small trampled area.
Tobas stared, and realization came to him, accompanied by a slow smile. He knew why these two people had pulled up on this lonely stretch of sandy beach, so far from anywhere, in the middle of the day, and why they had walked up over the dune, leaving the boat unguarded. People in love did foolish things, that well-known fact was why most people avoided romance and married for comfort and money. These two had probably had their arms about each other, accounting for how close their steps were to each other’s, and the trampled areas were undoubtedly where they had paused to kiss, an appetizer to the main course that was surely under way somewhere in the dunes, inaudible over the hiss of the surf. An open boat, he imagined, would be too crowded and too unsteady a place.
They might return at any moment, though. Hurriedly, he shoved the boat down into the water. The keel scraped heavily over the sand, then floated free on an incoming wave. Tobas pushed it out until he stood knee-deep in the surf, then grabbed the gunwale and steadied it.
He was just clambering in when a bearded, black-haired head appeared above the dune where the footprints had led.
“Hey!” the man called, plainly upset by what he saw.
The woman’s head appeared beside him.
Tobas ignored them both and yanked the oars from their stowage. “Hey, that’s our boat!” the man called. He was clambering up the dune now, tugging his sandy tunic into place.
Tobas got the oars into the oarlocks, splashed their blades into the water, leaned forward, and pulled, refusing to worry about any damage he might do if the oar blades caught on rocks hidden in the sand.
The boat slewed out into the water, and Tobas pulled harder on one side, turning the bow out to sea. Each stroke moved him visibly farther from shore; the bottom dropped off quickly, so that, by the third or fourth pull, the oars were no longer in danger of striking sand.
“Come back!” the woman cried, running down the beach toward him. “Come back with our boat!”
Tobas found himself facing her as the boat swung around. He smiled at her as she stopped at the water’s edge, already several yards away; she was very young, surely not yet eighteen, perhaps younger than himself, and handsome despite her rumpled brown hair and sandy, disheveled skirt and tunic.
“I’m sorry,” he called out. “But it’s an emergency. I’ll bring it back if I can!” A twinge of guilt struck him. Teasing young lovers was a long-standing tradition in Telven, but stealing their boat might have serious consequences. “Listen,” he called. “If you go a mile west, then a league due north, you’ll reach the village of Telven; they’ll help you there! Tell them T-” He stopped, hesitant to give his right name, but then shrugged and went on. “Tell them Tobas the apprentice wizard sent you!”
“But... our boat!” the woman cried, ankle-deep in the foaming water. The man stood beside her, knuckles on his hips, glaring silently at Tobas’ receding figure.
“I’m sorry,” Tobas repeated, “but I need it more than you do!” That said, he devoted his entire attention to rowing and paid no more attention to the boat’s rightful owners. He had a ship to catch.
CHAPTER 4
What little wind there was came from the northeast, helping Tobas along and hindering the ship he sought to intercept. He quickly found himself well out at sea, the coastline a vague blur in the distance. He glanced back over his shoulder and caught sight of the sail, far off his starboard bow; the ship was still hull-down on the horizon.
He looked back at the fading land again, and his nerve failed him. If the wind shifted, or if the ship decided to gain more sea room by running south, he would have no chance of catching it, and he dared not lose sight of the land completely. He was no navigator; he might be lost at sea. Generally, of course, he could find east and west by the sun, and he knew that the land was to the north, but there might be clouds, or a current might carry him west into the endless western ocean that extended from the south edge of the World to the north, uninterrupted by land. He looked at the sail, decided that it was, in fact, coming closer, and pulled the dripping oars inboard. He would wait. Why tire himself out and go farther out than was safe or necessary?
After a moment of sitting quietly, hearing only the faint slapping of the waves against the sides of his boat and the water dripping from the oars into the bottom, he remembered the canvas sack in the stern. This, he decided, would be an ideal time to see what was in it. Moving very carefully, he was out well past the breakers, but the sea was still rolling the boat gently, and he did not care to capsize it, he pulled the bag out and opened it.
A wonderful aroma wafted out at him as he peered inside, and he wasted no time in pulling out its source — half a roasted chicken. It was cold, to be sure, but he was hungry enough that he would hardly have hesitated were it raw.
As he gnawed on the drumstick, he explored further and hauled out a loaf of sweet golden bread, a bottle of cheap red wine, and an assortment of fruits.
He felt he was with the gods in Heaven as he poured the wine down his throat, close behind a good-sized chunk of chicken.
He devoured almost the entire meal, obviously intended for two, in short order, despite warning twinges from his stomach. At last he settled back as best he could and let his food settle.
It didn’t; he had eaten too much too fast after too long without, and his belly ached. The boat’s motion did not help at all. His conscience, too, was uncomfortable. He had stolen the boat and the food from the couple on the beach; he was a thief.
“Serves them right, losing their dinner,” he said aloud in a feeble attempt to laugh away his guilt. “Imagine bringing red wine with cold chicken!”
He didn’t laugh at his joke. It had been Indamara who had taught him that one should drink white wine with poultry, his father’s cousin, the woman who had largely raised him and who had thrown him out as soon as Dabran was dead. She had also taught him not to steal, or at any rate had tried to, and he had never before stolen anything more than a few ripe apples from a neighbor’s tree He had once brought up the question of theft when talking with his father. After all, Dabran had made his living stealing.
“Piracy at sea is a special case,” Dabran had said. “We rob merchants who are fool enough to sail around the peninsula close in. They know we’re here; if they risk sailing our waters anyway, then they deserve what they get. They have plenty of money to begin with, or they’d not be fitting out ships and loading them with cargo, but they try to make more by sailing their goods through dangerous waters; that makes them greedy fools who deserve to be robbed. That’s not the same as taking something from someone weaker than you who was minding his own business, or sneaking about in the night, stealing. We do our taking out in the open and we risk as much as they do. That makes it not so much theft as gambling, and I’ll defend to the death a man’s right to gamble away whatever he’s got, even his life.”
Tobas had never been sure he accepted this justification entirely, but he agreed that a man had a right to gamble with what was his. Well, Dabran had gambled and lost his life, sure enough, and his son had turned thief as a result, stealing a boat and a picnic dinner from an innocent pair of lovers. Tobas quoted one of his father’s axioms to himself as comfort. “A man has a right to do anything that will keep him alive.”
He still felt rotten and wished the Ethsharitic ship would come pick him up so that he could let the boat go. It might yet wash up on shore where the lovers could salvage it, minus the chicken dinner.
He looked around; the ship was definitely nearer now, its sleek, streamlined hull visible beneath a great panoply of sails, but still a long way off. He settled back, his head on a thwart that dug in uncomfortably, hands clutching his belly, and wished that he could convince himself that everything that had happened since he turned twelve was a bad dream.
The next thing he knew he was being rudely shaken awake; his exhaustion had caught up with him once he had stopped moving and no longer had his hunger keeping him awake.
“Who are you?” demanded a deep, oddly accented voice.
“Tobas,” he said. “Tobas of... of Harbek.”
“Harbek?”
“In the Small Kingdoms.”
