Sheep
A fanfic in which mutton becomes unexpectedly important ...
Tags: Fanfic/D&D
[This is what happens when fiction leaves out lots of stuff that makes you nuts so you throw it all in one scene. It is, as the changeling observes, a little too-too. But I had BIG FEELS. Which is really why one writes fanfic, after all. We can put this one in Faerun, up near the Spine of the World, if you like, some years after the battle of the 1,000 orcs. Somewhere cold and hungry.]
That was when the peace council fell apart entirely.
They had gone so far as to agree not to murder each other on sight. They had gone further and established a system of wergild — terms to be determined later by the various factors and actuaries of the dwarves, gnomes, elves, goblins, men and trolls involved — administered by the local king, magistrate, warlord or mayor as applicable. They had exempted acts of immediate self-defense from the wergild system.
And then Wulf, the headman of the shepherd folk, had restated for clarification: “So: We don’t kill your folk, and your folk don’t kill us, unless the one is actively attacking the other or raiding his flocks, do I have that right?”
There was a pause while Nestor, the elf scribe, took this down. Krimzeek — the Black goblin, a cambion and a polyglot — translated for those of his party who didn’t speak common: the two women goblins, Migwit and Fangtooth, and the troll, Door Knob.
“No raiding?” asked Migwit.
“No raiding?” echoed Abigum, the big bodyguard, who wasn’t meant to say a word.
This was translated back, but the goblins and the troll, didn’t wait for a response from the elvish faction. They were on their feet, addressing their own leader, the white changeling elf stolen as a good-luck token long ago, now known as the warlord Tor.
“No raiding? No sheep? No goats, no cattle?”
“Father, you didn’t say anything — no one said anything — about no raiding. No food?”
“What will we eat?”
Tor, still seated at the long stone table, opened his indigo-stained claws placatingly. “My children, we’ll work through all these details in time — ”
“Details!!”
The men, elves, dwarves and gnome were following this flurried exchange in goblin and common as best they could. They clearly saw, though, that Tor was about to lose the trust of his own party.
“This is a side item,” said the elf king reasonably. “We can discuss it later. There’s no need — ”
Wulf, meanwhile, picked up the thread of the argument enough to interject, in a shout, “Anyone, man or goblin, who attacks my sheep will find his head nailed to my shed!”
The council about to end badly.
Tor stood up and faced his people — the goblin women Fangtooth and Migwit, who sat well back from the uncanny elf folk, Door Knob the troll listening and trusting others to think for him, but determinedly present, Abigum, ready to put his body between Tor and any violence, Krimzeek, who stood with a wry grin on his face, and young Prince Golf, son of a neighboring goblin king, who had come to see whether to throw his weight behind Tor’s faction or his father’s. Golf was looking skeptical but withholding judgment.
Standing, the changeling Tor made a contrast to his folk: taller than any but the troll, slender, white-skinned, scarred with the delighted marks of goblins claiming a stolen infant for their own.
“My children,” he said in goblin, “if you will be patient with me, we will address this once for all.”
They sat down again, all but Kremzeek, who leaned a hip on the table.
Tor looked around and his eyes picked Wulf. “My friend, show me your knife.”
The big man blustered: “Our weapons are bound by the door, you know that — ”
“Nevertheless, you have a knife at your thigh … I mean no insult. You’re wise to be careful.”
Wulf pulled out a long knife, gleaming silver.
The white goblin was wearing leather vambrances that extended almost to the base of his fingers. He picked the thongs of one loose, removed it, and set his hand palm-up on the granite table.
“Drive it into my hand.”
Silence.
The elf king, across from Tor, watched his face gravely. The others were divided between staring at Wulf and staring at Tor’s hand — pale and statue-beautiful in the dusk. They had not thought to light lamps; they were watching by the last dregs of sunset and the werelights flickering around the two elves’ heads. Tor had no lights; he sat in darkness.
Wulf blustered: “I cannot. I’d dishonor myself to strike first.”
“Even a sheep thief?” Tor asked. His eyes found Fingal, the ranger. He had sworn an oath to hunt goblins, Tor knew. Why he was here was anyone’s guess. “You, then.”
Fingal took the blade from Wulf, who handed it over as if in a daze. He just touched it to skin, finding the place, then drove the blade down.
Red blood sprang up around it. The gnome, Shotreek, put both hands over her mouth.
“My friends,” said Tor to his folk in goblin, “I serve you and no others.” Krimzeek had to translate across Tor’s words, because the warlord didn’t wait for him. The effect was an odd echo that continued as Krimzeek changed his translation from common to goblin as —
Tor met Fingal’s eye again, the barest flicker, and the man drove the knife deeper yet, biting into the granite. Blood was both flowing from underneath and welling in Tor’s palm, spilling between his fingers —
The goblins and troll nodded. The elves and men exchanged glances under their eyelids. This was too much. Foul, self-aggrandizing, vaguely erotic — definitely too much. A caricature of the way goblins acted in stories. Was it a joke?
“My friends,” he said to the rest of the company, “you see I am bound to serve my people. And I say to you now, by this blood, that what you see as a side item is life and death to us. My friends, we live in the mountains and under the ground. If we want meat, we must hunt it. If we want herbs, we must forage the woods or glean in the fields of other folk. Yet the wood are held by the elves, and if we take the smallest deer, we are poaching. The fields and the flocks are held by the men, and if we take the least lamb, we are thieving.
“What would you have us to do? Shall I tell my people: eat rocks, drink dust?
“You have driven us from the land until we have not a hand’s worth of earth to till, or a single yard of forest to hunt. And then you reproach us for feeding our children.
“Our children! One of our young may live 25 or 30 years and is venerable by 40 — did you not know that? Are you so jealous that you would deny them the handful of days they have to live in this earth?
“You smile — oh, those primitive folk can’t come to a council without getting sidetracked by livestock, by their big hungry bellies — but we will go no further — we will return home and prepare for war — without your word: my folk must have SHEEP.”
It was all too much. And suddenly it was not nearly enough. Tor sat slack at the table as if he felt nothing but the weight of his thoughts.
The elf king said: “I spoke in haste. Forgive me.”
Wulf nodded. “I take back my words, too. But your lordship, my people need to eat, too.”
Tor nodded. “Then we have something in common. Let us start there.”
By this point Tor’s blood was beginning to drip off the side of the table and even in the freezing air, the smell was rising.
Krimzeek, the cambion, drawled, “Well, all this is very dramatic, but if you’ll put that knife away, my lord, I have a thought toward a solution.” And as Fingal pulled out the blade, wiped it, and returned it to Wulf with a bow, and Tor tugged his sleeve low and tied his vambrance tight across both sleeve and wounded hand, Krimzeek continued: “There’s an ad hoc economics happening amongst all our people as it is. We take your sheep, granted. Yet you travel paths scouted and mapped and cleared by our labor. You delve in caves we have opened. You take gems we have mined and call it … treasure hunting … I believe. You travel bridges we have built and instead of compensating us for our labor, you fight our trolls who keep our ways safe.”
Door Knob looked up and nodded. “No fight troll,” he said.
“Exactly. No fight troll. We all benefit from the other’s labor, so why not codify what actually happens between us and ensure that no helpful labor goes unrewarded?”
“That sounds like a job for the numbers men,” said Fingal.
“Well, we can imagine it out a bit,” said the dwarf Loi, drawing closer, “just to make sure we’re on the same page. The goblin women, for the first time, came closer to the table. Nestor dipped his quill in the ink again.
When the conversation grew thick , Tor stood up and, cracking his back, went to lean on the wall. In the starlight he loosened his vambrance, pulled a bandage and magic potion out of a pouch at his hip, and began tending his hand.
The elf king joined him. “That was well played,” he said.
“A little too-too for this company, perhaps.”
“Why the blood?”
“My folk reproached me, and rightly. It’s a symbol — I took their reproach on myself, renewing the bond. Goblins love shedding each other’s blood, but we’ve found ways to avoid killing each other every time tempers get hot — ”
“But still. I hadn’t thought.”
“Of course you hadn’t, my lord. Goblins are monsters. Our acts of sustenance are criminal by definition, don’t you see that?”
“But you’re not interested in … economics?” The elf king nodded to the conversation bouncing back and forth across the table. Tor watched quietly for a while.
“My children care about it, and I care about them, so there’s that … at any rate, I made the same error you did, though you were kind enough not to point it out. Being deathless, one sometimes forgets what it means to have to eat.”