Treasured One Read online

  “You’re probably right, Ara,” Omago agreed. “The wild stories we’ve been hearing are starting to make me a little cross.”

  “I’ll go with you, dear heart,” Ara said briskly. “I’m just as curious as you are.” That struck Omago as a bit strange, but he let it pass.

  They rose from their bed, dressed themselves, and went on up the hill in the warm spring darkness. When they reached the house, Veltan was standing in the doorway. “I was hoping that you’d stop by,” he said. “Please come in. I have a great deal to tell you, and I don’t have much time.”

  “I’m glad you came home, Veltan,” Omago said as he and Ara followed Veltan up the stairs to the room where Yaltar spent most of his time. “The shepherds up near the border of your sister’s Domain have been telling me all sorts of wild stories, and I’d like to know what’s really going on up there.”

  “You might want to know, Omago,” Veltan said bleakly, “but I don’t think you’re going to like it very much.”

  They went into the cluttered room, and Ara looked around. “Where’s Yaltar?” she asked.

  “He’s currently in the care of my sister,” Veltan replied. “I don’t think he’s quite ready to ride my pet just yet.”

  “Good thinking,” Ara replied.

  “All right, then,” Veltan said, “as it turns out, Yaltar is indeed one of the Dreamers, and his dream gave us a glimpse of the future. The creatures of the Wasteland have invaded Zelana’s Domain, but Yaltar’s dream gave us time to make some preparations. Zelana went off to the west and hired an army of Maag pirates to fight the war in her Domain, and I went south and hired some professional soldiers to help us defend this part of the Land of Dhrall. I took an advance party of Trogite soldiers up to Zelana’s Domain to lend her a hand.”

  “Some of the shepherds told me about that,” Omago said. “I thought they were just making it up.”

  “No, Omago, it’s really true. The outlanders are more advanced than we are, and their weapons are made of iron—or bronze in some cases. All of the tools and weapons here in the Land of Dhrall are made of stone or animal bones, but metal weapons are much better.” Veltan took a knife out from under his belt and handed it to Omago. “That’s an iron knife, and I’m sure you can see how much stronger it is than flint or bone could ever be.”

  Omago took the peculiar-looking knife and carefully rubbed his thumb across the edge. “Extremely sharp, isn’t it?” he observed.

  “Indeed it is,” Veltan agreed. “Did the flood do much damage down here?”

  “It could have been worse, I suppose,” Omago reported. “A fair number of people lost their houses, and I’ve heard that quite a few on to the south of here were drowned. It’s subsiding now, so I should be able to get some more accurate numbers before too much longer.”

  “The flood was a bit extreme, perhaps, but it was necessary. The buglike creatures that serve the Vlagh were invading my sister’s Domain, and Zelana’s Dreamer conjured up that flood to stop them until our hired armies were ready to meet them. The flood drowned thousands of them, and the Vlagh had to send new forces out of the Wasteland. The enemy force was using a ravine as their invasion route, and our forces have managed to block it off. We can’t really be sure how long the enemy forces will keep trying to break through. They aren’t really very bright, but sooner or later, I think they’ll give up and change direction. If they come south, we’ll have to be ready to meet them—probably up near the Falls of Vash.”

  “Do you think your hired army will have enough time to get here before we’re overrun?” Omago asked.

  “I’m sure they will. They have large ships, so they’ll come by sea rather than marching overland. I’m going to try to persuade my sister to send some help as well. Her people are hunters, and they’re excellent archers. The commander of the army I hired is a brilliant strategist, and once he gets his people in place, it’s not very likely that our enemy’s going to be able to get past him.”

  “I don’t think we’ll be of much help, Veltan,” Omago said dubiously. “We should be able to provide food for your outlanders, but we don’t even have anything resembling weapons. The shepherds use slings to protect their flocks from wolves, but other than that—” Omago left it up in the air.

  “We’ll see, Omago. Talk with the other farmers and see how they feel about this. I think the most important thing right now is to start gathering up supplies. The Trogite army I hired has about a hundred thousand men, so we’ll need a lot of food.”

  “I’ll pass the word along, Veltan, and we’ll get started.”

  “I knew I could count on you,” Veltan replied. “I think I’d better get on back. I wanted to warn you about what’s probably coming, but for right now, the war’s going on in Zelana’s Domain, so I want to be there in case she needs me.”

  Omago had a growing sense of apprehension. Nothing in his background had anything to do with war, so he didn’t have the faintest idea of what to expect.

  “Don’t worry so much, dear heart,” Ara told him as they went on back down the hill. “Just do the best you can and let Veltan do the worrying.”

  “For the moment, helping him worry is about the only thing I can manage, Ara,” Omago replied glumly.

  3

  The metal knife Veltan had given him opened some enormous possibilities for Omago. He immediately saw dozens of ways to improve common tools, but that would probably come later. For the moment, he felt obliged to concentrate on weapons. As nearly as he was able to determine, a weapon should serve two functions—hurt your enemy, and prevent your enemy from hurting you.

  The metal knife could probably damage any enemy who came too close, but if the enemy had weapons of his own, things might start to get a little sticky.

  “I wish this thing had a longer handle,” he muttered. Then he suddenly felt just a little foolish. Many of his own tools—particularly in his orchard—consisted of long poles with a cross-piece firmly attached so that he could pull the branches of his fruit trees down and pick the fruit without climbing up the tree. The longer handle he needed was right there in his toolshed.

  As a sort of experiment, Omago removed the cross-piece from one of his harvest poles and firmly lashed the knife to the tip. The pole stopped being a tool at that point and became what might be called a weapon. Omago tried a few practice jabs with his modified pole, and it seemed that it definitely had some potential. If his enemy came running at him, a jab in the belly or the face with that sharp knife would most likely hurt the enemy, and it might even kill him. Not only that, the length of the pole would keep his enemy from getting anywhere at all close to him.

  “Well, now,” he murmured. “Isn’t that interesting?”

  The notion of deliberately hurting people was completely alien to the farmers of Veltan’s Domain, but if the stories Omago had been hearing lately came anywhere near to the truth, the approaching enemies were not people. A few of them might look like people, but that was probably just a hoax. The term that had sort of drifted down from Zelana’s Domain had been “bug-men,” and that might be very useful. If Omago stressed the word “bug” when describing their enemies, the local farmers wouldn’t feel at all guilty about exterminating them. On occasion, swarms of locusts had attacked the fields, and the local farmers had found that grass fires were a fairly effective way to deal with them. It occurred to Omago that the word “bug” might be even more useful than metal weapons. Farmers start feeling belligerent every time they hear that word.

  All sorts of possibilities were coming to the surface, and Omago went home to supper filled with enthusiasm.

  “What are you grinning about, Omago?” Ara asked as he sat down at the table.

  “I don’t think we farmers are going to be quite as helpless as Veltan seems to believe. Turning tools into weapons isn’t nearly as difficult as I thought it might be, and I think I’ve stumbled across the solution to a much bigger problem.”

  “Oh?”

  “Farmers will go to any
lengths to protect their fields from bugs, and if I understood what Veltan was telling us about these invaders correctly, they’re at least part bug. All I’ll have to do is stand on a hill and shout ‘Bug!’ As soon as they hear that word, every farmer in Veltan’s Domain will come running to help me stamp them out.”

  “That’s very interesting, dear heart,” she said. “Now eat your supper before it gets cold.”

  Omago sent word to several of his friends, and that evening they came across the fields to his house. He took them out to his toolshed and showed them his improvised weapon. They all seemed quite interested.

  “Do you think Veltan could get any more of these knives for us, Veltan?” the bulky wheat farmer Benkar asked. “If we all had metal knives like that one of yours, we could tie them to poles like you did, and then we could lend the outlanders a hand when those bug-men come down out of the mountains.”

  “I’m not all that sure, Benkar,” Omago said a bit dubiously. “The outlanders might not want us getting in their way when the fights start, and I don’t really have any idea of just how valuable this knife really is.”

  “It’s something to think about, Omago,” the bearded shepherd Nanton said. “If all of you farmers had sharp poles like that one you’ve got, you could slow the bug-men down, and then I and my shepherds could rain rocks on them with our slings. Not very many of them would come out of a meeting like that alive. Some of the stories that came down from Zelana’s Domain suggested that the outlanders sort of looked down their noses at her people—right up until her bow-and-arrow men started killing bug-people by the hundreds.”

  “If somebody tries to look down his nose at me, I’ll knock his teeth out!” the small farmer Selga flared.

  “We’d have to practice for a while,” the farmer Eknor said.

  “How can we practice if Omago’s got the only iron knife in the whole of Veltan’s Domain?” Benkar demanded.

  “It’s the pole that does most of the work, Benkar,” Eknor said. “We can practice jabbing with just the poles. Then when the outlanders get here, they can give us knives to tie to the end of the poles and we’ll be ready to go to work. It won’t really be too much different from what we do when we harvest wheat. All we have to do is walk side by side in a straight line—harvesting bug-men instead of wheat.”

  Omago managed to conceal his grin. This was turning out even better than he’d hoped it would. The word “bug” had brought all the local farmers to his side almost immediately, and they were obviously feeling very belligerent. It was entirely possible that they weren’t nearly as helpless as Veltan seemed to believe they were. Nanton and Eknor had responded to the threat exactly as Omago had hoped they would. Things were definitely looking up.

  As the days passed, Omago’s “bug-men” warning brought more and more farmers and shepherds in from the surrounding territory to join the impromptu army. Eknor instructed the farmers in the business of holding their still-harmless poles steadily out to the front and keeping their lines straight while Nanton gave the shepherds extensive training in the art of hitting targets with their sling-thrown rocks at increasingly longer distances.

  They’d been at it for more than two weeks when on a sunny afternoon a crash of thunder shook the ground and Veltan was there. “What are we doing here, Omago?” he asked.

  “It sort of came to me that my knife needed a longer handle,” Omago explained, “so I tied it to a long pole, and it started to look more like a weapon than just a tool. The other farmers thought that was very interesting, and we’re hoping that the outlanders might give us more of these knives.” He looked around to make sure that none of the other farmers were close enough to hear him. “I cheated just a little,” he said quietly. “After you told me that our enemies were part bug, I started calling them ‘bug-men.’ Farmers get very belligerent when somebody says ‘bug,’ and when word got out, they all came running to join the fight. Then Nanton and the shepherds joined us with their slings. I think the outlanders might be a little surprised when they find out that we’re not quite as helpless as they might have thought we were.”

  “Very good, Omago,” Veltan said. “As soon as Rabbit gets here, I think I’ll be able to persuade him to make regular spear-points for our farmers. They work better than just tying a knife to the end of a pole.”

  “Who’s Rabbit?”

  “He’s a little Maag who works with metal. Once your men have metal spear-points—and venom—I don’t think any of the enemies will be able to get past you.”

  “What’s venom?”

  “Poison. The creatures of the Wasteland are part snake, and their fangs are venomous. Up in my sister Zelana’s Domain, all her hired soldiers dipped the points of their weapons in that venom. It killed hundreds of the servants of the Vlagh. Anyway, Dahlaine’s Dreamer, Ashad, had one of ‘those’ dreams, and the enemies are definitely coming this way. I don’t think we need to worry much, though. The outlanders will almost certainly be here in time to help us hold off our enemies.”

  “I hope so,” Omago said. “The farmers and shepherds here are getting better, but I don’t think we’re quite ready to fight this war all by ourselves.”

  “We’ll see, Omago,” Veltan said. “I’ll go see if I can hurry the Maags along.”

  Now that the planting was done, more and more farmers were drifting in, drawn by the stories that had been going around. As Omago was fairly certain would be the case, the visiting farmers were all extremely curious about the iron knife Veltan had given him, and terribly disappointed when he couldn’t tell them where they could find what Veltan had called “metal.” Quite a few of them just turned around and went home at that point, but enough of them remained to expand Omago’s growing army. Training the newcomers was very tedious, but Omago was fairly sure that it’d be worth the trouble, so he stuck with it for the next several weeks.

  Then, early one morning, the familiar crash of thunder announced that Veltan had come home again.

  Omago dressed himself, and then he and Ara went up the hill to Veltan’s oversized house to ask him how the war in the West had turned out.

  “Everything turned out even better than we’d expected,” Veltan told them. “We lost the village of Lattash, unfortunately, but I guess that was a small price to pay for our victory. The Maags and Trogites are coming here to help us now. If things turn out as well here in the South as they did in the West, we’ll win this war too, and that might persuade the creatures of the Wasteland to go back where they came from.”

  “Wishful thinking, dear Veltan,” Ara said. “Bugs aren’t really that clever.”

  “When do you think the outlanders will get here?” Omago asked. He wasn’t very comfortable with the notion of having alien helpers in the upcoming war.

  “Probably within the next day or so,” Veltan replied. “Zelana’s been tampering a bit, so the winds are being very cooperative.” He frowned slightly. “You might want to warn the womenfolk, Ara. Narasan has his soldiers pretty well under control, but Sorgan’s Maags are sort of rowdy, and they get ideas when they see young women.”

  “I’ll pass that along,” Ara promised.

  “How long do you think it’s going to take for us to get our hands on more of these metal knives?” Omago asked.

  “We’ll talk with Rabbit as soon as he arrives,” Veltan replied. “Don’t lock the notion of ‘knife’ in stone, though. I’ve noticed that Rabbit can be very creative. If you tell him what you want the weapon to do, he’ll come up with the best form to get the job done. The metal arrowheads he made for Longbow and the other archers were much more advanced than the flint ones they’d used in the past.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Omago said.

  4

  Did you want me to take my men on down to the beach before the outlanders arrive tomorrow, Veltan?” Omago asked just a bit dubiously.

  “I gather that you’re not very enthusiastic about it,” Veltan observed.

  “Well, not really,” Omago conceded
. “These strangers are professionals, and when you get right down to it, my men are still stumbling quite a bit. The outlanders might laugh when they see us pretending to be soldiers, and I’d probably lose half of my men right then and there. Wouldn’t it be better if you had a chance to talk this over with the strangers first?”

  “I see your point, Omago. All right, then. You and I’ll go down to the beach by ourselves.”

  “Ara wants to go too. She hasn’t seen Yaltar for quite some time, and she misses him.”

  “Good idea. I want her to meet my sister anyway.”

  “When do you think we should leave?”

  “After you’ve had breakfast should be soon enough. Zelana advised me that the fleet won’t arrive until about midmorning, and it’s only about two miles to the beach.” Veltan squinted for a moment. “Now that I’ve had some time to think my way through this, I’m having some second thoughts about bringing those entire armies here. I’ll need to bring a few of the officers, but I think maybe we should leave the rest of the outlanders on board their ships until we decide to march them on up to the Falls of Vash. Let’s keep the possibility of unpleasant confrontation to a minimum if we can.”

  “Whatever you think best, Veltan,” Omago agreed.

  The first hint of the approaching fleet was the mass of sails along the horizon, and the sheer numbers indicated by those billowing sails stunned Omago. Ara, who stood at his side, however, didn’t appear to be overly impressed. Ara’s reactions to things were sometimes very peculiar.

  As the fleet drew closer in the golden summer sunlight, Omago noticed certain differences. Some of the ships appeared to be very fat, while others were as skinny as saplings. “They don’t seem very much alike, do they?” he said to Veltan.

  “They were built with different purposes in mind,” Veltan explained. “The wide, slow ones were built to carry large numbers of people or cargo. The slender ones were built to go fast so that they can catch the slow ones and rob them.”