The Elder Gods: Book One of the Dreamers

by Leigh Eddings

  As the Seagull approached the town, an eddy in the wind carried a rancid smell out across the water. Longbow’s nostrils were very acute because he was a hunter, and he hoped that they wouldn’t have to stay in Weros for very long.

  The sailors dropped heavy iron anchors off both ends of the Seagull, and Eleria came looking for Longbow. “The Beloved asked me to find you,” she told him. “Hook-Big wants to tell us how he intends to use gold to persuade other Maag ship captains that it might be nice to visit the land of Dhrall. The Maags all seem to find square lumps of gold very pretty, and they’ll do almost anything to get their hands on as many of them as their ships can carry.”

  “Owning things seems very important to the Maags, doesn’t it?” Longbow observed.

  “That makes things easy for us, though, doesn’t it? They’ll do what we want them to do so that they can own gold, but we end up owning them instead. Let’s go see what Hook-Big has to say.” Eleria held out her arms to him. “You can carry me, if you’d like.”

  “Of course,” Longbow said, taking her up in his arms, although he knew that it was part of her game and that it played an important part in persuading people to do what she wanted them to do. Zelana commanded, but Eleria charmed. The intent and results were usually the same, but Eleria’s approach was more pleasant, and usually more effective.

  Longbow carried Eleria to Sorgan’s cabin at the stern of the Seagull. Ox and Ham-Hand were already there, as was Red-Beard. “The best way I know of to get people’s attention in a hurry is to show them gold,” Sorgan was saying, “and this is the way we’re going to do that. Ox, I want you and Ham-Hand to spread the word that the Seagull’s got stacks and stacks of gold blocks down in her hold. They probably won’t believe you—which is right down at the core of our little scheme. As soon as some ship captain says that he thinks you’re lying, tell him that you’ll be happy to show him, if he’d like. Don’t bring any ordinary seamen or tavern loafers out here, and don’t waste my time on the ones who call themselves captains but only have an oversized rowboat and fifteen or twenty men. We only want the captains of full-sized longships with full crews. If somebody doesn’t have eighty men at his command, I don’t want to see him. Now then, just to keep things from getting rowdy, don’t bring more than two or three to the Seagull at any one time, and let it get spread around that those of us here on board won’t look kindly on uninvited guests. We only want two or three at a time.”

  “I get your drift, Cap’n,” Ox said. “Me and Ham-Hand’ll take care to keep our visitors from turning into a crowd that the crew can’t handle.”

  “Do your people really have little boats, Hook-Big?” Eleria asked.

  Sorgan made an indelicate sound. “They’re leeches for the most part,” he replied. “They call themselves real Maag sea captains, but their boats are really nothing more than old fishing sloops, and the men who make up the crew don’t know the first thing about fighting. A real Maag longship’s better than a hundred feet long, and she’s got at least eighty men on board—fifty oarsmen, twenty-five to deal with the sail, three officers, a cook, a smith, and a carpenter.” He looked at Zelana. “How soon do you want the fleet we’ll put together to reach your country?” he asked.

  “We have a bit of time, Sorgan,” she replied. “The creatures of the Wasteland aren’t in position to attack us as yet.”

  “That gives us until next spring, doesn’t it? Nobody in his right mind tries to march an army across a range of mountains in the dead of winter.”

  “The Vlagh has a different kind of mind, Sorgan. It doesn’t care how many of its servants die along the way when it wants something. I want the Maag fleet standing off the coast of Dhrall before the snow starts to pile up.”

  “That’s only two months or so, Lady Zelana,” Sorgan protested. “I won’t be able to gather that many ships in so short a time. The ships aren’t all in one place, so I’m going to have to chase them down. I might be able to have a fair-sized advance fleet there by then, but it’ll probably take a while longer to bring the main body across. I’m just scraping a number off the wall here, but I think six hundred ships should be about right. With eighty or so men on board each one, you’ll have a good-sized army—fifty thousand or so anyway. The main problem’s going to be getting the word out to all those sea captains. A lot of them are cruising around out there in deep water looking for Trogite treasure ships.”

  “Doesn’t that mean that they’re between us and the Land of Dhrall?” Red-Beard asked.

  “I suppose so. Why?”

  “We’ll encounter them along the way then, won’t we?”

  “That’s open water out there, Red-Beard. If those ships aren’t right in our path, we won’t even see them.”

  “Are there paths in Mother Sea now?” Red-Beard asked mildly. “I hadn’t heard about that. Is there some reason that I don’t know about that all the ships of the fleet absolutely must trail along behind the Seagull? Wouldn’t it be better if they spread out as they sailed to the land of Dhrall? I’ve fished the waters of Mother Sea many times, and over the years I’ve found that my luck’s much better if I fish in waters that haven’t been recently worked by other fishermen.”

  “Well . . .” Sorgan began, but whatever he’d intended to say dribbled off.

  “It will still be your fleet, Sorgan Hook-Beak,” Zelana assured him. “All the Maags on all the ships will know that you command. Do you really have to have them clinging to your tail feathers all the way to Dhrall?”

  Sorgan looked a bit sheepish. “I’ve never had a whole fleet to follow me,” he admitted. “I really wanted to see all those ships massed up in one place and to know that it was my fleet. I was being sort of childish, wasn’t I?”

  “It’s all right to be a child, Hook-Big,” Eleria told him. “Look at all the fun I’ve been having lately.”

  Sorgan sighed. “I guess it’ll be all right if the fleet spreads out to bring in those other ships,” he said regretfully.

  “That’s a good boy,” Eleria said affectionately.

  “Just what’s this all about, Sorgan?” a lean Maag sea captain, among the first group Sorgan had invited to visit the Seagull in the harbor of Weros, asked as he climbed up the rope ladder to the deck of the Seagull.

  “Come on back to my cabin, and I’ll explain it,” Sorgan replied, glancing at the two other Maags in the skiff Ox had just rowed out to the Seagull.

  Longbow drifted along behind them as they went aft.

  Zelana and Eleria were up near the bow of the Seagull, looking at the town of Weros, so the cabin was empty at the moment.

  “Who’s he?” the other Maag asked, pointing at Longbow.

  “This is Longbow, and he works for the lady that’s paying me to gather up a fleet.”

  “Is it safe to talk in front of him?”

  “He knows what this is all about, cousin Torl,” Sorgan replied. “Didn’t Ox tell you about all the gold we’ve got piled up down in the hold?”

  The lean Maag snorted. “You didn’t really think I’d believe him, did you?”

  “We’ll go look in just a minute. There’s a war in the works over in a place called Dhrall, and the lady who sort of runs things over there needs men who know how to fight to join up with her people, and she pays in gold. I brought about a hundred bars here with me to prove to the ship captains I come across that it’ll be worth their while to join up.”

  “I think you might have lost your mind, Sorgan. Nobody with his head on straight starts waving gold in front of Maag ship captains.”

  “That’s why we’re having this little talk, Torl,” Sorgan replied. “I think I’d feel a lot more comfortable if I had a fair number of my kinsmen close by when I start showing the gold I’ve got stacked up down in the hold to other Maags.”

  “That makes a certain amount of sense, I guess. Just where is this place, Sorgan?”

  “It’s a fair distance off to the east.”

  “I take it that this lady who’s got all the go
ld hasn’t got any kind of real army to work with?” Torl asked.

  “I think it might surprise you, Torl. This is Longbow, and I’ve never seen anybody who could even come close to him when it comes to shooting arrows, but I guess Lady Zelana doesn’t have enough people to fight off her enemy. That’s where we come in. Right now, though, I want to get the word out to as many kinsmen as I can locate. Do you happen to know where Malar and Skell are right now?”

  Torl scratched the side of his face. “The last I heard, Malar was whooping it up with his crew down in Gaiso. They had a stroke of luck here recently, so they’re celebrating. You know how our cousin is. Once he starts to party, it goes on until he runs out of money.”

  “Do you think you could get word to him that I want to talk over a business opportunity with him?”

  “I’ll see what I can do. We’ll have to wait until he’s sober, though.”

  “Where’s Skell?”

  “Up the coast in Kormo. His ship needed repairs after he came up against a Trogite ship that rammed her off the northeast coast. That’s something you should know about, Sorgan. The Trogites have taken to reinforcing the bows of their ships, and they’ve added what they call a ram. It’s a real thick pole with the front end cased in iron. It sticks out in front of the Trogite ship, and it’s right at the waterline. The Trogites don’t just give up so easy when they see one of us coming anymore. They row their ships right into us now, and that ram puts a hole a man could walk through right in the side of any ship it smashes into. From what I hear, the Trogites have already sunk a half-dozen or so Maag longships with those cursed rams.”

  “That’s terrible!” Sorgan exclaimed.

  “Trogites have always been terrible, Sorgan. I thought you knew that. . . . You promised to let me and the other captains look at all this gold you’ve managed to pick up.”

  “All right, but then we’ll need to start getting word out to the rest of our family. I’ll sleep a lot better if I’ve got a dozen or so ships that belong to people I can trust anchored around the Seagull. After you see what I’ve got stacked up in the hold, you’ll understand why.”

  Longbow considered what he had just heard. The Maags, it appeared, had a very primitive culture. Their technology was more advanced, certainly, but their social structure had a long way to go.

  At first light a few days later, Longbow came out of the cabin at the stern of the Seagull to take a look at the weather, and he saw Red-Beard leaning against the railing at the bow. “You’re up early, Red-Beard,” he said as he joined the man of White-Braid’s tribe.

  Red-Beard shrugged. “Habit, I guess. I like to look at the sky before the sun comes up. Do you fish very much, Longbow?”

  “Once in a while. I really prefer hunting.” Longbow hesitated. “I noticed something the other day when Hook-Beak was talking with one of his relatives. You’ve spent quite a bit of time with the ordinary Maag sailors. Does it seem to you that family’s more important to them than tribe?”

  “I don’t think they even have tribes, Longbow, and as far as I’ve been able to discover, there’s no such thing as tribe—or customs, or rules, or chiefs. Their weapons are better than ours, but aside from that, they’re absolute savages.”

  “I sort of saw things much the same way. Customs might be a bit tedious, but they do seem to hold a tribe together.”

  “I don’t know if you’re aware of this, Longbow,” Red-Beard said then, “but you’re quite famous all over the Domain of our Zelana.”

  “I don’t really stray very far, Red-Beard, so I wasn’t aware of that.”

  “You can tell me that it’s none of my business, if you want to, but why do you spend all of your time killing the creatures of the Wasteland?”

  Longbow hesitated, but Red-Beard was about the closest thing to a friend he had here. “It was something that happened a long time ago,” he explained. “There was a young woman in our tribe named Misty-Water, and she and I had decided that we should mate. On the day of the ceremony, she went into the forest to bathe and dress herself in her new deerskin. While she was alone in the forest, one of the poison-fanged creatures of the Wasteland killed her. Since that day, I live only for vengeance.”

  “I’m sorry, Longbow,” Red-Beard apologized. “I didn’t really mean to pry like that. I understand now, though. You want to kill them all, don’t you?”

  “If I possibly can,” Longbow admitted. “No day is really complete for me if I haven’t killed at least one of those beasts. That’s what finally persuaded me to join Zelana and come here to the Land of the Maags. Little Eleria suggested that if I had Maags to help me, I could kill thousands of the servants of the Vlagh—or maybe even kill them all.”

  “That might take some doing, from what I’ve heard about those beasts,” Red-Beard suggested. “Would it offend you if I kill a few dozen of them? Just as a sign of friendship, of course. It’s courteous to kill the enemies of one’s friends, isn’t it?”

  Longbow smiled briefly. “It wouldn’t bother me in the least, Red-Beard. Enjoy yourself. One thing, though. When we reach the Wasteland, remember that That-Called-the-Vlagh is mine. It’s my thought that the spirit of Misty-Water might be pleased if I placed the head of the Vlagh at the foot of her grave as a sign of my continued love for her.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of interfering, friend Longbow,” Red-Beard declared. “Would it be all right if I held your cloak for you while you chop That-Called-the-Vlagh into small pieces?”

  “I think I could stand that, friend Red-Beard,” Longbow replied with mock solemnity.

  Then they both laughed.

  5

  Sorgan managed to gather several of his relatives about the Seagull as he continued to recruit unrelated Maag ship captains in the harbor of Weros. Longbow had been called upon several times to demonstrate his proficiency with his bow, and the Maags all treated him with a great deal of respect by the time the growing fleet left Weros to move south along the coast of Maag. The Seagull hove to each time she came to a coastal village where there were more than two or three ships anchored in the harbor.

  “I’ve got some of my kinsmen scouring the towns to the north of Weros for more ships and men,” Sorgan advised Zelana one evening a few days later during the customary meeting after supper in his former quarters. “The word’s getting out that I’m hiring and that the pay’s good, and that’s making things go a lot faster than I’d thought they might. We’ll probably have our fleet put together before too much longer.”

  “I certainly hope so,” Zelana replied.

  “I’ll be sending the advance fleet to Dhrall in just a little bit,” Sorgan assured her. “I’ve been holding off until my cousin Skell joins us. He’s more reliable than some of my other relatives.”

  “How’s Skell going to find Lattash, Cap’n?” Ox asked. “That coast stretches on for a long way, as I recall.”

  “I could go with them and show them the way,” Longbow offered.

  Sorgan shook his head. “I need you here, Longbow,” he said. “You’re the only man I know who can shoot arrows through knotholes from a hundred paces away, and that’s one of the things that I use to persuade others to join us.”

  “I could go with them, though,” Red-Beard suggested. “I’m not doing anything here but growing longer whiskers, and I don’t imagine that my beard—splendid though it is—has persuaded many to join us.”

  “It makes sense, Sorgan,” Zelana said, “and if your cousin follows Red-Beard’s advice and spreads his fleet out, they’ll encounter other Maag ships out on the face of Mother Sea. Then they can say the magic word ‘gold’ to the captains of those other ships, and we could very well have twice as many ships approaching the coast of Dhrall than we sent from the coast of Maag.”

  “That’s the way we’ll do it, then. You’re paying, so we’ll dance to your tune—but not until Skell joins us. He’s a lot more responsible than some of the other ship captains, so he’ll be able to prevent any enthusiasts from raiding the coastal v
illages instead of preparing to meet the army of the Wasteland. That would irritate your people, and I could lose half of my army before I even get there if the other Dhralls are even half as good with their bows as Longbow here is.”

  It was foggy the next morning, and Longbow stood near the bow of the Seagull, listening to the voices coming out of the fog from nearby ships. Sounds, he noted, always seemed to carry farther in the night or in dense fog. Perhaps there was some sort of agreement between the eyes and the ears involved.

  Red-Beard came along the deck from the stern and joined Longbow. “Murky,” he observed quietly.

  “I noticed that myself,” Longbow agreed. “I don’t think this would be a good day for hunting.”

  “The fishing might be good, though.” Red-Beard looked around and leaned closer. “Zelana wants to have a word with you,” he said very quietly. “Something happened during the night that’s bothering her.”

  “I’ll go right away,” Longbow replied in a similarly quiet voice. Then he spoke a bit louder. “Do you suppose you can watch the fog without any help, Red-Beard?” he asked. “I should probably go find out if Zelana has anything she wants me to do today.”

  “I think I’ll be able to manage here by myself,” Red-Beard replied. “I’ll have somebody fetch you if it gets to be more than I can handle.”

  “Very funny,” Longbow muttered.

  “I’m glad you liked it,” Red-Beard said with a broad grin.

  Longbow went aft toward the stern of the Seagull. Red-Beard was from a different tribe, but Longbow liked him anyway. The present crisis was altering many of Longbow’s preconceptions in ways that would probably have been impossible no more than a year ago.

  He tapped lightly on the door to the aft cabin.

  “Come in, Longbow,” Zelana’s voice responded.

  He went on into the low-beamed cabin that smelled of tar and quietly closed the door behind him. Zelana was sitting in a chair behind the nailed-down table, and she had a slightly worried look on her face. Eleria was standing just behind her, and this time she didn’t come running to Longbow with her arms held out.