Chapter 14: The Great Barbarian Brawl

I had been in two gnome attacks by then, and I thought I knew what one looked like. I had seen the badgers and the cabbages and the spiked ale barrel. I had seen Grimble on his pile of dead badgers waving a table leg. I had thought, privately, that if this was the worst the gnomes had, the Skullcrushers would be fine.

The first two had been the gnomes being polite.

They came through the open gate in blocks with their shields locked, and I watched them upside down, thousands of them, with the trees behind still full of red hats. I couldn’t count them, and I can count anything that might be worth stealing. Badgers came with them carrying lancers, and behind the trees the catapults were winding up.

The first volley came over the wall while the Skullcrushers were still jumping down off the wall walks. It wasn’t cabbages this time. It was jars. Little clay jars came tumbling down out of the sky by the dozen and smashed on the snow and the tents and the barbarians’ heads, and every one of them was full of swamp mud and live frogs. Muckbubble frogs, fat and green and furious, the size of my fist. The yard was suddenly full of them, hopping and croaking and going down people’s collars, and a barbarian next to the sawhorse took a jar on the helmet, sat down hard in the snow with mud running into his beard and a frog sitting on his head, and said, “Oh, come ON.”

That was the moment the Skullcrushers stopped laughing, because this one was serious. They roared and went at the gnomes with their axes, and the two armies hit each other in the middle of the yard with me tied over a sawhorse in the exact center.

Nobody touched me.

I didn’t understand it at first. I lay there braced for an axe in the back or a spear somewhere worse, and the whole fight broke around me and went past on both sides. A huge Skullcrusher with a bloody face came charging backward with three gnomes on his shield, and when his heel hit the leg of the sawhorse he stopped, looked down at me, said, “Sorry, little thief,” and stepped carefully over my ankle rope and went on fighting. A badger came straight at me with its rider’s lance down. The rider saw me, hauled the badger round by the ears, and went past so close I felt its fur brush my thigh. He tipped his tiny helmet to me as he went.

Bjorn had won me fair under barbarian law. The Deepburrow had a debt on me under gnome law, owed in my own flesh, and a gnome doesn’t damage property he hasn’t collected yet. Both sides owned me, and both wanted me in one piece for later.

I did not find this as comforting as Felix had promised.

An arrow came out of nowhere and thudded into the post six inches above my tied hands. I screamed. It was a little gnome arrow with red fletching, and it stuck there quivering, and a second later a barbarian throwing axe buried itself in the post on the other side, and I screamed again, and then a gnome archer ran up, wrenched his arrow out of the wood with both hands, and said, “Sorry, sir. Neutral party, sir. Wasn’t aiming at you, sir,” and ran off again with it.

A gnome came diving in under the sawhorse after that, to hide from a barbarian with a hammer. He wedged himself in under my belly with his shield over his head, panting, while the barbarian stood over the sawhorse and looked for him and didn’t dare swing. The gnome was so close I could feel his breath on my balls. He looked up at me between my own legs, and I looked down at him, and he went very red.

“Begging your pardon,” he said. “Very sorry. Won’t be a moment.”

He wasn’t. He waited until the barbarian gave up and went away, and then he squeezed out from under me and ran off and stabbed somebody else, and I hung there over the sawhorse with my face burning, and decided that of all the indignities of that week, being apologized to by a gnome under my own balls was the one I would take to my grave.

I had a front-row seat for all of it, upside down.

Bjorn and Helga were still at it at the foot of my post. Helga had him by the beard. Bjorn had her by the braids. Her hand was still bleeding where the Tome had bitten it, and every time she hit him she shouted at him in northland, and I didn’t understand a word of it, and I understood all of it.

After that the gnomes noticed Bjorn.

Grimble came out of the gnome lines on the biggest badger in the yard, finger up, shrieking about satisfaction, and rode straight at the chief of the Skullcrushers. Bjorn let go of his wife to meet him. Twenty gnomes came in behind Grimble, then fifty, and they went up Bjorn like ants up a tree, and he went staggering backward across the yard roaring, and Helga was left on her knees in the snow beside my post, alone.

She got up. She had blood in her mouth and her braids were half torn out, and she looked round for her husband, and found him, and then her eyes came round to the sawhorse.

Sigrid stepped in between us.

I hadn’t seen her come. One moment there was snow and blood and Helga coming for me, and the next there was Sigrid’s back, broad and bare and splashed with frog mud, with her axes out low at her sides, and three iron rings on her left hand. She stood with her feet planted between her stepmother and me.

“No,” Sigrid said.

That was all she said. Helga stopped. They looked at each other over three paces of trampled snow, and for a moment neither of them moved, and the battle went right on around them, and nobody else came near.

“You don’t know what you are,” Helga said, very low. She was breathing hard. “Helga kept you safe. Helga kept the whole clan safe from you. You think your father could have done it? He never even looked.”

“You put a leash on me,” Sigrid said, “and gave the gnome the other end.”

Helga went for her.

I had seen Sigrid fight all week, and I had never seen her fight like that. Before, she had fought all temper. This time she was calm. Her face didn’t change at all. Helga came in with her bleeding fists and twenty years of being the biggest woman in the north, and Sigrid let her come, turned her shoulder into the punch, took it, and cut her. It was one cut, the edge of the haft across the ribs, and Helga gasped and staggered.

She came back. She caught Sigrid by the hair and hit her twice in the face, hard enough that I heard it from the sawhorse, and Sigrid’s lip split and her nose went. She didn’t make a sound. She dropped the left axe, put that hand, with the rings on it, flat on Helga’s chest, and shoved, and Helga went backward three steps into the snow and sat down.

Sigrid stood over her with blood running down her face and the rings red with it. Her hand was steady. She was angry, and she was in charge of it, and I understood watching her that she had never in her life been allowed to be both of those at the same time.

That was when Felix came back.

He came strolling through the fight from behind me, with the catapult jars arcing over his head and smashing all round him and frogs everywhere, and he didn’t hurry. Not a hair of his was out of place. A gnome came at him with a spear, saw his face, and turned round and went the other way. I don’t know what Felix had done to the gnomes while I wasn’t looking, and I didn’t want to.

He crouched down beside the sawhorse, close to my hip, and watched the battle for a while.

The Tome’s eye came up over the satchel flap and fixed on me, wide and bright. “I’ve been thinking about the hearing. It bothered me. All those people watching, and you didn’t feel a thing.” His hand came down on the small of my back, warm in the cold. “That seemed like such a waste.”

“Felix…”

His hand slid down. It went over the curve of my ass, slowly, the way he does when he wants me to know he has all the time in the world, and between my cheeks, where the gnome had been, and I jerked against the ropes. He wasn’t two feet tall. His fingers were long and slick with oil he had brought with him, because Felix always brings oil with him, and he pushed one into me, then two, without any hurry at all, and crooked them.

I groaned. It came out of me before I could stop it, loud, in the middle of a battle, with my forehead against the post. The gnome king had got nothing out of me but humming, and Felix had me groaning in three heartbeats.

“Oh, there it is,” Felix said, delighted. “There. Was that so hard?”

His other hand found my cock under the sawhorse. It was already hard, from Sigrid, and he made a pleased little noise when he found that and took hold of it and worked it, slowly, in time with his fingers. I pushed back on his hand. I couldn’t help it. I was tied over a sawhorse, naked, in the middle of the biggest battle in the north, with arrows going into the post next to my head and frogs landing in the snow, and I pushed back on Felix’s fingers like a cat in the sun and moaned the whole time.

A jar smashed three feet away. A badger went past with its rider screaming. Felix didn’t even look up.

“You know,” he said, conversationally, curling his fingers, “if you had done this for the gnome, you’d be home by now.”

I said something to him that I won’t repeat. It turned into a moan halfway through.

The Tome was beside itself. “NOW he squeals! NOW! Where was this for the COURT? Where was this when two NATIONS were WATCHING? Oh, the waste! The criminal, artistic WASTE!”

Felix ignored it. He brought me right up to the edge, right to it, with his fingers deep and his fist tight, until my thighs were shaking against the sawhorse and I was begging him and I didn’t care who heard. He stopped there. He took both hands away, wiped them on the fur under me, and stood up.

“There,” he said. “Nearly satisfied. The court would be so disappointed.” He stepped back out of reach with the Tome. “You can do the knots yourself, I think. You’re very good at knots.”

I hated him so much I nearly came anyway.

So I did the knots.

They were good knots. The Skullcrushers tie the way they fight, hard and too much of it, and my hands were numb from the cold and shaking from Felix, and I had to work my right wrist round in the rope until the skin tore before I could get two fingers on the first knot. I picked at it with my nails. I have never been as fast at knots as I was that afternoon. The first one gave. I worked the second. The rope came off my right wrist and I nearly cried.

I didn’t stand up. I could have, with one hand free, and I didn’t, because the minute I stood up I would stop being a neutral party tied to a post and start being a naked thief loose in a war, and I was not stupid. I stayed bent over the sawhorse, working on my left wrist, and I watched.

Sigrid and Helga were still going. Helga kept getting up. She was bleeding from her ribs and her mouth and her bitten hand, and Sigrid was bleeding from her nose and her lip, and neither of them would stay down. Helga got Sigrid round the waist and they went down together, rolling in the snow at the foot of the post, so close that I had to pull my free hand in. Sigrid came up on top. She got her left hand, the ring hand, round Helga’s throat, and held her there in the snow.

She didn’t squeeze. She held her down, and they stared at each other, both of them gasping, with Sigrid’s blood running down her wrist and over the rings and dripping onto Helga’s face.

The rings started to hum.

I heard it first. It was the same hum I had felt in my palm on the wall the night before, but a hundred times louder, so deep it buzzed in my teeth and the bones of my face. The stones lit up. Blue and grey and amber, glowing through the blood on them, and the blood on the rings went bright, and began to steam.

Heat came off her. I felt it on my face from where I was, as if somebody had opened an oven door. It came off Sigrid in a wave, and the wave rolled out across the snow, and the snow under it went soft and wet, and it hit me.

It went straight into my cock. I had been hard for Felix and hard for Sigrid and on the edge for half an hour, and when that heat hit me my whole body went tight from the scalp down, and I grabbed the post with my free hand and held on.

Under Sigrid, Helga had stopped struggling. She was staring up at her stepdaughter with her mouth open.

“Oh dear,” Felix said, from a few paces off. He was not smiling. “Sam. I think the rings have changed their minds.”

“OH!” the Tome shrieked, from under his arm. “Oh, I KNOW this one! Suppression iron and berserker blood, and the blood OPEN! Gnome work, girl, cheap gnome work! It was built to hold everything IN, and you have bled on it, and now it is going to let everything OUT!” Its eye was huge and gleeful. “Oh, hold on to something, boy. Hold on to something!”

I was already holding on to the post.

The heat rolled out past us across the yard. I watched it go. A Skullcrusher and a gnome were fighting ten paces from the post, the barbarian with his axe up and the gnome with his spear braced, and the wave hit them both at once. The barbarian’s axe came down slowly, and stopped. The gnome’s spear tipped over sideways and fell in the snow. They stood there looking at each other, eight feet of barbarian and two feet of gnome, both of them breathing hard, both of them going red.

The next pair stopped, and the pair after that.

All across the yard, from the post outward, the fighting was going still.