The Elder Gods Read online

“Naturally. If I’m going to be the one who shoots them, I want to be sure that they’ve been made correctly.”

  “It must take quite a while to chip one out,” Rabbit observed, “and they wouldn’t all have the same weight, would they?”

  “They’re close enough.”

  “Why don’t I hammer a few out of iron, and you can look them over. I think they might surprise you. That lady who orders everybody around told me that someday soon you’re likely to need a whole lot of arrows, but she didn’t come right out and tell me how come.”

  “I’m going to shoot some geese for the entertainment of your people,” Longbow told him.

  “That sort of explains why you’ll need so many,” Rabbit said. “You must lose a lot of arrows when you start whanging them up in the air.”

  “They’re easy to find again, Rabbit. The dead geese float.”

  “What about the ones that don’t hit no geese?”

  “That doesn’t happen.”

  “Are you trying to tell me that you don’t never miss?”

  “It wouldn’t be useful to miss. How do you go about making arrowheads from this iron?”

  “Like I said, I heat it up in a fire until it starts to glow. That means that it’s soft enough to pound into the shape I want.”

  “A soft arrowhead wouldn’t be very useful, Rabbit.”

  “It don’t stay soft. After I hammer it into the right shape, I dunk it in cold water, and it gets hard again.”

  Longbow looked at the beach sliding slowly past as the Seagull moved west. “If we’re going to make arrows, we’ll need arrow shafts. I don’t think it’ll be much longer before the Seagull leaves the Land of Dhrall behind, so you and I should probably go to the beach and cut saplings before we begin making arrowheads. I’ll speak with Sorgan and tell him what we need to do.”

  “That makes sense,” Rabbit agreed. “We’ll have plenty of time to hammer out arrowheads once we get out on the open sea. It’s a long ways between Dhrall and Maag—a whole lot farther than the cap’n seems to realize.”

  “But you realize how far it is, don’t you?” Longbow said shrewdly.

  Rabbit looked around quickly to make sure there wasn’t anybody close. “I think I’d rather you didn’t say anything about that to the cap’n, Longbow,” he said quietly. “He doesn’t pay too much attention to the sky after the sun goes down, and if you know what you’re looking for, you can tell by the location of certain stars just where you are. When that sea current took hold of the Seagull, it took her a whole lot farther east than the cap’n— or anybody else—seems to have realized.”

  “You’re a very clever man, Rabbit,” Longbow observed. “Why do you go to so much trouble to conceal it?”

  Rabbit shrugged. “It makes my life easier,” he said with a sly little grin. “If the cap’n and Ox and Ham-Hand don’t realize that I’ve got something besides air in my head, they won’t expect too much from me. If they happen to find out that I can tell my right hand from my left, they might start ordering me to do things that aren’t quite as easy as the things I have to do now. I’ve always believed that ‘easy’ is a lot nicer than ‘hard,’ don’t you?”

  “Your secret’s safe with me, Rabbit. Someday, though—and I don’t think it’s very far off—you and I might have to explore the land of ‘hard,’ and our lives may depend on how well we do it.”

  “You just had to go and say that, didn’t you, Longbow?” Rabbit said sourly.

  “I just thought I’d warn you, that’s all.”

  The Seagull turned westward a few days later, and the Land of Dhrall receded behind her, soon dropping below the eastern horizon. The open sea made Longbow a bit edgy. He had always been a creature of the forest, and the vast emptiness of Mother Sea disturbed him.

  He also felt twinges of guilt, since he had abandoned his lifelong purpose. He was supposed to be in the forest killing the servants of the Vlagh, or at the burial ground tending to Misty-Water’s grave.

  His memory reached back to his meeting with Zelana of the West and child Eleria. Zelana held dominion over the West, and her command to him should have been the law, but it hadn’t been the word of Zelana which had made him agree to go with her to the Land of Maag; it had been the clever word of child Eleria. Her suggestion that the Maags could provide a way to kill more servants of the Vlagh in a short time than he’d be able to kill by himself during a lifetime of hunting had moved him to come on board the Seagull.

  The more he thought about that, the more peculiar it seemed. Zelana had absolute authority in her Domain, but he’d refused her peremptory command quite easily. Eleria, however, had lured him into acceptance with numbers. In a peculiar sort of way Eleria had just imitated Zelana’s approach to Sorgan. Zelana had bought Sorgan with a large number of gold blocks, and then Eleria had bought Longbow with a large number of dead enemies. Their tactics had been almost identical, and that raised a very interesting possibility. Just exactly who was Eleria? Her evidently simpleminded need for affection could conceal a hard but devious drive to get what she wanted, which made Zelana look soft by comparison.

  Eleria’s little game had almost succeeded, but she’d taken it a step or two further than had been necessary, and that had alerted Longbow’s instincts. If Eleria wanted to play games, Longbow was more than ready to show her that he could play much better than she could.

  It might just turn out that this tiresome journey would be much more interesting than he’d thought.

  “Hook-Big just doesn’t believe her, Longbow,” Eleria said a few days later, when they were alone in the tar-smeared cabin at the stern of the Seagull. “When the Beloved told him that your arrows always go where you want them to go, he said that nobody could do that.”

  “Hook-Big?” Longbow asked.

  “He seems to be terribly full of himself,” Eleria replied with a naughty little grin. “That’s why I call him ‘Hook-Big.’”

  “That’s unkind, little one.”

  “I know,” she admitted. “Fun, though.”

  Longbow laughed. Eleria was an absolute delight, and it was that, perhaps, that made her even more dangerous than Zelana herself.

  “Fun isn’t a bad thing, Longbow,” she said, nuzzling at his cheek like a small kitten.

  “Why don’t you speak with Zelana?” Longbow suggested. “This might be a good time for a flock of geese to fly over the Seagull. Let’s brush away Hook-Big’s doubts so that they won’t concern him anymore.”

  “That would be nice,” Eleria said. And then she giggled.

  It was not a very large flock, Longbow observed as the geese came out of the north, just before the sun sank into a red-flushed bank of clouds low on the western horizon—six or seven birds at most. It should be enough, however, to make a believer out of Hook-Beak. Longbow took up a handful of his new iron-tipped arrows and his bow and went to the stern of the Seagull, where Sorgan, Ox, and Ham-Hand spent most of their time. “I’m growing a bit tired of eating fish, Sorgan- Captain,” he said politely. “Would you find it offensive if I bring us something different to eat?”

  “What did you have in mind?” Sorgan asked.

  “Those,” Longbow replied, pointing at the incoming geese. “I haven’t made any contribution to what we eat here on the Seagull, and that isn’t proper. I think that geese might be a welcome change for you and your men.”

  “Them geese are pretty high up in the air,” Ham-Hand suggested dubiously.

  “Not quite high enough,” Longbow assured him.

  Ox squinted off to the west, the fiery sunset painting his face red. “The sun’s going down, Longbow,” he said. “You might be lucky enough to hit one or two of them geese, but finding them floating in the water after it gets dark won’t be very easy, will it?”

  “I’ll do what I can to make it easy,” Longbow promised.

  It took a bit of careful calculation, but Longbow had chosen the time of day quite deliberately. Killing the geese with his arrows would be simplicity in itself. Hi
tting them in the dim twilight and making them all fall on the deck of the Seagull instead of into the water would be a bit more difficult—but hardly impossible. Zelana wanted him to impress Sorgan and his men with his skill, and this would probably be the easiest way to do that.

  It rained geese onto the deck of the Seagull not long after Longbow had spoken with Hook-Beak, and Sorgan and his crew began to treat Longbow with a great deal of respect—tinged with a certain degree of awe. Longbow was accustomed to that. The men of Old-Bear’s tribe had been looking at him with a similar expression since he’d been very young.

  4

  She’s a lot older than she looks, Longbow,” Rabbit was saying the next morning. “From what I’ve heard, she was a pretty battered-up old tub when the cap’n bought her from the old Maag who owned her before. It took the cap’n, Ox, and Ham-Hand better than a year to fix her up. About the first thing they did was to add this.” Rabbit stamped one of his feet on the deck. “Up till then she was a lot like an open rowboat. They decked her over and built in those long, narrow ports for the oars. I guess part of the idea was to protect the oarsmen from foul weather, but the main reason for adding the deck was to give them as was going to do the fighting some running room. If you’re going to jump from one ship to another when the water’s choppy, you need to be moving pretty fast. If you’re not, you’ll probably get wet.”

  “It does make some sense, I suppose,” Longbow conceded. “Back in Dhrall we don’t fight out on the face of Mother Sea. It’s not a good idea to irritate her.”

  “We get along with her pretty good,” Rabbit said. “Anyway, the notion of decking over a longship’s fairly recent. It was, oh, maybe twenty years ago when a shipbuilder down in Gaiso came up with the notion—probably because some ship cap’n wanted to have his own cabin so that he wouldn’t have to sleep with his crew. Some ship cap’ns get kind of uppity sometimes.”

  “Isn’t it a bit difficult for the oarsmen to steer when they can’t see where they’re going?” Longbow asked.

  “That’s where the tiller comes in. If you look back toward the stern, you’ll see Ox standing there holding on to a long handle that’s attached to a post. The post runs all the way down into the water, and there’s a big flat board built out from the bottom of the post. It’s called the rudder, and it makes the ship turn this way or that way when Ox pulls on the handle to one side or the other. The oarsmen do the rowing, but Ox does the steering.” Rabbit grinned. “I don’t get stuck with that chore too often. It takes a pretty beefy man to steer a ship as big as the Seagull. Ox is pretty good at it, though. He’s got muscles on top of muscles from his neck down to his toenails. He could probably pick up something that only had one end if he really wanted to.”

  “I haven’t seen many things with only one end,” Longbow noted.

  “They are just a bit rare,” Rabbit agreed.

  “We like to think that it’s the prettiest place in the world,” Rabbit was telling Longbow and Eleria a few days later, when the three of them were sitting near the bow of the Seagull. “Of course, I grew up there, and everybody I’ve ever met seems to think that no place in the whole world is half as nice as the place where he grew up.”

  “It’s proper for you to be loyal to the home of your childhood, Rabbit,” Longbow told him. “Loyalty to place and people is the beginning of honor.”

  “I’m not all that big on honor, Longbow,” Rabbit confessed. “No matter where I go or who I hook up with, I’m always the runt of the litter. Every Maag I’ve ever known seems to think that bigger is better, so they always think that I’m not really worth much because I’m short and scrawny.”

  “But you like it that way, don’t you, Bunny?” Eleria said shrewdly. “You want them to think that your mind is just as teenie-weenie as your body is. That’s why you always talk so sloppy around them, isn’t it?”

  “Bunny?” Rabbit protested.

  “It’s a friendlier sort of name,” Eleria told him from her usual place on Longbow’s lap, “and I feel very friendly about you, since you’re almost as teenie-weenie as I am. Longbow here is one of the biggies, so he doesn’t really understand us teenie-weenies. I do love him, but he has a few flaws. But then, nobody’s perfect—except the Beloved, of course.”

  “Eleria’s very quick, Rabbit,” Longbow told the small Maag, “and you should probably know that sometimes she can make you do things that you’d prefer not to do. I’d still be back in the forest if Zelana hadn’t brought Eleria with her when she sought me out. I had ‘no’ halfway out until Zelana turned Eleria loose on me. I swallowed ‘no’ not long after that.”

  Eleria stuck her tongue out at Longbow, but then she laughed. “You have to be careful around this one, Bunny,” she cautioned. “He watches all the time, and he sees things that others are trying to hide. I guess everybody has things they want to hide, but they don’t have much luck when they try to hide them from Longbow.”

  “I’ve noticed,” Rabbit said dryly. “I’ve been pretending to be stupid since I was just a boy, and it’s always worked before, but he saw through me before I’d turned around twice.” He paused, and one of his eyebrows went up slightly. “As long as it’s come up anyway, maybe you ought to know that Longbow and I aren’t fooled a bit by your little game of silly. You grin and giggle a lot, but Longbow and I both know that you’re as hard as iron underneath. You always get what you want.”

  “Why, Bunny,” Eleria said in mock chagrin, “what a thing to say. I’m shocked at you. Shocked.”

  “We’re not going to spread this around, though, are we?” Rabbit said to both of them. “All three of us have peculiarities that other people here on the Seagull don’t really need to know about, do they?”

  “If they can’t see this for themselves, they probably wouldn’t believe us if we told them,” Longbow agreed.

  “There’s somebody coming,” Eleria warned in a soft whisper.

  “What’s the name of this place where you grew up, Rabbit?” Longbow asked, speaking a bit louder.

  “The folks over there in Maag all calls it Weros,” Rabbit replied, lapsing back into his usual slovenly speech pattern, “and they’re all just jumping up and down to go there and have theirselves a real bang-up good time. A real Maag’ll go a long ways to have hisself a good time.” He glanced casually over his shoulder at a seaman who was busy tying off a rope. Then the sailor turned and went back toward the mainmast. Rabbit lowered his voice. “If I’m reading the position of the stars right, we should sail into the harbor of Weros on the day after tomorrow—which doesn’t seem possible, since we were a lot farther from home than Sorgan and the rest of the crew seemed to realize.”

  “I wouldn’t spread that around, Bunny,” Eleria told him. “It isn’t really necessary for them to know how far it is from Maag to Dhrall, and the Beloved doesn’t really want them to find out. She needs an army, and the people she wants might not want to go that far away from home.”

  “How did we get there so fast?” Rabbit demanded.

  “The Beloved can make things happen when she wants them to happen, Bunny,” Eleria replied. “Do you really want to know exactly how she does that?”

  That seemed to jerk Rabbit up short. He swallowed hard. “Ah . . .” he faltered, “no, I don’t think so.”

  “Isn’t he nice?” Eleria said to Longbow. Then she squirmed down from the big Dhrall’s lap and approached the small Maag. “Kiss-kiss, Bunny,” she said.

  “What?” Rabbit sounded very confused.

  “It’s one of her habits,” Longbow told him. “It’s not too painful, and it makes her happy, so we all put up with it.”

  “Shush, Longbow,” Eleria said. Then she wrapped her arms about Rabbit’s neck and kissed him soundly. “You really ought to take a bath, Bunny,” she told him, wrinkling her nose.

  “I washed off no more than a month ago,” he protested.

  “It’s time to do it again, Bunny. Soon. Please.”

  The weather turned sour, and it was blu
stery and rainy for the next two days as the Seagull doggedly pushed her way west. Longbow was accustomed to rain, since the northwest coast of the Land of Dhrall was the native home of rain. The Maag sailors seemed dispirited by the weather, though, and the mood on board the Seagull was gloomy until the coast of Maag, hazy and indistinct in the steady drizzle, appeared on the western horizon.

  The Maag town of Weros stood at the head of a narrow inlet, and the Seagull’s oarsmen took their places without the usual grumbling, despite the weather. Coming home after a long time seemed to brighten things for sailors.

  Weros was a sizeable town, though the houses all seemed jammed tightly together, almost as if the inhabitants were afraid to be alone. The muddy streets wandered about aimlessly, strongly suggesting that the people who lived there had made it up as they’d gone along. Most of the buildings were constructed of squared-off logs, and they appeared to be more substantial than the lodges of Old-Bear’s tribe back in Dhrall. Iron tools, it seemed, made better houses. A pall of smoke drifted out from the town, obscuring the nearby fields. Long piers extended from the water’s edge, and there were many Maag longships tied to the piers or anchored some distance out in the harbor.

  As the Seagull approached the town, an eddy in the wind carried a rancid smell out across the water. Longbow’s nostrils were very acute because he was a hunter, and he hoped that they wouldn’t have to stay in Weros for very long.

  The sailors dropped heavy iron anchors off both ends of the Seagull, and Eleria came looking for Longbow. “The Beloved asked me to find you,” she told him. “Hook-Big wants to tell us how he intends to use gold to persuade other Maag ship captains that it might be nice to visit the land of Dhrall. The Maags all seem to find square lumps of gold very pretty, and they’ll do almost anything to get their hands on as many of them as their ships can carry.”

  “Owning things seems very important to the Maags, doesn’t it?” Longbow observed.

  “That makes things easy for us, though, doesn’t it? They’ll do what we want them to do so that they can own gold, but we end up owning them instead. Let’s go see what Hook-Big has to say.” Eleria held out her arms to him. “You can carry me, if you’d like.”