This recent Autumn, the fortress of Deleruz (Steelgrowl) received it's usual visit from Arpesor (The Still Confederacy), our friendly neighborhood humans. Among the cavans escort was a lasher by the the name of Ica Carapika. No one exceptional. No one I even noticed.
Trade took place without a hitch. The wagoneers hitched back up their horses and the caravan started to roll off. Ica lingered a bit longer, being escourt to one of the far slower moving pack-mules. As such, he was the only human guard still around when the goblin ambushes suddenly appeared.
Two, in rapid succession, sniffed out by the war dogs I had on watch outside our walls. One was mostly wrestlers, but the other, dreadfully, was almost all bowmen. The poor pups were both dispatched without even delivering a wound and the goblins rapidly moved in to swarm my completely unprepared fortress.
I'd never seen ambushes this early and largely blame the smoothed obsidian walls and floors that almost every room in the fort had, which pushed my Architecture value through the roof. I had not expected any ambushes nor prepared much in the way of a military. Just a couple of part-time axe-dwarves in leather armor there to kill or at least scare off raccoons and kobolds. There was not a single trap in sight. Indeed, my population was not even large enough to support a real military yet. Only 15 dwarves total, one of them just a child (I had 26, at one point, yet after getting an immigration wave of mostly hunters and rangers and an obscene number of wolf packs in the area, this number dropped rather fast).
Still, I at least had enough in the way of leather armor, iron bucklers, and assorted weapons to go around, so the whole population was activated and put on alert. They began to gather up in the dinning hall, which was separated from the trade depot only by a short corridor.
Most of the humans were well beyond the notice of the goblins notice by this point. Only two remained, strangely lingering far behind the others: Ica and the merchant he was escorting. The merchant, in their cowardly way, ran as soon as he saw the goblins. Yet Ica, brave Ica, fearlessly charged in against the goblin wrestlers!
Busying myself trying to get my dwarves into position, I didn't watch the fight at first. Only waited for news of the human's inevitable death. Which was why I was more than a little surprised when I began to get messages about goblin deaths. One after the other, the wrestlers were dying off. Surprised, I hurried back to the scene of the battle and witnessed a miracle. Ica Carapika, coated head to toe in goblin blood, at the center of a ring of goblin bodies.
Three were dead. The other two flashing Xs from their grievous wounds and rapidly bleeding to death. Body parts were scattered all over the place. Ica had been wounded extensively, yet not cripplingly, so he was still on his feet when the first goblin arrows began to rain down around him.
The brave human did not hesitate, moving in to attack yet again! Deciding that I could not allow this fellow to die alone, I sent my dwarves rushing out to join him in the fray. They caught up to him just as his body was pierced by numerous arrows. He crashed to the floor, still alive but unconscious, and managed to continue to draw their fire for just long enough for my dwarves to reach the goblins.
Clearly filled by an other-worldly fury, Nil Savotamost, one of my part-time axe milita, dashed ahead of the rest. He swung his axe at the nearest goblin with such force that it was cleaved in half, both chunks hurled backwards into the rest of the archers. The rest of the dwarves arived and piled on without mercy, beating the goblins with pick axes and stone swords and even a wooden club (weapon edited in and gotten from elves. Low-damage wooden mace, more or less) or shot at them from a distance with the few steel bolts we had left.
In the end, not a single dwarf died, though one of my craftsmen lost an eye and several others were bed ridden for the rest of the season. Yet, what was the strangest aspect of this whole event was what took place afterward. As soon as I took him off active military duty, my expedition leader Domas moved immediately over to Ica Carapika's body and picked it up. I was expecting him to take it to the refuse pile and dump him in among the lizard corpses, turtle shells, and fish bones.
Instead, much to my surprise, Domas carried the corpse into the fortress. He hauled it down a long flight of stairs and into the unfinished tombs I'd been working on there. There were a long series of stone coffins lining the hallways, intended for the burial of pets or dwarves who I couldn't get a tomb ready in time for (there were already a lot of hunters entombed there). Domas took Ica's body to the first of these he could find, a well made obsidian coffin, and laid the human to rest inside. I'd seen dwarves bury dwarven caravan guards before and even heard about them entombing traitor-dwarves who serve the goblins. Yet, this was the first time I'd ever seen them put a human (or any member of another race, for that matter) in a coffin.
He certainly deserved it, since he likely saved my tiny fortress from annihilation. It would have been rather depressing to see him tossed into a refuse pile, where he would rot away and his bones later carved into decorative images of bats or cheese on the side of a barrel. Sometimes, it seems, dwarves can show at least an ounce of decency...
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"Rest ye down among the good folk, long-legs," said Domas Rigothcilob as he pushed the heavy lid of the stone coffin into place. "Ye did us good service today."
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Topic: Dwarves entombing... humans? (Read 1423 times)