Rhodarr’s head was spinning. The second phase of the hangover was maybe even worse than the first one. The morning after a rowdy night could be brutal, but it was easily cured by a full meal and a copious amount of water.

The sinister mood and the thirst that came in the afternoon maybe weren’t as painful or hard to bear as the drums and hammers that thundered in one’s head in the morning, but they had no easy cure.

The thirst was especially bothering him. He knew that this was the last, most severe warning before his life irrecoverably headed down the gutters. He has seen it enough times. He had seen where the people ended up when they weren’t strong enough to turn back.

The sad truth was that if it had been up to him, he would have already been halfway towards Tipsyland again. I was never one to resist temptations.

But it was not up to him. Alderman Chagall was a steady and severe man, and he would never get drunk while lives depended on his sobriety.

And he was playing the Alderman now.

“Not there, spread it out more,” he told to Rigoor, one of the coachmen. The driver was adding broken planks to the circle.

“If I spread it out more, the fire won’t last half a night,” the man grumbled.

“And if you don’t spread it out more, the squirrels will simply jump over the flames,” answered the Alderman. “Back in the forest, they could easily jump on a wagon or even reach the throat of a grown man with one leap.” At least if I was interpreting the signs on the corpses correctly. Since I haven’t seen the battle with my own eyes.

“If you want me to spread these planks thin, you should bring new ones,” insisted the man stubbornly. “Otherwise, it will…”

“I understood it for the first time as well. It will burn down before the night is out.” He stood up and crackled his aching spine with a satisfied moan.

“We don’t have the time or the material to build a perfect circle of fire,” said Max Morrington ruefully.

“They won’t jump over the fire anyway,” fussed Rigoor. “Animals are afraid of fire. They won’t risk a leap into the flames.”

Max is right, realised Rhodarr. The twilight will be on us before we are ready. And with the dark, the squirrels will come too. What would the Alderman do now?

But it was Ferdin the Blue who answered. If you can’t win simply, you have to cheat, of course.

“Max, be so kind, and bring here a box of those giant nails! I have an idea for them.”

Time flew, the Sun sunk below the horizon, and the caravan survivors huddled in the middle of a small circle built from the remains of their convoy. The ring had to have a diameter of twelve yards in the end. Otherwise, twelve horses and ten men wouldn’t have fit into it. The horses were very unhappy with this bigger circle too. Seeing that they were encircled by flames on all sides, the animals’ every instinct screamed to flee, and they were hard to calm even for their drivers.

The fire was already burning but not equally thick or high everywhere.

Let’s hope that the beasts are not smart enough to recognise a trap when they see it.

It was hard to see the individual squirrels through the flames, but there was no mistaking that an army of them has gathered around the fire. They didn’t try to cross it, not yet. They just swarmed, chirped, more and more excited.

“Well, lads, there will never be a better time than right now,” said the Rhodarr in the voice of the Alderman. “These damned rodents should learn their placer, don’t you think?”

The frightened, dirty and tired survivors of the caravan couldn’t help but grin. They have toiled and sweated the whole day, and now they would finally see the result of their preparations. Rhodarr gestured towards the primitive catapult they built.

“Mr Morrington, be so kind, and give them hell!”

Truth to be told, the device didn’t even deserve the catapult name. It was only a teeter, a long plank with a basket on one end. The basket was full of small stones, and to “fire” them, the other end of the teeter simply had to be brought down with sufficient speed. This was done by the most accessible means available – by a grown man jumping on the plank from a wagon.

They have shortly tested out the range and the arc of the stones in the afternoon and found that they could get most of the rocks to fall outside of the circle of fire. Of course, for a human, these pebbles would have meant bruises and some inconvenience at most. But for a small creature, like a squirrel, the impromptu projectiles would be dangerous, potentially even deadly.

Or at least, that was the plan.

The first basket of stones was fired, and the hail of tiny rocks was answered by a furious choir of shrieks. It works, thought Rhodarr jubilantly. Great Egg, it works!

The men rotated the teeter to aim at another point of the besieging squirrels’ mass, and they were rewarded by even more squealing. Before the third salvo could be fired, the bloodthirsty rodents decided to put an end to these impudent intruders and started to leap over the fire.

Of course, they didn’t count on countless nail being hidden in the tall grass. Three men and Rhodarr spent the last hours of daylight digging nails into the soft soil with their pointy end up. The squirrels that leapt over the fire, landed amongst them. As tiny and lightweight the creatures were, they still had a substantial momentum after so long a jump, and the small stakes drove into their flesh, eliciting even more cries of pain and fury from the animals.

The men who were not occupied with the teeter were ready for the surviving attackers. They had long and light clubs in hands, ideal against the small and agile critters, and they have beaten them to death in scores.

This first assault of the little camp took a few minutes altogether, but at the end, there were at least fifty dead squirrels inside the circle of fire, and not one of the defenders perished.

The men looked at each other as if they couldn’t believe that they were still all alive.

“We have won!” exclaimed Rigoor jubilantly at last, and the others cheered as well.

“They will come back,” said Rhodarr as the Alderman would have done in his place.

The voice was the Alderman’s, but the plan and the traps were mostly thanks to Ferdin the Blue. The cynical bandit was very creative when it came to ruses and subterfuge, and this time even he was satisfied with the carnage.

You will all die, of course, he said to the actor whose mind he inhabited. But at least you will take a lot of them with you.

The drivers were still celebrating their unlikely victory when a howl cut into the night. It was the cry of a wolf, plaintive, melodic and bloodcurdling. Another voice answered it from a distance, then a third joined the choir. The first howl was the closest to the survivor’s camp, in fact so close that Rhodarr unwittingly started to search for the owner of the voice.

To his dismay, he found it. It was a giant black wolf at the edge of the light provided by their circle of fire. It looked directly into Rhodarr’s eyes. Then it turned and disappeared into the shadows.

The night was far from being over.