examining the threesome playing dice.
Honeycomb was a broad-shouldered hulk two yards tall with powerful, sinewy hands, a head that appeared to have no neck but grew straight out of his shoulders, and hair the color of lime-blossom honey. His rather simple features identified him as a country boy. You can tell them from the city types straightaway.
“Huppah!” laughed Uncle as he tossed the dice once again and leaned down over them with his comrades.
Uncle was more than fifty years old, with a few sparse gray hairs that had somehow survived on his bald head, and a thick gray beard. Compared with Honeycomb he didn’t look very tall, but he and the giant Honeycomb and the other Wild Hearts all had one thing in common: the experience of men who serve on the walls of the Lonely Giant on the edge of the Desolate Lands.
“I swear on a h’san’kor,” Tomcat growled, “but your luck’s in today, Uncle! I pass.”
The fat, round-faced Wild Heart’s behavior and harsh voice were nothing at all like a cat’s. The only thing that did lend him any resemblance to the animal was his mustache, which looked a bit like a cat’s whiskers.
“Don’t play if you don’t want to,” his leader laughed.
Tomcat waved his hand at his partners and lay down on the grass in front of the fountain, beside the sleeping soldier.
“I suppose that one must be called Sleepy or Snorer?” I asked ironically.
“The one beside Tomcat?” the jester asked. “No, they call him Loudmouth.”
“Why?”
“How should I know?” asked Kli-Kli, pursing his lips. “They won’t talk to me. And all I did was leave a dead rat in their room!”
“Don’t I recall that just recently you mentioned water in their beds? You didn’t say anything about rats.”
“Well, the rat was a little bit earlier . . . ,” said the jester, embarrassed.
“Never mind, let’s forget it,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me about that pair over there?” I nodded, drawing the goblin’s attention to two soldiers sitting apart from the others and sipping wine from a bottle.
“The rotten swine,” Kli-Kli muttered, ignoring my question. “That’s my wine!”
“Then why have they got it?”
“A trophy of war,” the goblin muttered.
“What?” I asked, surprised by his answer.
“I stuck a nail in that swine’s boot for a joke. But they got angry about it—”
“Naturally, I would have got angry, too, and torn your green head off.”
“They tried to do that, too.” The goblin bit off another piece of carrot. “But all they could get was the bottle. Eh, Harold! If you only know how much effort it cost me to steal it from the king’s wine cellar!”
“You’re the king’s jester. Couldn’t you have just taken it?”
“Pah! How boring you are!” Kli-Kli shook his head in disappointment, setting his little bells jingling in lively fashion. “I can take it, but it’s much more interesting to steal it.”
I didn’t try to argue with him.
“An amusing pair, don’t you think?” he asked, and showed his tongue to the soldier who was holding the bottle.
Amusing? That was putting it mildly! They were amazing! I never thought I would ever see a gnome peacefully sipping a bottle of highly expensive wine with his eternal enemy—a dwarf. The powerfully built dwarf, who could bend horseshoes with his bare hands, and his smaller, narrow-shouldered cousin with a beard, obviously had no intention of going for each other’s throats.
It looked to me as if the lads had already taken a drop too much. Which was strange—one bottle wasn’t usually enough for that with these races.
“Kli-Kli, are you sure that the trophy of war is only one bottle?” I asked the miserable goblin slyly.
“Of course it’s only one,” the jester said, and spat. “They swiped a whole crate from me, but that’s the last bottle.”
That certainly seemed closer to the truth. Even a gnome and a dwarf could easily get tipsy on a crate of wine.
“The ginger one’s called Deler,” Kli-Kli said with another sigh. “In the language of the dwarves that means ‘fire.’ And his friend who stepped on the nail goes by the name of Hallas. In their language that means ‘lucky.’ That one there,” said Kli-Kli, pointing to a man beside a bed of roses, who was practicing with two swords, “is called Eel. Never says a word, and he simply takes no notice of my jokes. It’s impossible to get him stirred up.”
Kli-Kli simply couldn’t bear that kind of insult to his profession. My attention was entirely absorbed by the Wild Heart’s practiced, precise