Pilgrimage v1.0 by Unknown Author

Author:Unknown Author
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-06-09T00:00:00+00:00

He was the largest man they had ever seen. Not any of the giants, not their captors nor the warriors they had met in the passages, were like him. He was immense, built as if carved from a chunk of the city’s stone. The beard down his chest was red, not the delicious auburn of Liza’s hair, but a bright carrot red and thick like snarled vines in the wildest of park-plats. “Oten,” they called him, perhaps his name, perhaps a title. He had some special place among the giants.

“Wag kommiga vah?” he asked them.

“Oten wishes to know you have entered here from where?”

“Tailend,” said Brann. He tried another mouthful. It faintly resembled Tailend beer but with a bitterness and stench of some foreign herb.

“Haartsood kornmad” the dwarf said back to Oten.

!Hartsood! Ha ha ha!” He drained the stone bowl of his own drink in a single swallow.

Liza squirmed upright in the pillows. “Why is Oten laughing?” she asked the dwarf.

The man, as did the other dwarf whose memory brought back to the three thoughts of Tailend before the shaking, stood as high as Brann, bandy-legged and bowed, with a huge head and prognathous jaw. He paraded across the hall between where Oten held a sort of court in a heap of huge pillows and where Brann, Liza and Hals am lay on similar pillows. A fire burned without smoke and torches on the walls of the hall burned strangely without heat Between them stood other giants, watching. Oten’s voice was cracked, an old man’s, and only that gave his age away.

“How big was he when he was young?” Halsam whispered.

Liza shushed him. “Will you tell us why he is laughing?”

The dwarf pranced closer. “It is funny so; Haartsood is how I must describe from where you come. It is the single word for it You know what is horse?” Liza nodded. “Well, Haartsood means to us, horse’s tail or horse’s ass.” He bowed. “It is a joke, you see.”

They were comfortable. Their clothes, the indestructible Gad’s cloth, smelled faintly of a soaping they had not needed to come clean, and the three smelled of it also, a musky scent when a woman of the giants—fresh back from battle somewhere and reeking of blood and battle sweat—had stopped the party in the halls and demanded that they be bathed before Oten received them.

This woman, Riija, she was called, unceremoniously took charge and propelled the three young city folk into a side passage that led to a bathhouse. There she ordered other giants to strip them and they were plunged into an immense circular tub full of very hot water. Liza screamed that she was being boiled. Halsam protested that he wasn’t a child to be bathed so. And Brann submitted, Liza watching him narrowly as though she could cast the evil eye. A woman of the giants, two heads taller than Brann, disrobed and plunged in next to Brann to scrub him thoroughly. But she dealt with Liza and with Halsam, also, sending them on to a man who pummeled them atop a padded table.

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