The Treasured One

Skell was leaning over the rail of the balcony above the map squinting down at the replica of the south coast. ‘I don’t see any towns of much size down there,’ he noted. ‘It sort of looks to me like there are a lot of small villages along that coast. If the Trog church-men are trying to round up all the natives so that they can sell them to the slavers, there’ll only be four or five ships anchored just out from each village. That should make things a lot easier for us. We’ll never come up against a massed fleet, so all we’ll have to do is just sweep in and set fire to every Trog ship we come across. One sweep along that coast will eliminate their whole fleet.’

‘That sounds about right to me, Skell,’ Sorgan agreed. ‘Then we can go on out to sea a ways, spread out, and make sure that no more Trog ships ever reach that coast. The ones who are already there will be trapped with no hope of reinforcements ever reaching them. Once their fleet’s been destroyed, I don’t think they’ll try to go on up toward the mountains. Without those ships, they won’t have any way to fall back if they meet an overwhelming enemy force. Only an idiot would take that kind of a chance. First we burn, and then we blockade. That second invasion stops right there.’

‘Sounds good to me, cousin,’ Skell agreed.

Torl had a few doubts, though, but he kept them to himself.

‘I think tar would work better, Cap’n,’ Buck-Teeth, the second mate of the Lark said. ‘When you set fire to tar, it sticks to anything it touches, and it spreads fire a lot better than oily rags.’

‘He might have a point there, Cap’n,’ Iron-Fist agreed. ‘And we could have a big pot filled with boilin’ tar right on the deck where the arrow shooters are workin’. We could have a whole lot more burnin’ arrows a-stickin’ outta them Trog ships if we did ‘er that way.’

‘It’s worth a try, I guess,’ Torl agreed. ‘We’ve got a lot of money riding on this, so let’s not pass up any opportunities to make things turn out the way we want them to.’

‘We got us some time t’ play with, Cap’n,’ Iron-Fist said. ‘Sooner or later we’ll come up with the best way t’ do this.’

‘Have you come up with a way to keep the men on the other ships from seeing what we’re doing? If they start imitating us, our bets might just start falling apart.’

‘We got all our arrow-shooters a-practicin’ down below deck, Cap’n,’ Iron-First answered. ‘It’s a little dark down there, but we put a lantern over the target so’s the shooters can see where their arrows are a-goin’. It ain’t quite as far as we’ll be a-shootin’ when we’re a-doin’ it fer real, but it’s prolly close enough. Trog ships are mighty big, so they’ll be awful hard t’ miss.’

‘Maybe we might want to swing in just a little closer when we first come across the Trog scows. We’ll come up with egg all over our faces if our first wave of burning arrows hits the water instead of those ships.’

‘And we’ll lose our shirts as well,’ Buck-Teeth added.

‘You just had to go and say that, didn’t you?’ Torl said. ‘I don’t think I’ll sleep very well until we find out if our scheme’s going to turn out the way we want it to.’

‘Don’t worry, Cap’n,’ Iron-Fist said. ‘We’ll make it work. When y’ git right down to ‘er, it has to work. We’ve got just about every penny on the Lark a-ridin’ on this scheme of our’n, an’ iffen it don’t turn out like we want it to, the crew might just decide t’ th’ow us all overboard.’

‘Thanks, Iron-Fist,’ Torl replied in a flat voice.

Sorgan’s fleet was nearing the southern tip of the eastern-most peninsula jutting out from the south coast when a huge fleet of wallowing Trogite ships came sailing up toward them.

Things were more than a little tense until a small sloop came across to the Seagull. As it turned out, the Trog fleet was not the fleet of church invaders, but rather it was the remainder of Narasan’s army.

Gunda spoke for a short while with cousin Sorgan, and then he returned to his own fleet to continue on up the coast. Sorgan sent out several skiffs to advise everybody to stay out of Gunda’s way, and after the Trogite ships had passed, cousin Sorgan ordered his men to raise the sail on the Seagull and proceed along the coast.

When the fleet reached the southern-most end of the first peninsula, cousin Sorgan signaled for a stop. Back during the war in the ravine above Lattash, they’d all learned how valuable the flag-waving means of communication was, and cousin Sorgan had come up with a rudimentary imitation of the much more complex Trogite version. Sorgan’s code only had four commands – ‘Stop’, ‘Hurry up’, ‘Run away’, and ‘Let’s talk’ – but it was enough for right now.

Torl rowed his skiff over to the Seagull to find out if the general plan had been changed.

‘Are we all ready?’ Sorgan asked when Torl and brother Skell joined him in the cabin at the stern of the Seagull.

‘We know what we’re supposed to be doing, cousin,’ Skell said. ‘Let’s get on with it.’

‘I don’t think so. Let’s sit here out of sight until first light tomorrow morning. Give the oarsmen some time to rest up. We’ve got to move just as fast as we can once we start.’

‘I don’t think “fast” is likely to be involved all that much, Sorgan,’ Skell said doubtfully. ‘We’ll have to slow down each time we come to a Trog ship. Since we’ll be throwing torches, we’ll have to wait a while to make sure that each Trog ship’s on fire and that the fire’s out of control. If some Trog on one of those ships is more than half-awake, all he’ll have to do is grab up our torches and throw them over the side, and that particular Trog ship won’t be on fire no more.’

‘He’s got a point there, cousin Sorgan,’ Torl grudgingly admitted. ‘If this is going to work the way we want it to, we should probably do our very best to set fire to every Trog ship along this coast in one single day.’

‘I don’t see how that’s possible, Torl,’ Skell protested. ‘It takes a while to get a good fire going on a ship. It’s not like we could just sail by and shout “fire” you know.’

Torl started muttering curses under his breath as his dream of winning a fortune in bets flew out the window. ‘All right, cousin,’ he said to Sorgan, ‘if you’ll pass the word to the other ships in the fleet that all bets are off, I’ll tell you just exactly how we can burn every Trog ship along this coast in a single day.’