30th Sunrise, Year of the Horde
I had heard much of the city of Phirul over the years, whether from long nights as a child listening to Aunt Edwina’s somewhat rambling readings of Edgar Stoat and the Brigade of Outdoor Heroes, or from tales told around the hearth-fire by travelers in this or that inn back in my native Peithris, or from Ephraim One-Ear, my shipmate on the Laughing Skua who had spent several years working there as a teamster. Oft were the times I had dreamed of its tall spires, its massive battlements, its expansive parks and wide boulevards, and especially the famous hippodrome where—in the book at least—brave Edgar Stoat defeated the evil Count Vladimir Chokulla in Edgar Stoat and the Flaming Horse Race of Death.
In practice, my first introduction to this great pinnacle of civilization would be rather less romantic, involving a pregnant goat, an ill-tempered elven mage, and a sack of sausages.
Viggo and I had heard the goat bleating as we approached the large throng of travelers waiting for admission through the city’s small eastern gate. As we grew closer, we could hear an angry voice too, uttering a stream of expletives in the colloquial common tongue of the Quirmian midlands. An angry drover, with four score or more scrawny black goats in his care, was cursing a single, white she-goat that lay pitifully on the hard, dusty road. Clearly it was very, very pregnant–and in pain.
“Get up yer lazy cursed beast or by the black snakes of Zehir I’ll show ye me boot!”
The goat bleated again. The growing crowd, tired of the delay, shouted at the drover to get his business in order and move on. The city guards looked on with equal impatience.
With a thud, the drover kicked the goat.
If there is one thing to know about my friend Viggo, it is that he loves babies–human, animal, and otherwise. It was for the sake of protecting two young children from the misdeeds of their father that he admitted to a crime he did not commit—and was exiled from his native Kuz Valley. It is to make babies that he pursues barmaids everywhere. It once took me more than an hour to stealthily recover his belongings from a group of street children who distracted him with games and laughter while they robbed him blind.
If there is a second thing to know about Viggo, it is that he detests cruelty. As a gamekeeper, he took pride that his kills were always clean. I’ve seen him stop, in the midst of a tavern brawl, to lift a kitten out of the way of a melee—and take a flask of Napolean mountainbrew to his skull for the effort. (The kitten, named “Four-down-and-one-in-a-tree” in honour of our eventual victory, now happily chases mice aboard the Skua.)
At the sight of the mistreated goat in the road, the ranger strode forward angrily.
[continued at http://talesfromthegoldengryphon.wordpress.com/2008/07/04/the-golden-gryphon-part-ii/]
