“That was just a lucky shot, Longbow,” Tlantar said.
“Not really,” Longbow disagreed. “I’m not certain that it’d work with your spear-thrower, but it works very well when you use a bow. It’s called ‘unification,’ friend Tlantar. The archer must unify his eyes, his hands, and his bow with whatever he wants to hit. If he does it right, he’ll never miss.” Then he laughed. “Back when Rabbit had set up his arrow factory in Lattash, there was a smith called Hammer who thought that we were just wasting time and metal. I handed him a clamshell and told him to walk down the beach holding the clamshell up over his head. He was 250 paces on down the beach when I smashed that shell right out of his hand. He didn’t argue with us anymore after that.”
“How very peculiar,” Tlantar said. And then he laughed. “Do you think that concept might work with a spear-thrower instead of a bow?” he asked quite seriously.
“We might want to give it a try, I suppose,” Longbow replied a bit dubiously. “You’d have to include several other things in your unification, though, so it might be quite a bit more complicated. We can try it and see what happens, I guess, but I won’t make any promises.”
“This must be the place,” a bulky fellow with a long, red beard who was sitting on the back of a fairly large animal said as he pulled back on the straps that appeared to be attached to the animal’s mouth to make it stop walking.
“It was the last time I looked,” Longbow said. “Is that animal you’re sitting on one of those horses Ekial kept talking about?”
“No, Longbow, he’s just a cow who lost his horns.”
“Very funny, Red-Beard,” Longbow said in a flat voice. Red-Beard looked over his shoulder at several other men who sat on animals and were approaching. “Here comes Ekial now,” he said. “You might want to send word to Dahlaine that we’re here. Have the bug-people arrived yet?”
“Not their armies. The Vlagh has sent out its usual snoopers, though.” Longbow put his hand on Tlantar’s shoulder. “This is Chief Tlantar of the Matans. The Matans hunt bison rather than deer, and they use spears instead of arrows, since arrows aren’t heavy enough to penetrate the skin of the bison.”
“I’m honored to meet you, Chief Tlantar,” Red-Beard said rather formally.
Then Dahlaine and several others came out of the mouth of the cave and Dahlaine spoke briefly with his younger brother.
“She did what?” Dahlaine’s brother burst out.
Then their sister gave him a brief recounting of events in the Domain of their other sister. Tlantar didn’t entirely understand the astonishment of Veltan when Zelana told him that the children called the Dreamers shared their Dreams with each other. If the children could see the future, they could almost certainly do other impossible things as well. The young fellow seemed to be profoundly disturbed by his older sister’s behavior. Tlantar, on occasion, had noticed that even Dahlaine, the eldest of the gods, could be very startled when he discovered that someone was trying to deceive him. There were times when it seemed to Tlantar that the four gods of the Land of Dhrall were almost themselves as innocent as children.
After Veltan had regained his composure, he introduced Ariga and several of the other Malavi to the people who’d been living in Dahlaine’s cave, and then various horsemen quite proudly demonstrated the capabilities of their animals, and they seemed to take a great deal of pleasure in the astonishment their demonstrating caused. Tlantar immediately saw how valuable the horsemen were likely to be in the upcoming war, but “showing off” seemed to Tlantar to be just a bit childish. Childishness of one kind or another kept cropping up lately, for some reason. Tlantar sighed. “Oh, well,” he murmured, “if it makes them happy, I suppose I can live with it.” Then he saw that the beautiful mate of the farmer Omago was looking at him with an amused sort of expression.
And then she rather slyly winked at him.
7
Early the next morning one of the men Tlantar had sent north came down to Mount Shrak with a northern tribe member called Tlorak. “This one’s head seems to still be working, Chief Two-Hands,” Tlantar’s man said. “Most of the people up there are too afraid to even talk to me.”
“It’s that cursed pestilence, Chief Two-Hands,” the young Tlorak declared. “Everybody’s so afraid of everybody else that we can’t even hold back those nitwits from Atazakan.”
“You can still talk to each other, can’t you?” Tlantar asked the excited young man, “even if you have to shout? Your spear-throwers can drop spears a hundred paces away. You and your friends don’t have to be standing right next to each other, you know. You can stay some distance apart from each other and still be effective. You can avoid infection—if that’s what it really is—and hold off the Atazakans at the same time. Just be sure that you’re close enough to each other that the range of your spear overlaps those of your friends.”
“We should have thought of that ourselves, Chief Two-Hands,” Tlorak said rather sheepishly. “That cursed plague’s got us all so frightened that our minds don’t seem to work anymore.”
“There’s a young Trogite who works for Dahlaine’s younger brother who doesn’t believe that what’s been killing people in the northern tribes is a disease. He knows a great deal about diseases, and he swears up and down that no disease can kill a man in just a half day. He says that diseases can’t move that fast.”
“What’s killing our people, then?”
“The Trogite thinks that it’s a poison of some kind. If the Atazaks have been sneaking around poisoning wells and ponds, everybody who takes a drink of water will die. I think that might come very close to what’s really been happening up there. I’d say that you should tell your chief about that. If he sets men to guarding the wells, springs, and ponds up there, your people will probably stop dying.”
The face of the young Matan from the north went bleak at that point. “If that Trogite’s come up with what’s really going on up there, I think that it might lead to the extinction of the Atazaks, Chief Tlantar,” he declared. “When word of that gets out, it’ll start raining spears over in Atazakan like a spring thunder-shower. We’ll empty that part of Dahlaine’s Domain in about a month.”
Tlantar shrugged. “Whatever seems right and proper to your chief, my young friend,” he said. “That’s his business, not mine.”
A few days later the Maags went on down into the southern mountains to begin work on what they called a “fort.” Tlantar wasn’t exactly sure what was involved, so he went looking for Longbow.
“The Trogites are the experts when it comes to building forts,” the tall archer explained. “The Maags are going down to Crystal Gorge to lay down a base. Then, when Narasan and his army arrive, they’ll go on down there and build what’s very much like a straight-up-and-down wall made of rocks. The wall will block off the gorge, and the creatures of the Wasteland won’t be able to come any farther north.”
“Does that really work?” Tlantar asked dubiously.
“It has in the last two wars,” Longbow replied, “at least partially. During the first war, the bugs had burrows that came out in the ravine behind the fort. Then, in the war to the south, we had a very nice fort, but we were told to abandon it. In that war, we had two enemies instead of just one, and they were busy killing each other right up until a wall of water came blasting out of what looked like solid rock and washed both of our enemies away.”
“From what you just told me, it doesn’t sound like those forts are really all that useful, Longbow,” Tlantar said. “Your enemies got behind you during the first war, and you abandoned the fort in the second one.”
“Exactly,” Longbow said. “When you get right down to the bottom, friend Tlantar, those forts were really nothing but deceptions. Our enemies from the Wasteland were certain that the forts were our only defense, and that kept them looking at the forts instead of paying attention to what was really going on. You don’t need to spread this around very much, Two-Hands, but we have a friend out there who can do thing
s that none of our gods can even think of doing. This friend can make mountains explode or bring whole oceans up out of the earth itself.”
“Why do we need all these outlander armies, then?”
“We don’t, really,” Longbow replied. “I think our friend out there wants to have the outlander armies here to see just how powerful she really is. The outlanders roam the world looking for gold, and there are huge deposits of gold here in the Land of Dhrall. After the outlanders who are here see what our unknown friend can do to people who irritate her, they’ll go on back home and warn all their friends to stay away from the Land of Dhrall, because if they come here, they’ll surely die before they can find even one speck of gold.”
“Just who is this unknown friend, Longbow?”
“I’m not really sure, Chief Tlantar, but I wouldn’t advise getting in her way.”
It was several days later when the Trogite army arrived at Mount Shrak, and it took Tlantar a while to get used to having people around who wore metal clothes.
After they’d all been introduced to each other, they went on into Dahlaine’s cave under Mount Shrak and gathered in what Dahlaine called his “war-room.” The outlanders carefully examined the miniaturized replica of Crystal Gorge and generally agreed that it was, indeed, defendable. “Once we have a fort in place, they won’t get past us,” the silver-haired Trogite commander declared.
Tlantar was still just a bit dubious about that, though. Longbow’s assessment of the two previous wars strongly suggested that the forts were only for show.
Then, as Tlantar had been certain it would, the question of the pestilence came up, and Tlantar told them as much as he’d picked up so far. “It was causing the northern tribes some fairly serious problems,” he continued. “The people up there were afraid to go near anybody else, so they were spread out to the point that they couldn’t defend the tribal lands—even from the incompetent Atazaks. I advised them to stay far enough away from each other to avoid the disease, but to get close enough that the range of their spears overlapped. They’ll still be safe from this pestilence, but they’ll be able to obliterate the invaders from Atazakan.”
“Did it work?” the Trogite called Padan asked.
“It should have,” Tlantar replied. “I haven’t received any verification from the northern tribes yet, though.”
After some extended discussion, the pretty wife of the southern farmer called Omago suggested that one of the gods could pick up the body of one of the men of northern Matan and carry it on down to Zelana’s Domain where an old shaman who was an expert on the peculiarities of the creatures of the Wasteland could examine the remains and determine exactly what had killed him.
Dahlaine looked just a bit sheepish when he agreed that the lady’s suggestion was probably the best answer to the problem.
When Zelana, Veltan, and Longbow returned from the western region of the Land of Dhrall, they advised Dahlaine and the rest of them that the aged shaman of Longbow’s tribe had found traces of snake-venom in the nose of the dead Matan, and that, of course, explained “the plague that is not a plague” that had so baffled everybody.
The farmer Omago suggested wet cloth as a protection, but Tlantar was more than a little dubious about that. He was fairly sure that some of the venom mist would penetrate almost anything they could use to protect themselves, and many of them would die if they were foolish enough to try the “wet cloth” form of protection. Dahlaine staunchly refused to even consider changing the direction of the wind to blow the venom back into the faces of the Atazaks and their insect allies, reminding Veltan and Zelana that they were strictly forbidden to use their almost unlimited power to cause the death of even their most dangerous enemies.
Finally, Longbow raised the distinct possibility that the “unknown friend” he’d mentioned to Tlantar probably could—and would—use her power to throw the venomous mist back onto the faces of their enemies.
“But how are we going to get word to her?” Veltan protested.
“I’m fairly sure that she knows already, Veltan,” Longbow replied with a shrug. “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 Tlantar saw the warrior queen Trenicia staring with obvious astonishment at the pretty wife of the farmer Omago. The pretty lady smiled, but she didn’t say anything.
It was probably a slight change in the light in Dahlaine’s cave that made the pretty lady’s face look somewhat older and stouter, but quite suddenly, Tlantar recognized her, and hers was a face that Tlantar would never forget, despite the fact that the last time he’d seen her had been twenty-five years ago. She now appeared younger and more slender, but Tlantar was positive that she had been the one who’d tried very hard to save Tleri on that awful night a quarter of a century ago.
Tlantar began to tremble violently as confusion came crashing down on him.
THE DEPARTURE OF AZAKAN
1
Longbow had set up a small camp not far from the village of Asmie late in the afternoon of the day when Narasan’s army reached Mount Shrak. The people in the cave were all his friends, of course, but Longbow’s years of solitude in the mountains of Zelana’s Domain had made it almost impossible for him to sleep when there were other people around.
The stars were better company anyway. They were very beautiful, and they almost never snored.
He awoke at first light on the morning after Narasan’s army arrived and went on back inside the cave. He followed the long, twisting passageway to the large central chamber.
Ara, the beautiful wife of Omago, was cooking breakfast there, and Longbow saw that she had added several modifications to the rudimentary stove Dahlaine had put together after the arrival of the little boy, Ashad. Longbow saw that Ara’s stove was primarily a cluster of ovens—some almost right down in the fire and others farther away. Evidently, some varieties of food needed more heat than others did when they were cooking. Since Ara knew more about the preparation of food than anyone else did, Longbow was quite certain that her various ovens were exactly as hot as they needed to be. Longbow had never thought of cooking food as an art form, but Ara obviously did, and she knew just exactly what she was doing.
Eleria was seated at the table, watching with great interest. “Where have you been, Longbow?” Zelana’s little girl asked.
“Visiting the Land of Dreams,” he replied with a faint smile.
“Really? Did anything interesting happen while you were there?”
“It’s possible, I suppose, but I was busy sleeping, so if anything unusual happened, I missed it.”
“That’s not very funny, Longbow,” Eleria scolded.
“So beat me.”
“I think you’ve been spending too much time with Red-Beard lately. You’re starting to sound just like him, and he’s not nearly as funny as he seems to think he is.”
Longbow shrugged. “Nobody’s perfect. Do you want to get the ‘kiss-kiss’ out of the way now, or would you rather wait until after breakfast?”
“Let’s do it both before and after, Longbow. You owe me a lot of kisses after that ‘beat me’ remark.”
“Does this happen very often, Longbow?” Ara asked curiously.
“All the time,” Longbow replied. “Eleria loves kisses, and if you spend too much time in her vicinity, she’ll wear out your lips.”
Ara smiled. “I sort of doubt that. As soon as you two have finished your little ‘kiss-kiss’ ceremony, why don’t you go wake the others. Breakfast is almost ready, so get our friends up and moving before it gets cold.”
Despite the fact that Dahlaine’s cave under Mount Shrak was extensive, the passageway that led from the cave mouth to the central chambers was narrow, and it twisted through the solid rock almost like a snake. There were also several branch passages that wandered off into the mountain, but didn’t really go anywhere. Given these peculiarities, Dahlaine had decided that only the leaders—and their best advisors—should ca
mp inside the cave. The rest of the forces should camp outside. “We could end up losing half of all the men we’ve brought here,” Sorgan Hook-Beak agreed. “A tunnel that wanders around for ten miles or so but doesn’t really go anyplace could draw off soldiers by the hundreds, and we’d never see them again.”
“Well put, Captain Sorgan,” Commander Narasan said.
After breakfast that morning they all returned to the place Dahlaine called “the war-chamber” to continue their study of Dahlaine’s map of the North country.
It was almost noon when a northern Matan named Tladak came into the map-room looking for Chief Two-Hands. “I could be wrong about this, Tlantar,” he said, “but it looks to me like the entire population of Atazakan is involved in this invasion. There are all those ones who call themselves ‘The Guardians of Divinity,’ of course, but there are others as well—including large numbers of women and children. That’s what’s giving us a lot of trouble. We don’t really want to throw our spears at the innocents, but the dreadfully brave ‘Guardians of Divinity’ are hiding behind them.”
“Did you happen to notice any very small ones that seem to be unusually pale?” Keselo asked the northern Matan.
“Oh, yes,” Tladak replied. “There are hundreds of those. They don’t look much like ordinary Atazaks, though.”
“They aren’t,” Keselo said. “They’re the ones responsible for this ‘unknown pestilence.’ They’re venomous—like certain varieties of snakes—and they’re spitting venom up into the air so that the wind from the east can carry it in your direction. If you’re unlucky enough to breathe it in, you’ll be poisoned, and you’ll die.”