Banjo D. Cedar

Banjo was a man most people would have liked taking a shovel to, but the man was too quick to catch and none had ever seen him sleep, and so he remained at large, and on a good day you’d find him down at the saloon with a fist wrapped around a whiskey bottle and the other arm wrapped around a careworn whore or two, and he never paid no mind to nothing that weren’t drinking or fucking or running quick like a jack rabbit up over a fence or ducking like a prizefighter from the furious ham fists of some feller or woman he’d stirred up, and he was always half-lit, even after days of drinking nothing but lake water and his own urine (in a misguided attempt to keep the whiskey in).

 

Banjo was a survivor, and that was that. He wasn’t ever much of a fighter, but he was cool under pressure, his drunkenness keeping his wits and emotions dulled, and when the other fool would yank too quick on his pistol and fire wide, Banjo would sure and steady shoot him down. He was dulled to pain too, which helped when they weren’t a bad shot and winged him, which is how he lost his left ear. He wasn’t so good at the close combat, and lost his right eye to an overzealous thumb on a man who came out from Missouri looking for a fight and found one.

 

When the orcs came flying through, their Pegasi neighing and flapping and trampling the good folk outside the saloon, old Banjo staggered to the doorway, took his pistol out his belt and shot one of them orcs dead right between the eyes, blew the contents of his brain pan all over his partner, a shaggy looking orc woman who had the sagging teats of an old milk cow, who lowered a crossbow at him and then chucked it, not quite grasping the mechanics of that rusty old arbalest. Banjo had him the good mind to pick it up, it being the crossbow of an orc riding a Pegasus, but he passed on it and wandered back into the saloon where the whores locked him out of their sleeping rooms downstairs and the other johns had barricaded themselves in the fucking rooms upstairs.

 

So Banjo stood himself up behind the bar and poured himself a tumbler of whiskey and sipped it gingerly like he imagined the owner of the saloon, a heavy set man with a jowly, feminine face, might stand when greeting customers of higher station than he greeted old Banjo. He laid his pistol out on the bar and when them orcs came running in with their crossbows bloody from all the clubbing they was doing with them, Banjo called to them like they was all old friends and set them up a few stiff shots and together they drank, Banjo plying his two new friends with liquor while they argued bitterly in their guttural language, Banjo guessed, about how they were going to kill him. He looked out the saloon door at the wild carnage in the street and saw a Pegasus chew the head off the stableboy.

 

Them orcs kept drinking, and others soon joined them, pounding at the keys of the piano and dancing and fist fighting and when the light had begun to fade to twilight and then darkness, the only light came from the burning post office and some of the other buildings not outright demolished by the raiders and their rainbow hued mounts. When the orcs made pantomimes that even a thoroughly and disgustingly drunk Banjo could understand, he pointed down the hallway to where the pussy had barricaded itself, though not stoutly enough to keep the crossbows from busting them down, and he listened to the grunts and the screaming and watched while them orcs queued up to rape them whores like they were citizens casting votes, and Banjo grabbed up his pistol off the bar and slipped out the back door while they was distracted.

 

The evening air was cool and smelled of burned hair and flesh, and he stepped over bodies picking pockets and taking rings from hands he found severed and not. The sky was clear, but the stars were obscured from the firelight of the burning town and a few of the homesteads that were too much temptation for them green skinned killers, whose mounts even now were rutting in the midst of the destruction and who reveled with the same patience as their riders, studs waiting to gang-bang mares in the churned mud of the street.

 

When he walked away from the town he came upon a troop of cavalrymen who were riding in, and he told them what was transpiring ahead, and the Lieutenant cuffed him roughly and they rode on, presumably to their doom for having interrupted the coitus of two very aggressive species of mammal who didn’t like to trifle with the particulars of civilization. Banjo had recognized that in them berserkers from the first, and had respected their beliefs, yes sir, because a bloodthirsty and horny orc don’t want any lawman telling him who he can and can’t rape when he pleases. The limit to his civility was waiting in line, and even that would grow to be too much. Them cavalry soldiers would get a good lesson in what the limits of such monsters was, and quick.

 

He lay down under a thistle bush favoring the side of his head caught by the horseman’s boot, and slept a long time. When he woke up the sun was high in the sky, and another man lay in the path beat by the horsemen the night before, and he wore their colors on his cavalry tunic and none else, his buttocks white and skyward where he’d fallen not long before dawn. Banjo poked the man with a stick, and he moaned a little, which let Banjo know he was still kicking, and while he searched around for a rock large enough to crush the man’s head with ease, the near naked man woke all the way up.

 

Horrible creatures, he said, and Banjo sat without much emotion on his face save the wince he wore for the daylight was piercing his head like a spike. He pulled on a flask he’d found on a body he’d known, the postmaster, a stern man who’d scorned those carousing in the saloon nights, and passed it to the cavalryman and leaned against the rock he drug over to bash with, and presently the man caught his wind and said his piece.

 

We rode into town and seen the winged horses fucking, and our own horses spooked and throwed all but the Lieutenant who rode right out of town cussing and punching his mount who’d not have stopped for a cliff. Them winged horses, they ain’t stopped for us, slipping in the mud and the bits of folk that clung to us, but the orc women come out, teats sagging and cooter dark and rough like sandpaper they was so dry, and they tackled some and others they clubbed to mash but those they kept they set about rutting on, and some they killed afterwards. Me they kept till I thought I might die from the fatigue, but they kept up and so did I, and when they was spent and snoring I crawled away, my leg broke at the shin when I was throwed, and no use to me walking.

 

The sky was blue and clear above them, arcing from horizon to horizon in the softest blue either could remember having seen, and though the morning cool had not been worn off completely as yet by the rising sun, the rays that fell on them were as a tonic and Banjo was restless to be off.

 

You aim to leave me, the cavalryman said and Banjo nodded.

I will perish sure if you leave me.

You’ll get us both killed if I try to drag you anywhere.

You can’t just leave me here.

See, now that’s where you’ve got it wrong.

The road ahead led through a stand of pines creaking in their extremities like a gaggle of old men, and Banjo set out alone, the cavalryman crying out behind him. He made it to the first bend in the wood, not far, fifty feet, when he stopped and come back to the cavalryman who was crying and hauling himself along on his belly. Banjo pulled the pistol from his belt and set it right between the man’s eyes. Mercy, the man said. Yep, Banjo said and shot him through the head and left him slumped dead in the road.