by Tina Daniel
“That’s it!” Tasslehoff cried, struggling in vain against his bonds. “Now you’ve crossed the point of no return! Sturm never hurt an unarmed person in his whole life—well, at least as long as I’ve known him! Which is years, or certainly a year or two by now. And he is about as noble and well-meaning a fellow as you will ever meet, quite apart from myself.”
This time the kender’s voice seemed to surprise the minotaur, as if he hadn’t quite deigned to notice Tas before. Caramon heard a sharp intake of breath as Dogz stepped back to speak, in his low rumbling voice, with the leader.
“The third one is a kender, Sarkis.”
“So?”
“Kender are unclean. They roam the earth, living by stealth and dishonor. To touch one, it is said, is to invite scorn or, worse, disease. I do not think it is necessary to search this one.”
From behind the two minotaurs came an angry hiss. From behind Caramon rose Tas’s indignant voice.
“Unclean! Why, you big horny cow! I’ll have you know that I bathe regularly. I washed my face just yesterday, to be exact—that is, assuming this is the day after yesterday, which I don’t know for sure because I have no idea where I am or how long it took me to get here. But if you want to bring up personal hygiene, I suggest you take your two moon-sized nostrils, bend over, and take a whiff of yourself!”
Sturm bit his tongue.
Caramon rolled his eyes.
The human scum and webbed ogres snickered.
The one named Sarkis stepped away from Dogz and faded into the gray mist toward the cloaked figure. This time Caramon couldn’t make out any words, only bestial snorts interspersed with guttural syllables and hissing sounds. The leader was obviously conferring with the mysterious figure.
Caramon’s thoughts whirled. They stopped at the thought of his twin. Raistlin and he had become expert at pairing up to seize the advantage in many tight situations. With a fierce longing, the young warrior wished he had his brother at his side now. What would Raistlin do in such a spot?
Sarkis returned and addressed Dogz contemptuously. “Pah, Dogz! It is true that kender are dishonorable, but it is well known they are impervious to common or uncommon illness. You are as likely to catch disease from a tree stump. Let me do the job, you superstitious fool!”
Tasslehoff was able to twist around to see Sarkis descend upon him, huge hands outstretched. “You ugly, wart-faced, pig-snouted, dun-colored cretin! I’m as honorable as they come—well, maybe not as honorable as Sturm, or even Caramon, who is honorable in his own humble way—but twice, ten times, one hundred thousand times as honorable as the likes of you! And let me warn you that I could give you any disease I wanted if I only cared enough to bother.… Hey, stop! Quit that! That tickles! Heh-heh! Hah-ha-ha-ha-hah!”
That crazy kender talks too much for his own good, thought Sturm. He saw from his vantage that Sarkis had discovered Tasslehoff’s packs and pouches. The minotaur leered, showing yellow teeth in his brutish face.
Sarkis stomped over to his second-in-command, holding up Tas’s pouches. He glared savagely at his subordinate.
“Well, what is it?” asked the chastened Dogz.
The humans and webbed ogres tittered until Sarkis silenced them with a glance. Sarkis strode back to the figure in the fog. Their conversation consisted of more hissing and muffled grunts. He returned to Dogz.
“He is the one,” Sarkis announced.
Dogz started forward, but Sarkis grabbed him by the shoulder. “Do not harm him! Bring him and”—he handed over the kender’s belongings—“his pouches.”
Dogz hurried over to Tasslehoff. A high-pitched shriek filled the air. Caramon and Sturm strained against their bonds, but there was nothing they could do.
Dogz came back around the mast, carrying Tas, holding the squirming, ranting kender as far away from him as he could, dangling him by his topknot. It looked as if the huge minotaur was carrying a rabbit by the ears, but the rabbit, in this instance, was cursing a vile streak.
“Ouch! Of all the— You clod-footed, garlic-breathing pokehead! Watch what you’re— Ouch! Where are we go—Ouch! You overgrown, thickheaded, milkless cow! Ouch! That’s my hair you’re pulling! Hey, what about Caramon and Sturm? Yeeeow!”
As Caramon and Sturm watched, the minotaur passed the kicking kender to two of the humans, who climbed over the rail and disappeared, presumably into a dinghy below. Smirking with satisfaction, Dogz turned to face Sarkis.
Caramon heard a scuttling sound and could just make out the cowled figure retreating toward the ship’s railing, then being swallowed up by the fog as he went over the side. Other humans, webbed ogres, and minotaurs hurried to do likewise.
Stepping forward, Dogz asked menacingly, “What about these two?”
Sarkis shrugged indifferently. “They are unimportant. Throw them overboard and set fire to the ship.”
The few remaining humans edged forward. One of them, a lumbering hulk of a man with a red beard and bearing a rope scar on his neck, gave Dogz a look of eager pleading. Dogz nodded to him.
The two bull creatures turned away and also disappeared over the side of the ship.
The humans swarmed over Caramon and Sturm, punching and beating them with short clubs. Unable to defend himself, Caramon tried to protect his eyes by clamping them shut. Next to him, Sturm moaned, then grunted as the first blows landed, but after that the Solamnic took his punishment in silence.
The huge man with the rope scar began to kick at the mast. After several kicks, it snapped at the bottom, and he and the other humans lifted it, dragging Sturm and Caramon over to the side of the Venora.
Sounds of the ship being wrecked surrounded them. Then came a sloshing noise, followed by a whoosh and a sudden rush of heat and fire.
Still bound to the jagged section of mast, Sturm and Caramon were hefted into the air. The men began a crude chant, lofting the prisoners in an arc over the water, then swinging them back to the ship several times before letting go with a final shout. Sturm and Caramon and the mast section sailed through the air before plummeting toward the water in a twisted jumble.
As he smacked the water, Caramon struggled to react. His arms seemed all tangled up with the wooden mast, and his hands were tied tight. Even without these disadvantages, swimming wasn’t Caramon’s strong point. He would have drowned in Crystalmir Lake some months ago if Sturm hadn’t rescued him. He had made some modest strides since that day, but now he kicked for all he was worth.
Because of the way in which they had hit the water, Sturm was briefly pinned under the mast and took a few seconds to surface. Gasping for air, Sturm struggled to free his arms, but like Caramon, he couldn’t. He scissored his legs, kicking strongly. Fortunately for the two of them, the wooden mast section helped keep” them afloat.
“Don’t kick so hard!” Sturm managed to wheeze at Caramon. “You’ll use up all your strength. Take it easy for now.”
The water was strangely warm and murky, brown rather than blue-green and swirling with sediment. Their kicking churned up bubbles and slimy, clinging vegetation. The water had a decidedly stagnant smell.
Suddenly a tremendous explosion rocked their ears. Both men twisted their necks around in time to see, through the mist, the Venora explode in a great plume of smoke and fire. The current had already carried the ship several thousand yards off. The other ship, the one Caramon had barely glimpsed, had vanished into the haze.
Caramon and Sturm watched for several minutes as remnants of the ship burned and sank into the waves. Almost as if by signal, then, the warm fog descended heavily, obscuring everything but the rolling infinity of the ocean.
As they struggled to keep afloat, both Caramon and Sturm had the same unspoken thoughts.
Where were they? Why had this happened to them? How in blazes would they ever find and rescue Tasslehoff? Or save themselves?
Although he certainly missed his good friends Caramon and Sturm, and although he certainly needed rescuing, Tasslehoff Burrfoot was having
a pretty good time.
It was true that he was stuck in a small iron-barred brig in the lower deck of the minotaur ship, which stank worse than a mountain of dead skunks. It was also true that he was a prisoner of the minotaurs, the webbed ogres—which he had learned were called orughi—and human seafaring rabble who might at any moment put him to death.
But so far he had been treated rather well, all things considered. Sarkis had given him back his packs and pouches. Indeed, the commander of the ship acted as though the kender’s possessions were sacrosanct and would be safer under the protection of Tas. Tas could spend hours poring through his various belongings, and now he had no shortage of hours to kill. He wished he hadn’t sent the magic message bottle to Raistlin, since this would be an even better time to use it.
Tas got plenty of sleep. And his captors fed him reasonably well under the circumstances, mostly a greasy, lumpy meat stew that once you got used to it tasted just fine. The bowls of stew were sometimes brought to him by monkeys, who were on the ship in droves and acted as the cook’s helpers. One of them in particular, a pear-shaped woolly monkey, Tas got to know rather well. He dubbed him “Oh-Tick,” after a certain innkeeper he remembered fondly, and when he conversed with Oh-Tick, Tas felt the monkey, tilting his head in a listening kind of way, almost understood him.
Tas had plenty of interesting visitors. Very few of the ship’s denizens had ever met or even seen a kender before. So they trooped down, by ones and twos, to gawk at him, in some cases to taunt him, and in a couple of instances to throw fruit cores and dirt clods at him.
Tas threw the fruit cores and dirt clods right back, but he liked it best when they came to taunt him. The human rabble really knew some good insults, and this in turn stimulated Tas’s imagination. He came right back at them with some of the most totally offensive things he had ever thought of. It made several of his visitors so angry that their faces got all purple before they stomped away.
The minotaurs had more dignity, even if they smelled worse. They would approach almost respectfully and gaze at him in his solitary cell. Tas only saw Sarkis once again, when the leader came down all alone and spent several minutes standing impassively, watching Tas, his eyes taking note of every detail of the kender from topknot to soft leather boots. Tas couldn’t manage to get a word out of the huge, ugly beast.
Dogz was different. Scornful and arrogant, he, too, came to take a leisurely look at Tasslehoff. After their first encounter, which was marked by a nasty exchange of barbed comments, Dogz returned again and again. Tas began to have stilted but edifying conversations with the huge beast, who seemed in some ways to be as curious about him as Tas was about everything, and indeed more fearful of Tas than the other way around. Gradually the two developed an awkward, almost friendly relationship.
Dogz was Sarkis’s cousin, as it turned out, and utterly in awe of and loyal to his higher-ranking relative. Sarkis regarded Dogz’s friendship with the kender to be another sign of a pathetic weakness, so Dogz had to steal his opportunites to see the kender.
“So you really like being a minotaur, huh?” asked Tas, amazed at the fierce pride exhibited by the strutting bull creature. Tas found Dogz fascinating, but the kender couldn’t help but know, even if Dogz seemed oblivious to it, that minotaurs were a race widely scorned on Krynn.
“It is … a great honor to be a minotaur,” rumbled Dogz uncertainly.
“What’s the good part?” asked Tas, intrigued. “I mean, when you’re a kender, the whole world’s your oyster. You’ve got friends and relatives everywhere, except maybe in Thorbardin among the Theiwar, although I’m sure even they would warm up to me eventually. You know how to make the very best maps, and if you’re lucky, you’ve got a handsome topknot.…”
Tas paused, realizing that this minotaur wasn’t going to interrupt or answer until Tas shut up. So Tas did something he rarely did. He shut up, giving Dogz the cue to speak.
“We fight to live, live to fight,” said Dogz after a long pause. He spoke haltingly but impressively. His wide-set eyes, Tas thought, looked almost mournful. “We bow down to no one. Our destiny is to rule.”
“Pretty heavy burden,” said Tas thoughtfully. He was tempted to add “even for a beast of burden,” but he thought perhaps he’d better not say that.
“Yes,” said Dogz, raising his eyes to meet Tas’s gaze.
After about a week, Tas realized that he hadn’t seen his favorite monkey, Oh-Tick, for several days, and he asked his regular visitor about it.
“Monkey stew,” said Dogz, pointing to the bowl of stew in Tas’s hands. “That is why the disgusting creatures are on board. Did you think they were pets?” Dogz gave a snort of laughter.
Oh-Tick’s demise made Tas feel lowly and ashamed. Suddenly he lost his appetite for the stew. Dogz noticed that he had stopped eating and said, rather gently considering his rumbling tone, “Kender don’t usually eat monkey?”
“Not usually,” Tas replied disconsolately.
“What do kender eat?” asked Dogz thoughtfully.
“Almost anything,” said Tas, “except monkey. Especially a monkey friend,” he added diplomatically.
“We always eat monkey stew,” said Dogz. “They are silly animals.” Then, more sympathetically, “I’m sorry.”
“Me, too.” Tas shoved his face between the bars to peer at Dogz. “I suppose I could pretend it was bran meal or something. I love plain old bran meal. I dream of hot bran meal with currants and honey! You wouldn’t happen to have any plain old bran meal on this ship, would you?”
Dogz shook his head. Tas sighed and pushed away his bowl. Several minutes passed in silence before Dogz asked tentatively, “If you aren’t going to eat your monkey stew, would you mind if I ate it?”
Tas pushed the bowl between the bars.
When Dogz’s shipmates came down to observe Tas, he got a chance to observe them, too. The kender was thrilled by the close-up view of minotaurs, and especially the webbed ogres, who waddled up to spy on him. Short, fat, and dull-witted, they shouted their insults at him in orughi, so Tas could only do his best to match their tone and decibel level in Common.
Tas had to look quick at some of the orughi, who after clucking their insults would scoot away before the kender could respond. Tas liked it when they stayed around awhile so he could study the ancestral weapon many of them carried over their shoulder, an iron boomerang with a long metallic cord, which Dogz told him was called a tonkk. It was used to hunt flying creatures. Tas would have liked to try using a tonkk, which reminded him of his own favorite weapon, the hoopak.
Tasslehoff still had his own hoopak, which had been strapped across his back when he was taken off the Venora. Sarkis hadn’t shown any interest in taking it away, and besides, it was no help to Tas in his cramped prison quarters.
One afternoon, after about a week, Tas felt the ship slowing down. There was a good deal of commotion on deck above as the ship shuddered to a halt. Tas heard the sounds of cargo being unloaded, and then the muffled tramping of the crew disembarking. For several hours, Tas heard sounds of activity above, but during the entire time, no one came to check on him.
The kender was beginning to think they had forgotten all about him when at last Dogz and Sarkis came below, speaking to each other in their low, guttural voices. They carried a small wooden cage that smelled of monkeys and made Tas think forlornly of Oh-Tick.
They entered Tas’s cell, squeezed the kender inside the cage, and then slid the cage onto two poles, which they hefted and balanced on their shoulders. Then the two minotaurs carried Tas up on deck and down the gangway, where the kender got his first glimpse of the fabled minotaur island of Mithas.
With the cage bobbing on their shoulders, Dogz and Sarkis paraded Tas through the streets of the minotaur city of Lacynos. What an amazing place, Tas thought. He could hardly wait to tell all his friends about it … if he was lucky enough to live through the experience!
The harbor was crowded with war galleys, cargo ships, and f
ishing boats. A system of ropes and pulleys unloaded huge bundles of lumber and other vital goods from cargo ships. Human slaves supplied the power, overseen by whip-wielding minotaurs. Fierce-looking merchants and human pirates argued with each other on the docks. The water was thick with floating seaweed and garbage.
The city proper began where the wharf ended. Lacynos’s rutted lanes, filthy alleys, and busy streets were paved with dirt that, as a result of rain and heavy traffic, had been churned into thick, gooey mud. Crude wooden buildings, larger than any Tas had seen in all of Southern Ergoth, were organized into block patterns. Outside ladders took the place of inside stairways; square holes in the rooftops provided egress.
Tas had to twist around repeatedly to glimpse all the strange, marvelous activity. There were plenty of humans, who seemed to have a monopoly on the corner taverns. Many of them looked like armed brigands, flaunting their plundered gems and rings. They carried wicked, curved swords and hooked weapons. The outnumbered humans mixed with the minotaurs, but Tas noticed that occasionally loud arguments took place between members of the two races and fights broke out.
So frenetic was the atmosphere that not everyone noticed Dogz and Sarkis carrying the caged kender, but others did. The human ruffians pointed and guffawed. The minotaurs peered curiously and growled with contempt. Tas pointed and guffawed and growled right back, trailing laughter in his wake.
They turned down a wider street, carrying Tas toward a bustling square of stalls, tents, and booths where the smell of fish and sweat was overpowering. The sounds of loud haggling drowned out other noises.
“Our marketplace,” Dogz boasted, inclining his head toward Tas. “Here you can buy the finest silver pieces in all the minotaur isles. But you have to be careful. There is also an abundance of worthless items.”
Sarkis barked a command at Dogz. “Stop talking to the kender!” he ordered. “It is a sign of weakness.”