3
Like a wreck on a reef, Rap was still slumped on the bench overlooking Milflor harbor. He hoped that his ankle would start feeling better soon, or that he would find the manliness just to walk on it anyway. Or that he might think of something else to do. The sun was really cooking him now, and it wasn’t near noon yet.
He had an infuriating hunch that he was overlooking some means of escape.
The bench would easily hold seven or eight people, and from time to time others had approached as if intending to sit. After a glance at the tattered and battered young man sitting there, they had all just wandered on by.
Gathmor’s lack of interest in him as either labor or merchandise had been alarming and unexpected. To have been thought worthy of a punch party was quite a compliment, though—he must have grown. If he had been in a fit state to accept the invitation and had endured the ensuing battering well enough, he might perhaps have been considered worth hiring.
Or enslaving. Everyone knew that jotnar traded in slaves. Why should that not be true in Faerie?
Father, where are you now that I need you ?
He must find a way off the island soon. He could not survive in the town without Thinal, nor in the jungle without Little Chicken. He wondered if the Thinal gang had survived, and which of them was presently in being, but he had no intention of going in search of Emine’s statue. He was going in search of Inos.
Except he didn’t know how to swim, and now he couldn’t even walk. Failure! He was a failure.
He was very hungry and very thirsty and the sun was cooking him. He stared glumly at the line of ships moored along the dock. None resembled in the slightest the fat little cogs that plied to and fro between Krasnegar and the Impire. He wanted to study all the various craft in detail, but his farsight wasn’t working as wall as usual. It made his head hurt more.
Gathmor’s Storrndancer he should avoid. He would have to try all the others and hope to find one that needed an extra hand. He might be selling himself into slavery, but it seemed to be the only way he would ever reach the mainland. Staying here was going to result in slavery at best, with death a likely alternative.
What would a ship’s captain say to a man who crawled up the gangplank on his hands and knees and asked to be hired? How was he ever going to get to Zark to help Inos?
There had to be a way!