“You were never supposed to be chief,” Fist pointed out. “You were supposed to watch over the tribe until Crag returned.”
Falog spat. “I was a better chief than Crag. I maked the Thunder People strong.”
“Let his arm stay broken. He ain’t worth it,” Maryanne said.
Fist placed a calming hand on her shoulder and nodded at the ogre. “You’re right, Old Falog. You did make the tribe stronger. In some ways I think you made it better. Crag had already started letting in the rogue ogres, but you united the tribes. You brought them all in. If you hadn’t, many of these ogres that are still alive would have been taken by the evil.”
Falog was taken aback by Fist’s unexpected compliment. “Then why did you make your giant fight me?”
“You imprisoned members of our tribe!” Maryanne said.
“And you were about to kill Crag,” Fist said. “I had no choice. Now are you going to let me heal you or not?”
Hesitantly, Old Falog removed his arm from under his cloak and held it out to him. Fist gripped his wrist and numbed the ogre’s pain, then twisted his arm so that the bones were set in place. He sent threads of water and earth into the bone, sealing the broken pieces together.
The ogre sucked in a hiss as the intense tingle of the healing took place, but it was soon over. Broken bones were easier to repair than gashes or open wounds. There was much less detail work involved.
Fist let go and the old ogre clenched his fist and moved his fingers. A smile touched Falog’s lips.
“There is one thing I would ask of you, Falog,” Fist said.
The ex-chief narrowed his eyes. “What?”
“Keep being a good leader to the Thunder People,” Fist replied.
“What?” Maryanne said.
“There are many ogres new to the tribe. They have heard of Crag, but they don’t know him. They already respect you,” Fist said. “Help Crag keep the Thunder People strong. The evil will keep coming. They will need you.”
“Crag will not want my help. Not now,” Falog replied.
“I sure wouldn’t,” Maryanne agreed.
“Stop helping me,” Fist said out of the side of his mouth. To Falog, he said, “I will talk to Crag for you. Think about it. Is it so bad being the second most powerful ogre in the tribe?”
To Old Falog, who had been imagining himself at the bottom of the hierarchy for the first time in decades, it didn’t sound that bad at all.
“Ooh!” huffed Rufus, pointing at the vanquished netherbeast. What about this one?
That is a good question. “What about Mog?” Fist asked Falog. “Do you think I should heal him?”
“That doesn’t seem like a very good idea,” Maryanne said.
Old Falog eyed her, looking her up and down. “Your skinny women is right.”
The gnome warrior bared her teeth and Fist grasped her shoulder again.
“If Mog waked up now, he would be mad,” Falog said. “You would have to fight him again.”
“Where did you find him, anyway?” Fist asked.
“He comed running into the territory one day just after Crag left,” the old ogre replied. “There was another big giant like him chasing him. It had the evil in it, but it wasn’t dead yet. Just screaming. It runned over me and stomped on my arm.”
“So that’s how you broke it,” Fist said.
Falog shrugged. “I telled the others to help him kill it. Then we smashed it up. It burned for a long time.”
“And he decided to stay?” Fist asked.
“He had nowhere else to go. He was lost,” Falog explained. “Mog seed my broke arm and knowed it was his fault. So he promised to be my fighter and I letted him stay. He has helped us fight the evil many times.”
Fist looked down at the netherhulk. “When he wakes, tell him that I am offering to heal him. However, if he attacks anyone in my tribe, I will not be so kind.”
“I will not allow him to,” Falog promised.
“Good.” Fist turned away from the old ogre and noted that most of the crowd had dispersed. It had grown dark outside, but Fist saw the backs of Charz and his father as they sat in front of the cave mouth, looking out over the camp. Fist walked towards them.
“Shouldn’t we go free Qenzic and Locksher now?” Maryanne asked, keeping pace with him. “Lyramoor disappeared a while ago and he’s so paranoid about being enslaved that I’m worried he might do something rash.”
“Yes. That’s been bothering me too,” said Fist. “I need to speak to Charz and Crag first and then we’ll go.”
There were a half circle of ogres sitting on the ground facing the two of them when Fist arrived. Most of them were unfamiliar to Fist, but he remembered a few of them as Old Falog’s supporters from earlier.
Charz was speaking in a slightly slurred voice, “You know what I could uthe right now, Crag? A big old barrel of grog. It’d really help numb my nerveths.”
“You has talked about this grog many times on our journey, giant,” Crag replied. “I would like to try it some time.”
“No you wouldn’t, father,” Fist said. “Not if you reacted to it the way that I did.”
Ogres didn’t have any fermented beverage traditions. The only alcohol Fist had drank, Lenny’s firewater, had given him a severe allergic reaction. Master Coal had suggested he never touch any liquor ever again.
“Oh, you done talking with the loser, Fist?” Charz asked. The giant turned to look at him.
Fist grimaced. Maryanne gasped. Rufus let out a concerned, “Ooh! Ooh!”
Ouch, said Squirrel.
Once Fist could find the words, he said, “Charz, that looks horrible.”
The wounds that the giant had received during the fight looked much worse than they had before. What had once been a blackened line in his skin was now a deep glistening fleshy wound. It stretched from his jawline up the left side of his face, across his forehead, and down to mid-cheek. In addition, half of his lips on the right side of his face were melted away from when he had bitten into the netherhulk’s tongue. Fist had no desire to see what the inside of his mouth looked like.
“Don’t need to sthee it to know that,” Charz replied glumly. “It burnth like blazeth right now, but it’ll heal. It always doth. That athid wath jutht thome thtrong thtuff. It only thtopped thizzling a minute ago.”
“Would you like me to try and help it heal?” Fist asked. It was difficult to replace tissue that heavily damaged, but he could at least help it to scab up.
“Naw. I’ll wait. My magic always doth it right. I do want my pendant back, though,” Charz replied.
“Oh.” Fist had forgotten he was wearing it. He pulled the iron chain up over his head and handed it back to the giant. “Here.”
“Thankth,” Charz replied, slipping it over his own head and wincing as the chain dragged against the side of the wound. “You ready to go free our boys?”
“Yes, I just wanted to talk to Crag,” Fist replied, looking down at his father. “I wanted to say sorry about your arm. Can I heal it for you now?”
“The women was just going to get some medicine,” Crag said, which Fist translated as, ‘they had just gone to chew some plants to spit on it’. Most of the Thunder People believed strongly in the tradition of ogre medicine. Fortunately, Crag had already experienced Fist’s healing first hand. He lifted his arm, which had been set in a crude splint; just some straight sticks tied to the arm with strips of leather. “So yes. Fix it for me.”
Fist did so, pouring his magic into the arm and repairing it as he had done for Falog. He waited until he was finished to ask, “Crag, I have a request to make of you.”
Crag grinned as he worked his fingers and began pulling off the splint. The ogres watched with frightened amazement at how quickly Fist had fixed the injury. “Yes, Fist. Anything for my ogre mage son!”
“I want you to take Old Falog back as your advisor,” Fist said. Crag’s grin turned to a scowl and Fist added, “I know he tried to kill you, but-.”
“Fist! You do not tell the chief of the Thunder People how to run his tribe. You has your own tribe,” Crag interrupted. He shook his head and pounded the fist of his newly healed arm into the palm of his other hand experimentally. “But I was going to do that anyway. Old Falog is smart and the new Thunder Peoples trust him.”
“Oh,” Fist said, surprised at his father’s grasp of the situation.
“Look at this people, Fist,” Crag said, pointing out at the enormous camp that gleamed in the darkness. “He did good when we was gone. We is bigger. We is better. And now that you is here, we can kill the evil.”
Fist was going to respond, but Crag suddenly waved at an ogre who approached them from a nearby fireside. “Ooh, good! Hurry.”
From the crossed-out flame-shaped scar on his chest, the oncoming ogre had once been Fire People. He was holding a metal rod in one hand that looked like it may once have been a human settler’s fireplace poker. The pointed end was glowing red.
Crag eagerly held out his arm.
“Wait, Crag,” Fist said. The branding thing that had started while Crag was gone was something he had hoped to stop. “You don’t need to do that.”
The ogre chief frowned at him. “All the Thunder People does this now. So must the chief.” He looked back at the ogre with the glowing brand enthusiastically. “Make it a big one.”
Fist turned away as the ogre brought the brand near. He started walking, but he still heard the sizzle of the hot iron and Crag’s grunts of pain.
Why he do that? Rufus asked through the bond, watching the scene back over his hairy shoulder as they walked.
I don’t know, Fist replied. He hadn’t thought Crag would so easily give in to that kind of ugly trend.
“You thqueamish about a little branding, ogre?” Charz asked as they walked away from the cave. His healing magic must have kicked in because his voice was already starting to sound better.
Fist still wasn’t sure how to explain what he felt. “It just seems . . .”
“Brutal?” Charz asked in amusement.
“You are ogres,” Maryanne pointed out.
“Yes, but this is new brutality,” Fist said. “I was hoping that we could change the way things are done in the tribes for the better. This feels like a step backwards.”
“Aww,” Maryanne replied, patting his shoulder affectionately.
They travelled along the cliff face, passing the multiple smaller caves that the Thunder People had used for sleeping throughout the years. The area was crowded. Despite the last gasps of winter’s cold, ogres stood around and talked in the firelight.
Fist’s group didn’t go by unnoticed. As they walked, people congratulated Charz about his fight and pointed at Rufus, whispering about the gwatch. Fist heard his name called out several times. “Fist!” “Hey, ogre mage!” “Big Fist is back!” Fist waved in the direction of the voices, but didn’t stop, hoping that he would be able to get to his imprisoned friends without further delays.
Then they passed the women’s caves. The crowds were thicker here as the men lingered, hoping to convince an ogress to pick him for the night. The voices calling Fist’s name changed tone. “Big Fist, come here!” “I will choose you, Fist.” “I missed you, Fist!”
“What’s that about?” Maryanne teased.
“Yeah, you leave a bunch a broken hearts behind in this place, Fist?” Charz asked.
“Just keep moving,” Fist replied, wanting to avoid any embarrassing explanations.
“Wait, Big Fist. Where is you going?” asked a gruffly alluring voice. The path in front of them was blocked by six imposing ogre females. These were perhaps not the prettiest or most well-endowed of the women, but they were the most influential ones; the women in charge of the cooking and healing and breeding done within the tribe.
There were some new faces among them, but Fist recognized Marg the Gutter and Fixer Fan. The woman that had spoken was Momma Zung. She was the woman in charge of all the females in the tribe. In reality, she had more influence than anyone except for the chief. Even so, Fist had seen her lead Crag around by the ear a few times over the years.
“We are going to the Jail Cave to free the rest of my tribe,” Fist replied. The Jail Cave was at the far end of the shelf at a section where the cliff face was weakened by crumbling rock. The ceilings of the cave dripped constantly. This made it less than desirable as living space, but a perfect place to keep ogres that needed punishment. “It is good to see you again, Momma Zung.”
The ogress moved forward, the firelight gleaming across her face. She had once been Crag’s favorite and much of that beauty still remained. When Fist was small, he had thought she might be his mother, but Crag had told him that his mother had been stolen away by another tribe.
Zung reached out and cupped his chin with her hand. “We heared about Puj.”
“She was a good healer,” said Fixer Fan.
Fist nodded slightly, unwilling to correct her. It saddened him to think about Puj, but there was nothing he could do to change what had happened. “My tribe killed the ogres who hurt her.”
I did, Squirrel corrected.
Zung smiled. “Do not worry, Fist. We will get another women for you.”
“Oh, uh. You do not need to do that,” Fist said.
“We must,” she insisted. “Crag promised you a women. Come with us and I will help you pick one.”
Maryanne cleared her throat and stepped between Fist and Momma Zung, forcing the ogress to take a step back. “You heard him. That won’t be necessary.”
“It touched me,” Momma Zung said in surprise.
“What is that skinny thing?” asked Marg the Gutter, stepping forward and eyeing Maryanne with distaste. She was the most imposing of the ogresses, large and smelly, in charge of the butchering of animals brought back by the ogre hunters. “Why does it wear shiny skins?”
“This is Maryanne. She is a gnome and she’s in my tribe,” Fist said.
“This thing is your women?” Mother Zung asked, looking both disgusted and amused at the thought. “Then we must get you a new one.”
Fist laughed nervously. This wasn’t going his way. “Well, she’s-.”
“That’s right,” Maryanne declared, stepping closer to the ogress and glaring. Though Mother Zung was probably twice her weight, Maryanne was taller than her by a good six inches and the intensity of her gaze was intimidating. “Fist is my man!”
Fist’s eyes widened. Charz took one look at the expression on his face and broke out into a fit of laughter. This confused the ogre women further and they looked at Fist questioningly. They understood that this woman, if that’s what she was, was terribly skinny and they found that amusing, but would Fist allow this giant to mock his choice in women, to guffaw and slap his knee so openly?
Maryanne turned and stormed at the giant. Her attack came so fast that Fist barely caught how she did it in the flickering firelight. The auburn-haired gnome was suddenly behind him.
First, she sent a sharp kick into the back of Charz’s knee. The joint crumpled, sending him teetering off balance. Then she was somehow in front of him and high in the air, spinning. Her right foot lashed out, then her left, catching the rock giant under the jaw both times. Charz’s head was rocked back and he fell to the ground with an audible oof.
She landed lithely, then flicked her hair out of her eyes and pointed, swinging her arm in a broad gesture that took in all of the ogres that had seen the spectacle. “That’s right! Fist is my man and if any of you dare challenge that, you will have to fight me!”
Several of the male ogres that were nearby looked at each other and muttered. A male fighting a female? How unbecoming. But the ogre females understood that the message was directed at them and they all understood that they were being given a warning. Fist was off limits.
She stormed away from the giant and walked over to Fist, linking her arm in his before turning back to say one more thing loudly to the crowd. “And this ‘shiny stuff’ I’m wearing is leathe
r armor made by elves. It’s comfortable and allows me freedom of movement!” She tightened her glare at Mother Zung. “Unlike those bulky furs you girls wear.”
I like her now, Squirrel decided. You should choose her.
Charz didn’t bother getting up. He lay in the dirt and sighed. “You know my face still really hurts, Maryanne.”
“That’s why I aimed for under your chin, you big oaf,” she replied. “Now get up and come along with us. It’s time we left these women behind.”
“Naw, I think I’ll rest here for a minute,” Charz said, placing both hands behind his head. “Hey, ogre ladies! You got a injured warrior over here that needs to be babied!” Several ogresses giggled and rushed to his side, some of them leaving disappointed ogre men behind.
The Troll King (The Bowl of Souls Book 9) Page 13