“I just come from a bit o’ ruckus with the elves of the Smirkwood. You knows them?”
“Only by repute.”
“Bunch o’ green-wearin’ pansy faggots is what they are. Can’t stand ‘em. Always leerin’ out o’ the trees at us, makin’ funny faces. My king – that’s the King Beneath the Mountain – he up an’ decreed we was gonna beat some respect into their tree-hugging little backsides. An’ we did, too!
“Biggest surprise of the day was that they showed up at all. Think they’re so much better’n us just ‘cause they live forever an’ we don’t. Know how much gold an’ iron I could’a mined if I’d been alive ten thousand years? But they jus’ sit around doin’ nothin’ but bein’ smartasses all the time. I figgered they’d chicken an’ split.
“First thing we did, o’course, was charge for the high ground. Dwarves is natural born sprinters, we is. Didn’t have nothing but axes an’ good armor, an’ a few crossbows an’ cannon. Didn’t need nothing else. Dwarves don’t plink around with longbows or keep truck with no smelly horses. Not like those faggot pointy-ears do.
“Yeah, they marched all into columns and came prancing up with their plumes waving all over the place.
“We took the high ground first, o’course. Dwarves don’t muck with prancing. We stick to what’s practical.
“The cannon fell a bit behind. But that’s a lot of metal to haul, even for a Dwarf! We make our guns stout, we do.”
“What did they do when you took the hill?”
“Went all sourpuss on us. Elves ain’t never good sports. They was too chicken to come up an’ get us, so they jus’ milled around plinking them bows of theirs.”
“Uhm …” some questions can’t be asked diplomatically. “I’ve heard elven bows are quite … effective.”
“Tosh! Worthless. Takes years o’ practice just to figure ‘em one end from the other. O‘course if you’re the kind o’ small-minded obsessive what spends twelve centuries just plinkin’ a bowstring over an’ over …”
“Did they push you off the hill?”
“Damnation, man! Of course not! … well, we did see some o’ the boys fall … but a dwarf’s got no fear o’ that sissy rubbish! Here’s the thing. Elves may be afraid to come up to ye’ an’ fight, but dwarves ain’t. Of course we charged ‘em!
“Some o’ them charged our crossbows, too – but only the ones that had horses to hide behind. An’ horses or no, we gave ‘em a good what for.
“Should’a seen the looks on their faces when we came up to ‘em with good iron axes! We chopped ‘em down to size!”
“So you forced them from the field?”
“We gave better than we got, laddie!”
“How long did it take before they fled?”
“Well, they didn’t exactly flee … I mean, after the bow-plinking garbage there was more of ‘em than of us, so even when we’d hacked a bunch there was still plenty left …
“… and the bow-ones ran back away like little sissy-girls so they could plink some more once we were done schooling their infantry … .”
“So what happened?”
“Well, we taught ‘em their lesson good an’ square, then marched off the field in good order.”
