Crystal Gorge

by David Eddings

  “I’ve never been in that part of the world,” Keselo replied, “but I’ve heard a few stories, and if those stories come anywhere close to being accurate, I definitely wouldn’t want to face them in a war.”

  “Just exactly what is a horse?” Rabbit asked curiously.

  “It’s one of the animals that eats grass,” Keselo replied. “It’s not very much like a sheep or a cow or a deer, though. It’s quite a bit larger, and it can run faster. The Malavi have somehow managed to tame them, and they sit on the backs of horses when they’re moving their cattle-herds from one place to another. Horses can run faster than cows—even when they’ve got a Malavi sitting on them. Over the years, the horses have turned out to be very useful, and the Malavi cow-herds have proved to be extremely valuable.”

  “Do the horse people have any unusual weapons?” Rabbit asked.

  “Their swords and spears are a bit different from ours. They call their swords ‘sabres,’ and they slash with them rather than stab. Their spears are called ‘lances,’ and they’re quite a bit longer than ours. I think they might have some problems if they encounter the bug-people, though. Venom would kill a horse just as fast as it kills people, I think, and a Malavi without his horse wouldn’t be very effective.”

  “Do they wear armor of any kind?”

  Keselo shook his head. “It would probably just get in their way, and the extra weight would slow their horses down. Speed is very important in Malavi war tactics. In many ways they’re very much like your people, Rabbit. They rely on speed.” Keselo smiled briefly. “Now that I think about it, the Malavi are almost a land version of the Maags, and the horse is very much like the Seagull here.”

  “I think we’ll get along with them fairly well, then,” Rabbit said. Then he sighed. “I guess I’d better fire up my forge. Longbow told me that the archers up north will probably want bronze arrowheads as soon as they see the ones he has.”

  “Wouldn’t iron be even better?”

  “Maybe, but not all that much. Bronze is almost as good as iron when you’re talking about arrowheads, and it’s a lot easier to work with. The fire in my forge doesn’t have to be as hot to melt down bronze. I can turn out ten times as many bronze arrowheads in the same amount of time as it’d take me to make a few out of iron.”

  “Do you have that much bronze here on the Seagull?” Keselo asked, sounding a bit surprised.

  Rabbit grinned at his friend. “There’s quite a bit down in the hold,” he said. “Trogite ships usually carry spare anchors just in case they happen to break the rope on the main one, but those spare anchors have been disappearing here lately for some reason. Isn’t that odd?”

  Keselo laughed. “You’re a pirate, Rabbit,” he declared.

  “Of course I am. I’m a Maag, after all, and piracy’s what we’re all about. Everybody knows that.”

  It seemed to Rabbit that there was a kind of dusty quality about the air as the Maag fleet sailed along the southern coast of Veltan’s Domain. He’d noticed that on several occasions in the past. Autumn was often pretty when the leaves were turning gold or red along the coast, but there was a kind of sadness about the season that followed summer.

  “You’re looking sort of gloomy today, Bunny,” Eleria said as she joined him near the bow of the Seagull.

  “Winter’s coming,” Rabbit said. “That’s the gloomy time of the year.”

  “We could ask the Beloved to make winter go away, if you’d like,” she said with one of those sly little smiles.

  “I don’t know if that would be a very good idea, baby sister,” Rabbit replied. “If she starts playing with the seasons, Mother Sea might send her off to the moon like she did to Veltan that time.”

  “Mother Sea wouldn’t do that to the Beloved,” Eleria replied. She held out her arms. “I need a hug, Bunny. Everybody’s so busy talking in that hut where we’re staying that they don’t have time for me.”

  “It’s called a ‘cabin,’ baby sister, not a ‘hut.’”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “I’m not really sure,” Rabbit admitted, “but I think ‘hut’ would upset the cap’n almost as much as when somebody calls his ship a ‘boat.’ That sends him right straight up the wall.”

  “You’re not hugging, Bunny,” she scolded.

  “Sorry, baby sister. I’ll get right on it.” He picked her up and wrapped his arms about her.

  “That’s so much nicer,” she said, kissing his cheek.

  Later that day, Longbow came out on deck and joined Rabbit at the bow of the Seagull. “It’s good to be moving again,” he said quietly. “I was starting to get a little tired of all that bickering.”

  “What was that all about, anyway? I never did get the straight of it.”

  Longbow shrugged. “Zelana’s older sister wanted all of the outlanders to defend her Domain, but her big brother wouldn’t hold still for it. He feels that his Domain is just as important as hers—if not more. Zelana and Veltan thought that they were both being a little silly. We sometimes forget that the Elder Gods are nearing the end of their cycle, and they’re starting to get just a little strange.”

  “More than a ‘little,’ sometimes,” Rabbit said. “Eleria’s going to take over for Zelana before long, isn’t she?”

  “I believe so, but the gods might have a different definition of ‘before long’ than we do. I’d imagine that the younger gods will have to grow up before their elders can hand things off to them.”

  2

  I see that you’re working again, Rabbit,” the farmer Omago said when he came forward later that day.

  “Just trying to stay a little bit ahead of Longbow,” Rabbit said. “He thinks that the Tonthakans will want bronze arrowheads when we reach Lord Dahlaine’s part of the Land of Dhrall. I’m not really doing anything very important now anyway, and if I’m banging on my anvil, Ox and Ham-Hand won’t be sitting around trying to come up with things for me to do.” He laid his hammer down on the anvil. “What’s Ara been doing here lately?” he asked. “We haven’t seen very much of her.”

  “She’s in the kitchen, of course,” Omago said with a faint smile. “She’s been giving that one called ‘the Fat Man’ some cooking lessons.”

  Rabbit laughed. “I should have known she’d do something like that,” he said. “The Fat Man’s not really one of the world’s greatest cooks, that’s for sure. He usually gets grouchy when somebody goes into his galley, though.”

  “Nobody stays grouchy very long when Ara stops by,” Omago said. “After she’d tasted a couple of the meals he’d served up, she decided to educate him. I’m almost positive that he’ll be a much better cook by the time we reach Dahlaine’s part of the world.”

  “That won’t hurt my feelings very much,” Rabbit said. “I’m not sure how much she’ll be able to teach him during this trip, though. There isn’t much stored down there in the galley except beans, and there’s only so much you can do with beans.”

  “I think you’re in for a pleasant surprise, Rabbit,” Omago said. “Ara is the finest cook in the world, after all, so I’m sure she’ll find some way to make beans taste better.”

  The fleet rounded the last peninsula on the south coast a few days later and turned north. There was a good following wind, and the longships seemed almost to fly. Rabbit found that to be quite exhilarating. This was what sailing was all about. He spent most of his daylight hours out on the deck near the Seagull’s bow heating bronze in his forge.

  “Breezy, isn’t it?” Longbow said as he joined him at the rail.

  “It’s a fair wind,” Rabbit agreed as he tested the iron pot filled with pieces of bronze on his forge. “If it keeps this up, we’ll make better time than the cap’n thought we would. Have we reached Zelana’s territory yet?”

  Longbow squinted at the coast. “Not quite, I think. Give it another day or so.” He glanced at Rabbit’s forge. “Your bronze is starting to melt.”

  “I know,” Rabbit said. “I want it to get a little
soupier before I pour it into the molds, though. If I pour too soon, there’ll be lumps sticking out of the arrowheads. How far would you say it is to the bay of Lattash?”

  “About two days, I think.”

  Then the bull-shouldered first mate Ox came forward to join them. “Lady Zelana’s brother’s going to tell us some things about his part of this country,” he said, “and the cap’n wants you two to sit in. I guess things on up north are just a little different from the places we’ve seen so far.”

  “It wouldn’t be much fun if it was all the same, would it?” Rabbit said.

  “We’re here for gold, Rabbit,” Ox said sourly, “not for fun.”

  “Gold and fun don’t always go in different directions, Ox,” Rabbit said with a grin.

  “Just go on back to the cap’n’s cabin, Rabbit,” Ox said a bit wearily. “If you want to have fun, do it on your own time.”

  The cabin at the stern of the Seagull was a bit crowded, but they all managed to squeeze themselves in.

  Zelana’s grey-bearded big brother looked around. “I guess that’s everybody,” he said. “Captain Hook-Beak wants to know a few things about the people of my Domain, and I thought that maybe it’d save time in the long run if you were all here. I’ll give you a sort of general idea about my people and the layout of the country up there, and then I’ll answer any questions you might have.” He paused, looking around at them. “When we get to the north of Zelana’s Domain, we’ll go ashore in the Tonthakan Nation. There are three significantly different cultures in my Domain—the Tonthakans, who are very much like the people of sister Zelana’s Domain, the Matans, who dwell on the grassy plain in the center, and the Atazakans. The Tonthakans are primarily hunters, the northern Matans have vast grain fields, and the Atazakans are totally worthless.”

  “Are we likely to hit bad weather?” Sorgan asked.

  “Not immediately,” Dahlaine replied. “There’s a warm current that comes up the west coast in the autumn that sort of holds winter back. When winter finally does arrive, it’s fairly brutal. We get snowstorms that last for weeks. Fortunately, the whirlwind season is almost over for this year.”

  “We come across those out at sea sometimes,” Torl said. “We call them ‘water-spouts.’ We use some other terms as well, but I don’t think we should repeat those words in the presence of Lady Zelana.”

  “I appreciate that, Torl,” Zelana said.

  “Are there mountains of any kind standing between your part of the Land of Dhrall and the Wasteland?” Sorgan asked.

  Dahlaine nodded. “If the creatures of the Wasteland come north, I don’t think they’ll enjoy it very much. The mountains of Zelana’s Domain and Veltan’s are gently rolling hills by comparison, and with winter coming, things are likely to get very unpleasant in those mountains without much in the way of a warning of any kind.”

  The wind held steady for the next several days, and Sorgan’s fleet moved briskly on up the west coast of the Land of Dhrall. It was about midmorning of an autumn day while Rabbit was busy forging more bronze arrowheads for the natives of the Tonthakan region of Dahlaine’s territory when Longbow joined him. “How’s your supply of bronze holding out?” he asked.

  “I’ve still got enough to keep me going for another week or so,” Rabbit replied. “The smiths on board the other ships are supposed to be working, too, but I couldn’t swear to it that they are.”

  “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Longbow said. “I’ve heard about what you did to that Regulator called Konag. When did you decide to take up archery? I thought your job was to make arrows, not to shoot them.”

  “It just sort of popped into my head one day,” Rabbit replied. “I’d been spending days and weeks making arrows, and then one day I realized that I’d never pulled a bow even once in my whole life. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to give it a try.”

  “I was busy someplace else when you killed Regulator Konag, but from what I’ve heard, you did a very good job.”

  “All I really did was follow your instructions, Longbow. It seemed like every time I turned around, you were talking about ‘unification.’ After I’d trimmed and shaped my bow and got the bowstring in place, I took a few arrows and went out into the woods to make sure that my bow—or the bowstring—wouldn’t break the first time I tried to shoot an arrow. There was a patch of moss on a tree a ways away from where I was standing, and I looked at it for a while, and then I shot an arrow at it. Somehow I knew that the arrow would go exactly where I wanted it to go. I stuck quite a few arrows into that moss-patch, and they all went exactly where I wanted them to go. That’s when I decided that Konag would look much prettier with an arrow sticking out of his forehead, and, as it turned out, he did.” Rabbit frowned. “When you get right down to it, though, I wasn’t really thinking about shooting him until I actually saw him. As soon as I saw him, I suddenly just had to kill him.”

  “I’m starting to catch a faint smell of dear old ‘unknown friend’ again,” Longbow said with a thoughtful expression on his face. “Konag was causing some problems, and she wanted him dead. You and your bow were right there, so she borrowed you.”

  “Borrowed?”

  “She was doing the same thing to me for several weeks. I wasn’t in the immediate vicinity when Konag started to get in her way, so she just reached out and grabbed you.”

  “Can she really do that? I mean, I don’t think that even Zelana could have done some of the things your friend was doing up in that basin above the Falls of Vash.”

  “I’m getting a strong feeling that our unknown friend can do things that make Zelana and her family look like children by comparison. She grabbed that geyser and moved it several miles off to the north of the place where it had been happily bubbling up out of the ground for thousands of years, and then she unleashed it to drown thousands of bug-people and church-people all at the same time. Even Dahlaine couldn’t have done that.”

  “I’m glad she’s on our side, then,” Rabbit said. “We wouldn’t really want to have her as our enemy, would we?”

  “Not even a little bit, friend Rabbit,” Longbow agreed.

  “Do you suppose we could talk about something else?” Rabbit said. “Just the thought of that kind of power makes me go cold all over.” He frowned. “Did I hear it right? As I understand it, you’ve actually visited the part of Dahlaine’s territory he calls Tonthakan.”

  “I’ve gone up there a few times, yes,” Longbow replied. “I’d pretty well thinned out the bug-people in our territory, and I was sort of wondering if I’d frightened them so much that they’d started to sneak around off to the north.”

  “Dahlaine says that they’re archers—just like you and Red-Beard. Are they any good at shooting arrows?”

  “They’re not bad,” Longbow replied. “They’re good enough to keep eating regularly, at any rate. There’s a man up there—Athlan, his name is—who’s quite skilled. He’s a funny sort of fellow, and I like him. I’m sure he’ll be delighted with these bronze arrowheads you’re forging for him.”

  “A man should always help his friends, Longbow,” Rabbit said. “We’re getting a start on this, but as soon as we go ashore in that place called Tonthakan, we’ll set up an arrow factory like we did at Lattash, and then we’ll be able to turn out bronze arrowheads by the thousands. I don’t think the bug-people will like that very much, but we can’t please everybody, I guess.”

  Since the Maag fleet was sailing north along the coast at a good rate of speed, it seemed to Rabbit that autumn was coming on much faster than it should. There were birch trees and oak scattered among the pines and firs of Zelana’s Domain, and their leaves were changing color now at what appeared to be an unnatural speed as he worked at his anvil.

  “Would it be all right if I stayed out here with you for a while, Bunny?” Eleria asked after she’d come out of Sorgan’s cabin about noon one day. “I’m getting very tired of all the talking that’s going on in Sorgan’s cabin. A
ll they want to do is talk-talk-talk.”

  “They’re making plans, baby sister,” Rabbit told her.

  “No, they’re just wasting time. We won’t know what’s really going to happen until one of the Dreams comes along.”

  “Are you going to do the dreaming again this time, baby sister?” Rabbit asked her.

  “I don’t really think so, Bunny,” she replied. “It’s possible, I suppose, but I think it’s just about time for Lillabeth to do her share of the work. Yaltar, Ashad, and I’ve been doing all the dreaming so far, so I think it’s Lillabeth’s turn.”

  “Won’t that be just a little inconvenient? I mean, if she’s way off to the east and we’re on up north, it’s going to be a long way from where we are.”

  “Distance doesn’t really mean anything, Bunny,” Eleria replied. “You should know that by now.”

  “Well—maybe—but I think we’d all be a lot happier if you or one of the boy-dreamers were telling us what was going to happen. Zelana’s sister won’t be very happy if her Dreamer is the one who tells us that we’ll be fighting the next war up north instead of off to the east. You don’t need to tell Zelana I said this, but I don’t really like her sister very much.”

  “You don’t have to like her, Bunny. The only one you’re supposed to like is the Beloved. She is the one who’s paying Hook-Big, after all.”

  “Are we still playing that tired old ‘Hook-Big’ game, baby sister?” Rabbit asked with a faint smile.

  “The old ones are the best, Bunny,” Eleria replied with a toss of her head. “Do you think you might be able to spare me a kiss-kiss along about now?” she asked then.

  “Oh, I think so,” Rabbit replied. “I’ve got quite a few of them stored up in the little room where I keep my hugs and kisses locked away so that nobody can steal them.”

  “Oh, goodie!” Eleria said, clapping her little hands together.