“I don’t quite follow you, Konag,” the first Regulator said.
“You must have been too far away to hear them talking,” Konag said. “When you want to test a man for holiness, all you have to do is throw him off some high place. If he flies, he’s holy. If he falls, he’s unholy.”
“Toss them all into the gorge, you mean?”
“What a brilliant idea!” Konag replied sardonically.
The following morning Rabbit decided that he should finish something he’d been tinkering with for the past few weeks. He took up the curved limb he’d chopped from a hardwood tree up on the west ridge and continued the tedious business of shaving it into shape with his knife.
“Whittling, Rabbit?” Torl asked him. “Are you that bored?”
“Not really,” Rabbit replied. “It came to me last week that I’ve been making arrows for Longbow and his people since last winter, but I’ve never once pulled a bow.”
“Isn’t it just a little short?” Torl suggested.
“If I happened to make my bow as long as the bows of Zelana’s people, I’d have to stand on a ladder to shoot the silly thing.”
Torl smiled faintly. “I’m sure that our enemies will all run away in terror when they see Longbow and Shortbow coming their way.”
Rabbit gave him a flat, unfriendly look. “I’ll tell you what, Torl,” he said. “As soon as I finish my bow, I’ll need a target to practice my shooting. You could walk off a ways, and we’ll find out if I know what I’m doing. I probably won’t be very good, so you won’t be in too much danger.”
“Maybe some other time, Rabbit,” Torl replied. “I’m just a little busy right now.”
“Anytime you start getting bored, my friend, I think that might be a way to liven up your day.”
“I’ll keep it in mind, Rabbit,” Torl said, and then he walked off, shaking his head.
When he’d finished shaping his bow, Rabbit went looking for Red-Beard. “What do your people use for bowstrings?” he asked after he’d showed his experiment to his friend.
“Dried gut, usually,” Red-Beard replied. “Some archers use animal tendons, but I’ve always had better luck with gut. I’ve got a couple of spares, so I’ll give you one of mine.” He took Rabbit’s bow up, holding an end of it in each of his hands. Then he bent the bow. “Nice and limber,” he noted. “This might work fairly well for you.”
“We’ll never know until I try.”
After Rabbit had strung his new bow, he took a handful of arrows and went on up into the woods on the west slope. He’d never shot an arrow at anything in his whole life, so he didn’t really want an audience when he started to practice.
Longbow had made quite an issue of what he called “unification”—something that sort of linked the archer, his bow, and the target. Rabbit gave that a bit of thought as he went up among the trees on the west slope. “Maybe it’s something on the order of what happens when I see that the chunk of metal I’m heating in the forge is exactly the right color,” he mused.
He looked around and saw a patch of green moss growing on a treetrunk about fifty paces on up the hill. He set the notch of an arrow on his bowstring without taking his eyes off that patch of moss. Then he raised the bow, drawing back the string as he did. Then, not even squinting along the arrow shaft, he let it fly.
He was actually startled when his arrow went straight and true directly to the center of the target.
“I must be better than I thought,” he murmured with a broad grin. “I’ve never missed a target in my life.”
With growing curiosity, he notched another arrow and let it fly.
Now there were two arrows protruding side by side from the patch of moss.
After he’d loosed his last arrow, he walked on up to the tree to take a closer look.
His arrows were clustered together so tightly that he could cover their notched ends with the palm of his hand. “That’s impossible!” he exclaimed. Then he looked around rather suspiciously as it came to him that maybe Zelana was somewhere nearby playing games. Then he realized that he probably wouldn’t be able to see her even if she was.
It took quite a bit of effort to pull his arrows out of the treetrunk, and he broke two of them in the process. Then he went on back down the hill and put his bow under his blankets. “I think maybe I should just keep this to myself,” he mused. “Nobody’s going to believe me anyway, so let’s not make an issue of it. A man should never miss an opportunity to keep his mouth shut.”
“They’re almost finished, Padan,” Torl reported late in the afternoon two days later. “And it looks to me like those Church Regulators are doing most of our work for us. They’ve managed to persuade all those Church soldiers to stay where they’re supposed to instead of running off toward goldie out there.”
“Goldie?” Padan asked with a slight smile.
“She’s one of my favorite pets,” Torl explained. “I just love pets who do all the work, don’t you?”
Padan scratched the side of his jaw. “I’m not sure, but it might just be that those Regulators have changed things just a bit. It’s possible that terror can overwhelm greed, I suppose.”
“It might not be a bad idea to let cousin Sorgan and Commander Narasan know about this,” Torl suggested. “If the Regulators can hold all those Church soldiers right here instead of letting them dribble off toward old goldie in twos and threes, a certain change of plans might be in order along about now.”
“You could be right, Torl,” Padan agreed. He looked at Rabbit. “How are your legs holding out, little friend?” he asked.
“I still know how to run,” Rabbit said. “I take it that you’d like to have me spread the news?”
“If it isn’t too much trouble,” Padan replied.
“And maybe even if it is,” Torl added quite firmly.
“It sounds like those Regulator people might have made all our work here unnecessary, cousin,” Skell said after Rabbit had told them what had been happening.
“Maybe,” Sorgan said a bit dubiously. “I still think we’d be better off if those idiots were still running this way like their lives depended on it. If they slow down a bit, they might decide to take another route to get to that gold desert out there.”
“I don’t think so, Cap’n,” Rabbit disagreed. “When Longbow, Torl, and I went up onto that west ridge to find out if the yellow sand wasn’t what it seemed to be, we were able to see a lot more of that desert out there. The sand that looks like gold but isn’t peters out a couple miles off to the west. Longbow says that the dream lady’s using it to bait those Church armies, so she put it just exactly where we need it to be.”
“I’d surely like to meet this lady,” Skell said. “I think we might owe her about a thousand pounds of thank-yous.”
“If it turns out the way she seems to want it to, Skell,” Sorgan said a bit dubiously. “But if something goes wrong, things around here could get real wormy in a hurry.”
3
Aracia and her brothers and sister, as well as the children, gathered near the geyser at the center of the basin late in the evening not long after the Church soldiers from the south had finally completed the bridge that everybody thought was important, and it seemed to the warrior queen Trenicia that the sole purpose of this gathering had been to watch the little girl Lillabeth sleep. Trenicia was fairly certain that Lillabeth could sleep without an audience, but Aracia’s family seemed to be very interested for some reason.
Queen Trenicia of the Isle of Akalla had been much confused from the very beginning by the male-dominated cultures of all these other lands. On the isle Trenicia ruled, men were little more than house-pets who spent most of their time trying to make themselves look beautiful. They even painted their faces on special occasions.
There were some ancient tales—quite probably pure invention—that stoutly maintained the absurdity that at some time in the distant past men had been dominant, and that they’d treated women as mere chattels. The tales went on to desc
ribe in some detail the events of a certain day when a large group of women in search of firewood on a southern beach had come across the wreckage of what appeared to have been a large raft—or something that went beyond a raft—from some far distant land, and in various places in the wreckage, the women found weapons that had been made of some material that quite obviously was not stone.
Had the women who’d made this discovery been docile, Queen Trenicia was fairly certain that the history of the Isle of Akalla would have been much different. The women, however, had been anything but docile. After many centuries of being treated as property only, the resentment of the women had been enormous, and a goodly number of the discoverers of those metal weapons returned home with the weapons in their hands and firmly demonstrated their discontent.
The males of the isle were horrified. Quite suddenly, the women of Akalla were total savages who refused any and all commands and responded to the faintest hints of disapproval with brutal efficiency.
The men fled at that point, but the women weren’t satisfied by mere flight. They wanted blood.
Trenicia was almost certain that the stories from the past had been exaggerated, but there might have been some justification for the behavior of those ancient women. At any rate, the wanton slaughter of the men of the isle finally alarmed the older and wiser women, and they reminded their savage younger sisters that if there were no men, there would be no children, and in a little while there would be no people on the isle.
The random killings had slowed at that point, and the women began to herd the surviving males into log pens. Then they brought the men out—one by one—and offered them to the other women. If a man was old or ugly or happened to have a bad reputation among the women, all the women rejected him, and he was killed right on the spot.
The practice of killing unwanted males had slowly disappeared in the society now dominated by women, but the males still believed that their very lives might depend upon looking desirable.
And so it was that the men of Akalla now spent every waking minute searching for ways to make themselves pretty. That, of course, made it totally impossible for the men to take on any chores whatsoever, so it fell to the women to plant, cook, harvest, govern, and fight any war that came along.
All in all, Queen Trenicia saw nothing really wrong with the current arrangement, and she was completely baffled by the peculiar arrangements in other societies.
Trenicia still could not understand why all the local gods—and their pet children—were so interested in Aracia’s pet, so she turned to the beautiful child Eleria, who was sitting some distance apart from the others with a peculiar expression on her lovely face. “Why is everybody so curious about Lillabeth?” she asked.
“She’s dreaming,” Eleria replied. “That’s what we’re supposed to do. We make things happen with our dreams—things that those who care for us aren’t permitted to do.”
“But aren’t your elders gods?”
“In a sense, yes they are.”
“But gods can do anything, can’t they?”
“Not really,” Eleria replied in a somewhat obscure manner. “They can’t destroy life—of any kind.”
“Not even enemies who want to kill them?” Trenicia was aghast at this limitation.
“That’s why those of us who look like children are here. We destroy the enemies with our dreams. Back in the Beloved’s Domain, I had a dream about a huge flood, and my flood drowned thousands of our enemies. Then, a bit later, Vash had his volcano dream, and he killed even more than I did.”
Trenicia looked at Lillabeth with a certain awe, and as she looked more closely she saw something in the air directly above the sleeping child, and the object had shifting colors that looked almost like fire. “What’s that pretty thing just above her?” she asked.
Eleria glanced at the sleeping child. “It’s a seashell,” she replied. “Abalone, I think. It’s kind of pretty, but I think my pearl’s even prettier. Our jewels are the things that give us our dreams. They’re the voice of the One Who Guides Us. She uses the jewels to tell us what we’re supposed to dream.”
“Who is she?” Trenicia asked.
“I’m not really sure,” Eleria replied. “I’ve known her since time began.” Then the little girl laughed a bit ruefully. “The only problem there is that I can’t quite remember when that was. I was there, of course, but it was so long ago that I can’t put any kind of number to it. As I remember, we were all very busy back then.”
“Busy?”
“We were making things. Our elders had been doing that for a long, long time, and they were growing very, very tired, so we told them to rest, and we took up the burden for them. We’ve just about reached the point where we’ll have to do it again, I think. The Beloved’s starting to get just a bit strange. She’s very, very tired, and she needs to go to sleep. I’ve been slipping around behind her back taking care of things for her, but that’s all right. I’ve done that many times in the past.” Eleria glanced at the sleeping child. “I think Enalla’s just about to wake up now. She’s probably already put her dream in motion, and her dream will probably win this war.” She pursed her lips. “Dakas might have to help her—sort of like Vash helped me last time,” she added in a speculative tone.
“Do you children all have different names?” Trenicia asked. “I thought Aracia’s little girl was named Lillabeth.”
“That’s what Aracia calls her, but her real name is Enalla.”
“What’s your real name, then?”
“Balacenia, of course. When Dahlaine came up with this idea, he decided not to use our real names. That was part of his deception. The other part involved pushing us all the way back to infancy so that our elders wouldn’t realize just exactly who we really are.”
“When Aracia came to the Isle of Akalla, she didn’t say a thing about this,” Trenicia said, feeling a bit offended.
“Aracia’s like that sometimes.” The child laughed. “She really irritates Dahlaine. He knows that she really wants to be the dominant one during their next cycle, and he doesn’t like the idea.”
“Why are you telling me about all of this?” Trenicia demanded. “If it’s anything even close to being the truth, shouldn’t you be trying to conceal it from me?”
“We’re not all like Aracia, dear,” the child replied. “I’ve always felt that being honest works a lot better than deception. I’m sure that the time will come when it’ll be very important for you to know the truth, so I just took you for a little stroll down the path of truth. After a while, when you’ve had time to think it over, we might want to go a little farther down that path.” She paused, and then she gave Trenicia a childish little grin. “Won’t that be fun?” she asked with exaggerated enthusiasm, clapping her hands together.
4
Sorgan Hook-Beak, his cousin Skell, and First Mate Ox were standing on the south side of the first trench peering into the darkness.
“I think you worry too much, cousin,” Skell said. “From what I saw during that last war, Trogite armies don’t fight wars very good after the sun goes down.”
“That might be true when you’re talking about a real army, Skell,” Sorgan replied, “but if Torl was anywhere close to being right about what happened down there on the south coast, we’re talking about a mob, not an army. If they’ve seen all that false gold out there, their brains have shut down, and they won’t think—or behave—like soldiers anymore.”
“I’d say that might depend on whether they’ve finished their bridge or not, Cap’n,” Ox added. “If they haven’t managed to get up here yet, all we’re doing is wasting sleep-time.”
“Not entirely, Ox,” Sorgan disagreed. “Padan said that he’d send somebody up here to let us know when that bridge is finished, and if his messenger doesn’t know where the trail through the poisoned stakes is, he’ll probably die before he reaches us.”
“Somebody’s coming, cousin,” Skell hissed, pointing off to the south.
“I mak
e it to be Rabbit, Cap’n,” Ox added, “or somebody who’s almost as small as he is, and Rabbit knows the way through the stakes.”
“It’s about time,” Sorgan said with a sense of relief.
“Is that you, Cap’n?” Rabbit’s voice came out of the darkness
“Who were you expecting?” Sorgan replied. “What’s happening down there?”
“Those soldiers in red clothes finally finished their bridge, Cap’n,” Rabbit said as he joined them, “but things aren’t going exactly like we thought they would.”
“Problems of some kind?” Skell demanded.
“Maybe so, or maybe not,” Rabbit replied. “Everything was going pretty much like we expected. The soldiers in red clothes finally managed to get one log across that last gap, and when they saw the peaks with imitation gold on them out there, they got all excited. After the sun went down, eight or ten of them came sneaking across that log—probably trying to get a head start on all their friends.”
The Treasured One: Book Two of The Dreamers Page 41