“Thanks for nothing,” sniffed his visitor. “You could have at least circled around or something. I almost landed in the water! Do you know how long it takes to dry out this topknot?”
“Topknot?” Kerrick gaped at the diminutive person standing lightly on the cockpit bench. The elf’s head was still aching, and he couldn’t think-couldn’t even imagine-what he had collided with so far out to sea. Sure enough, though, a kender had somehow materialized aboard his sailboat.
“Coraltop Netfisher, at your service,” said the fellow with a deep bow, embellished with a wide flourish of both hands. The kender hopped down from the bench and sauntered over to the elf. “Say, you’re bleeding,” he observed with a cluck of his tongue. “Have an accident or something?”
Kerrick pulled his hand away and groaned at the slick redness he saw. “Who are you?” he demanded. “And what, by all the gods, did I hit?”
“Well, that, of course.” The kender pointed off the stern. “I should have thought it was obvious, but then you did get a nasty bump on the head. You’re probably still confused.”
The elf wasn’t listening any longer. Instead, he was staring at a great, barren mound rising from the placid ocean. The shape was much too broad to be the barnacle-encrusted hull of a capsized ship, which was the only possibility that entered the elf’s mind.
He suddenly became aware of the sound of rushing water. “We’ve been holed!” he cried, and threw open the hatch to the cabin. In there it was dry. “Farther forward!” he said, sprinting along the narrow catwalk, leaning out over the gunwale.
He quickly spotted the damage, several planks along the starboard side, scored with ugly cracks. Coraltop Netfisher had scrambled right behind him, stretching out far over the water for a good look.
“Say, that doesn’t look too healthy,” the kender said. “Do you think this boat will sink? That happened to the last boat I was on. Purely accidental of course, and I’d just as soon not have it happen again.”
“Here!” Kerrick threw open the small hatch in the prow. “Climb down there and have a look-if you see water coming in, take some of the canvas you find there and try to plug the hole.”
“That sounds like fun!” agreed the kender cheerfully. In an instant he dropped below, feet first.
Kerrick went back to the main hold and pulled open that hatch. Quickly the sound of gurgling water reached his ears, and he whispered a fervent prayer to Zivilyn Greentree, pleading with the god for enough time to patch the boat before it went under. He plunged into the darkness, reaching for the bucket of tar and a swath of spare canvas.
“That was sure exciting!” Coraltop Netfisher told him an hour later. Cutter wallowed in the thankfully gentle swell. All of her sails were furled, and the kender and elf had managed to reduce the water pouring in through several holes to a trickle.
Kerrick flopped on the deck, exhausted. “I’m not sure I could have done it without your help,” he admitted. “Now, we’ve got to pump for the rest of the day, and we might just find that we’re seaworthy again. Here, I’ll show you how to work the pump, while I make some caulk and try for a more permanent repair.”
For the time being he had to admit he didn’t mind the kender’s company, though he was sure he would have cause to regret that feeling. Among all the peoples of Krynn, there was no more vexing and troublesome race than the small, fearless, and eternally curious kender.
Kerrick finally had a moment to inspect “his kender,” who was smiling at him guilelessly. Coraltop’s long red hair was bundled into the typical knot in the middle of his scalp, with a glossy tail hanging loosely as far as his waist. He wore a green shirt of some kind of mesh, gathered in at the waist by a belt of the same material. His feet and legs were bare, and he bore no apparent possessions.
After a minute of coaching, Coraltop was cranking the pump handle with a look of real delight. He squinted at the bellows mechanism, and the tip of his tongue protruded slightly from his lips as he set himself to the work with a look of real concentration.
“Hey, look at the way the water comes shooting out this hose!” he cried in delight as, moments later, the contents of the bilge started spraying over the side. “But it’s all getting wasted into the ocean-here, we can use it for a shower.” Quickly he pulled the nozzle around so that cold water washed over the elf. “You can go first,” he said graciously.
“This is no time for joking around,” snapped Kerrick. “Do you want to stay afloat or not?”
“Stay afloat,” pouted the diminutive passenger, but he followed the elf’s instructions.
Kerrick made his way forward again, and ducked into the main hold. The saturated canvas he had jammed into the cracks was leaking badly, and he wasted no time in plastering caulk over it. By the time he was done his muscles ached, and his hair was stuck to his face with a mixture of sweat and caulk. With a sigh he came back up on deck and sat on the bench next to Coraltop, who was still pumping. A short distance away, rising in a great dome above the surface of the water, he could spot the dark shape of the massive obstacle that had almost doomed his little boat. He was just about to ask the kender about it, when his passenger preempted his question with a query of his own.
“What happened to your ear?”
The elf froze. His hand went to his scar, feeling the scab, the strangely rounded flap which once been a long, slender, elegantly tapered ear.
“I had an accident,” he said curtly.
“I’ve had lots of accidents,” Coraltop replied proudly, before frowning. “I never got half my ear cut off, though. That must have really been some accident! Tell me what happened. Don’t leave out any good parts.”
“No.” Kerrick slumped. He thought about raising the sail, but it seemed like far too much work. Instead, he leaned his head back against the gunwale and remembered Silvanesti. Closing his eyes, he imagined that he could smell the blossoms of the royal gardens, hear the songs of the flautists in their towers and the lyres of the wandering minstrels as they sang their way down the city’s winding streets. It seemed unthinkable that he was exiled from the center of his world. He missed Silvanesti with such inexpressible pain that, for a few moments, he actually toyed with the thought of throwing himself over the side, of ending his suffering right here. He knew he had had to fight the wave of self-pity that was washing over him.
“So, where are we going?” asked Coraltop. “Wouldn’t we get there faster if we put up the sail?”
Kerrick groaned inwardly and cracked open one eye. Again he saw that great, floating mass off to the side, already black against the growing darkness.
“How’d you end up on that thing, anyway?” he finally asked. “And what is it exactly?”
“Well, my last ship sank, and I would have sunk too, if I wasn’t a pretty darned good swimmer. ‘You swim like a whale,’ my Grandmother Annatree used to say. But of course whales swim better, probably because they have more practice. I wouldn’t mind being a whale, except for all the drawbacks. Of course, like my grandmother used to say, ‘Life isn’t fair-unless you’re lucky.’ Do you think I’m lucky?”
“I think … well, you must be, yes.” The elf chuckled dryly in spite of himself. Kender might be utterly fearless to the point of stupidity, but they were amusing. Well, he could use some laughs in his situation.
“What kind of ship were you on?” he persisted.
“It was a Tarsian trading galley,” the kender replied. He seemed almost sorrowful. “The captain was really nice. I met him just two days out of Tarsis, when I woke up from my nap and went on deck to say hello. He said he going to tie a stone to my foot and throw me in the water to see how well I could swim.” Coraltop sighed. “His wife was there, and she was even nicer. She pointed out that I couldn’t very well swim with a stone tied to my foot-although I can surprisingly well-she made me her cabin boy, and as long as I stayed out of the captain’s ‘dang-blasted way’ I got to roam all over the ship and see how things worked.”