'Dunno.' The Lady Drule shrugged. 'We go see.'
She set out northward, the rest falling in behind her. Behind them, Krog realized that they were leaving. He stood up.
'Mama?' he rumbled. 'Wait for me.' He hurried to catch up with the Lady Drule, and gully dwarves scattered this way and that to avoid being stepped on.
Drule looked back at the confusion and shook her head. 'Ever'body come on!' she demanded. 'No time for fool around!'
'It not us fool around. It Krog!'
'Make Krog go 'way.'
After they had gone a few miles, the Lady Drule gave up on getting rid of Krog. She had tried everything she could think of to make the creature 'go 'way,' and nothing had worked. Faced with the inevitable, she accepted it and just tried to ignore him. It was difficult. Every time she turned around, the first things she saw were enormous knees. Even worse, he insisted on calling her 'mama,' and kept trying to hold her hand.
Worse yet, Krog's presence tended to discourage the others from following closely. Sometimes, when the Lady Drule looked back, they were barely in sight. Then, when the smoky sun was setting beyond the mountains to the west, she looked around and couldn't see them at all.
On the verge of exasperation, she climbed a broken stump and peered into the brushy distance. 'Now where they go?' she muttered.
'Who?' Krog asked.
'Others,' she said. 'S'posed to be followin'. Can't see 'em.'
'Oh,' he rumbled. 'Here.' Great fingers circled her waist, and he raised her high. 'See, mama? There they are.'
A half mile back, the others had stopped at the edge of a fallen forest and were scurrying about. They had built a fire.
'Oh,' the Lady Drule said. 'Time for eat.'
'Yeah,' Krog agreed, setting her on her feet. 'Time for eat. What we eat?'
'Make stew,' she explained. 'What else?' With a sigh, she started back.
'What else?' Krog rumbled, and followed.
Partway back, on a wind-scoured flat littered with fallen stone, Drule saw furtive movement among some rocks, and her nose twitched. 'Rat?' she breathed. She circled half around the rocks, saw movement again, and dived at it, her fingers closing an inch behind the rodent's fleeing tail. She stood and shook her head. 'Rats,' she said.
Krog watched curiously, repeated, 'Rats,' and squatted beside a boulder. With a heave, he lifted it, and several rats scurried away. The Lady Drule made a dive for one, missed it. Her hand closed around a stick. A second rodent raced by. Drule swatted it on the head.
She picked it up, looked at it, then looked at the stick in her hand. It was a sturdy hardwood branch an inch thick and about two feet long. 'Pretty good bashin' tool,' she decided.
'Bashin' tool,' Krog rumbled.
By the time they got back to the others, Drule had three rodents for the pot and Krog was busy fashioning a bashing tool of his own. He had found a section of broken tree trunk about five feet long, and was shaping it to his satisfaction by beating it against rocks as they passed. It was a noisy process, but the implement pleased him. It felt right and natural in his hand. He held the forty-pound club in front of him, studied it with satisfied eyes, tossed it in the air, caught it, and studied it again. 'Pretty good bashin' tool,' he said.
By the time the stew was ready, daylight was gone. 'Better stay here for sleep,' the Lady Drule told the others. 'Go on tomorrow.'
'Go where,S Mama?' Krog wondered.
'Find others.'
'These others?' He indicated the crowd around the fire.
'No,' she said. 'Other others.'
'Fine,' the Grand Notioner said, picking out a stew bowl. He dipped it and sat down to eat as others made their way to the pot. There weren't enough iron bowls to go around — much had been lost when the cavern of This Place had collapsed — but they made do with vessels of tree bark, cupped shards of stone, and a leather boot that someone had found and cut down.
Drule had just started eating when she heard a sniffle in the gloom, a very large sniffle. She looked up. 'What matter with Krog?'
'Want some, too,' the monster explained.
The Lady Drule filled a tree-bark bowl and gave it to Krog. He sniffed it, opened his mouth, and popped it in, bowl and all. He swallowed. 'Good,' he said. 'More?'
Hunch, the Grand Notioner, stared up at the big creature in disbelief. 'Gonna need lots more rats an' greens,' he said. 'Bark, too, if Krog keep eatin' th' bowls.'
'Rats?' Krog's eyes lit up. 'Krog get rats with bashin' tool'
He stood, picked up his club, and vanished into the darkness. He was gone for a long time, and most of the gully dwarves were asleep when he returned.
Drule saw him approaching and held a finger to her lips. 'Sh!' she said.
Quietly, Krog came to the waning fire, found a clear spot and dropped something on the ground, something very big. 'Rats too quick for Krog,' he whispered. 'Can't catch 'em. This do?'
Drule gaped at the thing. She had seen cave bears before, but never a dead one, and never up close. It certainly would make a lot of stew, she decided.
The Highbulp Gorge III was not happy. First to be snatched up by armed Talls and herded cross-country with a rope around his neck, lashed with whips and insulted at every stumble, then to be thrown into a cage with the rest of his followers and dozens of Tall captives as well — Gorge was almost certain that his dignity had been offended, among other things.
'This intoler… outra… unforgiv… this stink!' he grumbled, pacing back and forth in the comer of the roofed pen where the gully dwarves were huddled. 'Slave, Talls say. Not slave. I Highbulp!'
'Not slave either,' several of his subjects agreed.
A voice growled, 'You gully dwarves pipe down or you'll feel the lash.'
'Hmph!' Gorge muttered, but lowered his voice. 'Maybe dig out? Skitt? Where Skitt?'
'Here,' a sleepy voice said. 'What Highbulp want?'
'Skitt, you dig hole.'
'Tried it,' Skitt said in the gloom. 'Rock underneath. Need tools, no tools. G'night.'
'Might cut through bars,' another suggested. 'Bars are wood.'
'Cut with what?' still another pointed out. 'Same thing. Got no tools. If had anything for cut, could — '
'Shut up over there!' a human whispered from the other side of the pen. 'You'll get us all in trouble!'
'Hmph!' Gorge said, feeling helpless and hopeless.
Armed guards patrolled around the pen. Nearby, the fires of the slavers' camp burned bright. They had been coming in all day, groups of four to eight at a time, most of them bringing captives, and now there were at least thirty in the camp, and dozens of slaves in the pen.
A guard passed near the wood-barred enclosure, and a human voice inside said, 'If only I could get my hands on a sword, I'd…'
The guard laughed. 'You'd what, slave? Fight? By the time we sell you, we'll have beaten all the fight out of you. Now shut up.'
Another guard strolled past on the gully dwarves' side, and the Highbulp and his followers cringed away from the bars. They didn't like the way these Talls talked, at all.
At first dawn, the ladies packed as much bear meat as they could carry, while the Lady Drule went looking for tracks to follow. Krog tagged along, happy as a duckling following its mother.
Drule searched northward, then stopped and scratched her head. There had been tracks before, she was certain, but now there were none. 'Where they all go?' she wondered.
