The Treasured One

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 tool shed.

As a sort of experiment, Omago removed the crosspiece 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 tool shed 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 me 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.’