“They aren’t the brightest animals in the world,” Nanton admitted to Longbow as the pair of them followed the steep, twisting streambed up into the mountains with Skell close behind them, “but they’re very affectionate, and their wool’s quite valuable.”
“Doesn’t it get just a bit boring sitting on a hill and spending whole days watching them eat grass?”
“Boring’s the pleasant part of the life of a shepherd, Longbow,” Nanton replied. “It’s when things get unboring that I start to wish that I’d gone into a different line of work. Dealing with a pack of hungry wolves can get very exciting.”
“Isn’t it just a bit difficult to aim a sling?”
“Not if you practice every day. After a while, the sling almost becomes an extension of your hand.”
“Ah,” Longbow said, “and you never miss when you send a rock out to touch a wolf or a deer, do you?”
“Not that I can recall, no. How did you know that, Longbow?”
“I have much the same link with my bow. It’s a bit difficult to explain that to people, isn’t it?”
“I stopped trying to explain it years ago,” Nanton replied. “Of course, it doesn’t come up very often. The life of a shepherd is fairly solitary, so I don’t have people standing around watching me when I chase off a pack of wolves.”
“Don’t you just kill them when they start to pester your sheep?”
“Not too often. Usually I hit a wolf in the haunch. That sends him off through the tall grass yelping and bawling. That frightens the other wolves, and they all run off. There are five or six wolf-packs in that basin up on top, and I’ve taught them all to stay away from my sheep. Wolves are very clever animals, and it doesn’t take them very long to learn that some things are dangerous.”
“Are there any other animals in that area?”
Nanton spread his hands. “Just the usual ones—deer, birds, rabbits, and squirrels, and then there are the bats that come out in the evenings to eat bugs.”
“Now there’s a thought,” Longbow said with a broad grin. “Bats eat bugs, don’t they? Since our enemies are at least part bug, maybe we should have a talk with the bats and advise them that supper’s coming up out of the Wasteland.”
“I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a bat quite that big, Longbow,” Nanton replied, “and I don’t speak fluent batish, do you?”
“Maybe we should have a word with Veltan about that. If he were to fly around with the bats for a week or so, maybe he’d be able to pick up their language and form an alliance with them.”
“It might be worth a try,” the shepherd agreed. “I’ll take all the help I can get.”
Skell dropped back a bit. It appeared that Longbow wasn’t quite as icy as everybody seemed to believe he was. The casual conversation between the shepherd and the archer had been very revealing. Skell knew that Longbow and Red-Beard were close friends, and he was also aware of the friendship that existed between Longbow, Rabbit, and Keselo. Evidently, Longbow was now opening a door to the shepherd as well. Skell wasn’t quite certain just exactly why, but the aloof archer apparently felt that the shepherd might be very valuable during the current war. It was something to think about, Skell admitted.
4
They reached the top of the narrow streambed about noon on the following day, and Skell was a bit surprised when he saw the pleasant-looking basin that lay there. Nanton the shepherd had spoken of a “meadow” up here, but Skell had never before seen a meadow quite so large. It was easily ten miles from the southern end of the basin to the northern ridge. The grass was lush and green and there were a few clumps of trees here and there. Skell hadn’t completely understood what Veltan had described as “the geyser” that was the main source of the River Vash, so he was awed by the tremendous amount of water spurting almost a hundred feet up into the air. Evidently, there were some very interesting things going on under the ground.
The basin was surrounded on three sides by rugged mountain ridges. There was a sharp depression in the south ridge where the suddenly released water from the geyser plunged on down as the Falls of Vash.
The ridge to the north had a much wider gap in the middle, and Skell was fairly certain that the break in that ridge would be very significant. Veltan’s map had indicated that the Wasteland lay to the north of this basin, and that break would almost certainly be the invasion route.
“Pretty, isn’t it?” Padan said, looking out across the meadow.
“Not bad, I guess,” Skell agreed. Then he pointed toward the break in the north ridge. “We might want to look around this basin just a bit, but I think we’d better concentrate on that area up to the north. Our enemies will be coming from that direction anyway, and that break in the ridge looks to me to be about a mile wide. Cousin Sorgan and your commander should be coming along in a few days, but I don’t think we’ll have enough people up here to block that break off until your friend Gunda gets here with the bulk of your army. If the enemy doesn’t come charging up out of that desert until next month, we might be all right, but if it just happens to be next week, we could be in a lot of trouble.”
The break in the ridge line appeared to have been the result of some fairly recent event, since the sheared-off rock faces still in place showed little or no signs of weathering. The slope leading up to the break from the desert below was cluttered with rubble, which hinted strongly that some sort of natural disaster had demolished the ridge line.
“Do you get many earthquakes up here, Nanton?” Longbow asked the shepherd as they all stood looking down toward the Wasteland.
“Every now and then, yes,” Nanton replied. “Usually, they aren’t severe enough to break down these ridge lines, though.”
Skell was squinting down the slope. “It’s sort of a shame that all those rocks rolled down the north side,” he observed. “They’d be a lot more useful if they’d stayed closer.”
“I wouldn’t give up on them yet, Skell,” Padan said thoughtfully. “When Commander Narasan and your cousin Sorgan get up here with their men, they could build a series of breastworks across that slope, you know. That’d definitely slow our enemies down, and that’d give our people time to build a more substantial wall up here. Then we’ll have a much better chance of holding the enemy back until Gunda gets here.”
“That reminds me of something I’d almost forgotten,” Skell said. “Ho, Grock!” he called.
“Aye, Cap’n?” Grock replied.
“I want you to go on back down that creekbed and tell my brother that I want him to put the men coming up here through that steep gorge before long, and they’ll be able to come up a lot faster if we’ve got ropes in place—the way we did with that coil of rope you brought along when we came up. Tell my brother to set up several separate trails. If Narasan’s army comes up through that gorge one man at a time, it’ll take them all summer to get up here.”
“We’ll do ’er that way, Cap’n,” Grock replied. Then he turned and went back across the meadow toward the creekbed.
“There’s something else we might want to think about, Cap’n Skell,” Rabbit said. “Longbow’s archers are coming through the mountains to join up with us here, and once they’re in place, the enemies won’t pester the men working on the wall, because they’ll be too busy dying.”
“He’s got a point there, Skell,” Padan agreed. “About the best we can do with spears and swords is bring things to a standstill. It’ll take the archers to turn the tide.” He looked at Longbow. “Can you give us some kind of idea of just when your friends will get here?”
Longbow scratched his cheek. “Probably a couple of weeks,” he speculated. “They’re coming through the mountains, and that can make for slow going.”
“If cousin Sorgan and Commander Narasan sailed north when they said they were going to, they’re probably anchored down at the mouth of that little creek already,” Skell said, “so as soon as Grock gets down there and tells them the way things stand up here now, they’ll start coming up. I’d
say that they’ll be here inside two days, and then they can get started on our main fort here. A lot of things are still up in the air, but if everybody’s doing what he’s supposed to be doing, we’ll be in fair shape in two or three more days.”
The sun was going down behind the ragged mountain ridge to the west of the basin as they walked back toward the still-spouting geyser. Mountain sunsets were sort of pretty, maybe, but as far as Skell was concerned they were no match at all for sunsets out on the face of the rolling sea.
They built a fire some distance off from the geyser and Rabbit cooked a large pot of beans. Then Omago stood up to put more wood on the fire, but he instinctively ducked as a bat came swooping in out of the twilight. “I wish they’d stop doing that!” he complained.
“It’s the fire, Omago,” Nanton explained. “Firelight attracts bugs, and the bats are hungry.”
Longbow’s head came up sharply, and he reached for his bow.
“Is something wrong?” Rabbit asked, rising to his feet.
“I’m not sure,” Longbow replied. “There’s something that isn’t quite right.” He looked around, his face suddenly bleak. “I think it might be time to take a closer look at the neighbors.” He drew an arrow out of the quiver slanting up over his shoulder, set the arrow in place, drew his bow, and released it. The arrow went straight and true, and a dead bat fell to the ground some distance from the fire.
Longbow went over and picked the dead bat up by its wingtips and held it up to take a closer look. “You’d better come here, friend Red-Beard,” he said in a grim tone of voice.
“Trouble?” Red-Beard asked, standing up.
“Look for yourself.” Longbow held out the dead bat.
Red-Beard flinched back. “I think I’d better go see if I can find the archers,” he said tersely.
“What’s the trouble?” Skell demanded.
“This is,” Longbow replied, turning to show Skell the dead bat.
Skell instinctively jerked back from the hideous creature. It had the wings of a bat, the usual fur-covered body and clawed feet, but its head was the head of a bee—or possibly an ant—with protruding mandibles jutting from its lower face. It also had bulging eyes and odd-looking feelers growing out of the top of its head.
“Don’t touch it, friend Skell,” Red-Beard cautioned. “I’m catching a faint smell of venom.”
“Fangs and stingers again? Like the snake-men?”
“I’m not really sure,” Red-Beard replied, “but I don’t think it’d be a good idea to probe around with your bare hands.” He looked at his friend. “It looks to me like they’ve beaten us to the battlefield again, doesn’t it, Longbow? I was sure we were ahead of them this time. What did they do that made you realize that they weren’t just ordinary bats?”
“They weren’t really flying all that well, friend Red-Beard, and I saw a couple of them fly right past several flying bugs. A real bat wouldn’t have done that.”
“How can we fight off a flying enemy?” Padan exclaimed.
“Longbow can shoot them right out of the sky,” Rabbit told the frightened Trog. “I saw him shoot down a whole flock of geese once.”
“I wouldn’t waste any time, friend Red-Beard,” Longbow said. “It’s fairly obvious that the Vlagh’s been tampering with the natural order of things again, so we might need the archers here and not back in the mountains before long.” He paused briefly, and a faint frown touched his face. “Now that I’ve had a moment or two to give this a bit of thought, things might not be as bad as they seemed at first. We didn’t see any of these particular creatures during the war in Zelana’s Domain, and that suggests that they’re a new experiment. If that’s true, they’re most likely still groping around, trying to discover why they’re here and what they’re supposed to do.”
“Wouldn’t that also mean that they don’t know anything about fighting wars?” Rabbit asked.
“They won’t know how we fight wars,” Longbow agreed. “If this is really a new life-form, it’s going to take it at least twenty hatches before it fully understands what it’s capable of doing. They don’t live long enough to reach that level of understanding in one generation. I’d say that about all they’re capable of during the current hatch will be flying around and watching us.”
“Scouts, you mean?” Skell asked.
“Exactly. They won’t live long enough to go much farther. Our shaman, One-Who-Heals, explained some things about the servants of the Vlagh to me quite a long time ago. They only live for about six weeks after they reach their final form, not long enough to learn very much. Their knowledge accumulates over the generations, so the ones we’ll encounter later will be much more clever than the ones we’ve seen so far.”
“Maybe we should hide this dead one, then,” Rabbit suggested, looking around quickly.
“I didn’t quite follow you there, Rabbit,” Keselo said.
“If they don’t know what arrows can do to them, they’ll start making a lot of mistakes, won’t they? If they think a bow is just a stick, they won’t pay much attention when a couple hundred archers stand up and draw their bows. We could have dead bats raining down out of the sky for a week or two if they don’t understand what’s really happening.”
“Good point,” Skell said. “Let’s pile some brush on top of this dead one and then act like nothing important just happened.”
“I’m not sure if this would work, Cap’n Skell,” Rabbit said, “but it just came to me that maybe fishnet would keep those bat-things from getting close enough to bite us, and if they get all tangled up in the net, we could go around when the sun comes up and give each one a poke with our poisoned spears. That should thin them out at least a little bit, wouldn’t you say?”
“Nice idea, Rabbit,” Padan said, “but where are we going to get that much fishnet?”
“That’s not really much of a problem, Padan,” Skell said. “Every Maag longship has fish-netting on board. If we can catch fish, we don’t have to sail back to port to buy more beans. I’ll talk it over with cousin Sorgan when he gets up here, but after he sees that dead bug-bat, I’m sure he’ll go along with Rabbit’s idea. The notion of a flying enemy probably won’t sit any better with him than it does with me.”
Skell’s brother came up out of the narrow creekbed about midmorning the following day and joined Skell’s scouting party near the geyser. “Now that’s something you don’t see very often,” he said, pointing at the geyser. “I can’t remember the last time I saw a waterspout on dry land.”
“Strange things happen in strange country, Torl,” Skell said. “Are your men stringing ropes up along that creek?”
“They’re only about an hour behind me, and cousin Sorgan and the Trogs aren’t very far behind them.”
“Good. We’re probably going to need some forts in place before too much longer.”
“Have you spotted any enemies yet?”
“Oh, yes. We didn’t know that they were enemies right at first, but they’re out there.”
“Boring holes through the ground again?”
“Not that we know about. I suppose it’s possible, but the only ones we’ve seen so far have been flying.”
“You’re not serious!”
“I’m afraid so, Torl. That Vlagh thing’s been experimenting again, and now we’ve got bats watching everything we do.”
“Bats?” Torl said incredulously.
“It didn’t make me very happy either, Torl. We might just have to hole up until the archers get here—at least after the sun goes down. We haven’t seen any of them in the daytime yet.”
“Are they poisonous—like those snake-men we came up against back in the ravine?”
“Red-Beard says they are. Longbow killed one of them so we could take a look at it, and Red-Beard told me he was catching the smell of venom when he got close to it.”
“How can we possibly hide from them after the sun goes down?” Torl’s voice was just a bit shrill.
“Calm down, Torl,” S
kell told him. “That clever little smith from the Seagull has already come up with an easy answer. All we’re really going to need is fishnet, and every Maag ship in the fleet’s got about a half mile of fishnet stored in the hold. When one of those bat-bugs gets all tangled up in the netting, he won’t be a problem anymore.”
“Sometimes that little Rabbit fellow’s so smart that he makes me sick.”
“Just be glad that he’s on our side, little brother,” Skell said.
5
Cousin Sorgan and Narasan the Trog came up out of the narrow gorge about noon that day and joined Skell’s small group of scouts near the geyser. “Ho, Skell!” Sorgan shouted, “have you seen any snake-men up here yet?”
“Not a one, cousin,” Skell replied.
“We got up here before they did, then,” Sorgan said.
“I wouldn’t start celebrating just yet, Sorgan,” Skell said. “I think we might end up missing those snake-men before this is all over.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“We’ve got a whole new breed of enemies this time, Sorgan. These enemies know how to fly.”
“That’s not funny, Skell.”
“Do you see me laughing, cousin?”
“You’re just making this up.”
“Not even a little bit. We’ve got a dead one under that brush pile over by that water spout. It’s got bat wings and a bug head. Come and look for yourself. There were dozens of bats flapping around one night, and Longbow had one of those hunches he gets all the time, and he picked one of the bats out of the sky with an arrow. As it turned out, that hunch of his probably saved a lot of lives. When it’s flapping around in the dark, it looks pretty much like an ordinary bat, but when you take a closer look, ‘ordinary’ goes right out the window. It’s a bat with a bug’s head, and just to add to the fun, it’s got a strong smell of that venom the snake-men in the ravine had during the war we fought last spring. We kept the carcass, so you can look for yourself.”
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