The Pogrom of Mages: The Healers of Glastamear: Volume One (3 page)

Chapter 5

They all rose and began to walk along the black sand. In the distance, Michael saw a giant rock jutting up between the reef and the shore. It seemed to be their destination.

He thought the naiads’ version of the
Reel of Passage
might be the true one because he knew the Church of Perry Ascendant was really a nest of fire mages, and there had never been a time when none of the fifteen kingdoms of man had been at war. If he’d created men, he’d be disappointed too.

“What do you know of holy Perry, Arianna? Do your songs talk of him and his church?”

“Maybe tomorrow morning we’ll gather on the beach and sing the song of
Perry and the Red Dragon, Firebreath
. It tells of Firebreath’s revenge for the attempted destruction of her egg by the fool Perry and of her great prank on humankind to exact her revenge.”

It was near sunset when they reached their destination. What he had thought was a rock was actually a cut stone tower stretching about forty feet above the waves. It had crenellation around the top and a single wooden door for entry near the waterline. Small round glass windows like portholes circled the top floor.

“Arianna, this tower was built with metal tools, and some of you have metal tridents. If you use no fire, where do you get metal for tools and weapons?”

“What you’ve heard is true; we’re thieves. It’s not difficult if you can go invisible and know
open all locks
.”

“The myths always say you leave a pearl or two in place of whatever you take.”

“That part is true. There is a certain ethic to our pilfering ways. Sometimes we leave a pretty shell and sometime an emerald from a shipwreck, but most often a pearl. It’s part of the fun to hide and watch the discovery of the theft. Some people are thrilled and a few are really mad. We don’t do it often because there is not much we need that humans produce.”

“I thought all of you lived in the sea, not in stone towers.”

“The tower is just for guests like you. It’s your home for as long as you like. You’re exhausted; rest and we’ll see you on the shore a few hours after daybreak.”

Michael was not a good swimmer because he’d been raised in an inland village with only a small creek, but Arianna had taught him
water breath
. He said the mage-tongue words to invoke it before he began his swim.

The tower’s steps extended down into the water so it was accessible even during low tides. He found the door opened easily and he climbed the circular stair until he entered a single spacious room. He investigated his temporary home. It was cool in the stone tower now that daylight was fading, and the naiads had left him a bin of coal even though they never used fire.

The fireplace had a cooking pot hanging above the coal grade, and a stone saltwater basin contained two lobsters and six small crabs. A pipe provided fresh water from a rain catchment on the roof. Michael wondered if this room was his future. The naiads had been good to him, but he knew this tower would never be his real home.

He lit some coal with the fatwood and flint and put water on to boil. He climbed a ladder to the roof while he waited for the water to get ready for the lobster. Father Moon was big and blue in the eastern sky and Little Brother Moon was setting over the western sea. The Great Dragon stretched high above with the impressive Red Nebula forming its sinister eye. He wondered how many of these stars were homes to elves, their children, or other intelligent beings.

He cast
detect all manna
with the full force of his manna. Around the reef were more than a hundred water manna glows from naiads who had made the tideland their home. They seemed to swim into openings in the reef as they retired for the night.

North up the coast at least twenty thousand paces, he could see a strong point of fire manna in use and many smaller glows. That was probably the high priest of Westport and his priests and knights. He wondered if they had gathered to flay and burn one of his guild brothers.

Back east he detected three manna glows he recognized as the knight protectors who had followed him through the Great Black Thicket. They seemed to be heading back to Hearthshire Town to report his death.

Far at sea at the limit of his range he noticed four manna glows of healers. At least some had escaped by sea. He was uncertain where they were headed, but only Mitchell Island lay in that direction. Was there any safe place?

With a heavy heart he went down to prepare dinner and go to sleep.

Chapter 6

Michael woke at first uncertain where he was. After a few seconds, he remembered the past few days were no nightmare. William and probably eight hundred other guild members were dead. Maybe a few dozen had timely warning, but the church would have taken records from the guildhalls; they would know exactly who had eluded them.

Michael thought of his hometown of Riverton. He knew all eighty people who lived there, but he never expected to return home. His grandmother had been a famous master healer who was visited by the sick from all the nearby villages. His grandfather was a successful farmer. He didn’t remember much of them. His grandmother had died when he was two and his grandfather died following year.

His parents had farmed the most fertile plot of land near the Blue River. They were prosperous by village standards, and it was that reputation for success that had brought the brigands who killed them. It was the year he moved to Hearthshire Town for his apprenticeship. The brigands noticed that his parents had the largest house in town. One night they murdered them, and searched their house for hidden treasure. There was no treasure to find. Michael had vowed to find and kill them, but his mentor William redirected his anger into further study of healing as a more noble way of honoring his parents.

The bed was comfortable, stuffed with dried seaweed rather than feathers, and even softer than his bed at William’s house. It smelled of the sea. He was relaxed and recovered from his ordeal. He stayed in bed and tried to decide on his next move, enjoying a lazy quiet morning, remembering sad things and recalling happy times too.

Since he could now hide his manna, he could return to a human town and perhaps create some sort of life. That gift of water magic from the naiads was priceless. His problem was that the men of Glastamear seldom moved from one village to another. A few like him might move to a larger town for an apprenticeship, but at nineteen he was too old not to have developed a trade already. He had no skill but healing and any attempt to practice that trade would bring the church.

He climbed to the top of the tower to relieve himself and discovered a two-mast schooner under full sail and headed west. His spell revealed the glow of six fire mages on her deck. The boat tacked to move in the same southwestern direction that the fleeing healers had taken last night. Sparsely populated Mitchell Island was the only land on that course.

It couldn’t be a coincidence; he suspected someone had confessed the healers’ escape plans to the church. He knew the priest could extract information from anyone; there were no secrets kept by those they took alive. Every healer would confess to being part of the murder of late King Justin and his court. Confession before flaying and burning was always done in the public square and the citizens of Glastamear would probably believe it.

He had no money and no skill he could practice. The skill-less and land-less poor of Glastamear had few choices except to indenture themselves in the mines where on average they died by twenty-five or to sharecrop some poor track of land where they gradually starved. The crown would take almost anyone as a king’s soldier, but the training was brutal and sadistic and the life usually short because of the endless war with nearby kingdoms. He wasn’t certain he could kill anyone even in his own defense. Healers didn’t kill people.

He returned to his room, and discovered that while he was on the roof one of the naiads had brought a bowl of mangos and coconuts for his breakfast. They were a considerate race; he knew they didn’t eat these things themselves, so someone had gone to some trouble to get them for him. They didn’t get diseases like humans, but maybe some had injuries he could treat as partial recompense.

A few hours after breakfast, Michael swam ashore and joined dozens of naiads on the beach among the palms. Arianna came to meet him and led him into the crowd and introduced him to a huge male naiad named Obert, chief shaman of the Black Sand Beach pod.

“Welcome Elf-Blood, we’ve been expecting you for a couple of thousand years” Obert said in a deep-sea voice.

“He doesn’t know yet,” Arianna said with a grin.

Obert also smiled about some inside joke. “Oh yes, humans don’t know the comic
Epic of Perry and the Red Dragon
. We’ll need to sing it for him.”

“Michael, I need to tell you something about humans you may not realize,” Arianna said as if passing on bad news. “Humans don’t always tell the truth. All of the children of the elves except humans can tell when any other being lies so there is really no point of a lie except as part of a joke. When humans tell a fib, other humans can’t always tell.”

“That’s no sheep shit! Our whole church is just a financial scam; they’re merely a nest of Perry-damned fire mages pretending their spells are miracles from God. My parents and their friends paid those malignant hypocrites tithes their whole lives, even when they had too little left for themselves.”

Arianna continued, “Please don’t be insulted, but humans also have no long-term memory. If a naiad hears an epic song, we can remember every word three hundred years later. Humans can’t even repeat it the following morning.”

Obert moved forward and put his hand on Michael’s shoulder. “Elf-Blood, we mean no offense, but the song we will sing is two thousand years old; it’s the exact truth as sung by our ancestors at the beginning of the human race. We can tell no lies; this story of Perry is how it really was. The humans invented writing because they had no memory and liked to tell lies. Even a naiad can’t tell if a book lies.”

Like every child in the Kingdom of Glastamear, Michael had spent at least one hour each day studying the
Sacred Text of Perry
. From the age of four until he had entered his apprenticeship with William, he’d spent four thousand hours of studying bullshit. The naiads were trying to tell him that writing was a way of telling a lie over a long period of time, a way of reinventing history.

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 was 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.