The Elder Gods

by David Eddings

  “Did the warning reach Sorgan’s cousin?” Zelana’s elder brother, Dahlaine, asked.

  “They were passing it along,” Rabbit replied. “I listened for a while, and the sounds of the horns were getting fainter and fainter as they moved up the ravine. I’d say that the word’s reached Skell by now.”

  “How warm is the wind?” Zelana’s sister asked him.

  “Warm enough, I’d say. If it’s still that warm when it reaches the head of the ravine, the snow up there—and in the surrounding mountains—won’t last very long. Why are we all watching Eleria like this? Is she sick or something?”

  “She’s dreaming, Bunny,” the stout little girl who’d awakened him replied.

  “Everybody has dreams. What’s so unusual about hers?”

  “How much does this one know, Zelana?” Dahlaine asked in a quiet voice.

  “Probably quite a bit more than he’s supposed to,” Zelana replied. “He’s a member of the crew of Sorgan’s ship, and Longbow found him to be very useful. He’s caught me tampering with things on several occasions already. I don’t think we’ll be able to hide very much from him. Eleria’s very fond of him, and Longbow’s his friend.”

  “Does he know enough not to tell everybody he encounters just who and what we are?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “What about this other one?” Dahlaine asked, pointing at the young Trogite Keselo.

  “He’s young and inexperienced,” Veltan replied, “but Commander Narasan believes that he has a great deal of potential—assuming that we don’t get him killed.”

  A sharp sense of apprehension came over Rabbit. He was almost positive that Dahlaine was about to tell him and the young Trogite some things that they didn’t really want to know.

  “All right, then,” Dahlaine said, turning a stern eye on the pair of them. “We’d take it as a kindness if the two of you keep what I’m about to tell you strictly to yourselves. Of course, nobody from the outlands would believe you anyway, but let’s not start circulating rumors and exaggerations if we can avoid it. As you heard last night, there’s trouble in the wind here in my sister Zelana’s Domain, and Eleria’s currently dealing with it.”

  “Baby sister?” Rabbit exclaimed. “Why don’t you or Lady Zelana take care of it?”

  “That’s not permitted,” Dahlaine told him.

  “Lady Zelana tampers with things all the time,” Rabbit protested. “She can do anything.”

  “Not anything that kills people,” Dahlaine disagreed. “That’s one of the things that we aren’t permitted to do.”

  “But Eleria is? That doesn’t make any sense at all.”

  “She isn’t doing it. It’s her dream that kills. The dream brings natural forces into play. In this case, it’s going to be a very warm wind, I think—probably quite a bit warmer than is usually the case. Mother Sea controls the weather, but Eleria’s dream can override Mother Sea’s preferences. It gets just a bit complicated. To put it in the simplest of terms, Mother Sea wants to preserve all life—even the lives of the monstrous slaves of That-Called-the-Vlagh. Eleria’s dream will unleash a very hot wind that will cause a flood that’s going to be much more savage than the usual spring flood, and that flood will do most of your job here. It will kill most of the enemy creatures who are currently in the ravine above Lattash, so That-Called-the-Vlagh will be obliged to gather up more of its servants and command them to invade Zelana’s Domain again. That will take time, and we hope that extra time will give you outlanders the chance to occupy the ravine and hold back that second incursion.”

  “I really think you should take this up with Commander Narasan, sir,” Keselo protested. “I’m not really experienced enough to put this information to good use.”

  “I’m sorry, young man,” Dahlaine said firmly. “Somebody in each of our hired armies needs to know what’s really happening. That person should be close enough to the army commander to persuade him to do what needs to be done. Narasan listens to you, and Hook-Beak listens to Rabbit.”

  “Why do I always get saddled with these chores?” Rabbit complained.

  “Because you’re quick, clever, and very inventive,” Zelana told him, “and because Longbow and Eleria both like you. That might become important later on. Quit sniveling, Bunny. Just smile and do as you’re told.”

  “I wish all you people would get off the ‘Bunny’ business.”

  “Eleria calls you Bunny all the time,” Lillabeth said. “It’s a sign of her affection.”

  “If you people are going to keep on babbling like this, take it on outside,” Zelana’s older sister Aracia told them pointedly. “If you happen to interrupt Eleria’s dream, all our plans are going to fly out the window.”

  “We’re almost done, Aracia,” Dahlaine told her. He turned back to Rabbit and Keselo. “This is only the first war,” he told them. “There’ll be three more, and your people will be involved in all of them. I’ve observed Sorgan and Narasan, and I’m quite certain that they’ll stay here and fight if we offer them more gold. We’ll also be bringing in the Malavi horsemen and the woman-warriors from the Isle of Akalla to join us in our struggle. Eventually, we’ll probably have to march our armies into the Wasteland and deal with That-Called-the-Vlagh permanently. Now the two of you know what’s really happening here. You’re both clever enough to lead your chieftains, or whatever you want to call them, down the proper path. We’ll be close enough to keep you advised if the Dreamers are about to unleash any other natural disasters, so you’ll be able to warn your leaders.”

  “Sorgan and Narasan are coming along the beach,” Zelana warned them. “Rabbit, you and Keselo had better stay here. The rest of you go on back in the cave. Let’s not alert them to what’s really happening.”

  Her brothers and sister took the children back toward the passageway where Zelana kept her gold, and a moment or two later, Sorgan and Narasan entered, along with Ox, Ham-Hand, Gunda, Jalkan, and Padan. Longbow, the two chiefs, and Red-Beard weren’t far behind them, and they all had serious, businesslike looks on their faces.

  “That wind out there is really gusting,” Sorgan reported, “and it’s as warm as midsummer. Chief White-Braid here tells us that the river’s going to start to rise before morning, and it’ll run out of its banks by noon. He’s fairly sure that dike his people built will protect the village. We’ve talked it over, and we all agree that it might be best if all of us outlanders went back on board our ships out in the bay and sat out the flood there. That way we won’t get scattered, and we’ll be able to see when the flood begins to subside. Then we’ll come back ashore and move on up the ravine.”

  “The plan seems sound, Hook-Beak,” Zelana approved. “I’ll keep Rabbit and Keselo here, just in case I need to send messages out to you. The Dhralls will be up on the rim, so they’ll be able to keep an eye on the river. When it returns to its banks, they’ll sound their horns again, and Rabbit and Keselo can pass the word on to you gentlemen out there in the bay.”

  “This is turning out even better than I’d hoped,” Narasan said. “This annual spring flood’s likely to do about half of our job for us.”

  “We’ll see,” Sorgan replied cautiously. “It’s all going to hinge on whether or not the invaders stay down at the bottom of the ravine. If they recognize the danger and make a run for higher ground, we’ll have to face their whole poison-fanged army, and we might be just a bit shorthanded for that.”

  6

  The warm wind was still coming in from the sea when the sun rose the next morning, and Rabbit and Keselo climbed the hill above the cave mouth to keep an eye on the river.

  “I don’t really see all that much difference, do you?” the young Trogite said.

  “It’ll need to do a lot better than that if it’s going to do our job for us,” Rabbit agreed. Then he looked curiously at Keselo. “It’s probably none of my business, but what made you decide to take up soldiering? Is the pay really all that good?”

  Keselo shrugged. “Not r
eally, but we eat regularly, and we don’t have to sleep in the street. I wasn’t really interested in politics or buying and selling, so my father bought me a commission in Commander Narasan’s army.”

  “What’s a commission?” Rabbit asked.

  “I’m an officer instead of an ordinary soldier. I’m supposed to tell the ordinary soldiers what to do—‘dig a ditch’; ‘build a wall’; ‘kill those people over there’—things like that.”

  “Ah,” Rabbit said. “You’d be sort of like Ox and Ham-Hand, then. They’re the first and second mates on board the Seagull. The cap’n tells them what he wants done, and then they tell us ordinary seamen to do it and hurry. It sounds to me like being a soldier isn’t all that much different from being a sailor. We all take orders, don’t we?”

  “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. I
t 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.