The Elder Gods (25 page)

“Whatever suits you, Cap’n,” Rabbit agreed, resisting a strong urge to dance for joy.

Rabbit discovered that there were a few drawbacks to life at sea. The weather wasn’t always calm and sunny, and sometimes the wind was ferocious. There was also the tiresome business of standing watch. It was sort of necessary, of course, but standing in the bow of the
Seagull
looking at empty water could get very boring after a few hours.

Night watch, of course, was even worse. The hours seemed to drag by so slowly that each night on watch seemed to last for a week or more.

Rabbit could never really recall just exactly when it was that he became aware of the fact that the stars were not always in the same place in the night sky. At first he was quite certain that like the sun and the moon, they rose and set as they circled the world; but as he watched them more closely, he came to realize that it wasn’t that way at all. He didn’t mention his speculation to the other sailors on the
Seagull,
but his curiosity even led him to volunteer for night watch.

After a few months of close observation, it came to him that it was not the stars that were moving. It was the
Seagull.
If she was sailing east, certain stars—or groups of stars—rose higher in the night sky. If she was sailing westward, back toward the Land of Maag, they sank back down toward the eastern horizon.

Then one night it dawned on him that the friendly stars had been giving him the exact location of the
Seagull
every time he looked up at them.

He thought that was terribly nice of them.

Rabbit had always been painfully aware of the fact that the men of the Land of Maag who were of “normal” size viewed small men as defective—not only in their stature but also in their mental capabilities. The notion that small size meant small brains was locked in stone in the general Maag consciousness, and Rabbit carefully and very gradually began to take advantage of that prevailing prejudice. If he pretended to be simpleminded, he could quite easily avoid the more unpleasant chores on board the
Seagull.
The crew recognized his skill as a smith, but over the years they all seemed to reach the conclusion that his mind shut down when the fire in his forge went out. That suited Rabbit right down to the ground. To his way of looking at things, “easy” outranked “hard” more than just a little bit.

Things were going along very well for Rabbit, but then on a summer day, just after the men of the
Seagull
had looted yet another slow-moving Trogite ship, a sudden sea current grabbed the
Seagull
and swept her off in an easterly direction, and no amount of rowing by the oarsmen could pull her free.

Rabbit was more than a little worried as the
Seagull
rushed eastward. The stars were telling him that she was moving faster and farther than he’d ever thought possible. It was obvious—to Rabbit, at least—that something very unnatural was going on here.

Eventually, they made landfall on the coast of a very unfamiliar land covered with enormous trees. It seemed at first that the strange land was devoid of humans, but then they came across a village of crudely built huts, and a tall, bleak-faced man called Longbow told Captain Hook-Beak about an opportunity that seemed to Rabbit just too good to be true.

Rabbit observed that the Land of Dhrall was a peculiar sort of place with peculiar people and peculiar animals. When the
Seagull
reached the village of Lattash, he added the rulers of that land to his list of peculiarities. Lady Zelana was beautiful, there was no question about that, but she had Sorgan Hook-Beak bent over backward in almost no time at all. Rabbit had his suspicions about Sorgan’s awed report of the amount of gold she had piled up in her cave. If she was that rich, why was she living in a hole in the ground?

Rabbit decided to avoid her, just to be on the safe side, but he did enjoy the company of the sweet, pretty little girl, Eleria.

When the
Seagull
returned to the first village she’d visited, the tall, grim-faced native called Longbow joined them, and he almost immediately saw right through the clever game Rabbit had spent years perfecting. They got along quite well, though, and Rabbit offered to replace Longbow’s stone arrowheads with much superior ones made of iron. As the two of them worked together during the long voyage back to the Land of Dhrall, they became much better acquainted. Unlike the Maags, Longbow made no issue of Rabbit’s size, and he encouraged his new friend to assert himself a bit more.

Captain Hook-Beak had devised a clever plan involving gold bricks to recruit other Maag ship captains to assist him in the upcoming war in Zelana’s part of the Land of Dhrall, but Rabbit fully agreed with his friend Longbow that
some
of the captains might very well have slightly different plans.

The situation almost compelled Rabbit to drop his clever pose as a little dimwit and to take an active part in Longbow’s ridiculous plan to counter the scheme of an unscrupulous ship captain who went by the name of Kajak. He didn’t like it too much, but Longbow was the only friend that Rabbit had ever had since the death of Uncle Beer-Belly, so Rabbit wasn’t about to let him down.

2

R
abbit still had mixed feelings about the Kajak affair as Sorgan’s fleet set sail from the harbor at Kweta. His sudden celebrity as “the little fellow who helped Longbow that night” had given his ego quite a boost, there was no question about that, but celebrity was the last thing Rabbit really wanted. Inconspicuousness had been his goal since the day he first joined the crew of the
Seagull.
The standard Maag conviction that “bigger is better” had made the pose fairly easy, and his mock simplemindedness had convinced Sorgan and the others that a few easy tasks were about all he was good for. It had made his life less exhausting, and that was all that really mattered.

The only significant task that had ever been laid on his shoulders had involved the
Seagull
’s smithy, and that had worked out rather well. If he happened to be standing at his anvil tapping on a piece of iron with his hammer, Ox and Ham-Hand would find other sailors to attend to the more tedious chores.

He was required to stand watch, of course. No sailor can escape that task, and Rabbit much preferred night watch, when the captain was asleep. When things were going well, Rabbit could go for weeks on end without once seeing Sorgan.

That didn’t particularly bother him.

Rabbit had based his previous computations of the
Seagull
’s speed and location on the location of a specific cluster of stars in the night sky relative to the eastern horizon, and in the past he’d found that if the
Seagull
was moving at her normal rate of speed, those stars would be a hand’s breadth higher in the sky than they had been the previous night. It all fit together quite well, and Rabbit had been certain that his numbers were very accurate. When the current had seized the
Seagull
and swept her off to the Land of Dhrall however, Rabbit had almost discarded his entire set of computations, but now that he knew that Zelana could alter things to suit her purposes, he dropped the term “impossible.” When Zelana was involved, nothing was really impossible.

Sorgan’s fleet left the harbor at Kweta at first light on a blustery winter morning, and once they were at sea, the wind seemed almost to die. Then it came up again, but now it came out of the west. Most of the crew of the
Seagull
viewed the change of the wind as a stroke of good luck. Rabbit, however, was fairly certain that luck had very little to do with it.

Despite the fact that it was winter now, Sorgan’s fleet made good time, and they rounded the northern end of the Isle of Thurn after little more than two weeks at sea. Had the sky been clear, Rabbit might have been able to keep better track of their progress, but the clouds hid the stars from him.

He didn’t think that was very nice at all.

“Does she really need to blot the stars out like that?” he complained to Longbow one evening as the fleet made its way down the forested west coast of Dhrall.

“Go ask her,” Longbow suggested.

“Ah—no, I don’t think I’ll do that. I wouldn’t really want to irritate her.”

“Good thinking,” Longbow said without so much as a smile.

It was about midday on a chill day when the fleet turned into the narrow inlet that opened out into the bay of Lattash, where the fleet of Sorgan’s cousin Skell lay at anchor. The sky was cloudy, so there were no shadows, and it seemed to Rabbit that the village huddled in the chill air with the snowy mountains looming ominously above it.

Rabbit noticed that the village had more than doubled in size since he’d last been there, but most of the additions appeared to be temporary. The new huts were along the edges of the old village, for the most part, and there were even several of them standing atop the berm that separated the original village from the river. The smoke from the huts seemed to hang in the chill air, and what few natives were out in the open wore thickly furred capes, and they stepped right along. Rabbit knew that winter was an unpleasant time almost anywhere, but it seemed even worse here in the Land of Dhrall.

A narrow canoe came skimming out across the bay from the village. Red-Beard was in the rear of the canoe, and Sorgan’s cousin Skell, a lean, sour-faced man in a heavy fur cloak, was seated in the bow. Rabbit laid his hammer down on the anvil to watch and listen.

“You must have picked up a good following wind, Sorgan,” Skell called when the canoe came to within shouting distance.

Sorgan shrugged. “Lucky, maybe,” he called back. “How have things been going here?”

“Not all that great,” Skell replied as Red-Beard paddled his canoe up beside the
Seagull.
“You and I can keep our men pretty much under control, but some of these ship captains you saddled me with seem to have no idea of the meaning of the word ‘discipline,’ and they’ve got barrels and barrels of grog on board their ships. As soon as we got here, a fair number of the men in the fleet went on a rampage. I guess they thought that every hut here in Lattash had walls of solid gold, and they all seemed to get
those
kinds of ideas about the womenfolk here. That caused a lot of trouble. The Dhralls killed a few dozen of the rowdier ones, and things were real nervous for a while. I had a few sailors—and a couple of ship captains—flogged, and things quieted down after that.”

Sorgan winced. “Wasn’t that a little extreme?”

“We were right on the edge of open war, Sorgan,” Skell replied. “I had to do
something
to get back on the good side of the Dhralls.”

“Have you seen any sign of the enemy yet?”

“I haven’t personally,” Skell said as Red-Beard pulled his canoe alongside the
Seagull,
“but the Dhralls were scouting up on the rim of the ravine that river comes down through, and they told us that the invaders were coming downriver and that they had us outnumbered by more than just a little. The weather turned foul on them, though, and I don’t think they’ll be moving very much for a while. They’re bogged down in about fourteen feet of snow right now.”

“It sounds like luck’s on our side for a change,” Sorgan observed.

“I wouldn’t reach for my dice just yet,” Skell said, standing up and reaching for the rope ladder hanging down the side of the
Seagull.
“The weather around here can change in the blink of an eye.” He climbed up the ladder to the
Seagull
’s forward deck, and he and Sorgan gravely shook hands off to one side of Rabbit’s anvil.

Sorgan looked across the harbor to the village. “There seems to be quite a few more huts than there were when I came here last summer.” He said.

“Old-Bear’s tribe came here right after the local Dhralls saw the enemy coming down the ravine,” Skell reported. “The two biggest tribes here in western Dhrall are here, and there are more on the way.”

“Were you able to get any of your men up into the ravine before the weather turned bad?” Sorgan asked.

“Quite a few. We had to scout up on the north side of the ravine because a snowslide had blocked off the side closer to the village, but I picked the narrowest spot I could find and put a couple dozen ship crews to work building a fort across it. I doubt that they got much of it done before that snowstorm came out of nowhere. I haven’t been able to get anybody up there to find out, though. The snow’s too deep.” Skell looked out at Sorgan’s fleet. “It looks a little skimpy to me, Sorgan. Was that the best you could manage?”

“Things got a little wild back in Kweta right after you left, Skell. Do you remember Kajak?”

Skell made an indelicate sound.

“That comes close to what he really was,” Sorgan agreed. “He came up with a scheme to get his hands on all that gold I had on board the
Seagull,
but he came up against Longbow and Rabbit here. You wouldn’t
believe
how many people the two of them killed in short order. Anyway, after that I went back to hiring more ship captains, but then Lady Zelana’s brother came by and told her that things were starting to heat up over here, and that her people were going to need us before too much longer. I left your brother Torl back there to recruit more ships and men. He should be along in a couple of weeks.”

“We’ll probably need him,” Skell said, “but the way things stand right now, I don’t think anybody’s going to be able to move around very much until the snow melts.”

“We’d better start making plans for what we’ll need to do after that happens,” Sorgan said. “The snow might hold the invaders off for a while, but it won’t last forever. When it melts, we’d better be ready to deal with them.”

“That’s what we’re getting paid for, I guess,” Skell agreed.

“Where’s Longbow?” Red-Beard quietly asked Rabbit as Sorgan and Skell continued their discussion.

“He’s back in Lady Zelana’s cabin,” Rabbit replied. “Do you need to talk with him?”

“There are a few things he should probably know about. You might as well come along too, Rabbit. That way, I won’t have to tell the story twice.”