A Game of Groans: A Sonnet of Slush and Soot (2 page)

After a lengthy guzzle, Jarhead pulled the bottle from Airhead’s grip and said, “Quit bogarting the grog, Bro.”

“I have seniority, and I can bogart as much and as often as I’d like, just as Lord Borgar of Castle Blanca once did.” Airhead burped. “By the time you turned four, I already owned three swords, and had eight kills under my belt.”

“Yes,” Jarhead noted, “you’ve mentioned that. Several hundred times.”

“And I pulled myself up from nothing.
Nothing,
” Airhead whined.

“That has also been mentioned,” Jarhead pointed out. “But I suspect that won’t stop you from telling me…”

“I never knew who my father was, Bro,” Airhead interrupted. “I was a … a … a
jerkoff
. ”

“Of course you were.”

“That’s what folks around most of Easterrabbit call boys who don’t know who their fathers are: jerkoffs.”

“I know.”

“I understand they call them bastards up on the other side of the Wall, but here, they call them jerkoffs.”

“They sure do.”

“You understand that? For the sake of this discussion—and any discussions following—the definition of
jerkoff
is the definition of
bastard
.”

“Got it.”

“Forget everything you know about the word
jerkoff
. Right now, and for the next two hundred or so pages, a jerkoff is a child who was abandoned by his father.”

“Check.”

“And I was the biggest jerkoff in all the land.”

“And you still are.”

Airhead finished off the bottle, then stood up and threw it straight ahead, as hard as he could; the bottle stuck to the Wall as if it were covered in Velcro, and the Wall was covered with more Velcro. “That’s why I joined the Fraternity, Bro. Because I’m a jerkoff. A stupid jerkoff, with a stupid life that’s now even more stupid, because I spend every minute of every day watching this stupid Wall, wearing this stupid armor in this stupid heat. I’m sweating my onions off in here.”

“You think you had it rough just because you don’t know who your father was?” Jarhead questioned. “I grew up on the border of Dork. All our food came from Dork. All our clothes came from Dork. All the smells came from Dork.
That’s
a stupid life.”

Airhead raised himself to his knees, stood up, then fell down again. “I’m sorry, Bro,” he apologized. “Jerkoffs tend to focus on the fact that they’re jerkoffs, and that is
not
how a Frat brother should act.” He reached his hand under his armor, scratched his shoulder, then added, “It’s just that it’s hot, and I’m bored.”

Jarhead nodded his understanding, then said, “I understand. You want another drink?”

“I do,” he agreed, “but what I’d like more is to use my training. I want to fight.” He picked up his sword and whooshed it to and fro. “We trained to fight. We took an oath to fight.” He faced the Wall and yelled,
“We’re ready when you are, Others!”

A voice came over the Wall: “
You’re
the Others!”

Airhead and Jarhead gawked at each other. “Did you hear that?” Jarhead asked.

Airhead nodded.

“What do you think we should do?” Jarhead queried.

“I think we should go and…”

Before he could finish the thought, a bald man with no nose called from the top of the Wall, “
I think you should go and suffer!
Ahoy, Others! It is time to begin our takeover of the entire continent of Easterrabbit!”

A man wearing full-body black armor and a black cape leapt over the Wall, landed directly in front of Airhead, and pointed out, “In case anybody asks, regardless of what baldy back there says, we’re not the Others. We’re the Awesomes.”

At once, three or four voices called from the other side of the Wall,
“That’s not official yet!”

The man in black yelled, “I hate you all!” Then he picked up Airhead by his neck, held him three feet above the ground, and spiked him into the mud.

Jarhead drew his weapon and approached the man in black. When he was a sword’s thrust away, the man in black held up a finger and Jarhead came to a sudden halt, holding his throat with his free hand and gagging, unable to speak. The man in black breathed, “This is
it
? This is all they’ve got? This is the big, scary Fraternity we’ve been hearing about for the last, what, zillion Summers? We’ve been sitting here with mud up our bum cracks, and nothing’s been happening—not that we should be surprised by that, because if you know anything about Easterrabbit, you know there’s often pages and pages and pages and pages of nothingness—and this is
it
?”

A bespectacled boy riding a Lion—who anybody with any sense would recognize represented Jesus Chryst, if only because the word
Lion
is capitalized—materialized out of nowhere and corrected, “
Seven
Summers. We’ve been waiting seven Summers to make a move. Seven. Seven long Summers in the heat, and the sun, and the rain, and the heat, and the tornados, and the heat, and the…”

“Okay, Specs,” the man in black said, “we know, we get it, it’s hot, but put a sock in it. I’m wearing way more crap than you, and do you hear me bitching? No. So how about less whining, and more mauling.” The man in black turned to the Wall and roared,
“You guys coming, or what?”

In the blink of a dragon’s eye, a hole appeared in the Wall, and through it climbed the members of the group formerly known as the Others. The hole closed as quickly as it opened, and then the battle began.

A bearded man in a robe stomped on the fallen Airhead’s head, sending brain matter flying in all directions. Directly in the path of the brain shrapnel, the golden droid took several hits; he flicked a blop of gooey gray matter on his chest and uttered, “Dear me, what time does Ziebart close?”

Ignoring the effeminate-sounding robot, the noseless man ripped a tree from its roots and smashed it into Jarhead’s back, sending the Swatchman flying. “How’d that taste, you Easterrabbit bastards?” he asked.

Airhead sat up, picked up a fistful of brain, jammed it back into the hole in his head, and grunted, “I’m not a bastard, I’m a jerkoff!” Then he threw a handful of mud at the noseless man.

The noseless man easily dodged the salvo and called to the bespectacled boy, “Care to have a go at him, magician?”

The boy grinned wolfishly, snarled, “Bloody right I would,” then threw his wand at Airhead. The stick went into Airhead’s left eye and boomeranged out his right, then floated easily into the magician’s awaiting hand.

The Swatchman poked his fingers into his empty eye sockets, roared, “The Fraternity of the Swatch shall not be vanquished,” then pulled himself to his feet, took a single step forward, tripped on a snake, and collapsed onto the mud, looking deader than the deadest of dead snakes who had died.

During the commotion, the pointy-eared man bent over Jarhead and pinched the back of his neck. All four of Jarhead’s limbs detached themselves from his torso and flew into the Wall, where they stuck as if they were covered in Velcro, and the Wall was covered with more Velcro. The noseless man then twisted off Jarhead’s head and took a drink from his skull.

The bearded man declared, “We are done here. We have done what we needed to do. We have made our point. If we continue on this path, we will find ourselves heading toward the Dark Side.”

“You have a problem with the Dark Side, you old fart?” the man in black asked. “It’s
fun
on the Dark Side.” He ripped off Airhead’s arm and flung it over the Wall as if it were a twig that was blown from a tree during a Summer storm. “Now
that
is how we roll on the Dark Side, baby. It’s a pile of piss. You might want to…”

Before he could finish his thought, Airhead whispered, “We’ll be back, Bro. We’ll be back.” And then he bled out.

The pointy-eared man gave the dead Swatchman a nervous glance, then murmured, “He’s right, you know. All logic dictates that if he says he’ll be back, then he’ll be back, probably right before the end of the tale.”

“Whatever you say, space cadet,” the man in black said. He clapped once, then said, “Okay, I’m starved. Plenty of time to eat, because nothing ever happens in this freaky-ass continent. Nothing.
Nothing
. So who’s up for some onions?”

Allbran Barker broke wind.

Fortunately for Allbran’s sake, the wind from the sky dissipated the wind from his hindquarters to the point that he was the only person who heard the foulness. Unfortunately for Allbran’s sake, the wind was such that he was forced to inhale the foulness, a foulness that somebody with a sharp sense of smell would accurately surmise was born of a combination of onions, wild boar, raw oats, and more onions.

The seven-year-old scrunched up his nose with self-loathing, and his father, Lord Headcase Barker, noticed. Lord Barker inquired, “What’s with the face, Allbran?” Gesturing to the scene in front of him, he asked, “Is
this
too much for you?”

Allbran said, “Oh, of course not, Father. I look forward to
this
!” The
this
Allbran and Lord Barker spoke of was the weekly Deserter Demolition.

Some believed Deserter Demolition to be barbaric, but even Allbran understood it was a necessity. Due to its horrible climate—brutal cold one day, deadly heat the next, even hotter than that the next—Summerseve, the town in which House Barker was housed, was a less-than-ideal place to live. Angered by the broken promises about universal air-conditioning service, the townspeople began an exodus from the region—most of those who left relocated to Caelifornea, while a small contingency escaped to Paeresfrance—and Summerseve nearly went bankrupt. In order to salvage the region, Lord Barker instituted a strict no-deserters policy, the penalty being beheading. That did not stop people from trying to leave Summerseve on a daily basis. Some made it out. Most did not.

In order to cut costs, Headcase—Head to his friends—scheduled all his beheadings for Monday afternoons, and to Allbran, those Mondays tasted as good as a plate of lemon cakes. Lemon cakes with a healthy coating of deserter blood, granted, but lemon cakes nonetheless. The beheadings were enjoyable in and of themselves, but part of the fun was the opportunity to spend time with his father, his older brother, Bobb, and his not-quite-as-old-as-Bobb-but-still-older-than-Allbran jerkoff brother, Juan Nieve. For one day a week, the Barker boys were on an equal plane, and Allbran wanted to keep it that way, thus his concern about the windbreaking.

Head smiled at his son and uttered, “I look forward to these days too, son. It’s a pleasure to have you boys here by my side.” Looking at Juan, he said, “Even you, jerkoff.”

“Gracias, Padre,”
¹
Juan said.

“I apologize to you boys that we only have one deserter. It was a slow week. I feel horrible. I have let you down. Down I have let you. If somebody were to ask me, ‘In which direction have I let you,’ the answer would be ‘down.’”

Allbran—who was uncomfortable with his father’s predilection for self-flagellation—farted, then coughed to cover up the air tulip. “That’s alright, Father. One beheading is better than no beheadings.”

Head’s smile widened, and he said, “Ah, Allbran, you are growing into a fine young man.” He pulled the bloodstained axe from his tool belt and said, “When I die—and I will die, probably soon, because characters like me, we always die—this will all be yours. Well, not yours, but your older brother’s, who might lend it to you once in a while. And now, to the business at hand.” He lifted the axe above his head and called, “It is decreed by me, Headcase Barker, the Seventy-Eighth of His Name, King of the Swordfish and the Hemorrhoids, Lord of the Eight, no, Nine, no, wait, Six Kingdoms, and Protector of the Protractor, that this nameless deserter’s head be removed by mine hand with one whack, and one whack only.” He asked the deserter, “Have you any final words?”

The deserter mumbled, “I do have a name, you know.”

“Of course you do,” Head agreed, then—as Bobb yelled,
“I loves me some violence!”
—brought the axe down upon the back of the deserter’s neck.

Halfway through Head’s downswing, Allbran’s hindquarters emitted a sound so thunderous that he who supplied it could not deny it. It so disconcerted Head that his typically straight and sure axe chop was a tad wobbly, wobbly to the point that the axe did not slice all the way through the deserter’s neck. Head attempted to remove his weapon from the deserter, but it was so embedded in the man’s spine that the handle popped free of the blade, and the blade stayed put, half in his neck, and half out.

While the three full-blooded Barker men and the one jerkoff watched blood gush from the deserter and onto their respective shirts, Bobb pulled out his sword and asked, “Would you like me to finish him off, Father?”

Juan unsheathed his sword and declared, “
Dios mio, Padre,
²
give me the chance to prove myself. My swordwork has become
muy
³
impeccable.”

Head chuckled, “My son, my jerkoff, I appreciate the sentiment, but the law is clear: One whack, and one whack only. I know, I know, in the story outline, it was suggested that we should be as violent as possible, but once in a while, subtlety is called for, and what’s more subtle than one whack?” He turned to the deserter and said, “You are free to go. But I would advise you to stay in Summerseve. I think if you give it a chance, you’ll find it to be a wonderful place to live.”

The deserter stood up, bowed, gingerly touched his gushing wound, and said, “Yes, my Lord. Thank you, my Lord.”

Head nodded. “My pleasure.” He tapped the blade embedded in the deserter’s neck and said, “Hey, if you get a chance, could you return this thing to my castle?”

“Yes, my Lord.”

“Fantastic. Give it to my assistant, Maester Blaester, and he’ll get it to me.”

“Yes, my Lord,” the deserter repeated, then staggered off.