The Treasured One: Book Two of The Dreamers

by Eddings, Leigh;Eddings, David

  It was about midmorning when Konag went through the gate of the compound where the villagers were confined and approached a rather frightened farmer. “We need to know a few things about the mountains to the north,” Konag said. “If you’re the one who tells us what we want to know, I’ll see to it that you get more to eat and a more comfortable place to sleep.”

  “I’d be happy to tell you, stranger,” the farmer replied, “but I don’t really know very much about those mountains. I’ve always stayed pretty close to home. What was it that you wanted to know about?”

  “Where’s the gold?” Konag demanded.

  The farmer’s eyes brightened. “Ah,” he said. “You should have told me what you wanted earlier. Everybody around here knows about gold.”

  “Oh? How’s that?”

  “It was long, long ago when a man of our village grew weary of farming and went up into the mountains far to the north to look at a different land. He came at last to a mighty waterfall that plunged down from out of the mountains to the farmland below. Then he found a narrow trail that led him up into the mountain-land, and there he beheld a wonder such as he had never seen before. It was beyond the mountains that he saw a vast area where there were no trees or grass, for the land beyond the mountains was nothing but sand, and that sand was not the white sand of the beaches where Mother Sea touches Father Earth. The sand beyond the mountains was bright and yellow and it glittered in the Wasteland with great beauty, and now all men in the Land of Dhrall know full well that the sand of the Wasteland is pure gold, and it reaches far beyond the distance that the eyes can reach.

  “And having seen what was there, the adventurous farmer returned to his home and never again went forth to look for strange new things, for he had seen what lay beyond the mountains, and his curiosity had been satisfied.”

  All in all, Ara was quite pleased with the myth she’d implanted in the minds of the villagers the Trogites had penned up. There was adventure, mystery, and an ending that involved a huge treasure. It was all an out-and-out lie, of course, but it was a very good lie.

  Konag seemed stunned by the farmer’s recitation, and he abruptly turned and ran off in search of Jalkan.

  The farmer who had just recited Ara’s myth looked quite puzzled—which wasn’t at all remarkable, since he had no memory at all of his performance.

  “That’s impossible, Regulator Konag!” the fat priest called Estarg exclaimed when the black-uniformed Trogite told him what the farmer had said. “There isn’t that much gold in the whole world.”

  “I wouldn’t be all that sure, Adnari,” Jalkan disagreed. “Veltan gave Commander Narasan ten blocks of pure gold in the harbor of Castano, and he was treating those gold blocks as if they didn’t mean a thing.”

  Ara gently increased the level of avarice in the minds of the three Trogites by placing an image of gold in their minds.

  “I’ll go on up there and take a look, Adnari,” Konag volunteered eagerly.

  “How did you plan to even find the place that peasant told you about?” Jalkan demanded.

  “I’ll take a party of Regulators along. They’ll be able to chase down peasants to get information.”

  “Don’t steal any of my gold when you get up there, Konag,” the fat priest said in a threatening voice.

  “Our gold, Adnari,” Jalkan corrected. “A goodly part of that gold up there is mine.”

  The fat man glared at him.

  “Let’s be sure it’s there before we start arguing about it, gentlemen,” Regulator Konag said firmly. “It might just be some local fairy tale.”

  “If that peasant was lying, I’ll rip him up the middle with a dull knife,” Jalkan declared.

  “The peasant told you that everybody around here knows the story about the fellow who found the gold,” fat Estarg said, his eyes squinting shrewdly. “Before you go running off into the wilderness why don’t you ask some of the others if they’ve ever heard it. If they haven’t, then the first peasant was lying through his teeth, and we can all join hands and rip him up the middle.”

  The penned-up farmers all confirmed Ara’s myth, of course, and after a day or so, Regulator Konag gathered up a dozen or so of his black-uniformed men and led them up through the farmland toward the mountains lying across the northern boundary of Veltan’s Domain. Their route lay somewhat to the west of the more populated coastline, so they encountered very few real farmers along the way, but Ara provided several imaginary farmers to fill in the gaps—and to repeat her myth.

  The more she thought about that, the more Ara came to realize that it was not absolutely essential for Konag and his men to actually climb up into the mountains and look out at some vast stretch of imitation gold. All that was really necessary would be to make them believe that they’d seen it.

  It would most definitely solve a problem that had been nagging at her since she’d first come up with her scheme. There were a large number of Sorgan’s sailors and Narasan’s soldiers in the basin above the Falls of Vash, and Ara definitely didn’t want Konag and his men to know that they were there.

  Konag and his men dreamed that they were breathing very hard when they reached the top of the imaginary pass that opened out into the basin above the Falls of Vash, but—in their dream, at least—they hurried on toward the wide gap in the ridge line at the north of the basin.

  And there they stopped, astonished and awed by the wonder stretching off to the northern horizon. The sea of gold sparkled in the morning sun, and several of Konag’s hard- bitten Regulators actually wept at the sight.

  Ara held the dream image before them for perhaps an hour, and then she turned them around and pointed them toward the south.

  They were all positive that they were totally exhausted by the time they reached the foot of the vast waterfall, so they decided to stop for the day when they reached their previous campsite—which, in fact, they had never left. This merged dream with reality to the point that Konag and his men were absolutely convinced that what they had dreamed was hard truth. Ara was quite pleased by how well it had turned out.

  Then she implanted a sense of urgency in the minds of Konag and his fellow Regulators, so they arose early the following morning and set out toward the south before the sun was even over the horizon.

  Jalkan and Adnari Estarg would have much preferred to keep a tight level of secrecy on the matter, but Ara had already bypassed them. Konag’s Regulators were all possessed by an overpowering urge to tell everyone they met about the wonder they had seen, so at least half of the Church soldiers in the encampment on the southern coast of Veltan’s Domain knew about the field of gold before Konag reported it to his superiors.

  Konag went directly to the crude hut that Jalkan and Estarg had appropriated upon their arrival.

  “Well?” Jalkan demanded when Konag entered. “Was that idiot actually telling you the truth?”

  “No,” Konag replied with an absolutely straight face.

  The fat churchman groaned. “I knew it was too good to be true,” he grieved.

  “No, Your Grace,” Konag disagreed. “When you get right down to it, the native’s story didn’t begin to tell us just how much gold was out there. The golden sand that blankets that desert beyond the mountain goes all the way out to the horizon. My men and I were fairly high up in the mountains, so I’d say that it was at least fifty miles to the horizon, and I have no idea at all of just how wide it was.”

  “Did you bring any back with you?” Jalkan asked eagerly.

  “Adnari Estarg ordered us not to,” Konag replied. “We were supposed to verify that foolish story and then come right back.”

  “I’d really like to see some of it, Konag,” Jalkan whined in a voice filled with disappointment.

  “It’s not really all that far north, Jalkan,” Konag told him. “You can go up there and look at it all you want if it means that much to you.”

  3

  Ara’s thought surveyed the south coast of Veltan’s Domain to get a better idea of
just how many Trogites were now in the region. There were villages all along the coast, of course, and by now each village had been appropriated by Church soldiers, and there was now a slave-pen attached to each village.

  As the days passed and word of Konag’s discovery reached those other villages, an increasing number of Church soldiers decided that army life no longer suited them.

  At first, the desertions were almost always made under the cover of darkness, but then Ara implanted a growing anxiety in the minds of the soldiers who had remained behind. Her message got right to the point. “If you wait too long, those who have already deserted will get all the gold, and there won’t be any left for you,” seemed to work quite well.

  The soldiers began deserting their posts in broad daylight at that point, and after a few days, the priests who were theoretically in charge of the scattered villages began to send urgent messages to Adnari Estarg, begging him to send them more soldiers.

  But by then, of course, there were no more soldiers, since they were now deserting in battalions.

  The messengers stopped coming to Adnari Estarg’s door a few days later, and then the priests began to arrive, pleading for help.

  Adnari Estarg ordered the priests to return to the villages to which they had been originally assigned, and a few of them even obeyed his orders—but not really very many. Ara extended her warning to include the priests, and very soon, most of the priests had joined the ranks of the deserters.

  Ara’s thought lingered in the vicinity of the village where Jalkan and Adnari Estarg were growing increasingly distraught. She found that there was a certain charm in their growing sense of panic.

  Ara was rather fond of the farmer known as Bolan, since it had been his recitation of her “myth of gold” that had neatly snared Konag, so she briefly touched him to point out the fact that since there weren’t any soldiers guarding the slave-pen anymore, there wasn’t really any reason to remain there. Bolan got her point almost immediately, so after the few priests remaining in the village had gone to bed that evening, Bolan and his friends tore down the western wall of the slave-pen and vanished into the night.

  Seven Trogite ships, all painted dead black, came into view early the following morning, and Ara was fairly sure she knew exactly who—and what—the men on those ships were. If she was right, Bolan and the other villagers had left just in time.

  A fair number of bleak-faced men came ashore, and one of the few priests who still remained in the village went down to the beach to meet them. “I’ll go tell Adnari Estarg that you’re here, Captain Brulda,” the young priest said to the one who appeared to be the leader of the strangers.

  The grim fellow laughed. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you, young man,” he advised. “If you wake Estarg up before noon, he’ll find all sorts of unpleasant things for you to do. Where are the slave-pens? We’d like to take a look at the merchandise before Estarg starts telling us fairy tales about these new slaves.”

  “The Adnari wouldn’t lie to you, Captain,” the young priest declared.

  “Oh, really?” Brulda said sarcastically. “And will the sun come up in the west tomorrow as well? Estarg wouldn’t know the truth if it walked up and bit him right on the nose. We want to see the slaves, boy. Lead the way.”

  “Are you sure these slaves are healthy?” one of the other strangers asked the priest as he led them toward the slave-pen. “We bought five shiploads of slaves down the coast of Tanshall last year, and more than half of them died of some kind of disease before we were six days out.”

  “Oh, they’re very healthy,” the priest assured him, “and they’re farmers already, so their new owners in the Empire won’t have to waste all that time teaching them what they’re supposed to do.”

  “That might even raise the price we’ll get for them,” the slaver agreed.

  The empty slave-pen with its broken-down wall upset the visitors more than a little, and they rushed into the village to discuss the matter with Adnari Estarg.

  “You idiot!” the one called Brulda bellowed at the fat churchman. “Why didn’t you have any guards around that rickety pen?”

  “What are you talking about, Brulda?” Estarg, who seemed to be still about half-asleep, demanded.

  “Your slaves broke out during the night, you fool! Your slave-pen’s empty!”

  “That’s impossible!”

  “Go look for yourself, you dunce!”

  Jalkan rushed out of the hut, and he came back swearing after a little while. “They’re gone, Adnari,” he declared. “They broke down that rickety wall on the west side of the pen sometime during the night and ran away.”

  “Go chase them down!” Estarg shouted.

  “All by myself? Don’t be ridiculous!”

  “But all of my money is escaping! Help him, Brulda!”

  “Not on your life, Estarg,” the slaver said. “I came here to buy slaves, not to capture them.”

  The bickering and screaming continued for quite some time, and Ara found it all rather entertaining.

  Then she saw something that promised to brighten her day even more.

  Several dozen Maag longships, led by Sorgan Hook-Beak’s Seagull, were coming into the large bay.

  “The ships are burning, Adnari!” The young priest who’d met the slavers on the beach screamed, bursting into the crude hut in a state of sheer panic

  “What are you talking about?” the slaver Brulda roared.

  “Some pirate ships just swept in, and they set fire to every ship in the bay!”

  Ara found the reaction of the assorted scoundrels in the hut quite satisfying. When six men all try to go through a doorway at the same time, things start to get quite physical. Eventually, the slaver Brulda managed to bash his way through the others with the stout club he had hanging from his belt.

  “My ships!” he cried out in anguish. “My ships are on fire! Somebody do something! Save my ships!”

  There was nothing that any of the Trogites on the beach could do to save any of the ships in the bay, and the men still on board those ships were forced to swim ashore to keep from being burned alive. The Maags quite obviously knew exactly what they were doing, and by now nothing short of a torrential rain would even slow the fires, and the sky was clear and blue, with no rain in sight.

  The Trogites on the beach watched in horror as their only means of returning home went up in smoke and flame. They had come as conquerors, but now they were trapped.

  “Ah, me,” Ara murmured with mock sympathy. “What a shame.”

  And then she laughed. There were several ways she could have made her mocking laughter audible to the panic-stricken Trogites, but she decided against it. Her little scheme still had many more twists and turns to entertain these scoundrels, and she was sure she’d enjoy them more if the Trogites didn’t expect them.

  “You’re exaggerating, Jalkan,” Adnari Estarg declared. “These natives are little more than sheep. They wouldn’t dare to do something like that.”

  “I wouldn’t want to bet my life on that,” Jalkan replied bluntly. “We didn’t really treat these people very well when we came ashore, so I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to find out that they’re making plans right now to come back here and kill every one of us.”

  “Amar wouldn’t permit that!” the young priest who’d met the slavers on the beach protested.

  “Grow up, boy,” Brulda the slaver said. “Amar’s nothing but a myth, and this is the real world.” He turned to Jalkan. “Do these natives have weapons of any kind at all?”

  “I saw an archer during the first war who could kill people from a quarter of a mile away, Brulda. These natives do know how to kill an enemy, and right now the word ‘enemy’ means us. If we still had those five armies we had when we came here, we might be all right, but they all deserted when they heard about the gold in the mountains, so we’re all alone and totally unprotected. If we stay here, I don’t think any of us will still be alive next week.”

  “That gets ri
ght to the point, I guess,” Brulda admitted. “I don’t see that we’ve got much choice. If we want to keep breathing, we’ll have to go north and see if we can catch up with the deserters.”

  Ara smiled. She hadn’t really left these rascals many options, and the slaver Brulda had chosen the correct one right at the start.

  “I’ll need some of your men, Brulda,” the fat priest declared, “probably twenty or so.”

  “What for?”

  “They’ll have to build a sedan chair for me to ride in if you’re sure we’ll have to try to catch up with the deserters.”

  Brulda laughed at that point.

  “What’s so funny?” Estarg demanded.

  “You didn’t really think that my men would pick you up and carry you, did you, Estarg?”