Magic Casement (24 page)

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 but 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 Holindam’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 monopolized
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.

From
time to time women would slip out the door and come back with more wood for the
two monstrous fires. They at least wore robes, but men wandering out to relieve
themselves did not bother to dress, although even the thought of going out
unclothed into that unbelievable cold made Rap shudder. The buckskins that the
goblins had worn earlier were much flimsier than his furs, so obviously goblins
felt cold much less than faun -jotunn halfbreeds did, and the hearth was a
place of honor, rather than of comfort. The meal was finished. The drinking
continued. After an hour or two, the chief looked across toward Rap and asked
Darad something. Darad grinned and beckoned. Reluctant, feeling horribly
embarrassed and vulnerable in his state of undress, Rap rose and advanced to
the edge of the ring of junior goblins sprawled around the hearth.

His
hosts inspected him with curiosity, with amusement, then with contemptuous
comments that he could not catch. There was laughter. He knew he must look
strange to them-the reverse of the way they looked to him. He would seem a very
pale brown, very stringy, and too tall. His tussock of unruly brown hair would
be entertaining, also. The minstrel Jalon had told him that fauns had hairy
legs, and certainly Rap’s legs had been been busily growing hairy
recently. They obviously amused the goblins. But evidently he had overlooked
the feature that amused them most. The chief said something that provoked
especially loud laughter. Darad’s reply brought more.

He
leered at Rap. “The chief offered to give me your nose, because mine is
broken. I said mine was still prettier. “ He laughed again and took
another drink.

The
goblins all had wide, plump faces, but their noses were thin and very long.
They also had big ears.

“When
do I get to eat?” Rap asked.

Darad
showed his tooth gap in another leer. “Why waste good food? “

“What’s
going to happen, then?” Even if courage was important, Rap just could not
feel courageous-but now anger was coming to his aid. If they were going to kill
him, he would rather they got started than just left him in suspense.