T. Kingfisher - Nine Goblins

The back door opened with a wooden groan. He took three steps forward, turned and hucked the battered remains of the chicken onto the roof.

A stony chuckling came down to him, followed by the crunch of chicken bones. Satisfied, Sings-to-Trees went back inside to feed the raccoon.

He must have made tea at some point, because when he woke up, there was a stone cold mug of it next to his elbow and a half-eaten sandwich sliding off his knee. The raccoon cub was asleep on his lap, in the wreckage of what had been a saucer full of bread soaked in warm milk. Perhaps it was just as well he hadn’t bothered with a shirt.

It looked like most of the milk had gone into the raccoon, anyway, and his sandwich had a distinctly gnawed look. Some days that was all you could ask for.

Sings-to-Trees gave up even pretending he was awake. He put the raccoon to bed, toweled off the remnants of both their dinners as best he could, and limped to the bedroom. He had just enough energy to remove his shoes, and then sleep crept up and hit him.

The Nineteenth Infantry were marching, if you could call it that.

Goblins march badly. They have enormous thick feet like elephants, so they are quite good at walking, but they have no rhythm, and very few goblins have ever mastered the ability to tell left from right without stopping to think about it. So when somebody yells “Left foot, right foot!” there is generally a long silence while the goblins all try to remember which is which.

At some point, one bold goblin will step out, and all the others follow immediately in the hope he knows what he’s doing. It’s about a fifty-fifty shot if he’s leading with the correct foot or not, but at least they’re all wrong together.

On a good day, they will stay in step for nearly a minute before somebody gets bored, or trips, or stumbles, or forgets what he’s doing and begins skipping. Small knots break off. Officers ride around on their pigs, shouting orders and leaving havoc in their wake.

Eventually the better sergeants round up their units and herd them more or less in the direction that everybody seems to be going. In fits and starts, the goblin army lurches on.

Nessilka was a fairly good sergeant, and had most of the Whinin’ Niners aimed in the correct direction. Algol and the pack mule formed the nucleus of the group, and since he was taller than most of the other goblins, everybody was able to keep him in sight.

At the moment, Nessilka’s greater concern was the two new recruits.

They were identical twins, which gave her a headache, and they were young and bright-eyed and enthusiastic and finished each other’s sentences, which took the headache to a whole new level.

“Where are we…”

“…going, Sarge?”

“We don’t know. We just follow orders and go there.”

They gave her identical nods.

“Will we be…”

“…fighting, Sarge?”

“Sooner or later, yes.”

Everyone stumped along in silence for a while. The flat stony badlands were giving way to little lumpy hills and the occasional scrubby tree, with more trees on the horizon. The wind that came to them smelled like pine, which was a big improvement over goblin.

The new recruits had the standard loincloth from home, made out of the standard rancid goathide, and they both had what passed for weaponry in the goblin army—a board with a nail in it. Unless she managed to beat some kind of sense into them, Nessilka gave them a week.

“So you’re twins,” she said, by way of an opening gambit.

“Yes, Sarge!” they said in unison.

“How should I tell you apart?”

“You…”

“…don’t.”

“Not even our mom…”

“…can tell us apart.”

“We’ll fix that,” she said grimly, and beckoned to Thumper.

Thumper would need thick-soled boots to stand four feet tall, but he was at least four feet wide. His biceps were the size of badgers and he had no neck. He did not use a shield, preferring to carry two large spiked maces, both taken from the fallen foe. When he was hitting things, there was a joyful gleam in his eye, and when he wasn’t, there was a glitter that indicated he was probably thinking about hitting things.

He had no personality that Nessilka had ever been able to uncover—possibly it had gone off with his neck somewhere—but he was an excellent goblin to have at your side in a fight.

“Recruits, this is Thumper.”

“Hi, Thumper!” chorused the twins.

Thumper treated this the way he treated everything that did not involve hitting things—he eyed it warily to see if there was any potential hitting to be had, and then ignored it.

“Thumper,” she said, “I can’t tell these two apart.”

Thumper nodded.

“Fix that,” she said.

He nodded again, turned around, and punched the one on the left in the face.

The recruit fell over. The other recruit gaped at him.

Thumper picked the damaged recruit up, nodded to the sergeant, and wandered off.

The unfortunate goblin swayed on his feet. His left eye was already swelling, and would shortly be turning a striking shade of purple.

“That’s better,” said Nessilka. “Now, then. The first thing you should learn is to never tell a superior officer what they can’t do.”

They looked at her with identical miserable expressions (except for the swollen eye). “We’re sorry, Sarge.”

“Yeah, well…” Nessilka squelched a nagging feeling of guilt. It was a hard world and a hard war, and the sooner they learned it, the better. “What are your names?”

“Mishkin,” said the one on the right.

“Mushkin,” said the one with the swollen eye.

“Right. The next thing you should learn is how to take a punch a little better than that, but it’ll have to wait until we stop for the night. Have you had any training at all?”

“We had two weeks…”

“…of boot camp, Sarge.”

The sergeant grunted. “Whacked a lot of straw men with your board, eh?”

Mishkin nodded vigorously. Mushkin nodded rather more gingerly, holding his face.

Up ahead, Weatherby was drifting off to the side. Nessilka could tell he was planning to make a break for it, because he was starting to mutter to himself and tug at his clothes. She sighed, and did what sergeants have done since time immemorial…she delegated.

“Go see Corporal Algol and tell him that you’ve had the basic boot camp and nothing else. And that I said to put something on that eye.”

“Yes, Sarge!”

The twins went to find Algol, and Nessilka went to collar Weatherby.

Sings-to-Trees’ morning began slightly after dawn, when the hen crowed.

She was a black hen with a fine gold eye and a blue sheen to her feathers. She laid quite large brown eggs. She also mounted the other hens occasionally, an exercise in bafflement for everyone involved. And every morning, she crowed.

As far as he could tell, she seemed happy, so he’d resigned himself to getting up at hen’s-crow most mornings. He hadn’t wanted a rooster, anyway. His farm was located on the edge of what were nominally the Elvenlands. A small human settlement lay less than an hour’s walk away, where woods gave way to farmland. The humans viewed him as falling somewhere between the priest and the village idiot, and thus required feeding either way. Depending on the time of year, gifts of flour or cheese or bacon were always turning up, and they dumped excess chicks on him year-round. He had a hard enough time keeping up with donated chickens—had his small flock been producing more on their own, he’d have been hip-deep in fowl. So he was somewhat grateful for the confused hen, after all.

This morning, there was a small, fresh, cheese on the doorstep, accompanied by a small jug of buttermilk. He took both inside. Fleabane was gone, on some coyote-ish errand of his own, or there would have been toothmarks in the cheese.