The Elder Gods (31 page)

“I suppose I hadn’t really thought of it that way,” Keselo admitted. “How did you Maags get involved in this war?”

“Lady Zelana took the cap’n into the back of her cave and showed him about ten tons of gold bricks. Then the cap’n took a hundred or so of the bricks back to Maag and showed them to just about everybody who owned a ship over there. Every Maag sea cap’n
loves
the sight of gold, so we didn’t have too much trouble gathering up a fleet to come across and fight this war.”

Keselo smiled. “Veltan did much the same thing when he hired us. Of course, he had to find Commander Narasan first.”

“Oh? Was he lost?”

“Not really. We all knew where he was, but he didn’t want to be a soldier anymore. We’d been involved in a war that hadn’t worked out very well, and Commander Narasan blamed himself. He threw his uniform away and set up shop as a beggar. The army was right on the verge of falling apart after he left. We tried everything we could think of to persuade him to come back, but he wouldn’t listen to us. Then Veltan came along, talked to him for a little while, and Commander Narasan came back home. It could have been the promise of gold that persuaded him, but I think it might have been something a little more than that. For some reason, it’s awfully hard to say no to someone in Veltan’s family.”

“You’ve got
that
right,” Rabbit agreed. “And if one of
them
can’t bring us around, they turn the children loose on us. It’s impossible to say no to one of the children. Longbow’s made out of solid iron, and he didn’t want any part of this war. Zelana turned Eleria loose on him, and that little girl wrapped him around her finger in no time at all.”

“Is Longbow
really
as good an archer as everybody claims he is?” Keselo asked.

Rabbit shrugged. “He doesn’t know how to miss, that’s all.” Then Rabbit laughed. “When we first got here, the cap’n told me to set up an arrow shop on the beach. The Dhralls had always chipped their arrowheads out of stone, but when we were sailing across to the Land of Maag, I hammered out some iron ones for Longbow, and they seemed to work a lot better. Anyway, Hammer—he’s the smith on the
Shark
—wanted to argue with me about it. Longbow handed him a clamshell and told him to walk on down the beach a ways and hold the clam-shell up over his head. Hammer was about two hundred and fifty yards on down the beach when Longbow’s arrow smashed that clamshell right out of his hand. Everybody stopped arguing with me about arrowheads along about then.”

“Are the other Dhralls that good as well?”

“Close, maybe, but nobody in the world’s as good as Longbow.”

Zelana’s brother Veltan came up the slope to join them on the hilltop. “Anything unusual yet?” he asked.

“Not as far as we’ve seen so far,” Keselo replied.

“It’s coming. You can be sure of that.”

“I wish it’d get on with it” Rabbit said. “We’ve got a lot hanging on this flood business. Is baby sister still sleeping?”

Veltan nodded. “Why do you call her that?” he asked.

Rabbit shrugged. “It’s sort of silly,” he admitted. “It just popped into my head when she came up with that ‘Bunny’ business. She says ‘Bunny’ and I say ‘baby sister.’ It’s sort of childish, I know, but she
is
a child, after all, and she seems to like it. Wait until she starts climbing up and sitting in
your
lap.”

“You love her, don’t you?”

“Everybody loves Eleria. You just can’t help yourself.”

“Zelana’s very much the same,” Veltan said. “I’m sure that she taught Eleria all the little tricks.”

Keselo was staring at the mouth of the ravine. “I think the river’s starting to rise now,” he observed.

Rabbit looked quickly. The river was higher now, and its surface was littered with broken tree branches and other debris from the mountains. “I was expecting something a bit more spectacular, Veltan. If it just rises slow and steady like it’s doing now, the snake-people are going to have lots of time to get out of the way.”

“This is only the beginning, Rabbit,” Veltan told him. “Eleria’s still sleeping and dreaming. She isn’t finished yet.”

The sun was well above the horizon by now, and the wind from the west was still brisk and warm, but the river at the mouth of the ravine remained well within its banks. Then Rabbit heard a faint roaring sound echoing down from the ravine. “What’s that noise?” he asked Veltan.

“It’s what we’ve been waiting for, my little friend,” Veltan replied with a broad grin. “There’s a winter’s worth of snow coming down that ravine all at once.”

The roaring sound grew louder and louder until it was much like thunder, and then a solid wall of water burst out of the mouth of the ravine. As closely as Rabbit was able to determine, it was at least fifty feet high, and it was tearing trees up by the roots as it blasted out into the open. The crest of the huge wave curled forward, and the thunderous sound shook the very earth.

“What was holding it back before?” Keselo asked.

Veltan shrugged. “It probably hadn’t built up enough pressure to break through. The hot wind turned the snow on the mountainsides to slush, and the slush slid down into the river to form a sort of dam. The water backed up behind the dam and then broke through all at once. Nice little flood, isn’t it?”

“It looks good to me,” Rabbit agreed. “I sure hope our toots gave Skell enough warning. How long do you think it’ll take for the river to go back where it belongs?”

“Four or five days at least. A week might come closer.”

Large logs were tumbling over the crest now, and mixed with the debris were a goodly number of limp, dead creatures: deer, wild cows, and smaller animals as well. There were also quite a few tiny, oddly dressed men among the animals. “The flood seems to be doing its job,” Keselo observed. “I’d say that there probably aren’t too many invaders left up there in the ravine.”

“What a shame,” Veltan said.

The water continued to rush out of the mouth of the ravine for the rest of the day, flooding the low-lying ground on the north side of the river. The coastal village of Lattash had been built on the slightly higher ground on the south side of the river, but it was still the earth berm the Dhralls of White-Braid’s tribe had built between the river and the village that held the flood at bay.

Rabbit and Keselo came down the hill above the village and joined Longbow and Red-Beard on the berm.

“Has the spring flood ever come over the top of the berm?” Keselo asked Red-Beard.

Red-Beard shrugged. “A few times,” he admitted, “but no more than a few feet. It’s a little inconvenient, but it doesn’t do any serious damage. I’ve heard that once, a long time ago, the flood broke through the berm and destroyed most of the village. When the people here rebuilt the berm, they used rocks instead of dirt as a base, and that kept the river away much better.”

“I think we should speak with our chieftains, Red-Beard,” Longbow suggested. “We need quite a few people up here on the berm to drag in those drowned enemies. They have something that we’re going to need before too much longer.”

“I think you’re right, my friend,” Red-Beard agreed. “I’ve been trying to forget about that venom business. It makes me go cold all over.”

“We’ll bring in as many of the dead ones as we can and pile them up here on the berm. Then we can use our canoes to gather up the ones that get past us and we’ll pile those on the beach.”

“How do you go about getting the venom out of the dead ones?” Red-Beard asked.

“I’m not entirely sure,” Longbow confessed. “All I’ve done in the past has involved stabbing my arrows into the venom sacks on a dead one and then leaving the body in the forest for the vultures.”

“I don’t think that’ll work too well here, Longbow,” Red-Beard said. “We’ll have thousands of them stacked up on the beach, and things here in Lattash might start to get fragrant along about midsummer.”

“Burn them,” Rabbit suggested. “Eleria’s wind should carry the smoke on up the ravine, and that might make life unpleasant for any enemy snake-men left up there.”

“Wouldn’t it be better if we had some way to store the venom in jugs or something like that?” Keselo asked. “If we need to repoison our spear points later on, we should have a supply of venom handy.”

“It’s not a bad idea, Longbow,” Red-Beard agreed. “The potters here in Lattash could make jugs for us, but fooling around with something that’ll kill me if I happen to get a drop of it into any scratch I happen to have on one of my fingers doesn’t light any warm little fires in my heart.”

“I think maybe I should have a little talk with One-Who-Heals,” Longbow said. “If anybody can come up with a safe way to do this, it’ll be him.”

“Wise move there, Longbow,” Red-Beard agreed.

The river continued to rise for the rest of that day, but it crested late the following afternoon, and then the flood slowly began to subside.

Skell’s brother Torl arrived with about seventy more Maag ships about noon on the following day. Rabbit was fairly sure that Captain Hook-Beak had expected more ships, but Torl was at least as sour as his brother, so he seemed to put people off. Torl’s ships anchored near Sorgan’s fleet, and the harbor of Lattash was now choked with ships. All that was left to do was to wait for the river to go down.

Longbow conferred with the old healer of his tribe at some length, and the old man gathered a sizeable number of young men of both tribes and began to train them in the process of draining the venom from the bodies of the dead enemies that were beginning to pile up along the berm and the beach at the river mouth. The procedure was moderately revolting, but it produced dozens of jugs of the deadly venom. One-Who-Heals firmly instructed his pupils to smear lard on their hands before they went to work, and that seemed to provide enough protection.

The bonfires on the beach sent a thick cloud of black smoke up the ravine, and Rabbit was profoundly thankful that he wasn’t upriver at Skell’s fort.

Rabbit and Keselo stayed in Zelana’s cave for the next several days, periodically going down through the village to have a look at the water level. A wary sort of friendship began to grow between them as time inched its way along, and Rabbit came to understand the Trogites a bit better. They weren’t as rowdy as Maags, but then, who really was?

Longbow had gone up to the rim above the ravine to keep an eye on the flood, and time seemed almost to stand still as everyone waited for the flood to subside. That, of course, would be the signal to start.

“I need to talk with the cap’n,” Rabbit called up to Ham-Hand as he eased Red-Beard’s canoe up alongside the
Seagull
in the steel grey light of dawn several days later.

“He’s still asleep, Rabbit.”

“That’s too bad. I just got the word that it’s time to go to work. You want to toss that rope ladder over the side? I’d better wake him up myself. Longbow told me a few things that the cap’n needs to know about.”

Ham-Hand pushed the rolled-up rope ladder over the rail. “I hope Longbow knows what he’s talking about,” he said dubiously. “If another one of those big waves comes down the ravine, we could get washed on out to sea.”

“The Dhralls know a lot more about these spring floods than we do,” Rabbit replied, nimbly climbing the ladder, “and they’ve got a lot at stake here. Longbow’s not going to take any chances. You might want to hear this, too.”

“All right,” Ham-Hand agreed as they started aft. They went on into Sorgan’s cluttered cabin, and Ham-Hand touched the sleeping captain’s shoulder. “Rabbit’s here, Cap’n. He’s got some news for you.”

Sorgan sat up yawning. “What’s afoot?” he asked Rabbit.

“Longbow came back from up on the rim, Cap’n,” Rabbit replied. “He says that the water’s going down, and the benches on both sides are clear now, so it’ll be safe for us to start up the ravine. We’ll need to pick up our swords and spears before we go on upriver, but the Dhralls have dipped them all in that poison, so they’re ready to go now.”

“That still makes me go cold all over, Rabbit,” Ham-Hand complained. “I didn’t hire on to fight no wars with poison.”

“That wasn’t our idea to begin with, Ham-Hand,” Sorgan told him, “but if our enemy wants to play that way, we just about have to play along.” He looked over at Rabbit. “Has the river gone down enough for Skell’s people to get back into their fortifications?”

“Longbow said it’ll be another day or so before the river goes back to where it belongs, but he wants us to be in place on those benches on the off chance that the invaders realize that the benches would be the easiest way to come downriver. Zelana doesn’t think they’re that clever, but Longbow doesn’t want to risk it.”

“I’m with him on that,” Sorgan agreed, pulling on his boots. “You’d better send word to Narasan, Ham-Hand. Tell him that it’s time for us to go upriver.”

“Keselo’s already taken care of that, Cap’n,” Rabbit reported. “He stood on the beach waving a stick with a piece of cloth tied to it. He told me that the Trogites came up with that notion a long time ago. If two Trogites can see each other, no matter how far away they are, they can talk by waving flags at each other. He’ll be going up the north bench with us when we start up the ravine. Narasan thinks it might be a good idea if you two can talk to each other even if you’re on opposite sides of the ravine.”

“Them Trogites are just full of ideas, aren’t they?” Ham-Hand said.

“They spend a lot of time fighting wars,” Rabbit told him, “so they think about ways to make it easier. We sort of do the same thing by blowing horns, but I think their flag-waving might be quite a bit more complicated.”

“Do you and Keselo get along very well?” Hook-Beak asked with a speculative sort of look in his eyes.

“Pretty good, Cap’n. He’s sort of young, but he’s got a good head on his shoulders. He likes to talk, so I’m learning a lot more about the Trogites than he might realize he’s passing on to me.”

“Stay close to him, Rabbit,” Sorgan suggested. “See if you can learn this flag-waving language. Even if we never use it ourselves, it might be useful later on when we go back to robbing Trogite treasure ships for a living. Ham-Hand, go tell Ox to rouse the crew and get word to the other ships in the fleet. We want to hit the beach by sunup.”