David Tallerman - Giant thief

To cheer myself, I drew from the folds of my cloak the stash of food I'd taken from the cart: a hunk of bread, a quarter of wilted cabbage, and some foulsmelling fish. The bread seemed least unappetising, so I tore a lump and chewed ruminatively. I broke it in half when my escort stopped to glare at me and offered him the remainder.

"Stolen?" he asked.

"Not from here," I said, fairly truthfully. In fact, I'd acquired it just before the officer stopped us at the camp border.

"I'll have some fish as well then," he told me, so I halved that too.

After he'd eaten his share and kept it down, I followed his example. It was surprisingly good — though since I was starving, my own boots would have probably tasted delectable right then. The soldier finished his bread as well, then took a swig from a water skin and handed it to me. It turned out to contain wine. Though objectively I knew it was vinegary and heavily diluted, it too seemed delicious. I grinned at him gratefully, but he only grabbed the skin back and kept walking.

We'd been heading upwards all the while. I couldn't tell much beyond that. While the moon was almost full, it was cloudy, with a storm brewing over the eastern hills. The only real light was from campfires, and there weren't many of those, maybe due to the scarcity of wood this close to the river but perhaps also because Moaradrid didn't want to betray his numbers. My escort seemed to know where he was going, which implied that there was some order to the gaggles of men and bright spots of firelight. That didn't help me much. If I was going to escape before the battle, as I was determined I would, I'd need a better idea of where I was.

We came to a halt. There was a pitifully small fire, close to a stunted olive tree and what appeared to be a large upright rock like an obelisk. There were figures around the fire, though I couldn't judge how many. I could only count the innermost few and those were evidently a favoured minority. My escort glanced around. His night vision was better than mine, because he focused on one black shape no different from any other and called, "Lugos, how are your numbers?"

A stocky man loomed out of the darkness. "I've lost two to sickness, and one in a knife fight." His voice was coarse yet high-pitched, and the flickering orange glow upon only half his face served to emphasise his ugliness. "Why, have you brought me a new body?"

"I have if you want him. He's skinny and a thief. That hardly matters for what you want, eh?"

The man named Lugos turned to me. "Not at all," he said. "Skinny thieves die just as well as other men."

"My name is Easie Damasco," I said, "and stealing once to fend off starvation doesn't make me a thief."

"Who cares? Sure, I'll take him off your hands," he said, and my escort nodded and turned back the way we'd come. Then, to me, he continued, "Damasco is it? There's a few rules you'll need to know. Do what I tell you. Don't argue. When it comes to it, don't run away. And don't mess with Leon and Saltlick."

"I think I can remember all that. Who are Leon and Saltlick?"

"Here, I'll introduce you, and you'll know who to keep away from."

He led me around the campfire. One or two men cried out as we trampled blindly on their extremities, then shut up quickly when they recognised Lugos. We stopped near to the large rock I'd noticed before. There was a lean figure sat at its base, and he looked up as we drew close. He seemed surprisingly young to have been singled out for whatever special authority he had.

"This is Leon," Lugos said, and Leon waved a skinny hand at me. "And that," he went on, pointing to the black mass the boy was resting against, "is Saltlick."

"What? Behind that rock?"

Leon chuckled, and Lugos barked out a laugh. I wondered what could be so funny — until the rock moved. The clouds flurried away from the moon for an instant, and I saw a monstrous hand, each finger as long as my head. I leaped backward, and Lugos gripped my arm and held it tight.

"Careful," he said. "Or Saltlick might just decide you're food."

The night wore on. I tried hard not to think about what was coming when it ended.

A pack of cards materialised from somewhere, and one of my shadowy companions suggested a few rounds of Lost Chicken. In an hour, I managed to turn my quarter of cabbage into a hunk of unidentifiable meat, a few coppers, two more loaves of bread, and a small, cheaply crafted knife. Normally I'd have found such success cheering, but my thoughts kept getting in the way, however much I tried to avoid them.

I'd reached the conclusion that escape was possible but unlikely. Moaradrid wasn't an idiot. Realising that most of his troops would rather be somewhere else, he had sentries patrolling all around the camp borders. I'd heard them whistling to each other in bad imitation of various night birds. There would be plenty of guards within the encampment as well. The risk of fleeing, in my state of borderline exhaustion, far exceeded the hope of success. I was stuck there. I would likely get my first taste of war before the sun came up.

And that wasn't even the worst of it.

I had no doubt, after what I'd seen, that I'd be on the winning side. I would normally have taken some consolation from that, but just then it was difficult to do so. While I had no love of its authorities, who insisted on putting my name on "wanted" lists and generally trying to catch and jail me, the Castoval was my home and I was fond of it. I didn't want to see it crushed under the heel of a tyrant. I didn't want to see it overrun by monsters.

Yet that was apparently to be its fate. Moaradrid had found himself a weapon that the Castovalians couldn't defend against.

Later, when the sky had lightened to a drab charcoal grey, Lugos stoked the fire and heated some soup, which was doled out in dirty wooden bowls. In a rare act of charity, or more likely defeatism, I shared my bread and meat amongst my closest companions. I received a little weary gratitude in return. Most of them spoke with such wild accents or thick dialects that they might as well have been talking another language for all I understood. We were a group of strangers gathered from the length and breadth of the land, and all we had in common was our future, which was likely to be short. No wonder the atmosphere was grim.

The soup — mostly water and rice, with a few chunks of turnip and scraps of goat meat floating on the surface — was warming, at least, and my appetite made it seem better than it was. That, together with my acquisitions from cards, left me feeling full for the first time in longer than I could remember. I wouldn't die hungry, at any rate.

We'd barely finished eating when Lugos, now dressed in a hauberk and tattered leather helmet, stepped up close to the fire and shouted, "Listen up, fifth volunteers."

I assumed that was us.

"We'll be going into battle soon. It won't be fun, but if you do your best you might just survive. Don't try to run. There'll be archers on hand and they'll make sure you don't get far. Most importantly, keep away from the giant. He answers to three people only: Moaradrid, Leon, and myself. Anyone else he's likely to step on. That's all. Fight like the bastards you are."

It wasn't the most motivating speech I'd ever heard. It did, however, make me wonder again about the hulking thing they called Saltlick. We Castovalians knew in theory that the giants existed, somewhere high in the southern mountains, but they'd always minded their own business and we'd been more than happy to leave them to it. The arrangement had stood for generations — we didn't bother them, they didn't bother us — until their existence had become little more than legend. What could have drawn them down into the Castoval? What threat or promise could Moaradrid have used to bind them to his cause?