The Elder Gods Page 19

  “Are you feeling a little better, uncle?” Rabbit asked. “Would you like something to eat?”

  Beer-Belly didn’t answer, and he kept staring at the ceiling.

  “I’ll fry us up some bacon,” Rabbit said. “You really ought to eat something.” He put some wood in the stove and then went back into the smithy, dug some glowing coals out of the forge with a small scoop and fired up the cooking stove. “Are you going to be all right, uncle?” he asked as he sliced strips of bacon. “I have to finish up that frying pan for Old Man Gimpy today, so I’m going to be busy this morning.”

  Beer-Belly didn’t answer, and he kept staring at the ceiling.

  “Would you like a touch of grog to go with your bacon?” Rabbit asked.

  Beer-Belly continued to stare at the ceiling.

  A sudden chill came over Rabbit. He laid down the cutting knife and went to uncle’s bed. “Uncle?” he said. “Are you all right?” He reached out and put his hand on uncle’s shoulder. Then he snatched it back. Uncle’s skin was very cold, and he seemed quite stiff.

  “No!” the boy gasped. He looked more closely. Uncle Beer-Belly wasn’t breathing, and his eyes were still fixed on the same spot on the ceiling.

  “Oh, no!” Rabbit moaned, shrinking back. “What am I going to do now?”

  Several possibilities flashed through his mind. He immediately threw announcing uncle’s condition out the window. If the word that Uncle Beer-Belly had just died got out, the neighbors would come in and ransack the smithy, and the tools and just about everything else would be gone by noon. He was obviously going to have to hide uncle, but where?

  He shrank back from the obvious answer, but there wasn’t really an alternative. He was going to have to hide uncle somewhere—permanently—and he’d have to do it before very long. Dead people were probably like dead animals, so uncle would almost certainly start to smell in a few days.

  Their living quarters had a solid wood floor; the dirt floor of the smithy was hard-packed, and customers frequently came in without much warning. The storeroom on one side of the smithy also had a dirt floor, though, and it had a door that was usually closed. There was all sorts of rubbish in the storeroom, but Rabbit was sure that he could drag most of it out—enough, anyway, to give him room for digging.

  “At least he’ll still be here,” Rabbit murmured sadly.

  At first, Rabbit had no serious problems at the smithy. Just about everybody in Weros knew that Uncle Beer-Belly had “bad days,” and Rabbit had been doing most of the work for over a year now. As time went on, though, more and more of their regular customers came to realize that their old friend wasn’t visiting his favorite taverns anymore, and they drifted away. Rabbit was sure that they just didn’t believe that he was skilled enough to complete anything beyond the simplest of tasks, quite probably because his small size had convinced them that he was much younger than he claimed to be.

  It soon reached the point where not a single customer would come to the smithy for weeks on end, and things began to get very tight.

  There was plenty of money in Weros, but Rabbit wasn’t getting what he felt to be his fair share. “Well, uncle,” he murmured to the storeroom door, “it looks like I’m going to have to do something else. I think maybe I’ll try the waterfront for a while.”

  The waterfront of Weros was famous in the Land of Maag as one of the favorite places for sailors (or pirates) to celebrate recent successes. A sailor’s favorite form of celebration involved large amounts of strong drink, and it was not at all uncommon to see sailors sleeping under the tables in taverns or even in alleys or gutters. A sailor that far gone in drink seldom had much money left in his purse, but Rabbit didn’t really need all that much. He needed money to buy food, but that was about all.

  As he spent more and more time on the waterfront, Rabbit became fascinated by the longships. A sailor on a longship would be as free as the wind, and he’d have money to burn any time he reached a port.

  There was one ship in particular that seemed to Rabbit to be the most beautiful one in the harbor. She was called the Seagull, and Rabbit frequently dreamed of sailing out to sea as a member of her crew. It was a dream that had almost no chance of coming true, of course. Maag sailors were very large men, tall and bulky. Rabbit was positive that Sorgan Hook-Beak, the captain of the Seagull, would howl with laughter should he be foolish enough to apply for a berth on board his ship.

  But then he discovered that among the members of the crew of every longship afloat there was a smith. That bit of information raised some interesting possibilities. Rabbit had recently turned sixteen, and his whiskers were thick enough to convince people that he wasn’t really a child, despite his short stature. If he could somehow persuade Sorgan to give him a chance to display his skills as a smith, he might very well become a member of the Seagull’s crew.

  A few careful questions gave him the name of the Seagull’s current smith, a bulky fellow named Borkad, and Rabbit’s quick mind came up with a somewhat devious plan.

  First he was going to need a bit more money, so he roamed about the muddy streets on the waterfront for most of the night, looking for targets of opportunity.

  By the time the sun came up, Rabbit’s purse had started to get fairly heavy. There had been a few occasions when the sailor whose purse Rabbit had just filched wasn’t quite as far gone in drink as he’d appeared, but, as his name suggested, Rabbit could run very fast.

  He asked around the waterfront and found the name of Borkad’s favorite tavern, and then he went back to the smithy to catch a few winks. He’d definitely have to be on his toes this coming evening, and he was almost falling asleep on his feet right now.

  His plan wasn’t really all that elaborate. He’d locate Borkad and slip in the fact that they practiced the same occupation. Then, while they were talking shop, he’d buy the Seagull’s current smith enough strong grog to put an entire ship’s crew to sleep. He wanted to be absolutely certain that when the Sea-gull sailed from Weros, Borkad would not be on board.

  He woke up just before sunset and went on back to the waterfront. He glanced into The Sailor’s Home and saw Borkad sitting by himself at a table at the rear of the tavern. It appeared that he was not completely sober, and it seemed to Rabbit that he was spacing his drinks out. That suggested that he was getting close to the bottom of his purse, so it was time to move in on him.

  Rabbit went on into the tavern and approached Borkad’s table. “I’ve heard tell that you’re the smith on one of those ships out in the harbor,” he said.

  “What’s it to you?” Borkad demanded.

  “I’m a smith myself, and I’ve always been curious about how a man can practice our trade out at sea.”

  “It ain’t really all that much different from the way you landbound smiths do your job,” Borkad said.

  “The one thing that sort of puzzles me is how you manage to avoid having the sparks from your anvil set fire to the ship,” Rabbit said, sitting down across the table from Borkad.

  “Easiest thing in the world,” Borkad declared. “All you’ve really got t’do is pour buckets of water on the deck afore you start t’hammer.”

  “I knew there had to be an answer. Let me buy you another tankard of grog.”

  “I’d appreciate that,” Borkad conceded. “My purse is about to come up empty.”

  “More grog!” Rabbit called to the tavernkeeper. “There’s another thing that’s been pestering me,” he went on. “Is there really all that much for a smith to do on a ship?”

  “We always spend a lot of time bangin’ the anvil with our hammer.”

  “What for?” Rabbit asked. “Why do that?”

  Borkad gave him a bleary-eyed grin. “Just pretendin’ t’be busy,” he admitted. “If’n the smith on board a ship ain’t poundin’ on ’is anvil, the fellers as tells the crew what to do will find other things t’keep him busy.”

  The tavernkeeper brought them two brimming tankards, and Rabbit paid him.

 
“Thankee, little friend,” Borkad said.

  “My pleasure,” Rabbit replied.

  After three more tankards, Borkad was barely coherent, and Rabbit suggested that they might want to visit a different tavern. He was quite sure that the other sailors on board the Sea-gull knew that Borkad spent most of his time in Weros at The Sailor’s Home, so it was very important to make sure that the tipsy smith wasn’t there when they came looking for him.

  It was about midnight, and they were in a small, seedy-looking tavern some distance from the waterfront when Borkad slid off the bench where they were sitting to lie snoring under the table.

  Rabbit quietly stood up and went outside. “So far, so good,” he murmured, walking back toward the waterfront.

  The Seagull was tied to a wharf not far from The Sailor’s Home tavern, and Rabbit crouched in the shadows at the foot of the wharf to look things over. There were a couple of sailors on deck who were probably supposed to be keeping watch, but they didn’t seem to be taking the job very seriously. They were both back near the stern, and they were paying much closer attention to a brown jug than they were to anything else.

  Rabbit’s frequent conversations with seagoing men in the taverns of Weros had given him a fair idea of the general layout of the standard Maag longship, and it seemed to him that the best place to hide on the Seagull would probably be in what sailors called the “rope locker.” On most longships this was a small compartment below the deck and at the very bow, where it was too narrow for anything else. If the sailors had been telling Rabbit anything at all close to the truth, the rope locker was never opened during the first month or so after the ship left port, since all the rigging was carefully checked before the ship set sail.

  The Seagull’s mooring line gave Rabbit easy access, and he was below the deck at the bow of the Seagull in a few moments. Then he waited, listening intently, but he heard nothing. In all probability, most of the crew were still ashore, enjoying their fifth, or maybe sixth, “last drink.”

  He crept forward in the darkness with one hand outstretched. After he had gone no more than a few feet, his hand touched a wooden panel. He located two metal hinges on one side and the handle on the other. “This has to be it,” he exulted. He carefully opened the door, wincing as the hinges squealed. Then he reached inside, and his hand encountered well-coiled rope.

  He carefully checked his water flask and the half loaf of bread he’d brought with him, and then he crawled inside his temporary home and quietly pulled the door shut behind him.

  He remained in the rope locker for two days to make sure that the Seagull was a long way out to sea. Then he braced himself and went up onto the deck. “Where would I find the cap’n?” he asked a sailor who was leaning on the rail.

  “Back near the stern,” the sailor replied. He looked more closely at Rabbit. “You’re a new man, ain’t you? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you afore.”

  “Fairly new,” Rabbit replied evasively. Then he braced himself and walked on back to the stern. He’d never actually met Sorgan Hook-Beak, but the captain wasn’t too hard to recognize. His broken nose was a clear indication of how he’d come by his name. “Ho, Cap’n,” he called.

  Sorgan broke off the conversation he’d been holding with two other men. “Who are you?” he demanded.

  “My name’s Rabbit, and I’m the new smith here on the Seagull.”

  “How did you come up with that peculiar notion, little man?” a sailor with enormous hands demanded.

  “I came across a man named Borkad back in Weros, and he sold me his position here on the Seagull. Since I’m probably the best smith in the whole Land of Maag, the Seagull’s lucky that I chose her, rather than some other ship.”

  “It don’t look t’me like you’re even big enough to pick a hammer up, much less swing one,” a huge sailor standing at Hook-Beak’s side scoffed.

  “I manage,” Rabbit said tersely.

  “I don’t see that we’ve got much choice, Ox,” Hook-Beak said. “Nobody could find Borkad before we sailed out from Weros, so now we’re out here without a smith. Let’s not make up our minds until we see what this little man can do.”

  And that, of course, had been the one thing that Rabbit had really wanted.

  “That’s a mighty fine looking weapon,” the man called Ox said admiringly when Rabbit presented him a well-made war axe.

  “That is a pretty good-looking axe there,” the one called Ham-Hand agreed. “It looks to me like we might just have come up lucky. The little fellow ain’t none too big, but he seems t’know what he’s doing. It’s up t’you, cap’n, but I’d say that we might want t’keep him. Old Borkad couldn’ta made an axe like that one in a hunnerd years.”

  “Let me see that,” Sorgan said, taking the axe from Ox. He looked closely at it, absently scraping his thumb across the edge.

  “Careful, Cap’n,” Ox warned him. “She’s sharp enough t’shave with.”

  Sorgan gave the axe a couple of experimental swings. “Not bad at all,” he admitted. “What’s your name, little man?”

  “They call me Rabbit, Cap’n, probably because I can run about twice as fast as anybody else.”

  “Don’t run off right now. We’ll give it a try and see how you’re going to work out, but I’m getting a hunch that you’re going to be with us for quite a long time.”

  “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 mov
ing 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.