“You’ve got that right,” Rabbit agreed. “And if one of them can’t bring us around, they turn the children loose on us. It’s impossible to say no to one of the children. Longbow’s made out of solid iron, and he didn’t want any part of this war. Zelana turned Eleria loose on him, and that little girl wrapped him around her finger in no time at all.”

“Is Longbow really as good an archer as everybody claims he is?” Keselo asked.

Rabbit shrugged. “He doesn’t know how to miss, that’s all.” Then Rabbit laughed. “When we first got here, the cap’n told me to set up an arrow shop on the beach. The Dhralls had always chipped their arrowheads out of stone, but when we were sailing across to the Land of Maag, I hammered out some iron ones for Longbow, and they seemed to work a lot better. Anyway, Hammer—he’s the smith on the Shark—wanted to argue with me about it. Longbow handed him a clamshell and told him to walk on down the beach a ways and hold the clam-shell up over his head. Hammer was about two hundred and fifty yards on down the beach when Longbow’s arrow smashed that clamshell right out of his hand. Everybody stopped arguing with me about arrowheads along about then.”

“Are the other Dhralls that good as well?”

“Close, maybe, but nobody in the world’s as good as Longbow.”

Zelana’s brother Veltan came up the slope to join them on the hilltop. “Anything unusual yet?” he asked.

“Not as far as we’ve seen so far,” Keselo replied.

“It’s coming. You can be sure of that.”

“I wish it’d get on with it” Rabbit said. “We’ve got a lot hanging on this flood business. Is baby sister still sleeping?”

Veltan nodded. “Why do you call her that?” he asked.

Rabbit shrugged. “It’s sort of silly,” he admitted. “It just popped into my head when she came up with that ‘Bunny’ business. She says ‘Bunny’ and I say ‘baby sister.’ It’s sort of childish, I know, but she is a child, after all, and she seems to like it. Wait until she starts climbing up and sitting in your lap.”

“You love her, don’t you?”

“Everybody loves Eleria. You just can’t help yourself.”

“Zelana’s very much the same,” Veltan said. “I’m sure that she taught Eleria all the little tricks.”

Keselo was staring at the mouth of the ravine. “I think the river’s starting to rise now,” he observed.

Rabbit looked quickly. The river was higher now, and its surface was littered with broken tree branches and other debris from the mountains. “I was expecting something a bit more spectacular, Veltan. If it just rises slow and steady like it’s doing now, the snake-people are going to have lots of time to get out of the way.”

“This is only the beginning, Rabbit,” Veltan told him. “Eleria’s still sleeping and dreaming. She isn’t finished yet.”

The sun was well above the horizon by now, and the wind from the west was still brisk and warm, but the river at the mouth of the ravine remained well within its banks. Then Rabbit heard a faint roaring sound echoing down from the ravine. “What’s that noise?” he asked Veltan.

“It’s what we’ve been waiting for, my little friend,” Veltan replied with a broad grin. “There’s a winter’s worth of snow coming down that ravine all at once.”

The roaring sound grew louder and louder until it was much like thunder, and then a solid wall of water burst out of the mouth of the ravine. As closely as Rabbit was able to determine, it was at least fifty feet high, and it was tearing trees up by the roots as it blasted out into the open. The crest of the huge wave curled forward, and the thunderous sound shook the very earth.

“What was holding it back before?” Keselo asked.

Veltan shrugged. “It probably hadn’t built up enough pressure to break through. The hot wind turned the snow on the mountainsides to slush, and the slush slid down into the river to form a sort of dam. The water backed up behind the dam and then broke through all at once. Nice little flood, isn’t it?”

“It looks good to me,” Rabbit agreed. “I sure hope our toots gave Skell enough warning. How long do you think it’ll take for the river to go back where it belongs?”

“Four or five days at least. A week might come closer.”

Large logs were tumbling over the crest now, and mixed with the debris were a goodly number of limp, dead creatures: deer, wild cows, and smaller animals as well. There were also quite a few tiny, oddly dressed men among the animals. “The flood seems to be doing its job,” Keselo observed. “I’d say that there probably aren’t too many invaders left up there in the ravine.”

“What a shame,” Veltan said.

The water continued to rush out of the mouth of the ravine for the rest of the day, flooding the low-lying ground on the north side of the river. The coastal village of Lattash had been built on the slightly higher ground on the south side of the river, but it was still the earth berm the Dhralls of White-Braid’s tribe had built between the river and the village that held the flood at bay.

Rabbit and Keselo came down the hill above the village and joined Longbow and Red-Beard on the berm.

“Has the spring flood ever come over the top of the berm?” Keselo asked Red-Beard.

Red-Beard shrugged. “A few times,” he admitted, “but no more than a few feet. It’s a little inconvenient, but it doesn’t do any serious damage. I’ve heard that once, a long time ago, the flood broke through the berm and destroyed most of the village. When the people here rebuilt the berm, they used rocks instead of dirt as a base, and that kept the river away much better.”

“I think we should speak with our chieftains, Red-Beard,” Longbow suggested. “We need quite a few people up here on the berm to drag in those drowned enemies. They have something that we’re going to need before too much longer.”

“I think you’re right, my friend,” Red-Beard agreed. “I’ve been trying to forget about that venom business. It makes me go cold all over.”

“We’ll bring in as many of the dead ones as we can and pile them up here on the berm. Then we can use our canoes to gather up the ones that get past us and we’ll pile those on the beach.”

“How do you go about getting the venom out of the dead ones?” Red-Beard asked.