“I think I’ve earned my keep today, cousin, and I certainly wouldn’t want to cheat you and the other ship captains out of all the fun. Now that I’ve shown you how it’s supposed to be done, I’m sure you’ll be able to take care of the rest of the Trog ships without any help from me.”
“Very funny, Torl,” Sorgan growled. “And just how did you plan to spend the rest of your day?”
“I thought I might find out if the fish are biting today.” Torl turned and walked along the deck of the Lark toward his cabin. “You have a nice day now, cousin,” he called, “and when you finish up, swing on by and I’ll tell you what kind of bait works best in these waters.”
Cousin Sorgan was inventing new swear words as the Seagull moved away.
Torl had a nagging feeling that something wasn’t right, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on just exactly what it was. He paced up and down the deck of the Lark, staring at the beach.
“It looks t’ me like we scared all them Trogs real bad, Cap’n,” Iron-Fist said. “I don’t think I’ve seen more’n about three or four of ’em on that beach all day. Ain’t they supposed t’ have a great big ormy down here?”
Torl blinked. That was what was wrong! The beach should be covered with crowds of Trogs watching in horror as the only way they could ever return home went up in flames.
“I think I’d better go ashore and find out what’s going on,” he said bleakly.
“Not all by yerself, Cap’n,” Iron-Fist said very firmly. “Me an’ the crew ain’t about t’ take no chances of a-losin’ you. You ain’t a hard-nose like most ship-captains, an’ yer about five times smarter’n any cap’n I’ve ever seen. Good cap’ns is real hard t’ come by.”
“I’m touched, Iron-Fist,” Torl said with a certain surprise.
“Don’t git all gushy, Cap’n,” Iron-Fist said in a grouchy tone.
“All right, then. If I take a dozen men with me when I go ashore, will that make you feel better?”
“If’n y’ let me pick the men, it will, Cap’n.”
The beach was deserted when Torl and his men went ashore, so they carefully went on up to the nearby village. They didn’t encounter any Trogs, but the villagers all seemed quite happy to see them.
“Was there something you wanted?” a round-faced villager asked Torl.
“A few answers is about all,” Torl replied. “What happened to all the Trogs? We’ve heard that there were thousands of them down here in the southern part of Veltan’s Domain, but aside from the crews on those ships out in the bay, we haven’t seen a single one.”
“They all ran off a while back,” the villager replied. “I don’t think we’ll miss them very much. They weren’t really very nice to us when they first came here. They came dashing up the beach waving weapons, and then herded us all into a pen that I wouldn’t even have used for pigs. After a while, though, they got all excited about something that didn’t seem to make any sense, and then, they all ran off toward the north.”
“Strange,” Torl said.
“If they decide to come back, I don’t think they’re going to like you very much. Why did you set fire to all their boats the way you did?”
“Veltan didn’t want them to take you people off to be slaves, so we came here and burned their ships. Did any of them ever say anything about just why they all ran off like that?”
“Nothing that made any sense to me,” the villager replied. “Of course, a lot of things have been happening here lately that haven’t made any sense. As closely as I could tell, they all got very excited about something on up to the north.”
“There’s not very much on up to the north of here but farmland,” Torl said. “If you go on up farther, though, you’ll reach the mountains.” Torl frowned. “Did you happen to hear any of them talking about gold?”
The villager’s face went sort of blank. Then he began to speak in a peculiar way as if he was reciting something that he’d memorized a long time in the past. “It was long, long ago when a man of our village grew weary of farming,” he began, “and he 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 when 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.” Then the villager stopped, and his face seemed sort of puzzled. “I don’t think I know what you were talking about, stranger,” he said.
“It’s not really all that important, I guess,” Torl replied as if he wasn’t very interested. “Thanks for the information, friend. Whatever it was that got the Trogs all excited probably isn’t very significant—except that it made them pack up and leave.”
“That’s all that really matters, I guess,” the villager agreed.
Something very peculiar had just happened. It seemed that the villager didn’t even know that he’d just recited a story that was really coming from somebody else’s mouth, but what exactly had set him off? “It must have been something I said,” Torl muttered, “but as near as I can remember, all I asked him had to do with gold.” Then he blinked. “Of course! he exclaimed. “It was the word ‘gold’ that blanked out his mind and set him off.”
There was another villager standing not far away, so Torl walked over to the man. “Hello, there, stranger,” he said. “Why don’t we talk about gold?”
The villager’s face immediately went blank. “It was long, long ago when a man of our village grew weary of farming,” he began.
Torl walked away and left the villager talking to himself.
Another villager came out of one of the makeshift huts.
“Gold,” Torl said.
“It was long, long ago . . .” the villager began.
Torl went on back down to the beach chuckling to himself. He privately admitted that it had been nothing but pure luck, but he’d just stumbled over the reason for the sudden departure of the Trogs.
“I wonder . . .” Torl mused. He looked on down the beach. There was another village no more than a mile away. “Let’s try it and find out,” he said to himself.
The sun was going down when Torl and his men returned to the Lark.
“Well, Cap’n,” Iron-Fist said, “did y’ find out what happened t’ all them there Trogs?”
Torl shrugged. “They went north,” he replied, “and I was lucky enough to find out why they did that. We might want to drop by a few more villages, but I don’t think it’ll be necessary. Somebody—and I don’t have any idea of just exactly who—did something very strange to the people in five different villages that I visited today. Just as soon as I mentioned the word ‘gold’ every single villager I met today started to tell me exactly the same story—and they all used exactly the same words. I’ve heard it so many times now that I could probably recite it myself—and I wouldn’t make a single mistake.”
“Now that’s what I’d call real strange, Cap’n,” Iron-Fist said, a bit dubiously.
“‘Strange’ only begins to describe it,” Torl said. “I wish I knew just who’s behind this. I think whoever did it is on our side, but I wouldn’t want to swear to it. I hope he’s on our side, because he can do things that I’ve never even heard of before. We definitely don’t want to cross that one.” Then Torl laughed. “I’m fairly sure that this’ll drive
cousin Sorgan right straight up the wall, and I don’t think Veltan’s going to be very happy about it either. I’d say that this game just got very interesting.”
“You’re just making this up, Torl,” cousin Sorgan said a day or so later when the Seagull returned to the bay where Torl was waiting.
“If you don’t believe me, go try it yourself. All you have to do is say ‘gold’ to any villager anywhere along the coast of this bay, and he’ll tell you exactly the same story—and he won’t even remember that he said anything at all.”
“That’s ridiculous!”
“Go try it.”
“I’ve never heard such nonsense before.”
“Go try it.”
“You’re just clowning around, Torl.”
“Go try it.”
“All right, I will, and when it turns out that you’ve been lying through your teeth, I’ll whomp all over you.”
“I’m not even a little bit worried, cousin. I know exactly what you’re going to hear every time you say ‘gold,’ because I’ve tried it myself a few dozen times.”
Sorgan snorted and went on out of Torl’s cabin on the Lark, slamming the door behind him.
He came back several hours later with a stunned expression. “That’s the strangest thing I’ve ever come across,” he declared.
“I told you that was what was going to happen, cousin,” Torl said smugly.
“Don’t get too happy about it, Torl,” Sorgan said. “You do know that the Trogs are marching north and that they didn’t pay any attention at all to what we did to their ships, don’t you? That means that we just failed. We were all positive that burning their ships would stop them right in their tracks, but that idea just fell apart on us. I don’t think we can even catch up to those Trogs now. They’re too far ahead of us.”
“I sort of thought so myself, cousin,” Torl agreed. “What do we do now?”
“You, Torl, not ‘we.’” Sorgan said quite firmly. “Somebody’s going to have to go back up to that basin and tell Narasan—and Veltan—that we just failed. Burning all their ships didn’t mean a thing to the invaders. Then I want you to tell Veltan that somebody’s been tampering with these farmers. For all I know, he might even have done it himself, but that doesn’t make any sense at all, does it?”
“Not to me, it doesn’t,” Torl agreed.
“I want you to put on full sail, Torl, and get up there just as fast as you can. Like it or not, we do have two invasions, and there’s nothing I can do to stop the one that’ll be coming at Narasan before many more days have passed.”
“I’ll get the word to him just as quick as I can, cousin,” Torl promised.
“Even quicker would be better.”
4
As luck had it, there was a good following wind as the Lark sailed up along the east coast of the Land of Dhrall, but Torl was fairly sure that luck probably had very little to do with it. Somebody in this part of the world had been doing a lot of tampering here lately. A fair number of events during the war in Lady Zelana’s Domain had made it quite clear that tampering was quite common in this part of the world, but Torl couldn’t for the life of him see just where this unknown tamperer was going. If he was on their side, he should have been trying to stop the second invasion, but it seemed that he was encouraging it instead. Nothing that’d happened down on the south coast made any sense.
On the off chance that Veltan might be in his house, Torl anchored the Lark just off the familiar beach a few days after he’d left the south coast and walked on up to that peculiar building. When he reached it, the wife of Veltan’s friend Omago was waiting for him almost as if she had known that he was coming. Ara, the farmer’s wife, was almost certainly the most beautiful woman Torl had ever seen, and he could not for the life of him understand just why she’d chosen to marry the rather stodgy farmer, Omago. He was certain that she’d have had much better options.
“I don’t suppose that Veltan’s here right now, is he?” Torl asked her.
“I’m afraid not,” she replied in that rich voice of hers. “Did you want to see him?”
“There’s something he needs to know, ma’am,” Torl replied. “I was sort of hoping that I might be able to catch him here. My luck’s been running very well lately, but it looks like it might have gone sour on me.” He shrugged. “It was worth a try, I guess. Have you heard anything about what’s going on up in the mountains?”
“Nothing very specific. I don’t think the servants of the Vlagh have begun their attack yet.”
“That’s something, I suppose. Narasan’s people need to finish building that wall to hold off the enemy, and building a wall a mile or so long is likely to take them a while.”
“What was it that you thought Veltan should know about?” she asked. “If he happens to stop by after you’ve moved on, I could pass it on to him. Did it have something to do with that invasion of the southern part of his Domain?”
“It did indeed,” Torl replied glumly. “Cousin Sorgan was positive that we’d be able to deal with it, but our scheme fell apart on us.”
“Oh?”
“We burned every Trogite ship down there,” Torl said, “and that should have stopped the invasion dead cold, but it didn’t turn out that way at all.”
“What happened?”
“Somebody jerked our grand plan right out from under us. I know that Veltan, Lady Zelana, and their relatives can do all sorts of things that nobody else can do, but it seems that there’s somebody else running around here in the Land of Dhrall who can do even stranger things. That other somebody did something that I don’t think even Veltan could have pulled off.”
“Really?”
“The other somebody stuffed a ridiculous fairy tale into the mind of every single native down along the south coast, and they’ll all repeat that fairy story in exactly the same way anytime they hear the word ‘gold.’”
“How did you find out about this, Torl?” Ara asked him rather sharply.
“I was talking to one of the natives down there—Bolen, I think his name was—and I just happened to mention gold during our conversation. As soon as I said ‘gold,’ his eyes glazed over and he told me this old story, as though he was reciting something. I thought he’d just gone crazy, but after he’d finished he seemed to wake up and go on as if nothing at all had happened.”
“How curious,” Ara said.
“It gets even more curious. Right at first, it didn’t make any sense, but then I had a peculiar notion, and I walked around through several of those villages and said the word ‘gold’ to every single native I met, and would you believe that every one of them did exactly the same thing Bolen had done? Their eyes went blank and each one told me exactly the same story. Somebody—or maybe some thing—is playing a very complicated game down there, and the fairy tale makes the Trogs go even crazier than the word ‘gold’ makes the natives. They all started running off to the north as if somebody had just set fire to their tail feathers.”
She laughed then. “What an amusing way to put it,” she said with a sly smile.
The majority of Commander Narasan’s ships were anchored in the bay at the mouth of the River Vash, so the river itself wasn’t as cluttered as it had been when cousin Sorgan’s men had come down out of the mountains. Torl left Iron-Fist in charge of the Lark, and hurried up Nanton’s streambed to advise Veltan that things in the south hadn’t turned out as they’d hoped.
It was about noon of the next day when Torl reached the top, and he saw that the Trogites had been busy at the north end of the basin. Torl saw that they were building a wall rather than a fort, and their growing wall was already more than ten feet high.
It took him a while to locate Narasan and Gunda, since they were about halfway down the slope that led up out of the Wasteland.
“Back so soon, Torl?” Narasan remarked as Torl joined them. “Things must have gone better than we’d anticipated.”
“I don’t think ‘better’ is the right word, Commander,” T
orl replied. “We burned all those Trogite ships, of course. That only took us a day or so, but the Church soldiers, the priests, and even the slavers had already left by then.”
“Left? Are you saying that they’re marching this way?”
“I wouldn’t exactly call it a ‘march,’ Commander. ‘Run’ would come a lot closer.”
“I don’t quite get your point, Torl,” Gunda said.
“I think we’d better find Veltan,” Torl suggested. “Something very strange happened down on the south coast, and Veltan’s the expert on ‘strange,’ isn’t he? To put this in the simplest way, the invaders are completely disorganized, and they’re all just blindly running toward these mountains as if their lives depended on it. Somebody has been playing games down there, and they’re the kind of games that only Veltan and his family could understand.”
“I think he might be down near the geyser,” Narasan said. “Let’s go find him.” Narasan’s eyes were bleak, and his expression was grim.
“I tried it myself,” Torl told Lady Zelana and her younger brother. “Every time I said ‘gold’ to any native down there on the south coast, his eyes went blank and he recited that same silly story. I listened to the whole thing the first few times, but after that, I just walked away and left the native talking to himself.”
Veltan squinted at Torl. “Did the story stir any odd feelings in you?” he asked.
“Boredom, before long. After you’ve heard the same story five times in a row, it’s not really very interesting.”
“I’d say that we’re looking at a selective infection, baby brother,” Lady Zelana said. “The story excites the Trogites, but it doesn’t have any effect on the Maags.”
“It might even go a bit further, sister mine,” Veltan suggested. He looked speculatively at Torl. “Do you think you remember the story well enough to be able to recite it for us?” he asked.
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