The Higher Price, Part I

(source unknown)

The old man looks down at the children assembled by his feet. "Tell us the story of how we came to the sea, Grey-Hair", one of them burbles, pulling urgently on the man's long, tattered dull-red robe. The child's hand is smeared with what remains of her fish-stew lunch. The girl probably hasn't washed all day.

He reaches down. With gingerly determination his gnarled fingers extricate the girl's filthy hand from the folds of his recently cleaned robe. She finds he has more strength in his ancient, bony, sun-spotted limbs than she'd thought possible, a tenacity that defies easy resistance. Her fingers are peeled away. When he's done, and her eyes are stretched impossibly open, he remembers what it was like to be young. Despite himself, he pats her lightly on the head, silently reassures her that he's not going to eat her whole. He shoos her away, not impatiently.

"You know that story, er, little badger-mongers", he chides in a gentle voice. "It's a Hearth-Story, meant for cold Western nights, not smelly ships."

"But we want that story, you tell it so good", she says.

The wizened figure draws a deep breath and nods his head. Yes, yes, they always ask for that story at this time of year, when the Gathering is almost complete. Two of the children, probably identical twins, and at most eight years old, offer an explanation.

"My mum says she don't want to tell us, 'cause it's too long."

The other cheerfully adds, "An' she says you're old, an' if we wants to hear it, we've gotta hear it soon 'cause don't we all know that you won't be staying among us fer-ever, like. Um."

A wheezy chortle escapes from somewhere deep inside the old man's throat. "Yes, yes, don't we all know." He turns, stares sidelong out at the nervously expectant mob of children, suddenly bristles with false menace. The children fidget. The jumpy one nearest the door inches closer to the exit.

A tiny boy sniffles and wipes his nose on his arm. He's impossibly young. How can they be so young? the old man thinks. Was I ever that young? It seems like aeons ago. A barely remembered shadow of a former life, many times removed. Like someone else's memories, or a story told to him by a close friend, or maybe just a dream. The memory of a short lifetime spent on solid ground, long ago.

His face splits into a wide grin, his eyes wide, and the forbidding visage is transformed. The children jump back, laughing. "Hra! And will one of you fetch me some water if I tell your story, and leave a tired old man in peace for the rest of the afternoon?"

A pirate's dozen scraggly heads vigorously nod in unison. The youngest one leaps up on sturdy legs and races out the door in an instant, effortlessly compensating for the gentle heave of the ship's floor as if born to a life on the rolling seas. A sprightly blur of motion and she's disappeared into the blinding daylight outside. They're something to watch, the old man observes, they're like a troop of bright-eyed monkeys clambering over a wind-rocked tree, confident and fearless. He scratches his head and searches his memory again for the story that all young children want to hear.

In a moment the girl returns with a gourd of fresh water and presents it to the mysterious and much loved old man.

"Hm. Yes. And now you'll be wanting that story, I presume?"

"Yes!", a dozen voices chorus.

"Well, it's not short in the telling, and not a tale to take lightly. Your word that none among you will speak before I finish?"

Their heads bob in energetic agreement. He takes stock of his age-worn voice. It's lost someof its timbre over the years. He feels the throat-tightening induced by the ship's motion. The pitch and yaw of the gargantuan yarrow-wood ship around them makes him slightly sick, even after all these many years; he was never meant for this life on the sea.

He bids the child closest to the door to close it and seal it shut, blocking out all light but the faint glimmers that seep through cracks in the deck walls. He closes his eyes, nurses his jug of cool water. After a moment the litter of children quiets, and not even a whisper can be heard. A sniffle or two, of course. All tiny ears and eyes are focused, waiting.

The tale is familiar enough. He's told it so many times, he can almost feel himself drifting off into an alternate world of his own as the words come mechanically to his lips.

"The tale you seek is a tale of great ages past, now all but forgotten. It was long, long ago, in the time after the Great Revolution. That Great Revolution was long and bloody, a story of mighty heroes and evil villains and Great Battles of hundreds of warriors on wide beaches smeared with the blood of fallen. The whole of the Inner Sea was plunged into raging chaos!", and he raises his arms in an expansive gesture.

"In this time whole nations were destroyed, brother fighting brother, and where their fabled and ruined cities can be found today no-one knows. The Great Floating City of Yliris was torn asunder and sank beneath the stormy waves of Cape Truro. The jungles swallowed bejewelled Makrat and magnificent Girlith of the Great Walls, and the last King of all the Isles, Conqueror of the Inner Sea, Bergrum the Wicked, fled to the land of Tlon, far, far away, vowing one day to return and rule again..."

He opens one eye and scans the crowd. All the children are wide-eyed, their mouths agape, even the tiny little curly brown-haired one by the door who keeps whispering quiet questions to a larger neighbour, obviously her brother. The old man smiles, and gives her a quick glance; she's instantly silenced. Without even a momentary pause, he continues.

"The great and terrible Kings had at long last been expelled, but in their absence woeful wars wreaked terrible havoc throughout the islands. Don't just believe an old man; the islands bear the scars of this terrible time in our day. You've seen the Isle of Muir's Sorrow? Once it had great forests. In this forest those who took flight from Bergrum the Wicked were burned by his evil magic, and the fire consumed the whole island. Today it's nothing but a terrible place of sand and waterless desert, with empty ruins where once great cities were carved from the earth itself."

At this several of the older children nod their heads in awed agreement. They've seen the ruins. They've seen the graves.

"Soon after the expulsion of the Kings and the last of the Urban Wars, the five Great Islands joined together to form the League."

He spits at the name.

"No more slavery, no more evil kings, and the butchers of the Cult of Kren the Hydra were supressed."

The children remember the terrible stories of Kren the Hydra, how his stony face swallowed the heads of children whole and was bathed in their blood. Not a few flinch involuntarily.

"But not long after, in the time of the Zeare Amairga, an even greater evil, a quiet and insidious menace crept into the isles of the Inner Sea, and the people of the place once called Kaladon threw off the schackles of the hated Charter..."

And with the old man's words a dozen little hearts are drawn back, back to an earlier age, the age of their parent's parent's parents, an age of heroes and tragedy and myth and misty lore, and the ancient storyteller remembers, too.

A rag-tag collection of rebels and Citizen Delegates gathered on the Melitene, Kaladon's central hill. In addition, each newly-organized syndicate had also sent one representative to hear the Zeare's emissary in the city's central square. The baking, dusty heat of a summer day lent a deathly stillness to the scene, and under the white noonday sun, there was no breeze to relieve the air of its dessicating pressure. Three hundred nervous rebels eyed the richly clothed enforcer with a finely balanced mix of fear, awe and hatred. It was unclear which emotion would eventually dominate.

The city's massive copper statue of the first Zeare loomed over the crowd, holding the Charter in one hand and a jagged obsidian-bladed sword in the other. Her stern metal visage surveyed the populace, gazing in quiet contempt on the assembled peasants, debtors, criminals, turncoat soldiers, former servants, ex-bonded labourers, freed slaves, minor bureaucrats, miscreants and merchants. The green-tinged copper was chipped from age and neglect, but several rebels had also tried to deface the statue recently. They'd given up in despair; it was too huge and imposing to sufficiently damage, and not without better tools than they had at their disposal. So it sat there, abandoned to the elements, left to corrupt as eventually do all things.

The sight of smoke from far distant camps signalled the presence of the Zeare's Second Commandoes only half a day's march away, beyond the farms and through the dense, jungle-clad Augrin River valley. Soon, there would be a seige. Only in their worst nightmares had anyone ever thought it would come to this.

A man rose and signalled for attention, speaking in a booming voice. Before the revolution he'd been the city's official reciter, and his voice was rich, sonorous and well-trained. It brought the crowd to attention immediately. "Citizens of Kaladon! Kaladonians! All hear the Zeare's Emissary," he bellowed, and retreated back into the faceless crowd.

The emissary stepped forward. His was a tall, gaunt figure. The patrician form was rounded around the middle, as befitted an accomplished man of high rank. His perfectly tanned brown skin shone under the sunlight. His hair was drawn back in three long coiled strands, stretching almost to the middle of his back. He looked the part of the Zeare's man, certainly. And his features were definitely Terini. Had any of the town's inhabitants ever been to Terin, they might even have recognized the purple and orange Clan Magal sash he wore over his laced tunic. But there was no chance of that.

This was no minor dignitary; he was the elite's elite. The Zeare obviously had more interest in this small city than the citizens thought they themselves warranted. The respect went unappreciated. The two elite Zearial guards flanking the enforcer snapped a reflexive salutary gesture at the mention of the Zeare. The brightly painted red and blue lines on their chests and their waist-length white capes reminded the hastily-assembled miltia of exactly who they were dealing with. No common soldiers, these; only last year, the Zeare's Own had taken four entire islands for the League.