It soon reached the point where not a single customer would come to the smithy for weeks on end, and things began to get very tight.
There was plenty of money in Weros, but Rabbit wasn’t getting what he felt to be his fair share. “Well, uncle,” he murmured to the storeroom door, “it looks like I’m going to have to do something else. I think maybe I’ll try the waterfront for a while.”
The waterfront of Weros was famous in the Land of Maag as one of the favorite places for sailors (or pirates) to celebrate recent successes. A sailor’s favorite form of celebration involved large amounts of strong drink, and it was not at all uncommon to see sailors sleeping under the tables in taverns or even in alleys or gutters. A sailor that far gone in drink seldom had much money left in his purse, but Rabbit didn’t really need all that much. He needed money to buy food, but that was about all.
As he spent more and more time on the waterfront, Rabbit became fascinated by the longships. A sailor on a longship would be as free as the wind, and he’d have money to burn any time he reached a port.
There was one ship in particular that seemed to Rabbit to be the most beautiful one in the harbor. She was called the Seagull, and Rabbit frequently dreamed of sailing out to sea as a member of her crew. It was a dream that had almost no chance of coming true, of course. Maag sailors were very large men, tall and bulky. Rabbit was positive that Sorgan Hook-Beak, the captain of the Seagull, would howl with laughter should he be foolish enough to apply for a berth on board his ship.
But then he discovered that among the members of the crew of every longship afloat there was a smith. That bit of information raised some interesting possibilities. Rabbit had recently turned sixteen, and his whiskers were thick enough to convince people that he wasn’t really a child, despite his short stature. If he could somehow persuade Sorgan to give him a chance to display his skills as a smith, he might very well become a member of the Seagull’s crew.
A few careful questions gave him the name of the Seagull’s current smith, a bulky fellow named Borkad, and Rabbit’s quick mind came up with a somewhat devious plan.
First he was going to need a bit more money, so he roamed about the muddy streets on the waterfront for most of the night, looking for targets of opportunity.
By the time the sun came up, Rabbit’s purse had started to get fairly heavy. There had been a few occasions when the sailor whose purse Rabbit had just filched wasn’t quite as far gone in drink as he’d appeared, but, as his name suggested, Rabbit could run very fast.
He asked around the waterfront and found the name of Borkad’s favorite tavern, and then he went back to the smithy to catch a few winks. He’d definitely have to be on his toes this coming evening, and he was almost falling asleep on his feet right now.
His plan wasn’t really all that elaborate. He’d locate Borkad and slip in the fact that they practiced the same occupation. Then, while they were talking shop, he’d buy the Seagull’s current smith enough strong grog to put an entire ship’s crew to sleep. He wanted to be absolutely certain that when the Sea-gull sailed from Weros, Borkad would not be on board.
He woke up just before sunset and went on back to the waterfront. He glanced into The Sailor’s Home and saw Borkad sitting by himself at a table at the rear of the tavern. It appeared that he was not completely sober, and it seemed to Rabbit that he was spacing his drinks out. That suggested that he was getting close to the bottom of his purse, so it was time to move in on him.
Rabbit went on into the tavern and approached Borkad’s table. “I’ve heard tell that you’re the smith on one of those ships out in the harbor,” he said.
“What’s it to you?” Borkad demanded.
“I’m a smith myself, and I’ve always been curious about how a man can practice our trade out at sea.”
“It ain’t really all that much different from the way you landbound smiths do your job,” Borkad said.
“The one thing that sort of puzzles me is how you manage to avoid having the sparks from your anvil set fire to the ship,” Rabbit said, sitting down across the table from Borkad.
“Easiest thing in the world,” Borkad declared. “All you’ve really got t’do is pour buckets of water on the deck afore you start t’hammer.”
“I knew there had to be an answer. Let me buy you another tankard of grog.”
“I’d appreciate that,” Borkad conceded. “My purse is about to come up empty.”
“More grog!” Rabbit called to the tavernkeeper. “There’s another thing that’s been pestering me,” he went on. “Is there really all that much for a smith to do on a ship?”
“We always spend a lot of time bangin’ the anvil with our hammer.”
“What for?” Rabbit asked. “Why do that?”
Borkad gave him a bleary-eyed grin. “Just pretendin’ t’be busy,” he admitted. “If’n the smith on board a ship ain’t poundin’ on ’is anvil, the fellers as tells the crew what to do will find other things t’keep him busy.”
The tavernkeeper brought them two brimming tankards, and Rabbit paid him.
“Thankee, little friend,” Borkad said.
“My pleasure,” Rabbit replied.
After three more tankards, Borkad was barely coherent, and Rabbit suggested that they might want to visit a different tavern. He was quite sure that the other sailors on board the Sea-gull knew that Borkad spent most of his time in Weros at The Sailor’s Home, so it was very important to make sure that the tipsy smith wasn’t there when they came looking for him.
It was about midnight, and they were in a small, seedy-looking tavern some distance from the waterfront when Borkad slid off the bench where they were sitting to lie snoring under the table.
Rabbit quietly stood up and went outside. “So far, so good,” he murmured, walking back toward the waterfront.
The Seagull was tied to a wharf not far from The Sailor’s Home tavern, and Rabbit crouched in the shadows at the foot of the wharf to look things over. There were a couple of sailors on deck who were probably supposed to be keeping watch, but they didn’t seem to be taking the job very seriously. They were both back near the stern, and they were paying much closer attention to a brown jug than they were to anything else.
Rabbit’s frequent conversations with seagoing men in the taverns of Weros had given him a fair idea of the general layout of the standard Maag longship, and it seemed to him that the best place to hide on the Seagull would probably be in what sailors called the “rope locker.” On most longships this was a small compartment below the deck and at the very bow, where it was too narrow for anything else. If the sailors had been telling Rabbit anything at all close to the truth, the rope locker was never opened during the first month or so after the ship left port, since all the rigging was carefully checked before the ship set sail.