‘I thought those church soldiers were supposed to wear red uniforms,’ Rabbit said. ‘The ones sneaking along the rim are dressed in black.’
‘Regulators,’ Torl explained. ‘I heard about them down on the south coast. They’re sort of like police, and everybody in those church armies - and even the priests - are afraid of them.’
‘Maybe they just decided to go into business for themselves,’ Rabbit suggested. ‘If they run fast, they’ll reach that ocean of imitation gold long before the red-shirts do.’
‘It’s possible, I guess,’ Torl said a bit dubiously.
‘I think the answer’s creeping across that log they put in place just before sunset,’ Red-Beard said.
Rabbit peered down through the gathering darkness and finally caught sight of several shadowy figures creeping slowly along the log that was now in place. When they finally reached the rim, Rabbit could hear them whispering urgently to each other. ‘If we hurry, we’ll be able to reach the area where all the gold sand’s laying. Then we can scoop up several bags of gold and get back to the camp before anybody misses us,’ one of them said.
‘We’ll have to hide the gold someplace,’ another urgent voice came out of the darkness. ‘If those greedy priests catch even a hint that we’ve got it, they’ll turn the Regulators loose on us to torture answers out of us.’
‘This might be a good time for us to get rid of those greedy priests, and the Regulators as well,’ the first voice added.
‘We can’t kill priests!’ Another voice gasped.
‘We won’t have to kill them,’ the other voice replied. ‘Priests are so holy that they can probably fly, so all that we’ll be doing will be testing all of them. If we just throw them into that gorge, the holy ones will fly, right? The only ones who’ll fall into the gorge and go splat when they reach the bottom will be the wwholy ones, wouldn’t you say? All we’ll be doing is testing the priests for holiness, but if every single one of them goes splat - ah, well.’
The others all laughed raucously.
Then the black uniformed Regulators came out of the darkness - with clubs - and they beat the deserters into submission in only a few minutes.
‘What should we do with them now, Konag?’
The bleak-faced man who’d led the Regulators along the rim smiled faintly. ‘Why don’t you just give them the “holiness test”?’ he replied.
‘I don’t quite follow you, Konag,’ the first Regulator said.
‘You must have been too far away to hear them talking,’ Konag said. ‘When you want to test a man for holiness, all you have to do is throw him off some high place. If he flies, he’s holy. If he falls, he’s wwholy.’
‘Toss them all into the gorge, you mean?’
‘What a brilliant idea!’ Konag replied sardonically.
The following morning Rabbit decided that he should finish something he’d been tinkering with for the past few weeks. He took up the curved limb he’d chopped from a hardwood tree up on the west ridge and continued the tedious business of shaving it into shape with this knife.
‘Whittling, Rabbit?’ Torl asked him. ‘Are you that bored?’
‘Not really,’ Rabbit replied. ‘It came to me last week that I’ve been making arrows for Longbow and his people since last winter, but I’ve never once pulled a bow.’
‘Isn’t it just a little short?’ Torl suggested.
‘If I happened to make my bow as long as the bows of Zelana’s people, I’d have to stand on a ladder to shoot the silly thing.’
Torl smiled faintly. ‘I’m sure that our enemies will all run away in terror when they see Longbow and Shortbow coming their way.’
Rabbit gave him a flat, unfriendly look. ‘I’ll tell you what, Torl,’ he said. ‘As soon as I finish my bow, I’ll need a target to practice my shooting. You could walk off a ways, and we’ll find out if I know what I’m doing. I probably won’t be very good, so you won’t be in too much danger.’
‘Maybe some other time, Rabbit,’ Torl replied. ‘I’m just a little busy right now.’
‘Any time you start getting bored, my friend, I think that might be a way to liven up your day.’
‘I’ll keep it in mind, Rabbit,’ Torl said, and then he walked off, shaking his head.
When he’d finished shaping his bow, Rabbit went looking for Red-Beard. ‘What do your people use for bow-strings?’ he asked after he’d showed his experiment to his friend.
‘Dried gut, usually,’ Red-Beard replied. ‘Some archers use animal tendons, but I’ve always had better luck with gut. I’ve got a couple of spares, so I’ll give you one of mine.’ He took Rabbit’s bow up, holding an end of it in each of his hands. Then he bent the bow.
‘Nice and limber,’ he noted. ‘This might work fairly well for you.’
‘We’ll never know until I try.’
After Rabbit had strung his new bow, he took a handful of arrows and went on up into the woods on the west slope. He’d never shot an arrow at anything in his whole life, so he didn’t really want an audience when he started to practice.
Longbow had made quite an issue of what he called ‘unification’ - something that sort of linked the archer, his bow, and the target. Rabbit gave that a bit of thought as he went up among the trees on the west slope. ‘Maybe it’s something on the order of what happens when I see that the chunk of metal I’m heating in the forge is exactly the right color,’ he mused.
He looked around and saw a patch of green moss growing on a tree trunk about fifty paces on up the hill. He set the notch of an arrow on his bowstring without taking his eyes off that patch of moss. Then he raised the bow, drawing back the string as he did. Then, not even squinting along the arrow shaft, he let it fly.
He was actually startled when his arrow went straight and true directly to the center of the target.
‘I must be better than I thought,’ he murmured with a broad grin. ‘I’ve never missed a target in my life.’
With growing curiosity, he notched another arrow and let it fly.
Now there were two arrows protruding side by side from the patch of moss.
After he’d loosed his last arrow, he walked on up to the tree to take a closer look.
His arrows were clustered together so tightly that he could cover their notched ends with the palm of his hand. ‘That’s impossible!’ he exclaimed. Then he looked around rather suspiciously as it came to him that maybe Zelana was somewhere nearby playing games. Then he realized that he probably wouldn’t be able to see her even if she was.