Ara was rather fond of the farmer known as Bolan, since it had been his recitation of her “myth of gold” that had neatly snared Konag, so she briefly touched him to point out the fact that since there weren’t any soldiers guarding the slave-pen anymore, there wasn’t really any reason to remain there. Bolan got her point almost immediately, so after the few priests remaining in the village had gone to bed that evening, Bolan and his friends tore down the western wall of the slave-pen and vanished into the night.
Seven Trogite ships, all painted dead black, came into view early the following morning, and Ara was fairly sure she knew exactly who—and what—the men on those ships were. If she was right, Bolan and the other villagers had left just in time.
A fair number of bleak-faced men came ashore, and one of the few priests who still remained in the village went down to the beach to meet them. “I’ll go tell Adnari Estarg that you’re here, Captain Brulda,” the young priest said to the one who appeared to be the leader of the strangers.
The grim fellow laughed. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you, young man,” he advised. “If you wake Estarg up before noon, he’ll find all sorts of unpleasant things for you to do. Where are the slave-pens? We’d like to take a look at the merchandise before Estarg starts telling us fairy tales about these new slaves.”
“The Adnari wouldn’t lie to you, Captain,” the young priest declared.
“Oh, really?” Brulda said sarcastically. “And will the sun come up in the west tomorrow as well? Estarg wouldn’t know the truth if it walked up and bit him right on the nose. We want to see the slaves, boy. Lead the way.”
“Are you sure these slaves are healthy?” one of the other strangers asked the priest as he led them toward the slave-pen. “We bought five shiploads of slaves down the coast of Tanshall last year, and more than half of them died of some kind of disease before we were six days out.”
“Oh, they’re very healthy,” the priest assured him, “and they’re farmers already, so their new owners in the Empire won’t have to waste all that time teaching them what they’re supposed to do.”
“That might even raise the price we’ll get for them,” the slaver agreed.
The empty slave-pen with its broken-down wall upset the visitors more than a little, and they rushed into the village to discuss the matter with Adnari Estarg.
“You idiot!” the one called Brulda bellowed at the fat churchman. “Why didn’t you have any guards around that rickety pen?”
“What are you talking about, Brulda?” Estarg, who seemed to be still about half-asleep, demanded.
“Your slaves broke out during the night, you fool! Your slave-pen’s empty!”
“That’s impossible!”
“Go look for yourself, you dunce!”
Jalkan rushed out of the hut, and he came back swearing after a little while. “They’re gone, Adnari,” he declared. “They broke down that rickety wall on the west side of the pen sometime during the night and ran away.”
“Go chase them down!” Estarg shouted.
“All by myself? Don’t be ridiculous!”
“But all of my money is escaping! Help him, Brulda!”
“Not on your life, Estarg,” the slaver said. “I came here to buy slaves, not to capture them.”
The bickering and screaming continued for quite some time, and Ara found it all rather entertaining.
Then she saw something that promised to brighten her day even more.
Several dozen Maag longships, led by Sorgan Hook-Beak’s Seagull, were coming into the large bay.
“The ships are burning, Adnari!” The young priest who’d met the slavers on the beach screamed, bursting into the crude hut in a state of sheer panic
“What are you talking about?” the slaver Brulda roared.
“Some pirate ships just swept in, and they set fire to every ship in the bay!”
Ara found the reaction of the assorted scoundrels in the hut quite satisfying. When six men all try to go through a doorway at the same time, things start to get quite physical. Eventually, the slaver Brulda managed to bash his way through the others with the stout club he had hanging from his belt.
“My ships!” he cried out in anguish. “My ships are on fire! Somebody do something! Save my ships!”
There was nothing that any of the Trogites on the beach could do to save any of the ships in the bay, and the men still on board those ships were forced to swim ashore to keep from being burned alive. The Maags quite obviously knew exactly what they were doing, and by now nothing short of a torrential rain would even slow the fires, and the sky was clear and blue, with no rain in sight.
The Trogites on the beach watched in horror as their only means of returning home went up in smoke and flame. They had come as conquerors, but now they were trapped.
“Ah, me,” Ara murmured with mock sympathy. “What a shame.”
And then she laughed. There were several ways she could have made her mocking laughter audible to the panic-stricken Trogites, but she decided against it. Her little scheme still had many more twists and turns to entertain these scoundrels, and she was sure she’d enjoy them more if the Trogites didn’t expect them.
“You’re exaggerating, Jalkan,” Adnari Estarg declared. “These natives are little more than sheep. They wouldn’t dare to do something like that.”
“I wouldn’t want to bet my life on that,” Jalkan replied bluntly. “We didn’t really treat these people very well when we came ashore, so I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to find out that they’re making plans right now to come back here and kill every one of us.”
“Amar wouldn’t permit that!” the young priest who’d met the slavers on the beach protested.
“Grow up, boy,” Brulda the slaver said. “Amar’s nothing but a myth, and this is the real world.” He turned to Jalkan. “Do these natives have weapons of any kind at all?”
“I saw an archer during the first war who could kill people from a quarter of a mile away, Brulda. These natives do know how to kill an enemy, and right now the word ‘enemy’ means us. If we still had those five armies we had when we came here, we might be all right, but they all deserted when they heard about the gold in the mountains, so we’re all alone and totally unprotected. If we stay here, I don’t think any of us will still be alive next week.”
“That gets right to the point, I guess,” Brulda admitted. “I don’t see that we’ve got much choice. If we want to keep breathing, we’ll have to go north and see if we can catch up with the deserters.”
Ara smiled. She hadn’t really left these rascals many options, and the slaver Brulda had chosen the correct one right at the start.
“I’ll need some of your men, Brulda,” the fat priest declared, “probably twenty or so.”
“What for?”
“They’ll have to build a sedan chair for me to ride in if you’re sure we’ll have to try to catch up with the deserters.”
Brulda laughed at that point.
“What’s so funny?” Estarg demanded.
“You didn’t really think that my men would pick you up and carry you, did you, Estarg?”
“I’m an Adnari in the Church of Amar, Brulda,” Estarg proclaimed in a haughty tone of voice. “Your men have a religious obligation to serve me in any way I think is proper. It’s beneath me to walk as a commoner would.”
“Stay here, then. It doesn’t matter to me. I’m going north, though—just as fast as I possibly can.”
“I forbid it!” Estarg shouted.
“Forbid all you want, fat man,” Brulda replied, “but I stopped taking orders from you when my ships were all burned. The way things stand right now, it’s every man for himself. If you want to go north with the rest of us, you’re going to have to walk—with your very own feet.”
“That’s outrageous!”
“You do remember how to walk, don’t you, Estarg?” Brulda asked with an evil grin.
“But—” Estarg put both hands under his belly.
&
nbsp; “It’s walk or die, Estarg, and it’s entirely up to you.”
Ara despised the slaver Brulda, but she was forced to admit that he did have a way with words.
All in all, Ara was quite pleased with the way this had turned out. There were now two enemy armies in Veltan’s Domain, but they were not really armies in the conventional sense of that word. The servants of the Vlagh were driven by the need for more land and more food, so they would mindlessly rush south, no matter what—or who—stood in their path. The servants of Jalkan—or Estarg, actually—were driven by their hunger for gold, and they would just as mindlessly rush north, no matter what stood in their path.
At some time in the far distant past, Ara had heard someone speak of “a war of mutual extinction.” It was a rather stuffy sort of term, but in this situation it seemed to come very close to what was really going to happen.
THE GREAT WALL
1
Subcommander Gunda had sailed south to the seaport of Castano on board the Ascendant, the ship of a distant cousin, and when they reached their destination, Gunda realized that his ancestral home was not nearly as attractive as he remembered. The harbor itself was littered with floating garbage, and the stone columns that supported the piers extending out into the harbor were covered with slimy green algae. The “magnificent” buildings had all been turned a dirty grey by the perpetual cloud of smoke that came belching out of every chimney in town.
Gunda set aside the more comfortable clothes he’d worn on the voyage south and pulled on his black leather uniform and his polished breastplate and helmet and belted on his sword. This was something in the nature of an official call, so it was appropriate for him to wear his uniform.
The waterfront of Castano was laced with stone piers, and it had that distinctive odor of rotting fish that quite probably hung over every seaport in the entire world. The streets of the town were narrow and dirty, and most of the people Gunda encountered had that lofty expression that virtually every Trogite in the Empire seemed to be born with. The Land of Dhrall was very primitive, but it was clean—cleaner by far than the birthplace of civilization. Gunda sighed and went on through the port city to the south gate.
It was early summer now, and Gunda was quite sure that the gently rolling hills to the south of Castano would push his disappointment aside, but the hills were not nearly as impressive as he’d remembered them to be. His memories of the western part of the Land of Dhrall, where towering mountains ran down to the sea and gigantic trees reached up toward the sky, kept intruding, and Gunda found the hill country to the south of Castano rather skimpy by comparison.
The temporary encampment of the bulk of Commander Narasan’s army lay just to the south of Castano, and it was more or less a canvas-tent duplicate of the army compound back in Kaldacin. That similarity made entering the camp almost like coming home for Gunda.
He walked through the open gateway in the log palisade surrounding the camp, sharply returning the salutes of the pair of guards, and went directly to the only building in the compound. Tents were adequate for sleeping, but army headquarters required something just a bit more substantial.
The clerks and various administrators in the large central room of the headquarters building all rose and came to attention as Gunda entered.
“Relax, gentlemen,” Gunda told them. Strict military courtesy had always irritated Gunda, for some reason. “Where’s Andar’s office?”
“Back through that hallway, Subcommander,” a very young officer replied, pointing toward the rear of the central room.
Gunda nodded and went on through the office.
Subcommander Andar was a bit taller than the average Trogite, and, like most of the higher-ranking officers of Narasan’s army, his hair was touched at the temples with silver. He was a solid, dependable man, and Narasan had left him in charge of the bulk of the army that was still here in the Empire.
Andar was dressing down a very junior officer for some blunder when Gunda entered the office. Andar had a deep, rolling voice, and he could turn oratorical at the drop of a hat. When he saw Gunda enter the office, though, he abruptly dismissed the young soldier.
“Did that boy make a serious mistake?” Gunda asked.
“Not really,” Andar replied. “He’s been getting just a bit full of himself here lately, is all, so I thought it was just about time to take him down a peg or two. How did things go up north, Gunda? We haven’t heard a thing since the advance force left Castano.”
“Well, I guess we won the war in the western part of Dhrall—sort of,” Gunda replied a bit dubiously. He took off his helmet and absently brushed his hair forward to cover his receding hairline. “There were a lot of things going on there that I didn’t entirely understand.” He looked around at Andar’s office. “Are the walls here fairly solid?” he asked his friend. “Some things happened up there in Dhrall that we probably wouldn’t want to get spread around.”
“It’s secure, Gunda,” Andar assured him, “as long as you don’t shout.”
“Good.” Gunda sat down in the chair beside Andar’s desk.
“You encountered a few problems, I take it,” Andar rumbled.
“More than just a few, old friend,” Gunda replied. “You probably won’t believe this, but our revered commander has come down with a bad case of friendship for a Maag pirate who goes by the name of Sorgan Hook-Beak.”
“You’re not serious!”
“I’m afraid so. The peculiar thing is that it worked out quite well. The Maags are undisciplined, but they’re very good fighters.”
“They’re monsters, Gunda!”
“Maybe, but they’re not nearly as monstrous as the things we were fighting.”
“Barbarians, I take it?”
“Several steps below barbarians, Andar. I don’t think they even qualified as animals.”
“Could you be a bit more specific, Gunda? I want to know just exactly what we’re likely to be coming up against.”
“You’re not going to like it much,” Gunda said glumly. “I think Narasan should have held out for more gold.”
“That bad?”
“Even worse, I think. If I understood what I was told correctly, the things we were fighting were only part human. The rest was a mixture of bugs and snakes.”
“I think your load’s starting to shift,” Andar scoffed.
“Everybody’s load shifts up in that part of the world, Andar. We kept coming up against a nightmare while were still awake. One little nip from those bug-snakes will put you in your grave right there on the spot.”
“That’s not the least bit funny, Gunda.”
“Do you see me laughing? I’m not making this up, Andar. You’d better take everything I tell you seriously, because your life could depend on it.”
“Are the natives up there as helpless as our employer suggested?” Andar asked.
“The natives of Veltan’s Domain might be, but there’s an archer up in Zelana’s Domain who doesn’t seem to know how to miss. He was the one who told us how to use the enemy’s own venom to kill other enemies.”
“Is that really ethical, Gunda?”
“We were fighting bugs, Andar, not people. Ethics aren’t relevant when your enemy isn’t human.” Gunda paused. “It’s going to take you a while to hire enough ships to carry all of our men on up to Veltan’s Domain, wouldn’t you say?”
“Quite a while, I’m afraid. Sea-captains love to haggle, for some reason, and sometimes it takes half a day to hire just one ship. Were you planning an extensive visit to the local taverns to celebrate your homecoming?”
“Not really,” Gunda replied. “I’m fairly certain that I know approximately where the commander and the rest of the advance force is likely to be bound for, but I’m not sure that’s where we’ll be fighting the next war. I think I might want to drift around the waterfront just a bit and find one of those dinky little fishing sloops—like the one Veltan used to take Narasan on up to the Land of Dhrall before the rest of us in the a
dvance force went on up there. I’ll have one of the clerks draw you a copy of my map so that you’ll be able to find your way through the channel to the southern part of the Land of Dhrall. Then I’ll go on ahead and talk with Narasan and find out just exactly where he wants us to go ashore. Then I’ll come on back. I’ll probably meet you somewhere in that channel through the ice, and I’ll be able to guide you to the place where Narasan wants us to land.”
“That probably would save us quite a bit of time, Gunda.” Andar squinted slightly. “Did we lose very many men up there?”
“Several thousand at least.”
“I don’t suppose that Jalkan happened to be one of the casualties,” Andar said rather hopefully.
“I’m afraid not. The commander had to reprimand him a few times, but that’s about as far as it went.”
“What a shame,” Andar said regretfully.
“Don’t give up hope, my friend,” Gunda said with a tight grin. “It’s only a question of time. Sooner or later, somebody will kill Jalkan, and then we’ll be able to mark the date on our calendars.”
“What for?”
“I was thinking along the lines of something in the nature of a national holiday.”
“I’d be more than happy to celebrate that one, my friend,” Andar agreed.
Gunda moved around the seedy-looking waterfront of Castano looking for a reasonably priced fishing sloop for the next few days while Andar went through the tedious business of hiring enough merchant ships to carry the bulk of the army up to Veltan’s Domain. Although Andar had access to the army treasury, Gunda was fairly certain that his friend would go up in flames if his sloop cost the army too much.
Gunda finally located a yawl that seemed to suit his purpose, and then he introduced Andar to the scruffy old fisherman who wanted to sell it. The two of them were haggling spiritedly when Gunda left the shabby waterfront tavern to have a word with his distant cousin, the captain of the Ascendant, about the rudiments of steering a boat. Despite his family background, Gunda knew next to nothing about boats.
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