The Treasured One

by David Eddings

  “Well, hallelujah, Jalkan!” Gunda said with a broad grin.

  Padan laughed. “Nicely put there, old friend,” he said.

  Keselo smiled. “Subcommander Gunda was just joking, I think, but what he just said comes very close to being an accurate description of the current clergy of the Amarite church. Jalkan is probably the greediest man in the whole world—right up until you take a look at the higher members of the clergy. They take greed out to the far edge. They believe that everything in the entire world belongs to them—even the people.”

  “And that brings us face-to-face with slavery, Lord Dahlaine,” Narasan added grimly.

  “I was just about to raise that question,” Dahlaine said in a bleak tone. “Was slavery a part of the original Amarite doctrine?” he asked Keselo.

  “Most certainly not!” Keselo exclaimed. “The original Church denounced slavery as an abomination.”

  “It would seem, then, that holy old Jalkan and his friends have strayed from the path just a bit,” Padan suggested.

  “Maybe we should correct that,” Sorgan Hook-Beak declared. Then he grinned wickedly. “I’ve always enjoyed correcting people when they’re wrong.”

  “It’s our duty, friend Sorgan,” Narasan said blandly.

  “You’re going to be busy with the bug-people, Narasan. I’ll take on the chore of whomping the Church people.” He put on a woeful face. “It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s going to have to do it.”

  “Do those idiots in the Trogite Church actually believe that they can own people?” Dahlaine demanded.

  “I’m afraid so, Lord Dahlaine,” Keselo replied, “but the Church very seldom keeps the slaves. They sell them to the slave-dealers, who turn around and sell them to people who own vast amounts of territory but would sooner die than farm it themselves. Over the centuries an occasional emperor felt much as you do about slavery, and he issued an imperial proclamation abolishing the institution, but he almost never lived for very long after that proclamation, since if the Church didn’t kill him, the rich landowners did. There’s a lot of money to be made from slavery, and the people who deal in slaves and the people who buy them aren’t about to let anybody interfere.”

  “I think we might have a bit of a problem here,” Dahlaine said then. “If the Church is corrupt, doesn’t that mean that the Church soldiers are as well? How can we trust people like that to do what we want them to do?”

  “Who said anything about trusting them, big brother?” Zelana retorted. “Somebody, who I dearly love, has taken the matter completely out of our hands.”

  “I think you’re just making this up,” Zelana’s sister declared, sounding more than a little offended. “Nobody could have done that.”

  “You’re wrong, sister,” Lady Zelana disagreed. “Somebody did. I don’t know who—or how—but she’s obviously trying to help us, and we need that help.”

  Aracia glared at Lady Zelana and then abruptly turned and stalked away.

  “What’s your sister’s problem, Lady Zelana?” Sorgan Hook-Beak asked bluntly.

  “She’s just been outdone,” Zelana replied with a faint smile, “and Aracia can’t believe that anybody’s capable of that. She’s also having trouble with Keselo’s description of the Amarite church. There’s a goodly number of fat, lazy people in her Domain who spend hours every day telling her that she’s beautiful and all-powerful. Aracia loves to be adored, but Keselo’s story just raised the possibility that her priests are glorifying her just to keep their positions in what they call ‘the Church of Holy Aracia,’ so that they can avoid honest work.”

  “Isn’t that all sort of silly?” Sorgan asked.

  “‘Silly’ comes fairly close, wouldn’t you say, Dahlaine?” Lady Zelana asked her older brother.

  “Not right in front of Aracia, I wouldn’t,” Dahlaine replied with a faint smile. Then he straightened. “Let’s get back to business here,” he said firmly. “If those Church armies are, in fact, coming here to help us—even though they don’t know it—I think we’d better do all we can to help them.” He looked at Padan. “How are they progressing?” he asked.

  “They’re doing a little better now that we’re providing them with building materials. They’ve still got some distance to go, though. I think our major problem’s going to be the width of that ramp they’re building. It’s only about ten feet wide, and that’s not wide enough to get a significant force up here in a short time.”

  “And,” Torl added, “as soon as any of them get up here and see all that pretty sand, they’ll start running toward it just as fast as they can. If they dribble on down to the Wasteland in twos and threes, the bug-people will have them for lunch.”

  “That’s where we come in, cousin Torl,” Sorgan said. “Our trenches and barricades will definitely slow them down until their friends can catch up with them.”

  “Did you by any chance recognize the voice of this lady who spoke to you while you were dreaming, Longbow?” Dahlaine asked.

  “I’m positive that I’ve heard the voice before, Dahlaine,” Longbow replied, “but I can’t quite put my finger on just who she is.”

  “She was undoubtedly concealing her identity from you,” Dahlaine said thoughtfully, “and that sort of suggests that she’s somebody we all know. Did she just talk to you, or did she show you anything?”

  “She was never visible in the dreams,” Longbow said. Then he frowned slightly. “Her language seemed to be quite archaic—almost as if she were speaking to me from the past.”

  “That might have had something to do with her attempt to conceal her identity from you,” Dahlaine mused. “It’s not really important right now, though. She’s managed to manipulate the thinking of about a half-million Trogites, and even though they don’t know it, they’re coming north to help us. We’ll worry about who she is some other time. Right now we’d better do anything we can to help her. If this turns out the way I think it will, she’s probably already won this war for us.”

  Early the following morning Padan was standing near the riverbank above the thundering waterfall watching as his men, grunting and sweating, were rolling boulders down toward the brink of the gorge from about a quarter of a mile up the slope. “It looks like we’re about to run out of boulders up here,” he muttered. Then he peered down at the river below the falls. “They must be sleeping on the job down there,” he added. “They’re definitely slowing down.” He looked around. “Sergeant Marpek!” he shouted, “Could you come here for a minute?”

  Marpek was a solidly built fellow, which was only natural, perhaps, because he’d made a career out of solid building as one of the best engineers in Narasan’s army.

  “Is there some kind of problem, sir?” he asked as he joined Padan at the edge of the gorge.

  “Is it my imagination or have those idiots down there slowed down quite a bit?”

  Marpek squinted down into the gorge. “They’re still doing the best they can, sir,” he replied. “They seem to be working as hard as they have for the last several days.”

  “The ramp they’re building hasn’t come up more than a yard or so,” Padan protested.

  “I’d be very surprised if it had, sir.”

  “Could you explain that to me—in nice, simple, one-syllable words?” Padan asked. “Try to keep it in mind that I’m not too fluent in the language of engineers.”

  Marpek smiled. “They need more rubble now, sir. The farther up the wall of that gorge they come, the more dirt, gravel, boulders and such they’re going to need. If it was flat, they’d move at the same speed, but it comes up at about a thirty- degree angle, so it takes a lot more rubble to come one foot ahead than it did a few days ago.” He held out his hand and squinted at the space between his thumb and forefinger. “I’d say that they’ve got about three hundred feet—or a hundred yards—to go.” He looked off into the distance, tapping one finger against his iron breastplate. Then he looked just a bit startled. “I hadn’t really given this much thought, sir, but now th
at I’ve put a few numbers together, I’d say that we’ve got quite a long time to wait before they finish.”

  “Throw some kind of number at me, sergeant,” Padan said.

  “At thirty degrees, ten feet wide, and two hundred feet high, I’d say that they’ll need about sixty thousand cubic yards of rubble, sir,” Marpek said.

  “Sixty thousand?”

  “If they’d made it steeper, they wouldn’t have needed so much,” Marpek mused, “but it’s too late to do anything about that now, I’m afraid.”

  “That’s going to take them most of the rest of the summer, Markpek!” Padan exclaimed.

  “That’s fairly close, I’d say.”

  It was shortly after noon when Sorgan, Torl, and Rabbit joined Padan at the rim of the gorge. “What’s got you so worked up, Padan?” Sorgan asked.

  “Numbers, my friend,” Padan replied. “I just received a fairly abrupt lesson in multiplication. Does the term ‘cubic yard’ mean anything to you?”

  Sorgan shrugged. “Three feet by three feet by three feet, isn’t it?”

  “Unfortunately, there’s still another number involved,” Padan added sourly. “How does sixty thousand sound to you?”

  “Just exactly what are we talking about here, Padan?” Torl asked.

  “The amount of rocks and whatnot those people down there will need to finish that ramp.”

  “Where did you come up with a number like that, Padan?” Sorgan demanded.

  “Sergeant Marpek dropped it on me,” Padan replied glumly, “and he’s probably the best engineer in Narasan’s army.”

  “I think you’d better look somebody else up, Padan. That’s not possible.”

  “I’m afraid that it’s very possible, cousin,” Torl disagreed. “The higher up they build that ramp, the more rubble they’ll have to pile up under it.”

  “What if we gave them logs to play with instead of rocks?” Rabbit suggested.

  “Rocks, logs, what’s the difference?” Torl scoffed.

  “If they’ve got logs, they won’t have to pile garbage under them,” Rabbit replied. “If they happen to get our point, they won’t keep on saying ‘ramp.’ They’ll say ‘bridge’ instead, won’t they?”

  2

  The only problem I can see with the idea is that we don’t really have very many axes or saws, sir,” Sergeant Marpek said. “There are plenty of trees on the slope that comes down to the riverbank, and we’ve got plenty of men, but we just don’t have enough tools to get the job done.”

  Padan looked at Rabbit. “Any ideas?” he asked.

  “I don’t have my forge or anvil here,” Rabbit reminded him. “so I don’t think I’ll be of much use.” He hesitated. “Your men could chop trees down with their swords, you know.”

  Padan feigned a look of unspeakable shock. “Blasphemy!” he gasped.

  “I’ve got a fairly reliable whetstone, Padan,” Rabbit added, “so your men should be able to polish the nicks and dents out of their swords if it bothers you so much. Then too, if using their swords is going to offend them so much, they could always use their teeth, I suppose.”

  “Their teeth?”

  “Beavers chew trees down all the time, Padan,” Rabbit said, grinning broadly. “And there’s a bright side to that as well.”

  “Oh?”

  “If they’ve been chewing on trees all day, their teeth will probably be so sore that they won’t want any dinner after the sun goes down. Look at all the money you’ll save if you don’t have to feed them.”

  There were some violent protests when Padan ordered his men to start chopping down trees with their swords, but that came to an abrupt halt after Padan had given them an alternative. “Report back to Commander Narasan. I’m sure you’ll find chopping at turtle-shells with your swords much more entertaining and a lot less boring than hacking down trees with them.”

  Padan’s men used the simplest means of delivering the trees they’d cut down to the Church armies below. They simply pulled them down the slope and rolled them into the River Vash. The two-hundred-foot-high waterfall effectively put the trees fairly close to the Church soldiers.

  It took the armies below a while to come up with the concept of a bridge, and their first attempt was woefully unstable.

  “If those amateurs down there try to roll one more log out on the ones they’ve already got in place, the entire thing will tumble down into the gorge and the whole crew will get killed,” Sergeant Marpek predicted.

  “Oh,” Sorgan said with mock concern, “what a shame.”

  The always serious Marpek actually broke down and laughed along about then.

  There were several minor disasters during the next few days as the Church soldiers kept trying various shortcuts to avoid building a bridge in the standard manner. Padan found the blunders moderately amusing, but the despairing screams of soldiers falling to their deaths on the rocks far below started to get on his nerves after a while.

  Sorgan dropped back from the region just upstream where his men were digging deep, twenty-foot-wide trenches and erecting rudimentary barricades on the far sides of each trench to check on the progress of the Church soldiers. He arrived at the edge of the gorge just as another bridge collapsed, carrying yet another bridge crew plunging to their deaths.

  “How many times has that happened so far?” Sorgan asked Padan.

  “I think I’ve lost count,” Padan replied. He looked over at Rabbit. “Is that the sixth failure or the seventh?” he asked.

  “I make it seven,” Rabbit replied.

  “They’re just wasting time,” Sorgan fumed. “Maybe we should stop giving them all those trees and build a bridge for them ourselves. Lowering the south end of the silly thing down to the upper edge of their ramp would be quite a bit easier than trying to lift the upper end here to the brink of the gorge. Lowering is always easier than lifting.”

  “It might come to that,” Padan conceded. “How are your trenches and barricades coming along?”

  “The first three are all complete,” Sorgan declared. “All except for the final decoration.”

  “Decoration?”

  “Ox came up with the notion, and I think it’ll work out just fine.”

  “What is it, Sorgan?”

  “We go back to using those poisoned stakes,” Sorgan replied. “We want them to slow down, don’t we? After a dozen or so of a man’s close friends fall over dead when they’ve stepped on those poisoned stakes, that man will start to be very careful where he puts his feet down. The ones who come across that bridge later will see all that imitation gold out there and start running as fast as they can, but when a man comes to a ditch that’s about half-full of his dead friends, he’ll stop running right there, wouldn’t you say? And the more they slow down, the more of their friends will catch up to them. If they dawdle around building that bridge right, they’ll give my men enough time to dig two more trenches, and that’ll probably fix it so that their whole army is up here before any of them come out of that last trench. Then we’ll warn Narasan that they’re coming and run off to the west just as fast as we can.”

  “Slick, Sorgan,” Padan complemented the burly Maag. Then he paused. “Don’t you mean east?” he asked. “That’s where Nanton’s pass is located.”

  “I know,” Sorgan replied, “but the river runs along the east side of those trenches and barricades. I swim fairly well, but the current in that river is fierce. I don’t think I’d care to get swept over those falls, would you?”

  “Not one little bit,” Padan agreed.

  It was early the following morning when Narasan came down to Padan’s temporary camp on the west side of the River Vash. Padan had just awakened and he was kneeling by the river, splashing icy water on his face to push away the usual grogginess that clouded his mind every time he woke up.

  “I thought you quit doing that a long time ago, Padan,” Narasan said.

  “Not too likely, Narasan,” Padan replied. “I need to be alert.”

  “The
world always needs more lerts,” Narasan repeated the tired old joke. “How are the Church armies doing now that they’ve decided to build a bridge instead of a ramp?”

  “Quite a bit better than they were right at first,” Padan replied. “They were in such a hurry to get to the land of gold that their first eight or ten bridges were awfully sketchy—like three trees tied together end to end with chunks of twine. After a goodly number of soldiers, priests, and Regulators took up high-diving for a hobby, though, the rest of them started to wake up. A man who’s just been splattered all over a few hundred feet of river beach after he’s fallen about a hundred and fifty feet is a fairly convincing object lesson, wouldn’t you say?”

  Narasan winced.

  “Their latest bridge—which isn’t finished yet—looks to be strong enough to stay in place even if a thousand men try to come across all at the same time. They’ve got braces jammed up against the underside of their new bridge every few inches, I’d swear.”

  “How much longer do you think it’s going to take them to finish?”

  “A couple more days is about all. Then they’ll all dash north, shouting ‘Gold! gold! gold!’ right up until they reach Sorgan’s trenches and those poisoned stakes.”

  “He told me about them when I passed through his camp. He can be a very evil man when he sets his mind to something, can’t he?”

  “Fun, though,” Padan replied with a broad grin. “Those poisoned stakes at the bottom of his trenches will make it almost certain that the entire five Church armies will be coming up to Gunda’s wall all at the same time, and that’s all we’ve ever wanted.”

  “I think I’ll need to reconsider my original plan, though,” Narasan said glumly. “I thought that falling back to the next breastworks every night would give the Church armies enough time to get up there—in small groups, anyway. Sorgan’s stakes will delay them, I’m afraid. We will get more men up there, but it’s going to take them longer. I think I’ll revise the plan and tell the men to hold each breastworks for two days instead of only one.”