A Man of His Word

by The Complete Series 01-04 (epub)

  “Then this may be your last chance.”

  “Last chance for what?” Rap did not want to raise his voice, and yet obviously the fire and the sound of his ax had already proclaimed their location like a carillon.

  “Your last chance to share your word with me, of course. An adept would be in no danger, but I doubt that my talent will work well enough on these fellows. Spit it out, Rap! Quick!”

  “I have no word!” Rap protested, horrified. Had Andor been thinking him a liar all this time?

  Andor threw down the knife he had been using on the pemmican and put his mitted hands on his knees. “Last chance, Master Rap!”

  “Andor …” Rap felt his world crumbling. His terror of the goblins faded before a heartbreaking sense of betrayal. “Is this all a trick? The king isn’t dying?”

  “Oh, he’s dying. That doesn’t matter much now, does it? You know what the goblins will do to us, don’t you?”

  They were closing in now, the circle shrinking. Yet eyes could not have detected them, and they made no sound. Only a seer could have known.

  Rap wavered on the brink of panic.

  “I have no word to tell! You tell me yours, then! If I do have one, then two will make me an adept, won’t it? Then I can save us!”

  Ander uttered a snort of derision. “Not likely!” He climbed to his feet. “Which way are they coming?”

  Rap searched with his mind. The circle had stopped shrinking and there was a knot of men advancing. “That way.”

  “You’re quite sure you won’t tell me? It would be nicer than having bits pulled off.”

  “I can’t! Tell me yours!”

  Andor shook his head in exasperation. “That wouldn’t work! You’d need time to learn to control it. I don’t even need to become an adept, really—not for this. All I need your word for is to boost the talent I already have, more power. Then I’ll win over the goblins, and we’ll be made welcome. So you have to tell me yours, don’t you see?”

  Talent? Win? How could he have ignored the obvious for so long? “It’s not just girls, is it?” Rap said bitterly. “It’s all people. Men, too. You tricked me.” Andor had done to Rap what Rap had done to Firedragon’s mares. Thief! Traitor!

  Andor shrugged heavy, furred shoulders. “The goblins are no trick, and I don’t intend to stay around to entertain them. You’re being foolish, Master Rap.”

  Then he turned to face the arrivals.

  Three shadowy figures had emerged from the dark into the edge of the firelight, visible even to eyes.

  If goblins valued courage, then they were not going to be impressed by Rap’s quivering jaw, or the way he was keeping his knees pressed together. He resisted the temptation to sidle in behind Andor and hide.

  The three came slowly closer, spears raised, inspecting their catch with care. They were short and very broad. They wore jerkins and trousers and boots, but made of buckskin instead of fur, gaudily decorated with fringes and beadwork. The fire’s glimmer showed hard, unfriendly faces, dark-skinned and marked by complicated tattoo patterns around the eyes.

  The one in the center seemed older than the others. He had the most ornate decorations on his clothes and on his face, and he spoke first, barking out a question that Rap could not understand, accompanied by a threatening movement of the spear.

  Andor seemed to straighten up, tall and imposing. He rolled off a long answer in the same tongue, and his voice was harsher and much deeper than usual. Rap jumped with surprise when he heard it. It had never occurred to him that the goblins spoke another language.

  Then he wondered how Andor knew it.

  The spear points dipped slightly. The leader spoke another question, sounding surprised.

  Andor replied and pointed to his face. Now Rap could catch a word or two. It was a strangely coarse dialect, but not a totally different tongue.

  The chief snapped an order to his two companions and then advanced alone, holding his spear at waist height now. He peered up into Andor’s hood.

  Rap had just noticed that he could barely see over Andor’s shoulder. Andor was much taller than he ought to be and certainly much broader. His parka strained over massive arms and shoulders. He looked wrong to Rap’s eyes, and also to his farsight. There was a bigger man in there than Andor.

  The chief had rattled off more questions, Andor replying. The chief showed irregular teeth in a broad grin. He reached out a mitt and turned Andor around. He wanted to see Andor’s tattoos in the firelight, but in doing so he showed that face to Rap.

  It was not Andor. It was a huge man, a man with the ugliest and most terrifying face Rap had ever seen—nose crushed over to one side, one corner of his mouth lifted by a scar, the corner of one eye pulled awry by another. Andor’s dark, stubbly beard had vanished—this man looked newly shaved. He was not a goblin, but he had goblin tattoos around his eyes—pale jotunn’s eyes, which now met Rap’s and crinkled with contemptuous amusement. He grinned. His front teeth were missing, top and bottom, giving him a most hideous and sinister wolfish leer.

  Rap backed away in dismay, almost into the campfire. “Where is Andor?”

  “You won’t be seeing him again, not likely.”

  Rap’s heart was spinning, and he thought he might be going to faint. Andor had been there only minutes before. “Who are you?” he cried.!

  “A friend of his,” the big man said. “I’m Darad. You were warned about me.”

  5

  The chief inspected Darad’s tattoos by the trembling light of the campfire and apparently approved of them. He smiled and dropped his spear, attempted to embrace the giant, and received a bear hug in return. That ought to be a good sign for Darad, but who was going to hug Rap?

  The chief’s two companions were smiling also and coming forward for introductions and more embraces. The rest of the goblins floated in from the trees, silent as moonbeams, appearing suddenly in the firelight like ghosts. They were younger men, mostly, bearing spears or bows, and all wearing the same fringed and beaded buckskins.

  What was going on? Obviously there was some sort of sorcery at work, yet Andor was most certainly not a sorcerer. Sorcerers need not endure the hardships of long days’ trekking through the wastelands; they had abilities to avoid such dangers and discomfort. If Andor was a sorcerer and wanted that damnable magic word that he thought Rap possessed, he would surely have revealed his powers sooner.

  And who was this Darad, against whom Jalon had warned him, this Darad who so conveniently bore goblins’ tattoos and spoke their tongue? Rap trembled as he thought of Kranderbad and the others who had tried to fight Andor and had then been so callously maimed. The idea that the soft-spoken, kindly Andor might commit such atrocities, even in the heat of a fight, was just as unthinkable as the notion that he might be a sorcerer. Darad, however, looked capable of anything. Perhaps Darad was a demon that came to Andor’s rescue when he was in trouble. If so, and if the goblins were going to be friendly, would Andor now reappear?

  But the goblins were not being totally friendly. The four horses had been caught and led forward into the firelight, tugged unwillingly by their manes; too weak and dispirited to resist. Darad and the chief were in guttural argument with much pointing and waving of hands. As the voices rose, Rap began to catch a few of the words: horse and four and saddle. The old chief turned and looked at Rap, who quivered instantly and reminded himself sternly that goblins respected courage. The thought brought him little comfort.

  The chief asked a question, Darad replied. Rap made out his own name, but little else. The argument seemed to go back to the horses, then to him again.

  Darad stepped over, took Rap’s arm in a grip that made his bones creak, and turned him away from the fire, toward the dark of the forest.

  “I’ll give you one more chance.” His voice was low and harsh, blurred by the missing teeth.

  “I don’t know any words of power!” Hopefully Darad—and the goblins, too—would think it was the fearsome cold that was making Rap tremble
so much, Why couldn’t he stop?

  “The chief must have a gift. I offered two horses. He wants all four. But he’ll settle for something less.”

  “What?”

  “You.”

  “You wouldn’t!”

  Darad grinned. His tongue and his eyeteeth were very prominent because of the gaps, and his grin was lupine and inhuman. His eyes were shiny and cold as the polar night. If Rap had been able to give him what he wanted, those eyes alone would have been persuasion enough.

  “I don’t know any …”

  Darad pushed contemptuously. Rap toppled into a snowbank. By the time he had picked himself up, Darad and the chief were embracing again.

  Experienced woodsmen would not have made their camp half a mile from a goblins’ village. As soon as Rap was pointed in the right direction and jabbed forward by the point of a spear, he could sense it at the limit of his range. He had been careless; now he was going to pay dearly for his stupidity.

  He staggered along, dimly aware of the guards around him, and of Darad and the goblin chief walking arm in arm at the front of the line. They were an incongruous pair, for the huge Darad made the other seem like a dwarf. The big man was hobbling, as if Andor’s mukluks were hurting him.

  Having registered that the horses and the equipment were being brought along, Rap concentrated on sensing out the clearing ahead, where four log structures stood in a square. He could soon tell that the closest was a stable containing three runtish ponies—small wonder that the chief had wanted all four of the Krasnegarian horses—but the farthest was much larger than the others and there were many people in there, mostly women. Of the two others, one seemed to be reserved for women and girls, and the smallest for boys. All three houses were sending up lazy columns of smoke into the crystal-cold night, but the big one was the communal house, and it was there that the procession headed. As it left the forest and crunched over the snowy clearing, a chorus of barking broke out in greeting.

  Before Rap had any time to study all the details with his sensing, he had reached the largest hut and was hurriedly pushed inside. Blinded by a blaze of light, half choked by a fog of acrid smoke and fetid odors, he recoiled and was shoved forward bodily into a melee of undressing men. He tripped and rolled among greasy legs and smelly feet. He began to cough; his eyes streamed tears; he gasped in heat unbearable to him after a whole week of arctic cold.

  All around him men were stripping off clothes; he rose and copied them out of necessity. The goblins stopped just short of total nudity, retaining only brief loincloths, the same indecent garments he had seen on goblins at Krasnegar. With head swimming and stomach all knotted up at the stench, quivering and sweating, he struggled to maintain control. Courage! he told himself. Brave men do not vomit!

  He stripped to his shirt and shorts, and saw his furs tossed into a communal heap of buckskins by the door. Then an elderly, near-nude goblin shouted at him. Seeing that Rap did not understand, he ripped Rap’s shirt off and hurled it furiously to the floor—apparently wearing a shirt indoors was an insult. He shoved Rap ahead of him, over to a corner, and gestured that he must sit down. Glad to obey, tormented by this shameful undress, Rap crouched down, hugged his knees, and made himself small.

  The building was one giant room, longer than King Holindarn’s great hall, made of enormous logs. The center held the place of honor, a low stone platform around a blazing hearth, where Darad was already stretching out on a pile of furs and looking comfortable.

  The women were clustered around a much smaller fire at the far end of the hall, and farsight told Rap that they were preparing food. Neither hearth had a chimney; reluctant to depart through the hole in the roof, the smoke gathered overhead in a whitish cloud, billowing up and down like a sea swell.

  Probably nowhere in the lodge was truly warm, except near the fires—Rap had been deceived when he first entered by the sudden change and by having furs on. Where he was sitting now, down low, the air was freezing, and polar drafts knifed in through chinks in the logs to ice his back. He shivered constantly and was hard put to keep his teeth from chattering. Perhaps the smell was not quite so bad down there, but his eyes still smarted unbearably. It was unfair to ask a man to pretend to have courage when he was so cold, and the air so smoky.

  The women were invisible, swathed in voluminous buckskin robes reaching to the ground, their heads covered with wimples of woven stuff, and only their hands and faces showing. The few goblin women he had seen in Krasnegar had been shrouded like that, even in summer.

  The men, by contrast, were almost completely visible, their dark-khaki skin shining greasily and displaying in the firelight the greenish tinge of which the goblins boasted. They wore their heavy black hair matted into a tail with fat and draped over one shoulder to hang down their chests like a bellrope. All of the men seemed short, although that was partly because Darad towered over them like a swan among mallards, but they were wide and deep, their limbs thick and heavy. Rap wondered how much of that meat was fat and how much muscle; seeing the easy and limber way the goblins walked around, he decided that it was mostly muscle. Their eyes were wrongly shaped and set at an odd angle in their heads, their limbs and bodies smooth, although most sprouted scattered black bristles around their mouths—goblins had big mouths, full of teeth that seemed too large and pointed.

  Darad dwarfed them all. His pale-pink jotunnish body was furred in yellow hair, but also heavily scarred and much tattooed. Andor’s flimsy underwear clung on him in shreds, provoking loud hilarity until a suitably large loincloth could be found to replace it. He had been given the thickest rug, next to the chief, and two young maidens had been set to work rubbing grease into his pelt. Looking like a white walrus basking among seals, drink in hand, surrounded by admirers, he was obviously prepared to enjoy a fine evening.

  Knowing that he must seem as odd to the goblins as they did to him, Rap was happy to remain as inconspicuous as possible. But he did not only look wrong, he smelled wrong. His farsight warned him, and he turned around hastily to meet the slitted eyes of the largest dog he had ever seen. It might even be a full-grown timber wolf—silver gray, and certainly weighing almost as much as he did. Its lips were curled to display teeth like white daggers. Its hackles were raised, it was already tensed to spring. None of the goblins was paying any attention and the visitor was surely about to be savaged.

  Quickly Rap turned on the charm that he used for dogs, like the charm that worked on horses. He smiled, he raised a hand …

  “Here, Fleabag,” he whispered. “Nice doggie?”

  Fleabag postponed his attack to consider this unexpected development. As Rap’s soothing thoughts sank in, his ruff began to settle. He edged forward with great suspicion and sniffed at the hand. His tail started to twitch.

  Rap discovered that he was shaking. Having his throat ripped out by a wolf might be much pleasanter than whatever the goblins had in store for him, but it was still an event better avoided.

  Other dogs arrived to inspect what Fleabag had found, sniffing and then licking. Apparently Rap had an interesting taste. The dogs stank foully, but not as badly as their owners did, and while Rap might have been able to send them away, they were company and they helped to shield him from the goblins’ view. They lost interest eventually and settled down to sleep, spread out untidily on the floor around him. Even in Krasnegar, the palace dogs had tended to follow him about.

  The men around the central hearth—the most senior sprawling on the platform itself, on furs, youngsters sitting on its edge or squatting on the floor—were all busily rubbing grease on themselves or on one another, combing and greasing their hair.

  The goblin chief was a middle-aged man, potbellied and thinshanked, but bearing himself like one who accepts no questions. His facial tattoos were richer and more complex than anyone else’s, his rope of hair was streaked in silver, and he wore a necklace of many strands of bear claws, which clicked and clacked when he moved. He reclined beside Darad and the two of them monop
olized the conversation.

  Darad was a guest. No one offered Rap a drink, or even a fur. Was he guest or captive? He might even be a slave if Darad had given him to the chief. It was hardly flattering to be second choice to two horses, but perhaps that was a realistic evaluation.

  Meanwhile he could only sit and shiver in cold and fear and lonely silence. He ought to say a prayer or two, but he wasn’t much of a praying man and it seemed shameful to change now, when he was in trouble, after so seldom offering thanks for the good life he had enjoyed back in Krasnegar. The Gods might feel that his ingratitude was being well rewarded. If he’d done some serious praying sooner, he might have known that stealing the king’s horses was very wrong behavior.

  In the end he decided it would be all right to ask the God of Courage to send him strength to endure whatever was coming.

  Darad was holding forth, waving his beaker with one hand and pointing to his various scars and tattoos with the other. The goblins listened intently, seeming impressed. Rap began to catch some of the language, especially Darad’s words, and the name Wolf Tooth kept recurring. He concluded that this must be Darad’s goblin name and he was talking of himself, telling of Wolf Tooth’s triumphs and all the various tribes he belonged to worldwide, as evidenced by his tattoos. Sysanasso was mentioned.

  So were murder and rape. Quite evidently Darad was a horror, as different from the gentle, sociable Andor as it was possible for man to be. Yet if a quarter of his tales were true he had traveled as widely as Andor had. He was also a braggart and probably stupid, but the goblins did not seem to mind that. After a while the women began to bring their menfolk dishes of food. Rap sat and watched them gorge. His mouth watered, hoping someone might think to throw it a bone.

  The dogs snored and twitched in their dreams. Rap was weary, but fear and cold kept him alert. He wondered why women so greatly outnumbered the men. Scanning the other buildings with farsight, he saw that there the numbers were more even; girls in one, boys in the other. The difference was the adult men, therefore, and a reasonable guess would be that a war party was out raiding somewhere.