The Treasured One: Book Two of The Dreamers

by Eddings, Leigh;Eddings, David

  “What choice do I have?”

  “None, little brother. I never give people choices.”

  And so it was that the Shark sailed unobserved into the harbor of Gaiso in the middle of one dark, gloomy night, and Torl selected a ship that suited him. The Shark eased up beside that ship, and Torl led the boarding party that threw the few crewmen who’d remained on board over the side. Then Torl and his men hauled anchor and sailed along behind the Shark out of the harbor.

  The brothers then pulled into a secluded cove and put the crew of the Shark to work modifying her until she no longer bore any outward resemblance to her former identity. For some reason, Torl decided to call his ship the Lark. Skell couldn’t for the life of him understand exactly why. Maag ships usually had very threatening names, and “Lark” didn’t seem to fit. Torl had a peculiar sense of humor sometimes.

  After a bit of fairly difficult consideration, Skell decided that a grim-faced and somewhat older seaman named Grock might be the best man to serve as the Shark’s first mate. Grock was one of those “serious” men who seldom smiled, but he’d been a crewman on the Shark for more than ten years, so he was very familiar with her quirks and peculiarities. He was also a very good judge of character, and it was at his suggestion that Skell chose Baldar Club-Foot as second mate. “He’s a good sailor, Cap’n,” Grock said. “That bad foot of his makes him sorta gimpy, but he don’t put up with no nonsense. Younger sailors are a bit silly sometimes, but Club-Foot knows how to jerk ’em up short when they need it.”

  “He’s our man, then,” Skell agreed. “Now, then, I think we’d better sail on up the coast to Kormo. My brother’s going to need a crew for the Lark, and I want my men back here on board the Shark before we go hunting Trogs again. The way things stand right now, we’re both short-handed, and even those scows the Trogs call ships could probably outrun us.”

  “Aye, Cap’n,” Grock agreed.

  Once the two ships were fully manned, the brothers went back to work, robbing every Trog that came their way—just to keep Papa happy, of course.

  Captain Jodan began to expand his simple seaside home as the seasons marched by, and before very long it more closely resembled a castle than the modest residence of a retired sailor.

  Business was very good for the next several years, but then some disgustingly clever Trog came up with the idea of “the ram,” a thick pole firmly in place at the waterline at the bow of every Trog ship that passed the coast of Maag. Skell learned about that the hard way, and he’d only barely managed to get the Shark to the port at Kormo before she’d gone to the bottom.

  His imitation grouchiness became very real for a while after that near disaster.

  Skell heard some very interesting rumors in Kormo while the Shark was being repaired in the shipyard, and as soon as she was fit to sail again, he went on down the coast to see if he could catch up with the Seagull. If the rumors he’d picked up in the taverns of Kormo even came close to the truth, cousin Sorgan had just struck gold, and Skell thought it might be the polite thing to help his kinsman with the counting.

  The fleet Sorgan had been gathering was in the harbor at Kweta when the Shark sailed into the bay, and Sorgan seemed quite happy to see his cousin. When he showed Skell all the gold blocks that were stacked up in the Seagull’s hold, Skell became very enthusiastic.

  There were a few disturbing things involved, however. Their employer was a woman, and that bothered Skell just a bit, and he was even more disturbed when he met her. Lady Zelana was quite probably the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, but just below the surface of that stunning beauty, she was harder than a rock. Then there was the native called Longbow, who was evidently her bodyguard. Longbow was the sort of man that anybody with half a brain would go way out of his way to avoid irritating. There was a bleakness about Longbow that sent chills up and down Skell’s back. There was another native in Lady Zelana’s party as well, and he was called Red-Beard. Red-Beard came very close to destroying the pose that Skell had spent years establishing. Every time Red-Beard opened his mouth, Skell had to steel himself to avoid laughing out loud.

  After Skell and Sorgan discussed the matter at some length, they decided that Skell should lead an advance fleet to a place called Lattash on the west coast of the Land of Dhrall to protect Lady Zelana’s Domain until such time as Sorgan arrived with the main fleet, and Torl would remain on the coast of Maag to gather up any latecomers. Skell wasn’t too enthusiastic about the prospect of a land war, but the pay promised to be good, and that was all that really mattered.

  The voyage from Kweta to the Land of Dhrall took quite a bit longer than Skell had thought it might. Evidently the sea spreading out from the east coast of the Land of Maag was much larger than Skell had ever imagined. The humorous native Red-Beard assured him that the Land of Dhrall was actually there—“unless the gods got bored with it and made it vanish.” Red-Beard seemed to think that remark was very funny, but Skell wasn’t in a laughing mood just then. They’d been two weeks at sea, and he was feeling very edgy.

  In time, however, they made landfall and eventually sailed into the bay of Lattash. As soon as they landed, though, Skell began to have problems. The various ship captains had all piously promised Sorgan that they’d behave themselves when they reached the Land of Dhrall, but they’d lied through their teeth. The assumption that the primitives in the village of Lattash were weak and helpless and therefore prime targets for Maag freebooters turned out to be seriously flawed. Maag sailors in search of gold or entertainment began sprouting arrows, and Skell was obliged to come down on the offenders—hard. It took several floggings to get his point across, but it still seemed to him that getting the sailors out of the village would be his best course of action.

  “It don’t really matter what kind of excuse we come up with, Cap’n,” Grock advised. “All that’s really important is getting those rowdies out of the village afore the natives kill ever’body in the fleet.”

  “We did hire on to fight a war, didn’t we, Cap’n?” Baldar Club-Foot suggested.

  “That’s what cousin Sorgan told me,” Skell agreed.

  “Soljers as does their war-fighting on dry land almost always spend a whole lot of their time a-building forts or barricades, I’ve heard tell. Since the enemy’s going to be coming this way from the east, and that river that comes down out of the mountings above town runs through a narrow ravine, we could tell all the other ship cap’ns that your cousin Sorgan told you to go up a ways and build a fort to hold the enemy back.”

  “He didn’t really say anything like that, Club-Foot,” Skell objected.

  “Lie to ’em, Cap’n,” Baldar suggested. “What we’re really trying to do is to keep them all from getting kilt, ain’t it?”

  “That comes close, yes.”

  “Lying might not be very nice, but if it keeps ’em alive, it’ll be worth the trouble.”

  “And, if you tell the other ship cap’ns that they won’t get paid if the fort ain’t good enough, they’ll hustle right along, I’ll bet,” Grock added.

  “I guess it’s worth a try,” Skell conceded a bit dubiously.

  When Sorgan’s fleet finally arrived, their employer, the beautiful Lady Zelana, evidently decided that a bit of honesty might be in order. First off, one of the old headmen of the assorted tribes described the annual spring flood. That really disturbed Skell, since most of his men were up in the ravine where they’d be trapped—and drowned—if the old chief’s description of the yearly disaster came anywhere close to being accurate.

  Then there was the issue of venom. Skell had heard stories about poisonous snakes, but he’d never actually seen one—and he really wanted to keep it that way.

  Lady Zelana’s bleak-faced bodyguard, Longbow, put Skell somewhat at his ease, however, with his description of the process whereby he’d used the enemy’s venom to kill other enemies. It seemed to Skell that there was a certain justice involved there.

  Skell would be the first to admit that he
hadn’t once encountered one of what his cousin colorfully called “the snake-men,” largely because he’d spent most of his time in Zelana’s Domain building an impregnable fort to prevent any intruding enemy force from reaching the village of Lattash. He’d seen a few of them, but when something’s a half-mile away it doesn’t usually pose much of a threat.

  The thing that had really disturbed Skell during the war in Lady Zelana’s Domain had been their alliance with the Trogs. There was no question about the fact that Commander Narasan’s men were very good soldiers and that they’d been a great help, but it had just seemed so unnatural to Skell to have Trogs for allies.

  The natives had warned them that the flood—which had been very useful—was an annual event in the region, so Skell had finally accepted it as a more or less natural phenomenon, but the sudden appearance of two volcanos at the head of the ravine—just when they’d really needed them—was an entirely different matter. The natives had hinted around the edges of some very unlikely explanations, but Skell had been fairly sure that Lady Zelana had been at the bottom of it. That raised a somewhat unsettling question, however. If Lady Zelana could make mountains explode whenever it suited her, why did she need an army?

  By the time it was all over and the invaders had been obliterated, cousin Sorgan and the Trog commander had become close friends, and Sorgan offered his assistance in the war the Trogs had been hired to fight. Skell had been more than a little dubious about that—until Lady Zelana and her brother had made a very generous offer of even more gold.

  Skell decided that he might as well go along at that point.

  2

  It was early summer when the combined fleet of Maags and Trogs sailed south to the Domain of Lady Zelana’s younger brother Veltan, and that made Skell a bit more comfortable. Bad weather was seldom a problem in the summertime.

  After they’d passed a somewhat indeterminate boundary, Skell observed that Veltan’s Domain was primarily farmland. There did appear to be mountains up near the northern part of the region, but they were quite a long way off.

  The fleet turned toward the east when it reached the southern coast of the Land of Dhrall, and then they swung north, following a rather irregular coast.

  Veltan’s scruffy-looking little fishing sloop was leading the fleet, and evidently the men on board the sloop—Longbow, Red-Beard, Rabbit, and Keselo—had been looking for a certain landmark, because the sloop abruptly turned shoreward, and she was beached without much warning. Skell muttered a few choice curses under his breath as the Shark heeled over very sharply when Grock jerked on the tiller.

  The white sand beach seemed much cleaner than most of the beaches Skell had seen in his lifetime at sea, and the wheat-fields on the gentle slope rising from the beach were an almost luminous green. There was no getting around the fact that this was beautiful country, but Skell still preferred the open sea. He prudently ordered his men to drop the anchor some distance out from the beach. The Shark drew more water than Veltan’s sloop, and Skell wasn’t in the mood to take any chances.

  Commander Narasan and several other people went ashore to meet with Lady Zelana’s younger brother, but for some reason, cousin Sorgan held back just a bit. That puzzled Skell, but then it occurred to him that Sorgan was trying to be polite. “What an unnatural sort of thing,” he muttered to himself. Evidently Sorgan had been spending far too much time with the Trogs, and some of their customs had rubbed off on him.

  After a while, Sorgan finally went ashore, and Skell left Grock in charge and rowed on into the beach to see if he could find out just exactly what was in the wind. He hung back a bit, quietly observing and listening. Sorgan and the Trogs seemed a bit surprised that a farmer named Omago had gathered up a sizeable number of other farmers to help in the defense of Veltan’s Domain. Skell was a bit dubious about that. If the local people here in the Land of Dhrall could hold off the enemy all by themselves, why had Lady Zelana and her relatives gone to all the trouble and expense of hiring professionals from various other lands to do the fighting?

  Then Veltan suggested that they should all go to his house to have a look at his “lumpy map.” Evidently, the Trogs had found Red-Beard’s miniature imitation of the ravine above Lattash very useful.

  Sorgan let the others go on ahead and motioned to Skell. “I think maybe you’d better stay here, cousin,” he said. “I don’t think it’d be a good idea for our people to start wandering around on the beach or running around in any nearby villages. We don’t want the same sort of foolishness happening around here that you came up against when you first reached Lattash, do we?”

  “Not even a little bit,” Skell agreed. “I’ll pass the word to the other Maag ship-captains that you want everybody to stay on board their ships for right now. We don’t really know just exactly where we’ll be fighting this war anyway, so there’s a fair chance that we’ll have to sail off to some other part of this region, and it’d take quite a while to drag the sailors back to their ships if we were to just turn them loose.”

  “That’s for certain sure,” Sorgan agreed.

  Skell rowed his skiff back on out to the Shark, and then he sent Grock and Baldar out to advise the other Maag ship-captains that Sorgan had decided that the sailors should all remain on board their ships. Then he went on over to the Lark to advise his brother that they’d probably be moving before too long.

  “Cousin Sorgan seems to be getting just a bit more clever,” Torl noted as the two of them stood at the stern of the Lark admiring the gentle sky of evening. “We might not have to flog half the ship-captains in the fleet this time.”

  “I didn’t make too many friends that day,” Skell conceded, “but if I hadn’t flogged those idiots, the bowmen in that village would have killed everybody in the fleet.”

  “Who’s that coming back to the beach?” Torl asked, pointing at a black-leather-clad Trog who seemed to be dragging another Trog down the trail that led to the shore.

  Skell peered through the fading light. “I think that’s Padan,” he said.

  “Why’s he dragging that other one behind him?”

  “How should I know? Maybe one of the Trogs broke some of the rules.”

  “You could be right about that, Skell. The Trogs have rules for just about everything—how many times your heart’s supposed to beat, how often you’re allowed to blink, when you’re supposed to breathe—all those terribly important things that whoever’s in charge decides for every soldier in the whole silly army.”

  “They are just a bit picky about things, aren’t they?” Skell agreed. “It’s probably nothing very important, but maybe we should row on over there and ask Padan what happened.”

  Padan was just coming up out of the hold when Skell pulled his skiff up alongside the wide-beamed Trog ship. “Ho, Padan,” Skell called. “Is there something afoot that we ought to know about?”

  “We just had a stroke of good luck is about all, Skell,” Padan replied with a broad grin.

  “We struck gold, maybe?” Torl asked.

  “Well, sort of. Did you two get to know that arrogant ex-priest Jalkan at all during that war up in the ravine to the east of Lattash?”

  “Well enough not to want to have anything more to do with him,” Torl replied.

  “You know, I think just about everybody who’s ever met that scrawny rascal feels exactly the same way about him. Anyway, Veltan’s best friend in the wheat-fields near his castle is that farmer called Omago, and he’s married to a beautiful woman who’s probably the best cook in the whole wide world. We were all studying Veltan’s map when Omago’s wife came into the map-room to tell us that supper was ready. Jalkan ogled her a bit, and then he made some off-color remarks that almost made Commander Narasan faint dead away. Omago the farmer flattened Jalkan with a good solid punch right straight in the mouth that scattered teeth all over the place.”

  “I’m sorry we weren’t there to see that,” Torl said.

  “It gets better,” Padan said with a broad grin. “Ja
lkan started screaming about punishing the farmer for his lack of respect for somebody who ranks just a step or two below God Himself, but then Commander Narasan jerked his divinity out from under him by revoking his commission right there on the spot. The commander ordered me to chain the little rascal and then kick him in the backside every step of the way back here to the beach.”

  “If your foot gets tired, I’d be happy to take over for you, Padan,” Torl offered. “Between the three of us, we could probably spend the next week or so kicking Jalkan back and forth between the castle and the beach.”

  Skell pursed his lips. “We could even make bets on something like that,” he suggested.

  “I never pass up on opportunity to make a good bet,” Padan said. “We’d probably have to set up a few rules, though—so much for the longest kick, and a side bet for the highest one.”

  “It’d give us something to do beside standing around watching the tides rise and fall,” Torl added. “When you get right down to it, though, it’ll probably start to get tiresome after a while. When it stops being fun, we might want to consider just giving him a decent burial and let it go at that.”