Most of the entire Tul Guard, the two dozen or so of them that were on
duty, were at what passed for their headquarters, which meant a wooden
palisade and towers, not unlike the bandit camps they had struck, and guard
towers with men atop them. Inside were tents, arranged in neat rows, with
slopes cut around them in order to keep them from flooding after a rainy
night. Indeed, the water flowed down to the very center of the palisade
compound, which was about two hundred yards square, where a pit had been dug
and a wooden cage top had been lashed down on top of it.
It was here that a sorry looking group of bandits were sitting up to
their chests in water that had been rained in, awaiting transportation to a
court for trial for their crimes. Most of them whined and moaned at first,
until a squaddie in Glend's section let his snake slither in the cages. When
one of the bandits screamed rather sweetly to the ears of the leathery
ranger types that patrolled Tul.
"GODS! THERE'S RATS IN HERE!"
The Tul guards hated bandits. With a passion. Perhaps it was reflective
of the sort of spirit that Flinteyes brought when he had joined up two years
ago, when he had whipped them into shape for the previous captain. They had
gone from a rustic, slightly lazy guard unit to one of the most aggressive
and well-trained guards, even if they were still the tiniest. That Flinteyes
was the captain didn't change much -- he had been the acting captain ever
since the old one retired into town. They were still keeping their armor
oiled and their weapons sharp. It was a religion for them now. Outmachoing
the rest of the Royal Guard.
And so in the spirit of machismo, it was one of the Tul guards that came
down to the prisoner cage with a huge snake wrapped around his arms and a
grin on his face.
Indeed, he was careful to drop the snake over the top of the cage so
that the prisoners could see the snake, in all his six feet of glory, that
was dropped. It was a huge Chubutan Cobra, complete with the flared head.
They were virulently poisonous, and known to lurk in their jungle habitat,
in reeds and other brush, for their water-rodent prey. Rats and the such. Of
which a few did get into the cage anyways. The cobra's proud owner crinkled
his eyes in amusement under the wide brim of a leather hat.
"Y'all just stand real still while Bogo there takes care of your rat
infestation problem. And try not to move around too much, he hunts by that
and loud noise."
David W. Eddings
(Not the author by the same name!)
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
"Just name a hero and I'll prove he's a bum." - Gregory 'Pappy' Boyington
"To retain respect for sausages and laws, one must not watch them in the
making." - Otto von Bismarck
"Good laws derive from evil habits." - Macrobius
"How many things be there which we imagine are not? How many things do we
esteem more value than they are? These vain imaginations, these
ill-proportioned estimations, these be the clouds of error that turn into
perturbations. Is there then any such happiness as for man's mind to be
raised above the confusion of things, where he may have a respect for the
order of nature and the error of men?" - Francis Bacon, "The Praise of
Knowledge."
"I am ready to meet my maker, but whether my maker is prepared for the great
ordeal of meeting me is another matter." - Winston Churchill
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