A Fistful of Elven Gold

by Alex Stewart

  “Offer’s there,” Clearspring said, turning away with a shrug. “Whether you take it is up to you.”

  “It’s not too late to change your mind, you know,” Greel said, as the Rippling Light pulled in to a landing stage on which a couple of elves stood, aiming drawn bows at Hannie and Greel. A couple more were running along the narrow jetty, arrows already nocked, presumably to cover Drago and Clearspring, who must have seemed like less immediate threats. An impression Drago was certainly not intending to disabuse them of. The sailor nodded in the direction of the soldiers, the tabards over their mail coats emblazoned with the oak tree crest Greenleaf had shown him back in Fairhaven. “These are the friendly ones.”

  “This is a restricted landing,” one of the archers called, addressing Clearspring directly, despite both Drago and Greel being closer to his eye line. “What are you doing here?”

  “Dropping a passenger,” Clearspring said, at which Drago raised a hand in a friendly greeting; to his immense lack of surprise it was completely ignored. “Miner looking for work. Soon as he’s ashore, we’re gone.”

  “You’d better be. Traits aren’t welcome here, any more than their cattle are.”

  Drago found himself glancing round for some livestock, before realizing the elf meant him and the humans. Greel tensed beside him, but kept a bland expression.

  “And yet, even with such outstanding courtesy, no one wants to do business with you. Imagine that.” Clearspring directed a glance of withering disdain at her interlocutor, and turned to Drago. “This one’s polite for a Marcher. Most are worse. Are you sure you want to get off here?”

  “I’m sure.” Drago nodded. “I can’t explain, but I need to do this. And I appreciate the thought.”

  She echoed the gesture. “I haven’t asked, and I’m not about to. Because I really don’t want to know. But fair winds and strong currents go with you.” Then she nodded a final farewell. “You’ve been a lot less trouble than most, and you know how to stand your round. I’d take your fare again.”

  “Let’s hope you get the chance to,” Drago said, as the Rippling Light bumped the planks of the jetty, a little harder than he’d expected. The archers swayed as the vibration jarred through the decking supporting them, losing their balance, and a single arrow sailed over the masthead to vanish with a derisive-sounding plop!

  “Oops. Sorry Skip.” Hannie sounded anything but. “I just get a little nervous when nad-brained spunkbuckets point arrows at me.”

  “Hannie.” The warning tone in Clearspring’s voice was unmistakable. “One more word and they’ll do a lot more than point. We’re in the bloody Marches now, so mind your manners. And your sodding language.”

  “Sound advice.” The senior archer spoke again, still directly to Clearspring. “Unload your passenger and go.”

  “With pleasure.” She turned to Drago. “Now would be good. Before we die of old age.”

  “Or at least still have the option.” He shouldered his knapsack, and climbed over the rail for the last time, feeling his boots impact on the planks of the landing stage with what sounded like emphatic finality. He was committed now, whatever misgivings he might feel about that.

  Clearspring and Greel went straight for the sail, and Hannie leaned into the tiller, directing the boat away from the jetty. Drago stood and watched it recede until it had rejoined the steady traffic heading upstream, becoming just one more sail among many, but none of the Rippling Light’s crew turned to look back. Feeling vaguely deflated, he turned and walked along the landing stage, feeling the stares of the soldiers on his back the whole way, but none of them spoke again.

  Well, that had been easier than he thought. Reaching the rutted mud of the river bank, Drago paused to look around him. Elven soldiers were everywhere, hurrying about on errands of their own, or huddled around cooking fires; appetizing as the aromas arising from them were, he felt little inclination to linger. Certainly none of the elves he could see looked as though they’d be willing to spare a bowl of broth for an itinerant gnome.

  In some ways the camp struck him as similar to the riverside settlements he’d already seen: muddy, chaotic, and noisy. Even the wooden buildings bore a passing resemblance to the ones he’d seen in Birch Glade, lap-boarded planks nailed around a skeleton of beams, both hewn from the local woods. Instead of the profusion of randomly scattered structures, however, these were of uniform size and shape, about three times longer than they were wide, and arranged in a grid, creating arrow-straight lanes between them. The other main difference was the wall, about two and a half times the height of the average elf, enclosing the entire encampment on three sides, the fourth being occupied entirely by the riverbank.

  A wider open space separated the two main blocks of wooden buildings, from which occasional carts drawn by plodding donkeys emerged, or into which others disappeared, so Drago made for that, encouraged by glimpses of a larger structure midway along the longest wall. As he’d surmised, this turned out to be a gatehouse: a steady trickle of carts was arriving through it, loaded with what looked like firewood, while others departed empty to collect more. None of the elven soldiers engaged in this activity seemed particularly enthusiastic about it, but, as he was beginning to expect by now, they all found it far more interesting than the presence of a gnome.

  Moving at the kind of steady pace that seemed to encourage being regarded as invisible, and keeping well to one side of the roadway to avoid being trampled or run down, Drago approached the gateway. Staircases rose on either side of it, leading to a platform running around the wall about three feet from the top, and which seemed to pass through some kind of guardhouse perched over the gate itself. Turning his head, he could see similar structures at both ends of the wall, where it met the ones running riverwards at a right angle to it, and a couple of intermediate staircases rising to the platform. Given the number of soldiers he could see, and assuming they had an adequate supply of arrows, the camp could mount a formidable defense against anyone trying to attack it; even professional soldiers would have their work cut out, and any bandits making the attempt would simply be throwing their lives away.

  Drago braced himself for a challenge as he passed through the gates, but once again the guards simply ignored him. Then again, why wouldn’t they? Their job was to keep people out, not in, and he could hardly have been the first gnome to arrive at the wharf. In fact, judging by the size of some of the footprints he could see in the muddy earth just outside the stockade, he probably wasn’t even the first to have passed through the gates that day.

  He glanced around, getting his bearings. As he’d expected, a wide expanse of clear ground surrounded the walls, partly to provide the material for their construction, and partly to ensure their continued security. Nothing but stumps, scrub and thick, wiry grass could be seen extending out to well past the range of a bowshot; sneaking up on the place unobserved, and subsequently unperforated, would have been almost impossible, even at night.

  From where he stood, wagon tracks meandered away in many different directions, and there was little discernible pattern to the movements of the donkey carts crisscrossing the elf-made heath. Drago briefly debated whether to turn back and ask the guards for directions, but if the ones he’d met at the wharf were anything to go by—and the crew of the Rippling Light certainly seemed to think they were—he didn’t think they’d be all that helpful. Some of them might even think it was funny to send him off in the wrong direction entirely. So much open, empty space was a little disorientating for a city boy; he found himself wishing for a few cramped alleyways to walk down.

  All right then, if he’d been in Fairhaven, how would he have found his way? You certainly didn’t stop and ask for directions there, unless you wanted to advertise the fact that you were from a different district, and confident enough to handle the consequences.

  The majority of the wheel ruts, and all the gnomish footprints, led straight from the gate behind him toward the distant line of the forest, disappearing into a not
ch among the trees which probably marked the beginning of a track. That would do for a start, especially as the line of hills looming over everything seemed to be in more or less the same direction.

  Looking as untroubled and confident as he could, Drago set out to see where it led.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  “Hmm.”

  Sure enough, after a few minutes’ walking, Drago found himself among the trees, heading along a broad, flat cart track. Every now and then he had to step aside to avoid being trampled by kindling scavengers from the garrison, but the further he went, the less frequent these encounters became, until eventually they petered out altogether.

  It felt strange to be surrounded by so many living things, but completely out of sight of any other people. An astonishing number of creatures rustled in the grass and undergrowth, scuttling away before he could get a good look at them. More birds than he had ever seen or heard in his life squawked, twittered and chirruped overhead, staring down at him from the branches like tiny gargoyles, or wheeling in the sky above the woods. None of them were species he recognized, but that wasn’t surprising; the closest he’d ever come to some of them in Fairhaven had been as tiny migrating dots in the strips of sky between buildings.

  Several years’ accumulation of fallen leaves littered the ground beneath the trees, turning the earth underfoot into a wet, slippery mess, in which his boots slithered even more than they had done in the back alleys of home. Nevertheless, Drago kept to the margins of the track as it wove its way deeper into the woods, meandering like the river around knolls and sharp rises in the ground. Partly he did this so he could retreat into the shelter of the trees at the first sign of danger, but mainly because the ground between the cart ruts had been churned into a quagmire by the plodding of the animals which had drawn them. Every now and then a clear hoofprint showed in an unusually firm patch of mud, but for the most part there were few tracks to follow now. Presumably the other gnomes, in whose footsteps he followed, had done the same, or ridden in the cart.

  Up ahead, the hills continued to glower at him in intermittent glimpses between the boughs, like thunderclouds which had sunk to earth under the weight of their rain, but it wasn’t until nearly noon that he broke out of the trees entirely and got his first real look at them. They were bigger than he’d imagined, the highest peaks wreathed in wisps of cloud, and stained purple and brown by the bracken which enfolded them.

  Impressed in spite of himself, Drago lurked just inside the tree line, trying to make out more detail. Dots on the nearer hills seemed to be moving, painfully slowly, across the near vertical slopes, and for a few moments he wished he’d had the foresight to buy a farseeing charm before boarding the riverboat; then he realized he was probably just looking at wandering sheep, grazing on whatever fodder they could find up there.

  Which, in turn, made him think of mutton stew, then of how long it had been since he’d breakfasted. Too long, he decided, even if he hadn’t been burning off all that energy slogging through the woodlands. Remaining just inside the trees, he shrugged off his knapsack and began rummaging inside it for some food. Greel had found some almost fresh bread and some cheese he seemed pleased to see the back of, even though it still seemed fine to Drago, to which Clearspring had added a bottle of ale by way of a parting gift, claiming it gave her gas anyway.

  Though the meal was basic, he ate heartily enough, forcing himself to break off and return a lump of the bread to the knapsack before it was all consumed. It would be hours yet before he made it to the mining camp, even if he didn’t turn out to be on the wrong road entirely. And now he’d finally seen a squirrel, trying to catch one for the pot he didn’t actually possess anyway seemed like it would be a great deal more trouble than he’d fondly imagined.

  Shading his eyes, he tried to follow the line of the road, which wound its way into the distance before vanishing among the hills. Failing to see anything remotely threatening, he returned the rucksack to his back, and prepared to set out again. Just as he did so he caught sight of a small black dot on the highway, emerging from behind a fold in the ground, before disappearing again behind the crest of a ridge.

  “Hmm.” It seemed he wasn’t the only traveler on the road today after all. He waited a moment, but it didn’t reappear, so he shrugged and began walking again, trying to remember any details that might give him a clue as to whom or what he was following. The trouble was, the glimpse had been so fleeting, and at such a distance, that he hadn’t been able to make anything out at all. He couldn’t even be sure whether it had been a single person or a small group, clustered so close together that they couldn’t be told apart.

  Once he was clear of the trees, the track grew less muddy, and the going a little firmer underfoot. Thick, wiry grass, like the stuff he’d seen outside the stockade, spread over everything as far as the eye could see, interspersed with patches of scrub. Here and there, outcrops of dull gray rock reared up as if tearing their way out through the matted blanket of roots, their sides and upper surfaces still swathed in the sward as though they were huddling into cloaks of the stuff to escape the wind which blew constantly across the desolate moor.

  Drago shivered, and picked up his pace. The wind was blustery, and ruffled his clothes and hair, finding its way through every gap in his garments. Now and again bright sunshine elbowed the clouds aside, and the moorland seemed to glow around him, although it brought little warmth along with it. In the distance, an ever-changing patchwork of light and shade flowed across the hills, making individual crags and screes stand out with astonishing vividness for a moment, before fading back into the amorphous mass looming over the plain.

  At least the going was a little easier here, with springy grass or other plants underfoot, some of them astonishingly delicate in color and shape, over a firm foundation of bedrock. The line of cart ruts he followed was showing bare stone in places now, sometimes broken into pebbles or patches of gravel by the inexorable processes of erosion. On the other hand, virtually none of the road was level anymore, rising steadily toward the hills, or dipping back into the clefts between ridges before beginning to climb once again.

  Used to the relatively flat streets of a city built on the coastal plain, Drago found the constant change of slope harder work than he’d bargained for, and before long his thighs and calf muscles were protesting in no uncertain terms. But every ridge crest was higher than the previous one, and when he paused to look back, he was astonished at how far he’d come. The stretch of woodland was below him now, the treetops a wide expanse of clotted green, through which the glittering thread of the river curled away in both directions. From up here he could just make out the scudding dots of the riverboat sails, hundreds of them, in two constantly moving lines, keeping commerce flowing through the heart of the continent. The garrison at which he’d disembarked was hidden by the trees, but he could make out a score of other villages and hamlets up and down the distant banks.

  He wasn’t here to admire the view, though. The sun was well on its way to the horizon, and it occurred to him that he had no idea how much farther he still had to go. Finishing the rest of the bread, as much as for the excuse to linger for a few more minutes that it afforded him than to ward off incipient hunger, he turned his face resolutely toward the hills again. They seemed somehow to be both larger and no nearer than they had before.

  Well, there was nothing he could do about that. He must be getting close to his destination by now. The mines and the wharf which served them were sure to be within an easy day’s travel of one another; camping out halfway simply wouldn’t be an option in an area rife with bandits.

  Which was another uncomfortable thought. The closer he got to the hills, the more wary he’d have to be. Keeping his eyes as much on the landscape surrounding him as on the road itself, he set off again, trying to quell his misgivings.

  Another hour’s steady walking brought Drago out of the moors and into the foothills themselves. The road carried on climbing just as steeply, but was n
ow passing through gullies and ravines as often as it ran along ridge spines or ledges in the steeply sloping hillsides, and Drago’s sense of wariness increased with every step. The trouble was, the more he tried to look out for movement in the forbidding landscape surrounding him the more he saw, and he had no idea what could be safely dismissed in this unfamiliar landscape. Accordingly he wasted a lot of time stopping at frequent intervals to make sure that what looked like stealthy movement in the heather was only a rabbit, not a goblin bushwhacker trying to sneak up on him, or that a sudden shadow flashing across his path had merely been cast by a high-flying raptor looking for a rabbit of its own to invite for dinner, before deciding to hell with it, and pressing on regardless. If anyone jumped out of the rocks with designs on his pack or his purse he’d just have to deal with it as he would have done back in Fairhaven.

  Thus resolved he made much better progress, only stopping on one more occasion, to examine a place where someone had apparently paused for a little refreshment not too long before: a sheltered spot in the lee of an overhang just off the track, where the grass had been trampled flat and not yet sprung fully back. There were a few scattered crumbs on top of a boulder, where someone taller than a gnome could have comfortably sat, although he couldn’t tell if it had been a goblin or an elf. Whoever it was, they hadn’t left that long ago, though, as the crumbs hadn’t been scavenged by any of the local wildlife yet, and a moist half-moon where a water bottle had rested was still damp to the touch. It seemed he was catching up with the traveler he’d glimpsed in the distance a few hours before.