“Now, why didn’t I think of that?” Dahlaine said, looking just a bit ashamed of himself.
“You don’t really want me to tell you, do you, Dahlaine?” Ara replied with a naughty little smirk.
It was almost certainly well past midnight when Zelana, Veltan, and Longbow returned from a journey that Trenicia was positive would have taken her several months at least.
“As it turns out, big brother, the Matan was killed with venom rather than some ordinary poison,” Zelana reported to Dahlaine.
“That’s not—” Dahlaine began to protest.
“Hear me out, Dahlaine,” Zelana scolded him. “It appears that the creatures of the Wasteland have come up with a way to spray their venom up into the air instead of leaking it out through their fangs.”
“In a sort of mist, you mean?” Dahlaine suggested.
“Exactly. The venom is still deadly, but it doesn’t kill people quite as fast as the usual dose of it would if it were injected into the victim’s veins. The victim breathes the mist in, and it takes a while for it to get into his blood. The old—but still very skilled—shaman of Longbow’s tribe found traces of the venom in the dead Matan’s nose, and that fine mist didn’t kill him instantly as it would have had it gone straight into his blood. If the servants of the Vlagh can make that mist fine enough, it could probably kill several dozen Matans with the same amount of venom as it could deliver with one bite to kill just one man.”
“That’s terrible!” Dahlaine gasped.
“Moderately terrible, yes,” Veltan agreed. “The next question that sort of leaps to mind is, what are we going to do about it?”
Were these gods children? Trenicia had almost instantly come up with a solution. Why couldn’t they see it? “Correct me if I’m wrong here, but can’t you and the other members of your family control the wind?”
“Well, up to a point, I suppose,” Dahlaine conceded, “but—” He abruptly stopped. “How in the world did you come up with that, Queen Trenicia?”
“On occasion in the past I’ve used smoke to drive an enemy away,” she replied. “A little bit of smoke doesn’t bother people very much, but a lot of smoke makes it almost impossible for them to breathe. At that point, they have to run away—or stay and die.”
“Omago came up with something very much like that a little while back, Queen Trenicia,” Veltan said. “There’s a peculiar sort of tree down in my Domain that the farmers call ‘greasewood.’ When they’re having trouble with insects, the farmers make a large pile of those trees and then set fire to them. The bugs can’t stand that smoke, so it drives them away before they can eat all the food the farmers are growing. The smoke bothers the farmers almost as much as it bothers the bugs, though, so the farmers cover their lower faces with wet cloth. If Dahlaine’s Matans covered their lower faces with wet cloth, it might protect them—particularly if the wind suddenly changes direction. Our people would be fairly safe, but the wind would blow that mist right back into the faces of the creatures of the Wasteland and those Atazakans who’ve joined forces with them. When Omago suggested this, we thought that our enemies from the Wasteland were using mushroom spores to poison the Matans with this imitation disease, but a sudden change in the direction of the wind would blow this misty venom back into the faces of our enemies just as fast as it’d blow mushroom spores, wouldn’t it?”
Sorgan the pirate chortled. “I love it when an enemy provides just exactly what we need to kill him,” he said.
“It’s not a bad idea,” Dahlaine said, “but I think it might just break one of the rules. Mother Sea won’t let us kill anybody—or anything—and changing the direction of the wind in this situation would be almost as bad as throwing thunderbolts at our enemies.”
“I don’t think I’d worry very much, Dahlaine,” Longbow suggested. “We have this ‘unknown friend,’ remember? The wind will go where she wants it to go. If she could change the direction of a waterfall, changing the course of a breeze wouldn’t give her many problems.”
“But how are we going to get word to her?” Veltan protested.
Longbow shrugged. “I’m fairly sure that she knows already, Veltan,” he said. “I don’t think that there’s very much of anything that she doesn’t know about, when you get right down to it.”
Then several things that had taken place near the Falls of Vash suddenly all fit together for Trenicia, and she stared at the wife of the stodgy farmer Omago in open astonishment.
“That was quick,” Ara’s voice came soundlessly to the warrior queen. “You’re more clever than you appear to be, Queen Trenicia. Some of the others have caught a few hints, but they haven’t quite put them together yet.”
Trenicia tried to speak, but her tongue seemed to have gone to sleep.
“Not out loud, dear,” Ara’s voice scolded. “Don’t upset the children just yet.”
“Which children?” Trenicia silently demanded.
“They’re all children, dear. Didn’t you know that? They call it ‘war,’ but it’s really just a game. Let them play, dear. It keeps them busy and out from underfoot. You and I can talk about this some other time, Trenicia. I’m going to be occupied for a while, so this can wait.”
Trenicia began to shiver and she stared at the pretty lady in astonishment.
“Don’t let your mouth gape open like that, Trenicia,” Ara’s voice chided. “It’s not very becoming.”
THE PESTILENCE
1
Tlantar was born in the village of Asmie, which was snuggled up against the south side of Mount Shrak, the home of Dahlaine of the North, the eldest of the gods of the Land of Dhrall.
Tlantar’s father, Tladan, was the chief of Asmie, and Dahlaine frequently came by Tladan’s lodge when he wanted to send word to other Matan villages, so Tlantar was perhaps much more familiar with him than were the children of the other villagers in Asmie.
The close proximity of the village to the towering Mount Shrak didn’t seem to make much sense in the summertime, but when winter came roaring in, Mount Shrak was Asmie’s dearest friend, sheltering her from howling gales and blizzards that went on for weeks at a time. The lodges of the tribe were solidly built of sod blocks and thatched roofs held in place with heavy rocks, and they were clustered tightly together with overlapping roofs. Tlantar was quite sure that winter found that to be very offensive, since there was no way she’d be able to pile her pet snowflakes in the narrow passages between the lodges. All in all, the villagers were quite smug about winter’s discontent.
There was a nice little brook that giggled down through Asmie, generously giving the tribe all the water they needed, and the endless meadow to the south of the village provided fuel for the cooking fires—if the members of the tribe had gathered up enough of the plentiful bison droppings to get them through the following winter.
Tlantar’s early childhood was a time of impatience for him. The men of Asmie spent most of their time in the hunt. There was an almost ritual quality about the hunting of the bison of Matan. They were very large animals, shaggy, humpbacked, and not really very bright. Their horns were massive, and they were joined together at the base in the center of the animal’s forehead. Many of the younger men of Asmie seemed to think that the bison was a stupid and timid animal, but Tlantar had some serious doubts about that. It seemed to him that the reaction of the bison to anything that happened in their immediate vicinity was most effective. One frightened and fleeing animal posed no threat to anyone who happened to be nearby, but the bison of Matakan were herd animals, so they ran away in groups, and Tlantar was quite certain that the flight of the bison wasn’t really a response to panic, but was a clever way to deal with anything that threatened the herd. The stampede of a herd of bison could kill almost anything—or anyone—who posed a threat. Any man with even a hint of intelligence knew that standing in the path of a thousand fleeing animals, each of which was at least ten times as heavy as a full-grown man, was an act of pure stupidity. The horns of the bison of Matakan were
most impressive, but the older men of the tribe warned the boys that it was the hooves of the bison that were really deadly. The experienced hunters all seemed to have a habit of repeating the same warning to the novices. “Don’t ever stand in front of them if they start to run.”
It was when Tlantar was about ten years old that his father and several of the other experienced hunters returned to the village from the hunt and told the boys of Asmie that there was something not far away that they should see. They led the boys out across the grassland to a spot a mile or so to the west of Asmie and then pointed at a place where the grass seemed to be all mashed flat. “Go look,” Tlantar’s father commanded the boys.
When the boys reached the area of mashed-down grass, several of them began to vomit. Tlantar clenched his teeth to keep his breakfast where it was supposed to be as he stared in horror at the remains of what had probably been a hunter who hadn’t been clever enough—or agile enough—to get out from in front of a stampeding herd of bison.
The splintered pieces of a Matan spear-thrower and the scraps of what had probably been the hunter’s shirt confirmed the fact that what was scattered about in the mashed-down grass had been a man not too long ago, but what was left of him was not recognizable.
“All right, boys,” Chief Tladan called, “that’s enough. Come away from there. Now you know what’s likely to happen to you if you make a mistake when you’re hunting bison. It’s not very pretty, but it was important for you to see it.”
“Who was he, Chief Tladan?” one of the boys asked when they rejoined the older men of the tribe.
Tlantar’s father shrugged. “We can’t really be sure yet. When everybody comes home later, we’ll count noses. One of the men of the tribe won’t be among us, and that should let us know just who it is that’s scattered around out there. We’re lucky that there’s only one dead man involved. When there are four or five, it’s very difficult to keep the bits and pieces separate when you bury them, and every man should have his own grave, wouldn’t you say?”
It was about a year later when Tlantar began his training with the clever device the Matans all referred to as “the spear-thrower.” The experienced hunters told the boys that a man who knew what he was doing could cast a spear twice as far with his spear-thrower as he could if he just picked up his spear and threw it with his hand. As one wry old hunter told them, “Those extra yards can be very important. They give you just a bit more time to run away if you happen to miss on your first cast. Bison always seem to get sort of grouchy when people start throwing spears at them, and you don’t want to be too close when they come running in your direction.”
Tlantar began to practice with one of his father’s worn-down spear-throwers, casting spear after spear at an old, worn-out bison-hide blanket stuffed full of straw. What he was doing seemed to bother the old hunter who was giving the boys instructions. “Will you make up your mind, Tlantar?” he demanded. “Are you right-handed or left-handed?”
“Both, I think,” Tlantar replied. “Whichever hand I pick something up with seems to work just as well as the other one does. I’ve always sort of wondered why everybody else in the tribe only uses one hand.”
“Let’s find out which of your hands works best right now. One of them has to be better than the other.”
It took Tlantar the better part of a week to convince the old hunter that there was no significant difference between what he could do with either hand, and his teacher began to refer to him as “Two-Hands.” Chief Tladan seemed to be a bit puzzled by that. “Everybody has two hands,” he objected.
“Maybe so,” the old man replied, “but they don’t—or probably can’t—use them the way your boy does.”
Tlantar felt that they were all getting excited about something that didn’t really mean very much, but if they wanted to make a big thing out of it, that was up to them.
After the boys of the tribe of Asmie had grown more proficient, the men of the tribe took them out into the grassland to give them a chance to hurl spears at live bison instead of stationary targets, and even Tlantar was a bit surprised when he felled a full-grown bison with his very first cast.
“Which hand did you use?” his old teacher asked.
“I’m not too sure,” Tlantar admitted. “I was just a little bit excited, so I can’t really remember.”
His teacher walked away, shaking his head and muttering to himself.
There was a fair amount of discussion among the men of the tribe that evening. Tlantar was still just a growing boy, but it had long been a custom in the tribe to elevate a young man to the status of adulthood when he made his first kill. Ultimately, “first kill” won out over “just a boy,” and “Tlantar Two-Hands” was now a grown-up, probably the youngest grown-up in the history of the tribe. Chief Tladan was so proud of his son that the other men of the tribe began to avoid him, since his boasting was getting to be just a bit tiresome.
Tlantar spent the next several weeks scraping and curing the shaggy hide of his first kill in keeping with yet another tired old custom. He was required to make new clothes for himself from that hide. The older men of the tribe could give him advice, of course, but the scraping, curing, and sewing were his responsibility. He made several mistakes, naturally, but he was able to conceal them fairly well, and he was quite proud of the winter cloak he’d put together.
Unfortunately, however, he outgrew his new winter cloak in about a year and a half, so he had to make himself a new one before his fourteenth birthday—and yet another one when he was sixteen.
He began to have a recurrent nightmare about then—a horrible dream in which he was about forty feet tall and had to make yet another winter cloak out of the hides of a dozen or so bison.
Winters were most unpleasant in the Domain of Dahlaine of the North. It turned bitterly cold, and howling blizzards swept in to bury everything in deep snowdrifts. The winter of Tlantar’s seventeenth year was particularly savage. The previous summer had been a good hunting season, so there were ample supplies of smoked bison meat in Asmie, and the stores of beans had been building up for years now. The members of the Asmie tribe were quite smug about that. If winter wanted to howl and scream all around them, let her. They had food in plenty, fuel for their fires, and the thick sod walls of their lodges held the screaming winter at bay.
But there was nothing to do. Tlantar was a very active young man, and just sitting by the fire in his father’s lodge day after day after day was almost more than he could bear.
And then there came a day when the wind seemed to have died and the bitter chill softened, and the sun even came out low over the southern horizon. The sky overhead was blue, and except for a patch of dark clouds off to the west, things seemed almost springlike.
“I need to stretch my legs, father,” Tlantar said along about noon. “If I sit here for much longer, I’ll probably forget how to walk.”
“Just be careful, Tlantar,” his father cautioned. “Don’t go out into the open too far. Winter’s still lurking out there, and she could come crashing back without much warning if she decides to have you for lunch.”
“I won’t be too long, father,” Tlantar promised. “I just want to stretch the kinks out of my legs.”
His father smiled faintly. “When you get a bit older, your legs won’t kink up quite so bad.”
“That’s then, father,” Tlantar replied. “This is now, and now’s been piling kinks all over me since last fall.” Tlantar gathered his heavy winter cloak around him and went on out into the open.
There was still a definite chill in the air, he noticed, and the sunlight gleaming from the vast sea of snow was almost blindingly bright. Tlantar squinted and tried to shade his eyes with his hand.
The howling blizzard that had savaged the village of Asmie for the past several weeks had come up out of the southwest rather than the usual northwest, and the unobstructed wind had swept most of the snow away from the village. Tlantar thought that might be a good sign. Mount Shrak normally s
heltered Asmie from the wind, and snow seemed to be very fond of shelter. It hadn’t been at all uncommon for the snowdrifts in Asmie to be twelve feet deep, and in shaded spots, they’d still been there in midsummer. So far this year, however, there wasn’t more than a few inches of snow lying on the village. That promised to make life much more pleasant in early summer.
Tlantar strode away from the village, squinting out over the gleaming snow. He was just a bit surprised when he saw a herd of bison raking their hooves across the snow to uncover the grass. If the weather held steady, there might even be an opportunity to take fresh meat. It was something to think about, that was certain. Tlantar began to move carefully at that point. He didn’t want to frighten the grazing bison, and he wished that he’d remembered to bring his spear and spear-thrower with him.
He moved cautiously, of course. He wanted to see just how close he’d be able to come to the herd of bison, but he most definitely didn’t want to startle them. Startled bison usually ran, and about half the time they ran right over the top of whatever—or whoever—had surprised them.
He crouched low and moved very slowly, keeping his eyes fixed on the grazing bison, and that quite nearly cost him his life.
A sudden blast of cold wind struck his back and a blinding swirl of dense snow came rolling down the side of Mount Shrak to engulf him.
He prudently suppressed his sudden panic. His heavy winter cloak gave him some protection, but that might start to fade if the wind grew colder. What he needed right now was shelter of some kind, but there wasn’t anything nearby that would shelter him. All that there was in his vicinity was snow. “It’s the wind that’s trying to turn me into ice,” he muttered. “I’ve got to get in out of the wind.”
Then “snow” and “shelter” suddenly came together. Snow wasn’t warm, exactly, but it wasn’t nearly as cold as that cursed wind. If he could somehow burrow down into a patch of deep snow, it would get him in out of the wind, and right now that would probably give him his best chance of surviving.