“Drop an Empire cat and it will land on its feet. Drop a Strigany cat, and you will land on your head.”
– Empire saying Most of the Empire’s settlements had been created by the same natural forces that had created its forests, mountains and rivers. Marienburg, for example, had been formed by the flow of the River Reik. Its treacherous currents and shattered islands had drawn the first settlements of smugglers, and then their comrades, and then the merchants and artisans that the growing community had needed, and eventually the merchants themselves.
Talabheim, on the other hand, had been forged by stone rather than by water. Its sheer cliffs had made it a natural fortress for the first ragged hunters who had stumbled across it, and it had been inhabited by their ancestors ever since.
Then there was Nuln. Until the dwarf technology of black powder had fallen into the hands of man, the confluence of the embryonic iron and sulphur trade routes had been irrelevant. Then, the first cannon had been cast, and suddenly the village of Nuln had grown into the very arsenal of the Empire.
Flintmar was different. No trade routes fed it, or rivers, or roads. It guarded no mountain pass or rich farmlands. No religion found relevance in it, and no king had ever wanted it.
It was no more than a wasteland of sour water, bitter growth and constant, swarming mosquitoes.
Although there was no logical reason for it to exist, Flintmar did exist, the only settlement in the Empire to have been created by pure, unadulterated politics.
As the Strigany had arrived at this miserable place of exile, Flintmar had sprung up as suddenly as fungi on a forest floor, and, already its squalor was enough to equal any other town in the Empire.
No paving stones covered the mud of its roads. Its shallow latrines were more often than not open pits with perhaps a scrap of old canvas for privacy. Dogs roamed through the encampment, looking even leaner than usual, and clouds of flies had already begun to join the swarming mosquitoes that had gathered to add to the misery of the place.
That was Flintmar, a fitting tribute to the character of the man who had created it, and who, even now, was willing its destruction.
If any other people had been forced into such a place, no doubt their hearts would have broken, their spirits snapped, their will extinguished, but not the Strigany, and certainly not Dannie or Mihai.
They were, after all, about to fall in love.
Neither of the two men would ever forget the first time they saw her. At Brock’s orders, the two of them had been walking around the ragged edges of their sprawling settlement, checking that the barricades were being properly maintained. They carried axes and coils of rope slung over their shoulders, and by the time they reached the loose, open circle of Malfi’s caravan, they were already plastered with mud and sweat from their endeavours.
Chera, on the other hand, was as fresh as a new dawn. She had finished her day’s work, and now sat, washed and refreshed, on the seat of her wagon. The thick rope of her braided ponytail gleamed on the pale skin of her shoulders, and the linen shift she wore was thin enough to reveal the supple grace of her body as she played the harp.
Both Dannie and Mihai stopped when they saw her. Chera didn’t notice them. She was lost in the complexities of her instrument, and of the music that she was playing. It was a new composition, and, like all of her new compositions, it seemed to be writing itself. She felt as though her fingers were being played by the music, instead of the other way around, and she was lost in the race to keep up with the tune that played through her.
As the two men listened, the music changed. At first, it had been a lullaby, sweet enough for the sourest ear.
Now, it speeded up, building into a wild, beating rhythm that set their blood racing and their tired feet itching to move.
“Shall we?” Mihai asked turning to his friend with a mock bow.
Dannie looked at him uncomprehendingly. Mihai held out his arm, and Dannie grinned, only half embarrassed. He had got used to Mihai’s sudden, wild enthusiasms.
“Come on,” Mihai said, “with music like that it would be rude not to dance.”
Dannie grinned, and, dropping his tools, began to dance. He linked arms with Mihai, and the two spun each other around in a high-kicking jig.
They were clumsy, tired by the day’s labours, and heavy-footed with boots clogged with mud, but they danced with a will. A gaggle of children, who had been following them with the unthinking instinct of born pickpockets, started laughing. Then somebody started to clap a beat to accompany their stumbling performance, and soon others joined in.
By the time Chera realised that she had an audience, the two men were dancing in a ring of clapping Strigany. For a moment, she played on, her fingers flitting over the chords with a will of their own. Then she stopped, and the music came to an awkward halt.
Dannie and Mihai gave a final pirouette, and, to the cheers of their audience, bowed. When they turned to Chera, it was to find her blushing bright red.
She looks as delicate as the first blush of colour on a new rose, thought Dannie.
Mihai wondered how it would be to be held by her as she was holding the harp.
“Good afternoon, domnuezuella,” both men said in perfect harmony.
“Good afternoon,” Chera said, and put a hand over her mouth. These two were both so handsome, she thought, and so different. The one with the strange white hair bore himself with such dignity, and with a certain sadness, too. His friend, on the other hand, was red-haired and blue-eyed, and wore the brightest smile she had ever seen.
She glanced from Dannie to Mihai, and then back again, and all of a sudden she felt something apart from her usual shyness at strangers.
“The way that you played that music,” Dannie said, “was masterful.”
“We thank you for it, domnuezuella,” Mihai added. “I’ve never heard better.”
“It was wonderful,” Dannie added, not to be outdone. “I’ve never heard that tune before, either.”
Mihai looked at him.
“I’ve been trying to interest my friend in this beautiful art for a long time,” he told Chera. “I’m glad he recognises how brilliant your recital was.”
Dannie barely paused before replying.
“Even a deaf man would have recognised your playing for the art that it was, domnuezuella,” he said.
“I made it up just now,” Chera said, surprising herself at her bravery in talking to these men. Work, or even combat was one thing, but romance…
She felt her cheeks burning, and raised her hands to cover her face.
“Really?” Dannie asked. “You created such beauty out of thin air?”
“It was wonderful,” Mihai added.
There was a moment of silence as the three of them tried to think of something else to say. Chera, remembering the magic that Maria had worked upon her, lowered her hands.
Mihai tried not to stare at her. Dannie sighed, and sought inspiration in the clouds. The small crowd that been clapping their performance a moment ago, looked on with fresh amusement.
“I would like to give you a gift,” Mihai said, at last thinking of something to say. “So that maybe you will play for us again.”
“What a good idea,” said Dannie.
Chera shook her head.
“I don’t mind playing for you again,” she said. “Strig-any are all one family. You don’t have to give me anything.”
“We must give you something in return,” Dannie said solemnly. “It is our way. Anyway, there must be something that you miss in this place.”
Chera looked past the wagons, and out into the drab heath beyond. The shadows of the clouds rolled across it, as black as night, but even where the sun shone there was no colour for it to catch amongst the mud and gorse, and withered grasses.
“I miss flowers,” she said.
“Then flowers,” Mihai said with a bow, “it shall be.”
Chera wriggled with embarrassment, clasping her harp. The two men watched the way that the curves beneath her shift moved, and the way that the pinkness of her flesh showed beneath the stretched white cloth. Both realised that they’d do anything but kill to be the first to return with their tribute.
Maybe they’d even do that.
“Might we ask your name, domnuezuella, so that we know for which beauty we are seeking the blooms?” Mihai asked.
“Her name,” said a voice from behind him, “is Chera, and my name is Malfi, Domnu Malfi. I am her father.”
Dannie and Mihai turned to find Malfi standing behind them. They saw the scowl on his face, the strength of his arms, and the cleaver that he wore at his belt. It was not a romantic sight.
“Good afternoon, domnu,” Mihai said.
“We wanted to see if you needed a hand with your section of the barricade,” Dannie added.
“How neighbourly. In fact, it does seem that our barricades aren’t yet strong enough to keep out the undesirables.”
“Well, that’s why we’re here,” Mihai said, pretending not to understand.
“Yes, you are still here, aren’t you?” Malfi said. He glared at the younger man, who shifted uncomfortably.
“We were just going,” Dannie told him, “unless you have anything that needs to be done?”
Malfi said nothing. Instead, he let his hand fall to the handle of his cleaver.
“Right, we’ll be off then,” said Dannie.
Mihai followed him to the edge of the encampment. Then he turned and smiled at Chera. She smiled back, before he turned back away, and, beneath her father’s glare, hurried off.
“Oh Father!” she said, stamping one foot down upon the running board of her wagon.
“Don’t take that tone with me,” Malfi retorted. “I won’t have vagabonds wandering around our camp. And why don’t you go and put some more clothes on? You’ll catch a cold.”
With that, he turned, and stomped off to make sure that their barricade was completed by nightfall.
Chera watched him go, and, still scowling, put her harp away. It would have been nice to have been brought some flowers. It would have been nice to have seen those men again, but, now that her father had frightened them away, she knew that she’d never see either of them again. The next morning dawned cold and grey, the chill a promise of the winter that was on its way. A sleeting drizzle angled in from the east, and the mud into which Flintmar was sinking had already become ankle deep.
Mihai had risen with the dawn, and boiled a pot of water in the brass stove of his wagon. Boris and Bran woke up as the smell of burning charcoal and tea filled the wagon in which all three slept.
“So what are we doing today?” Bran asked, sitting up and rubbing his eyes. Mihai had opened the wagon’s rear door to let out the smoke and the steam. Boris took one look at the weather outside before making a suggestion.
“I say we make some crossbow bolts, or maybe,” he said, yawning and stretching comfortably within the cosy confines of the wagon, “we should just decide what we’ll say at council tonight. I hear the domnu will be elected as Kazarkhan. The one-eyed old tyrant will make a good one too, I reckon. Remember-”
“The bastards that tried to rob us after we left Lerenstein?” Bran finished for him, and grinned wickedly. “It was almost as if the domnu knew they were there. I bet they hadn’t taken such a beating as we gave them in their whole miserable lives.”
“The domnu used to be a mercenary didn’t he, Mihai?” Boris asked “Mihai?”
“What was that?” Mihai asked. He had been lost in his plans, as he had gazed into the rain, but now he poured the tea and passed the wooden bowls to his friends.
“Your father,” Bran told him, “he used to be a mercenary, didn’t he?”
Mihai grunted, and winced at the scalding heat of the tea. He was drinking it quickly, eager to be about his business.
“Yes, he was. That’s how he lost his eye.”
“So,” Bran began.
“Think he’ll be elected Kazarkhan?” Boris finished.
“If they’ve got any sense,” Mihai said. He nodded, and slurped down the rest of his tea. “After all, it isn’t a personality contest, so the miserable old devil stands a good chance. Right, I’m off. See you tonight.”
“Off?” asked Bran, who had been blowing on his tea.
“Off where?” Boris asked.
Mihai couldn’t help it. He looked shifty. The twins were suddenly alert.
“You don’t have to tell us if you don’t want to,” Bran said.
“Because we’ll find out anyway,” Boris explained.
“Oh, it’s nothing. I’m just going back to that forest we passed on the way here. I want to find some wood for making crossbow bolts with.”
“Plenty of seasoned wood here,” said Boris, reasonably.
“The best sort of ash, too,” his brother nodded.
“Yes, well you can work on that, and I’ll restock our supplies.” Mihai smiled at his own invention. “Can’t be running out of seasoned wood, even for crossbow bolts, and I saw a good few stands of ash in that forest.”
“Looked more like oak to me,” Boris said, frowning.
“Like you’d know oak from ash,” Bran said, rolling his eyes.
“You’ll know oak from ash from my fist if you don’t shut up,” Boris told him, conversationally.
“Going to use it to wipe your eyes with?” Bran asked from within the safety of his blankets.
“Idiot,” Boris said, affectionately.
“Fool,” Bran muttered, and drank his tea. “Hey, where’s Mihai gone?”
“Must have grown tired of your arguing,” Boris said, and dragged a sackcloth bundle down from its wicker shelf. He unrolled it to reveal a bundle of thick wooden shafts. Bran found the box of goose feathers, and started splitting them into fletch for the arrows Boris had started shaping with his knife.
“How much do you want to bet he’s gone to collect ash from the forest?” he asked after a while.
Boris sniggered.
“Girl, you reckon?”
“No doubt about it. Not that I blame him. There’s a whole caravan of seamstresses, apparently. Grigor was telling me. Imagine it, every single one of ’em for sale. Fat ones, skinny ones, old ones, young ones: you just go in and take your pick. If you’ve got the coin, of course.”
Both men paused in their task, and looked wistfully out into the sodden settlement beyond.
“Let’s get about making some coin, then,” Bran said and, thus inspired, the twins got stuck into their morning’s work. Mihai was glad that he’d been able to slip away. For a moment, he’d considered going on foot, so that he would be able to slip around the pickets that blocked the road out of Flintmar. He’d dismissed the idea almost as soon as it had occurred, though. If his excuse was good enough for the twins, it would be good enough for the men on the barricade, and anyway, it was too far to walk.
He would need time to look around if he was going to find a nice enough bloom in this season.
It would have been nice to have brought the twins to help him, but he hadn’t even considered that for a moment. There was no way, absolutely no way, that he was going to tell them that he was going to all this trouble to pick some flowers.
“This is ridiculous,” he muttered to himself, as his horse trudged unhappily into the sheeting rain. Mihai’s waxed cloak was already dripping, and it flapped up in the sudden gusts, so that his breeches were soon wet too.
Even as he said the words, he knew that they weren’t true. Not going to fetch Chera her flowers, now that would have been ridiculous. She was, Mihai had decided, the most gorgeous woman he had ever seen, and he had seen a few. It was just that, somehow, the tavern girls and seamstresses that he had so cheerfully bedded, had never had anything like this effect on him.
It wasn’t just that she was lovely, he considered, although she certainly was. Everything about her, from the curve of her hips to the tilt of her nose, was perfect. No, it was much more than that. Maybe it was something to do with the music.
For no good reason, he suddenly remembered the night in Lerenstein when he had sung the charm to quieten the guard dogs of the inn that they’d burgled. Then, the thought was gone, and his attention returned to the way that Chera’s hair had gleamed in its braided tress, and the way that her shift had flushed pink where the thin material had been stretched across her chest.
Mihai was lost deep in a fantasy, in which he was heroically saving her from a band of marauding orcs, when he noticed that another rider was ahead of him on the road out of Flintmar. In the sheeting rain, it was impossible to see who it was, but Mihai spurred his horse on anyway, curiosity getting the better of him. As he drew nearer to the rider, curiosity gave way, first to suspicion, and then to dismay.
The rider wasn’t wearing a hood, and his sodden white hair was recognisable anywhere.
“Dannie,” Mihai said as he drew level with him.
“Oh,” Dannie, who had been hunched against the rain, said, looking as dismayed to see his friend as his friend had been to see him. “Mihai.”
“What are you doing out in this filthy weather?” Mihai asked.
Dannie shrugged and looked away.
“You know that I am apprenticed to the petru,” he said. “I spend my time on all sorts of tasks.”
Mihai nodded sceptically.
“This task wouldn’t be taking you to where those wolf roses were in flower back in those woods, would it?”
Dannie grinned. “My task might take me there, and where are you going in this filthy weather?”
“I thought that it would be a nice day to gather some staves from the forest,” Mihai said, and wiped the sheen of rainwater off his face.
“What a coincidence,” Dannie replied, his tone the driest thing in a hundred miles. “We might as well go together, then.”
Mihai nodded. So, he wouldn’t be the only one to bring Chera flowers. That was all right. He’d just have to make sure that the ones he brought were the best.
The barricade soon loomed up out of the downpour ahead of them, and a pair of miserable pickets strolled forward to wave them down. Although both men were swaddled in cloaks, the rain had made rats’ tails of their beards, and they were shivering.
“Are you the relief?” one of them asked hopefully.
“No,” Dannie said, “I am the apprentice of Petru Engel, from the caravan of Brock. My business is elsewhere.”
“Damn,” the picket said, making no attempt to hide his disappointment, “and who are you?”
“I’m looking after him,” Mihai said.
“You’d better go through, then, but remember that you’ll be outside of Flintmar, so you’ll be outlaws until you return.”
“We’ll keep our wits about us,” Dannie told him, and, with a final, disappointed glance down the road, the two pickets went to untie a section of the barricade so that the two men could pass.
“Right then,” Mihai said when they were out of earshot, “shall we race to that clearing? It can’t be more than a couple of miles away.”
“In this weather? You’re crazy.”
Even so, when Mihai spurred his horse into a gallop, Dannie didn’t hesitate to join him in his mad dash through the sheeting rain. “These aren’t as nice as I remember,” Mihai said as he plucked one of the dog roses from the bush. In the week since he had passed it, the petals had turned brown, as though singed, and, as well as being discoloured, they were also limp and wilted.
“It’s a shame,” Dannie agreed.
Both men had dismounted to search through the flowering bushes that grew in the clearing. The rain had given way to sunshine. The forest floor was steaming and the wet autumn leaves gleamed as though freshly created. The water and sunlight had come too late to save the flowers, though. Their season had well and truly finished.
“I suppose that we could give her some flowers made out of wire and cloth. Hradic the tailor does that,” Mihai suggested.
“Good idea,” Dannie agreed. “I think that I’ll stay here for a bit though, as it’s stopped raining.”
Mihai nodded.
“You’re right. There are plenty of other places to look. What’s that blue one called that grows in the autumn?”
“Blueskife,” Dannie told him. “It’s good for gout and rheumatism.”
“How romantic,” Mihai said, and Dannie snorted.
“Romantic or not, I don’t know if it grows amongst oaks.”
“Let’s find out,” Mihai said, and so, vaulting back up onto their horses, the two men rode slowly off into the depths of the forest. It was Dannie’s mare who saved them. Although the rainstorm had long since dried up, the wind still blew strong enough to set the forest’s branches crashing and rattling against each other in a constant, deafening rhythm. Although neither the Strigany nor their mounts could hear anything, apart from the steady roar of the wind in the trees, it didn’t stop Dannie’s mare from smelling the danger that lay ahead.
She stopped suddenly, and, when Dannie nudged her with her heels, she stubbornly refused to walk on. Instead, she shifted nervously from side to side, and whinnied a warning.
“What’s up with her?” Mihai asked.
“Something,” Dannie frowned. “Something ahead, something she doesn’t like.”
Both men turned to look along the deer path that they had been following. Apart from the constant flurries of falling brown leaves there was no movement. There was certainly no sign of any danger.
“Whatever it is, we should check it out,” Mihai decided, eyes brightening with the promise of adventure.
Dannie’s frown deepened. His mare was a stolid old thing, and it wasn’t like her to jump at shadows. The last time she had been so nervous had been before the orcs had fallen upon them in the mountains, the day before he had found his caravan.
“All right,” he said, not wanting to dwell on that particular memory. “Let’s go, quietly though.”
He whispered something soothing into his mare’s twitching ears and stroked her neck, and, eventually, she consented to walk on down the path.
They had gone for no more than a hundred yards when both men heard the first sounds of the danger ahead. There was a slow, drawn-out crash that sounded like a falling tree, an explosion of fleeing birds from the surrounding forest, and a chorus of wild voices.
Without exchanging a word, both of the Strigany slipped from their horses, and led them off the track. Mihai tied their reins around the branch of a tree, the slipknots perfect for a quick escape. Dannie, meanwhile, disappeared into the undergrowth.
He stooped down to crawl beneath the briars on his knuckles and knees. The detritus of the forest floor was cold and wet. It soaked through his breeches, and scraped his fists, as he made his way up to the top of the nearest hill. He paid no heed to the discomfort, though. As he moved through the tangled undergrowth, all of his senses were straining to make sense of the uproar ahead. At times, he wondered if it was an illusion, that perhaps he was imagining voices in the windblown forest, in the same way that he had once heard the sea in a conch shell.
Then he crested the ridge that marked the end of the forest proper, and, in the grasslands below, he saw that this was no illusion.
His eyes widened in disbelief at the sight below, and, for a moment, he froze. Then he slowly lowered himself on to his stomach, and, ignoring the things that wriggled below him, slithered forwards to gain a better view.
“Sigmar’s balls,” he whispered.
“You can say that again,” Dannie whispered back. He had crept up to lie beside his friend, and, although he knew that there was no need to whisper, or even to lower his voice, he whispered anyway.
The creatures they had found were maybe three hundred yards away, and even if the wind wracked forest hadn’t been so loud, the things would have been deafened by the noise they were making.
“What are they?” Mihai whispered, his voice even softer.
Dannie just shrugged. Their was no doubt that the sound they had heard had indeed been that of a falling tree. A dozen of them lay on the pastureland below, scattered behind the creatures that had torn from the edge of the forest. Their branches were still clothed with the russet colours of autumn leaves, and their roots were still clogged with fresh soil.
Three hundred yards beyond the last of these splintered trunks a great canvas encampment sprawled out across the grass, a whole city of tents, shelters and bivouacs. The organised chaos of these disparate shelters were grouped into little islands, separated by muddy streets, and, in the centre of each of the hundred separate encampments, there fluttered a pennant, each of which was more garishly decorated than the last.
Some were topped with gilded carvings. Others with the skulls of unrecognisable beasts, or great sprays of coloured feathers. One even had what seemed to be the remains of a man still locked into an iron cage. Men moved among the tents, as busily as ants in an upturned nest. They were tending cooking fires, sharpening weapons, smoking and gambling, and doing any one of the hundred other things that encamped soldiers do.
Dannie had no interest in the mysterious army, at least for now. He was interested in the things that were busily pulling the forest apart, as casually as children weeding a vegetable garden.
There were two of them, and they were massive. Despite the fact that they were slouched so low that their heads were held no higher than their shoulders, both stood as tall as the oaks they were felling. Apart from the shapeless loincloths, which they wore swaddled around them, they were naked, and, despite their terrifying stature, they looked scrawny and malnourished. Ribs as big as ships’ staves showed through the grimy skin of their chests, and the bones of their joints could be seen white in their elbows and wrists.
Malnourished or not, there was no mistaking the sheer, blind power that the creatures wielded. The Strigany watched, as they clumsily tried to loop great cables around two more trees. Their piggy eyes narrowed in concentration as they did so, and their sloping foreheads were furrowed.
Threading a cable around a tree was obviously as mentally challenging for them as it was physically easy. One of them pulled the mess of knots it had made, and the whole lot came crashing free of the branches.
It roared with frustration, the cry booming through the forest with a bone-rattling depth. The noise seemed more like a force of nature than a voice.
Despite himself, Dannie felt his pulse accelerating in instinctive terror, and he pressed his body further into cover, as the creature stamped down with one bare foot. There was a crash of splintering timber from the wrecked mess that surrounded it, and a branch as long as a wagon was sent catapulting through the air.
Dannie watched its trajectory, and, for the first time, he noticed the crowd of men who were watching from the edge of the camp. They yelled with surprise as the piece of lumber spun towards them, and scattered as it thudded into the ground.
The creature, whose fit of pique had almost been the death of a dozen of them, paid no heed to their complaints. Its head cleared by the sudden violence, it had managed to loop the cable around the trunk. It looked ridiculously pleased with itself as it stood there, and, when the men’s howls of protest gave way to a mocking cheer, it smiled and drooled with pleasure.
“So, these are what giants look like,” Dannie said. “As moronic as they are massive, it says in the lore.”
“Giants!” Mihai echoed.
Dannie turned and looked at him, one eyebrow raised.
Spurred on by its fellow’s success, the second giant had managed to secure its tree, too. It had wrapped the cable three times around it, and was struggling to remember what to do with the ends of the ropes. It looked to its fellow for inspiration. There wasn’t much there. Content with the job it had done so far, the first giant had lapsed into comatose contentment, its eyes vacant as it stared over some far horizon.
“Not the sharpest tools in the box, are they?” Mihai whispered as, fumbling all the while, the second giant finally remembered how to wrap the ropes around its wrists. The circlets of bruised skin that ringed them showed that it had done the same thing many times before. Even so, it took it a few attempts before it managed to wrap the sackcloth around its limbs.
Only then did the crowd of spectators part, and the giants’ handler, a man resplendent in an ankle-length leather jerkin, step forward. He held a great pewter cone in one hand, open at both ends, and a jug of something foamy in the other. He took a long swig of it before raising the loud hailer to his lips and speaking.
“Ungrol!” he bellowed. The sound of his voice was loud enough, even for the hidden Strigany to hear, and the first of the giants turned in response to its name. There was a wild cheer from the gathered men, as well as some booing. Ungrol looked vacantly towards them, and both the cheering and the booing stopped, so suddenly that they might have been cut off by a guillotine’s blade.
“Belnar!” the man bellowed, and the second giant looked around with a dazed expression. He too had his supporters and detractors among the gathering, and they risked another roar of cheers and catcalls.
“Get ready,” the man with the megaphone bellowed, raising his voice above the hubbub around him. Both giants turned back towards the oaks they had secured, looking surprised to find themselves attached to them. Ungrol raised his hands, and examined the ropes that he held as if he had never seen them before. Belnar just broke wind. It was a spectacular rip of sound that set the watching men howling with laughter.
“Pull!” roared their handler.
Nothing happened, and the crowd’s laughter degenerated into a storm of advice, most of it disgusting. The man with the loud hailer turned to them, and, waving the pewter cone around like a marshal’s baton, he cursed them into silence. Only then did he turn back to the waiting giants.
“Pull!” he bellowed again. “Ungrol. Belnar, pull! Pull!”
Ungrol, inspired by some flash of wild genius, pulled hesitantly on his rope until he met some resistance. He paused, and then, with a sudden, deafening howl of irritation, he flung his weight back against the rope, and, shoulders bulging, started to pull on the oak.
For a moment, his fellow simply stood and stared at him, something that filled one half of the spectators with as much rage as it filled the other half with glee.
“Pull, Belnar!” the man in the great coat bellowed, sounding suddenly nervous as several enraged spectators started to close in on him, “pull!”
Whether it was the pleading tone in the handler’s voice, or the example of his fellow that did it, the giant did pull. He shifted, his bare feet pushing up great mounds of soil and turf as they slipped about, and he began to emit a deep, tidal growl of exertion.
Muscles bulged beneath the giants’ grimy skin, and the cloth mosaics of their loincloths slipped and shifted unnervingly as they strained against the stubborn resistance of the trees. The oaks, Dannie noticed, were at the prime of their lives. They must have stood for generations, weathering storms, fires and diseases, and they weren’t about to give up now.
The giants obviously lacked his philosophical nature. After only a few minutes, the resistance of the tree’s deeply buried roots, and the shouts of encouragement and scorn from the watching crowd, became too much for one of the giants. Its grunts of exertion grew in volume, until they were loud enough to drown out even the hundreds of voices of the spectators. Then its temper snapped. Abandoning the dubious benefits of technology, it dropped the cable, and charged the tree with a snarl that sounded like an avalanche. The ground thundered beneath its feet, and as its body crashed against the tree trunk. It seemed that it had won.
Although the oak bent back, it neither splintered nor broke. Instead, as the giant stood back, it sprang back up, and whipped its topmost branches across his face. The giant, outraged by the treachery of this attack, screamed with fury, and grabbed the tree trunk with fingers the size of hams. Its contorted features flushed bright red as it squeezed and shook the tree, apparently trying to strangle it.
“As massive as they are moronic, you say?” Mihai asked, raising his voice over the commotion.
“Almost,” Dannie said. Then he winced as the giant slipped. Its sliding feet threw up great gouts of mud and turf, and, tearing off the top of the tree, it crashed to the ground.
The Strigany could feel the impact of its collapse reverberating through the ground beneath them. The tree, which the giant had been trying to strangle, sprang back up in ragged triumph.
The giant struggled to sit up, eyes blinking and mouth open with surprise. It looked at the tree, and then at its hands. Then its face screwed up, and, wrapping its arms around its knees, it leaned forwards, and started to howl.
“I don’t believe it,” Mihai said, as the giant rocked back and forth, “it’s crying.”
Dannie was about to disagree, when he saw the tears that were sheeting down its face.
“So much for the mighty and terrible creatures, descendants of the sky folk,” he said.
Mihai sniggered. As the two watched, the second giant dropped his ropes and lurched over to where its fellow sat. It stood over him as he blubbered. Then it reached down, and, with a blow that would have crushed an ox, patted him on the head.
“Sympathetic fellow, isn’t he?” Dannie asked.
“More than can be said of the crowd,” Mihai replied. He was looking beyond the giants to the near riot that had broken out among the spectators. Fists had already been raised, and, whenever the weeping giant paused for breath, a storm of invective could be heard.
“Why do gamblers always take disappointment so badly?” Mihai wondered. “It’s not as though they ever win.”
“Not against us, perhaps,” Dannie allowed, “but when they gamble among themselves some of them must win. That big fellow with the pink face and the drawn sword, for instance, I bet his luck’s in more often than not.”
“It’s the one with the loud hailer I’m interested in,” said Mihai.
“Not doing him much good now, is it?” Dannie said.
Nor was it. The mob’s disappointment at the giants’ lack of professionalism had found an immeasurably safer target in the form of their handler. He was backing away from a knot of angry men, his hands waving as he tried to reason with them. Eventually, he retreated behind his loud hailer and bellowed something about all bets being off.
It was a mistake. For a moment, the cries of outraged sportsmanship grew so loud that they could be heard above the fading sobs of the giant. The man in the leather coat, who was obviously no stranger to such controversy, made the right decision. He turned and ran towards the relative safety that could be found beneath his charges’ mighty fists.
“Bet you a penny he makes it,” Mihai said, as, leather coat billowing, the man sprinted away from his pursuers.
“No,” Dannie said. “Look at that turn of speed. Anyway, look. They’re already dropping back.”
“I reckon that’s enough spying for one day.”
Dannie and Mihai turned to ask what the other had meant. Then they looked behind them.
There stood half a dozen men. The black-tarred steel of their scale armour, and their well-oiled leather harnesses marked them out as soldiers. So did the stealth with which they had come upon the two Strigany, and the solid, unadorned crossbows that they were aiming at them.
“We were just going,” said Mihai.
The soldiers’ leader grinned, and stood back, as two of his men stepped forward to bind the Striganies’ wrists.