Captive of a Fairytale Barbarian

by Elizabeth Gannon

  Tzadok, of course, had received no such gift.

  Kharash was an ass.

  “I’m too old to have another cousin.” Tzadok grumbled, looking at Violet’s very pregnant belly.

  “I thought I was too old to be a father.” Kobb shrugged. “Shit happens. Shut up and stop questioning happiness.”

  Tzadok rolled his eyes. “I liked you more when you were all wise and relaxed, old man.”

  “I still am wise and relaxed.” Kobb insisted. “But now I’m sick of all of your whining, Tandy’s right. Chox gave you the woman of your dreams, control of your lands, and the iron strength of your sword-arm to protect both. I don’t know what more you could possibly want.” He looked over at Violet. “Granted, he still gave me more, but try not to be too envious.”

  The woman smiled at Kobb like he had singlehandedly created the totality of existence this morning in an attempt to please her, then she glared at Tzadok like death itself.

  The woman still scared him.

  “I shall try, Uncle.”

  “The thing you never understand?” Kobb leaned closer to him, across the table. “Chox created this world with no purpose. No goal which he seeks to achieve. It is all meaningless. One day without warning, he will end his game, because he will find that he has given his children ample time to slay and feast and lust. Then he will start again, creating some newer version of man to have its time in the sun. That is his cycle, repeated through the great unremembered darkness and countless ages untold.” Kobb tapped his fingertip against the tabletop. “He follows that same path in all things. Barbarians trod gilded empires beneath them, become civilized and wealthy beyond dream, then are conquered by newer barbarians which spring up around them. That is the way of the world. The way of flowers. Landscapes. Life. It repeats itself like the seasons. Crawl, then walk, then crawl again. Men have but a short time in which to stand.” He nodded to himself, obviously convinced that he’d discovered the answer to Chox’s great hidden puzzle. “That is the ultimate meaning of life. That is all Chox wants from us. To live. To love. To protect what is ours. To have honor. To not be envious of what others have. And to enjoy every moment of your life while it’s still yours. Because all too soon, someone else will stand where you now stand, and only your legend will live on.”

  Tzadok considered that silently. “Dammit… I think I actually understood your nonsense this time.”

  “That’s a beautiful sentiment, Kobb.” Tandrea praised, sitting down at the head of the table, next to Tzadok.

  His Heart’s hair was done in the style of a Gallandish married woman, and Tzadok still found it so unbelievably erotic. On her own, she’d always been an absolute vision. But when she was proclaiming to the world that she was his? Honestly, it was a constant effort not to take her whenever he saw her. Most days, he lacked that strength.

  Tzadok opened his mouth to reply, then saw a strange man walking from a hut behind her. “Who is that?”

  Kobb turned to look at the man. “That’s Noxii’s prize. She Claimed him not too long ago.”

  Tzadok frowned in confusion. “What happened to the other guy? The dog from Galland?”

  “Oh… we don’t talk about that.” Kobb assured him.

  Tandy made a regretful face. “Such a pity.”

  “Galland?” Violet sauntered over to sit down on Kobb’s lap. “I know many things about the Galland military.” She informed them eagerly, once again launching into her second favorite topic, after only how amazing Kobb was. “Easy to take them apart.” She offered. “We can expand our borders. Start ‘Empire of Salt.’”

  Kobb placed his hand on his Heart’s stomach, where his child slumbered. “Probably should at least wait until the baby is born, Flower.”

  “No need.” Violet shook her head persuasively. “His parents are warriors. Good stock. Born with sword in hand and enemies’ corpses at feet.” She pounded her fist on the table. “Enough hiding! Fuck other kingdoms! Wasteland returns to put them to the blade!”

  Wow. That woman was out of her fucking mind.

  Tzadok looked over at Tandrea to see if his Heart was hearing this.

  Tandrea shrugged.

  “I can see why my sister picked you out for me, Flower.” Kobb grinned, pulling her in for a kiss. “You are someone she would have adored.”

  Violet sucked on Kobb’s bottom lip, then bit it playfully. She started laughing, then tenderly whispered no-doubt nauseatingly romantic things into Kobb’s ear, her tongue teasing his earlobe.

  “There are going to be two of them now.” Tzadok reminded Tandrea, pointing at his aunt’s pregnant stomach. “And as much as I pray to Chox, I fear that her sons will take after their mother.”

  “Well,” Tandy sighed in contentment, “if it’s any consolation, I’m sure our daughters will take after their father.”

  Tzadok nodded. “I’m sure they will …” He trailed off, instantly looking over at her again.

  She nodded, confirming the news. “Is it too early to start a baby book?”

  Tzadok grabbed his Heart and kissed her, overjoyed by the news.

  Kobb frowned slightly. “I’m too young to be a grand-uncle.” He thought aloud.

  Xiphos sat down at the table, next to Kobb. “A man may be many things to many people. That shows his power and builds his honor.” He nodded, continuing to playfully dangle a dagger over his infant daughter, as the girl giggled and grabbed for it.

  Even Tzadok thought that was a terrible idea. “Do we have no other toys the baby could enjoy, cousin?”

  Xiphos looked genuinely insulted by that. “By Chox, my daughter is a Wasteland warrior born! She is unafraid of a child’s blade! I had three by the time I was her age!”

  Tzadok rolled his eyes, wrapping his arm around Tandy’s shoulders and pulling her closer.

  Tandrea raised her glass. “To family.”

  “To Team Wasteland.” Violet agreed, grabbing the goblet from Kobb’s hand as he tried to raise it. “We’re not perfect… but we’re a damn sight better than anyone else.”

  Tzadok took on an appalled face. “Do we have to call it that?”

  “I think the most important thing is that we concentrate on…” Kobb began.

  “No, seriously.” Tzadok cut him off. “Do we have to call ourselves that? If I call us something else, is your wife going to hurt me?”

  “I’ll protect you.” Tandy promised, taking his hand. “Ultimately, words aren’t important. Because whatever we call ourselves, we belong together.”

  Author’s Note/Commentary on book

  “Growing up, Lizzy's favorite dwarf was Grumpy. Her favorite Care Bear was Grumpy. Her favorite Muppet was Oscar the Grouch. Her favorite Smurf was Gargamel. She voted for Cobra. She watched Return to Oz an unhealthy number of times. And she always named all of her toys after herself. Psychologically, I'm not sure what any of that means, but it's probably not good.”

  - My sister Cassandra’s description of me.

  Tzadok is based on every barbarian guy I’ve ever seen, mixed in with a dash of Last of the Mohicans. He’s not a complicated man. The genre doesn’t really create complicated heroes; he’s really tough and he wants his woman. That’s about it. Oh, for those wondering, the “T” is silent in his name. So, it’s pronounced “Zad-ick.” I went through a bunch of different options on his title. My notes from Nobody Likes Fairytale Pirates show the creative process behind him, which started out as me just thinking up a cool nickname for a background character and then building on it. The options I wrote down originally were: “The Frontier Butcher / The Forest Butcher / Desert Butcher / The Mountain Butcher / The Skyland Butcher / The Golden Butcher / The Silver Butcher / The Island Butcher / The Wolf Butcher / The Swampland Butcher / Butcher of the Wilderness / The Wasteland Butcher.” Of those, I picked The Wasteland Butcher, obviously, and then wrote out a couple sentences about him so that I’d know something about him, if/when I ever stuck him in a scene: “Tzadok, The Wasteland Butcher. South of the Grizzwood. I
t is very cold, but also very dry. So, no snow. Ground is almost entirely one flat slab of rock at a high elevation, so not much grows. Thin air. Live in underground caves/the walls of sinkholes.” Obviously, I changed some of those facts along the way. And honestly, I still like “The Wolf Butcher” more than what I ended up going with. I feel like it’s more evocative and sounds scarier. But Travels with a Fairytale Monster already established that a people called “the wolves” live in Stheno, which is nowhere near The Wasteland. Why I couldn’t just come up with an easy explanation for that, I couldn’t tell you. Even though I like the name more, it’s just not what Tzadok is called in my head, so I couldn’t use it. But, fair warning, I still like the sound of it, so I’ll probably use it somewhere eventually. “The Wolf Butcher.” It sounds so sinister and badass.

  Tandy is inspired by a background character from Disney’s Tangled movie. If you recall the film, Rapunzel and Flynn go to the Snuggly Duckling tavern, which is filled with ruffians. As their leader starts his song though, he tosses an ax towards the far wall, which barely misses a small man dressed as a medieval minstrel. The shackled man looks terrified, but he then immediately starts playing the song’s intro. He’s never seen again, but I like him. I want to know his story. How did he get to be captured by that gang of killers? Where is he from? Why did the gang want him in the first place? I think Tandy probably grew out of that basic idea. In Nobody Likes Fairytale Pirates, I was writing a couple of chapters which featured a gang of barbarians, and I needed a way to differentiate their leader from the other badass guys which inhabit my books. He needed his own thing. So, I took that nameless minstrel background character and combined him with C-3PO’s scenes with Jabba the Hutt in Return of the Jedi. And then Tzadok had a gimmick. He was much more colorful once he had to do his intimidation through the mouth of an entirely unintimidating petite woman. And it created a sense of a much larger “world” within the books, since not everyone speaks the same language. It sold Tzadok as an “other” to Uriah and Ransom.

  Oddly, readers seemed to think I was going somewhere with Tzadok and his then unnamed translator. Which I really wasn’t. I had a few paragraphs about them, which I wrote for my own edification (almost verbatim the scene where they first meet in this book, basically Tandy’s insistence to her boss that it’s a warrior culture and Tzadok threating Volo because he liked “the green one”), but I never really intended to actually write that. It was just background to better understand them while I was writing their one and only scene.

  They were *actually* supposed to show up a second time in Nobody Likes Fairytale Pirates, when the Adithian forces followed Uriah and Ransom into The Wasteland though. Empress Lujayna and the Adithians would have had a scene with Tzadok. It was edited for pacing though. Since this is their book now, here’s an excerpt, presented in the very loose draft format I sometimes use to write down ideas. It’s pretty random, but basically, the Adithians have arrived in Tzadok’s camp and Tzadok isn’t happy about it. They threaten him, he threatens back, then they decide to challenge him. He kills Csejte (again) and then the Adithians decide not to mess with him. I actually ended up recycling a lot of the scene for uses elsewhere in this book. Most of the lines in the couple of pages which made up the scene were Tandy’s, because I hadn’t gotten around to writing down the rest of it. Tandy’s translations are just more fun to write and they guide most scenes anyway. “/” indicates an alternate reply I could use, depending on how the final scene goes when I’m writing it:

  “Tell him that my navy is so large it displaces the entire sea when it moves.” The Empress threatened. “Its sails blot out the sky, barbarian.”

  “My master tells you that what you say may well be true. But he inquires as to how exactly you intend to attack him with this impressive fleet of yours, five days inland and fifteen thousand feet up?” The translator asked her. “You are not floating on water now, child-like foreign queen. You are on the Grizzwood Plateau. The Wasteland. Where the closest sea is made entirely of salt and is one hundred days wide in all directions. He is Lord of Salt. King and Conqueror. And he is growing angry with you.” Her voice grew uncertain and almost scared. ”Do not… do not make him angry with you.” / “If your boats can somehow sail from the sea and up fifteen thousand feet of stone to The Wasteland Plateau to fight his Saltmen, then you have skilled and powerful sailors indeed. Because boats typically need water. And it hasn’t so much as rained in his lands for five thousand years. If you wish to wait though… ” The translator paused to listen to her master. “…He will check with his mystics about their weather forecast for the next week.” She giggled, then tried to hide it with a small cough.

  So, that’s literally every time Tzadok was supposed to appear. When you spontaneously receive a couple dozen letters from readers though, all of whom write to ask when Tzadok’s book is coming out, you know that you need to write that. Generally speaking, if readers ask to see more of a certain character, I try to do that. Especially if I like the character too.

  Kobb actually screwed up this book a lot though. It would have been completely different, but he kept messing up my plans. He wasn’t in Tzadok’s scenes in Nobody Likes Fairytale Pirates (although I now imagine that he’s one of the warriors in the scene who laughs at Tandy’s incorrect translations and Tzadok’s frustration). He was originally just conceived as a person Tandy could talk to about Tzadok in this book, since she’d be scared and needed a friend to discuss her relationship. I thought he’d be all Chingachgook from Last of the Mohicans-y. But as I started to write the book, Kobb and Tzadok spent most of their time talking about *her* (I don’t know why they did that). Ultimately, Tandy didn’t need a friend character to talk things over with, because she had Tzadok. She had no problem sharing whatever she was thinking with him. So, Kobb switched roles.

  To make things worse, I’m writing the Choosing scene, and I realize that there needs to be at least one other woman there, since then we know that Tzadok wants Tandy, not just any woman. I felt like if there were only one woman there, of course she’d be the one he took. He needed more options, but not so many that it becomes unmanageable from a directing standpoint. So, two sounded like a good number. I figured that Hawser would take the other one and she’d either leave the book, or we’d understand the kind of fate Tandy escaped, by seeing the woman again later in the book, only now she’d be… I don’t know. Disfigured or something, I hadn’t gotten that far. But when the Choosing scene came around, Kobb immediately Claimed Violet. I mean, I’m writing the scene and he had no hesitation. And I literally stopped writing for a minute, as surprised by that as Tzadok was. I was not expecting him to do that, since Violet was *literally* an extra. She didn’t even have a name. She was there to fill out a scene and make Tandy special, not to actually do something. Plus, I was planning on killing Kobb off (the wise mentor *always* dies in barbarian/fantasy things). I decided not to erase Kobb’s decision right away, just to see where he was going with it. Eventually, I let him keep her rather than changing the scene, since he’d been the one to Choose her for himself and I don’t typically second-guess characters. I don’t know why he wanted her, since she’s horrible, but I figured he’d get a friend. But they weren’t friends, either. They treated each other as a couple. A dysfunctional couple, but a couple. Which pissed Tzadok off, so I found it amusing. Once Kobb had a girlfriend though, I couldn’t kill him anymore. That would be… mean. So, she kinda saved his life. Which he’d really think was destiny. He saved her from whatever unspecified horror she would have been subjected to as an unnamed extra in the original conception of the scene, and she saved him from a dramatic death to kick off act 3.

  Somewhere along the line, I realized that Aix is… kinda right. Not in the result, obviously, since his side does horrible things and worships a demonic snake-god. And not about his views on lesbians (which is actually almost verbatim what the creator of Conan’s views were, vis-à-vis lesbians causing society to crumble). Just in his complaints that the S
altmen are breaking the rules. Which they clearly are. His arguments are all based on law and tradition, while the Saltmen are just saying “Yeah, but we REALLY want Tandy! And you can’t have her because we’re stronger!” So, from his viewpoint, Tzadok *is* seizing control of the kingdom. He *is* stealing from his allies. He is unquestionably a leader breaking the law and overstepping his bounds. Tzadok is wrong. And Kobb *does* do horrible things behind the scenes to play god with The Wasteland. He *is* altering their religion as he sees fit and he *was* a killer. Aix’s complaints are entirely accurate, and there’s really no argument to counter them. I kinda like that idea. Most barbarian fiction has an element of fascism at its heart, and Tzadok’s “What I want, I take, and you can’t stop me!” style of leadership would certainly qualify. That’s deliberate. The Saltmen aren’t a “noble savage” kind of society, they’re just people. The good and the bad. I don’t know. I still side with the Saltmen over Aix though, since I don’t like the idea of women being mistreated (obviously) and I think Tzadok would have been Lord of Salt either way, but Aix’s procedural arguments are compelling. He’s not an “EVIL!” man. He’s just willing to participate in evil, if it follows his own interpretations of the law. To him, following the law is honorable, which is more important than morality. He believes that following the honor code *is* moral, even if the things it requires are horrible. He is a testament to “the banality of evil,” I suppose. As such, he ended up being a more interesting character (at least to me) than I intended. He didn’t get to do much, but I can’t remember the last time I wrote a villain who was so logical about it. His argument makes perfect sense; I agree with his points. On paper, without looking at the nightmarish outcomes of his philosophy, within their culture he’s a better person than either Tzadok or Kobb. He still needed to die and he’s certainly not my favorite villain I’ve ever written by any means, but he made as good a case as he could. And he turned out serving as an excellent counterpoint to Kobb’s “holy man on the outside, killer deep down” personality, since Aix looks like a killer but is very concerned with personal honor and the law.