“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.