“No,” laughed Jon. “I guess I don’t talk about her as much, but I think about her a lot.”
“I feel sorry for the poor woman,” said Mikus who returned with an armload of wood and caught the tail end of the conversation. “Having to give birth to a boy with that giant of a head must have been a traumatic experience.”
“You don’t know the half of it, Mikus,” said Jon as he got up to help dig out a small fire pit. “I’m a twin.”
“There’s two of you?” asked Mikus and shook his head in disbelief, “I can’t believe a woman could survive such a birthing.”
“My sister is not as big as me,” said Jon, “she only comes up to here,” he said pointing to his lips.
Sorus, knew his own height of six feet and realized the girl was half a foot taller yet. “Yeah, a real shorty I bet.”
Jon laughed, “She always complains there aren’t enough tall boys in the world but I don’t think she means it. She loves to fight more than me and is already a gray captain.”
“Aren’t you a captain in your army,” said Mikus as he turned to face Jon.
Jon shook his head sadly, “My commander says I have to learn discipline before I can be a captain. I think he’s still mad about me and his daughter.”
“I don’t even want to know,” said Mikus as they put the kindling in a pile and the young squire began to scape his knife over a metal plate, which instantly produced a shower of sparks that caught light to the kindling, and soon a roaring little blaze was going.
“Those rabbits good eating?” said Jon with a motion of his head to the bunnies that romped all over the field.
“Three Maria’s,” said Sorus with a grin. “I don’t know why they call them that but they’re fine eating. They’re all over the foothills like this,” he went on. “There’s another kind too called Mountain Rabbits that are a little bigger with big white tails. We’ll bag a few this afternoon after lunch if you want to try them. Do you have rabbits up north in Tanelorn?”
Jon smiled, “I don’t think there’s anywhere with rabbits. Speaking of rabbits do you have gnolls down here,” he continued.
“I’ve heard of them,” said Mikus. “Great hairy beasts, ten feet tall and they like to laugh in this crazy way, right?”
“They are big and they are hairy but I don’t know about ten feet tall,” said Jon, “at least not where I’m from anyway. We have an expression up in Tanelorn that the bunnies made me think about. Rabbits breed like gnolls!”
“There must be a lot of them then,” said Mikus with a smile. “How come they don’t just overrun Tanelorn?”
“I fought a dog-man once,” Germanius rumbled up from the depths as he stirred some vegetables into the water not yet aboil. “Not much bigger than Jon there,” he went on, “but a wild creature he was, he fought with an obsidian blade, the stone swords are sharp but brittle. He smashed it against my shield and near broke my arm but I managed to best him in the end.”
“Where was this?” asked Jon.
“Eh?” said Germanius as he went back to the vegetables.
“Where… did… this happen?” Jon said in a loud voice.
“No need to yell,” said Germanius and then gave Jon a wink. “The old man is only mostly deaf, not completely.”
At this all three of the youngsters laughed aloud and Sorus urged the old knight to continue, “Come on Sir Germanius, tell us the story.”
“You youngsters always humoring an old knight,” said Germanius with a smile as he attended to their lunch with great diligence. “It was well west of here, in the territories of the orcs, Grelm it is now, but before that it was something else, I can’t remember. I couldn’t have been much more than twenty or so years old. There were reports that the old masters were stirring and me and some of the fellows went into the orc lands looking for any them.”
“Old masters?” whispered Jon to Sorus who replied with a nod of his head.
“I’ll tell you about them another time. Brutus Brokenhand was their slave and he escaped and founded Elekargul,” said Sorus and turned his attention back to the old man who himself had paused in his story for a brief moment to fish out a small onion and pop it into his mouth.
“I think it was Torrentius Oldhill watched the camp that night when we was attacked,” said Germanius. “He was mostly hobgoblin old Torrentius, he leapt in front of them ambushers and was near chopped in half by the dog-man but held them off long enough for the rest of us to get up. It was quite a scramble I can tell you that. At one point one of them, a little fellow, goblin or some such, jabbed a dagger right up my arse. Now boys,” said the old warrior, “let me tell you straight, don’t ever let a goblin feller jab his dagger up there unless you’re fond of screaming like a little girl every time you take a crap for the next month.”
The three young men burst into laughter, Jon and Sorus clutched each other, tears streaming down their faces, and Mikus rolled around on the ground so much so that he put the tail edge of his leather jerkin into the fire and had to throw it off and stomp it out, which led to more merriment.
After everyone finally settled down Germanius continued his story, “The way that dog fella laughed was enough to chill the bones, sorta half a laugh, half a scream, and a little something else as well. I stuck my sword in his eye and that was that, but we had to bury poor Torrentius in the morning,” finished Germanius and this sobered the boys a great deal.
“He died a hero though,” said Mikus. “I mean he saved the rest of you from getting ambushed in camp.”
Germanius nodded his head in agreement, “Every day I’m alive is because of that,” he said. “I had forgotten about that until you mentioned gnolls,” he went on. “There’s quite a number of good fellas in their grave instead of me. Sometimes I wonder if the Black Horse wanted it that way or whether it’s just the fate of things.”
“Tell me about the Black Horse. I don’t know much about your religious beliefs,” said Jon with a look to Sorus.
Sorus thought for a moment as Germanius poured the hot water off through a strainer and began to dish out piles of vegetables; carrots, onions, cauliflowers that set off a cloud of steam, onto tin plates and passed them to the boys. “The Black Horse is sort of a god to us here in Elekargul but also sort of just a thing to say. Nobody really prays to it and it doesn’t really give bounties to priests or anything,” said Sorus between bites. “We just sort of talk about him and go about our business.”
“It’s like that in Tanelorn, everyone who settles there comes from somewhere else so they all worship different gods, there isn’t anything really common to the gray city,” said Jon and gobbled down his own food in great bites. “My father doesn’t worship any gods at all but some of the gray druids are very religious.”
“Doesn’t worship any gods at all?” said Mikus.
Jon shook his head, “Nope. He says that it’s up to a man to make his own way in life and that anyone who prays for guidance is just fooling themselves.”
“That’s pretty raw,” said Mikus. “I know a lot of men who’d have something to say about that.”
Jon shrugged his shoulders, “That’s my dad. He says what he wants, or at least he used to.”
“Getting soft as he gets older?” said Sorus with a look at his friend, concern in his eyes.
Jon paused the shovel like motion and stared at Sorus for a long minute before he replied, “I don’t know. Right before I left to come here he told me that a nation… what was it… a nation without heroes is a nation run by thugs.”
“What does that mean?” said Mikus and looked at Jon who shrugged his shoulders but Germanius nodded his head and put his hand to his sword hilt.
“It means that ambitious, strong men of action drive a nation, and if those men aren’t heroes then the thugs take over. The only ones who can stop self-interested bastards are the heroes,” he said and stomped his foot. “By the balls of the Black Horse I’d like to meet your father Jon, but I’m too old, too weak. You’ll just have to act like him and I’ll settle for that.”