The shaman asked, “What do you know of dragons, Elf-Blood?”
“I saw a black one flying in the distance when I was a child, but everything I know about them came from books, and you pointed out books can repeat lies.”
“When the elves arrived on Home under the star Blue Haven, the dragons welcomed them. Because it takes a huge hunting area to keep a dragon well fed, less than a hundred dragons lived in the whole word. Every ten thousand years or so, an adult dragon might mate and spend a few months together with another of its kind, but except for that, they had no one to talk with, no community. The elves were happy to include the nearby dragons in their community. Firebreath the Red Dragon lived in the Snowy Plains of Min near the highest mountains in Glastamear. She became extremely friendly with the elves who settled nearby in the Forests of Many Lakes.
“The elves and dragons learned from each other and became lasting friends; for over eight hundred years elves and their children lived in these lands and were happy. Because they were devoted friends, when the elves began to use life magic to make the other intelligent beings of the world, the dragon promised never to hunt the elves’ children. It was when the elves brought forth their last children, the humans, that the trouble began.”
Chapter 7
The shaman began the song; light-hearted and joyous it began. One by one the other naiads joined until over fifty voices sang in harmony of the elves and dragons and the many children the elves brought forth to settle every type of terrain upon the first continent.
To each race they gave its magic and to each they showed a land in which to dwell. They made the fairies for the ancient hardwood forest, the centaurs for the great prairie of the east, the naiads for the tidelands of the west, and the dwarves for the great caves of the Blue Mountains. Because there were less than three thousand children, elves, and dragons in the whole world, there was never conflict because each had its homeland. Only a few dozen children were born each century among all the tribes of naiads, fairies, dwarves, and the seven other races. Their scarcity increased the offspring’s value to her tribe, so that every child born on Home under the light of New Haven was treasured and loved by the whole community and grew to be a happy adult member of their tribes.
Since Little Brother Moon had been the elves’ home as they traveled between the stars, the elves sometimes returned to it to gather things they could not make easily even with their powerful magic. During one such trip, the elf shaman, Gripton, noted how tiny the impact of the elves’ arrival had been upon the world even after eight hundred years. He estimated that it would be a hundred thousand years before the elf-children had even filled the first continent and almost a million before they made the whole world their home.
Obert sang the creation of mankind solo; his voice an octave higher conveying alarm.
The human children bred like rabbits; in only three hundred years there were thousands of them. They did not know how to live gently upon the land. In each generation their healing magic grew weaker and less common. To help reduce the suffering of their human children some elves returned to little brother moon and brought the humans sheep, chickens, corn, grapes, and many other living things so that the thousands could grow food and not strip the land like a plague of grasshoppers.
Fifty other naiads joined the song. Soaring yet gracefully, they described the great dragon of the Mountains of Min. The Red Dragon was old beyond counting because dragons never really age; they just get bigger each century. Since nothing can kill a dragon, they had no fear, but they were concerned about the humans. The Red Dragon saw Gripton’s error and discussed it with her.
“Release me from my promise to never kill your children. I will take care of your mistake in only a few hundred years. When they’re gone, you can create some other better children in their place. Their sheep turn the high hills to dust by eating every stalk. They hunt the antelope to extinction on the great prairie from horseback, they pollute the mountain streams with their waste, and they burn the ancient forest through their stupidity and carelessness. The human men fight battles over the rocky useless hillsides and kill one another with their arrows and knives. Let me remove them from our land and restore the natural order.”
But Gripton could not agree, for they were her children even though flawed.
Then the great Red Dragon flew to the highest ice-covered peak of the Min Mountains and thought about her problem. She could travel to some other home because dragons were scarce in the world and there were many places where she could hunt in peace far from the plague of mankind, but eventually they would spread and defile her new home. She wondered why she should be the one to move after living in Min for twenty-seven thousand years.
Her promise to the elves had not included the sheep and other creatures the elves had introduced to feed the men who bred too fast for the land to support. She decided to eat their sheep so the mountain meadows would not be bare. She would eat their horses so they could not hunt the antelope to extinction. They would then at least leave her alone in the Mountains of Min.
She started her project that very day by eating every sheep belonging to the tribe who polluted her high meadows with their revolting odor. Other men called this tribe the Stinking Coal Baggers because they had no skill at properly curing leather and the concept of a bath had never occurred to them. The Baggers were truly the foulest of humans and the Red Dragon wanted them gone from the land of Min.
To supplement their winter rations every autumn, the Baggers gathered leather sacks of coal from the foothills and carried the bags to nearby towns to trade for grain. Without sheep the Baggers were even more impoverished. Although they lived among large ore deposits, they knew nothing of smelting. They had no skill at construction and built no houses, living all together in one large cave where bats shit on them every day and fleas spread to everyone, increasing their misery to a level shared by no other human tribe. They knew only flint knapping to make arrows and knifes. Their bows were weak. They did not know of the atlatls to throw their spears a greater distance, therefore their hunting trips often failed.
After the dragon devoured their sheep, the tribe of Baggers lost people every winter and were down to about a hundred suffering souls when they decided to become bandits and raid the caravans that passed by the edge of the mountains. Their ironwood bows were so weak that they could not outshoot the caravan guards who used double-reflex horn bows, and many men were killed without the tribe ever taking a prize.
In the fourth desperate winter after the sheep were killed, a child was born. He was huge, killing his mother as he forced his way from her belly. Perry they called him and by the time he could crawl, he grabbed food from every other child and the weaker adults to feed his insatiable appetite.
By the time Perry was six he was as tall as an adult, and the Bagger tribe had shrunk to fifty adults and a dozen children. Perry lorded over the children and even the adults were afraid of his temper and his skill with a flint knife. He knew no fear and was especially quick to cut if offended.
When Perry was thirteen, he fashioned a huge ax from flint. One end was knapped to a point and the other was rounded. It was so heavy that Perry, who was twice the weight of any other Bagger, was the only one who could lift it. The same day he finished the new weapon he killed the Bagger chief, Coal Face, and two other strong men and assumed leadership of the clan. He organized the Baggers as never before, forcing them, even the children, to gather coal and carry it to nearby villages for trade all through the spring, summer, and autumn. Because of their grueling toil, more grain was stockpiled and the population grew that winter for the first time since the sheep were killed.
Now the naiads’ tone changed from mocking to serious. They formed a circle with Michael in the center and held hands as they walked slowly around Michael while singing in perfect harmony.
Hating their brutal chieftain, the men of the tribe conspired to eliminate him. Because he was both a giant in size and dim of wit, they decided it wa
s safer not to fight him directly. In the early spring, the Bagger men organized a hunting party in the high mountains to look for mountain goats to add meat to their diet.
High in the icy peaks Perry woke to find the rest of the hunting party gone. They had snuck away during the night following a trail of cairns they had left behind as they climbed to the highest peak in the whole of the Mountains of Min. As they retreated, the Baggers dismantled each rock pile they passed so there would be no trail home for the dimwitted Perry to follow.
Perry the Bagger chieftain wandered that high place for three days until he came upon the hidden nest of the immense Red Dragon. She was returning from a hunting trip to the great plains of the east. Perry gasped when he saw a huge scarlet egg alone in the hidden nest. He did not know that it was the first she had laid in eleven centuries.
Perry was starving because his tribesmen had taken all the food when they abandoned him, and he was about to open the egg to eat the dragon embryo within. As he raised his giant ax, Firebreath the Red Dragon returned. Although she’d promised not to hurt any of the elf’s children, a threat to her egg was beyond the power of her promise. She was about to immolate Perry, but there was still a chance he would drop the ax and destroy her egg. She hesitated.
“Stinky Bagger chieftain, I will give you a gift beyond value if you lay down that ax.” She had thought of a way to create some havoc among the humans, to save her egg, and to still not violate her commitment to her friends the elves.
“What gift? How do I know you won’t kill me as soon as I put the ax down?”
“Foolish man, dragons don’t know how to lie. I will never kill you if I promise. I will give you the gift of fire magic. You and all of your male children will be the only humans who can perform powerful fire spells. You’ll soon be king among your kind and be treated as a god, and your sons will rule the world of men.”
Perry put down his ax and the Red Dragon laughed. What better revenge upon the humans she despised than to put the foulest, stupidest, and most evil man among them as their leader. He would foment wars and destruction and pass the fire manna to his own offspring, keeping the destruction going for generation after generation. All the while she would have kept her promise to the elves.
All the naiads laughed at the great joke as the song ended.
Chapter 8
After they finished the Epic of Perry and the Red Dragon, the shaman led Michael away from the palm grove where the rest of the naiads had resumed their attempts to make baby naiads. They walked north along the black sand in the direction of the city of Northport.
“Elf-Blood, what did you think of our epic-comic song?”
“I believe it’s true, but it left me with lots of unanswered questions. For example what happened to Perry? I’m sure he didn’t really ascend to his heavenly throne where he punishes us for not paying tithes to his church.”
“That sorry story was never made into song. It’s not one naiads would be willing to sing. After returning to his cave, Perry immolated every man who had been on the hunting party. He killed every boy without fire manna because they were not his true sons. He made the rest of his tribesmen slaves in the coalfield except that he took every comely woman as his wife. The following spring he took the nearby village of Min Hollow and again enslaved all the men, killed all the male children, and took every comely woman as his wife. Four years later, he was trying to fornicate with a woman who was nine months with child. He pursued her to the village well where he tripped on a stone and she pushed him in.
“Fire blasted from the well for two days as he struggled to get out. After he finally drowned, the villagers filled in the well and dug a new one. By the time he died, Perry had forty-three sons who became the first priests of Perry Ascendant.”
“You always refer to me as Elf-Blood. What’s behind that? My parents were just farmers in a small village of Riverton in Hearthshire Provence.”
“After Perry was given fire magic, the Red Dragon flew to the Forest of Many Lakes in the far north to see the elf shaman Gripton and explain his actions. They reached an agreement to do nothing.
“The elves knew something the dragon did not. Gripton understood that his human children had twenty generations for each generation of naiads or dwarves. Because of their short lives and the myriad of their offspring, humans would change and develop faster than the other children of the elves. Dragons and elves had not changed much for millions of years. In even one million years, humans might be a completely different race.”
Obert explained, “Gripton realized that someday the seed and egg of two humans would combine in a way that an elf-blood would evolve. This is how the first elves arose on the world of terra before the beginning of their great journey to fill the star cloud. A human would be born with all the manna and power of an elf but the physical form of a human. Of course, the change would occur by chance. Not even Gripton could say if it would be a thousand years or ten thousand, but to the elves and dragons, a thousand years is like a summer afternoon to a short-lived human.
“Gripton knew that a human with elf-blood would have the power to remove the Red Dragon’s curse on mankind. You must begin the great quest; you must produce the next epic song and remove the Perry’s curse from your kind. You’ll destroy the Church of Perry Ascendant and restore healing magic to the place it should have among your kind. We naiads are proud to be part of the beginning of your epic song.”
They walked along the beach without talking for half an hour as Michael thought about what he had heard.
He broke the silence. “Obert, I appreciate the help you’ve already given. Those knight protectors would have killed me without Arianna hiding my manna, but I’m sorry, there’s no new epic song. I’m just a scared apprentice healer hiding from the terrifying power of Perry’s church.”
Obert laughed. “Epic heroes never realize who they are until their story is over. You already have almost everything it will take to end the power of the silly Perry Ascendant religion. Over the next few weeks, we’ll teach you many more water magic spells including quench fire manna. You’ll be able to suppress all fire magic within a thousand paces or so, maybe even farther with your huge manna level. You’ll learn float that will let you walk on water but also even walk on rain or fog. On a rainy or foggy day, you could walk to the highest tower of the Great Mother Temple of Min Hollow. You can already hide your own manna and make yourself invisible. By the time you leave us you’ll be ready to really shake things up.”
Although Michael was skeptical, it couldn’t hurt to spend a few weeks learning every skill the naiads were willing to teach him, but there was something he hoped to do before beginning his studies.
“I would be honored to study under the great shaman of the Black Sand Pod, but there is something I must do before I begin. Last night I detected the manna of four fleeing healers. I think they were sailing toward Mitchell Island. This morning I saw a schooner with the manna of six knight protectors who seemed to be in pursuit. I must at least try and save my guild brothers. I must find the fastest possible way to follow.”
“I can get you there before the knights catch the healers, and I’ll teach you some important spells along the way.”
Obert led Michael about fifty yards inland from the beach where a metal barge about ten paces by five paces with one end shaped like the prow of a boat. Although it had no mast, tiller, or obvious means of propulsion, there was a chain harness arrangement at the front.”
“We’ll need some protection from the sun, a barrel of fresh water, and some human food. I’ll ask Arianna to organize that while I teach you the first spell you’ll need, quench fire manna. Once you cast it no fire mage within the sound of your voice will be able to perform fire magic for the next day or two.”
“I take it you have some manner of propelling this barge fast enough to beat a schooner with her full sails set and a six-hour head start.”
Obert looked at the heavy ungainly barge and nodded. “We sometime use th
is to haul stuff, but there are faster and more powerful swimmers in the sea than naiads. We’ll use a pod of narwhales who are good friends to the naiads. They can take turns in pairs pulling her and get us to Mitchell Island, probably even before your guild brothers arrive. You’ll be there tomorrow about noon.”
Six naiads pulled the loaded barge through the protective reef until the more powerful narwhales took over. The gray-body whales were about twenty feet long with a twisted ivory tusk extending two feet beyond the nose of each of the males. Two of the streamlined creatures swam into the harness and began to tow the barge. Once they reached their cruising speed, the wind blew through the barge faster than a fast horse at full gallop. Obert and Michael sat under the protection of a jury-rigged cabin, while Obert began to teach the spells Michael would need to help his guild brothers.
Chapter 9
As dawn broke purple through the eastern clouds, it cast silver highlights on a calm sea. Squalls were visible ahead, and Michael wondered how the shallow-drafted barge would behave in high seas. Unlike Obert, he could barely swim and had never been at sea; even these gentle waves were making him slightly nauseous.
When Michael recast the manna detection spell, he realized that they had passed the fire mages during the night and that they were now close to the sloop carrying the healers. He pointed out its single sail on the horizon to Obert who passed the instructions to the narwhales. The barge changed angle and sped up to close the distance, and within an hour, they were approaching the small single-masted craft whose headsail carried her rapidly towards Mitchell Island, now visible as a blue line in the distance just past the line of squalls ahead.
As they neared the sloop, four crewmembers stood at the gunnels with notched arrows in the bows, but when they saw Obert, they lowered them. All sailors regard naiads as friends; there’re hundreds of sailors’ legends of naiads saving sailors from drowning and doing other acts of kindness. Even threatening one with a bow was regarded as risking a lifetime of bad fortune.
The Pogrom of Mages: The Healers of Glastamear: Volume One Page 3