The clumsy creatures reached the now-abandoned breastworks and began to mill about, evidently looking for someone to bite.
“They look confused to me, Andar,” Danal said with a tight grin. “Now, if they were people-people, one of them at least would wake up enough to realize that we aren’t there anymore. Since they’re only bug-people, though, they might just start biting the rocks in the breastworks.”
“That’s absurd, Danal,” Andar scoffed.
“I wouldn’t be too sure, my friend. That voice out there in the Wasteland ordered them to go bite something, and since we pulled all of our people back last night, there’s nothing left there except rocks.” He stopped abruptly. “You know, Andar, that might just be a distinct possibility, and if they start biting rocks, they’ll break off their teeth. That could win this whole silly war for us.”
“I wouldn’t make any large bets, Danal,” Andar replied. “As soon as the Vlagh gets word that we aren’t there anymore, it’ll start bellowing orders again—and from what I’ve heard, information reaches the Vlagh almost immediately.”
Then, almost as if it was confirming Andar’s speculation, the voice of the Vlagh roared again, and the clumsy bug-men turned to advance across the open space between the abandoned breastwork and the now-occupied one.
“Archers to the front!” Danal commanded.
The more or less inept Trogite trainees and the highly skilled native bowmen took their positions, set arrows in place, and drew back their bows.
“Shoot!” Danal shouted.
The arrows flew forward in a nearly solid wave, and the enemy charge collapsed in the lethal shower.
The few remaining bug-people plodded forward, climbing over the heaps of their now-dead companions as the highly skilled native archers sent new arrow-storms out to meet them.
Then there was yet another roar with more than a slight touch of fury in it, and the hard-shelled spider creatures came over the now-unmanned breastworks to scamper across the open field littered with the dead.
“Catapults ready!” Danal bellowed.
“May I?” Andar asked.
“Be my guest,” Danal replied with a broad grin.
“Catapults launch!” Andar barked.
The wave of fire rose up from behind the breastworks, arched up and out, and then fell upon the charging enemies, engulfing them in fire.
2
In a certain sense, Rabbit found the war here in Veltan’s Domain much more interesting than the war in the ravine had been. He was more or less obliged to privately admit that the unexpected appearance of those five Church armies had added a great deal of excitement, and Longbow’s dreams had added even more. Rabbit had sensed a great reluctance on the part of Zelana’s family to accept Longbow’s firm belief that the Church armies had been deceived to the point that they had unknowingly become allies in the war with the creatures of the Wasteland. That reluctance, it seemed to Rabbit, had grown out of a certain resentment. Zelana and her family were apparently very put out by the suggestion that Longbow’s dream visitor could do things that were beyond their capabilities. That seemed almost stupid to Rabbit. Quite obviously, they were going to need help in this war, and refusing to accept help because Longbow’s dream visitor was more gifted was ridiculous.
The bridge the Trogite armies were building was approaching completion, and Padan had pulled his people back into the forest on the west side of the basin to keep them out of sight. “They don’t need to know that we’re still here,” Padan declared. “They’re busy doing exactly what we want them to do, so let’s stay out of their way.”
Longbow’s friend Red-Beard, however, thought that it might be wise to keep an eye on the “friendly enemies.” Sometimes Red-Beard’s clever remarks irritated Rabbit a bit, but if Longbow had been anywhere at all close to being correct, “friendly enemies” might just be quite accurate.
It was late in the afternoon on a day a week or so after the Church Trogites had started building their bridge when Rabbit joined Red-Beard and Sorgan’s cousin Torl in a fairly dense clump of bushes on the west rim of the gorge the waterfall had gouged out of the mountains off to the south. “Are they making any progress?” he asked quietly.
Torl covered his mouth to muffle a laugh. “They seem to be having some trouble with the question of balance,” he said.
“Balance?” Rabbit asked, a bit puzzled.
“When you’ve got a log that’s about a hundred feet long and you want to slide it across an open space that’s eighty feet wide, the log starts to get a bit wobbly after fifty feet. But when it gets out to about seventy feet, it doesn’t wobble anymore. It just plunges on down into that gorge. Those nitwits over there have already sent four logs tumbling on down, and they’ve just started on log number five.”
“You’re not serious!”
“Serious, no,” Red-Beard said with a broad grin. “Accurate, yes. Eventually—sometime next week, maybe—somebody over there will realize that they’ll have to put something heavy on their end of a log to keep it up here instead of down there.” He pointed down at the gorge.
“We do sort of want them to finish, you know,” Rabbit reminded them in a slightly worried tone.
“They’ll manage,” Torl replied with a shrug.
“I think somebody over there just woke up,” Red-Beard said. “It might take several more logs and a few hundred more men to sit on the short end of the log, but they’re getting closer, I’d say.”
The three of them peered out at the busy Trogites.
“Using people for counterweights isn’t the best idea they might have come up with,” Rabbit said dubiously.
“They’ve got lots of people, Rabbit,” Torl said. “Sooner or later they’ll get it right.”
The red-uniformed soldiers pushed the now-teetering log out a bit farther, and more and more of them lay across it to hold it in place. Then, when it had perhaps a foot more to go, the Trogites rammed it onto the rim.
“Just how long did it take them to get that one log in place?” Rabbit asked curiously.
“They started about noon, didn’t they, Red-Beard?” Torl asked.
“A little earlier, maybe,” Red-Beard replied.
“If two logs a day is the best they can manage, they’ll be at it for quite a while,” Rabbit said.
“They’ve got the first log across,” Torl said. “Things should go faster now.” Then he suddenly grinned. “If it wasn’t that we really need them, the three of us could wait until about midnight and push their log clear of the rim and let it fall. Can you imagine the screaming we’d hear when the sun comes up tomorrow?”
Dusk was settling rapidly by now, and the Trogites had fallen back to their ramp and built several cooking fires. “That pretty much does it for today,” Torl said. “Let’s go see what’s for supper this evening.”
“Not quite yet,” Red-Beard replied. “There are a few people coming up along the rim.”
“How did they get up here?” Torl demanded.
“Ladders, probably,” Rabbit suggested. “I suppose when you get right down to it, ladders might have been even a better idea than the bridge.”
“Let’s sit tight,” Red-Beard said. “Those people are being very careful to stay out of sight of their friends down on the ramp.”
“I thought those Church soldiers were supposed to wear red uniforms,” Rabbit said. “The ones sneaking along the rim are dressed in black.”
“Regulators,” Torl explained. “I heard about them down on the south coast. They’re sort of like police, and everybody in those Church armies—and even the priests—are afraid of them.”
“Maybe they just decided to go into business for themselves,” Rabbit suggested. “If they run fast, they’ll reach that ocean of imitation gold long before the red-shirts do.”
“It’s possible, I guess,” Torl said a bit dubiously.
“I think the answer’s creeping across that log they put in place just before sunset,” Red-Beard said.
&nbs
p; Rabbit peered down through the gathering darkness and finally caught sight of several shadowy figures creeping slowly along the log that was now in place. When they finally reached the rim, Rabbit could hear them whispering urgently to each other. “If we hurry, we’ll be able to reach the area where all the gold sand’s lying. Then we can scoop up several bags of gold and get back to the camp before anybody misses us,” one of them said.
“We’ll have to hide the gold someplace,” another urgent voice came out of the darkness. “If those greedy priests catch even a hint that we’ve got it, they’ll turn the Regulators loose on us to torture answers out of us.”
“This might be a good time for us to get rid of those greedy priests, and the Regulators as well,” the first voice added.
“We can’t kill priests!” Another voice gasped.
“We won’t have to kill them,” the other voice replied. “Priests are so holy that they can probably fly, so all that we’ll be doing will be testing all of them. If we just throw them into that gorge, the holy ones will fly, right? The only ones who’ll fall into the gorge and go splat when they reach the bottom will be the unholy ones, wouldn’t you say? All we’ll be doing is testing the priests for holiness, but if every single one of them goes splat—ah, well.”
The others all laughed raucously.
Then the black-uniformed Regulators came out of the darkness—with clubs—and they beat the deserters into submission in only a few minutes.
“What should we do with them now, Konag?”
The bleak-faced man who’d led the Regulators along the rim smiled faintly. “Why don’t you just give them the ‘holiness test’?” he replied.
“I don’t quite follow you, Konag,” the first Regulator said.
“You must have been too far away to hear them talking,” Konag said. “When you want to test a man for holiness, all you have to do is throw him off some high place. If he flies, he’s holy. If he falls, he’s unholy.”
“Toss them all into the gorge, you mean?”
“What a brilliant idea!” Konag replied sardonically.
The following morning Rabbit decided that he should finish something he’d been tinkering with for the past few weeks. He took up the curved limb he’d chopped from a hardwood tree up on the west ridge and continued the tedious business of shaving it into shape with his knife.
“Whittling, Rabbit?” Torl asked him. “Are you that bored?”
“Not really,” Rabbit replied. “It came to me last week that I’ve been making arrows for Longbow and his people since last winter, but I’ve never once pulled a bow.”
“Isn’t it just a little short?” Torl suggested.
“If I happened to make my bow as long as the bows of Zelana’s people, I’d have to stand on a ladder to shoot the silly thing.”
Torl smiled faintly. “I’m sure that our enemies will all run away in terror when they see Longbow and Shortbow coming their way.”
Rabbit gave him a flat, unfriendly look. “I’ll tell you what, Torl,” he said. “As soon as I finish my bow, I’ll need a target to practice my shooting. You could walk off a ways, and we’ll find out if I know what I’m doing. I probably won’t be very good, so you won’t be in too much danger.”
“Maybe some other time, Rabbit,” Torl replied. “I’m just a little busy right now.”
“Anytime you start getting bored, my friend, I think that might be a way to liven up your day.”
“I’ll keep it in mind, Rabbit,” Torl said, and then he walked off, shaking his head.
When he’d finished shaping his bow, Rabbit went looking for Red-Beard. “What do your people use for bowstrings?” he asked after he’d showed his experiment to his friend.
“Dried gut, usually,” Red-Beard replied. “Some archers use animal tendons, but I’ve always had better luck with gut. I’ve got a couple of spares, so I’ll give you one of mine.” He took Rabbit’s bow up, holding an end of it in each of his hands. Then he bent the bow. “Nice and limber,” he noted. “This might work fairly well for you.”
“We’ll never know until I try.”
After Rabbit had strung his new bow, he took a handful of arrows and went on up into the woods on the west slope. He’d never shot an arrow at anything in his whole life, so he didn’t really want an audience when he started to practice.
Longbow had made quite an issue of what he called “unification”—something that sort of linked the archer, his bow, and the target. Rabbit gave that a bit of thought as he went up among the trees on the west slope. “Maybe it’s something on the order of what happens when I see that the chunk of metal I’m heating in the forge is exactly the right color,” he mused.
He looked around and saw a patch of green moss growing on a treetrunk about fifty paces on up the hill. He set the notch of an arrow on his bowstring without taking his eyes off that patch of moss. Then he raised the bow, drawing back the string as he did. Then, not even squinting along the arrow shaft, he let it fly.
He was actually startled when his arrow went straight and true directly to the center of the target.
“I must be better than I thought,” he murmured with a broad grin. “I’ve never missed a target in my life.”
With growing curiosity, he notched another arrow and let it fly.
Now there were two arrows protruding side by side from the patch of moss.
After he’d loosed his last arrow, he walked on up to the tree to take a closer look.
His arrows were clustered together so tightly that he could cover their notched ends with the palm of his hand. “That’s impossible!” he exclaimed. Then he looked around rather suspiciously as it came to him that maybe Zelana was somewhere nearby playing games. Then he realized that he probably wouldn’t be able to see her even if she was.
It took quite a bit of effort to pull his arrows out of the treetrunk, and he broke two of them in the process. Then he went on back down the hill and put his bow under his blankets. “I think maybe I should just keep this to myself,” he mused. “Nobody’s going to believe me anyway, so let’s not make an issue of it. A man should never miss an opportunity to keep his mouth shut.”
“They’re almost finished, Padan,” Torl reported late in the afternoon two days later. “And it looks to me like those Church Regulators are doing most of our work for us. They’ve managed to persuade all those Church soldiers to stay where they’re supposed to instead of running off toward goldie out there.”
“Goldie?” Padan asked with a slight smile.
“She’s one of my favorite pets,” Torl explained. “I just love pets who do all the work, don’t you?”
Padan scratched the side of his jaw. “I’m not sure, but it might just be that those Regulators have changed things just a bit. It’s possible that terror can overwhelm greed, I suppose.”
“It might not be a bad idea to let cousin Sorgan and Commander Narasan know about this,” Torl suggested. “If the Regulators can hold all those Church soldiers right here instead of letting them dribble off toward old goldie in twos and threes, a certain change of plans might be in order along about now.”
“You could be right, Torl,” Padan agreed. He looked at Rabbit. “How are your legs holding out, little friend?” he asked.
“I still know how to run,” Rabbit said. “I take it that you’d like to have me spread the news?”
“If it isn’t too much trouble,” Padan replied.
“And maybe even if it is,” Torl added quite firmly.
“It sounds like those Regulator people might have made all our work here unnecessary, cousin,” Skell said after Rabbit had told them what had been happening.
“Maybe,” Sorgan said a bit dubiously. “I still think we’d be better off if those idiots were still running this way like their lives depended on it. If they slow down a bit, they might decide to take another route to get to that gold desert out there.”
“I don’t think so, Cap’n,” Rabbit disagreed. “When Longbow, Torl, and I went up
onto that west ridge to find out if the yellow sand wasn’t what it seemed to be, we were able to see a lot more of that desert out there. The sand that looks like gold but isn’t peters out a couple miles off to the west. Longbow says that the dream lady’s using it to bait those Church armies, so she put it just exactly where we need it to be.”
“I’d surely like to meet this lady,” Skell said. “I think we might owe her about a thousand pounds of thank-yous.”
“If it turns out the way she seems to want it to, Skell,” Sorgan said a bit dubiously. “But if something goes wrong, things around here could get real wormy in a hurry.”
3
Aracia and her brothers and sister, as well as the children, gathered near the geyser at the center of the basin late in the evening not long after the Church soldiers from the south had finally completed the bridge that everybody thought was important, and it seemed to the warrior queen Trenicia that the sole purpose of this gathering had been to watch the little girl Lillabeth sleep. Trenicia was fairly certain that Lillabeth could sleep without an audience, but Aracia’s family seemed to be very interested for some reason.
Queen Trenicia of the Isle of Akalla had been much confused from the very beginning by the male-dominated cultures of all these other lands. On the isle Trenicia ruled, men were little more than house-pets who spent most of their time trying to make themselves look beautiful. They even painted their faces on special occasions.
There were some ancient tales—quite probably pure invention—that stoutly maintained the absurdity that at some time in the distant past men had been dominant, and that they’d treated women as mere chattels. The tales went on to describe in some detail the events of a certain day when a large group of women in search of firewood on a southern beach had come across the wreckage of what appeared to have been a large raft—or something that went beyond a raft—from some far distant land, and in various places in the wreckage, the women found weapons that had been made of some material that quite obviously was not stone.
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