Thornhold - Elaine Cunningham [31]
As he ran, the dwarf tugged a kerchief from his pocket and mopped his face. He suspected he looked a sight, what with all the running. His reddish brown hair was exceedingly curly at the best of times. At the moment, he was as lathered as a racehorse, and at such times his hair sprung up into wild clusters of small, tight ringlets. Ebenezer’s beard was another matter. Long and full and defiantly red, it had the decency to just hang there. A beard any dwarf would be proud of; it was. For all his odd ways-and according to his clan, his ways were plenty odd-he was a dwarf who appreciated tradition. So what if he hated mining, preferring the sway of a horse to the measured rhythm of the pickax? Whose affair was it if he kept his upper lip clean-shaven, rather than sporting the usual thick mustache? What stone was it engraved on, anyway, that a dwarf had to wear a mustache? All the damn thing did was guarantee that he would keep smelling his dinner, hours after the fact. Thank you, but no.
Ebenezer grimaced with amusement when he realized that he was rehearsing for the arguments to come. Well, no matter. He’d been gone a long time, and with each moon phase that had passed, the measure of his clan’s more annoying tendencies shrank just a bit more. Fact was, he was looking forward to the brand of contentious peace that meant hearth and home.
He wove his way through a henge of statues, a circle of ten-foot stone dwarves that honored heroes of the past, and bolted down the final tunnel toward the clanhold’s cavern. He burst out into the open, to be confronted with the slack-jawed astonishment of his kin.
His Da, a buriy, gray-bearded dwarf with a belly the size of a boulder and a heart to match, was the first to recover. “Osquips!” he howled, his eyes gleaming wildly as he took his hammer from his belt. “Didn’t I tell you, Palmara, the boy’d be back in time, and bringing gifts?”
Ebenezer’s mother sniffed and reached for her pick. She buried it deep in the skull of an onrushing rodent and kicked the twitching thing aside. Long years together had blurred the differences between the dwarf pair; except for the feminine cut of her dress tunic, Palmara Stoneshaft was nearly indistinguishable from her mate. She gestured with her bloody pike. “There’s two more over there. You, Gelanna! Back off them critters. I saw ‘em first!”
For several moments the ceremony was forgotten as the dwarves busily chased down the invading osquips. Ebenezer edged his way toward the center of the cavern. The stone lectern that served as podium for their contentious clan meetings had been turned into an altar, now abandoned as the priestess of Clangeddin joined gleefully into the sport. Tarlamera and her soon-to-be-husband, a likely little sprout of a dwarf who was not more than fifty and not much more than two hundred pounds, stood with arms folded and eyes filled with mingled amusement and frustration. Osquipbashing was fun to watch, but no dwarf willingly stood still when there was mayhem to be had. But Tarlamera wore the ceremonial apron, and she would get stomped by every other maiden in the clanhold if she messed it up with rodent guts. Regrettable, but that was tradition for you.
“You’re a lucky dwarf; Frodwinner. You got yourself the prettiest dwarf maid in a hundred caverns,” Ebenezer said and meant it. His sister was a picture, with her normally wild red beard neatly plaited and her hair tamed into bright ringlets. On her, those damned ringlets looked good.
The dwarf maid snorted, but her eyes were fond. “About time you showed. Staying long?”
It was a familiar question, and edged with a sarcasm that predicted Ebenezer’s answer. “Long as I can stand to,” he admitted. He softened the remark with a shrug. “I’m not one to stay put. You know that.”
Tarlamera shook her head in puzzlement and swept her hand toward the elanhold