Tayyar had, indeed, talked to several people about where he found the gold. The problem, of course, was the fallible nature of human memory. Tayyar had been gone for some time, either captured and sold in the slave markets or slain by something that he wasn’t tough enough to handle. The fact was that nobody really knew what had happened to him.
Part of the challenge was that his descriptions to others, his directions, they lacked context. Remember when I complained about the directions to the Mages Guild I received back in Westfield? It was something like that. Human minds are interesting. We do a great job of filling in details in our memories when those details would be otherwise lacking. There is even a technical term for it. It’s called confabulation. And let me tell you, there was a whole lot of confabulation going on. Each of the first three people that we talked to gave wildly different descriptions of where the gold had been found. I will admit that it frustrated me. It would probably take a whole week to wander around to each of the destinations that they described, if we could find them at all. For all I knew, the places they were talking about didn’t actually exist and were woven from the whole cloth of fertile imaginations.
Nonetheless, we kept meeting with others and kept asking questions. Many people, who had arrived after Tayyar had gone missing, had no idea what the hell we were talking about. Others wondered why we would even look for gold because its not like they had anywhere to trade it or spend it. We worked our whole way through the complex in a couple of hours. Finally, I gave up and just decided we would have to take our chances. I had more or less resigned myself to wandering around the area of their former camp trying to find any watercourses that showed even a hint of the metal. We had just reached the guards at the entrance and preparing to leave when Sawwar spied us.
“You are leaving so soon?” he asked. “But you just got here.”
“Yeah,” I said. “We need to go out and try to locate where Tayyar found his gold.”
“Oh, that’s easy,” Sawwar said. “I can show you.”
“You can show us?”
“Sure,” Sawwar said. “Shortly before he disappeared, he took me out to teach me how to hunt and scavenge. I had just gotten here and was pretty damn clueless. We stopped at a stream to get a drink and he told me that upstream from there is where he had found the gold. I never liked that man much. He was kind of mean and didn’t bathe very often so he stunk. He was a good teacher, though.”
Given the smell I had noticed in the other cave, if someone’s stench stood out from the rest, he must have really reeked.
“Would you mind showing us to this stream?” I asked.
“Oh, not at all,” Sawwar said. “But if you find the gold, you have to give me a cut.”
“I have no problem with that,” I said. “Especially if you help us dig.”
“Let’s not get too hasty here,” he sputtered at me.
“Let’s get going,” I said with a laugh.
We headed back through the well-trodden path through the cave and came out once again covered in bat poop. I wished we could find another route in and out because it took me hours each time we traversed that chamber to get the acrid taste out of my mouth.
After washing up, I told Sawwar to lead us to where we needed to be. He took off on a meandering course down and across the mountain, usually but not always sticking to game trails. We had left the wyvern hide back at the complex so at least we were less encumbered, but I knew if that hide was going to be worth anything we would need to get it down into town fairly quickly. We had, at most, a day or two to find the gold.
Soon, Sawwar had led us to a decent sized stream flowing down the mountain. Well, it was decent sized for being this far up the mountain. With a running start, I still could gave leapt over it. This must have been the dry season here, because there was evidence that its flow was much larger and more violent from time to time. While the others took a breather, I poked around in the stream bed with the pickaxe trying to stir up even a hint of gold. I couldn’t find any.
“Are you sure this is the right place?” I finally asked.
“Yeah, this is where he told me he found it,” Sawwar replied. “But remember, he said it was farther upstream.”
I looked upstream and realized that we were in for some serious climbing. There were no game trails on either side of the stream but the low water level meant that we could hug the side of the stream bed and use it as a path. The problem was that just a few dozen yards uphill, there was a small, perhaps ten foot tall waterfall. We would have to climb it. And I am certain it wasn’t the only challenging terrain we would encounter. Today was going to be grueling, that’s for damn sure. And that didn’t even take into account the possibility of having to fight off something that saw us as prey.
We started the long uphill slog. Climbing the first waterfall turned out to be fairly easy. There were plenty of handholds and even if we fell, the fall would probably not kill any of us. The entire time we walked, I kept my head down looking for the faintest glimmer, the most miserly speck of gold. I still didn’t see anything.
We got a rude surprise when we reached the top of the waterfall. The part of the mountain immediately before the drop had been eroded by the flow of water over innumerable years and as a result the stream had formed a little pond behind what was essentially a natural retaining wall. Instead of having a dry stream bed to traverse, we had to splash our way through the pond further upstream until we once again found some dry ground. The water wasn’t very deep, barely rising up to my knees, but hiking all day with wet feet was a recipe for serious blisters. Even though I would quickly heal from them, the others wouldn’t and that could potentially slow us down. Well, everyone but Sawwar, I guess, whose unclad feet had to be the toughness of shoe leather at this point.
When we reached dry ground, I once again started scanning the area for any hint of precious metal. A couple of glimmers drew my attention and I quickly reached down to retrieve them.
“Is this gold or pyrite?” I asked the others.
“It looks like gold to me,” Bowen said. “But I don’t know what pyrite is.”
“On my Earth, we call it fool’s gold,” I said. “I really don’t know how to tell the difference.”
“I know this one!” Sawwar said, almost hopping up and down. “We have pyrite on my world as well but it is much harder than gold. We can probably tell what it is by trying to scratch it with something relatively soft.”
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“That’s a good idea,” I said. Then, I went rooting into my pouches and packs for something that I could use to test it.
Finally, I settled on using a copper coin. I remembered reading somewhere that gold was softer than copper. What I didn’t know, however, was whether pyrite was softer than copper.
“Do you know if pyrite is harder or softer than copper?” I asked Sawwar.
“Harder, I think,” he said. “But I am not completely certain.
I reached down and drew the coin across the face of the largest speck of ore that I had found, one about the size of my thumbnail. The coin left a mark.
“It left a scratch,” I said. “That’s fairly promising. Maybe, anyway.”
Glancing around, I realized why we had likely not noticed any gold downstream. The retaining wall for the pond inadvertently served as a dam. If we could somehow manage to drain the little pond or at least dredge it, it was likely that there was quite a bit more of the ore concentrated on its bottom.
While retrieving the gold would be nice, I wanted more. I wanted to find the seam that the gold was coming from in the first place. Why much around in a fairly cool pool of water when we could just dig gold by the handful out of the side of a hill? I found the little glimpses of metal that I had pulled out of the stream fascinating. I had been bitten hard by the gold bug, thinking about how a ready source of income would speed up all of our plans.
Up the stream we went, each of us scanning the ground around us for the source of the gold. I saw more glimmers in the stream bed from time to time. Some of them were in the part of it that wasn’t under the water currently, so I stopped to pick them up. The stuff under water I left. Yahg had previously mentioned his wife expected him to come back rich or not at all, so if I brought the company up here then he could spend his time panning for gold. I was after a bigger prize.
The topography didn’t become more gentle as we ascended the mountain. We had to scramble up loose rocks or climb impediments several more times before we reached the source of the stream. We ended up taking some risks that in ordinary times I wouldn’t have dreamed of taking but thankfully the only damage we suffered was gashed up knees and elbows from slipping time after time.
We reached another small waterfall, the endless flow of water having eroded a channel through a low cliff. After climbing it successfully, we continued heading upstream but that’s when I noticed something. I didn’t see any hints of gold around us anymore. After walking for five or ten minutes and not seeing anything, I called for a halt.
“I think we’ve passed the source,” I said.
“Yeah,” Bowen responded. “I was wondering why I hadn’t seen any more gold in quite some time.”
“When’s the last time you remember seeing any?” I asked.
“I think it was before that last climb,” Aleyda said. Bowen and Sawwar quickly agreed with her assessment.
“Let’s head back downstream and explore that area,” I said. “Continuing seems like it would be pretty fruitless.”
So, we retraced our steps to the top of the waterfall constantly scanning the stream bed for any hint of luster. We didn’t see anything. I asked the others to wait at the top and I climbed back down. When I reached the bottom, I immediately noticed specks of gold again. The climb itself was no more than fifteen feet, but as I had said previously the water had eroded a channel through the rock for that entire length. Somewhere in that channel, I surmised, was a gold seam. Getting to it to mine it would be very difficult. The channel itself was perhaps three or four feet wide at the widest part and many areas were narrower. Honestly, to mine it effectively, we would have to divert the flow of the stream somehow and that would require building a dam or engaging in countless hours with a pickaxe to dig another channel. I couldn’t let this go, though. I had to see whether I could find the seam somehow. I climbed back up to the others.
“Let’s get out the rope,” I said. “You three can lower me down through the channel and I will see if I can find the seam.”
“James, you are too heavy to hold aloft for long, unless we can find a tree or rock to anchor the rope,” Aleyda said. Great, was she insinuating that I was fat? “It would be much easier for Sawwar or me to go. We weigh less.”
“Only if you take off your armor,” I said.
“Hey, I’ve done my part,” Sawwar said. “I showed you where this was. I didn’t sign up to be drenched by a waterfall.”
I thought I heard Bowen mutter something like don’t be a baby, but I wasn’t sure.
Aleyda stripped out of her armor and deftly fashioned a sling she could sit in at the end of the rope. Then, we started slowly lowering her down the channel. Every ten seconds or so, she would pop her head out of the water by using her legs against the back of the wall so that she could breathe. Inch by painstaking inch, we lowered her down as she inspected the walls. After a few minutes of this, I was starting to feel the strain. My arms were holding up fine but the strength of my grip was starting to waver. Aleyda was starting to weaken as well. The water was cold and when she would pop out to take a breath I noticed that she was shivering.
“We are going to need to take a break soon so you can warm back up,” I called to her. Why admit my own weakness when I could use her condition as an excuse?
“Yeah, my hands and arms are getting tired,” Bowen admitted.
By this time, she had only descended about a third of the way down the cliff. We needed a better system.
“Alright,” she said. “Let me check just a few more feet and then we’ll break.” And she plunged her head back into the water.
She stayed under for an inordinately long time. Finally, her head popped out.
“I think I found it,” she proclaimed excitedly. “It’s on the back wall right about here.”
She was still nine or more feet in the air. That meant that we would need to fashion scaffolding as well in order to get to the seam even after we diverted the water. There were a few trees in the area but probably not as many as we needed. This was not a three person job.
“If Sawwar hands you the pickaxe, do you think you can get a small sample?” I asked. “We need someone who knows more about gold to test it to ensure we aren’t digging for something worthless.”
“I can do that,” she said. “You’ll have to pull me up a little so I can reach it.”
Pulling her up a few feet was a chore. I decided then and there that she would be lowered to the ground when she was done. We had to go back that way anyway.
After receiving the pickaxe and being lowered back down, she went back underwater. Seconds passed and then her head and one arm poked out of the waterfall. In her hand she held a chunk of rock that was striated with gleaming metal.
“Is this good enough?” she asked. “There’s really no room to swing the pickaxe and this was the biggest I could break off.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “We’re lowering you down now.”
After she had made it to the bottom, the rest of us took a little break and then made our way down to join her. I inspected the rock. To my amateur eyes, it certainly looked like there was gold in it.
“When we get back to the company, there are going to have to be some negotiations,” I said. “We found this and I’ll be damned if we just get an equal share for all our had work. I doubt they will give us two thirds of it, but we deserve something for this risk and effort.”
“What about my cut?” Sawwar asked,
“I’ll make certain you get your cut,” I replied.
Then, we headed back down the mountain. I hoped there was still enough time left in the day to reach the cave before dark.