“Just what does this crystal look like?” Sorgan asked.
“I think it’s that pale rock called quartz,” Ariga replied, “only it’s not quite that clear quartz that shows up now and then down in Malavi. It’s got a sort of pink cast to it.”
Sorgan suddenly laughed. “I think we’d better keep Eleria away from it, then—and probably Zelana as well. Just the word ‘pink’ perks up their ears.”
“Have you been on down to where Gunda and Sorgan’s men are working on the base for our wall?” Narasan asked.
“A couple of times, yes,” Ariga replied. “We pretty much have to go through the gateway they’ve built when we need to check the lay of the land on down to the south of the wall.”
“What’s it like down there?”
Ariga grinned. “There are lots and lots of little side canyons that look almost like they were made for ambushes. I’m sure we’ll be able to make life very unpleasant for the bug-people.”
“Right up until the time that they bite your horses and you have to start walking instead of riding,” Sorgan added.
“We’ve already taken care of that, Captain,” Ariga said.
“You’ve been training your horses to wear those bison-hide cloaks?” Sorgan asked.
Ariga shook his head. “We decided to use boots instead.”
“Boots?”
“I’ve never seen one of these bug-people but Ekial says that they’re very short. All we had to do to make our horses bite-proof was wrap a couple layers of that bison hide around their legs up to the joint. Anyway, when the bug-things come up into the gorge, we’ll whip out of those side canyons, kill a few hundred of them, and then duck back into our canyons.”
“With the bug-people hot on your tails,” Sorgan added.
“That’s what’s behind the whole idea, Captain,” Ariga said with a wicked grin. “We’ve sort of joined up with the archers from Tonthakan, and they’ll be hiding up in our canyons with arrows that have been dipped in that venom everybody keeps talking about. We’ll rush out and sting the bugs and then rush back into those canyons like we were trying to get away. The bugs will come chasing after us, and the archers will kill every single one of them who tries to follow us.”
“That’s brilliant!” Narasan exclaimed.
It was late in the afternoon of the following day when Narasan and Sorgan crested a rocky little knoll in the mountains and saw the northern end of Crystal Gorge. There was a sizeable cloud-bank off to the west, and the setting sun bathed the clouds in glory.
“I wouldn’t want to throw any accusations at anybody,” Sorgan declared, “but that gap looks a lot like ‘tampering’ to me.”
“I’m not really all that familiar with mountains, Sorgan,” Narasan admitted, “but that gap doesn’t look much like a natural formation to me either.”
Sorgan shrugged. “It’s Dahlaine’s part of the Land of Dhrall, I guess, so if he wants to pick up an axe and chop holes in his mountains, that’s up to him.”
“That would have taken some axe, Sorgan,” Narasan said, looking at the wide gap with absolutely straight walls on either side. “I can see why they call it a ‘gorge,’ though.” He looked at the peculiar stone sides. “If I understood what Ariga was saying correctly, this ‘crystal’ that’s part of the name is quartz. We encounter that once in a while down in the empire. It’s pretty, I suppose, but it’s just a bit too brittle to be of much use. I wouldn’t really want to make a house out of it—not one that I intended to live in, anyway. We much prefer granite.”
“It looks like Ariga was right,” Sorgan said. “The side walls of that gorge are definitely pink.”
“It’s probably because the quartz has been contaminated by iron ore,” Narasan said. “Iron ore seems to give everything around it a reddish cast.”
“Maybe it’s Longbow’s ‘unknown friend’ again,” Sorgan suggested with a wry sort of grin.
“I wouldn’t start throwing any accusations around, Sorgan,” Narasan replied. “If you happen to offend her, she might just turn you into a toad.”
“I don’t think that’s very funny, Narasan.” Sorgan squinted at the mouth of the gorge again. “It looks to me like there’s a small brook wandering around at the bottom of the gorge.”
“There almost has to be, Sorgan. That bear who visited us in Dahlaine’s cave comes down here every year to go fishing.”
The sturdy Matan called Tlodal joined them on the rocky knoll and looked down at the mouth of the gorge. “Can you believe that I’ve never seen this before?” he said. “Our village is no more than forty miles away, but it never even occurred to me to come down here and have a look at it. I’ll admit that it’s sort of pretty, but the bison herds aren’t the least bit interested. They eat grass, not rocks.”
“You’re sort of in charge of the village of Asmie and its people while Two-Hands is away, aren’t you?” Narasan asked.
“I’m not sure just exactly how much authority I have over the other men of the tribe, Narasan. They’ll do what Two-Hands tells them to do, but about as far as I’ll go is to make suggestions,” Tlodal replied a bit dubiously. “Anyway, I’ve been talking with Chief Kathlak of Statha, and we’ve sort of agreed that his archers should concentrate on throwing their arrows at the small bug-people who’ll be coming along fairly soon. The spearmen of Asmie—and the other Matan villages as well—will sit still until the larger creatures attack that wall, or fort, or whatever you want to call it, and then we Matans will take over. The Tonthakans can throw their arrows much farther than we can throw our spears, but their arrows probably won’t be heavy enough to cut through anything like armor—or whatever might be there to protect the bug-people.”
“You two seem to be getting along with each other quite well,” Sorgan observed.
Tlodal shrugged. “We’re both hunters,” he said, “so we know the rules.”
“Rules?” Sorgan seemed to be a bit surprised.
“There’s only one rule, really, and it’s fairly simple. It has to do with poaching. I don’t try to kill his game animals, and he doesn’t try to kill mine. Do you want us to set up a camp out here in the open, or should we go on down the gorge a mile or so? Kathlak and I agree that ‘out here’ might be better than ‘down there,’ but that’s your decision. What’s it to be?”
“I see that you waited until the sun was going down before you came here to ask us,” Sorgan said shrewdly. “I’d say that ‘down there’ sort of died on the vine when the sun decided to go to bed.”
“It’s one of our responsibilities to make these decisions easier for you, mighty chieftain,” Tlodal replied blandly. “Do you want me to move around and tell everybody that you’ve wisely chosen ‘out here’ as the campsite for tonight, mighty chieftain?”
Narasan had a bit of trouble suppressing his laughter.
Their camp was fairly rudimentary, Narasan was forced to concede. Had the party camped there been exclusively Trogite soldiers, Narasan would quite probably have delivered a few blistering reprimands, but “neatness” and “straight lines” were alien concepts for the Matan spear-throwers and the Tonthakan archers, so Narasan chose not to make a big issue of “neat.” They were going to be here for only one night anyway, so it wasn’t all that important.
After a surprisingly rich supper of beans and bison meat, Tlodal, Kathlak, and Trenicia joined Narasan and Sorgan to discuss a few things. Then the Malavi, Ariga, arrived to describe in some detail what they were likely to encounter farther on down the gorge. “You’ll come to some fairly rough places,” he advised them, “and Gunda thought that I might be able to help you get around them.”
“What exactly do you mean when you say ‘rough places,’ Ariga?” Sorgan asked.
“Mostly landslides—or maybe quartz slides,” Ariga replied. “I guess that quartz is quite brittle, and an extremely cold winter will freeze it. Then, when spring rolls around, there’ll be a quick thaw, and whole sheets of that quartz will break free and crash down on the floor of th
e gorge. I’m sure that you’ll have to spend quite a bit of time wading back and forth across the brook. It’s the only way to get around those piles of shattered quartz—unless you’d prefer to dig.”
“That sort of explains why everybody was talking about ‘crumbly quartz’ when they were describing this end of the gorge,” Sorgan noted. Then he frowned. “If it happens up here at this end of the gorge, wouldn’t the same thing happen farther on down?”
“Not necessarily,” Narasan replied. “Dahlaine told me that there’s water involved in the process of breaking the quartz free from the wall. There are springs and brooks up on top here in the north end of the ravine, and the water seeps down through the cracks in the quartz. It’s drier on down to the south, so there isn’t enough water down there to break the quartz away. That means that there’ll be good solid walls on both sides of Gunda’s fort.”
“That’s all that really matters, I guess,” Sorgan said. Then he looked at Ariga. “You’ve been up and down this gorge several times, I take it,” he said.
“Often enough to get the general lay of the land,” Ariga replied.
“Then you’ll pretty much know where these ‘wade across the river’ places are located, won’t you?”
“Approximately, yes.”
“Where are we going with this, Sorgan?” Narasan asked his friend.
“We’ve got Matans and Tonthakans with us,” Sorgan explained, “and they can move around in rough country quite a bit faster than your men can. Suppose that we send them on ahead of us tomorrow morning. Ariga can show them those ‘wade across the river’ places, and then several of them can sit down and wait for your men to come marching along and then guide them around the rough places. That should save quite a bit of time, and we should all make it down to Gunda’s wall-base before the sun sets tomorrow. That way, the men’ll be able to get a good night’s sleep, and they’ll be ready to start building the real wall.”
“You’re getting better and better at this, Sorgan,” Narasan told his friend. “I’d always assumed that ‘planning ahead’ was an alien concept for Maags, and that ‘making it up as you go along’ was the standard procedure.”
“I’ve had some good teachers here lately,” Sorgan said. “You’re one of the best, of course, but the really best goes by the name of Keselo.”
“You just had to remind me of that, didn’t you, Sorgan?”
“It’s good for you, Narasan,” Sorgan replied with a broad grin. “I’m told that humility is a virtue, and Keselo splashes humility all over everybody who goes anywhere near him.”
2
It was late afternoon, and the sky to the west was red. For some reason that Narasan couldn’t quite understand, the sky here in Dahlaine’s part of the Land of Dhrall was always—or almost always—red. Things had gone quite well that day as the horse-soldier Ariga had guided them around the numerous places that had been blocked off by the shattered heaps of quartz.
Then Narasan and Sorgan rounded a rather sharp turn in the gorge, and Gunda’s solidly constructed base came into sight.
“We made good time,” Sorgan noted. “I’d say that Ariga earned his pay today.”
“He was sort of useful,” Narasan agreed as he studied Gunda’s base. It had been constructed out of solid blocks of the pink quartz, obviously, and Narasan was more than a little dubious about that. Quartz was pretty enough, but it was very brittle.
Then Gunda came out of the partially completed base. “What kept you?” he called.
“We stopped a few times to see if the fish were biting,” Sorgan called back.
“You’re starting to sound a lot like Padan,” Narasan told his friend. “He comes up with that excuse every time he’s late. Couldn’t you have come up with something just a bit more original?”
Sorgan shrugged. “Like they say, the old ones are the best.” He peered down at the wall-base. “That looks to be just about right,” he noted. “Now that your men are here, they should be able to complete our fort in just a few days.”
Gunda came on up the slope. “You might want to look the base over,” he said to Narasan, “but I don’t think you’ll find much to complain about.”
“Except that you built it out of quartz instead of granite,” Narasan replied.
“Quartz was all we had to work with,” Gunda said. “Skell and Torl went looking for granite, but the nearest outcropping of it is about ten miles on down the gorge. They said that it’d take all winter to break granite loose and drag it up here. We probably won’t have that much time, so we used quartz instead. It’s just a bit on the brittle side, I guess, but Torl reminded us that about the only tools the bug-people have are their teeth and knuckles. If the bug-people try to break through our wall with their bare hands and teeth, it’ll probably take them ten or fifteen years to even put a noticeable dent in our wall, and by then, the only enemies we’ll have out front will be toothless cripples.”
“You’ve got some fairly massive blocks there, Gunda,” Sorgan said.
“It was easier to make big ones than it would have been to make little bricks. I can flat guarantee that nobody’s going to be moving those big blocks around—particularly not when we’ve got them jammed up against the walls of the gorge.”
“This looks to be just about the narrowest place in the entire gorge,” Sorgan said then.
Gunda nodded. “Forty feet is about all. Now we’ll be able to concentrate on ‘high’ instead of ‘wide,’ and higher forts are always the best.”
“How would you describe the slope on down to the south?” Narasan asked.
“Steep, narrow, and without much of anything to hide behind,” Gunda replied with an evil grin. “It was just a bit cluttered when we first got here. There were quite a few large boulders on down there, but we used most of them to construct our base, and we’ll probably use up all the rest when we start erecting the main wall. We won’t leave any kind of shelter on that slope, so the bug-people will have to come at us right out in plain sight.”
“Let’s go take a look,” Sorgan suggested.
“Whatever makes you happy, Captain Hook-Beak,” Gunda agreed.
Narasan found Gunda’s base blocks to be massive, and the numerous chip-marks strongly told him that the Maags who’d been shaping the blocks had worked very carefully.
The slope just to the south was very steep and totally devoid of anything that the bug-people could use for concealment. “Nice job, Gunda,” he complimented his friend.
“I sort of like it myself,” Gunda said.
“Have you installed that up-and-down gate yet?” Sorgan asked. “Keselo and Rabbit described it, but I think I should see the real thing.” He paused. “Does it really work the way Keselo told all of us that it would? I’ve seen a lot of side-to-side gates, but I’ve never seen one that goes up and down.”
“It takes a lot of grease,” Gunda said, “but Ox has it pretty well moving like it’s supposed to.”
“How were you able to install it when the wall wasn’t complete yet?” Narasan asked.
“I cheated just a bit,” Gunda admitted. “We set up the frame and then braced it with quartz blocks. I was quite sure that gate would be about the first thing you’d want to see, so we went ahead and got it set up. Ox is our gate-man, and he fiddled around with it for almost a week. It does just exactly what Keselo told us it would do. Ox has a crew of men who all have shoulders about four feet wide. When those burlies pull the rope, the gate goes up so fast that if you blinked, you’d miss the whole thing.”
“Open is all right, I guess,” Sorgan said, “but wouldn’t you say that the important thing is how fast it comes down?”
“That’s the easy part,” Gunda replied. “All they have to do when they want to close the gate is let go of the rope. The gate drops like a rock. It makes a loud bang when it hits the bottom, and that tells us that the gate’s closed. When Keselo and Rabbit designed this gate, they wanted to keep the weight down to make it easier for the gate-crew to raise the
thing, so they used iron bars instead of thick iron plates. I’m not sure if they saw a terrific advantage there. Our people will be able to see through the gate, so they’ll know exactly what the enemies are up to. Then, if our people don’t like what the enemies are doing, they’ll be able to shoot arrows right through the gate. That should make things terribly exciting for anybody on the other side, wouldn’t you say?”
“Let’s go take a look, Narasan,” Sorgan suggested. “I really want to see this fancy new gate.”
“Have you heard anything at all about how things are going up in the north?” Skell asked Narasan that evening.
“Much better than we’d expected,” Narasan replied. “After we’d discovered that the ‘pestilence’ wasn’t really a disease, things went more smoothly.”
“If it wasn’t a disease, just exactly what was it?” Gunda demanded.
“It appears that the creatures of the Wasteland are growing more clever than they were when this all began last spring,” Narasan replied. “Somehow they discovered that their venom was just as deadly if the victim breathed it in as it was if they bit him and pumped some of it into his blood. They started to spit it up into the wind, and anybody who was standing on the downwind side—and breathing, of course—would inhale the venom and die within a few hours.”
“That’s terrible!” Gunda exclaimed.
“Moderately terrible, yes, but the disgustingly clever little Maag called Rabbit came up with a very simple solution.”
“Oh?”
“He called it ‘shut off the wind,’ as I recall. Mighty Dahlaine, who can perform miracles without so much as turning a hair, looked just a bit sheepish when Rabbit explained his notion. If the wind’s not blowing, spitting venom up into the air would be a very bad idea, since the venom would settle right back down and contaminate the air that whoever—or whatever—had spit it up would breathe in himself. They’d end up poisoning themselves—and the Atazaks who were on their side.”
Crystal Gorge: Book Three of the Dreamers Page 34