And then they both laughed, and Rabbit picked her up and kissed her soundly several times.
3
What’s afoot?” Rabbit asked Kryda Ham-Hand, the second mate of the Seagull, a couple of days later when they veered off from the main fleet and anchored just off the beach of a small village about three days to the north of the bay of Lattash.
Ham-Hand shrugged. “Longbow wants to go ashore and have a few words with his chief. He’s fairly sure that Chief Old-Bear will know if anything’s happening on up to the north of here. As I understand it, the natives of the coastal region of Lord Dahlaine’s country stay in touch with Old-Bear’s tribe, so if anything’s happening up there, Longbow’s chief will know about it. The cap’n thinks it might not be a bad idea to find out if the bug-people have started to move yet. Red-Beard’s just going along for the ride. It shouldn’t take them very long, and the information could be very useful.”
“It makes sense, I guess,” Rabbit agreed. “Good information can sometimes be worth more than gold when you’re fighting one of these land wars with the bug-people.”
“Bite your tongue, Rabbit,” Ham-Hand said. “Nothing’s worth more than gold.”
“Could you accept ‘almost worth more than gold’?” Rabbit asked.
“I’d have to think about that for a while,” Ham-Hand said. “I’ll get back to you about it—one of these days.”
Longbow and Red-Beard paddled back on out to the Seagull after about an hour or so, and they went directly to Captain Hook-Beak’s cabin to report. Longbow’s face seemed to be just a bit bleak, but there was nothing particularly unusual about that.
After a while, though, Red-Beard came out of the cabin alone and joined Rabbit near the anvil.
“Are the bugs moving yet?” Rabbit asked him.
“Not so far as Chief Old-Bear knows,” Red-Beard replied. “A few things cropped up, though, that you should probably know about.”
“Oh?”
“It seems that there’s been an old story floating around up here in this region that has to do with Longbow’s ‘unknown friend.’ Chief Old-Bear was just a little surprised when Longbow mentioned her. If the myth—or story—or whatever you want to call it—comes anywhere close to being truth, Longbow’s ‘unknown friend’ can do things—or arrange to have them done—that Zelana’s family couldn’t even come close to doing. It was Dahlaine who came up with the idea of the Dreamers, I guess, but ‘unknown friend’ tells the children what they’re going to dream about. Zelana’s family has some fairly rigid limitations, but she—whoever she is—doesn’t. The story mentions ‘strangers’—you, Sorgan, Narasan, and all the others—who’ll come here to help, but I guess there’ll be times when she’ll deal with the bugs all by herself. That’s why she kept telling Longbow to get out of the way. When you get right down to it, all we were doing was cluttering things up. Back in the first war, she gave Eleria the flood dream and Yaltar the fire-mountain dream, but during the war in the basin above the Falls of Vash, she didn’t even bother with the Dreamers. She made that ‘sea of gold’ to drive the church armies crazy, and then when the church-soldiers started to run all over the bug-people, she told that river to turn around and go the other way—and it did exactly what she told it to do. She killed all of our enemies and created an ocean with little more than a snap of her fingers.”
“I’d say that if she can do things like that, Zelana and her family don’t really need all the armies they’ve been hiring,” Rabbit mused.
“It might just be that you outlanders are important for something else,” Red-Beard said with a slight frown. “Maybe she wants a lot of outlanders here just to watch while she’s turning the world inside out. Then, when they go back home, they’ll be able to tell all their friends that trying to come here to the Land of Dhrall could be the worst thing they could ever do, because if they try, they won’t live long enough to spend any of the gold they steal.”
“I think she’s already convinced me,” Rabbit declared with a shudder. “It might take her a little longer to get through to the cap’n and some of the others, but I think they’ll get her point—eventually.”
“The only trouble there is that time might run out for them before ‘eventually’ gets here.”
The Maag fleet continued to sail north along the coast for the next several days, and at some indeterminate point they left Zelana’s territory and moved on up into the Domain of her older brother. Rabbit had noticed that the borders here in the Land of Dhrall were seldom marked by rivers or any other significant—or even noticeable—landmarks. It seemed that boundaries in this part of the world existed in the minds of the people rather than on the ground itself. The natives didn’t seem to have any problems with that informality, but it appeared to bother Sorgan Hook-Beak quite a bit, and he came out on deck quite often to ask Longbow or Red-Beard if they’d moved out of Zelana’s territory yet.
Then about midmorning on a hazy autumn day the Seagull rounded a jutting point of land, and there was what appeared to be a fishing village just ahead. Dahlaine came out of the cabin near the stern and joined Sorgan up near the bow. “We’ll stop here, Captain Hook-Beak,” he said. “Now we get to start walking.”
Sorgan looked at the village. “That’s not much of a town, Lord Dahlaine,” he said.
“I wouldn’t even call it a town, Captain,” Dahlaine replied with a faint smile. “We have to go inland several miles before we’ll reach the home of the local tribe. The fishermen here usually pack up and go on back home when winter arrives. Winters aren’t very pleasant out here.”
“That makes sense, I suppose,” Sorgan agreed.
Rabbit noticed that the somewhat scruffy-looking huts of the village were almost identical to those in Lattash and the village of Chief Old-Bear, and the natives standing on the beach were dressed in leather clothes much like those of Longbow and Red-Beard. They might live in a different Domain, but their cultures appeared to be nearly identical.
Then a tall, lean native with dark hair pushed a canoe down the sandy beach to the water, nimbly stepped into it, and paddled on out toward the Seagull. As he drew closer, he slowed. “Ho, Longbow!” he called out, “what are you doing in that floating house?”
“Resting my feet, Athlan,” Longbow called back. “Walking isn’t all that much fun anymore.”
“You know him, I take it?” Rabbit said quietly.
“I’ve known him for a long time, Rabbit,” Longbow replied. “His name’s Athlan, and he’s a good hunter. I’m just guessing, but I’m fairly sure that he was sent here to guide us inland to the main tribal village.”
“What’s afoot, Longbow?” the native in the canoe called.
“War lately. The creatures of the Wasteland are starting to get restless.”
“I thought you’d have killed them all by now.”
“I left a few of them alive to give you something to shoot arrows at. Dahlaine’s here, and he wants to talk to you.”
“I’m not the chief of the tribe, Longbow,” Athlan protested, pulling his canoe in beside the Seagull.
“I know that, but Dahlaine wants you to see enough of our outlander friends so that you can tell the members of your tribe why they’ve come here and what they can do to help them. Is your old chief still alive?”
“Just barely. His son, Kathlak, is sort of filling in for him. He goes into the chief’s lodge and when he comes out, he tells us that the chief wants us to do this, that, or something else. We all know that the chief probably isn’t even awake, and that the orders are coming from Kathlak himself, but we don’t make an issue of it.”
Longbow dropped a rolled-up rope ladder down to his friend, and Athlan climbed on up. “Where did this thing come from?” he asked, looking around at the Seagull.
“There’s a land off to the west of here, and Zelana went on over there to hire outlanders to help defend her Domain. I’m sure that the man in charge of those outlanders will want to talk with you, but this little fellow here is much more
important.”
“He’s not very big, is he?”
“He doesn’t have to be big, Athlan. He makes arrowheads that are probably the best in all the world.”
“Is he really strong enough to split rocks?” Athlan asked a bit dubiously.
“He doesn’t split rocks or chip points and edges. He makes arrowheads out of something else.” Longbow handed his friend one of the bronze arrowheads Rabbit had forged.
Athlan carefully ran his thumb over the arrowhead. “What is this,” he asked Rabbit, “and where can I find some?”
“You won’t need to find any of it,” Rabbit told him. “I’ve got several hundred of them already, and there’s more on the way. It’s a metal called bronze, and I heat it in my forge until it melts down into a liquid. Then I pour it into a baked clay mold. After it cools off, it stops being liquid and goes back to being solid, but it’s in the shape that you’ve got right there in your hand.”
“Where does this ‘bronze’ come from originally?”
“I haven’t got the faintest idea,” Rabbit admitted. “When I need some of it, I buy it—or steal it, if nobody’s watching. People have told me that bronze is a mixture of two different metals that aren’t very good by themselves, but once they’re mixed together, they’re much better. There’s another metal called iron that we use for knives and axes, but it takes a much hotter fire to melt iron.”
“There aren’t any of these peculiar things here in the Land of Dhrall, are there?”
“I’m sure that there are. I’ve even seen red-colored rocks that are almost certainly iron ore. I can heat iron in my forge to make it soft enough to work with, but my forge doesn’t get hot enough to melt it.”
“What would you want me to give you for a dozen or so of these?” Athlan asked, holding up the bronze arrowhead.
Rabbit shrugged. “Nothing. I’ve come here to help you fight the bug-people, so the arrowheads are a gift.” Rabbit shuddered. “I can’t believe I just said that,” he told Longbow.
“It sounded all right to me,” Longbow replied.
“I’m not the only one in the tribe who’ll need these new arrowheads,” Athlan said. “It’s likely to take you a long time to make enough of them for us, don’t you think?”
“I won’t be working alone,” Rabbit said. “There’s a smith on every ship in the fleet. Back in the war last spring we set up what we called the ‘arrow factory’ while we were waiting for the snow to melt off. We made enough arrowheads there to give every archer in Zelana’s Domain all that he needed.”
“I think this one just got a lot taller, Longbow,” Athlan said. “I might have to twist a few arms to persuade the other men in the tribe that these new arrowheads are better than stone, but I’m sure they’ll get my point.”
“Let’s go talk with Dahlaine, Athlan,” Longbow said. “There are a few things you need to know so that you can pass them on to Kathlak.”
“Lead the way, friend Longbow,” Athlan replied.
“All creatures change with the passage of time, Athlan,” Dahlaine told Longbow’s friend. “The changes usually take so long that the creatures aren’t even aware of them. The Vlagh has been tampering with the natural order of things here lately, though. When one of the creatures who serve the Vlagh sees a characteristic that might be useful, that characteristic will probably appear in the next hatch. During the war in the south, the Vlagh added turtle shells to a new hatch to protect them from the arrows my sister’s archers had been using to kill them. Back before these wars, the servants of the Vlagh were all very much the same, but now we’re facing six or eight varieties of enemies—that we know about. For all we know, there could be several new varieties when we encounter them here.”
“Are you certain that they’ll attack our part of Dhrall next?” Athlan asked.
Dahlaine shook his head. “They could come north,” he said, “but they might go east instead. We don’t know for sure yet, so we’re covering both areas.”
“That makes sense,” Athlan agreed. “I think that maybe we should go on up to Statha now. It might be best if Kathlak hears about this as soon as possible, and we’ve had another problem that you should know about. The Reindeer Hunter Tribes started breaking the rules while you were off to the south. We drove them off, so they’ve more or less started to behave themselves. They might just be waiting until we go to war with the creatures of the Wasteland so that they can attack us when we’re not looking.”
Dahlaine’s face blanched, and he stood up. “Let’s go to Statha,” he said. “I need to get to the bottom of this.”
4
The region to the east of the fishing village was marshy, with thick grass at the water’s edge, and dead trees sticking up out of shallow, brown water. Rabbit was more than a little startled when he saw that the swamp seemed to be on fire. It wasn’t an ordinary fire, though. Most of the fires Rabbit had seen were orange or red, but this one was blue.
“Don’t be concerned, friends,” Athlan told them. “That’s just swamp-fire. It shows up in these marshy areas all the time.”
“How do you go about setting a swamp on fire?” Ox asked. “Swamps are mostly water, aren’t they? And I don’t think I’ve ever come across a patch of water that burns.”
“It’s not the water that’s on fire,” Keselo explained. “I’ve heard about this, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen it. Our instructors told us that there’s a gas called ‘methane’ that rises up out of stagnant water. I guess it also shows up in coal mines. Swamp-fires aren’t really very dangerous, but a fire in a coal mine can turn into a disaster.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen blue fire before,” Ox said.
“It is sort of pretty, though,” Rabbit observed.
“I’ll stick to red fire,” Ox said. “Blue fire looks kind of spooky to me.”
“It does frighten the native population in some parts of the world,” Keselo told him. “They believe that blue flame is a sign that there are ghosts in the vicinity, and they won’t go near a burning marsh.”
“Why would anybody want to wander around in a swamp?” Sorgan demanded.
“It might be a good place to hide, Cap’n,” Rabbit said. “If somebody happens to be chasing you, and he believes that blue fire means that the swamp’s haunted, he won’t go near it.”
“I think I’ll stick to open water,” Sorgan said.
“I burn coal in my forge,” Rabbit told Keselo, “but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it burn blue.”
“It probably wouldn’t,” Keselo said. “The methane sort of grows out of the coal when there isn’t very much fresh air around. The people who dig coal up out of the ground are really afraid of it. I’ve heard that there’s one coal mine in the southern part of the empire that’s been burning for about seventy years now. The owners of the mine have tried everything they can think of to put the fire out, but it’s still burning all their coal, and that turns their profit into smoke.”
The village of Statha was almost as big as the original village of Lattash had been, but unlike Lattash, it stood in a deep forest of huge trees. Rabbit saw a certain practicality there. The trees protected the lodges from the wind and weather to some degree, but the mud-and-wattle structures were widely scattered, since nobody in his right mind would try to chop down a tree with a stone axe when the tree was thirty feet thick at the butt. There was a rambling sort of quality about the village that made it almost impossible to determine just exactly where it started or where the end might be.
“Interesting idea,” Keselo murmured as they followed Longbow’s friend toward the center of Statha. “If this region’s periodically struck by cyclones, those huge trees would offer a great deal of protection, and the people who live here were clever enough to lash their lodges to the trees with strong ropes. They might lose a roof once in a while, but it looks to me like the walls will stay intact.”
Rabbit shrugged. “I prefer living on board a ship,” he said. “A steady drizzle of pine needl
es might be sort of irritating after a while.”
“They would keep the streets—if you could call them streets—from turning into mud when the rainy season rolls in,” Keselo pointed out.
The center of the village had several structures that were quite a bit larger than Rabbit had seen to the south in Zelana’s Domain. “Are they trying to build palaces?” he asked Longbow.
“Not really,” his friend replied. “Those are what the Tonthakans call ‘Nation Lodges.’ It’s part of what emerged when Dahlaine established what he calls ‘the Nations’ as a way to put an end to the tribal wars. The Tonthakans are supposed to talk rather than fight. There are three groups of tribes here, and they have general meetings every five years. There are ‘Nation Lodges’ here, others in a village to the north, and more in a village in the mountains. Any time a disagreement occurs, they gather in those ‘Nation Lodges’ and talk at each other until they reach some sort of agreement. Athlan told me about a meeting that lasted for three years on one occasion.”
“Three years?” Rabbit exclaimed.
“I think they forgot what they were arguing about after about six months, but they kept on talking anyway. They finally agreed that they’d think about it and then get together again. From what Athlan told me, I guess the subject never came up again.”
“That’s ridiculous, Longbow.”
“Maybe so, but nobody was killed. I think that was what Dahlaine had in mind in the first place. As long as people are talking instead of fighting, nobody loses very much blood—unless he happens to bite his tongue.”
They entered one of the large structures, and there was a tall, grim-faced native of middle years with silver-touched hair waiting there.
“What’s going on off to the north, Kathlak?” Dahlaine asked.
“We don’t really know for sure, Dahlaine,” the native replied. “The northern tribes keep shouting about ‘insults’ and ‘violations,’ but they refuse to be specific. They seem to think that somebody from one of the southern tribes did something that’s forbidden, but they won’t tell us who it was or what he did. Of course, it’s a little hard to hear what they’re saying, because they won’t come within bow range of any of our people, and they start howling threats if we try to get anywhere near them.”
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