Boots, Hat and a Needle

Harmanga "We Can Sell It" Grabstrangler was nearly a hand shorter than his friend Tryggvi Fuchs. When people looked down to Harry, they also looked down to Tryggvi, which somehow made the dwarf more comfortable amid the growing band of misfits and degenerates whose purpose was to stop the Black Road of the Giens from invading Marrishland.

Harry was busy being looked down to by four giant roofers who couldn't comprehend the idea of overlapping shingles when a heavy wooden mug hit him in the back of the head.

"Whoever did that had better have a good reason," he said, turning. "Hey, my mug!" He picked it up. It was hardly dented.

"Yeah, you can have it back," said a young man with a gloriously purpled face.

"You must be Stubby."

"Yeah."

Harry sized up the former leader of the Wood Mites for a bit. He didn't waste time considering why the turncoat Mar falsetto had come to Tryggvi's camp. You only came to the camp if you wanted to find it.

"What do you want?" he said, to pass the time.

While Stubby worked his way through his poor, inane reasons for switching sides again, Harry considered his accent. Only a dwarf could hear the differences in Mar twangs from region to region. It helped a lot in gaining the trust of the half-crazed, foul-mouthed rapists and butchers who came to join Tryggvi's band.

Ignoring every word Stubby said, Harry turned back to the giants.

"Look, it keeps more water out than laying them side to side, you understand me?" One of them raised a hand. "Never mind!" Harry shouted at them. "Just do it my way, and you can work out the truth of it in your own time."

He dropped his hammer and sauntered off. Stubby and the howls of a man with a hammered foot followed.

"I want to join the band," Stubby said.

"That's what they all said," Harry replied, hurrying through the busy little town springing up in the midst of the eastern Marrishland forest. It was a good hiding place. South was a marsh, east was a swamp, north was a river and west was the thickest forest in all of Marrishland. It could almost be called a jungle. In any case, the Black Road would come no where near here. It was impenetrable.

"I want to join the band," Stubby repeated.

"'I want to join the band,'" Harry mimicked in his best little girl's voice. "What happened to your last band?"

"You got them killed."

Harry pursed his lips thoughtfully. "Better'n we expected, then."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Stubby asked, then when Harry stopped and gave him a dirty look, he said, loudly, "I want to join the band."

The dwarf stared into the purpled face of the youth. His nose had certainly been broken and never set. No one had cleaned the blood off. The swelling was strong, but what was most noticeable was the stench of rotting flesh, where some disease had crawled into his split cheek.

"How'd you know it was my mug?" Harry said finally.

"The barkeep tol' me."

So sandy was still alive. Tryggvi would be happy to know that.

"He gave up the mug?"

"He did after I smashed his face in 'cause I thought it was his."

So Sandy was brutally scarred, and maybe not alive? Harry appraised the boy one more time. Anyone who cared that much about his band had something that could be called merit.

"What can you do besides sing?" he said.

"Um ..."

"You know," Harry said, motioning the youth to walk at his side. "Everyone who wants to join has to beat Tryggvi in single combat."

A look of panic flashed across Stubby's face. Harry sighed. Not smart at all.

"What's your real name, lad?"

"Zear Stenbold. Everyone calls me Stubby."

Harry ushered him inside one of the finished buildings. "Sit up here," he instructed, then climbed up and stood next to him on the table. "Anggr! Get me boiling water and hot tongs! And stitching thread!"

"You need a needle?" someone hollered from the back.

"What do you think, you thick-skulled damnen seed?" Harry shouted. "Ah, Anggr. Never saw a man with more stitches, and can't remember we use a needle." He sighed.

"What are you going to do to me?"

"Fix your nose, boy. Now, let me tell you a bit about the man."

Anggr, a man as round as he was tall and with half his face scarred and stitched, snorted happily into the room with a steaming bucket, a tray of metal tongs and a half-spool of black thread. He took a close look at Stubby while Harry watched amiably.

"You'll be wanting the medicines, then?" Anggr snorted.

"Yes, yes. Give me the needles."

Anggr produced the small black packet reverentially and snorted and coughed his way away again.

"Now, lad, this might hurt, so I want you to listen very carefully to what I'm going to tell you about Tryggvi, and not think at all about how I'm going to remove most of the ruined flesh on your face and sew you back up again."

He began talking as he dipped a knife into the hot water. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the thin trickle of liquid drip out of Stubby's boot.

********

Tryggvi Fuchs lay in his makeshift hammock over the small, rocky, and most importantly fast-flowing stream in the upper eastern reaches of Marrishland. He was mostly naked, and he was snoring.

Most prominent about his nakedness was the one bare foot that hung over the side of hammock, which upon closer examination was made from the socks, pants, underwear, shirt, vest, cloak and hat of someone who no doubt didn't need it anymore. Some bits of hair stuck in blood adorned to the hat.

Tryggvi's boots stood alone near one of the trees the hammock was attached to.

A man, perhaps a relative of the person whose clothes made Tryggvi's hammock, sidled up to the boots cautiously. Everyone knows that if you steal a man's boots, he thought, the man will die. So instead of having to face this villain alone, his mind went on, he could let nature take its course.

He stared at the boots thinking this for a while, then snatched for them. A blade met them halfway, and the man fell face first in the mud, his wrist cut to the bone.

Tryggvi stood over him, barefoot in the stream.

"Looks like a nasty cut," he said. "You should stanch the bleeding before it gets too bad."

He took his boots, put them on, and walked away while the man slowly wrapped the hammock around his hand and bled to death.

Tryggvi was known as a thief and a villain, a rapist and a mass murderer. He was said to have ravaged entire villages for a meal and an occupied bed. He was said to have destroyed thousands of rice fields over the smallest insult. He was a man built entirely of uncontrollable rage and vengeance.

He was the perfect hero for the first Gien invasion.

Tryggvi drank water fresh from the mountain stream and continued on his journey, south and east. He had heard tales of strangers in the land, and he wanted to see if they were worth more than his fellow Mar. When an entire town had to be leveled just for one night's sleep, one ran out of food and towns very quickly.

The man had traveled the length and breadth of Marrishland, from Domus to Pidel to Wasfal and back again, across the Fens of Reur and through Drake country, and maybe this was the first time he headed to the border with Huinsy or not, but it was the first time he decided something not in his immediate vicinity was worth stealing.

And then he reached a town that he hadn't burned, but that was burning anyway.

Helzgather, what amounted to a sprawling city this far east, had nearly forty people residing within its walls. A half-dozen extended families, a few hapless young couples, and a handful of single-and-adventuresome young men and women had discovered the enemy, and as Tryggvi scavenged their remains, he learned that the usual suspects hadn't set this fire.

The usual suspects were the Drakes, or more specifically the damnens, who ventured forth from the Dead Swamps to steal from the Mar, much like Tryggvi often did. Only Tryggvi wasn't a giant and immune to magic. And Tryggvi did his work solo, not in the packs the damnens did.

Tracks led south. Tryggvi would not have survived the length and breadth of Marrishland, which is full of countless dangers in the forms of living things such as damnens and plants and inanimate things such as water and mud, if he couldn't tell Drake tracks from human tracks. And here were about eighteen different sets of human tracks coming in and going out.

He found their camp with ease, as they had slaughtered every community they had found and now only had to worry about the occasional unarmed traveler. In their own defense, they could not have reckoned that Tryggvi Fuchs would be in the area.

Bold as brass, he strode straight into the middle of their fires. cloak swirling around him, and dumped a hat-full of mud on the face of the man he figured was in charge.

Before anyone could draw their swords, the man started screaming and clawing at his face.

Tryggvi disarmed three and shouted, "Who are you?"

He tossed one man over his shoulder into an oncoming attacker and skewered another, and requested, "Who are you?"

He fended off three swords with his own, noting briefly that these were better quality than his own, and nabbed a thrown dagger out of the air. Hefting it and appraising its balance, he tossed it into the eye of one of his attackers, disarmed the other two and sliced off their heads.

"I ask a third time, who are you?"

He gave them every chance. But long before he heard their language and learned he couldn't understand it, he had killed all seventeen men there.

The eighteenth, of course, he had let continue his escape, so that whoever these people were could find him.

The swords were, indeed, if not better quality than his, then certainly newer. He had acquired his sword off the wall of an old man's house a few years ago after sneaking in quietly to kill the man and his wife after they had disturbed one of his many caches of food in the swamp.

The throwing daggers were interesting. Tryggvi had thrown a few daggers in his time, but he had never had a dagger specifically designed to be thrown. He pocketed all of those he could find, then put some more wood on the fire and enjoyed the rest of the strange men's meal.

He prodded a corpse with his boot. The man was only taller than Tryggvi because Tryggvi was so short, but he guessed the corpse would have been his height if he was alive. He had no facial hair, and wore a strange domed leather helmet. Tryggvi tapped it with a sword thoughtfully.

The next wave of strangers found him at the camp site three days later.

Tryggvi had propped one of the gamey corpses against a tree, pinning him up with a sword through the neck. The helmet on the man's head was riddled with knife holes, but there were far more marks where a knife had slipped off. Tryggvi was satisfied though.

The leader of the strangers stepped forward, a young man at his elbow. Tryggvi was disgusted to see he was a Mar.

The leader said something in a strange tongue. Tryggvi eyed the Mar.

"I speak his language and ours," the Mar said. "The catpain says, who are you?"

Tryggvi stood up, stretching. He came up barely to the captain's clean chin. He scratched at his full beard, picked a tick out of it and ate it.

The leader's face grew disgusted and he spat a word that could only be a vile oath. Tryggvi watched the translator, who paled.

"I ask, who are you?" Tryggvi said.

"I am Captain Pinorsi, third in command of the Gien's Western Foray Force" the captain replied through the translator. "I ask again, who are you?"

"I am the spirit of Marrishland," Tryggvi said, waited for the translation, and drew two swords. "I am death that sweeps out of the night to take you to the next life. I am the water that seeps up through you thin-soled boots and nibbles away at your insides. I am the damnen, whose lightning claws will rip you to shreds."

The translator tried to keep up, but the captain reacted. Tryggvi removed the man's arms before he had taken three steps with his sword. Then the translator fell with barely a groan, somehow trying to say with his eyes why has my fellow Mar betrayed me when he himself had betrayed his fellow Mar. Before a minute had passed, Tryggvi Fuchs was drenched in the blood of a dozen of the Gien Western Foray Force and the rest had fled.

But Tryggvi had not gone unscathed this time. One of the lesser men had dodged his whirlwind attacks and cut his leg, low on the back of the thigh. It stung and bled. The man threw the swords down and searched the corpses for a needle. He started with the captain, surely the captain would have one! But no, he did not. Among all of these soldiers, he found not one needle. Taking a brand from the fire, he burned the wound, then limped westward.

Five men had escaped. Had been allowed to escape. They escaped in different directions. They found different foraying forces. They told different stories. Different runners were sent to different commands, until seven runners arrived at the master command and told of the strength of a dozen fighters who took down two units of foraying forces with no losses.

The Giens had conquered all of the north half of the continent with little resistance. They considered themselves the finest army in the world. They were right. They were the finest army in the world. No one ever said Tryggvi was an army.

These tall tales grew with each day as more runners appeared. Tryggvi had not stopped with his massacre of Pinorsi and his predecessor. Though the stories contained information about a limping swordsman who wielded weapons with both hands and his teeth, and many referred to the strange battle cry, "Why don't any of you bastards carry needles?", the number of this incredibly awesome force remained vague. The Gien High Command estimated between two dozen and several hundred armed and dangerous men out there, and made this army's destruction their top priority.

For his part, Tryggvi kept clawing his way westward, limping and dragging his swords. When he came across these Giens, he would pierce a few in the head with throwing daggers before coming after them with the longer blades, but they often ran in fear of him before he reached them. Not one of the corpses had a needle.

It was not long before Tryggvi found two important bits of information. The first was that the Gien High Command was hunting for him with everything they had, in an effort to kill him. The second was that he had crossed into damnen country, and would probably die before the day was out anyway.

He sat down and propped his infected leg up on a moss-covered log. He scraped off the latest mash of pus and rotted flesh with a dagger. He vomited noisily behind the log. He looked up into the faces of an army of Giens.

"Er," he said, struggling to stand up. "Has anyone got a needle?" He propped himself up using one sword as a crutch.

The general stepped forward, and spoke something. Tryggvi stared at him in fevered silence. The general looked over his shoulder irritably and shouted a word Tryggvi understood, because it always meant that the translator would come. He did.

The young Dwarf was sheepish and shy and blushed at the mere sight of Tryggvi. Tryggvi, for his part, was surprised that this was not another turncoat Mar.

"Do you have a needle?" Tryggvi asked.

The Dwarf, being practical like all Dwarfs are, produced a black packet of needles and tossed them to Tryggvi, earning a slap from the general. The general spoke again.

"Where is your army?" the Dwarf said.

Tryggvi stared at the needles in disbelief. How many days had he sought these beautiful little bits of metal amidst people clothed in metal-studded armor and carrying metal weapons and eating out of metal pots and cooking with metal utensils and not carrying one damn needle?

"The general asks, where is your army?" the Dwarf repeated, more loudly and with less confidence.

"I am but bait, for I am weak and dying," Tryggvi said, staring at the Dwarf with burning eyes. "My army lies in ambush behind me, waiting for your silly soldiers to come and take me."

The general was no fool, and sent scouts out to look. In the meantime, the Dwarf helped Tryggvi light a fire and clean and bandage his wound, which had eaten much of the flesh of his leg.

When the scouts failed to return, the general ordered a retreat.

"Be wary," Tryggvi told the Dwarf. "The damnens will have surrounded us by now."

********

"Indeed they had," Harry finished, tying the last knot on the stitches. "And so was the first Gien Invasion stopped by a single cutthroat and thief. Now, lad, can you tell me why it is so incredibly important to always have a pair of boots, a hat, and a packet of needles with you?"

Harry put down his needle and the knife and looked at Anggr over the unconscious body of Stubby.

"Do you think he'll remember?" Harry said at last.

The fat man snorted and bubbled a bit about the eyes.

"Neither do I."

Copyright 2005-2007 Eric Zawadzki and Matthew Schick. All Rights Reserved.
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