Nine Goblins (2 page)

Then the humans came.

They came in small groups at first, and
cleared little clearings and built little houses, and the goblins
didn’t really mind. They’re cowards, after all, and there was
plenty of room, so they had no desire to forcibly evict the humans.
They just avoided those places.

The clearings got bigger and the houses got
bigger, and the goblins kept avoiding them, until one day, there
was hardly any place left that you weren’t avoiding. And one by
one, tribe by tribe, the goblins would melt quietly away into the
wilderness, to impose on the hospitality of the next tribe
over.

Sometimes, of course, it wasn’t that easy. In
a few cases, goblins wound up living on mountaintops and tunneling
down instead of running away. On islands, they would have to steal
boats and rafts from the humans and strike out across the ocean.
Occasionally they couldn’t find another island without people on
it, and a whole colony of raft-goblins sprang up, traveling with
the currents, living on fish and seabirds and whatever they could
steal from human settlements.

A knot of goblins even got stuck in a park
for years, every avenue of escape having been filled in by a
reasonably large city. They survived by panhandling and occasional
muggings, and a fair number established themselves successfully in
the sewers, where they breed riding rats the size of ponies and
wrestle white alligators in the dark.

By and large, though, the goblins went deeper
and deeper into the wilderness, and the wilderness got smaller and
smaller and tamer and tamer. And then one day, a goblin scouting
for new territory found himself standing on a beach, gazing out
across the western sea.

It was the end of the road. They’d been
pushed right to the edge of the continent, and there was simply no
place else for them to go.

Sings-to-Trees had hair the color of sunlight
and ashes, delicately pointed ears, and eyes the translucent green
of new leaves. His shirt was off, he had the sort of tanned muscle
acquired from years of healthy outdoor living, and you could have
sharpened a sword on his cheekbones.

He was saved from being a young maiden’s
fantasy—unless she was a very peculiar young maiden—by the fact
that he was buried up to the shoulder in the unpleasant end of a
heavily pregnant unicorn. Bits of unicorn dung, not noticeably more
ethereal than horse dung, were sliding down his arm, and every time
the mare had a contraction he lost feeling in his hand.

It had been nearly two hours, the ground was
hard and cold, and his knees felt like live coals wrapped in ice.
She’d kicked him twice, and if Sings-to-Trees hadn’t known that it
was impossible, he’d have begun to suspect that the unicorn had
arranged a breech birth out of spite.

No, he was being unfair. It couldn’t be any
more fun for her than it was for him. Just because he didn’t really
like unicorns, he shouldn’t let it cloud his judgment.

He sighed and tried yet again to get a grip
on one of the foal’s legs. Unicorn foals had hooves as delicate as
glass bells, naturally, and however adorable they were when
tripping lightly ‘cross the meadow, they were pure torture to grab
in the slippery less-than-hospitable environment inside the mother
unicorn.

If he could just get the little monster
turned around, a few good pushes should do it. The problem was
getting a good grip. He rode out another contraction with gritted
teeth.

Sings-to-Trees loved all living creatures
with a broad, impartial love, the sort of love that rescues baby
bats and stays up nights feeding them, one drop of milk and
mealworm mix at a time. He splinted the legs of injured deer and
treated mites in the ears of foxes and gave charcoal to colicky
wyverns. No beast was too ugly, too monstrous, too troublesome. He
had once donned smoked glass goggles and shoulder-length cowhide
gloves to sit up with an eggbound cockatrice for three days, giving
it calcium tablets and oiling its cloacal vents every four hours.
Since he’d been nursing a pocketful of baby hummingbirds at the
time, which had to be fed sugar water every fifteen minutes sixteen
hours out of the day, it had been quite an extraordinary three
days. He still had nightmares about it.

But he’d never really warmed to unicorns.
Possibly it was because they didn’t need him. Regular elves loved
unicorns, as they loved all beautiful creatures, and a unicorn with
so much as a stubbed hoof could turn up at the door of any elf in
the world and be assured of royal treatment. Sings-to-Trees hardly
ever had to deal with them, and he preferred it that way.

But when somebody needed to actually reach a
hand in there and turn a foal around, suddenly the unicorn lovers
of the world melted away, and it was down to Sings-to-Trees and a
barn and a bucket of soapy water. And the hind end of the unicorn,
of course.

As if to punctuate this thought, the unicorn
kicked him again. He grunted. He was pretty sure the mare was smart
enough to know that he was helping her. He just didn’t think she
cared.

He got a grip on something that felt like a
wee little hock, and started the tricky process of hauling,
coaxing, and generally begging the tiny creature to turn around.
Another contraction came along, and he willed his numb fingers to
hold on to the foal’s leg. His fingers laughed at him.

Give him trolls any day. A thousand pounds of
muscle and bone, froggish goatish creatures the size of grizzly
bears, with enormous curling horns that could smash through a
concrete wall. They were
ideal
patients. Trolls might not be
any more talkative than unicorns, but they understood every word
you said, and if they had come to you for help, they’d trust you to
the ends of the earth. You could saw off a troll’s leg, and it
would look at you with huge, tearful eyes the size of dinner plates
and hold still while you did it. And if you told them to come back
in a week for a check-up, they’d be there a week later, as soon as
the sun went down, squatting patiently in the vegetable patch,
ready to be poked and prodded all over again. Sings-to-Trees quite
liked trolls.

And they were
grateful,
too—not a
month went by when he didn’t wake up to see gigantic cloven
hoofprints around the yard, and half a billy-goat left draped
across a tree stump.

Not like unicorns. As soon as the foal was
able to walk, the mare would be gone like a shot, and he’d never
see her again.

Come to think of it, maybe that wasn’t a bad
thing.

“Okay,” he said to the unicorn, mildly
surprised at the weariness in his own voice, “I think I’ve got it
presenting right. Let’s give this a try…PUSH!”

The mare pushed. He pulled. There was a brief
horrible moment where nothing happened and Sings-to-Trees saw
another two hours of internal fumbling ahead of him, and then with
almost absurd ease, the foal slid out and hit him in the chest, the
mare grunted in triumph, and he fell over backwards with his arms
full of slimy baby unicorn.

Its first act was to kick him with its
adorable little hooves. He gazed at the barn rafters while it beat
a tattoo on his ribs. It hurt, but not as much as his knees
did.

Okay. Not much more to go. He could handle
this.

He staggered upright, shuffled on his knees
to the end of the unicorn he hadn’t seen much of this evening, and
dumped the foal in front of her.

She bent down, snuffled at the tiny creature,
tapped it delicately with her foot-long horn as if to test it, and
then began licking at its damp white hide. The bedraggled foal
lifted its muzzle and made a faint squeaky snort of protest.

Even to someone who didn’t much care for
unicorns, at another time, this scene would be pure magic, a
reaffirmation of everything good and noble in the world. But there
was gunk from the hind end of a unicorn plastered clear up the side
of his face, delicate hoof prints turning purple across his
ribcage, and he felt about a thousand years old.

He got painfully to his feet—his knees had
moved through the on-fire stage and now felt as if tiny wolverines
were chewing under the kneecaps—and staggered outside to the pump.
He tried to grab the pump handle, and for an awful minute his hand
wouldn’t close on it.

Well, no surprise there. His right arm, which
had been the one inside the unicorn, was red and white and bruising
magnificently where contractions had smacked his bicep repeatedly
against the mare’s pelvic bones, and there was unicorn crap and
amniotic fluid and bits of straw all over him.

Sings-to-Trees slumped against the pump
handle, moaned, and managed to grab it with his left hand. By
dropping most of his weight on it, with all the grace of a sack of
potatoes, he got enough water out to sluice the worst of the muck
from him. It was icy cold, but he didn’t really care.

There was soap somewhere. He found it. It
didn’t lather very well, but he made at least a symbolic effort
before giving up.

He ducked his head back in the barn and
glanced over at the mother and child, who were arranged in a
beautifully domestic scene, as tranquil as the dawn. White hide
glowed in the muted lamplight of the barn. You’d never know she’d
spent hours in labor. That was unicorns for you.

Pausing only to make sure that the afterbirth
had passed with no difficulties—he considered patting the foal, but
the mare, ingrate that she was, stamped a hoof at him and lowered
her horn warningly—Sings-to-Trees limped out of the barn.

The moon glared down like a bar of soap in a
bucket of cold sky. The path up to the house was packed earth,
washed blue and black in the moonlight, and approximately a
thousand miles long. Several ages of the earth passed while he
toiled up to the house, punctuated by the bright jangle of pain
from his knees.

A coyote with one eye and a ragged ear was
stretched out across the porch rug. When the elf was close enough,
it lifted its head, pricked up the good ear, and came down to meet
him. A cold nose touched his hand, and the tail made a careless
motion that was certainly not a wag—Fleabane had a certain amount
of dignity, despite his name—but might conceivably be mistaken for
one. Sings-to-Trees wound a cold hand in the coarse hair behind the
coyote’s ears and rubbed affectionately. They walked the last few
yards up to the house together, and then Fleabane flopped back down
on the rug and Sings-to-Trees went inside.

There were animals to be fed yet—a bat
hanging upside down in the closet who was thankfully past needing
ground mealworms shoved down its throat, an orphaned raccoon who
was just starting on solid foods and needed warm milk with a little
bread, and of course the gargoyle. He dumped a handful of dried
mealworms on the closet floor, heard a grumpy chitter in response,
and left the bat to its own devices.

There was cold chicken left, and he divided
it up carefully, a quarter for a sandwich, and three quarters for
the gargoyle. He built up the fire, and set milk to warm by the
hearth. The warmth was wonderful, if painful on his cold hands. He
started to sink down into the rug in front of the fireplace, caught
himself, and lurched to his feet. He didn’t dare stop moving. If he
sat down to rest, he wasn’t going to get back up in a hurry.

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.