a few rugs. He had to wash
them so often that it made sense to keep extras. An elven visitor
had once commented (with the air of one desperately trying to find
something complimentary to say) about the unusual patterns dyed
into the rug. Sings-to-Trees had to explain that it wasn’t dyed,
precisely, but marked by numerous Mystery Stains from patients who
had not been entirely in control of their bladders. The silence had
been awkward.

He suspected the other elf had been expecting
something on the order of a hermit monk, communing with nature and
binding up the wings of snow-white doves with snow-white bandages,
not a bedraggled lunatic daubed with unspeakable substances,
surrounded by shrieking birds, and massaging the belly of a tiny
lynx kitten to make it defecate. (In Sings-to-Trees’ defense, it
had been a particularly insane week, with two lynx kittens, a
nestful of orphaned gray jays, an infant false-phoenix that kept
exploding into flames when startled, and a pine marten with a
broken foot, who would have happily eaten any of the other patients
if he could catch them.) The other elf hadn’t been back.

The raccoon trundled away from its food,
stood up briefly on its hind legs, wobbled, and tried to steady
itself against his mug. The mug went over. The raccoon also went
over. He could only catch one, and of course, there was no
question.

The raccoon snuggled against his chest and
went “Clur-r-r-p!” The mug went “plunk!” The buttermilk went into
his lap.

“Bad raccoon.”

“Clurr-up!”

Well, it was his own fault for trying to feed
himself and the creatures at the same time. The raccoon cub went
back into its hutch by the hearth. He toweled off the worst of the
buttermilk, and then the remains of the raccoon’s breakfast. The
mug had survived intact.

Had he been inclined to collect blown glass
sculptures, he would have lived a life of great frustration, but
his tastes had been limited by necessity to things that could take
a heavy pounding. The mug, for example, was attractively glazed
earthenware—pretty enough, but durable, and easily replaced if,
say, a raccoon got into a cupboard, had the door swing shut behind
it, and tried to smash its way out.

Unfortunately, this meant that there was very
little elven about his home, as durability went somewhat against
the prevailing elven aesthetic of things brought briefly from the
earth, and then given back. A litter of fox cubs could give things
back to the earth at an extraordinary rate, generally before the
owner was quite done with them. Sings resigned himself to art made
by humans and occasionally dwarves. As sacrifices went, he’d made
worse.

Speaking of sacrifices…

He dumped the mug in the washbasin, shoved
his feet into boots, squared his shoulders, and went to see if the
unicorn was still there.

“Two weeks of boot camp, eh?” said Algol. He
was digging in the pack goat’s packs until he came up with a
dubious bit of steak left over from the elephant (or possibly
Blockhammer). “Here, put this on your eye.”

The steak was cold, thanks to Murray. He had
invented a device that kept meat cold, a small box with a fan and
little metal wings. He claimed the wings dispersed heat. Most of
the other goblins thought he was loony, but Algol had made an
effort to understand. “Like birds!” he’d said.

Murray had stared at him, wiping sweat from
under his goggles.

“Hot air rises,” Algol tried to explain, “so
birds must be hot, because they fly. The wings cool them down so
they can land without floating away.”

“Riiiiight,” Murray had said. “Ah…yeah. Just
like that. How…
novel
of you to figure that out.”

Algol was proud.

Mushkin put the steak on his eye. Mishkin
hovered nervously. “Will he be okay? Should he go to the
medics?”

“You in a big hurry to lose the eye?” asked
Algol mildly. “Keep the steak on it, you’ll be fine.” He had
figured out that the best way to deal with the twins was to address
them as one goblin with four arms and two heads.

“This is Buttercup.” Algol nodded to the
supply goat.

“Hi, Buttercup!” the twins chorused.

Up ahead, Sergeant Nessilka cringed. Why had
she let him name the goat? You shouldn’t name the goat. It was just
“the goat.” If food got scarce enough, you ate the goat, and that
was much harder when it had a name.

Algol was a good goblin, and a fairly
reliable corporal, but he had some odd blind spots, often where
animals were involved.

“Now then. Boot camp. Kill a lot of straw
men?”

“Yes, Algol!”

“S’fine if we’re fighting scarecrows, I
s’pose. Unfortunately, we’re fighting elves. You ever
seen
an elf?”

“No…”

“We heard they were eight feet tall and
breathed fire from their nostrils!” said Mushkin from under his
steak.

“Generally not, no.”

The average elf, the corporal explained, was
a little under six feet tall, with pasty skin like a mushroom and
long, pointy ears like a mule. “They’re fast, see? Not goblin fast,
but quick as weasels. And they have really good weapons. Loot their
weapons if you get a chance.” He patted the sword at his side. It
had runes like wriggling worms all down the length, which Murray
said meant “Blade that Dances in the Houses of the Moon” in
Elven.

Algol called it “Bob,” after his goldfish
back home.

“If you loot their packs, they’ve usually got
decent vittles, too. Vegetarian, but it’s good in stew. Their armor
doesn’t fit us for beans, so don’t bother.”

Mishkin and Mushkin listened with round eyes,
absorbing it all.

“Now, if we get in a fight—err—”

He looked at the twins. They looked back
guilelessly. Algol sighed.

“If we get in a fight, try to stay close to
me.”

He wracked his brain.

“They’re all a lot taller than we are, so go
for the legs. Hardly anybody has any armor on the back of their
knees. We’ll try to find you a shield. Hold the shield over your
head, and go for the knees.”

“Always go for the knees…”

Always go for the knees
was, in fact,
the family motto of Clan Uggersplut, to which Algol belonged in a
roundabout fashion involving several second cousins and a yak.

Uggersplut, as it happened, was also the clan
to which the most competent of the ranking generals of the goblin
army also belonged.

It had been the scions of Uggersplut who
carried the demands of the goblins to the humans, long ago, at the
start of the war.

Goblins, much like rats, prefer to flee, but
when they’re cornered…well. When the goblin scout had arrived on
the shore of the western sea, the goblin tribes had turned, all
together, like an enormous green rat at bay, and bared their
collective teeth.

So the goblin leaders sat down, in the
mountain called Goblinhome—half city, half refugee camp—and talked
for three days and two nights. As the sun set on the third day,
they signed the large warthog hide on which their demands were
written. Then they drew straws for who would carry it to the
humans.

Clan Uggersplut had drawn the short
straw.

Mounted on their best steeds, their faces
marked with elaborate tribal patterns in black earth, coup markers
braided into their hair, Uggersplut rode down from the mountains to
the largest of the nearby human settlements. Single-file, heads
held high, they rode through the center of the town, and stopped in
the central square, and demanded to see the leader of the town.

Many of the subtleties were lost on the
humans. The lean bodies of war-pigs in fighting trim looked feral
and half-starved to human eyes, and the patterns of black earth, in
which a goblin could have read whole volumes about tribal
affiliations and clan standing, looked like streaky dirt and caked
dust. Coup markers of bone and stone, denoting enemies slain and
great deeds done, were seen as garbage trapped in unwashed hair.
Where goblins would see high-ranked emissaries in full regalia, the
humans saw a raggle-taggle band, ill-kempt and filthy, to be held
in pity and contempt.