The Last Satyr: The Company is Formed Part 1

From the Bridge of Talmuth, a great highway ran southeast through the same forests like that of Danmire only now, of course, one could see where the trees had been cut and felled to be hewn into what the humans called "lumber" and cleared for what they called "fields" for crops. Both were unthinkable to Ronthiel.

They spent the night at an inn along the highway and found Arathorn to be a friendly host who saw to their needs. They shared stories, and the boy was surprised when Arathorn knew about satyrs.

“Oh! Yes!” he said. “It wasn’t that many years ago that we walked the white snow passes to trade with the satyrs for horses, as the satyrs not only had the most horses but the finest.”

“But you don’t cross the pass anymore?” the boy wanted to know.

“No. About a dozen years ago, the Dark Elves marched forth out of the Mithril Mountains, some say out of the mines of the dwarves,” Arathorn said with a glance towards Marroh. “We had put a watch on them at the time, for they had come out once before to fight us in the First War. So we gathered up our army to meet them. But they moved not east towards us, but west, and captured the satyrs and their horses in a single night as they had no such guards standing watch. The Dark Elves marched the satyrs and their horses back towards the Pass, intending to take them to their underground cities. We knew the horses would not survive down there. Grass does not grow underground. They obviously intended to feed the horses to their steeders. With our army already poised at the snow passes and prepared to battle them, we decided to attack and free the horses, taking them for our own. We did and now the horses belong to us.”

“You stole them!” accused the boy.

“Stole them or saved them?” asked Arathorn in reply. “And, if we did steal them, we stole them from drow and not from satyrs.”

“Why did you not free the satyrs?” demanded the boy.

“Two reasons,” replied Arathorn. “First, that would have required a much bigger battle as the horses were in easy reach but not the satyrs. The drow marched all by night but kept the horses in open areas where they might graze by day and with fewer guards. Not so with the satyrs whom they packed together between them and who were watched more closely. Second, we owed the satyrs no sacrifice. The price of their horses was steep and, when the Dark Elves invaded us in the First War, the satyrs came not to our aid. So why should we have come to theirs?”

“You must forgive the boy’s impertinence,” said Graybeard. “He is the only satyr to escape the drow attack you describe. Until you just explained he had no idea of what happened to his kind. To hear that you did nothing while his parents were marched off underground is a bitter pill to swallow.”

“Yes. I suppose it would be,” answered Arathorn, gazing at the boy. “But we meant no harm to the satyrs and, if it’s any consolation, we killed many drow that day.”

The next day, they rode on. The trees thinned even further. More and more of them had been cut down and turned into houses and villages or simply burned for firewood. Where the trees once stood were now farms and cattle. Ronthiel noticed but said nothing.

There were a good number of humans in the land. Perhaps the company noticed because they were more easily seen than elves, but they certainly had more villages than they were used to. The population of men was growing, or so it seemed.

They spent another night in an inn where Graybeard and Amien shared ale with Arathorn, who remained in good spirits. The boy entertained himself with the innkeeper’s daughter as she was more or less sitting at hand. He’d never really talked to a human girl before, though he’d seen a few in passing. They were generally a bit wider and rounder than elf girls who were all slim as hourglasses, and this one seemed to have the figure of a head of cabbage. She was nothing special to look at either, sort of ordinary and perhaps less. But the boy had discovered that the more he looked at a girl usually the more attractive she became on account of he’d always spot her hidden attractions. It might be that she had a cute button nose or a catching smile or a pleasant blush or just the way she tossed her hair. Usually, he could spot it in two or three glances or, in this case, six or seven.

But he finally did seize upon her one redeeming feature and sought to compliment her on it as he had learned girls were partial to compliments above the neck and he was partial to giving them. So he gave her a big-eyed, longing look and mustered up the nicest thing he could possibly think to say about her.

“My!” he said, “But that is a lovely wart on the end of your nose.”

And, of course, nobody had ever told her that before. He could just tell. And so he proceeded to woo her on his expertise of what constituted a lovely wart as compared to an ordinary one. And he told her that her eyes were deep enough for a man to drown in and that they could just see right through him and know if he was lying or not, and so he didn’t dare lie to her. And he told her how any man would value her on account of, he figured, her buck teeth could chew down most any tree, and that could come in mighty handy as there seemed to be a great need for that service around here. After a while, he was laying it on thick as corn syrup, and she was lapping it up like a honeybee. It was just grand how the boy was doing it. He was at his peak.

And pretty soon she was feeling pretty special and allowed him to walk her in the night and there he made his first discovery about human girls and that was, no matter how plain or ordinary or even ugly they looked by day, they all looked better in the dark. It was a powerful discovery, and he wondered how it was done.

The next morning, though, Arathorn’s good spirits had changed when they had breakfast and prepared to leave. After a word with the innkeeper, whose daughter had somehow magically returned in daylight back to being rather drab and ordinary, Arathorn looked troubled.

“Is something wrong?” asked Amien.

“With you, no,” said Arathorn. “But for us—yes. Something has entered our land behind us. We know not how or what it is, but it has left cattle lying on the fields.”

“Dead?”

“No. Alive. But they appear sick.”

“Perhaps it is a disease that infects them?” suggested Amien.

“Can a disease break through fences and move as swiftly as a deer?”

“You say it’s behind us?” asked Graybeard.

“That is what I was told. Yes.”

The boy looked at Graybeard’s eyes with expectant hope, but the old keeper’s gaze gave away nothing.

“I think it will move on of its own,” he offered. “These sorts of things usually do. I should not worry about it. And, speaking of moving on, we should be leaving ourselves.”

As they left the inn, Graybeard whispered to the boy in a low voice.

“Wipe that look of fear off your face,” he said.

“Ahead lies our capital city of Nahor,” said Arathorn. “Therein lives our king, should he be willing to see you.”

The highway was leading to a city or what passed for one here. It was one with stone gray walls, marred from battle, with notched parapets for archers and a barred gate. No dwarves built this, for it was of clumsy, though effective, construction. It lacked guard towers, the walls were not particularly high, and the gate was of wood and not iron rods as they approached. They passed over a stream and the soft ground ahead was paved with the hoofprints of many horses. When they reached the gate, Arathorn called up to the sentries.

“I am Arathorn, captain of the border guards,” he announced. “I bring a troop of foreigners who wish to see the king.”

“Are they prisoners or guests?”

“Neither,” said Arathorn, “and yet both. They come uninvited but unarmed, and have raised no weapons against us as yet.”

The gate opened and let them through. There was a stone masonry hall built within the walls from which a single gold banner blew above in the wind. There were a few armed guards to be seen but not many, though a great stable of horses was to be had as well as many piles of cut straw hay. They rode up to the large hall, where they stopped, and Arathorn dismounted.

“Wait here,” said Arathorn. “I will see if the king will see you.”

They watched as two door guards let the captain inside.

“What if the king won’t see us?” asked Marroh.

“Oh! He will!” said Graybeard with absolute certainty.

“How can you be sure?”

“It’s what kings do,” replied Graybeard.

“If he doesn’t see us, how shall we get horses?” asked young Joe.

“Answer him, goat boy,” said the old keeper knowingly.

“We’re sitting on them. We were given five of our six horses in order to get here,” the boy said. “Arathorn rides the sixth and has left it unguarded. So, you see, no matter what the king decides, we already have our six horses.”

Young Joe nodded.

“That’s pretty good thinking,” he said.

The boy didn’t answer. For it didn’t explain why they were here at all. They could have stolen the six horses while Halmuth’s elves held their arrows on the six men at the bridge. Yet Graybeard had bypassed that opportunity altogether. He wanted to come here. Why?

Captain Arathorn reappeared.

“The king will see you.”

Graybeard winked at Marroh as they dismounted. “What did I tell you?” he said.

They walked up the stone steps and through the open doors held by the guards. They strode into the inner chamber that was long and wide with a stone floor in the center of which a wood fire burned in a brass pot, both for warmth and light. The crackling fire filled the hall with shadows and half lights and there was a row of pillars to each side. Beyond them, woven tapestries decorated the walls but darkened with soot.

Past the fire, a somewhat middle-aged man in a rustic robe sat upon a raised chair that might have been a throne, though it lacked anything grand about it. More than anything else, what gave him away as a king was that he had a crown and the finest sword in the room as well as a commanding air.

“Hail, King Grendel!” announced Arathorn.

Graybeard and the rest of the company bowed before him.

“Greetings, King Grendel. I am honored to be received,” he said.

King Grendel ignored him and cast his eye upon Ronthiel. The tension in the chambers grew suddenly taut like a drawn bowstring, each heartbeat echoing like the pluck of a harp’s string on the edge of snapping as Grendel's eyes narrowed.

“We don’t allow elves here,” he firmly said. “Guards! Kill him!”