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.