The Collected Stories, The Legend of Drizzt (forgotten realms)

by R. A. Salvatore

  That memory brought a chuckle from G’nurk, but that laugh melted fast into a sob.

  Again he leaned on a rock, needing the support. Again he scolded himself about honor and duty, and doing proud by Tinguinguay.

  He climbed up on the rock to better survey the battlefield. Many years before, Obould had led an expedition to a volcano, believing the resonating explosions to be a call from Gruumsh. There, where the side of the mountain had blown off into a forest, G’nurk had seen the multitude of toppled trees, all foliage gone, all branches blasted away. The great logs lay in rows, neatly ordered, and it had seemed so surreal to G’nurk that such a natural calamity as a volcanic eruption, the very definition of chaos, could create such a sense of order and purpose.

  So it seemed to the orc warrior as he stood upon that rock and looked out across the rocky slope that had marked the end of the horde’s charge, for the bodies lay neatly in rows-too neatly.

  So many bodies.

  “Tinguinguay,” G’nurk whispered.

  He had to find her. He needed to see her again, and knew that it had to be there and then if it was to be ever-before the birds, the beetles, and the maggots did their work.

  When it is done, all that is left are the bones and the stones. The screams are gone; the smell is gone. The blood is washed away. The fattened birds take with them in their departing flights all that identified those fallen warriors as individuals.

  Leaving the bones and the stones to mingle and to mix, as the wind or the rain break apart the skeletons and filter them together, as the passage of time buries some, what is left becomes indistinguishable to all but the most careful of observers.

  A rock shuffled under his foot, but Pwent didn’t hear it. As he scrambled over the last rise along the cliff face, up onto the high ground from which the dwarves had made their stand before retreating into Mithral Hall, a small tumble of rocks cascaded down behind him-and again, he didn’t hear it.

  He heard the screams and cries, of glory and of pain, of determination against overwhelming odds, and of support for friends who were surely doomed.

  He heard the ring of metal on metal, the crunch of a skull under the weight of his heavy, spiked gauntlets, and the sucking sound of his helmet spike driving through the belly of one more orc.

  His mind was back in battle as he came over that ridge and looked at the long and stony descent, still littered with the corpses of scores of dwarves and hundreds and hundreds of orcs. The orc charge had come there. The boulders rolling down against them, the giant-manned catapults throwing boulders at him from the side mountain ridge-he remembered vividly that moment of desperation, when only the Gutbusters, his Gutbusters, could intervene. He’d led that countercharge down the slope and headlong, furiously, into the orc horde. Punching and kicking, slashing and tearing, crying for Moradin and Clanggeddin and Dumathoin, yelling for King Bruenor and Clan Battlehammer and Mithral Hall. No fear had they shown, no hesitance in their charge, though not one expected to get off that ridge alive.

  And so it was with a determined stride and an expression of both pride and lament that Thibbledorf Pwent walked down that slope once more, pausing only now and again to lift a rock and peg it at a nearby bird that was intent to feast upon the carcass of a friend.

  He spotted the place where his brigade had made their valiant stand, and saw the dwarf bodies intermingled with walls of dead orcs-walls and walls, piled waist deep and even higher. How well the Gutbusters had fought!

  He hoped that no birds had pecked out Gendray’s eyes. Honcklebart deserved to see his son’s eyes again.

  Pwent ambled over and began flinging orc bodies out of the way, growling with every throw. He was too angry to notice the stiffness, even when one arm broke off and remained in his grasp. He just chucked it after the body, spitting curses.

  He came to his first soldier, and winced in recognition of Tooliddle Ironfist, who had been one of the longest-serving of the Gutbuster Brigade.

  Pwent paused to offer a prayer for Tooliddle to Moradin, but in the middle of that prayer, he paused more profoundly and considered the task before him. It wouldn’t be difficult, taking Gendray home, but leaving all the rest of them out there …

  How could he do that?

  The battlerager stepped back and kicked a dead orc hard in the face. He put his hands on his hips and considered the scene before him, trying to figure out how many trips and how many companions he would need to bring all those boys home. For it became obvious to him that he couldn’t leave them, any of them, out there for the birds and the beetles.

  Big numbers confused Thibbledorf Pwent, particularly when he was wearing his boots, and particularly when, as on this occasion, he became distracted.

  Something moved to the northwest of him.

  At first, he thought it a large bird or some other carrion animal, but then it hit him, and hit him hard.

  It was an orc-a lone orc, slipping through the maze of blasted stone and blasted bodies, and apparently oblivious to Pwent.

  He should have slipped down to the ground and pretended to be among the fallen. That was the preferred strategy, obviously, a ready-made ambush right out of the Gutbusters’ practiced tactics.

  Pwent thought of Gendray, of Tooliddle, and all the others. He pictured a bird poking out Gendray’s eyes, or a swarm of beetles crunching on his rotting intestines. He smelled the fight again and heard the cries, remembering vividly the desperate and heroic stand.

  He should have slipped down to the ground and feigned death among the corpses, but instead he spat, he roared, and he charged.

  Who will remember those who died here, and what have they gained to compensate for all that they, on both sides, lost?

  The look upon a dwarf’s face when battle is upon him would argue, surely, that the price is worth the effort, that warfare, when it comes to a dwarven clan, is a noble cause. Nothing to a dwarf is more revered than fighting to help a friend. Theirs is a community bound tightly by loyalty, by blood shared and blood spilled.

  And so, in the life of an individual, perhaps this is a good way to die, a worthy end to a life lived honorably, or even to a life made worthy by this last ultimate sacrifice.

  G’nurk could hardly believe his ears, or his eyes, and as the sight registered fully-a lone dwarf rushing down the slope at him-a smile curled on his face.

  Gruumsh had delivered this, he knew, as an outlet for his rage, a way to chase away the demons of despair over Tinguinguay’s fall.

  G’nurk shied from no combat. He feared no dwarf, surely, and so while the charge of the heavily armored beast-all knee spikes, elbow spikes, head spikes, and black armor so devilishly ridged that it could flay the hide off an umber hulk-would have weakened the knees of most, for G’nurk it came as a beautiful and welcome sight.

  Still grinning, the orc pulled the heavy spear off his back and brought it around, twirling it slowly so that he could take a better measure of its balance. It was no missile. G’nurk had weighted its back end with an iron ball.

  The dwarf rambled on, slowing not at all at the sight of the formidable weapon. He crashed through a pair of dead orcs, sending them bouncing aside, and he continued his single-noted roar, a bellow of absolute rage and … pain?

  G’nurk thought of Tinguinguay and surely recognized pain, and he too began to growl and let it develop into a defiant roar.

  He kept his spear horizontally before him until the last moment, then stabbed out the point and dropped the weighted end to the ground, stamping it in with his foot to fully set the weapon.

  He thought he had the dwarf easily skewered, but this one was not quite as out — of control as he appeared. The dwarf flung himself to the side in a fast turn and reached out with his leading left arm as he came around, managing to smack aside G’nurk’s shifting spear.

  The dwarf charged in along the shaft.

  But G’nurk reversed and kicked up the ball, stepping out the other way and heaving with all his strength to send the back end of the wea
pon up fast and hard against the dwarf’s chest, and with such force as to stop the furious warrior in his tracks, even knock him back a bouncing step.

  G’nurk rushed out farther to the dwarf’s left, working his spear cleverly to bring it end over end. As soon as he completed the weapon’s turn, he went right back in, stabbing hard, thinking again to score a fast kill.

  “For Tinguinguay!” he cried in Dwarvish, because he wanted his enemy to know that name, to hear that name as the last thing he ever heard!

  The dwarf fell flat; the spear thrust fast above him, hitting nothing but air.

  With amazing agility for one so armored and so stocky, the dwarf tucked his legs and came up fast, his helmet spike slicing up beside the spear, and he rolled his head, perfectly parrying G’nurk’s strike.

  He kept rolling his head, turning the spear under the helmet spike. He hopped back and bent low, driving the spear low and getting his belly behind the tip. And, amazingly, he rolled again, turning the spear!

  Almost babbling with disbelief, G’nurk tried to thrust forward on one of those turns, hoping to impale the little wretch.

  But the dwarf had anticipated just that, had invited just that, and as soon as the thrust began, the dwarf turned sidelong and slapped his hand against the spear shaft.

  “I’m taking out both yer eyes for a dead friend,” he said, and G’nurk understood him well enough, though his command of Dwarvish was far from perfect.

  The dwarf was inside his weapon’s reach, and his grip proved surprisingly strong and resilient against G’nurk’s attempt to break his weapon free.

  So the orc surprised his opponent. He balled up his trailing, mailed fist and slugged the grinning dwarf right in the face, a blow that would have knocked almost any orc or any dwarf flat to the ground.

  I cannot help but wonder, though, in the larger context, what of the overall? What of the price, the worth, the gain? Will Obould accomplish anything worth the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of his dead? Will he gain anything long lasting? Will the dwarven stand made out on that high cliff bring Bruenor’s people anything worthwhile? Could they not have slipped into Mithral Hall, to tunnels so much more easily defended?

  And a hundred years from now, when there remain only the bones and the stones, will anyone care?

  I wonder what fuels the fires that burn images of glorious battle in the hearts of so many of the sentient races, my own paramount among them. I look at the carnage on the slope and I see the inevitable sight of emptiness. I imagine the cries of pain. I hear in my head the calls for loved ones when the dying warrior knows his last moment is upon him. I see a tower fall with my dearest friend atop it. Surely the tangible remnants, the rubble and the bones, are hardly worth the moment of battle. But is there, I wonder, something less tangible there, something of a greater place? Or is there, perhaps-and this is my fear-something of a delusion to it all that drives us to war again and again?

  Along that latter line of thought, is it within us all, when the memories of war have faded, to so want to be a part of something great that we throw aside the quiet, the calm, the mundane, the peace itself? Do we collectively come to equate peace with boredom and complacency? Perhaps we hold these embers of war within us, dulled only by sharp memories of the pain and the loss, and when that smothering blanket dissipates with the passage of healing time, those fires flare again to life. I saw this within myself, to a smaller extent, when I realized and admitted to myself that I was not a being of comforts and complacency, that only by the wind on my face, the trails beneath my feet, and the adventure along the road could I truly be happy.

  I’ll walk those trails indeed, but it seems to me that it is another thing altogether to carry an army along beside me, as Obould has done. For there is the consideration of a larger morality here, shown so starkly in the bones among the stones. We rush to the call of arms, to the rally, to the glory, but what of those caught in the path of this thirst for greatness?

  Thibbledorf Pwent wasn’t just any dwarf. He knew that his posture, and his need to speak and grin, would allow the punch, but indeed, that was how the battlerager preferred to start every tavern brawl.

  He saw the mailed fist flying for his face-in truth, he might have been able to partially deflect it had he tried.

  He didn’t want to.

  He felt his nose crunch as his head snapped back, felt the blood gushing forth.

  He was still smiling.

  “My turn,” he promised.

  But instead of throwing himself at the orc, he yanked the spear shaft in tight against his side, then hopped and rolled over the weapon, grabbing it with his second hand as well as he went. When he came back to his feet, he had the spear in both hands and up across his shoulders behind his neck.

  He scrambled back and forth, and turned wildly in circles until at last the orc relinquished the spear.

  Pwent hopped to face him. The dwarf twisted his face into a mask of rage as the orc reached for a heavy stone, and with a growl, he flipped both his arms up over the spear, then drove them down.

  The weapon snapped and Pwent caught both ends and tossed them out to the side.

  The rock slammed against his chest, knocking him back a step.

  “Oh, but yerself’s gonna hurt,” the battlerager promised.

  He leaped forward, fists flying, knees pumping, and head swinging, so that his helmet spike whipped back and forth right before the orc’s face.

  The orc leaned back, back, and stumbled and seemed to topple, and Pwent howled and lowered his head and burst forward. He felt his helmet spike punch through chain links and leather batting, slide through orc flesh, crunch through orc bone, a sensation the battlerager had felt so many times in his war-rich history.

  Pwent snapped upright, taking his victim with him, lifting the bouncing orc right atop his head, impaled on the long spike.

  Surprisingly, though, Pwent found himself facing his opponent. Only as the orc stepped forward, sword extended, did the battlerager understand the ruse. The orc had feigned the fall and had propped up one of the corpses in his place (and had retrieved a sword from the ground in the same move), and the victim weighing down on Pwent’s head had been dead for many days.

  And now the real opponent seemed to have an open charge and thrust to Thibbledorf Pwent’s heart.

  The next few moments went by in a blur. Stabs and swats traded purely on reflex. Pwent got slugged and gave a couple out in return. The sword nicked his arm, drawing blood on his black armor, but in that move, the battlerager was able to drive the weapon out wider than the orc had anticipated, and step in for a series of short and heavy punches. As the orc finally managed to back out, he did manage a left cross that stung Pwent’s jaw, and before the battlerager could give chase, that sword came back in line.

  This one’s good-very good for an orc-Pwent thought.

  Another vicious flurry had them dancing around each other, growling and punching, stabbing and dodging. All the time, Pwent carried nearly three hundred pounds of dead orc atop his head. It couldn’t last, the dwarf knew. Not like this.

  A sword slash nearly took out his gut as he just managed to suck in his belly and throw back his hips in time to avoid. Then he used the overbalance, his head, bearing the weight of the dead orc, too far out in front of his hips, to propel him forward suddenly.

  He came up launching a wild left hook, but to his surprise, the orc dropped into a deep crouch and his fist whipped overhead. Improvisation alone saved the stumbling Pwent, for rather than try to halt the swing, as instinct told him, he followed through even farther, turning and lifting his right foot as he came around.

  He kicked out. He needed to connect and he did, sending the orc stumbling back another couple of steps.

  But Pwent, too, the corpse rolling around his helmet spike, fell off balance. He couldn’t hope to recover fast enough to counter the next assault.

  The orc saw it, too, and he planted his back foot and rushed forward for the kill.

  Pw
ent couldn’t stop him.

  But the orc’s eyes widened suddenly as something to the side apparently caught his attention. Before he could finish the strike, the battlerager, never one to question a lucky break, tightened every muscle in his body, then snapped his head forward powerfully, extricating the impaled orc, launching the corpse right into his opponent.

  The orc stumbled back a step and issued a strange wail. But Pwent didn’t hesitate, rushing forward and leaping in a twisting somersault right over the corpse and the living orc. As he came around, rolling over his opponent’s shoulder, the battlerager slapped his forearm hard under the orc’s chin while slapping his other hand across its face the other way, catching a grip on hair and leather helm. When he landed on his feet, behind the orc, Pwent had the battle won. With the orc’s head twisted out far tothe left and the warrior off-balance-surely to fall, except that Pwent held him aloft-G’nurk was unable to do anything about it.

  A simple jerk with one hand, while driving his forearm back the other way, would snap the orc’s neck, while Pwent’s ridged bracer, already drawing blood on the orc’s throat, would tear out the creature’s windpipe.

  Pwent set himself to do just that, but something about the orc’s expression, a detachment, a profound wound, gave him pause.

  “Why’d ye stop?” the battlerager demanded, loosening his grip just enough to allow a reply, and certain that he could execute the orc at any time.

  The orc didn’t answer, and Pwent jostled its head painfully.

  “Ye said ‘for’ something,” Pwent pressed. “For what?”

  When the orc didn’t immediately respond, he gave a painful tug.

  “You do not deserve to know her name,” the orc grunted with what little breath he could find.

  “Her?” Pwent asked. “Ye got a lover out here, do ye? Ye ready to join her, are ye?”