WE ARE THRILLED TO WELCOME OUR GUEST AUTHOR, DAN FORRESTER, TODAY. DAN IS SHARING CHAPTER 2 OF HIS QUIRKY COMEDY NOVEL, 'HAVOCK' #RWRTeamBlog #ReadWriteRepeat
- 3 days ago
- 8 min read
Chapter 2
Lord Gorab of the Sabres, Chief of The Hills, shifted his weight on the ring of twisted bark and furs sitting on his wooden throne. His piles always played up when he was bored. He had seen off his entire troop of fighting cocks that morning already, and most of the pacifist ones too. He’d had some slaves flogged and then had the flogger flogged, and now he was back in his palatial tent with nothing to do but stare at the ancestral tapestries and painted skins surrounding him. They told tales of his family’s conquests, the people they had enslaved and the riches they had pillaged. And they were boring.
‘Spriggle!’
There was a stir of hushed activity behind him and the clatter of a chamber pot being upturned. A scrawny figure dressed in brown robes appeared in front of Gorab, rubbing his right foot and pouring piss out of his boot. ‘Yes, my lord?’ Spriggle grimaced as he pulled off a wet sock.
‘I wish to Know.’
‘Right you are.’
Gorab peered at him from beneath his thick plaited eyebrows.
‘I mean, yes, Lord Gorab. It is my honour to serve you.’ Spriggle lit some candles dotted about the yurt in heavy silver candelabras, donated over the years by townsfolk after they had been savagely murdered. With no means of escape, the scent settled in the air atop the thick layer of tension.
Gorab breathed it in as his scryer unstrapped a roll of yak hide from his back and spread it across the floor. There were several bones in the bundle, which Spriggle collected up and shook in his clasped hands before tossing them onto the fleece.
‘Are those from tonight’s supper?’ Gorab asked with suspicion.
‘No, my lord, these are ancient bones from the fabled Phoenix.’
Gorab bent forward and frowned. ‘One’s still got gristle on it.’
‘Ancient gristle, my lord.’ Spriggle leaned over the bones, the candlelight dancing off his bald head, and after a few moments picked one up and put it down somewhere else. While he waited, Gorab sipped wine from a goblet that had been a wedding gift. Not his wedding gift, but it’s what the happy couple would have wanted; it was no use to them dead.
Spriggle picked up another bone and held it up to the candlelight, turning it round as he inspected it. ‘I’m afraid I’m struggling to see.’
‘Try harder.’
‘The vision is cloudy, my lord.’
‘I hope it clears, for your sake.’ Gorab fingered the dagger in his belt.
Spriggle rocked back and forth on his knees and waved his hands over the bones. ‘I see a boy, my lord. A young warrior with a long mullet and many weapons strapped to him.’
Gorab yawned. ‘Anything else?’
‘There is another figure. It waddles, my lord.’ Spriggle squeezed his eyes shut in concentration. ‘It looks like a large lady in a red dress and hat.’
‘A young warrior and a woman in red? What could it mean?’
‘The bones only ever show, Lord Gorab. Their meanings are for us to decipher.’
‘I wish to Know more,’ Gorab demanded.
Spriggle took up the bones and scattered them once again across the fleece. ‘The woman is complaining… the warrior is throwing something at the woman… the woman is sitting down on a rock and refusing to walk any further. Now the warrior is pulling at the woman’s beard.’
‘Beard? She sounds like a seasoned bird.’ Gorab stroked his own plaited beard and glanced at the throne by his side, empty this last year since his queen had displeased him and tragically stepped backwards into the knife he’d been holding. ‘This bearded woman, are all her curves in the right place?’
‘Difficult to say, my lord, there’s only one curve. It goes all the way around.’
Gorab eased his bulk from the throne to relieve his piles. ‘Too much good living,’ his physician used to say. But then he’d also said, ‘Please don’t kill me,’ so Gorab didn’t know what to think. He adjusted his sword belt and strode to the tent’s exit.
‘My lord, do you wish me to continue?’ Spriggle asked.
Gorab paused. ‘No, collect your trinkets.’ At last, someone to fight and a wench to ravage. He stepped out past the wooden posts at the entrance and called behind him, ‘And prepare the Teeth for inspection.’
Spriggle, busy gathering up the chicken bones from dinner, looked behind him to see who Lord Gorab was addressing. ‘Oh, fantastic,’ he grumbled. ‘Now I’m the bloody general, too. Anything else? You want me to stick a broom up my arse and sweep up while I’m at it?’ Gorab poked his head back into the tent. ‘Excellent idea, Spriggle. I’ll have someone help you with the broom.’ Satisfied the evening’s entertainment had now been arranged, he set off up the hill in a much better mood.
*****
A few centuries earlier, the ruling family had built a mausoleum at the top of the highest and greenest hill in High Havock to honour their ancestors. It was constructed by the finest craftsmen, using marble hauled from distant lands by slaves who fought and died for the right to be a part of its creation. It boasted the kind of wealth and taste that separated the elite from the peasantry. It was awe-inspiring, magnificent, a resting place befitting the most royal of corpses. Gorab’s ancestors had thought it looked lovely, so they murdered the monarchy and moved in.
He stood now before the entrance to the tomb. Carved figures reached up to the sky and begged the gods for their blessing. They could keep it, Gorab thought. He couldn’t care less for gods or their protection; they’d never done him any favours. What he had needed, he had taken. He had got this far without them and he was buggered if he was going to offer anything of his to those freeloaders. And by ‘his’ he meant everything he saw, had ever seen, or was ever likely to see. Gods, pah!
He would lie in there one day, in that tomb, and become part of the dust. Well, he would damned-well make sure whoever put him in there would spend the rest of eternity with him, cushioning his piles. He stepped around to the side of the mausoleum and climbed the steps he’d had cut into the ancient stone to give access to the roof.
The sky was moody; the whining gods would be pissing on him later. Rain already fell over Low Havock in the distant south. That was a hard land. Almost his neighbour, and yet still it stood in defiance. Their time would come; they would fall into line like lambs.
A horn blew, loud enough for the gods to hear. He looked again at the sky. You stay there and listen to the prayers of lambs, he thought. His warriors were ready for inspection.
He made his way back down the hill, past the perimeter huts with a curt nod in reply to the guards’ salutes and on through the mud towards the parade field. He arrived to find Spriggle next to the ten-foot horn, bent double with his hands on his knees and struggling to recover his breath.
‘I hope I fare better when I am your age, Spriggle. A cold bath and plenty of exercise, that’s the secret.’
‘My age?’ Spriggle wheezed, managing not to pass out. ‘I have barely a score years behind me, my lord.’
‘A score? I’ve seen corpses in better shape than you. Where is the official hornblower, anyway?’ Gorab asked.
‘You gave him the night off.’
‘The night off? What the hell for?’
‘Dinner, my lord.’ Spriggle pointed across the field to where a large man was being turned on a spit.
‘So I did.’ Keeping discipline was a constant bore, but it would do the slaves good to
have some meat for a change. ‘See to it he is replaced. Cooked and then replaced.’
‘Yes, my lord. Would it please you to inspect the army now?’
‘I doubt it, but I’d better have a look.’
Spriggle bowed and led the way. Gorab couldn’t understand why Spriggle was so nervous; he’d had more than thirty minutes to drill them into shape. All right, there had been a few months of lazy feasting since their last conquest, but his Teeth were part of a brutal machine. All it needed was a little fine tuning.
‘My lord,’ Spriggle said, gesturing to the rabble of plump warriors panting in their furs after an unexpected half-hour of activity, ‘I present the Sabres’ Teeth.’
There was silence. Even the most overweight of the Teeth held his breath under the scrutiny of the most violent and unpredictable ruler The Hills had seen since someone had called Horace Blood-Boiler a sissy more than a century earlier.
Someone’s belt-buckle popped.
‘Spriggle?’
‘My lord?’
‘Who are these men, and what have you done with my Teeth?’
Spriggle cleared his throat despite the imminent probability of it being throttled. ‘These are they, my lord. The most fearsome warriors the lands have ever seen, the conquerors of the horizon, those who make legend itself tremble in its stockings.’
‘Are your stockings trembling, Spriggle?’
‘Greatly, my lord.’ Spriggle bowed again, with more than his stockings trembling beneath his robes.
Gorab ignored him and stepped forward to address a warrior, a bearded brute whose leather jerkin didn’t quite meet in the middle and did nothing to conceal the grease that had dripped from his chin onto his protruding gut. The warrior stiffened to attention, adding to the strain on his jerkin.
‘Your name?’
‘Hukah, Lord Gorab.’ Hukah looked close to tears. He’d been known to crush a man’s skull with one hand to get at the soft bit in the middle and had even beaten a troll in an arm wrestle for the last of the fried pig guts. But he did like his chicken with the skin left on, and it was starting to show.
‘What do the Teeth say, Hukah?’
Hukah glanced down at the scribbles tattooed on the palm of his hand. ‘Fight to take, kill to keep,’ he grunted. His pride partially restored, he risked thrusting his chest out. The pressure was too much for the last button on his jerkin, and it pinged off to give his enormous belly the freedom it had worked so hard for.
Spriggle closed his eyes and looked like he was praying. ‘Regard, my lord,’ he ventured, ‘the spoils are the evidence of their success.’
In the quiet moments that followed, even Hukah had the good sense to shrink back into the ranks as Gorab refocussed on Spriggle. ‘My betrothed is abroad, Spriggle,’ he said, ‘and with every moment that passes she is in the dangerous company of a young savage.’
‘Your betrothed, Lord Gorab?’
‘The seductress in your vision.’
‘The big woman with the beard?’
‘The same,’ said Gorab. ‘And Low Havock awaits our attention. I want my Teeth back, Spriggle.’
‘And you shall have them, my lord.’
‘I suggest you try threatening them with horrendous torture and death. I often find that very effective.’ Gorab stared hard at him. ‘Horrendous torture, Spriggle.’
‘Yes, my lord.’
‘And death,’ Gorab said. ‘Remember that bit.’
**********
AUTHOR BIO
Dan Forrester graduated from college back when he was still young and happy. Several years later, with life having addressed that, he took up writing and has since won awards for his short stories from both the National Association of Writers’ Groups and the Lancashire Authors’ Association. He has also had short stories published by Reader’s Digest and Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook amongst others, and his first novel 'Havock' won Judges’ Pick in Grindstone Literary’s International Novel Prize.
Dan lives in West Yorkshire with his wife, Angela, and likes to spend time reading or watching a good sit com. The rest of the time he mostly does as he’s told.
You can find more at www.danforrester.co.uk if you find yourself at a loose end.
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COMING SOON: On Sunday, 1st March, we are delighted to welcome our guest author, Rhys Hughes, who is sharing an extract from his novel, 'The Devil's Halo'.
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