Who needs a school for wizards when you can have a school for hairy warriors!

(Author's Note: This humorous fantasy was originally published online at AlienSkin Magazine in October 2004)

'You're nothing but a hairy little devil,'� said Mr. Figgal from the first day that Hairy came out of the orphanage and he kept saying it for the next fifteen years. It took that long for the lycanthropic disease to run its course. The changes gradually became permanent, though Hairy retained his faculties and eventually no longer required monthly caging.

One side effect of the lycanthropy caused Hairy to become so shaggy that he didn't require clothing. Yet, neither his furry hide nor any of his other wolfish attributes seemed the least bit of a detractor for Figgal's seven daughters. The sisters used Hairy as a plaything for a number of years. They teased his fur according to their latest fancy and even taught him how to read for their own amusement. That all ended when Hairy was old enough to work in Figgal's armory. He was usually given the more menial tasks and never worked near the forge, which had unbearable heat, not to mention an extreme fire hazard for his fur. Instead, he used his growing strength to haul weapons that he'd spent hours sharpening and days polishing.

The truth was, in spite of the sister's affections, Hairy was nothing more than a slave. Mr. Figgal took great pride in having worked his way up from a common blacksmith to now owning the giant armory conglomerate simple known throughout the kingdoms as Figgals. For while Hairy endured taunts, tricks and beatings, the seven sons of Figgal had been groomed to either take over daddy's business or go on to other great aspirations. The eldest son, Hansel, had already left to attend Cromwell, school for warriors.

Cromwell. Long had it been Hairy's dream. Every time he secretly practiced with the weapons of the armory he envisioned himself as a warrior, not necessarily a great one, but at least one who was treated with respect. Only recently had Hairy learned what respect was. This respect came from a boy named Reggie, about Hairy's height but seemingly wiser than his apparent dozen years. It was their conversations that kept the Cromwell dream alive. They built upon the dream with mock duels. Reggie seemed particularly tricky with a sword while Hairy enjoyed any and every weapon that he could lay paws to. It helped pass the drudgery of slavery and in no time an entire year had passed to mark their friendship.

'Today is your day.'� Reggie put down the polishing cloth, used a cord to tie back his long gray hair and picked up a shiny short sword he'd commented on the day before. 'Didn't you hear me, Hairy?'�

Hairy had been intently examining the intricate metal weaving on a mace he was polishing. The interruption was somewhat irritating. 'What are you doing? We have too much work to spar today.'�

'You definitely haven't been listening. I said that today is your day, your day to leave this place.'� Reggie carved up the air with a series of slashes.

'Leave? Wise up, boy. Slaves don't leave whenever the fancy takes them.'�

In a movement so fluid that Hairy had no chance to even think about parrying, Reggie held the point of his sword to Hairy's throat.

'You're no longer a slave. You're a warrior, Hairy. A warrior.'�

Hairy could feel his neck hairs tug around the sword point, but that didn't bother him as much as the steely words that Reggie had thrust into him. Reggie had spoken with such utter conviction that Hairy yearned to believe it.

'You think that a boy and a half grown were beast can fight past the sons of Figgal?'�

'I'm no mere boy.'� The sword point was gone before Reggie finished his sentence, his weapon once again flitting the air like an insect on the wing. He stopped long enough to walk away and then he turned back to motion Hairy after him. 'You have more of a score to settle with the Figgal's than I do. The old man may have bought Hansel into Cromwell, but he'll be the last if I have anything to do with it. They are about to pay for a year worth of ill treatment. Come on, Hairy, and bring that mace. I think it suits you.'�

Hairy followed not quite believing his own actions and fearing the consequences. They found the brothers in the main show room. Apparently, old man Figgal was gone to the trade square again.

'You two,'� said Baldwin, second eldest, 'back to the shining room.'� He used his fine dueling blade to point the way.

'We're not going back. We're going forward, through you.'� Reggie held his short sword straight out with his other arm hooking in the opposite direction.

'I don't want to damage one of my father's slaves. Besides, you're just a boy, so stop pretending that you know how to use that pig sticker,'� said Baldwin.

'I've been watching all of you and Hairy is the only one who deserves to go to Cromwell. I recruit new scholarships and Cromwell is where I'm taking him.'�

'Like hell you are.'� Baldwin rushed at Reggie but never had the opportunity to cross swords before his own fancy dueling blade was gone, along with the hand that had held it. The cut was so clean that it nearly sealed itself. Baldwin gawked at his amputation in disbelief.

When the others joined in it was Hairy's first real taste of combat. He ducked and then bit into Herman's arm. He followed up with a downward swing of his mace that shattered Herman's legs. Hairy was quite fascinated that this had been accomplished with such ease, but he didn't have much time to ponder it with Karl's sword thrusting toward his belly. Hairy batted it away with the mace and then tested his claws out on Karl. He was amazed that they could scratch so deeply.

When his opponents were on the floor, Hairy looked over to see Errol lying hamstrung by Reggie. Kurt and Mandel seemed to be sprint racing one another out of the front doors. Hairy followed them, leaving the armory for the first time. He and Reggie made straight for Cromwell.

Cromwell rose out of the valley floor an octagon of engineered defense. Each section varied so that students could practice defense and assault on eight different castles. It was all mock of course with the pouring of tepid oil, the use of blunted weapons and the catapulting of sand bags instead of rocks. Still, there were always a few casualties. Every year a number of students returned to their families prepped for the funeral pyre.

Reggie gave Hairy a grand tour of the fortress. He met Headmaster Duvall, a gray haired barbarian with a face containing enough intersecting scars that it could've passed for a crude street map. Duvall bunched up his nose at Hairy, but signed off on the scholarship pledge given to him by Reggie.

'Hope you live long enough to graduate,'� the old fighter grunted before shoving them both out of his fur-lined office.

Hairy visited every Hold in the fortress with Reggie offering introductions and inquiring about the possibilities of Hairy applying for membership. Very few would even consider Hairy as a possible applicant. The Knight Hold looked down their pig nosed war helmets at him. The Archer Hold didn't like how his claws frayed their bowstrings. The Ogre Hold was asleep and the Lizard Hold was too busy with some sort of sacrificial ceremony. At least the Duelist Hold, Reggie's old almamater, received Hairy well enough. He loved the wide variety of swords they used, but the delicate choreography they practiced just didn't seem right to him.

The Wild Hold was the most receptive and seemed to be having the most fun. The barbarians and other wild men readily invited Hairy to join their party, which seemed to be ongoing. He sampled various fermented drinks and received instruction in the crucial areas of head butting and wenching. Hairy was extremely tempted to apply and the Holdmaster seemed too drunk to care one way or the other. It was the crude weaponry that turned Hairy off and he wasn't sure whether he had the right social personality to compliment the wild men. In the end there was only one Hold for him.

The Freak Hold. It was actually the school's dumping ground for half-wits, the deformed and the magically mutated. Under other circumstances it was the last place that Hairy would have chosen, save for the fact that it allowed the use of any and every weapon. There were no warrior specialties or ethnic solidarity in the Freak Hold. The only specialty each member contributed was whatever freakiness the warrior brought with him. The rejection they felt from their own kind actually produced unity within the Hold. For they realized that truly no one else gave a damn about them. The fact that Hairy grasped this concept greatly contributed to his rise in leadership. Soon Hairy developed a core group of Freakers who looked to him for direction.

Among this core group were two human twins. These brothers were freaks from birth with Hammis sporting massive legs while Brazos had equally incredible arms. The rest of their bodies were puny even in comparison to children. There was also Didley, one of the rare half-elves rejected by his own people. Though he had no physical deformity he had a unique ability to throw objects. And though he could toss a needle into an eye at thirty paces, he preferred rocks instead. His preoccupation with perfect accuracy was just short of insanity. Then there was Pudger, named for his form as much as Hairy had been. Pudger was an obese ogre, which is quite a label when it comes from other beings of such enormous mass. He was quite slow and only half as strong as most of his kin, but able to take the sort of punishment that would have killed five of his own race. Finally, there was Kareem. At a mere fifteen feet his own people considered him somewhat of a dwarf giant. This was made all the worse by his thin frame and long limbs. With a spear in hand he was as formable as any mounted knight, but very vulnerable inside his own reach and fearful of amputation.

Now of course Hairy didn't learn these intimate details all at once, but slowly, over two semesters at Cromwell. Those two semesters were filled with classes and in those very classes Hairy fell in love. Oh, it wasn't with a female as there were few enough of those warriors, with most residing in the Duelist and Archer Holds. And it certainly wasn't with another male, other than the brotherly affection that grew between him and his Holdmates. Hairy's true love was promiscuous because he divided it amongst so many deadly lovers. His beloveds were the weapons he trained with and he also learned their histories as one would the intimacies of a soul mate. He unlocked their secrets until he knew their insatiable desires, their strengths, their deadly weaknesses, and their magical relatives long lost. The decision to become a master of all weapons was an easy one for Hairy. As it was, Cromwell lumped weapon classes together so that there were Bashers, and Slashers, Piercers and Thrashers. These were the four cornerstones of a Cromwell education. And many a dead creature had Cromwell to thank for producing such well-trained graduates.

The classes were supplemented by a wide variety of intramural combat sports. Hairy loved to play them all until clawing got him into trouble during a Warrior's Chess match. Chess actually involved the mixture of different Holds on both sides with dwarves and other shorter warriors like Hairy relegated to the role of pawns. This was how Hairy found himself on the front line armed with a blunt pole-spear and a wooden stick-sword. Behind and to each end of the back line archers fired blunt shafts from the tops of wheeled towers. Next to those stood fully armored knights and their low flying hooves bumped Hairy more than once. Then came the berserking barbarian bishops and of course only the most senior students were allowed to be king and queen. Hairy dreamed of the day he would be allowed to pull on the queen's white dress and wield the mock two handed sword.

Other than the prescribed chess board boundaries there were no prescribed moves in Warrior's Chess. As long as a team protected their king they were free to strategize their attack and defense any way they liked. Players were removed by either team depending on where they were at the moment they lost consciousness. Seriously injured players, such as those who were inadvertently bone fractured or trampled, were immediately taken to the fortress infirmary.

Hairy had certainly never intended to get disqualified during his very first match. He was rather surprised by the intensity of the clashes and the frailty of his mock weapons. When they broke he tried to pummel with fist and foot, forgetting entirely to retract his claws. The evidentiary gouges were enough for the referees to not only suspend him from the game, but also penalize him with a day's work in the fortress garden.

The complex garden in the center of the octagon had but one master. He was a battered warrior of some renown, though the master gardener's true name was somewhat a mystery. Rumors whispered that he'd once been called Conan or even Lancelot. Whatever the truth, the students of Cromwell had bestowed upon him the title of Gimpy. One look at Gimpy revealed that the old warrior had definitely seen his share of battles and the toll had been significant. His left foot and all that hung below his right knee were as wooden as his front teeth. A patch covered the crater that once cradled his left eye and metal pincers grasped garden implements where fingers once held a sword. Gimpy was often seen lurching through the arborvitae using a hoe as a crutch. Leather cords wrapped around his pincers to flay the backsides of students under his direction. He had a number of war stories which made the morning more tolerable, but the afternoon worse when the same accounts were told again and again. Who really cared how many orcs he'd killed in the battle of the ten thousand or how many tavern sluts he'd conquered afterwards? Rarely did he remember anything new until that afternoon with Hairy when the sun fell outside the fortress walls and old Gimpy's arm had grown too tired to lash Hairy's back. Then it was that he remembered the story of the sorcerer's bones.

Hairy had to listen closely while Gimpy rambled on about an ancient sorcerer buried in the midst of ruins that had once been a school for wizards. A city had grown up around it that was now populated by a legion of the undead, animated as they were by the school's magic. Gimpy admitted that he never got close to it and lost a good many chums before making it back to Cromwell. Only at the end did he reveal that the wizard's bones could be ground up for a powerful strength potion.

'Anyway, that was how I earned the first of my many war souvenirs.'� Gimpy pointed to the eye patch that couldn't hope to cover the five-digit slash extending above and below his puckered eyehole. 'That reminds me of how I lost my foot during the battle of the ten thousand. Let me tell you about it.'�

'Whatever, Gimpy,'� said Hairy rising from the flowerbed to leave. 'Thanks for the tale about the wizard's bones. They sound like just the thing that my Hold needs.'� Hairy heard the whip crack far behind him and he knew that Gimpy had no hope of catching up. In the distance, just before dusk engulfed a lonely old warrior standing in the midst of his arborvitae, Hairy heard the old man call out again, each word made clear through supersensitive ears.

'Come back here, you furry ingrate.'�

Hairy had no trouble convincing his Holdmates to join him on a quest for the bones. They embarked on it the very first day of Spring Break.

Sunshine, birds, and butterflies were the standard for springtime but none of that pierced the gloom encasing the city of the dead. The gang had already destroyed two waves of lumbering zombies before they had barely passed the city limits. Fortunately, the zombies were so pitifully slow that over half went down from Didley's well-placed stones. Those that persisted with crawling forward were squashed under Pudger's feet. The rest were crushed by either Brazos' double hammers, kicked high into the air by Hammis or skewered five in a row by Kareem. It was all great fun until the vampire bats swarmed in.

The bats enveloped Pudger as they attached long fangs through armor and fat. Kareem went nearly crazy with so many hanging onto his limbs. And they went right after the muscle bound areas on the twins. Only Didley's half Elvin agility allowed him to avoid the blood sucking. He hurled a multitude of missiles until bats fell around him like birds subject to a sudden gust of toxic fume. Hairy had to claw Pudger and Kareem free.

Through it all Hairy led them onward. Most felt oozy from blood loss, all were tired from fighting. Yet Hairy wouldn't let them stop because the desire for the wizard's bones gnawed at him. Attack followed attack and then came the bone yard. In a walled compound surrounding a mausoleum a bone pile carpeted the ground to rival all others. The white shards crunched underfoot and there came a short, but wonderful respite. The rest lasted until the bones began their dance.

The first bones to rise against them came in the form of little folk. Hairy felt the sting of short weapons gathered from the graveyard litter. He used his mace to good effect, crunching dwarf, gnome and halfling back to their component parts. In the next attack the bones assembled to the height of elves and men. These too, the freaks beat back only to see the bones dance up again to the height of ogres. This was almost too exhausting to fight against and the fun had clearly gone out of it for Hairy. Kareem lay unconscious with Pudger protecting him from the blows that rebounded off of the gelatinous layer buffered underneath the ogre's leather armor. Brazos swung his hammers like a drunk and Hammis could barely lift his legs. The bone ogres eventually collapsed only to be replaced by a giant. By then Hairy knew it was time to try something else.

His opportunity came when at last he could distinguish the incantation floating on the breeze. It took him some time to pinpoint the words back to a bone slope near the mausoleum. There, nearly camouflaged, stood the wizard. A tattered cloak decorated with crescent moons covered the skinless sorcerer. A dilapidated conical hat with the same patterns topped a skull with radiating eye sockets. Hairy sprinted underneath the giant that his fatigued companions still occupied. He scrambled, losing and then gaining purchase again on the shifting bone hills.

There wasn't a shred of finesse in his attack. His months of classes went unheeded. Hairy made no use of the weapons he'd been trained with other than that which the lycanthropic disease had gifted him with. He tackled the bone sorcerer, a wolf taking down meatless prey. Claws and teeth soon broke the wizard along with the spell that made the giant bones dance. Down it all came and Hairy gathered a good many bones to be brought back for examination by a licensed alchemist. They ground all of it up and the alchemist determined that with the addition of a few common ingredients he could create a powerful anabolic potion.

Brazos and Hammis were eager guinea pigs. After only a few weeks of heavy lifting, a balanced diet, and plenty of rest, both warriors had substantial muscle growth. Their puny parts increased in relation to their muscle bound appendages, causing them to appear slightly less freakish.

Hairy and the unnamed alchemist signed a contract. In no time, Hairy was making lucrative sales of Wizard's Growth Potion. WGP was especially popular with the barbarians. Unfortunately, though quite legal and heavily regulated in most kingdoms, all growth potions were a violation of Cromwell's rules. Despite this, Hairy was able to maintain his illicit sales until the Freak Hold's wealth rivaled that of the Knights. It all came to a premature end when Headmaster Duvall authorized a covert investigation using Reggie as a confidential informant. But that's another story.

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