Wanderlust

by Mary Kirchoff

  “Gaesil Bishop.”

  Tas extended his hand again, and this time the tinker shook it heartily. “Pleased to meet you.” Gaesil took his position behind the wagon.

  Dipping his hand into the largest of the packs on his belt, Tasslehoff poked around, searching for the remainder of a lump of beet sugar. “This ought to get Bella moving,” he said, holding the lump up for inspection.

  Tas moved to stand at the old nag’s head. The diminutive kender stretched up to grasp her bridle in one hand, his other holding the lump of sugar under her hairy nostrils, from which wisps of white breath escaped. Still edgy from the fight, her eyes were wide and bloodshot. But her furry lips ruffled happily as she tried to take the cube, revealing only two yellowed front teeth.

  “Come on, old girl,” Tas said softly, pulling his hand back before she could get the sugar. “You’ve a job to do, and then this nice treat will be yours.”

  “You’ll have to shout—she’s pretty near deaf,” Gaesil yelled from his position behind the wagon.

  “When I say ‘Now,’ push!” Tas screamed to Gaesil.

  “Bella’s deaf, not me,” Gaesil reminded the kender.

  Holding the bridle firmly, Tas kept the cube in his open palm about four inches from Bella’s nose, out of range of her greedy lips. He counted to three. “Now!” he cried, giving the bridle a tug. Blinking her milky eyes in surprise, Bella stumbled forward slightly, mud sucking at her hooves. Behind her, the wagon gave a jolt, rocked up to the edge of the rut, then rolled and settled back stubbornly into the muck.

  “We almost had it!” Tas cried excitedly. “Push harder next time, and longer.”

  Gaesil looked morosely at his mud-spattered tunic. Dirty, wet specks were hardening on his face. Cold mud oozed over the tops of his boots. He’d be lucky if he didn’t slide under the wheels of the wagon the next time. “OK,” he responded.

  They repeated the process, Tas tugging harder, Gaesil pushing longer. Creaking and groaning, the wagon rolled up and out of the rut with a violent lurch, sending Tasslehoff flying, right after Bella managed to wrap her lips around the proffered piece of sugar.

  Tasslehoff found Gaesil on his chest in the mud where the wagon had been. “Oh, dear, how did that happen?” Tasslehoff asked, helping Gaesil to his feet. “You should be more careful. You’re quite a mess.”

  In response, Gaesil opened the back door of his wagon and extracted a clean tunic and breeches. Setting them on the back step, he shrugged off the frigid, muddy ones, shivering. Transferring valuables between pockets, he quickly slipped on the freshly laundered clothing. “That’s better, but I’m going to need a bath before anyone will hire me in Solace.”

  “Solace?” Tasslehoff exclaimed. “Why, I left there just this morning! You really must go to the Spring Festival—I’m sure you’d make a lot of money there.”

  “That’s where I was headed,” Gaesil said. “I was hoping to draw a lot of business, but I’m afraid I’ve missed most of the festival. It’s undoubtedly too late for me to find a booth.”

  “Say, one of my best friends has a booth there!” Tas boasted. “Well, perhaps he’s not my best friend, but I don’t think he hates me anymore. We met when I was safeguarding some merchandise for him, but there was a little misunderstanding about that. He might share some of his space with you, for a small fee.”

  Tasslehoff pulled off the bracelet and bounced it in his palm. “Actually, this bracelet is his, and he needs it back rather badly. Darned if I know how it got into my pouch again this morning, but here it is. Since you’re going that way, you could take it back for me. My friend seemed awfully distraught when he lost it the last time. He made it for a customer who’s coming to pick it up real soon, so I’m sure he’d be very grateful to you for bringing it back. He might even share his booth with you for nothing!”

  Though grateful for the kender’s help, Gaesil listened to Tas’s tale with suspicion. “I don’t know …” he hedged. He was not keen on protecting or transporting someone else’s valuables, especially after they’d passed through a kender’s hands. As Tas himself had pointed out, people tend to misunderstand the intentions of kender. Besides, Gaesil made it his policy not to get involved with anything that did not concern him.

  “But why not?” Tasslehoff asked. “You need booth space. My friend needs his bracelet back. And I need to go that way, away from Solace. This solution couldn’t be better.” Tasslehoff was puzzled by the tinker’s hesitation, but then added, “Your wife would never need to know about any of this if it didn’t cost any money, would she?”

  He had unwittingly stumbled on the one thing that could persuade Gaesil. Just to be sure, he drew from the pocket of his pants one small, four-sided die and tossed it on the back step of the wagon. Obviously satisfied with the answer, he replaced the die, looked up, and said, “I’ll do it!”

  “Great! His name is Flint Fireforge,” Tas said, pulling his writing equipment and a scrap of parchment from his scroll case. He sketched a map of the festival grounds, marking Flint’s booth with an “X.” “You should have no trouble finding him, but if you do, try the Inn of the Last Home. He seems to be a regular customer there, and I’m sure you could get a bath as well.”

  Tas took one last look at the bracelet. He would miss its alluring beauty and unusual features. But with no regrets, he extended it to the tinker. Gaesil slipped it into the pocket of his breeches and without further ado, hopped onto the driver’s seat of his wagon.

  “Farewell,” the tinker called. “You saved my life. I guess I never thanked you for that.”

  Tas waved and replied, “It was my pleasure. Good luck. Say hello to Flint for me.”

  The tinker gave the reins a snap, and Bella lumbered forward. The wagon lurched northward toward Solace, detouring around the corpses lying in the road and leaving Tas to continue his travels.

  Chapter 5

  Something Borrowed

  Gaesil Bishop was a man with little zest for life.

  He had long ago surrendered his life to fate. Gaesil’s fatalism could be traced to his upbringing in the province of Throt, on the eastern border of Solamnia in the north. Throtians as a whole were a superstitious, vagabond lot, their culture ripe with wives-tales and sayings. As a result, there wasn’t an incident in his past that he could not, upon reflection and review, attribute to some outside force. Everything that came in life was the result of luck. For example, people who had money were lucky. Gaesil, who had none, was unlucky. Worst of all, luck—whether good, bad, or indifferent—was nothing more than supernatural whim, as far as he was concerned.

  When a man does not believe that hard work is rewarded with prosperity and sloth is punished with poverty, he usually is not a hard worker. But however indifferent life might be, Gaesil knew that reward and retribution (especially retribution) did flow freely from his wife.

  He had met her some years before while traveling and working in the town of Dern, where Hepsiba now lived in the ample cottage where she had been reared. She was an only child, and her father was a successful merchant by Dern’s standards. Hepsiba had been spoiled beyond redemption, and her husband was now paying the price.

  Gaesil had been conducting business with her father in his grocery when Hepsiba stepped in. At that moment, thunder rolled out of a clear sky and a bolt of lightning struck the village bell. Clearly this was a sign of some sort, and Gaesil was moved. Still, he never made a decision, at least not an important one, without throwing the Eye.

  Some people carried rabbit’s feet. Throtians rolled an unusual, four-sided die called the Eye, which served basically the same function as reading one’s fortune in cards, only it was quicker. Each side of the Eye represented a facet of fate. Good luck was symbolized by the element of Earth, steady and fertile; bad luck, by Water, heavy and restrictive; and chance, by Air, meaning ever-changing. Fire represented death. Gaesil had never rolled Fire, though he once knew a man who did. The poor fellow panicked and threw himself off a cliff, making the prophe
cy come true.

  On the day he asked for Hepsiba’s hand in marriage, Gaesil had rolled the symbol for Earth—good luck. With no other suitors of any kind and growing older, she accepted at once. They were married that afternoon.

  Within hours of the marriage, Gaesil began to wonder if perhaps he had not somehow misread the Eye, for Hepsiba revealed herself to be homely in both body and spirit: suspicious, selfish, and conceited. But much worse than these, as far as Gaesil was concerned, was her ability to sour any mood, to make any splendid thing seem ugly. He had no illusions about his looks, with his dishwater hair, knobby bones, and big feet, but he had a good heart and a ready smile. She would have seen his virtues, he was certain, if she was capable of appreciating anything besides money.

  Despite his unhappiness, Gaesil felt certain there was some reason fate had thrown him together with Hepsiba. He hoped only that she would let him live long enough to discover what it was.

  And so he spent a lot of time on the road, fixing what needed fixing wherever it needed to be fixed. He traveled along the festival route, and Solace held the first, and possibly the best, festival of the year. He would stay in each town along the way up to a week if business warranted it. Sometimes he was gone for as long as six months at a stretch, especially if the weather was good and the people were friendly, like the chatty little kender who had saved him from the hobgoblins and helped him free his wagon from the ditch. That fellow was the least annoying kender Gaesil had ever met.

  Just after midday, Gaesil reached the turn to Solace at the south end of Crystalmir Lake. A snap of the reins guided Bella to the right and the wagon rolled on toward the ancient stone bridge that crossed Solace Stream. Here traffic picked up. Gaesil nodded his head in greeting at the driver of a wagon passing from the other direction.

  Ahead, just stepping onto the bridge, were two travelers on foot. They appeared to be in quite a hurry. Their agitated pace was being set by the shorter of the two, a dwarf with a goodly amount of gray in his hair and a large scowl on his face. The other, with the soft good looks of a young elf, moved more calmly, his longer strides seeming slower and more deliberate. He walked with his face turned toward the dwarf and sounded as if he were trying in vain to calm down his companion. The dwarfs expression remained stony, his gaze locked straight ahead.

  “Here’s someone coming from the road through Darken Wood. Perhaps this fellow’s seen him and can tell us if we’re even headed in the right direction,” Gaesil heard the dwarf say before running up to the tinker’s wagon. Gaesil tugged on Bella’s reins until she stopped.

  “Excuse me,” the dwarf called up, “but have you seen a kender on the road this morning?”

  Gaesil looked surprised. “Why, yes, I have. A helpful little fellow—”

  “Ah, ha!” the dwarf interrupted, slamming a fist into his hand in smug satisfaction. His eyes narrowed to slits. “Where did you spot the little gadfly?”

  The young elf stepped before the dwarf. “What my friend means is, were you traveling from the south on the new road or north on Haven Road?”

  Gaesil was a bit flustered by the dwarf’s animosity. “Why, I left him about two hours ago on Southway Road, but I doubt it’s the same kender you’re looking for. The one I met was a cheerful little fellow in blue leggings. His name was Tasslehouse, or Tusslehauf, or some such thing.”

  “That’s him!” the dwarf shouted, grabbing the elf by the arm and breaking into a run. “Come on, Tanis, time’s a-wasting!”

  “Thanks for your help, sir,” the elf managed to call back as he was pulled away behind the dwarf.

  “Certainly,” Gaesil said from habit, though the two were out of earshot. He shook his shaggy head. What could such a nice kender have done to inspire such anger? Giving Bella’s reins another sharp tug, he set off again across the bridge and toward Solace. He dared waste no more time. As it was, he was in a hurry to track down that kender’s friend, Flint Fireforge, to return the bracelet and, he hoped, beg or buy some festival booth space from him.

  * * * * *

  “Yeah, I know Flint Fireforge, but you just missed him,” the jowly barkeep at the Inn of the Last Home told Gaesil a half-hour later. “He and Tanis tore out of here more than an hour ago.” The innkeeper, whose name was Otik, balanced two plates of fried potatoes and sausage on his forearm, having just come through the swinging kitchen door. “Do you mind?” he asked, nodding his head from the plates to the patrons who awaited them.

  “Oh, not at all,” Gaesil said. He sat down absently on a stool to wait for the innkeeper’s return, while he pondered Otik’s comment. Tanis … where had he heard that name before?

  “Now, you were asking?” Otik said, returning, his arms free. He wiped his hands on his dingy white apron and moved behind the bar.

  “Flint Fireforge. You said he’d left. Will I find him at the festival?”

  Otik chuckled. “You might, but I doubt it. He and Tanis were hot on the trail of a kender. He’d stolen a very important bracelet from Flint.”

  Gaesil’s eyes went as wide and round as two steel pieces and his mouth fell open. He remembered the dwarf and the elf on the bridge! That’s where he’d heard of Tanis. But the dwarf had never been called by name. How could he have known? The kender hadn’t mentioned that the dwarf would have a friend with him, an elf at that.

  “Something wrong?” the barkeep asked him, noting the tinker’s startled expression.

  Gaesil put his knobby hand into the pocket of his breeches and his fingers closed around the bracelet. “I have—” But the tinker stopped short. He was about to give the bracelet to the innkeeper to return to Flint the next time the dwarf visited the inn, but he was having second thoughts. “You say Flint left town and won’t be running his booth at the festival?”

  “Not until he finds that kender. And the festival will only last another couple of days.”

  “I see.” Gaesil was already mulling the situation. With the dwarf out of town and unable to sell his wares anyway, his booth would be vacant. Gaesil could borrow it and no one would be put out, though there might be trouble if the dwarf caught up to the kender, returned before the festival ended, and found a stranger using his business space. Judging from what Gaesil had seen, Flint Fireforge didn’t seem the affable kind.

  On the other hand, Gaesil could claim he was waiting at the booth to return the bracelet to its rightful owner, the dwarf. If he conducted a little business to pay his expenses while waiting, no one could hold that against him. If the festival closed up before the dwarf returned, why, then, Gaesil could hand the bracelet over to the innkeeper and skedaddle. It wasn’t dishonest, he reasoned, just good business.

  “I’m a little busy, friend. Is there anything else I can do for you?” Otik’s mild voice interrupted Gaesil’s thoughts.

  “I’m sorry,” the tinker said, bouncing back to the present. He scratched ruefully at his mud-caked skin. “Actually, I could use a bath before I head over to the festival grounds. Do you have a bathtub on the premises?”

  * * * * *

  A pink and scrubbed Gaesil emerged from the inn an hour later and wound his way down the bridgewalk to the ground, his hair freshly washed, his road clothing in his hand newly clean and ready to hang to dry. He had put on his best tunic and trousers—not too plain, so as to make customers think him a novice at his trade, and not too fancy, so as to make them think him too high-priced. He had removed the dwarf’s bracelet from his breeches before washing them and placed it in the pocket of his clean trousers for safekeeping.

  The tinker hiked the short distance to the stables, where he had left Bella and his wagon in the care of a young hand, a well-fed, red-haired boy of thirteen. Paying one steel piece for Bella’s food and grooming, he clambered onto the seat of his wagon and leaned back through the small front opening to hang his clothing inside. A quick glance told him nothing was missing—the lad had done a good job.

  Turning back, he pulled the kender’s map of the festival grounds from a box under t
he seat. He knew from previous years that the fair was held on the west edge of town, within sight of Crystalmir Lake. He was currently on the northeast side of Solace. There was no direct route to the festival, so he set Bella’s head back down the road to the south, turning right to pass the town square’s north side. The road narrowed and turned into a quagmire.

  He heard the festival before he saw it, sprawled across the land to the west dipping down behind the cover of the vallenwoods. Fairs, no matter the season, were always noisy, bawdy events, mucky swamps in spring and fall, choking clouds of dust in summer. And of course, in snowy regions like Abanasinia, they were seldom held during winter.

  Gaesil consulted the kender’s map, locating the “X” that marked the dwarfs stall. Instead of taking the direct route, down the main, mired thoroughfare on which the fairgoers walked, he traced a path to the back of the stalls with his index finger, calloused from years of sharpening dull knives to razor points and other exciting tinker tasks. The wagons and carts of countless merchants had dug trenches in the newly thawed thatch, but the going was still easier.

  The tinker located the dwarf’s booth without trouble and reined in his wagon as close as possible. A simple, drab curtain hung at the back and sides of the stall, beyond which was a small, grass-covered square with three crude chairs, a clean pile of hay covered by a coarse blanket, an empty ale flask, and a short series of empty shelves. The dwarf probably used them to store additional merchandise, but had taken his wares home for safekeeping at night, Gaesil decided. Beyond another curtain was the actual front of the booth, three simple planks on sawhorses, open to the skies. They were set lower than Gaesil would have liked, but he certainly wouldn’t feel comfortable rearranging the booth without permission. A narrow entrance at the front allowed customers to walk inside among the wares. Hay was sprinkled on the ground to allay the mud.

  Crude but usable, the tinker concluded. Unhitching Bella from her harness, he gathered up his tools and carted them into the stall in three or four trips. On his last he fetched his sign, “Honing, Soldering, Repairs on Anything,” then stood on a chair to hang the sign from the front curtain.