“Yes, son,” Shasa said as he stopped at a stall filled with a sweet-smelling, long yellow fruit and turned to face a woman with high, delicate cheekbones tending it. “There is no place more beautiful than Nothree. . wouldn’t you agree, Khesai?”
“Far be disagreement from my door,” the woman replied with a wide smile. “May the gods grant you a fair wind, Elder Shasa.”
“Where is Durian today?” Shasa asked. “I would have thought he would be here on market day. . especially with such a fine crop.”
“He is helping Moda repair a ship at the beach,” Khesai replied. “Moda has offered to help us add a room to our home in exchange.”
Shasa raised his eyebrows. “Another room? Then have the gods blessed your family, Khesai?”
“Soon enough,” the woman smiled even more.
Shasa nodded. “Have you met our traveler, Drakis?”
“Fate smiles,” Khesai bowed slightly with the traditional greeting.
“Fate smiles,” Drakis bowed back.
“Your family shall be in our hearts, Khesai,” Shasa said. “Forgive us our leaving. I must speak with Drakis.”
Shasa turned and continued down the path with Drakis falling into step at his side.
“Elder,” Drakis said, “I have only been here a week, and yet I feel more at home here than any other place I have ever been.”
“This was not always so, Drakis,” Shasa laughed deeply.
Drakis grinned. “No, Elder Shasa. . that is true. When we first arrived. . well, I had never seen any humans with skin nearly so dark as the Sondau.”
“And this worried you?” Shasa asked.
“Well, no. . I just felt terribly conspicuous. . as though everyone was looking at me.”
Shasa laughed again; warm and filled with humor. “Everyone was looking at you. It is easy to pick you out in a crowd. . your white face could be seen from two leagues in the darkest part of a cloud-covered night. Finding you is not a problem. . hiding you is.”
Drakis nodded.
They passed the great house at the end of the square. The path under their feet now moved under the canopy of the tall, palm trees and the huts of the village families. The sounds of a mother yelling from inside the home for one of her children drifted past them as the path soon started to climb a winding trail up the steep slopes surrounding the village and its bay.
“There was one other thing,” Drakis said after many steps in silence.
“Yes, Drakis.”
“It’s that I’ve never seen so many humans in one place before,” he replied. “There have always been a few of us, of course, doing specialized jobs or kept around as curiosities. Timuran owned five or six of us, and that was considered an extravagance. But several hundred in one place? That could only happen when entire Legions were called into battle, and even then it would be hard to find them in the enormous press of so many other races. How did you get here? How have you survived?”
“The Sondau Clan settled Nothree during the Age of Fire, some seven hundred years ago by the counting of our lorekeepers,” Shasa said. “In those days, it was an outpost of the Drakosian city-states; the human kingdoms of the north that ruled all the land of Armethia. They were still recovering from the War of Desolation-the first great conflict between the humans of the north and the Rhonas army of conquest from the south. It was an unsettled time, and the Clans of the Coast took it to be a sign of opportunity.”
“Opportunity?” Drakis squinted in disbelief.
The path became steeper and more winding as they climbed.
“Certainly!” Shasa nodded. “In all change there is opportunity to benefit someone. So our ancestors came in their ships to what they saw as a land of promise. They found that the Forgotten Coast east of Point Kontantine was mountainous and lush, its ground fertile and mineral rich from the ancient volcanoes that had shaped it. Much of the coast was treacherous going for ships but there were choice harbors to be had if one knew where to find them along the arc of Sanctuary Bay. The Sondau captains were exceptional seafarers, and soon small settlements tucked in the back of hidden harbors like this one-accessed through all-but-impassable rock-strewn passages-dotted the great jagged shores of Sanctuary Bay.”
As Shasa spoke, they stepped to the crest of a low hill overlooking the village. The thatched roofs of the huts below could barely be made out through the canopy of trees-lush broad-leafed hardwoods and tall, strange trees with great fanlike leaves spreading out from their tops. He had never seen their like in all the lands of Rhonas and wondered why. Surely, he thought, they would fetch a handsome price for so strange a thing as these trees Shasa called “palm.”
The village was formed around a small, deep harbor surrounded entirely by steeply rising hills. The homes had to be built on the hillsides, and in many cases the roof of one butted up against the foundation of the next home higher up the hill. Communities here seemed to grow in clusters, like fruit springing somehow from the mountain-side. The harbor itself was guarded by a narrow and winding passage that looked to Drakis to be entirely impossible to navigate although whenever he brought this up with the Sondau villagers, he was universally greeted with laughter.
Behind him, bright in the rising light of morning, stood the craggy peaks of the Sentinels, nearly vertical mountains whose slopes were covered in lush foliage and whose tops were always shrouded in clouds. Those peaks seemed to hold the outside world at bay and, Drakis reflected, perhaps that was truer than he knew.
“So they found their land of opportunity, then,” Drakis said as he sat down and looked back out over the village spread below him.
“No, not nearly as easily as they had hoped. . for no dream comes without cost,” Shasa mused, sitting next to him. “Many other settlements were established during that time as the Drakosians tried to extend their land holdings to include footholds in Nordesia and the Vestasian Coast. but each in turn failed. Only Nothree, Notwo, Nofor and a handful of others clung stubbornly to their existence through the tumult of war and shifting alliances that marked that age. Our fathers found themselves increasingly on their own. The Clans of the Coast, as they called themselves. . Darakan, Phynig, Merindau, Sondau and Hakreb. . struggled to survive as the ships from our homelands became increasingly infrequent, and our distant government drifted farther and farther removed from our lives.”
Shasa picked up a stone from the hillside and tossed it lightly down the slope.
“Then, two centuries ago, when the dragons of Armethia betrayed their alliance with the Drakosian lords,” he continued, “the ships stopped coming at all. We became ‘The Forgotten’ colonies, and here, in our little havens, we have been born, loved, lived, and died ever since.”
Drakis thought about this for a moment, the silence resting easily between them. “Elder Shasa. .”
“Yes, Drakis.”
“Have you determined whether I am this ‘prophet’ everyone is looking for?”
“Drakis, what a strange question,” Shasa said. “It seems to me that a prophet would know the answer to that question himself!”
“I don’t know, Elder,” Drakis replied. “Sometimes I believe it, and sometimes I think it’s just nonsense. I hear the Dragon Song in my mind, but from what I understand so do many others. My name fits the prophecy, but then it’s a common name. . there is none more common among human slaves.”
“There seem to be a lot of people who want you to be the Drakis of prophecy,” Shasa replied. “Perhaps you should ask a different question.”