“Did it work like it was supposed to?” Gunda asked.
Narasan shrugged. “We left Mount Shrak to come on down here before any reports from the north came in, but I’d say that any time you’ve got Longbow, Keselo, and Rabbit working together, life will be very unpleasant for the enemy.” He paused. “Can you give me any kind of an estimate of how long it’s likely to take our men to complete this wall? The creatures of the Wasteland have been trying to divert us from this gorge, so I’d say that it’s going to take quite some time for their main force to reach us here, but we’d better get the fort in place as soon as we possibly can.”
“It won’t really take us all that long, Narasan,” Gunda replied. “We’ve got most of the Maags down here to lend us a hand. They’ll carry the raw, unshaped rocks to the fort here, and our men will be able to concentrate on wall-building. I’d say give it a week or so, and then the bug invasion will stop right here.”
“We didn’t see anything at all down there that even comes close to mortar, Commander,” a lean old sergeant reported, late the following day. “This ravine—or gorge, I guess they call it—is nothing but quartz. We could try farther on down tomorrow, sir, but I don’t think we’ll have any luck there, either.”
“I was sort of afraid of that, Narasan,” Gunda said.
“How can we build a fort without mortar?” Narasan demanded.
“We’ll have to go to lock-stone, I guess,” Gunda replied.
“That’s sort of shaky, isn’t it?”
“It’s not all that bad. It takes longer to build, but it does the job. It’s not as if the bug-people were armed—or even knew anything at all about catapults and rams. Their weapons are limited to teeth and fingernails. If they try to chew their way through our wall, it’ll take them several years to get through, and it’ll be sometime next spring before they can even get past the outer layer of blocks.” He stamped his foot down on one of the huge base-rocks. “If we had more time, this would be the simplest answer. If we built the whole fort out of these foundation blocks, the silly thing would probably still be here a thousand years from now.”
“I’ll settle for ten years, Gunda,” Narasan told his friend. “If we do things right, there won’t be any creatures of the Wasteland ten years from now. Build your wall, Gunda. I need to go see how the men building the catapults are coming along.”
He carefully lowered himself to the ground on the back side of Gunda’s fort and went on back to what the men of his army called “the catapult factory,” a fairly obvious variation of Rabbit’s “arrow factory” on the beach near the village of Lattash.
The warrior queen Trenicia was watching as the highly skilled engineers constructed the standard Trogite catapults. “Ah, there you are, Narasan,” she said. “I thought that these things were used to break down the walls of cities or forts. What good are they going to be here?”
Narasan smiled. “The catapult has many uses, Trenicia,” he explained. “When we want to break down a wall, we use very large rocks, but when we want to thin out the number of enemies charging on our position, we use hundreds of smaller rocks. A well-constructed catapult will throw those pebbles about a hundred feet up into the air, and then it’ll quite suddenly start raining rocks down on our enemies. Our little rock-shower might not kill all of our enemies, but it will reduce their numbers significantly. I’m quite sure that a shower of quartz fragments will be even more effective than ordinary pebbles could ever be. Quartz seems to shatter into very sharp fragments, and when they come raining down on our enemies, they’ll cut the bug-people all to pieces.”
“You people make war much more complicated than we do on the Isle of Akalla,” Trenicia observed. “We kill our enemies one at a time, and we’re usually face-to-face with the one we’re going to kill. You people who come from that place called civilization kill people you don’t even know from a long distance away.”
“The main thing in any war is winning, Trenicia,” Narasan reminded her. “If more enemies are killed than your friends are, you’ve just won. If it’s the other way around, you’ve lost. I’ll grant you that over the years we’ve made things more complicated by adding machines of one kind or another, but it still comes back to killing more enemies than the enemies kill of your people.”
“But are those machines you build strictly honorable?”
Narasan winced. Sometimes it seemed that every time he turned around, the word “honorable” kept popping out of nowhere.
Trenicia sat down on a large slab of quartz with a somber expression. “There’s so much I have to learn,” she said. “Things were happening down in the Domain of Dahlaine’s younger brother that I still don’t understand. I could see the value of these machines, of course, but I thought they were built mostly for knocking down the enemy’s forts. Then I saw them used to throw fire at enemy soldiers. I thought that forts were the main things in civilized wars, but it seemed that as soon as your people finished building a fort, they just walked off and left it standing there.”
“That was a very unusual war, Trenicia,” Narasan told her. “Forts are usually our primary way to hold back an invasion, but Longbow’s ‘unknown friend’ changed almost everything down in Veltan’s Domain. She’s capable of things that go beyond anything that Dahlaine or Zelana or Veltan can even imagine.”
“I know. She spoke to me not long after we reached Mount Shrak.”
“She did?” Narasan was startled. “Why didn’t you tell us?”
“She told me not to. I do silly things quite often, but crossing that one would go a long way past silly, don’t you think? Let’s just say that she’s here to help us, and let it go at that. Let’s get back to these ‘civilized wars.’ What are they really all about?”
“Land, usually,” Narasan replied, “and gold, of course. We take land away from others so that we can grow food on it. Then we sell the food to others—if they’re willing to pay for it.” He smiled faintly. “You’re not really interested in gold, though, are you?”
“Not really,” Trenicia said. “I prefer jewels. They’re prettier and much more valuable than the yellow lead that makes civilized people get so excited. What would you say is the most important thing you want to do when you’re fighting a civilized war?”
“We call it ‘take the high ground,’ Trenicia. You always want to be uphill from your enemy. If you do it that way, he has to climb to reach you.” He frowned slightly. “When you get right down to it, that’s what our forts are all about. In a sense, we make high ground when we build a fort.”
“It sort of keeps you stuck in one place, though, doesn’t it? You build a fort, and then you have to sit there. Doesn’t that make your wars sort of boring? When we fight a war on the Isle of Akalla, we spend most of our time running. We run in, cut down a lot of our enemies, and then run off. Then our enemy runs after us. After we get a few miles ahead of her, we circle around and attack her from behind. After you’ve done that to an enemy several times, she doesn’t have very many warriors left.” Then she pursed her lips. “I think maybe I should have a long talk with Longbow or those archers from over in Tonthakan. If I had bows and my warriors knew how to use them, I could own the Isle of Akalla.”
Narasan smiled. “I thought you already did own the isle,” he said.
“Oh, I do, of course,” Trenicia replied, “but there are a fair number of women there who don’t quite realize that—yet.”
Gunda’s fort was beginning to take shape now, and Narasan began to feel just a bit more relaxed. Dahlaine had assured them that it would take their enemies quite a long time to reach Crystal Gorge, but still . . .
Ariga and his horse-soldiers had been scouting off to the south of the gorge, and as yet they hadn’t encountered any of the invaders. If things kept going the way they were now, the fort would be complete long before the creatures of the Wasteland came anywhere near the gorge.
Then on a chilly, cloudy afternoon, Ariga came galloping up the gorge. “There’s company coming!”
he shouted as he swung down from his horse.
“Well, finally,” Gunda said with a tight grin. “I was beginning to think they might have gotten lost out there in the desert.” He looked rather proudly at his nearly completed fort. “Let them come,” he added. “We’re ready for them.”
Sorgan Hook-Beak grinned. “I was starting to think that they didn’t like us anymore, and we’ve spent a lot of time building our welcome for them, and I’d hate to see it go to waste.”
“I wouldn’t get too happy yet, Hook-Beak,” Ariga said. “From what Ekial told me, the bug-people down in Veltan-Land didn’t have weapons of any kind—except for their teeth and fingernails. That’s changed, though. We saw a goodly number of them coming up the slope from that desert out there, and they’re quite a bit better-armed now.”
“What kind of weapons do they have?”
“You name it, and they’ve got it—swords, spears, axes, and clubs with iron spikes sticking out of them.”
“They’ve started to make real weapons?” Sorgan exclaimed.
“I don’t think ‘make’ had much to do with it,” Ariga replied. “I’d say that ‘picked up’ would come closer. The swords they’re carrying are the same as the ones your men are carrying, and the spears appear to be of Trogite origin. People do get killed in wars, you know, and I’d say that our enemies roamed around various battlefields picking up all those lovely free weapons.”
“They wouldn’t really know how to use them, would they, Narasan?” Sorgan asked.
“They’ve been watching us during the course of two wars, Sorgan,” Narasan reminded his friend, “so I’m sure they’ve got a general idea of how to use those pillaged weapons. They won’t be very good right at first, but I’m sure they’ll get better as time goes by.”
“It’s just not fair,” Sorgan growled. “Everything was going along just fine, but now we’ll have to face all those thieves who’ve been stealing our weapons every time we turned our backs on them.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard a Maag use the word ‘thief’ before,” Narasan said mildly.
It was three days later, and as yet there had been no sign of the now-armed creatures of the Wasteland, and that was making everyone just a bit edgy.
Then, not long after noon, Prince Ekial of the Malavi rode in, and as the days passed, more and more of the Malavi horse-soldiers that had been diverted to the meaningless war in the northern part of Matakan arrived in Crystal Gorge, and they ranged out farther and farther to the south to disrupt and delay the gathering of the enemy forces.
There was a kind of independence about the Malavi that Narasan found to be a bit disturbing. Soldiers were supposed to be a part of a larger entity—an army, in most cases. They weren’t supposed to dash off and do things on their own the way the Malavi all too frequently did.
“Don’t let it bother you so much,” Gunda said when Narasan privately told his friend of his discontent. “They do things a bit differently, that’s all. We build forts, and then we sit in them waiting—and waiting, and waiting—for our enemies to mount futile, and stupid, attacks on our impregnable defenses. The Malavi prefer to harass our enemies while they’re marching toward our fort. I’m not saying that the Malavi will drive our enemies away before they ever reach our fort, but they’ll probably thin out the herd quite noticeably.”
“You’re even starting to talk like a Malavi, Gunda. ‘Thin out the herd’? That’s horse-soldier talk.”
“So beat me. Relax, Narasan. Our Malavi friends are having fun—and they’re reducing the number of enemies who’ll still be alive when they come here to attack our fort. Do you have any idea at all about how much longer it’s likely to take Longbow and the others to get down here?”
“Ekial says just a few more days,” Narasan replied. “They move independently rather than marching in groups the way we do, so they can go quite a bit farther—and faster—than we can.”
Gunda rose up just a bit and looked back along the front wall of their fort. “Do you need someplace to hide?” he asked.
“Hide?”
“Here comes Trenicia. If you give her half a chance, she’ll talk your ears off before the sun goes down.”
“Very funny, Gunda,” Narasan said.
“I’m glad you liked it.”
3
It was several days later when Padan, Longbow, Keselo, and Rabbit came down through Crystal Gorge to join their friends at Gunda’s wall. Narasan chose not to make an issue of it, but it seemed that just about everybody heaved a sigh of relief when Longbow arrived. There was something about Zelana’s archer that seemed to give just about everybody a sense of invincibility. Longbow was one of the best. There was no question about that, but Narasan was fairly sure that it didn’t rub off.
“Now we get to find out exactly what happened to the crazy man from Atazakan,” Sorgan declared. “What in the world was it that made you decide to let the bison kill him instead of driving one of your arrows right through his head?”
Longbow shrugged. “They were right there, and they could do a much more thorough job than we could have. I suppose we could have made war on Holy Azakan and his ‘Defenders of Divinity,’ but a few of them would quite probably have evaded us and returned to Atazakan to stir up more trouble. The bison killed almost every one of them, and I didn’t have to waste any arrows—or friends—in the process.” He smiled faintly. “The nice thing is that so far as we could tell, not one single bison was killed during their stampede.”
“How were you so certain that those wild animals would do what you wanted them to do?” the warrior queen Trenicia demanded.
“Everyone who lives here in Matan knows that bison are afraid of fire,” Longbow explained. “Of course, almost all animals are afraid when fire breaks out. Keselo and his men had built catapults, and they knew the proper mixture of various liquids to make what the Trogites call ‘fire-missiles.’ In a peculiar sort of way, we were able to steer that bison herd in much the same way as Maags and Trogites steer their ships. All we really had to do was set fire to the grass in every direction that we didn’t want the bison to run. We left them one option and only one, so they ran in the direction that we wanted them to run, and they ran much, much faster than anybody from Atazakan could.”
“And that killed every single one of those invaders?” Trenicia asked.
“Not quite every one,” Two-Hands said. “The bison—who probably didn’t even see them—ran right over the top of them. After a thousand or so bison run over somebody, there isn’t much of him left out in plain sight. Most of him is probably a foot or two down in the dirt in very small bits and pieces.”
Trenicia shuddered. “I really wish you wouldn’t say things like that, Chief Two-Hands,” she said.
Tlantar shrugged. “He was one of our enemies. We want bad things to happen to our enemies, don’t we?”
“Maybe so, but we don’t have to talk about it, do we?”
It was early the following morning when Padan roused Narasan from a sound sleep. “We’ve got company,” he said.
Narasan stretched and yawned. “The bug-people are coming to call?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t put it that way,” Padan replied. “I’m a bit surprised that you’re still sleeping. The thunderclap almost shook Gunda’s fort down. Actually, Lord Dahlaine stopped by—with family—to see how things are going.”
“Why didn’t you say so?” Narasan demanded, pulling on his uniform.
“I just did. You don’t really have to rush, Glorious Commander. Gunda’s taking our visitors on a tour of his fort. You know how Gunda loves to show off. I’m sure that he’s boring the children almost to tears.”
“Dahlaine and the others brought the children with them?” Narasan found that a bit disturbing. “That’s not really a very good idea. The bug-people haven’t attacked yet, but they are out there.”
“Actually, they’re not,” Padan said. “The Malavi went out just before daybreak to see what our enemies have been u
p to, and so far as they were able to determine, there’s not a single bug anywhere in the gorge. That might explain why Dahlaine and his family decided to pay us a call. On the bright side of this, Dahlaine brought the farmer Omago and his wife along as well, and Ara of the pretty feet is making breakfast.”
“Are you having fun yet, Padan?” Narasan sourly asked his friend.
“Just doing my job, Mighty Leader,” Padan replied with a broad grin.
Narasan grunted and went up the narrow stairway that led to the top of the front wall of Gunda’s fort.
“Ah, there you are, Commander,” the grey-bearded Dahlaine said. “I’m sorry that we had to wake you, but this sudden disappearance of our enemies is a bit disturbing. Were you able to pick up any hints about why they all went away?”
“I didn’t even know that they’d left,” Narasan replied. “Prince Ekial told us that they were still there yesterday evening.”
“Maybe they took one look at your fort and decided that they didn’t want to play anymore,” Sorgan suggested with a grin.
“Their minds don’t work that way, Sorgan,” Zelana said.
“Are we sure that they haven’t gone back to burrowing down under the ground again?” Red-Beard asked.
Longbow shook his head. “They haven’t had that much time,” he said. “That’s not bare dirt out there, you know.”
“Where are they, then?” Red-Beard demanded.
“I’ll go take a look,” Zelana said.
“You don’t have to do that, dear sister,” Dahlaine objected. “That’s my responsibility.”
“You’re too noisy, big brother,” Zelana replied. “I’ll do it, and I won’t shake down the walls of this gorge in the process. Just stay right here. I won’t be long.”
Narasan shuddered and looked away as Zelana rose up into the air without so much as making a sound. “I wish she wouldn’t do that,” he muttered.
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