Among the oldest body of Bill Springstep tales are those stories that are concerned with what we might call the dawning days of the world. We see Bill interacting with the first elf and the first dwarf, witness him changing the landscape from some primordial form into the world we recognize today.

It is actually unlikely that these stories in particular were the original tales of Bill Springstep, for the simple reason that they would have needed to be composed after the fact. The first gnomish people who told stories about Bill Springstep would have been more likely to tell stories about the problems that confronted them in their own lives, possibly inspired by a real individual who was contemporary to them. It would only have been later, after the figure of Springstep had been established and then faded into myth that he would have been inserted backwards into speculative stories about the origins of the world and its inhabitants.

The same process also extends forwards in time. As the canon of gnomish lore extended, additional stories were attributed to Bill Springstep even if the stories originated or were set long after the period of any of his traditional stories.

The modern human study of lore places no value judgment on the veracity of these sorts of stories as truth is not their function, but the modern reader who has grown up on a diet consisting mostly of fiction created as a single more or less coherent body with internal consistency and a continuous timeline (“continuity”) may feel drawn to the challenge of making sense of how the stories fit together.

Be assured, to try to construct a literal timeline of the hero’s life based on the canonical tales would be quite impossible even if we make generous assumptions about his lifespan or ability to return to the land of the living, because from the outset it requires us to accept that he was at least thirty-three years of age when the world was new and had ten generations of ancestors preceding him.

Gnomish scholars regard such contradictions as trivial at best.  Some gnomish loremasters who have been reached for comment regard the tales of Bill Springstep as “literally true, but not actually true”. The venerable gnomish sage T. John Ronald is said to have opined that each individual story is completely true, but the body of stories as a whole is not.For them, the Springstep tales fall into the category known as “Is-So” stories… as in, “It doesn’t matter what objection you throw up, I tell you it is so.”

Trying to reconcile the various stories into a single coherent narrative becomes all the harder when one widens one’s gaze to consider as well those stories which might be considered variations on a theme.

In New Port Chartres, for instance, the shortfolk tell the story of Guy Roublard.

“It isn’t always night in New Port Chartres,” the story of Guy begins. “Only when it matters. La Belle Dame Nuit, she doesn’t come out for the little stuff. She leaves that to her brother, the overstuffed peacock Lord Toujours. It is always night when Guy Roublard rolls into town, though.”

In this tale of Guy Roublard, students of the Springstep canon will recognize elements of the tale of Bill and the Night, where the familiar figure inadvertently (or possibly not) seduces a woman who lives in the moon, causing it to always show the same face to the world as it searches for him (among other fanciful elements, this story supposes a spherical moon circling around the world at some fixed distance)… but the story of Guy and the Belle Dame is more than merely a local retelling of the older story.

The story draws on elements of local history and mythology, and the diminutive Guy is outwardly cannier and cagier than the cheerful and somewhat avuncular Bill. He has sharper edges to his soul.

Other similar “Bill Figures” crop up in the most unlikely places. There may have been such a gnome as Bill Springstep at some point in the past, but whether he existed or not it is true that he lived, he died, and in between he did many things, some of which haven’t happened yet.

Real or not, alive or not, Bill goes anywhere that gnomes may go… and gnomes, for all their famed distaste for adventure, may turn up anywhere.

Not so long ago on the other side of a river, a small shire of folk lived in a rolling green expanse around which a human city had grown. The city had once been a single farm, built on the shire’s border in the spirit of cooperation and with the blessings of those who lived there. From time to time the family of farmers had wandered over to the shire to share in some celebration or other, or to borrow some simple necessity.

The shirefolk had no shortage of celebrations or anything else that was needful, and had never much minded sharing. If the farmers were not quite scrupulous in returning their generosity, still it pleased the shirefolk to know that they themselves were the better neighbors in the arrangement.

But the one thing that humans know how to do better than anyone else is to grow, and the farm grew into a village, which then grew into a town, and in the fullness of time that town had become a towering city full of giants who did not remember their debts to their neighbors.

When the day came that the city had all but run out of room to grow outwards, it began to look inwards to that expanse of green at its center that over eleven dozen souls called home. The giants sent a delegation of sorts to speak to the reeve of the shire, who was called George. This was the sort of delegation that was armed with long pointy spears and heavy clubs, and after the shirefolk issued their customary retort to that delegation, the giants sent in another one that was armed with documents instead. This one was led by the mayor of the giants, himself a descendant of the original farming family.

“You see here, Shire-Reeve,” he said. “Eleven decades ago, your ancestor took his breakfast at my ancestor’s table. He ate a whole roasted hen all by himself, saying ‘I’m sure I’ll replay the favor sometime.’ I have a receipt and other documents that record this.”

“I need no proof, it sounds likely enough,” George replied. “What of it? Your ancestors ate at our tables often enough, not that we minded the company.”

“The debt is outstanding, and I am here to collect it,” the mayor said.

“Surely it was repaid many times over!”

“Produce the receipts that prove it, then,” the giant mayor said.

“We don’t keep records of our kindnesses,” George said. “But if all this fuss is over a chicken, you may have a dozen of our finest with my compliments. One extra for every eleven years the ‘debt’ has been in arrears, and another just because I like the looks of your honorable worship’s face.”

“That doesn’t begin to cover the interest.”

“It exceeds the extent of my interest in the matter,” George said, “so you may take it or leave it.”

“If not for the guzzling gluttony of your ancestor, that chicken would have produced eggs for my ancestor’s table,” the mayor said. “The surplus of those eggs would have been income. The hen could have been bred, producing still more food and money. That money could have been invested in any of a number of advantageous ways, including but not limited to the purchase of more chickens. My ancestors might not have needed to come begging at your doors for scraps.”

“They would have been welcome all the same,” George said.

“I have here in my hand affidavits from mathematicians, economists, grocers, and cooks totaling the amount of money our community could have earned or saved from the produce of that one chicken, if your ancestor hadn’t eaten it,” the mayor said. “Now, as we are both the lawful rulers of our municipalities, Reeve Springstep, you must meet my charges before a lawful tribunal or else your lands are forefeit to me.”

“Well then, Your Honor, my representative shall see you in court,” George said, for he saw the shape of things. He was only a little worried… his last name was Springstep, after all, and he had a cousin named Bill who he knew would sort the matter out.

“You have one week to prepare your case,” the mayor said.

When the mayor and his men had left, George sought out his cousin and put the matter to him.

“Do you think you can see this thing through?” the reeve asked him.

“Cousin, it is as good as done,” Bill said. “You may depend on me.”

This worried George, for Bill was wily and he was knowledgeable and he was in most ways decent, but the one thing that he wasn’t was dependable. Bill had what the impolite might call an adventurish streak in him, and it got the best of him at the worst of times. For the rest of the week, George had the shire watch post guards around Bill to see that nothing distracted him. He gave no signs of interest in anything shiny or dangerous, but to George’s growing dismay, he made no preparations for trying the case, either.

On the night before the appointed day, George went to him.

“Have you done no research?” he asked.

“None.”

“Do you have any legal stratagem in mind?”

“None in particular.”

“Have you studied the rules of the tribunal?”

“Do you think there’s anything of use in them?”

“Bill Springstep, are you taking this matter seriously in the slightest?”

“Seriously?” Bill answered. “Cousin, I am skipping breakfast for it.”

Relieved and slightly shocked, George left his cousin, certain that things were well in hand.

The next morning, though, the guards could find no trace of Bill in his room, nor anywhere else in the shire. With nothing else to do but trust in his cousin, George set out for the courtroom in the city of giants. All the important citizens of both communities were there, and both expected to see some great sport before the matter was settled.

The tribune (who, it must be mentioned, was also the mayor) saw that the appointed hour was approaching and there was no sign of Bill.

“If the hour arrives and you can present no case, you lose by default,” the mayor reminded George.

“We are allowed eleven minutes’ grace,” George replied, having familiarized himself with the rules that Bill had scorned.

“But no more than that,” the mayor said.

The hour arrived, and then passed. Minute after minute ticked by until at last it was ten minutes past the hour. The mayor reached for his mace of authority when all at once the door was flung open, and there was Bill surrounded by a gaggle of his younger cousins, nieces, and nephews.

“Good morning!” he declared. “I do beg Your Worship’s indulgence, but I was so worried about this I couldn’t eat.”

“That is hardly our problem,” the mayor said.

“Quite right, quite right,” Bill said. “My nephew cooked up a big pot of beans for me, and I couldn’t muster the slightest appetite. I have to admit that your records are quite clear and I can offer no defense against them…”

“Cousin!” George said warningly, to no effect.

“…and the whole thing has affected my appetite to the point that I simply gave up. So, in order to waste nothing… and possibly offer a settlement… I had my young relations here help me plant the beans throughout the shire grounds, with the idea that the profit from such a bumper crop as may be produced from such a quantity of beans might be found acceptable by your august self to serve in lieu of our debt.”

“That is your proposed settlement?” the mayor said. “It is unacceptable.”

“Your honor, do not make the mistake of underestimating a gnome’s breakfast,” Bill said. “It was quite a large pot of beans.”

“Gerald take the beans!” the mayor said.

“Perhaps your learned mathematicians could help you calculate the worth of the crop, before you reject them out of hand?”

“You simpleton,” the mayor said, chortling as only the very large and very arrogant can chortle. “I need consult no mathematician. It does not matter how many blasted beans you planted if they were already cooked when you put them into the ground. There can be no crop produced from them, and they are therefore worth nothing.”

“I see,” Bill said. “This is your final judgment on the matter?”

“It is,” the mayor said. “What kind of fool do you think I am, that you expected me to accept the future produce of cooked beans as payment?”

“Why, your honor, I took you for the kind of fool who tries to collect on the future eggs of a chicken already plucked and cooked,” Bill said. “Was I mistaken?”

At that, the crowd watching the drama erupted into gales of laughter, gnomes and giants alike. It was the end of the mayor’s attempts to annex the green, as well as his career in politics in that city. The gnomes of the green had seen which way the wind was blowing, though, and they began the process of vacating their premises on their own initiative, and in their own time. Bill Springstep made sure that they were well compensated in one way or another for the loss of their traditional home, as well as the material aid they had given the ungrateful giants whose memories were shorter than they were.

And yet so powerful was the memory of the former mayor’s humiliation that no one in that city ever again tried to claim the green expanse of hills, trees, and grass which to this day stands untouched in the middle of it.

They say that every now and again, though, a beanstalk does sprout up from that ground. The mayor was quite right about the general principles of agriculture, but Bill does nothing by half-measures.

Some notes on idioms:

• “The other side of a river” serves the same function in a gnomish tale as “a far-off land” serves in a human one. That is, it is not meant to convey a precise distance or location so much as establish that the story concerns a locale with which the listener is unfamiliar.
• Gnomes often use the term “giant” for any person taller than a dwarf they regard as unpleasant.
• “Skipping breakfast for it” might be taken to mean “deadly serious about it.”
• The habit of counting by elevens is a gnomish practice being projected by the tellers of the story onto the humans. In particular, it is unlikely that any human tribunal ever had a practice of eleven minutes’ grace.
• Gnomes often refer to time as “ticking”. This is believed to possibly refer to the sound drops of water make when they drip off a stalactite.
• ”Gerald” is how gnomish storytellers often render human oaths invoking the Dark Herald.

Contents:

1. Heads or Tails
2. Bill and the Goblins

There is a whole cycle of stories told throughout the region of Blackwater about the figure known as “The Man in the Woods”, believed by most folklorists to be a remnant sidhe. Some of these stories are undoubtedly older ones carried over by Merovian settlers, recast around the local figure in place of an elven noble or other traditional character.

There are many extant variations on the story called “Heads or Tails”. Some omit the detail regarding the escalating coins. Some make the coins themselves the focus of the girl’s needs and the man’s boons. Later versions in particular are apt to give the tale’s heroine a confidante, to explain how her dealings with the Man in the Woods would become known.The following is one of the more elaborate of the traditional tellings.

Lucy was a child when she first went into the woods all on her own. Her father had warned her not to go out of sight of the house, but she was a willful girl and one day, feeling she’d exhausted all the possibilities for play in those familiar environs, she resolved to explore further. She found a single beech tree that marked the boundary of the edge of the familiar woods behind her family’s cottage, and made careful note of it.

“I can see the house from this beech tree,” she reckoned, “and so, so long as I can see the beech tree I know I’ll be able to find my way back.”

She nodded to herself at her cleverness, and set off to see what adventures might lay beyond it. She was disappointed to find that the woods on the far side of the beech tree were no more enchanting or wonderful than the ones on the near side, however, even when she’d gone so deep into them that she could barely see the beech tree.

“I can go a little further,” she decided. “So long as I keep this fallen tree in my view, I’ll know how to find my way back to the beech tree.”

And so she continued to find new landmarks for herself until, having been walking for some time in deepening woods, she was quite weary and decided there was no adventure to be found in the woods after all.

“Well, then, I’ll simply retrace my steps,” she decided. “There’s the moss-covered rock, and from there I just need to find… was it the crooked elm? No, it was a fallen stone arch. I’m sure of it.”

But when she made her way back to the rock, she could see neither elm nor arch, nor anything else that jarred her memory.

“Well,” she said. “I’ll just walk in the same direction and I’m bound to see something I recognize.”

And she did: trees, and rocks, and ruins, and other things that she thought she had passed before. Even she couldn’t remember their proper order, she was heartened to think that she was on the right track, until one more she came to the moss-covered rock, upon which she collapsed sobbing.

“Now, now,” a voice said, cool and calm and sticky-sweet like molasses, and very close behind her. “What are you crying for?”

“I’ve lost my way,” Lucy said. She had no fear of the man, for she was already lost in the woods and truly she could think of no thing worse than that. “Can you help me?”

“Well, that depends,” the man said. “Do you live in the cottage on the other side of the beech?”

“Yes,” Lucy said. “Yes, that’s the one.”

“And is your father a woodcutter, and a gods-fearing man who praises the brothers every Sunday?”

“Yes, yes, that’s him!” Lucy said.

“Then maybe I can help you find your way back to him,” the man said. “But we’ll have to spin a coin on it. Heads, or tails?”

Lucy did not question the logic of the game, or the consequences for losing, for where an adult might have seen caprice and cruelty, she saw only hope. The man pulled out a shiny copper coin from his coat pocket and set it on his thumb.

“Heads!” she cried as the man sent it spinning up into the air.

He caught it out of the air, and with barely a glance at it, declared, “Little lady, it is your lucky day.” He put his hands on Lucy’s shoulders and turned her about. “Walk straight ahead. Turn aside not an inch. If a rock is in your path, climb over it. If a branch is in your way, duck under it. If a tree is in front of you, fell it if you must, but do not turn aside for anything or you will surely be lost again. If you hurry, you can still be back before you’re missed.”

“Thank you,” Lucy said, and the man slipped the penny into her hand.

“You’ll find me again, when you’re older,” he said.

Lucy found her way back to the cottage just as her father came out to call her inside for her supper. It was a long time before she dared to stray beyond the boundaries again, and longer still before she saw the man again. That came only when her father judged her old enough to play out of sight of the house, when she was too old to search for enchantment or adventure in the woods.

It was the fall of that year, and there was to be a dance to celebrate the harvest at the count’s manor. Every eligible maiden in the county would be there. It was the first year Lucy was old enough for such a thing, and her father had said that she could go.

“I just wish,” she said to herself as she idly wandered the now-familiar environs on the other side of the beech tree, “that I had a dress worth wearing.”

“Well, now,” the sweet voice said, very close behind her. “I have something here that might suit you better than it suits me, but if you want it, we’ll have to spin a coin for it.”

Lucy turned to see the man holding up with one hand the most gorgeous ball gown she’d ever seen, and in his other hand was a shiny silver coin.

“Heads, or tails?” the man asked her.

“Heads,” Lucy said breathlessly, and the man flipped the silver coin, and again he declared that she was in luck with barely a glance spared at the disk.

“You wear it in good health,” he said, pressing both dress and coin into her hands.

Lucy’s father didn’t question his daughter’s fine new dress. She had grown up fine and strong, and it seemed within the limits of good fortune that she could have attracted an admirer. When she caught the eye of the count’s third and youngest son at the harvest ball, he assumed that the wealthy young man had been her benefactor all along.

It was a long courtship, though, and before the young lovers could be officially betrothed, the count’s older sons died in a duel and a hunting mishap, leaving Lucy’s intended in line for the countship. Questions arose about her suitability as a countess. The count’s relatives put forth other, more obviously worthy candidates.

She knew the count’s son loved her, but she knew that he’d have other duties to obey that might come before his own heart.

It had been more than a year since Lucy had gone into the woods around her father’s old cottage, but she fled there, seeking the comfort and familiarity of her childhood surroundings. She also sought, though she dared not admit it to herself, the man who had twice before helped her.

She found him, or he found her, at the same mossy rock.

“Why so sad, little lady?” he asked her.

“I fear my beloved must marry another,” she said.

“Does he not love you?”

“With all his heart, he says,” Lucy replied. “But if he is to rule when his father is gone, then he must rule over his own heart.”

“Then perhaps he doesn’t understand what it is to rule,” the man said. A glint of gold appeared in his hand. “And perhaps I can explain it to him.”

“Could you?”

“Perhaps,” the man said. “Heads, or tails?”

“Heads,” Lucy said, and though the man explained nothing of his plans to her, she walked away from that place with a coin of gold in the palm of her hand and a great sense of surety that her love would return to her.

Lucy was not disappointed. The count’s heir found his voice and sent his meddling relatives away, declaring that he would sooner be no count at all if he could not have his own chosen countess. His steadfastness won over his aging father, who had always been a bit of a romantic, and so the two were swiftly wed.

When this union did not immediately produce a child, it was not seen as an immediate problem. The lack of issue became more of an issue after the old count died, and Lucy’s husband inherited the title. Three winters melted into springs. Three times the cows calved. Three years the creche in the noble nursery remained empty.

While the count’s relations circled around him once more like vultures, putting forward their daughters and the daughters of their favorite friends, Lucy knew what she had to do. She begged her husband to excuse her while she purified herself on a retreat, and alone, she went into the woods.

“I think I can help you,” the man told her this time, “but I’m afraid I’m out of coins. We’ll have to play a different game, though this one has the same odds as the other. The odds have been good for you, so far, haven’t they?”

“What must I do?” Lucy asked him.

“Not a thing, little lady,” he said. “You just lie back and do nothing. I will give you a child. If it’s a boy, well, then, it’s your lucky day. Your count has his heir, you have your count, and everybody’s happy.”

“And if it’s a girl?” she asked.

“Well, that’s no good to you, anyway, is it?” he said. “So you wouldn’t miss her.”

Lucy was not so sure of this, but she’d always been lucky before, and she could see no other way out now.

“Very well,” she said.

And Lucy walked out of the woods without a coin on her, but very soon after it was found that she was with child. The vultures withdrew to a respectful distance, and for a time it seemed all was well in the county. But nine months passed, and tragedy struck.

First came word that the countess’s child was a girl. Then before that news could even be properly disseminated, word came that the child had been born dead. And then, as though the bill all the good luck the county had ever experienced came due all at once, word went around that the countess had hanged herself in her chambers.

That was the story that circulated. Some say that the babe was born alive, and the countess smothered her in her grief at the thought of giving her up to the man in the woods, then took her own life in remorse. Others suspect that the man came to collect his due, and an empty box was placed in the family crypt.

No one save the man himself knows the truth of the matter.

While tradition holds that the culture hero known as Bill Springstep traveled the length and breadth of the world and generally found people like himself everywhere that he went, no variety of gnomes has ever been identified as being native to the westering lands. Tales such as Bill and the Goblins that chronicle his supposed adventures in the vicinity of Magisteria have no clear antecedent among the old world canon, making them very obviously a latter-day invention.

While the typical lore of the insular gnomish folks is not known for either the modesty of its claims or the flattering of non-gnomish people, these tales tend to stand out in both regards, and are not well-established outside the Blackwater region.

When the world was still quite young, the boundaries among its regions were much sharper than they are today, having been much more recently drawn up and settled. The trees remained in the forest. The sand remained in the desert. The borders of each were straight and sharp as a razor’s edge, and regular as a square.

It did not rain in those days, owing to a strong belief that water should remain in the lakes and oceans and rivers where it had been placed. The rivers did not flow, for there was nowhere they were desirous of going, and the waters of the oceans did not beat themselves upon the shore, for they felt a great contentment within themselves and desired no more than the portion of the world they had been given to cover.

And while traveling across the oceans or down the rivers would have been much harder in those days than it is now, with neither current nor wind to aid the sailor, it was a very pleasant time for walking around, which is what Bill Springstep liked to do best. He walked through the forests. He walked over the deserts. He walked in the highlands and the lowlands. There were no wetlands, for no god had created any, the thinking being that water should be wet and land should be dry

Wherever Bill walked, he found much to admire in the neatness and orderliness of things, and yet things had a way of untidying themselves in his wake, for Bill did not think anyone would begrudge him one shade tree to rest beneath in the grassy plain, or one pool of limpid water in the midst of the burning desert. The grid of the world acquired more sides as Bill traveled, until it lost its lines completely.

But the day came when Bill found a great river blocking his path, and he found himself with no means of crossing it, having judged both the bridge and the boat to be too revolutionary for these tame times.

“If only,” Bill said to himself, “the river were a bit less rivery, then perhaps I could walk across it.”

And having determined that this was the best solution, Bill set about to find a way to make it happen. He first tried to enlist the aid of dwarves in digging out channels to spread the water of the river, but they would not be persuaded to dig where they knew there to be no profit and they would not be tricked. So he went to their rivals, the kobolds, and told them that he knew of ground that the dwarves would dare not dig, and said he would wager the kobolds wouldn’t, either.

“We’re no shrinking dwarves,” the chief of the kobolds said, and he ordered his crews to prove it.

And so Bill marked on a chart for the kobolds all the places where he thought the dwarves were not brave enough to set their picks, and the kobolds set to work, and soon they had created an immense network of channels all around the mighty river. Finally, there remained only a thin sliver of dry land separating the channels from the water, and when Bill told the kobold chief that no one would think any less of him if he were not brave enough to take his pick to it, the chief knocked it down with a single blow.

All at once, the great river rushed out of its boundaries with such force that it, and all the waters it connects to, are still moving to this day. It spilled through the channels, uprooting trees and flooding the valleys and creating the wetlands known today. The kobolds who’d come out of the mountains to dig the channels felt so humiliated they dared not go back to their mines, and they settled in the wetlands and became known as goblins.

Bill Springstep was able to cross the much-diminished river with only a very little difficulty, and was on his way.

Editor’s Note: The following is a portion of a tale that’s part of the cycle of Bill Springstep stories known as “The Boat Tales”, which are regarded as apocryphal by wide swaths of the gnomish community, or else attributed to Springstep’s less respectable cousin, Maury Springstep. These stories have a long history, though, among those gnomes who ply the waterways of the Mother Island, and most folklorists regard “Maury” as a later invention in order to distance the legendary hero from his more scandalous exploits. Serious scholars all agree that “Maury” is in fact the same figure as Bill himself.

The codex this tale comes from, the Westbook of Redmarch, has been rather poorly treated by previous owners. Whole passages have been excised or scraped raw to be written over with later works of more questionable value. Even the original stories that remain were not untouched… certain words and phrases were lifted clean from the page and replaced for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. Where it’s been possible to identify such alterations, the substituted words have been marked in bold. We can only speculate what the original version might have said.

Once upon a time when the world was considerably newer and old Bill Springstep was not so old as he is now, he found himself with a great yearning to see what lands there were on the other side of the water. His feet had already carried him as far as they could go in any other direction, and they were not yet tired.

For Bill, doing a thing was often as simple as deciding to do it, and so in a little more time than it takes to say it at a moderate pace, he got himself a boat. The story of how exactly this came about has been told dozens of times and hundreds of ways, but the important thing was that he did it, and he christened it the Goodmorning.

Now, old Bill was more clever than most at many things, and as clever as any at most things, but he had never once been out on the water before and so when it came to sailing he was no more than a talented beginner. That is to say that he knew enough to keep his little craft on the right side of the waves more often than not, but decisions on which way to go and when had to be made in committee with the wind and the tide, and more often than not, they both voted against him, and they seemed to want nothing more than to bear him to the east.

Thus it was that Bill could only watch longingly as the boat drifted past islands and continents that were no doubt very interesting and perhaps quite pleasant in their own way. He consoled himself by noting that he could always walk back if he felt like it, when the Goodmorning finally came to a stop.

But the boat flew stubbornly onward, further and further to the east until there was no land in sight in any direction. Bill’s boat was tossed for week upon week upon the endless empty sea, until he had all but despaired of ever seeing so much as a grain of sand… and then came a morning that was very good indeed, for as the sun rose it seemed to have a dark shape silhouetted in front of it, like a lady’s fan held in front of her face… there was an island, to the east, and Bill and his boat were headed straight for it.

“I wonder what land that is,” Bill thought. “It can’t have a name… I must be further east than anyone has ever gone.”

But as the Goodmorning sped eastward, he saw he was mistaken, for upon a sandy beach he spied a number of other craft, and a collection of creatures there. Old Bill being a natural mediator by nature, he was not surprised to see that they were quarreling, for natural mediators find quarrelers as easily as bees find sweet flowers.

They were, he noted as he drew even closer, the strangest assortment of creatures: there was a Cat, a Fox, a Rabbit, a ridiculous looking thing that was not quite a Dog and yet not quite a Raccoon, and a very regal-looking Dragon. He couldn’t begin to guess at the sum or substance of the arguments being made, but it all seemed very heated. The Dragon, who was quite easily three times the size of any of the other creatures, was keeping his silence but looked more and more impatient with each passing moment.

“Good morning!” Bill said, announcing his arrival as his tiny boat drove itself into the beach like an arrow into a tree, and the assembled creatures barely noticed him. “Good morning!” he said, a bit louder, and this time they all jumped to attention.

“Whoever you are, you’re too late,” the Fox said.

“Late?” Bill said.

“I agree,” the Cat said. “I don’t agree with anything else but I agree with that. Quite a bit too late.”

“I assure you, I came as swiftly as I could,” Bill said.

“Yes,” the Rabbit said. “If anybody is ineligible to be emperor, it’s someone come late to the party.”

“Emperor?” Bill said. “What an idea! But is that what you’re quarreling about?”

“Of course,” the ridiculous Raccoon-Dog thing said, and Bill couldn’t help but notice the creature had enormous gumption. “This is a new land and it must have an emperor.”

The Dragon, which Bill could now plainly see was easily five times as large as all the largest of them, said nothing.

“Have you considered…” Bill started to say, his eyes on the enormous beast, but he was cut off.

“An outside mediator?” the Fox said.

“An impartial judge?” the Cat said.

“A neutral party?” the ridiculous Raccoon-Dog thing said.

“A fair arbiter?” the Rabbit said.

“Well,” Bill said. “Perhaps if you would care to present your cases…”

“I am Fox,” the Fox said. “I am noble and wise, full of magic and wit. I am certain you will make the right decision, and if I am not selected as emperor I shall have to amuse myself by making mischief and madness.”

“He’s certainly full of something,” Bill thought to himself, but he politely held his tongue.

“I am Cat,” the Cat said. “I am lucky and welcoming. I bring good fortune and ward off disaster. Of course, Emperors are better at warding off disasters than Cats… who knows if I’ll be able to protect your ship from harm without a throne behind me?”

“Many’s a fool who’s lucked into power, but rarely for the good of any but himself,” Bill thought to himself, but he politely held his tongue again.

“I am Rabbit,” the next applicant said. “Swift and strong of foot, and many in number. None shall extinguish my line, for if you slay all my sons I will get a thousand, thousand more. Not so many as to overrun a modest palace or overtax a modestly supported granary, but perhaps too many to be supported by the gardens of those who would prefer my children run wild in the world.”

That was as dire a threat as Bill had ever heard, but he was not one to be bullied or to answer rudeness with rudeness, so he held his tongue and turned towards the fourth claimant.

“I am some sort of Ridiculous Raccoon-Dog thing,” that one said. “And I am clearly best suited to be emperor because of my great courage. If you do not accede to my wishes, I shall be forced to crush you with my enormous allies.”

“Impressive,” Bill thought to himself, “but perhaps he’d be a bit busy to be emperor. Him and Rabbit both.”

He turned to the last claimant, who had not yet spoken a word and was clearly at the end of his patience. He had also drawn himself up to his full and proper height, which Bill could now see was easily eleven times the size of all of them.

“Begging your pardon, your imperial majesty,” Bill said to him, “but if you would be so kind as to state…”

“Fie on you,” the last one said. “I’m a Dragon.”

“Well,” Bill said, “it is clear that there can only be one choice.”

Editor’s Note: The text ends here, unfortunately, leaving us with no clear indication of who Bill picked to rule as the first emperor of that nameless land far to the east. We can surmise, from later stories in the cycle, that he was able to solve the problem of his boat only sailing eastward, as other stories feature him being drawn inexorably westward in a renamed Goodevening.

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