For the third time that day, Griff had been an absolute bastard.
The first time was early that morning, when he had suggested to Jean that they play cards with some boys from the light infantry.
Giancarlo’s army had fallen on hard times, and had taken to making raids and pulling taxes from the caravans and little hamlets that dotted the country –side. The light infantrymen had made a raid yesterday, and as Griff reckoned, were near stuffed full with coins.
It was a foggy morning, with the gray clouds low and threatening in the dawn sky. Griff woke up last of the three little goblins that Giancarlo Durriso had put together, smelling the coming rain. They were all littlee grayskins and so they made a neat set. That was Giancarlo’s logic summed up into one, though they couldn’t be more different from one another.
When they went into battle, for example, Arn was always at the front, leading the charge, crawling all over whoever was unlucky enough to wind up in his path.
Roach was a quiet one. He could hole up in a tree or disappear for days, right into the undergrowth like he was planted there. He could hunt and fish and sneak around quiet as you like. Griff admired that. Roach could also set a limb and wrap a wound and a hundred other useful things. Best of all, Roach knew how to keep his mouth shut. Griff liked that the most.
When he had pulled his stiff body up from the ground Griff was glad to be rid of his fellows for the moment. They had their uses, of course, but what he was planning required a delicate touch and a force of personality. The things that Griff could do that the others could not. He stood in the cool, wet air, and stretched his arms up to the darkening sky, then picked his way down to the rain bucket. He splashed his face and then took a long drink. Finally, with his wet hands, he slicked back his thick, stringy black hair.
Back at camp, he found Ryon and Jean sitting together by the low campfire, poking the smoking wood and grumbling to one another in low, rumbling voices.
“Morning all,” Griff said to announce himself. The other two didn’t even bother to look up.
“Morning,” Jean said, none too happy with himself by the sound of it.
“What’s for food?”
“Less than shit,” Ryon huffed. He was a short, wide Orc, heavy of brow and arm, with sallow olive skin and receding, curly black hair. Griff liked Ryon well enough, all things considered. Even though Ryon was an Orc, he’d lived in human civ long enough to know better. He’d always treated Griff as well as he treated everyone else, and that was good enough for Griff. That didn’t mean it was always good, but there was an unsaid understanding between the two. They knew which way the rain fell better than the others.
“Why don’t you whip up to magic to feed our fire?” Jean asked. He had a thick accent from the Gaulic Land, and little moustaches and a pointed beard like the men from that region were all said to have. He had shaggy, straight greasy brown hair that he let fall in front of his eyes. It was hard to tell how old Jean really was, and Griff had never felt need to ask. Still, even though Griff tended to like Jean more than Ryon, and he liked them both better than most, Griff had to admit that even at the best of times Jean was a pain in the ass.
“If I could do magic,” Griff said, his displeasure thick in his voice, “I’d undo whatever curse what turned you as ugly as you are.” He found a soft looking rock and sat. “Though, perhaps even my magic would not be enough.”
That was when he decided he would be a right bastard today, without feeling too bad about it.
“If you were magic,” Ryon said, “We’d have sold you for breakfast long ago, and so wouldn’t be much better off.”
They went around like this for a while, hoping to postpone the inevitable realization: that a hot breakfast was about as likely as their fire suddenly and defiantly roaring to life. Roach was gone and nowhere to be found. That one knew how to build a fire, Griff reflected, and how to hunt meat. Knew how to cook, too. Though, he was less reliable than most. Roach was like to disappear as to stick around, and once he was gone, it was hell and the gods before you’d find him again.
So they sat. They talked for a while and were quiet for a while, and by the time they were quiet it wasn’t long before Griff had gotten tired of that. Anyway, he was still a little angry about that comment Jean had made earlier about his goblin magic, so he made his suggestion, as he had been planning to do all along.
“Ey, what say we go out to where those horse-fuckers make their camp and have a round or two of cards?” That made Jean sit up a bit. He was always interested in seeing some gambling, though getting him in was another thing all together. The Gaulish weren’t known for their boldness, it was said, and Jean was happy to stand way in the back and look over someone’s shoulder. Griff could get him to buy in, of course, much easier than he would Ryon, but it would take some doing.
“What say we do?” Jean said, looking at Ryon. “Why would we?”
“Those horse-fuckers, as you say,” Ryon put in, gazing sideways at Griff, “Went out raiding yesterday, and you know they keep a handful for themselves.” Jean leaned forward a little at that.
“Well, I’m going to play,” Griff said, dusting off his knees and pushing himself off his rock. “Question is, will either of you partner with me, or should I share my winnings with someone else?”
Jean looked carefully between the two of them before turning to Ryon. “You haven’t played a hand in a good while, have you?” He asked. Ryon shook his head.
“I haven’t on purpose,” Ryon grunted. “I’ve seen all my money home anyway, and I don’t have coin to play. My wife got mad enough at me on my last leave that I won’t go back if there’s no coin in my pocket.”
“Well, we will make our own run in a few days, won’t we?” Griff asked. He didn’t care one way or the other if Ryon played, but this was part of it. Jean would feel better about throwing his money away if he knew Griff wouldn’t have a partner. “And we just got paid a day or two ago. It won’t hurt her if she don’t know, will it? You’ll have enough money at week’s end to give to the couriers when they show up, won’t you?” He had said to Ryon, but it was meant for Jean. A little more encouragement, simple as you like.
“That is a good,” Jean said, pointing to Griff. “That is good, yes. You can play a few hands, no problem.” Ryon just grunted.
“I’ll tag along and maybe I’ll watch, but I won’t be playing.” He pulled himself up, taking his sweet time. Jean, however, was excited.
“You can speak us up,” Jean said, standing. “Shit speaking, as they say.” Ryon huffed but smiled at that.
“Why not?”
“Where have they set up?” Ryon asked. That was the question Griff had been waiting for. He pointed up stream.
“That way, if it serves.”
“It usually does,” Ryon said. Griff had used to count cards on the streets and as such, he had a keen memory. Ryon and Jean didn’t know the details, but they had seen him recall hands perfectly from rounds before. That wasn’t strictly how card counting word, per se. It was more like a little game to keep track of when you should be on yourself and when you should bet against, but it was better that he kept that to himself. It was easy to intimidate foes and inspire allies if you kept quiet about how it really worked, and could call up entire rounds worth of hands.
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Griff had learned from hard experience down by the docks how to play and account, and how to stack decks and draw exactly the card he wanted when he wanted it. How to produce those fine movements, the finesse to make them look easy and natural, to put the card right on top and under the opponents nose so they couldn’t even sniff something off. Griff was content to let Jean lose or win as much money as he saw fit. Because he hadn’t really wanted to rob the horse-fuckers blind today. Really, he wanted to see Jean get all worked up and lose a little money. That would serve for the day’s diversion. It was a cruel sort of justice that Griff liked to work with his friends.
***
It wasn’t long before they had gotten themselves embroiled in a game of high-low with some of the cavalry-men upstream. Griff and Jean were playing against two big, ugly-looking bastards, one a tall, bald northerner called Bjorn and one a short, dark haired man from the Mosaic Islands called Lyn. They were both missing one of their four front teeth and each had a big scar on their face, so they looked interchangeable to Griff, despite the differences in their builds and features. Griff took this as a sign that neither of them were smart enough to avoid getting hit.
Sometime in the wandering between leaving their rocks and their sorry little fire and finding an appropriately difficult card game upstream, they hand run into Arn and had even brought him along.
Unfortnely, Arn was also not quite smart enough to see the value of not getting hit. His face was a tangle of pale silver scars, his mouth of a mess of missing and cracked teeth. One of his shoulders had broken and healed back so many times that it was hitched up higher than the other and it gave him a lumbering way of carrying himself. Still, Griff knew Arn was tough. Riff’d seen that well enough himself in the year since Giancarlo had stuck the two of them together with Jean and Ryon.
They found the two scarred men playing two others they didn’t recognize at a table made from a turned over tomato box. They stood around waiting for the others to lose before they took their place in front of Lyn and Bjorn.
The two taunted them and sneered in broken Cillian, talking to each other in another language that Griff knew was a trade pidgin spoken in Orcish lands, though he could only catch every third word. They also muttered to themselves in even stranger foreign tongues, neither of which he could place (though he guessed something Northern, for the big man). The two ugly men were already giving him a headache when he noticed they were trying to cheat him.
After about five hands he saw the seven of wheels come up again, and after two more hands he saw the six of leaves. Of course, he had been pitching hands to them, working against Jean in subtle ways that didn’t make it obvious he was losing. That was before he saw the same hand twice in a row. That’s when he started paying attention.
“Another loss,” Griff said and threw down his cards. An eight of vines and an eight of bones. A good trick, too. The hand was just good enough to make them want to keep playing. These two, ugly as they were, stupid as they had to have been, still had some vulgar simulacrum of skill, to pull something like this. Even Griff, loathe as he was, had to admit it.
“We’ve lost four in a row,” Jean was saying in Gaulic. He’d adopted the tactic of the enemy, speaking low in a language he was sure no one else knew.
“I know,” Griff said. He wasn’t going to call their cheating just yet. He wanted to watch a little more, now that he was awake. He wanted to see what they were really doing, and how they were doing it.
“Well, it might be time to start cheating,” Jean spat out. What he really had said was that he thought rain was coming, which was true enough. It was perfectly obvious, really. This was how Griff knew what it meant.
“Not yet,” Griff said, a perfectly reasonable reply to both the statement said and unsaid. He wasn’t worried about being understood or misunderstood. There were few Gaulish here and their lands were far away. In fact, Jean had no countrymen in Giancarlo’s army, though Griff had known many in Pomadora where he’d spent his youth. It was there, on the seaside, playing cards against the sailors, that Griff had learned you can never be too careful. Jean had learned that lesson too, somewhere, and so the two of them got on. At least at cards.
“Why not? Looks like rain to me.”
“Two more hours, at least, before it starts to fall.” Even as Griff spoke he was studying the way the big man shuffled. It was hard enough to watch the small cards fly through his meaty hands, but Griff had seen all sorts of shuffles and could tell what he was doing by the way the fingers moved.
They played out the next two hands, just looking at his cards long enough to commit them to memory. He bet automatically. There was no thought or enjoyment in his play. He just threw the coins in and watched them get taken away.
It didn’t take long to see the action. A quick change over. He took the cards off the table when he picked the deck back up, some good and some bad, straight out of the discard pile. Then, as the bald northerner shuffled, he finessed the good cards onto the bottom, the bad cards into the top.
He dealt out the next hand. The first, a bad card for Griff from the bottom of the deck, a good card for Lyn off the top. A bad card for Jean from the bottom of the deck, a good card for Bjorn off the top. He went around again, mixing in a few new cards to keep the hands interesting, leaving some good cards on top for when they eventually made their discards. It was a simple system to keep things seeming random, but controlled.
Griff looked toward Jean and gave a little nod. Then, he looked up to the sky. “Bad rain,” he said. “A little on the plains, a little on the mountain.” Jean looked down at his cards and turned them up at the corner, just to see. He put his hand down on the table.
“Well, what do you know?” Jean said in his heavily accented Cillian, “Another of shit. Could I have guessed?” The two men looked at one another. It was that pleased look on their face that made Griff do what he did next.
“Bad luck for you,” the little Islander said and laughed. “Little shit.”
He should have just let it go, should have stood up and walked away like they always did. Instead, for the second time that day, Griff decided to be an absolute bastard.
“What about this?” Griff asked. He reached over to the discard pile and flipped the cards over. “I had an eight two hands ago, didn’t I?” He fanned out the cars there to show everyone that there were no eights at all.
“Ah,” Jean said. “What is this shit? You cheat!” Bjorn did not care for that accusation.
“Fuck you,” he spit out through the hole in his teeth. “You cheat. Little shit.”
“Little cheat shit,” Lyn said. “Baby orc. Orcisso, Orcisso.” The four players stood looking at one another, cursing and prodding and calling each other names. It wasn’t pretty, but that was part of it.
“Give us our money back,” Jean said, and took a handful of coins and pulled them over to their side of the table.
“No no,” Lyn said and swiped at Jean’s hand. “No no, bad loser! Little shit, little loser. Orcisso loser. Orcisso bitch. Loser bitch.”
“Stupid loser bitch,” Bjorn said, his accent gitting thicker the redder his face became, until he was bellowing unintelligibly. There was still time left for Griff to pull away, to say it wasn’t worth their time. They could go back to their cold camp and sit on their hard rocks and be happy with most of their pay still in their pockets. It was still possible. It was still easy.
But nobody cheated Griff. Not that like. He’d learned a long time ago that you could only scam someone who was willing to be scammed, and as soon as they figured out your tricks it was better to cut and run. Bjorn had not received the same education.
By this time a group was starting to gather around to watch the commotion. Some members of the cheater’s battalion took sides with their fellow soldiers, cussing at the Goblins and the Gaulic and pushing around the small table to get a better look at the so-called evidence. Some of the others, certainly those who had already been tricked by Lyn and Bjorn, who had already lost their pay coin and were looking to get it back, had gathered up around Griff and Jean. There may be something in it for them, if they took up sides now.
Things continued to grow more heated. Bjorn had pushed himself up against Jean, he was at least half a head taller, and was bellowing down at him. Jean, not one to pass up a chance to argue, was bellowing right back. The Islander was also barking at Griff, the same sort of name calling and mocking, but the little goblin wasn’t taking the biat. He was too busy thinking up what he should do next. This was starting to get well and truly out of hand and he would have to make his next move carefully.
Arn was yelling something that Griff couldn’t make out. He’d grown up picking voices out of the shouting crowds of sprawling cities and spent the last few years listening for orders over the screams and cries of a battlefield. Even compared to that, this was chaos. At first he’d thought it was fair and fun, calling out a cheat. He thought they’d cut and run and him and Jean could take over the table. He thought he’d shame them a bit and then get back to the game. Bjorn and Lyn, however, weren’t playing it right. They didn’t know how to run away and live to scam another day. Instead, they were standing and fighting and that just wasn’t how you did it. They were already making a mistake and so Griff couldn’t just back down. That’d be admitting he was wrong and that would make it harder to get games.
In the end, it was Lyn who did something stupid before Griff did. Unsatisfied with the amount of attention the little goblin was giving, Lyn picked up his crudely carved wine cup and slashed the dregs into Griff’s face. At almost the same time, Bjorn pushed Jean hard and the man went down to the ground.
“Gretch gretch gretch,” Lyn called, his face twisted into a broken smile. It was not a nice thing to call a little Goblin. Saying they were magic was one thing. Certainly a soft spot, for sure, but nothing like this. Nothing like implying that he was a slave. That set Griff’s mind. And so, for the third and final time that day, Griff decided to be an absolute, unassailable, catastrophic bastard.
Griff took out his six shooter, put it into the little Islander’s face, and pulled the trigger.