|
XVI
Somewhere, someone opened
up an unending supply of beer, and the mass of singing, dancing,
drinking dwarves and gnomes covered the whole of Ironforge proper well
into the next morning. Rothfus ran back and forth through the library’s
museum, swatting revelers away from the exhibits. Madoran toured the
celebration, flanked by Beren and me, accepting beer after celebratory
beer: luckily they were in dwarf-sized mugs, and quaffing them before
the next one was thrust up at me was easy, for a time.
An hour later, as the
constant flow of beer into my stomachs started to go to my head, Madoran
began bowing and excusing us from the party, steering us towards the
royal quarters, located off the Military Ward. Settling into his
office, Madoran busied himself with Beren and a stream of other dwarves
that came and went throughout the night, conquering the grueling task of
forming a new government. I was shown immediately to the royal suite’s
guest suite with its large (but not quite large enough) bed, let Ajax
out to play in the night, and slept like a baby.
* * *
Madoran woke me up some
hours later: 10 PM, according to the bedside clock. He hadn’t slept. I
packed hurriedly. Then, flanked by imperial guards, we walked through
throngs of cheering dwarves and gnomes, still celebrating, to
Ironforge’s great gate, where Allyndil, the elf priest who had healed me
after my fall, met us. “He’s a ranger,” Madoran had said about him
earlier. “He travels this northern half of the world, healing as he
can. He knows the land better than anyone.”
“Your shoulder is
better,” said the elf by way of greeting.
I glanced down at my
arm. The sling had fallen off during the pitched battle. I hadn’t
noticed, which was a good sign. “Good job healing it,” I said back, by
way of thanks.
Madoran waved goodbye to
the throngs of cheering dwarves and gnomes, elbowing me in the knee to
do so too, and then, with the setting sun turning the snow orange and
red behind us, the three of us set off for the northlands.
* * *
For almost half an hour
it was nearly pitch-black, but the road we walked was well-maintained,
with no stones askew to catch an unwary foot or hoof. Periodically,
there were short stretches of low wall with electric lamps behind them,
casting pools of yellow light into the night. Soon, as the mountains
wound away to our left, the full moon rose ahead of us, bathing the
white world in cold, white light. The snow-laden trees glimmered like
jeweled statues, standing proud guardians of the ages. We passed
reverently beneath them, and they neither noticed nor cared.
The temperature had been
cold at sunset, and as we walked I’d warmed up sufficiently. As the
night wore on, though, the temperature dropped and began to seep in
under my warm walking clothes. Soon, I was shivering.
“Are we stopping for fire
and sleep any time soon?” I asked. “I’m freezing.”
“Keep moving,” said the
elf airily. “It keeps you warmer than fire does, in the long run.”
I gritted my teeth and
began stomping my hooves a little harder as I walked, hoping to work
more blood into them.
* * *
A couple of hours or so
on I got my wish, partially. We cleared the snow out from under a tree,
squatted in the damp brush and lit a weak fire. It was barely large
enough to cook on, and trying to warm my hands over it was futile.
Allyndil warmed some meat over for us, and we munched on it with loaves
of bread which Madoran produced from his pack. I let Ajax out for the
duration of our stop, and he huddled in my lap, eating scraps of meat
and shivering.
Five minutes later we
were walking again. It was too cold to talk, too cold to sing or even
think, so we marched in silence, through the long, clear, cold moonlit
night.
* * *
The eastern edge of the
sky ahead of us was just beginning to turn a dim, pale blue before we
stopped again. I had lagged behind, my hooves and legs and nose numb
and my lungs feeling each breath like icicles in the deep pre-dawn
freeze. My teeth chattered. Ahead, without a word, Allyndil touched
Madoran on the shoulder, and they halted. With the moon set and the
sun’s light still unrecognizably far off, the world had returned to near
blackness. It had been hours since we’d past our last lamp post. Our
surroundings, near as I could make out, were hills with trees and snow,
same as they’d been the entire trip. The stars disappeared quickly to
the north, to our left: there were mountains nearby. To the south, the
stars extended nearly all the way down to the proper horizon: the land
must be surprisingly flat and clear there, I thought.
We turned south, and,
wading through snow up to my ankles, made our way slowly away from the
road. Allyndil led, with Madoran trailing behind me making swooshing
noises. “What’s going on back there?” I said, and I regretted speaking
immediately as I watched precious body heat condense and drift away with
my breath.
“Covering up our path, I
hope,” said Madoran. “Either that or making it a lot more obvious.”
The dwarf didn’t seem to be concerned with body heat.
Why cover our tracks? I
thought. Was he worried we were being followed? I didn’t open my mouth
and say it, though.
That point just before the sunrise arrived where
the sky and the world grows lighter by the second, spreading blue over
everything and wiping out the stars. All of a sudden I could see my
feet, and my companions, and the world around me again as more than
shadows against shadows. The ground was rising slightly, and, behind
us, the road wound along beneath a steep ridge. The flat field we were
walking through was becoming brushy, with thick, hibernating bushes
clawing at our pants and dropping snow as we walked through.
Then the field ended suddenly, dropping down ten
feet into a large, flat, rectangular depression, shallowing out to the
right and getting deeper off to the left, where it ended abruptly at a
similar, though much higher, drop. Without comment or preamble,
Allyndil leapt off the edge, landing lightly on his feet at the bottom.
Madoran lept down a moment later, landing, if not lightly, then at least
on his feet. He grunted in pain. I sat down at the drop’s edge,
gripping it with my big hands, and dangled until my arms were extended,
then let go and dropped the remaining inches to the ground.
“No line of sight to the road down here,” winked
Madoran to me.
“This doesn’t look natural,” I shivered.
“It used to be a strip mine,” said Allyndil, “the
ugliest and most disrespectful way there is to get what you need from
the ground.”
“Well,” said Madoran, “it’s not like ye can just
ask it fer what ye need and it’ll just pop it out of the ground for ye.”
“You’re right,” said the elf lightly, “they’d call
that ‘agriculture’.” I was too cold to think it was funny.
* * *
Madoran and I built a
fire out of brush and tinder while Allyndil snuck off to make sure our
tracks had been hidden.
“Why the secrecy?” I
asked the dwarf, once the fire was blazing and the blood was returning
to my face and brain. I had wrapped myself up in my sleeping blanket.
“Ironforge is the capital
of Khaz Modan ,” he said, “and whoever rules Ironforge rules it. The
Heralds of the Titans laced the countryside with willing and coerced
agents, though, and word will be slow in getting out to them that their
rightful king has returned.”
“That’s you,” I said,
grinning.
“Yer damn right it is,”
said Madoran good-naturedly. I was relieved: I had worried that banter
appropriate to a prince would be not so with a King. “At any rate,” he
continued, “we’ll run into fewer of them at night, and even so I’m quite
certain that we’ll fight some fights before we leave this land,” he
said.
Allyndil returned,
dangling a pair of rabbits from each fist. “That was fast,” I said.
“Rabbits are easy,” he
replied. “The dumb things just jump about on top of the snow waiting to
be caught.” He knelt with us next to the fire and began skinning and
gutting them.
“Were our tracks gone?”
said Madoran.
“Aye,” said the elf,
“replaced with the tracks of a dwarf walking backwards waving his arms
in the snow.” Madoran laughed heartily.
The rabbits were set to
roasting. Allyndil, in a stoic approximation of enthusiasm, asked for
the story of our battle, and Madoran launched immediately into an
animated recounting of it. He deferred to me at the point that our
paths had diverged, and I did my best to take over. The dwarf clicked
his tongue when I was discovered by the guard – “Too hasty, young Horse,
too hasty.” – but he cheered at the door landing perfectly and at my
game of bang the dwarf on the head. “Knock ‘em out an’ not kill ‘em,
good lad.” The elf listened in a stoic approximation of rapt.
Madoran insisted on
taking back over when his populist army arrived, and told my part in the
final battle as the most amazing, heroic maneuver that I had ever heard
described: I sailed out over the heads of the separatist army, becoming
a great bear, landing in their midst and scattering them like paper….
Allyndil looked piercingly at me for a moment. “It wasn’t quite that
grand,” I said, embarrassed. Allyndil nodded, his face now blank.
“You’d make a terrible
politician,” Madoran muttered, then continued the story. When he got to
the part where he selected me and Beren as the heroes of the night, I
protested again.
“Why me?” I said. “Why
not just Beren, or Beren and the librarian?”
“Rothfus would have hated
the attention,” said Madoran. Me too! I thought. “Beren, of course,
needed to be introduced before they’d accept him as my stand-in. As for
you…” he glanced at the fire. “It looks pretty bad when a king returns
at the head of a mighty army to retake his kingdom, and then leaves
right away for a vacation to the northlands.” Allyndil snorted at the
phrase. “But I’m not, am I?” he said. “I’m repaying a debt, owed by
the people of Ironforge, to a national hero. Sounds much better that
way.”
Despite my hesitance at
accepting the mantle of hero, his writing it off handily deflated me a
little. Madoran saw it. “You were a hero,” he said gently. “So was
everyone else that threw themselves into battle for the love of home.
You, though, you stood fast for love and home which wasn’t yours. I
would have gilded you either way, but your bravery, and your
selflessness,
and that bear move of yours, they made it easy for me.” He paused.
“You haven’t got the poise of one yet,” he said,
“but I meant it when I
said you have the heart of a hero.”
The sun was up off the
horizon and the world was warming noticeably by the time the rabbit meat
was ready. The elf divvied it up between us, roughly by size and
metabolism rate. It was savory and crisped, and I ate greedily. I let
Ajax out to play. “I ‘ave got to get me one o’ those,” said Madoran as
the cat nuzzled my big fingers. “They keep yer blood pressure down, I’m
told.”
We settled in, wrapped in
our blankets and pillowing our heads on our packs. Ajax curled up
against me, purring and providing much-welcomed warmth. “Another
night’s journey and we’ll be out of the mountains,” said Madoran, “then
another night and a half until we reach the shallow sea to the north.”
The elf and I grunted, absorbing the information and fading fast.
My legs and back were
sore. Since my journey had begun, the most sleep I’d gotten, aside from
being in a coma at the top of a mountain for a day and a half, was a few
hours snatched in tiny beds at the wrong end of days. Now, the sun
rising overhead and the infinite ground for a mattress, I tossed and
turned, cold and frustratedly sure that I would be awake for hours.
Then I tossed and turned again, and then, a moment later, I had fallen
asleep.
XVII
|
|
