"Thanks," he muttered. "I need your strength, Amra."
"Anybody would who had done what you've done," she said. "But my strength and all of me is at your disposal, Alan."
The children were looking at him with wide, admiring eyes and yelling, "That's our daddy! Big blond Green! He's quick as a grass cat, bites like a dire dog and'll spit poison in your eye, like a flying snake!"
Then, in the next moment, he was submerged under the men and women of the Clan, all anxious to congratulate him for his feat and to call him brother. The only ones who did not crowd around, trying to kiss him on the lips, were the officers of the Bird and the wife and children of the unfortunate sailor, Ezkr. These were climbing up the rigging to fasten a rope around his waist and lower him.
There was one other who remained aloof. That was the harpist, Grazoot. He was still sulking at the foot of the mast.
Green decided that he'd better keep an eye on him, especially at night when a knife could be slipped between a sleeper's ribs and the body thrown overboard. He wished now that he'd not gone out of his way to insult the fellow's instrument, but at the time that had seemed the only thing to do. Now he had better try to find some way to pacify him.
13
Two weeks of very hard work and little sleep passed as Green learned the duties of a topsailman. He hated to go aloft, but he found that being up so high had its advantages. It gave him a chance to catch a few winks now and then. There were many crow's nests where musketmen were stationed during a fight. Green would slip down into one of these and go to sleep at once. His foster son Grizquetr would stand watch for him, waking him if the foretop captain was coming through the rigging toward them. One afternoon Griz's whistle startled Green out of a sound sleep.
However, the captain stopped to give another sailor a lecture. Unable to go back to sleep, Green watched a herd of hoobers take to their hoofs at the approach of the Bird. These diminutive equines, beautiful with their orange bodies and black or white manes and fetlocks, sometimes formed immense herds that must have numbered in the hundreds of thousands. So thick were they that they looked like a bobbing sea of flashing heads and gleaming hoofs stretching clear to the horizon.