“You said there was much to report,” Prestimion reminded him. “It would be kind of you to begin, brother.”
He had commenced the trip, Abrigant said—still obviously thunderstruck by the news of Prestimion’s marriage, but making a visible effort to put it out of mind—by heading eastward from Sippulgar along the Aruachosian coast of the Inner Sea. But that was such a vile sweltering place, where the air was so wet and thick that one could hardly breathe, and the wasps and ants were the size of mice and the very worms had wings and jaws, that they were driven inland soon after crossing over into the province of Vrist. The last glimpse of the sea that they had was at the dreary Vristian port of Glystrintai; after that, they found themselves in much less humid country, largely uninhabited—a hot, primordial-looking plateau of wrinkled crags and congealed lava, of pink lakes in which gigantic snakes lay coiled, of turbulent rivers inhabited by monstrous sluggish mud-colored fish, bigger than a man, that seemed to have wandered out of a much earlier era.
In this sun-baked prehistoric land of broad vistas and distant horizons a terrible silence prevailed day after day, broken only by the occasional skreeking cries of sinister-looking predatory birds, bigger even than the khestrabons or surastrenas they had seen in the east-country, that went soaring by high overhead. The travelers felt almost as though they were the first explorers of some virgin planet.
But then they spied smoke on the horizon—campfires—and they came the next day to a land of jet-black hills laced with dazzling outcrops of brilliant white quartz, where thousands of Liimen living in the middle of nowhere were mining gold. “True gold this time?” said Prestimion. “After golden bees and golden hills and walls of golden stone, a place where the actual metal itself is found?”
“The metal itself,” Abrigant said. “These are the mines of Sethem province, where naked Liimen work like slaves under the murderous sun. Here. See for yourself.” And he reached into a burlap knapsack that he had brought into the throne-room with him and pulled forth three square thin plates of gold, each about the size of the palm of his hand, on which geometric symbols had been marked with punches. “They gave me these,” said Abrigant. “I don’t know what they’re worth. The miners didn’t seem to care. They just do their work, as though they were machines.”
“The mines of Sethem,” Prestimion said. “Well, the stuff had to come from somewhere. I never gave it a thought.”
The image came to him of long lines of Liimen at work in that barren stony landscape: strange uncomplaining rough-skinned beings, with broad flat heads shaped like hammers and three fiery eyes glowing like smouldering coals in the craters of their deeply recessed eye-sockets. Who had assembled them and brought them there? What thoughts went through their minds as they plodded through their days of unthinkable toil?
The gold lay hidden in the quartz, the merest dusting of it scattered thinly through the rocky veins. The Liimen mined it, Abrigant said, by building fires on the black stony outcrops and hurling cold water and vinegar against the heated rock to fracture it so that the ore could be extracted from the fissures thus created. Some worked on the surface of the hills, others in deep tunnels that were too low-roofed for them to stand in, so that they had to writhe along the ground, seeing their way with lamps fastened to their foreheads. Eventually great mounds of ore-bearing rock were collected. Then a different group would set to work with stone sledgehammers to break that up into smaller pieces, which yet other workers took and ground down in mills operated by great handles, two or three Liimen to a handle, until it came to the consistency of flour.
The final phase was to spread the processed quartz out on slanting boards and pour water over it to flush away the dross, a task repeated again and again until only pure particles of gold remained. This then was smelted for days on end in a kiln, along with salt and tin and hoikka bran, and eventually pure gleaming nuggets came forth, which were beaten into the thin plates that Abrigant had been given.
“It is miserable work in a miserable place,” he said. “But they toil every hour of the day, handling an immense amount of rock to produce very little gold. And all that labor just for the sake of gold! If only there were more of the stuff, perhaps we could find some way to convert it into useful iron or copper. But as it is, we have just this, suited only for trifling decorative purposes.”
“And after Sethem,” Prestimion said, “where did you go then?”
“Eastward still,” replied Abrigant, “into the province of Kinorn, which was not quite a land of deserts but far from pleasant, having been folded again and again by ancient movements of the land so that crossing it was like crossing a giant griddle. We went on and on, ridge after ridge, and there was always the next steep ridge to climb, and we were tossed about in our floaters as though in a storm at sea. This bruise, Prestimion—I struck my head once when our car overturned and thought it would be my death. Some villages had been founded here, too, the Divine only knew why, where the people lived by farming and seemed to have very little knowledge of the great world beyond. They spoke a dialect that was difficult to understand. Zimroel was only a myth to them, and its demonic Procurator unknown; they claimed to know of such places as the Fifty Cities of Castle Mount, and Alaisor and Stoien and Sintalmond and Sisivondal, but it was obvious that their information went no farther than those cities’ mere names. I asked of Skakkenoir, though, and they smiled at that, and said, yes, yes, Skakkenoir, and pointed east. They pronounced the name in a barbarous way that I could never get my tongue to imitate; but the soil there, they said, was bright red. The red of iron, Prestimion.”
“Of course, the six-month limit expired precisely at that point,” said Prestimion lightly, “and therefore you turned back without investigating any further.”
“You knew it, brother! That is what happened. But in fact we were actually a few days short of the six months, so we went on a little way. And look, Prestimion!” He put his hand into the knapsack again, taking from it three little glass vials of red sand, and a fourth that contained the dried and crumbling leaves of some plant. “Have this sand analyzed, and I think you’ll find them rich with iron, as much as one part in ten thousand. And the leaves: can these be from the metal-bearing plants of Skakkenoir? I think they are, Prestimion. It was only a small strand of red earth, twenty feet wide at most and soon petering out—one little accidental tongue jutting forth out of the land of Skakkenoir, I think. And half a dozen scraggly little plants growing on that red soil. The real wealth lay still to the east, of that I was sure. But of course I was sworn to turn back on the day the seventh month began, and that day had now arrived, and so I did. I came very close, I believe. But I was sworn to turn back.”
“All right, Abrigant. You’ve made your point.”
Prestimion opened the vial of leaves and lifted one out. It looked like nothing more than a dried leaf, such as one would use as a cooking herb. There was nothing metallic about it: one might do better, perhaps, trying to extract gold from the shining shrubs on the hills of Arvyanda that reflected the gold of the sunlight than to get iron from this little wrinkled brown scrap of vegetation. But he would have it analyzed, all the same.
“There you are,” said Abrigant. “The mines of Skakkenoir are yours for the taking. It is such ugly country, Prestimion , and so forbidding in its heat and its up-and-down landscape: I can see why other explorers gave up too soon. But perhaps they weren’t as eager as I was to find the land of iron. The great prosperity of the age of Prestimion, brother, is in those four vials.”