A Wurzel’s Wanderings

30th Sunrise, Year of the Horde

[continued from http://talesfromthegoldengryphon.wordpress.com/2008/07/04/the-golden-gryphon-part-ii/]

I must admit that—despite the tussle in the road, the grumbling crowd, and the sight of many more guards mustering at the city gate—I could not help but laugh at the sight of my friend knocked prone. Rare is the time that I’ve seen Viggo knocked down by fist, axe, or ogre—that it should happen by a length of “Butcher Kruggo’s Very Special Hot Spiced Goblin Bloodwurst” (or so it said on the side of his sausage cart) seemed beyond all reason.

My mirth was rapidly contained, however, by the sight of that very same hulking great butcher drawing an equally formidable cleaver, with the fairly clear intention of using it on Viggo. As quick as a vole in a plowman’s sock-drawer, I grabbed a small rock and lobbed it at the the oaf in the hopes of distracting him.

It had little effect. In desperation, I threw an elf at him.

Well, I didn’t really throw an elf at him–it was much more a sharp shove, applied to the back of the haughty-looking purple-robed elf standing nearest me. The elf stumbled directly into the path of the butcher, and the two collided with a loud thump. I stepped back into the crowd as quickly as I could–it is one thing to shove an elf, it is quite another to be turned into a one-legged blackbird or have one’s head explode in a angry display of arcane powers. My caution proved wise, for when the butcher uttered a few choice curses and waved his cleaver at the elf, he suddenly found himself sinking into a pool of grey-green ooze.

“Hello hello… what’s all this then?” The sergeant of the Phirul East Gate Midday Guard had all the confidence of one of his exalted rank, as he and several of the guardsmen pushed through the throng to survey the odd scene in the road. Almost immediately, accusations started to fly, as everone in the crowd offered their own view of what had just transpired. As Viggo stood up and kicked the last sausage links from around his ankles, several—rather unfairly—blamed him for the commotion.

“Its a shame about the prophecy…” I muttered the the farmer now standing beside me.

The sergeant strode up to Viggo, jabbing him several times in the chest with an accusatory finger. “Who are you, and what do you think you are up to?” Viggo took this all rather literally, and started to explain the conditions of his birth, by way of preamble to his life’s story.

“I mean, it does say that if the white goat gives birth before entering the city, the county will suffer a plague of voracious earwigs…” The matronly women on my other side gave a shriek at this news, one that grew even louder as I made the sign of imaginary earwigs crawling in their hair.

Viggo had reached the part about having his umbilical cord cut with the traditional sharpened bison hoof when the sergeant ordered him to be quiet.

“And that poor druid.. all this way from the Valley of Kuz to deliver the sacred prophetic she-goat, only to see his mission fail and the Demon Earwig Lord Skornag unleashed from the blood-pits of the Eleventh Plane of Hell.” This, of course, was quite over the top, but played well to the small group of scullery maids with whom I was now speaking. One screamed in terror at this apparently impending doom, and fainted as a murmur started to arise from the crowd. “The goat, the goat!” shouted one man. “The prophecy!” muttered another, as he made wiggly gestures and pointed to his ears. The sergeant looked alarmed… clearly none of this was headed in a direction he understood.

I leapt atop a hay wagon, and added my voice to the din. “Let the virtuous Druid go! The sacred she-goat must bless the city, or all is lost!” 

By this point, Viggo was looking thoroughly confused, a state no doubt aggravated by the striking similarity between the term “virtuous druid” and the Kuzian warning “virt u-us druuuuyd!” (“danger, avalanche!”). Nonetheless, he scooped up the poor bleating creature from the road, and was being hustled forward by the crowd. (I’ve never thought the depiction of this now-famous moment, later carved upon the portico at Phirul’s East gate to mark the city’s “blessing and deliverance,”  depicts him well—he looks rather more like a skinny disoriented scribe than a hardy northern ranger.)

[continued at http://talesfromthegoldengryphon.wordpress.com/2008/07/05/the-golden-gryphon-part-iv/]