Zhengyi marveled at his prize, for the skull glowed bright, seething with the spirit energy of the trapped dragon soul, the newborn dracolich Urshula.
Zhengyi’s newfound ally.
The Witch-King lowered the gem and considered the scene. He had timed his intervention perfectly, for only a couple of the warriors remained alive, and they lay helpless, squirming, groaning, and bleeding on the floor.
Zhengyi didn’t offer them the courtesy of a quick death. He cast another spell and magically departed with his prize taken and his victory complete, leaving them to their slow, painful deaths.
“You thought you had won those months ago when you defeated the force that had slipped behind you into Vaasa,” Byphast scolded Zhengyi on a cold Damaran winter morning.
“I won the day, indeed,” the Witch-King replied, and he looked up from the great tome on his desk to regard the dragon in elf form.
“My kin are fleeing you,” Byphast went on. “Lord Dragonsbane is a foe we will not face again. The allies arrayed against you are more formidable than you believed.”
“But they are mortal,” Zhengyi corrected. “And soon enough they will grow feeble with age and will wither and die.”
“You believed your kingdom secured,” the dragon countered.
Zhengyi had to refrain from laughing at her, so shaken did she seem by his calm demeanor. For her observations were correct; it was indeed all crumbling around him, and he knew that well. Gareth Dragonsbane could quite possibly win the day in Damara, and in that event the paladin would, at the very least, drive Zhengyi into hiding in a dark hole in Vaasa.
“It amuses me to see a dragon so fretful and obsessed with the near future,” he replied to her.
“Your plan will fail!”
“My plan will sleep. Cannot a dragon, a creature who might raze a town and retire comfortably in her lair for a century or more, understand the concept of patience? You disappoint me, Byphast. Do you not understand that while our enemies are mortal, I am not? And neither are you,” he reminded her, nodding to the shelf beside his desk where several gemstone dragon skulls sat waiting for the spirits of their attuned wyrms.
“My power comes not from my physical form,” the Witch-King continued, “but from the blackness that resides in the hearts of all men.”
He slipped his hands under the covers of the great tome and lifted it just a bit, just enough for Byphast to note the black binding engraved with brands of dragons—rearing dragons, sitting dragons, sleeping dragons, fighting dragons. Zhengyi eased the book back down, reached into his belt pouch, and produced a glowing dragon skull gem.
“Urshula the black,” Byphast remarked.
Zhengyi placed the skull against the center of the opened tome and whispered a few arcane words as he pressed down upon it.
The skull sank into the pages, disappearing within the depths of the tome.
Byphast sucked in her breath and stared hard at the Witch-King.
“If I do not win now, I win later,” Zhengyi explained. “With my allies beside me. Some foolish human, elf, or other mortal creature will find this tome and will seek the power contained within. In so doing he will unleash Urshula in his greater form.”
Zhengyi paused and glanced behind him, drawing Byphast’s gaze to a huge bookcase full of similar books.
“His greed, his frailty, his secret desire—nay, desperation—to grasp this great treasure that only I can offer him, will perpetuate my grand schemes, whatever the outcome of the coming battles on the fields of Damara.”
“So confident.…” Byphast said with a shake of her head and a smile that came from pity.
“Do you seek to sever your bond with the phylactery?” Zhengyi asked. “Do you wish to abandon this gift of immortality that I have offered you?”
Byphast’s smile withered.
“I thought not,” said Zhengyi. He closed the great book and lifted it into place on the shelf behind him. “My power is as eternal as a reasoning being’s fear of death, Byphast. Thus, I am eternal.” He glanced back at the newly finished tome. “Urshula was defeated in his lair, slain by the knights of the Bloodstone Army. But that only made him stronger, as King Gareth, or his descendants, will one day learn.”
Byphast stood very still for some time, soaking it all in. “I will not continue the fight,” she decided. “I will return to the Great Glacier and my distant home.”
Zhengyi shrugged as if it did not matter—and at that time, it really did not.
“But you will not sever your bond with the phylactery,” he noted.
Byphast stiffened and squared her jaw. “I will live another thousand years,” she declared.
But Zhengyi only smiled and said, “So be it. I am patient.”
et’s strip things down to the harsh, unmitigated truth (for a change), shall we? The fundamental question of every war has to be “is it worth it?” There’s no getting around that. In fact, such a question applies to almost every human endeavor. Is it worth the money and the stress and the trouble of taking that vacation with the young kids? Are the forty hours a week, not counting the commute, worth the paycheck they’re offering?
With war, however, this is a particularly interesting question, because those who stand to most benefit from war, in terms of power or treasure, spend their energy in constructing fancy façades to minimize the inevitably harsh truths of battle. And then, when they get their way, those pushing the campaign go to great lengths to gloss over the wretchedness. And thus we have embedded reporters and flag-waving head-nodding super-patriots at the very same time that one side cannot begin to understand the motivations of the flag-waving head-nodding super-patriots of the other side.
I am reminded of the words of an old Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young song, “Wooden Ships”: “I can see by your coat, my friend, you’re from the other side/there’s just one thing I’d like to know,/can you tell me please who won?” There’s such simplicity there, something so very human and vulnerable and resigned. I can hardly watch the news over the last decade without hearing that song in my thoughts.
I try hard to make sense of war. I have met so many wonderful soldiers and their incredible families over the years. So many letters, so much heartfelt friendship and emotion.
But that nagging question, “Is it worth it?” has to remain first and foremost, and I hope it is always the primary concern for those who have to make the decisions regarding peace or war. Because with war, we too often forget, any answer of “yes” has to get over a tremendously high bar, because of the “Bones and Stones” inevitably left behind, because of the enduring pain when the flags stop waving.
The structure of this story is a bit different; I wrap a mini adventure with Pwent around a previously published Drizzt essay. That essay was inspired by a line in the movie We Were Soldiers. At the end, a North Vietnamese colonel laments the victory the Americans achieved and says, to paraphrase, “They think they have won a great victory here, so more will come. The outcome will be the same, but many more men will have to die to get there.” Cut out the over-the-top heroics and battle sequences (I swear that watching most war movies is like watching most sports movies, like Miracle on Ice, where suddenly the actual events just aren’t enough and so we have Jim Craig making nine hundred outrageous diving saves for the “drama” of it all … ah well, that’s another essay), and We Were Soldiers is quite a powerful movie with many poignant scenes, and asks many tough questions of war and humanity. Those remarks by the NVA colonel have stayed with me, as has the helicopter sequence with the haunting lyrics of “Sgt. MacKenzie.”
Drizzt stripped it all down to the basic, harsh truth in that essay. Like the birds in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, there’s really nothing he can say against the hard truth of the massacre, is there?
Enter Pwent and the orc, two unlikely and ferocious warriors to add a touch of humanity to the seemingly senseless slaughter.
“Bones and Stones” doesn’t answer any questions. It’s not supposed to. It a
sks questions.
The Year of the Tankard (1370 DR)
n uneasiness accompanied Thibbledorf Pwent out of Mithral Hall that late afternoon. With the hordes of King Obould pressing so closely on the west and north, Bruenor had declared that none could venture out to those reaches. Pragmatism and simple wisdom surely seemed to side with Bruenor.
It wasn’t often that the battlerager, an officer of Bruenor’s court, went against the edicts of his beloved King Bruenor. But this was an extraordinary circumstance, Pwent had told himself—though in language less filled with multi-syllable words: “Needs gettin’ done.”
Still, there remained the weight of going against his beloved king, and the cognitive dissonance of that pressed on him. As if reflecting his pall, the gray sky hung low, thick, and ominous, promising rain.
Rain that would fall upon Gendray Hardhatter, and so every drop would ping painfully against Thibbledorf Pwent’s heart.
It wasn’t that Gendray had been killed in battle—oh no, not that! Such a fate was accepted, even expected by every member of the ferocious Gutbuster Brigade as willingly as it was by their leader, Thibbledorf Pwent. When Gendray had joined only a few short months before, Pwent had told his father, Honcklebart, a dear friend of many decades, that he most certainly could not guarantee the safety of Gendray.
“But me heart’s knowin’ that he’ll die for a good reason,” Honcklebart had said to Pwent, both of them deep in flagons of mead.
“For kin and kind, for king and clan,” Pwent had appropriately toasted, and Honcklebart had tapped his cup with enthusiasm, for indeed, what dwarf could ever ask for more?
And so on a windy day atop the cliffs north of Keeper’s Dale, the western porch of Mithral Hall, against the charge of an orc horde, the expectations for Gendray had come to pass, and for never a better reason had a Battlehammer dwarf fallen.
As he neared that fateful site, Pwent could almost hear the tumult of battle again. Never had he been so proud of his Gutbusters. He had led them into the heart of the orc charge. Outnumbered many times over by King Obould’s most ferocious warriors, the Gutbusters hadn’t flinched, hadn’t hesitated. Many dwarves had fallen that day but had fallen on the bodies of many, many more orcs.
Pwent, too, had expected to die in that seemingly suicidal encounter, but somehow, and with the support of heroic friends and a clever gnome, he and some of the Gutbusters had found their way to the cliffs and down to Mithral Hall’s western doors. It had been a victory bitterly won through honorable and acceptable sacrifice.
Despite that truth, Thibbledorf Pwent had carried with him the echoes of the second part of Honcklebart Hard-hatter’s toast, when he had hoisted his flagon proudly again and declared, “And I’m knowin’ that dead or hurt, Thibbledorf Pwent’d not be leavin’ me boy behind.”
Tapping that flagon in toast had been no hard promise for Pwent. “If a dragon’s eatin’ him, then I’ll cut a hole in its belly and pull out his bones!” he had heartily promised, and had meant every word.
But Gendray, dead Gendray, hadn’t come home that day.
“Ye left me boy,” Honcklebart had said back in the halls after the fight. There was no malice in his voice, no accusation. It was just a statement of fact, by a dwarf whose heart had broken.
Pwent almost wished his old friend had just punched him in the nose, because though Honcklebart was known to have a smashing right cross, it wouldn’t have hurt the battlerager nearly as much as that simple statement of fact.
“Ye left me boy.”
I look upon the hillside, quiet now except for the birds. That’s all there is. The birds, cawing and cackling and poking their beaks into unseeing eyeballs. Crows do not circle before they alight on a field strewn with the dead. They fly as the bee to a flower, straight for their goal, with so great a feast before them. They are the cleaners, along with the crawling insects and the rain and the unending wind.
And the passage of time. There is always that. The turn of the day, of the season, of the year.
G’nurk winced when he came in sight of the torn mountain ridge. How glorious had been the charge! The minions of Obould, proud orc warriors, had swept up the rocky slope against the fortified dwarven position.
G’nurk had been there, in the front lines, one of only a very few who had survived that charge. But despite their losses in the forward ranks, G’nurk and his companions had cleared the path, had taken the orc army to the dwarven camp.
Absolute victory hovered before them, within easy reach, so it had seemed.
Then, somehow, through some dwarven trick or devilish magic, the mountain ridge exploded, and like a field of grain in a strong wind, the orc masses coming in support had been mowed flat. Most of them were still there, lying dead where they had stood proud.
Tinguinguay, G’nurk’s beloved daughter, was still there.
He worked his way around the boulders, the air still thick with dust from the amazing blast that had reformed the entire area. The many ridges and rocks and chunks of blasted stone seemed to G’nurk like a giant carcass, as if that stretch of land, like some sentient behemoth, had itself been killed.
G’nurk paused and leaned on a boulder. He brought his dirty hand up to wipe the moisture from his eyes, took a deep breath, and reminded himself that he served Tinguinguay with honor and pride, or he honored her not at all.
He pushed away from the stone, denied its offer to serve as a crutch, and pressed along. Soon he came past the nearest of his dead companions, or pieces of them, at least. Those in the west, nearest the ridge, had been mutilated by a shock wave full of flying stones.
The stench filled his nostrils. A throng of black beetles, the first living things he’d seen in the area, swarmed around the guts of a torso cut in half.
He thought of bugs eating his dead little girl, his daughter who in the distant past had so often used her batting eyes and pouting lips to coerce from him an extra bit of food. On one occasion, G’nurk had missed a required drill because of Tinguinguay, when she’d thoroughly manipulated out of him a visit to a nearby swimming hole. Obould hadn’t noticed his absence, thank Gruumsh!
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.
The Collected Stories, The Legend of Drizzt Page 26