Kinderling 38

 In case you are interested in starting this story at the beginning, Kinderling 1 can be found here:

The Tricycle of Thought: Kinderling 1

Please don't judge the story or the writing too harshly, this story is written with little to no editing.  It is just meant to get me writing regularly for practice.  

Now back to our story, already in progress...

And so it went for the next few days.  Flower and I got up, ate a few bites of our quickly dwindling food supply, and carefully scurried up the next place of dubious concealment.

I had only been carrying enough for a Kinderling, not enough for a Kinderling and a Gorf, and with Flower's pack gone, we were going through  our food supply at an alarming rate.  I know Flower tried to eat less, and was probably practically starving herself, but there was no getting around the fact that with her much larger size, she needed quite a bit more food.

I wasn't sure what was going on,  but it seems our party had stirred up quite a hornet's nest.  We started seeing two or three Gorf platoons pass us each day.  At one point, we met a platoon coming down the switchback in a place where we couldn't find anyplace to hide.  I thought we were goners for sure, but the platoon just passed us by.  The Gorf soldiers' eyes all looked blank and uninterested.  Like the others, the platoon was accompanied by three better-dressed Gorfs, although not as well dressed as the three on that first day, but luckily when the platoon passed, the three of them were on the other side of the platoon so they didn't see us.  The whole time they passed, I held up the no-see-me in front of us and prayed to Kindness harder than I ever had before.

I hate to admit it, but that scare almost had me pack up and go home.  I was battered and bruised, hungry, dirty, tired, and terrified.  I found myself thinking things like "this is too big a job for me", "I need help",  "Mama would know what to do", and "nobody would blame me for quitting."   Well below with that!  

"Tandy ain't no QUITTER!"

I guess I yelled that last part, because I really startled poor Flower, who's nerves were definitely on end.  She stood there staring at me with her eyes nearly popping out of her head, acting like she was about to run, but couldn't decide which direction to go.

Look, I have always been small for my age, and as I'm getting closer to the age where Kinderlings stop growing, it looks like I'll always be small.  When I was in Kinderling school, I had to fight to be allowed to go to classes with Kinderlings my own age.  The school constantly tried to corral me in with Kinderlings a few years younger.  At the same time, both Mama and Father pushed both Tommil and me hard when it came to education.  Both with our school work, and our personal interests, so I'm not bragging, but for me school was mostly review of things I had learned years before.

That did not ingratiate me with students who were less advantaged, educationally speaking.  Beso, in particular, struggled every day in school.  I offered to help tutor him.  I was trying to make friends, but he took it as an insult and never forgave me for it.  I guess that explains why he threw me in that ditch that day, when he and his minions almost killed me by pelting me with rocks.  Explains it... doesn't excuse it.

So I have never been a quitter, even when that would have been easier.  Even when the adults around my tried to hold me back.  The idea of quitting, of giving up, angered me, and right then I had a good old fashioned mad-on.  I pulled out my arrow chucker, made sure it was loaded up, and started marching up the road.

"C'mon Flower."

Bless her, she followed.

That was when we finally reached the top.  Me, for all the world to see, looking like a Kinderling child playing at war, followed by a fretting Gorf woman, wringing her hands.

As soon as I saw the battlements, I grabbed Flower and dove off the road dragging her with me scrambling in my pack for my no-see-me charm.

The battlements, there was nothing else to call them, topped an impressive wall.  They were patrolled by what looked like a hundred Gorf soldiers.  Once it became clear that troops weren't going to stream forth and grab us, we were able to find a good vantage point to hide and watch.  The whole spectacle would have been impressive if I didn't notice that the soldiers were practically bumping into each other, and it didn't seem like any of them were actually doing much watching for trouble.

The wall itself was built of rough-hewn stone - nothing like the smooth stone walls that Tilly built in the garrison at Outcropping - but still it looked formidable.  The ends of the wall connected to the side of the mountain, and the center curved outward.  The road ended in the middle of the wall with huge, strong doors that were closed.  There didn't seem to be a lot of traffic in or out.

Another road ran in front of the wall, running North to South.  I didn't know where that road lead in either direction, but it looked much more used than the road down the mountain towards the forest.

As I watched, a small caravan of three wagons, each pulled by a large goat with tall curved horns.  I couldn't tell what the wagons held, because the wagons were covered by tarps.  When the wagons reached the gates, a squad of Gorf soldiers with a single Gorf leader came out through a small door to talk with the creatures from the wagons.  I couldn't tell what manner of creature they were though, because they wore long cloaks with hoods that they kept up, covering their heads.  They were much too big and stocky to be Kinderlings.  Not that I would have expected them to be Kinderlings.  They were the wrong shape for Gorfs though, which surprised me.  Gorfs come in all shapes and sizes, but even the shortest and stockiest of Gorfs aren't as wide and stoutly built as the wagon people.  Couldn't be elves of course, by all accounts, elves are tall and wispy thin.  Perhaps dwarves then?  Dwarves appeared in a couple of the books I read as a kid, but I didn't know much about them than "There was this dwarf who did this or that and he liked gold a lot."  There are old stories that the coins we use in the village were minted by dwarves at some point in the distant past.  They are all from back in the time of the last Kinderling King, and it's known that Kinderlings were much more numerous and traded with other races much more back then, so maybe.

After a short conversation with the wagon people, and a look under the tarps and around the wagons, the Gorf  in charge of the squad signaled to the gate, and the gate was opened and the wagons went in.  The gates closed right after the last wagon.

Seeing goats harnessed to the wagons was a new experience for me.  Kinderlings don't domesticate animals in that way.  Sure, we keep cats around to keep mice and rats out of the village, and there are a few Kinderlings who keep songbirds as pets.  Chickens and sometimes ducks are commonly kept for eggs and food, although most Kinderlings don't eat meat, so mostly for the eggs.  I made myself laugh trying to imagine a wagon being pulled by a chicken and instantly regretted it seeing how much my laughter disturbed Flower.

I also know that there have been at least a few Kinderlings in the past who's gift was being able to converse with animals.  I grew up on stories about a Great Great Uncle that had that gift.  The story goes that he eventually went crazy and ran off into the forest with a family of wild boars, although Mama insists that those stories are untrue and that Great Great Uncle Pnof died quietly of old age in bed.  There were wild boars in her version of the story too, but they quietly left the village for the forest soon after Uncle Pnof died and were never seen again.  Of course, Father disagreed and said the real wild bores of the story are the people who ruin the fun by having a slavish addiction to the literal truth.  Of course, both Mama and Father claim that Uncle Pnof was from the other side of the family, so I have always taken the whole thing with a grain of salt.

We did, of course, learn in school about the race of Man and their beasts of burden.  Horses and oxen to pull their wagons, pigs and cows for food and leather.  Sheep and goats for wool.  And the tame wolves that they call dogs that they train to guard it all.  I've seen wolves in the woods.  I take that story with a grain of salt too.

The next interesting occurrence at the gate happened early the next morning.  The gates opened, and a group of bedraggled beings in chains shuffled out, being escorted by a platoon of  Gorf soldiers.  The group consisted of a mix of peoples.  Mostly Gorfs of various sizes - none of them anywhere near as large as the Gorf Soldiers - but I also saw what I was almost sure were a pair of dwarves and a few of the race of Men.  To my surprise, there were also three small forms that almost had to be Kinderlings.

"Flower, get up here.  Are those your people?"

Flower scurried up and looked.  I gathered from the tear in her eye that at least a few of them were indeed her people.  I took a second look, and it was hard to see because we were so far away, but it did look like some of the Gorf prisoners shared the odd hand-shape like Flower.