The Collected Stories, The Legend of Drizzt

profoundly and considered the task before him. It wouldn’t be difficult, taking Gendray home, but leaving all the rest of them out there …

How could he do that?

The battlerager stepped back and kicked a dead orc hard in the face. He put his hands on his hips and considered the scene before him, trying to figure out how many trips and how many companions he would need to bring all those boys home. For it became obvious to him that he couldn’t leave them, any of them, out there for the birds and the beetles.

Big numbers confused Thibbledorf Pwent, particularly when he was wearing his boots, and particularly when, as on this occasion, he became distracted.

Something moved to the northwest of him.

At first, he thought it a large bird or some other carrion animal, but then it hit him, and hit him hard.

It was an orc-a lone orc, slipping through the maze of blasted stone and blasted bodies, and apparently oblivious to Pwent.

He should have slipped down to the ground and pretended to be among the fallen. That was the preferred strategy, obviously, a ready-made ambush right out of the Gutbusters’ practiced tactics.

Pwent thought of Gendray, of Tooliddle, and all the others. He pictured a bird poking out Gendray’s eyes, or a swarm of beetles crunching on his rotting intestines. He smelled the fight again and heard the cries, remembering vividly the desperate and heroic stand.

He should have slipped down to the ground and feigned death among the corpses, but instead he spat, he roared, and he charged.

Who will remember those who died here, and what have they gained to compensate for all that they, on both sides, lost?

The look upon a dwarf’s face when battle is upon him would argue, surely, that the price is worth the effort, that warfare, when it comes to a dwarven clan, is a noble cause. Nothing to a dwarf is more revered than fighting to help a friend. Theirs is a community bound tightly by loyalty, by blood shared and blood spilled.

And so, in the life of an individual, perhaps this is a good way to die, a worthy end to a life lived honorably, or even to a life made worthy by this last ultimate sacrifice.

G’nurk could hardly believe his ears, or his eyes, and as the sight registered fully-a lone dwarf rushing down the slope at him-a smile curled on his face.

Gruumsh had delivered this, he knew, as an outlet for his rage, a way to chase away the demons of despair over Tinguinguay’s fall.

G’nurk shied from no combat. He feared no dwarf, surely, and so while the charge of the heavily armored beast-all knee spikes, elbow spikes, head spikes, and black armor so devilishly ridged that it could flay the hide off an umber hulk-would have weakened the knees of most, for G’nurk it came as a beautiful and welcome sight.

Still grinning, the orc pulled the heavy spear off his back and brought it around, twirling it slowly so that he could take a better measure of its balance. It was no missile. G’nurk had weighted its back end with an iron ball.

The dwarf rambled on, slowing not at all at the sight of the formidable weapon. He crashed through a pair of dead orcs, sending them bouncing aside, and he continued his single-noted roar, a bellow of absolute rage and … pain?

G’nurk thought of Tinguinguay and surely recognized pain, and he too began to growl and let it develop into a defiant roar.

He kept his spear horizontally before him until the last moment, then stabbed out the point and dropped the weighted end to the ground, stamping it in with his foot to fully set the weapon.

He thought he had the dwarf easily skewered, but this one was not quite as out — of control as he appeared. The dwarf flung himself to the side in a fast turn and reached out with his leading left arm as he came around, managing to smack aside G’nurk’s shifting spear.

The dwarf charged in along the shaft.

But G’nurk reversed and kicked up the ball, stepping out the other way and heaving with all his strength to send the back end of the weapon up fast and hard against the dwarf’s chest, and with such force as to stop the furious warrior in his tracks, even knock him back a bouncing step.

G’nurk rushed out farther to the dwarf’s left, working his spear cleverly to bring it end over end. As soon as he completed the weapon’s turn, he went right back in, stabbing hard, thinking again to score a fast kill.

“For Tinguinguay!” he cried in Dwarvish, because he wanted his enemy to know that name, to hear that name as the last thing he ever heard!

The dwarf fell flat; the spear thrust fast above him, hitting nothing but air.

With amazing agility for one so armored and so stocky, the dwarf tucked his legs and came up fast, his helmet spike slicing up beside the spear, and he rolled his head, perfectly parrying G’nurk’s strike.

He kept rolling his head, turning the spear under the helmet spike. He hopped back and bent low, driving the spear low and getting his belly behind the tip. And, amazingly, he rolled again, turning the spear!

Almost babbling with disbelief, G’nurk tried to thrust forward on one of those turns, hoping to impale the little wretch.

But the dwarf had anticipated just that, had invited just that, and as soon as the thrust began, the dwarf turned sidelong and slapped his hand against the spear shaft.

“I’m taking out both yer eyes for a dead friend,” he said, and G’nurk understood him well enough, though his command of Dwarvish was far from perfect.

The dwarf was inside his weapon’s reach, and his grip proved surprisingly strong and resilient against G’nurk’s attempt to break his weapon free.

So the orc surprised his opponent. He balled up his trailing, mailed fist and slugged the grinning dwarf right in the face, a blow that would have knocked almost any orc or any dwarf flat to the ground.

I cannot help but wonder, though, in the larger context, what of the overall? What of the price, the worth, the gain? Will Obould accomplish anything worth the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of his dead? Will he gain anything long lasting? Will the dwarven stand made out on that high cliff bring Bruenor’s people anything worthwhile? Could they not have slipped into Mithral Hall, to tunnels so much more easily defended?

And a hundred years from now, when there remain only the bones and the stones, will anyone care?

I wonder what fuels the fires that burn images of glorious battle in the hearts of so many of the sentient races, my own paramount among them. I look at the carnage on the slope and I see the inevitable sight of emptiness. I imagine the cries of pain. I hear in my head the calls for loved ones when the dying warrior knows his last moment is upon him. I see a tower fall with my dearest friend atop it. Surely the tangible remnants, the rubble and the bones, are hardly worth the moment of battle. But is there, I wonder, something less tangible there, something of a greater place? Or is there, perhaps-and this is my fear-something of a delusion to it all that drives us to war again and again?

Along that latter line of thought, is it within us all, when the memories of war have faded, to so want to be a part of something great that we throw aside the quiet, the calm, the mundane, the peace itself? Do we collectively come to equate peace with boredom and complacency? Perhaps we hold these embers of war within us, dulled only by sharp memories of the pain and the loss, and when that smothering blanket dissipates with the passage of healing time, those fires flare again to life. I saw this within myself, to a smaller extent, when I realized and admitted to myself that I was not a being of comforts and complacency, that only by the wind on my face, the trails beneath my feet, and the adventure along the road could I truly be happy.

I’ll walk those trails indeed, but it seems to me that it is another thing altogether to carry an army along beside me, as Obould has done. For there is the consideration of a larger morality here, shown so starkly in the bones among the stones. We rush to the call of arms, to the rally, to the glory, but what of those caught in the path of this thirst for greatness?