Haggling with the Gnaeblin Youth

As we passed through a larger town just after lunch, I think it was called Bilerren, we encountered the strongest resistance to our cause yet.  Gallanarre and I sat with the town's elders – a small council of the wise – and we discussed defensive tactics with them.  Some of them had military experience, and that helped speed up our work, but as we moved out of the meeting to review the physical defences we ran into a small crowd of youngsters, maybe twenty or thirty of them, who object to the whole fighting thing.  Rather than wave them away, Gallanarre and I took a step we hadn't taken before – we invited them inside the meeting room where we'd just sat with the elders.

While the protesters assembled in, I had a chat with Vachney, the senior of the Gnaeblin elders and I asked him to keep quiet during the discussions that followed, I told him that it was important that he leave the talking to Gallanarre and myself and to just back us up if asked any direct questions.

Because we had run into this kind of resistance on our journey, Gallanarre and I have been thinking of ways to counter it.  In previous towns and villages we'd only met with a few token protesters, nothing like this, although the further we've journeyed the bigger the protest groups have become.

We sat and listened to their protests.  We asked them to define their position – we had lots of them do it, over and over; we really wanted to know _why_ they thought it necessary to endanger the lives of their friends and family by trying to broker a peace with invaders.  I've not actually had to fight Gurgam before, of course I've heard stories of Dzarraf encounters with them, but they're not first hand accounts.  Gallanarre, on the other hand, had so he did the talking.  He told them of his earliest days in the military, his first posting which was part of a defensive station out in the valley beyond Meer-Pevero (a well known outlying surface town of the Gnaeblin) and how, just as dusk was falling one day, they were attacked by a wave of Gurgam.  They were caught on the hop, but rallied – and butchered many of their attackers, turning the Gurgam back.  Some of his friends were injured in the fighting though, and they struggled to tend to the wounded before the Gurgam returned, this time with disgusting Ogruks behind them.  The Ogruks had swords and whips and drove the Gurgam onto the Gnaeblin defences.  It was carnage.  Most of the Gurgam perished in the fighting, but the Ogruks pressed on.

The Gnaeblin were outnumbered and were pressed so hard they had to  abandon their positions.  They retreated up the valley back towards the towns, but they couldn't take their own injured.  The Gnaeblin screams from the defensive camp as the defenders were beaten back were terrible – the Gurgam dealt brutally with the injured that had remained behind.  It wasn't the Gurgam that were the real problem that day, it was the Ogruks who used them as infantry.  They're rubbish as soldiers and are weak and easily overcome.  But they're numerous, and easily manipulated.

Gallanarre held the protesters' full attention as he told his first-hand account.  He continued his story from three hours later, when reinforcements arrived from the towns and from other defence stations nearby.  The Gnaeblin troops pushed back through their base, wiping out the Gurgam and getting to the Ogruks.  They captured a few but those that didn't die mostly ran off into the darkness.  Questioning the prisoners was useless.  All they learned was what they already knew, that Ogruks hate the Gnaeblin with a passion, and they hate the Dzarraf even more.

This pulled some of the protesters on board, some were finally convinced that military defence was the only solution, but not all of them.  There were some that still felt that a negotiated peace had never been tried, that it would be the best way to ensure the survival of people on both sides of the conflict.  We asked if they would volunteer to visit the Ogruks who are driving the Gurgam on, to try and negotiate that peace.  There were no volunteers.  Cowards.

I threw threw in some more details of my own – the names of my own friends who had joined the delve defence forces only to be killed defending our delves from the likes of the Ogruks and their tougher cousins the Oggar.  Despite all this, there were those who still refused to accept that the enemy wanted anything but peace.  I really struggled to contain my rage – several of the friends I'd had as a youth had fallen victims to the most savage, spiteful, hateful rage-filled people imaginable.  And these idiots wanted to negotiate with them.  And they weren't even willing to attempt to start that negotiation themselves.  I stormed out of the meeting rather than lay into them verbally.  At first there was silence behind me – then the protesters began bickering and arguing among themselves, I could hear it kicking off behind me.

As I sat in the front office of that splendid building taking a drink of spring water and calming down when Gallanarre and Vachney came out to join me.  They seemed quite pleased.  As the worst of my anger had passed I tried to project a calm sense of purpose, to try and give the impression that I'd been in complete control the whole time, and that my rage was measured and pre-planned to achieve an effect.  I don't know if they swallowed that line, but they were certainly happy at the end result.  Gallanarre had told the stunned silence after I'd walked out that Gurgam do not take prisoners, and they do not negotiate.  That they're the puppets of the Ogruks, and they will fight and fight until there are no Gnaeblin and no Dzarraf left anywhere.  That, he said, was the point at which arguing and in-fighting in the group exploded.

We stopped and listened to the loud arguing for a while.  Some were arguing that they should seek peace, but others were now adamant that Ogruks cannot be bargained with, and that even if a peace could be fashioned, there'd still be hundreds, and maybe thousands, of Gurgam bent on attacking the Gnaeblin homelands.

We resumed our work of reviewing the defences at this point.  We'd have loved to stay and listen to the fight develop further – but we've got work to do.