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Stripped old farm equipment stood in the center of the village, a playland-junkyard for the little Grogs. They swung and climbed and chased each other and an assorment of village dogs in and out of old harvesting tubing, control cabs, and engine housings. At the edge of the playland, a scrubbed and polished claw-foot bathtub served as a central drinking trough.
Their escort Grog pointed to a place for them to sit and went up the stone stairs to the skeleton of the house's first floor.
The chief remained huddled with his subchiefs and elders. Valentine extracted a two-pound bag from his trade goods, went to the big drinking cistern, and ripped open the packet.
An elderly female tried to stop him, hooting and slapping at his hands. Valentine ignored her and emptied the packet, full of granules that looked like sand, into the trough.
That got the attention of the elders and the chief.
Valentine mixed the water with a clay carrying pot, upending and dumping the water as it began to froth.
"What the hell's that?" Callaslough asked.
"Root beer mix."
Valentine took his canteen cup and drank. Then he refilled it and offered it to the grandmother. She sniffed suspiciously and turned her head away.
"Damn," Valentine said. He filled another cup and drank again. It wasn't very good-the mixture really needed to sit and chill to be truly tasty-but it was sweet.
The younger Grogs weren't so shy. They slurped and squealed, and their elders ran forward to pull them away. A squirmy youngster managed to break away from his mother and go back to the tub, drinking with both hands.
The chief came out on his steps to watch, eyes shaded under a heavy brow. He had huge, woolly thighs that looked like a pair of sheep standing close together in a field. One of the youngsters brought him a cup of the mixture, babbling.
The chief, sniffed. He laughed and upended the mixture down his throat. He wiped his lips and laughed again.
"Good-humored guy," Callaslough ventured.
"I'm sure he'd laugh just as hard if his warriors were playing soccer with our heads."
"I am Whitefang," he barked at Valentine in the Grog trade tongue. He stamped on the old steps, hard, and Valentine heard a commotion from the upstairs.
"O Whitefang, this foot-passed stranger begs the powers of your ears and eyes and tongue."
Whitefang waved them over with a two-handed gesture that made it look like he was taking an appreciative whiff of his own flatulence.
"He didn't just cut one, did he?" Callaslough said.
"Try and look agreeable, no matter what," Valentine said as he stepped forward.
The chief bobbed and one of his subchiefs put a pillow-topped milking stool under his hindquarters, but he didn't sit until Valentine and Callaslough were both off their feet.
It took a while for the negotiations to commence. The subchiefs and elders and warriors had to arrange themselves in a semicircle around the visitors, bearing their best captured weapons, flak jackets, and helmets. The most battle scarred of all of them, both with inten-tional artistry and in random wound, held a massive surgical-tubing slingshot and two bandoliers of captured hand grenades.
Whitefang's dozen or so wives stood behind him, the two most heavily pregnant in front of the others, turning now and then to display swollen bellies as proof of the chiefs potency.
Others gripped their children by the ears to show them how their father conducted himself with strangers.
A splendid-looking teen female, almost attractive in her careless lounge, wore the white headband of an unmarried daughter as she rested against Whitfang's scarred shoulder. By the woolliness of her thighs, Valentine guessed her to be Whitefang's eldest daughter. She wore a long, modest skirt made out of old Disney bedsheets, but she managed to hike it up a little in the direction of the unblooded warriors.
Valentine heard splashes and slurps behind as the Grogs drank the root beer. A young warrior made for the tub, but his fellows held him back, grumbling and grunting.
"What do the strangers beg of Whitefang?" Whitefang asked. Valentine couldn't tell what had changed in the assembly that caused him to commence negotiations.
"Battle alliance," Valentine said.
The audience gasped or hooted.
"Battle alliance. With humans?" the veteran with the artistic battle scarring asked.
