Along the Cradle Road

Dvorak could taste manure in the air. The "road" that wound through western Wilder's Gorge, a place the locals referred to as The Cradle, was really just a raised mound of hard-packed earth. Its edges limned with emerald grass, the highway was wide enough for two wagons to pass by each other on either side, the wheel ruts showed through as strips of mud baked golden brown by the sun and separated by strips of more grass. Rolling hills in square-cut patches of gold and green and brown flanked the highway, here and there dotted with thatch-roofed cottages and barns and brown-furred cattle. It was a bit bumpy, but otherwise pleasant enough, especially on so fine a late-spring day.

Bayside had been wet, and though its road was paved, he had never been fond of rain. The bounty hunter had not improved matters, but he had died easily enough. Not the first and Dvorak expected not the last time he would be underestimated by a human. The dwarf knew what he was hauling in the stout oaken trunk that rested in a secret box in the floor of his cart, piled over with fabrics and wine and spices and even a few foreign oddities from the shores of Khinasi and Vosgaard. No one had told him, but he was a dwarf who made it his business to know his business and the 'hunter had proved his instinct right. Dvorak did not much care. A wise dwarf concerned himself with gold over foibles of moral sentimentality. He did not even mind the trouble it had indeed brought him.

As dwarves go, Dvorak knew he must look an oddity. Red-gold of hair and beard, both oiled and perfumed and twisted into fanciful shapes. His skin laden with the spoils of his trade; gold rings in his nose, eyebrows, and ears, aye even some in less visible places. He wore a sleeveless coat of golden silk over a light tunic of wine-tinted cotton. Billowing pantaloons of shimmering blue, in the Khinasi fashion, and supple brown boots buckled with gold, not brass, but gold. On each of his fingers he wore a ring, each of some precious metal crusted with gems, each more precious than the last. His thick, bare arms were hairless and hung with bangles that shone in the light, each of which could feed a man for a month. He had been assured in nearly every city he had ever had cause to visit that he would be enacting suicide were he to journey down the more odious streets. He always laughed. Dvorak Irontongue went where he pleased, damn the gods and any man or woman who tried to stop him.

This Wilder's Gorge, despite its rustic nature, was a pretty place. The folk he had had cause to meet were polite, sturdy, industrious. They reminded him of his family with smiles in place of scowls and ready cheer in place of a constant stream of dour, weighty demands. Dvorak always suspected the altitude of their heads had always had something to do with the humans' greater capacity for joy. That and sunlight. Glorious fucking sunlight. It had been the thing that had first pulled him from the grim halls of his ancestors. To live in a land awash in gold for half of every day had seemed to him something any true dwarf should deeply desire, but his people had called him strange for his love of it.

His earliest travels had taken him to the place that had the most of it: Khinasi. The Anuireans called that empire "The Cities of The Sun," and a name more apt Dvorak could not discern. The delights to be found therein had boggled his mind. Food, wine, women, men, books, and sport; all pleasures could be had there had one the coin to cover the price. That was where his admittedly mundane love of coin had fully bloomed. Within a year of arriving he knew the routes between every port, knew the fair prices and weights of every commodity that flowed through the streets of every city on the Khinasi coast. Alas, his travails forced him to cross paths with some of that glorious land's less savoury breed, and youthful indiscretions led to a deterioration of enough business relationships that his return to Anuire became a hot necessity.

That had been years ago, now. Anuire made a harder market for an independent seller of things. One required the blood to gain any real power among the land's merchants, and of divinity Dvorak's blood was as empty as they came. More for the best, in his opinion. Khinasi politics had seemed to him a nest of hungry vipers. Anuirean politics were just the same except the whole thing was also on fire. 

He had heard tales of this young lord to whose court his cart now rolled, and he did not seem as venomous as many of his peers. The cargo Dvorak carried seemed to tell a different tale, but again, that business was none of his own beyond the coin it gained him. The wilder lasses looked hale and lively as well, and he had a mood for women of late. Perhaps, if this Baron was what people said, he would stay for a time. He had been a dwarf of the cities since he had crawled from the earth, perhaps he could find something to love in the trees and rivers of Wilder's Gorge as he had found in the harams and bazaars of Khinasi. He knew right away that it would not be the smell, but he was a dwarf who chose to hold his heart open and his eyes on the horizon.