It was about midmorning on the small party’s second day of struggling up the narrow streambed when a burly Maag called Grock made a startling discovery. “I just found gold, Cap’n!” he shouted. “Gold! There’s tons of it up there in that rock wall!”
It was Keselo, the young Trogite soldier, who suggested that the little smith from Sorgan’s longship might be the logical one to verify the nature of the yellow flake.
Ara sensed the enormous disappointment of Skell and the rest of the little group when Rabbit proved to them that the bright yellow flake was not gold.
It was fairly obvious that Keselo had known from the very start that what Grock had discovered was not what it appeared to be, and Ara probed the young man’s mind and discovered that what Grock had found was a peculiar combination of iron ore and sulphur.
Ara realized that this was what had aroused that premonition in the first place. If Jalkan’s greed for gold was going to be the reason for Ashad’s second invasion, this false gold might turn out to be very useful.
Ara withdrew her thought from Skell’s scouting party and went into her kitchen to examine some very interesting possibilities.
It required a bit of experimentation for Ara to get the proper mix, but her kitchen was the natural home of experimentation, so on her third try, she produced a sizeable amount of bright yellow flakes that were identical to the one Grock had found in the mountains.
She was very pleased with the results of her experiment—until she saw the heaps of glittering sand lying all over her kitchen floor. Muttering to herself, she went to fetch her broom.
2
The small group of men Nanton the shepherd had led up to the grassy plain above the Falls of Vash were busy exploring the region. It was more open than the ravine above the village of Lattash had been, and that seemed to concern the seafarers quite a bit. Given the number of servants the Vlagh could send charging up out of the Wasteland, Ara could understand that concern.
As evening was settling over the little camp near the geyser, the bats came out, and Longbow the archer quite suddenly came up with a notion that chilled Ara down to her very bones. A single arrow proved that Longbow’s notion had been very correct. The bats were not at all what they had appeared to be, and Ara had a sudden urge to take up her beloved mate and go directly back home.
After a bit of discussion, though, the clever little smith called Rabbit came up with the notion of using fishnets to protect them from the flying enemies, and that eased the tension to some degree.
Then Longbow spoke briefly with the burly Red-Beard. It was fairly obvious that arrows would be the best solution to the problem of flying enemies, and Red-Beard went off to the west to hurry along the archers coming down from Zelana’s Domain. Then Skell sent the gold-hunter Grock back on down to bring more men—and fishnets—up to the basin.
The hard practicality of these men helped Ara to control her sudden panic, and she decided to wait a bit before she grabbed her mate by the arm and ran away with him.
Skell’s brother Torl reached the basin the following day, and Narasan and Sorgan were only a few hours behind him. Skell led them up to the gap at the north end of the basin to show them the most probable route the servants of the Vlagh would follow when they came south.
Then Veltan came crashing in on his pet thunderbolt and advised his friends that the second invasion Ashad’s dream had mentioned was coming up from the south. He went on and on about the incursion into the southern part of his Domain, but Ara pulled her awareness back to her kitchen and then sent her thought south to have a look for herself.
There were several large peninsulas jutting out into Mother Sea on the south coast of Veltan’s Domain, and they formed large, protected bays. There were quite a few farming villages along the shores of those bays, and the wheat-fields stretched inland for several miles.
It was not the wheat-fields that attracted Ara’s immediate attention, however. There were a large number of bulky Trogite ships with red sails anchored in the bay, and the armed soldiers from those ships were going ashore in the vicinity of every village. The soldiers were busily gathering up all the residents of those villages and herding them at sword-point into crudely constructed pens just outside each village as if they were no more than cattle.
It took Ara several minutes to get her sudden rage under control, and it didn’t get any better when unarmed Trogites in flowing black robes entered each pen to harangue the terrified villagers about “the only true god in all the world.”
When one of the villagers in the pen near the largest village on the shore of that particular bay politely advised a fat Trogite who’d just made that announcement that the god of this particular region was named Veltan, two of the black-uniformed outlanders clubbed him into unconsciousness. They might have gone even further, but Ara smoothly deflected one outlander’s club, and he very nearly brained his companion.
Since the origin of this invasion was obviously the filthy-minded Trogite called Jalkan, Ara sent her thought out in search of him, and he wasn’t all that hard to find. There was a farming village on the shore near the central bay here on the south coast, and there were several red-sailed Trogite ships anchored just off the coast. The natives were all penned up, and the Trogite priests and their soldiers had stolen the huts of those natives. Jalkan was in a fairly central hut, and he was not alone. He was speaking with a grossly fat man dressed in an ornate yellow robe.
“Nobody was ever very specific about just where the mines were located, Adnari Estarg,” Jalkan was saying. “I’d imagine that they’re up in the mountains, though.”
“We’re going to need more specific information than just ‘up in the mountains,’ Jalkan,” the fat man said. “There might be gold in this primitive part of the world, but if we can’t get anything more specific than that, it might just as well be on the back side of the moon.”
“That’s why we brought those Regulators along, your Grace. The Regulators have ways to make anybody talk. We know for certain that there’s gold here. You saw those gold blocks I showed you back in Kaldacin. They prove that there is gold in this part of the world, and all we have to do to locate it is turn the Regulators loose on the natives. After the natives see a few of their friends die while the Regulators are questioning them, I’m sure they’ll start to be very cooperative. How long do you think it’s going to take for the slave-ships to get here?”
“A week, at least. The slavers buy; they don’t catch.”
“Things should work out very well, then. It won’t take the Regulators very long to get the information we need out of the natives, and once we have that information, we can sell the natives to the slavers and get them out of our way. There’s a distinct possibility that we’ll make almost as much gold selling the natives to the slavers as we’ll make in the gold-mines.”
“I never pass up gold, Jalkan,” the fat man said with a broad grin.
Ara drew back just a bit. The discussion between those two had chilled her to the bone. These people were absolute monsters. Their willingness to wring information out of people with torture raised a very serious problem, though. The people of the Land of Dhrall had never been very interested in gold, so the farmers here in the south probably didn’t even know what the word meant.
Then something came to her out of nowhere. If the Trogites so desperately wanted to hear about gold, Ara was quite sure she could arrange things so that they’d hear enough stories about it to drive them wild.
She directed her thought to the crude pens where the Trogite soldiers had confined the villagers and conjured up an “ancient myth” which she then planted in the minds of everyone in that pen. From here on, every time one of the villagers heard somebody say “gold,” he’d automatically recite Ara’s absurd story word for word.
Then with a faint smile, she sat back and waited for the fun to begin.
The Trogites that Jalkan called Regulators now guarded the natives, and they were a harsh, brutal group of men who wore b
lack uniforms, apparently to distinguish them from the soldiers, who wore red. The one Jalkan and his fat friend relied upon was called Konag, and Ara didn’t like him at all. She thought it might be sort of nice if he were the one who carried the story she’d conjured up to Jalkan and Estarg.
It was about midmorning when Konag went through the gate of the compound where the villagers were confined and approached a rather frightened farmer. “We need to know a few things about the mountains to the north,” Konag said. “If you’re the one who tells us what we want to know, I’ll see to it that you get more to eat and a more comfortable place to sleep.”
“I’d be happy to tell you, stranger,” the farmer replied, “but I don’t really know very much about those mountains. I’ve always stayed pretty close to home. What was it that you wanted to know about?”
“Where’s the gold?” Konag demanded.
The farmer’s eyes brightened. “Ah,” he said. “You should have told me what you wanted earlier. Everybody around here knows about gold.”
“Oh? How’s that?”
“It was long, long ago when a man of our village grew weary of farming and 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 where 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.”
All in all, Ara was quite pleased with the myth she’d implanted in the minds of the villagers the Trogites had penned up. There was adventure, mystery, and an ending that involved a huge treasure. It was all an out-and-out lie, of course, but it was a very good lie.
Konag seemed stunned by the farmer’s recitation, and he abruptly turned and ran off in search of Jalkan.
The farmer who had just recited Ara’s myth looked quite puzzled—which wasn’t at all remarkable, since he had no memory at all of his performance.
“That’s impossible, Regulator Konag!” the fat priest called Estarg exclaimed when the black-uniformed Trogite told him what the farmer had said. “There isn’t that much gold in the whole world.”
“I wouldn’t be all that sure, Adnari,” Jalkan disagreed. “Veltan gave Commander Narasan ten blocks of pure gold in the harbor of Castano, and he was treating those gold blocks as if they didn’t mean a thing.”
Ara gently increased the level of avarice in the minds of the three Trogites by placing an image of gold in their minds.
“I’ll go on up there and take a look, Adnari,” Konag volunteered eagerly.
“How did you plan to even find the place that peasant told you about?” Jalkan demanded.
“I’ll take a party of Regulators along. They’ll be able to chase down peasants to get information.”
“Don’t steal any of my gold when you get up there, Konag,” the fat priest said in a threatening voice.
“Our gold, Adnari,” Jalkan corrected. “A goodly part of that gold up there is mine.”
The fat man glared at him.
“Let’s be sure it’s there before we start arguing about it, gentlemen,” Regulator Konag said firmly. “It might just be some local fairy tale.”
“If that peasant was lying, I’ll rip him up the middle with a dull knife,” Jalkan declared.
“The peasant told you that everybody around here knows the story about the fellow who found the gold,” fat Estarg said, his eyes squinting shrewdly. “Before you go running off into the wilderness why don’t you ask some of the others if they’ve ever heard it. If they haven’t, then the first peasant was lying through his teeth, and we can all join hands and rip him up the middle.”
The penned-up farmers all confirmed Ara’s myth, of course, and after a day or so, Regulator Konag gathered up a dozen or so of his black-uniformed men and led them up through the farmland toward the mountains lying across the northern boundary of Veltan’s Domain. Their route lay somewhat to the west of the more populated coastline, so they encountered very few real farmers along the way, but Ara provided several imaginary farmers to fill in the gaps—and to repeat her myth.
The more she thought about that, the more Ara came to realize that it was not absolutely essential for Konag and his men to actually climb up into the mountains and look out at some vast stretch of imitation gold. All that was really necessary would be to make them believe that they’d seen it.
It would most definitely solve a problem that had been nagging at her since she’d first come up with her scheme. There were a large number of Sorgan’s sailors and Narasan’s soldiers in the basin above the Falls of Vash, and Ara definitely didn’t want Konag and his men to know that they were there.
Konag and his men dreamed that they were breathing very hard when they reached the top of the imaginary pass that opened out into the basin above the Falls of Vash, but—in their dream, at least—they hurried on toward the wide gap in the ridge line at the north of the basin.
And there they stopped, astonished and awed by the wonder stretching off to the northern horizon. The sea of gold sparkled in the morning sun, and several of Konag’s hard- bitten Regulators actually wept at the sight.
Ara held the dream image before them for perhaps an hour, and then she turned them around and pointed them toward the south.
They were all positive that they were totally exhausted by the time they reached the foot of the vast waterfall, so they decided to stop for the day when they reached their previous campsite—which, in fact, they had never left. This merged dream with reality to the point that Konag and his men were absolutely convinced that what they had dreamed was hard truth. Ara was quite pleased by how well it had turned out.
Then she implanted a sense of urgency in the minds of Konag and his fellow Regulators, so they arose early the following morning and set out toward the south before the sun was even over the horizon.
Jalkan and Adnari Estarg would have much preferred to keep a tight level of secrecy on the matter, but Ara had already bypassed them. Konag’s Regulators were all possessed by an overpowering urge to tell everyone they met about the wonder they had seen, so at least half of the Church soldiers in the encampment on the southern coast of Veltan’s Domain knew about the field of gold before Konag reported it to his superiors.
Konag went directly to the crude hut that Jalkan and Estarg had appropriated upon their arrival.
“Well?” Jalkan demanded when Konag entered. “Was that idiot actually telling you the truth?”
“No,” Konag replied with an absolutely straight face.
The fat churchman groaned. “I knew it was too good to be true,” he grieved.
“No, Your Grace,” Konag disagreed. “When you get right down to it, the native’s story didn’t begin to tell us just how much gold was out there. The golden sand that blankets that desert beyond the mountain goes all the way out to the horizon. My men and I were fairly high up in the mountains, so I’d say that it was at least fifty miles to the horizon, and I have no idea at all of just how wide it was.”
“Did you bring any back with you?” Jalkan asked eagerly.
“Adnari Estarg ordered us not to,” Konag replied. “We were supposed to verify that foolish story and then come right back.”
“I’d really like to see some of it, Konag,” Jalkan whined in a voice filled with disappointment.
“It’s not really all that far north, Jalkan,” Konag told him. “You can go up there and look at it all you want if it means that much to you.”
3
Ara’s thought surveyed the south coast of Veltan’s Domain to get a better idea of just how many Trogites were now in the region. There were villages all along the coast, of course, and by now each village had been appropriated by Church soldiers, and there was now a slave-pen attached to each village.
As the days passed and word of Konag’s discovery reached those other villages, an increasing number of Church soldiers decided that army life no longer suited them.
At first, the desertions were almost always made under the cover of darkness, but then Ara implanted a growing anxiety in the minds of the soldiers who had remained behind. Her message got right to the point. “If you wait too long, those who have already deserted will get all the gold, and there won’t be any left for you,” seemed to work quite well.
The soldiers began deserting their posts in broad daylight at that point, and after a few days, the priests who were theoretically in charge of the scattered villages began to send urgent messages to Adnari Estarg, begging him to send them more soldiers.
But by then, of course, there were no more soldiers, since they were now deserting in battalions.
The messengers stopped coming to Adnari Estarg’s door a few days later, and then the priests began to arrive, pleading for help.
Adnari Estarg ordered the priests to return to the villages to which they had been originally assigned, and a few of them even obeyed his orders—but not really very many. Ara extended her warning to include the priests, and very soon, most of the priests had joined the ranks of the deserters.
Ara’s thought lingered in the vicinity of the village where Jalkan and Adnari Estarg were growing increasingly distraught. She found that there was a certain charm in their growing sense of panic.
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