“She’s just showing off,” Dahlaine declared. “She loves to startle people that way.”
“We still love her, though,” Veltan declared with a gentle smile. “As long as playing games makes her happy, we can live with it, can’t we?”
Dahlaine gave Longbow a curious sort of look. “I’m not trying to criticize you here, my friend,” he said, “but what made you decide to goad that bison herd into fighting the battle in north Matakan for you?”
Longbow shrugged. “They were there, and I’ve been hearing stories about stampedes for quite some time now. The Atazaks were hopeless incompetents, but I still didn’t want to take any chances with the lives of my friends. Several things came together all at the same time, and it seemed to me that stampeding the bison over the top of the Atazaks might solve several problems. It worked out even better than I’d anticipated. I’d say that no more than four or five of ‘the Guardians of Divinity’ are still alive—or were—after the bison ran over just about everything on that slope.”
“You plan to rouse another bison stampede to eliminate the survivors, then?”
“The bison have done enough already, wouldn’t you say? Ekial left a fair number of horse-soldiers up there to guide the ordinary Atazaks back to their own territory. I’m fairly sure that the Malavi have chased down those few Guardians of Divinity by now, so the Atazakan Nation has been purified. You might want to give some thought to finding a leader who has his head on straight to rule that part of your Domain.”
“I probably should have been paying closer attention,” Dahlaine ruefully admitted. “I’ve been just a bit preoccupied with these attacks by the creatures of the Wasteland here lately, though.”
“The invasion of the lands of the Matans was a part of their attack,” Longbow reminded him. “The servants of the Vlagh have been trying to divert us for quite some time now. They were behind Kajak’s attack on Sorgan’s fleet in the harbor of Kweta in the Land of Maag, as I recall, and they’d pushed the Reindeer Tribes right to the brink of a war with the Deer Hunters in Tonthakan. I’d say that the Vlagh has begun to realize that her servants are no match for us in an ordinary war, so she’s doing her best to make things not ordinary.”
Then Zelana suddenly appeared as if from nowhere. “I found them,” she reported. “They’re definitely up to something.”
“There’s nothing new about that,” Veltan said. “What are they doing this time?”
“They all pulled back out of the gorge, little brother,” she replied. “They’re gathered near the southern mouth of the gorge, and they seem to be waiting for something.”
“A new hatch of an entirely different breed of enemies, maybe?” Veltan suggested.
“I don’t think so,” Zelana replied. “I took a quick swing out over the Wasteland to see if there were more of them coming this way, but it looks completely deserted down there.”
Narasan glanced on down the gorge and suddenly drew in a sharp breath. “I think we’ve got a problem,” he told the others.
“Oh?” Gunda said. “The fort here can keep the enemy from getting anywhere close to us.”
“The enemy has a friend, I’m afraid,” Narasan said. “It’s called ‘smoke.’ Look on down the gorge.”
They all turned and stared at the dense black cloud of smoke that seemed almost to be boiling up the gorge.
“Cover the lower parts of your faces!” Omago shouted. “Tell your men to use wet cloth! If they breathe in too much of that smoke, they’ll choke to death!”
“What is that?” Gunda demanded. “I’ve never seen smoke that black before.”
“They’re burning grease-trees,” Omago replied. “We do that down in Veltan’s part of the Land of Dhrall to drive bugs away from our orchards and crops. It kills them if they don’t get clear of it.”
“We aren’t bugs, Omago,” Gunda scoffed.
“You still have to breathe, don’t you? If you breathe in that smoke, it’ll kill you almost as fast as it kills a bug.”
“Can you block it, Dahlaine?” Veltan demanded.
“I can hold it back for a while,” Dahlaine said, “but this gorge is almost like a chimney. It’s pulling that awful smoke up from down below.”
“Rain,” Longbow suggested. “If the fire goes out, there won’t be any smoke.”
Veltan turned. “I need you, baby!” he shouted.
There was a sudden flash of intensely bright light and a deafening crash of thunder, and then Veltan was gone.
“I wish he wouldn’t do that,” Padan grumbled.
“If it puts those fires out, I think we’ll be able to live with it,” Gunda disagreed.
For a short time there was an almost continuous roar of thunder to the south and jagged bolts of lightning flickering from horizon to horizon down there.
Then, as abruptly as the storm had appeared, it died out, and Veltan came flashing back, spouting curses in several languages. “It’s no good,” he declared. “Can you believe that they built those fires inside caves? Gather up your people, Narasan. You’re going to have to get up out of this gorge, and you don’t have very much time. Dahlaine and I can hold the smoke cloud back—or slow it a bit—but it will keep coming. If you don’t get your people out of this cursed gorge, they’ll die.”
THE RETREAT
1
The thick cloud of dense black smoke continued to come boiling up the gorge even as the Trogite soldiers and their Maag friends hastily gathered up their equipment and prepared for the march to the north.
Keselo had dabbled in botany a bit when he’d been a student at the University of Kaldacin, but so far as he could remember, he’d never heard of any tree or bush such as Omago had described.
“Just exactly what causes this particular tree to emit this dense smoke you mentioned?” he asked the farmer.
“I’m not really sure,” Omago replied. “It’s always been called ‘the grease-tree,’ and we’ve learned not to use it for cooking or heating. Quite a long time ago, though, the farmers in Veltan’s Domain learned that a cloud of dense, greasy smoke will drive the bugs away from our orchards or crops. The smoke from a greasewood fire clogs up their breathing pits, and they die from the lack of air. It sort of comes down to ‘run away or die.’ Bugs aren’t very intelligent, but over the years they’ve come to recognize the odor of greasewood smoke. I’ve seen several varieties of bugs that are usually natural enemies fleeing from that smoke side by side.”
“Does it kill every variety of bugs?” Keselo asked.
“It’s not limited to bugs, Keselo. Greasewood smoke kills animals as well—and also people. Every now and then, the wind changes direction and throws the smoke right back in our faces. Then we’re the ones who start choking and running away. Wet cloth provides a little bit of protection, but only temporarily. I’ve heard that many farmers who’ve used greasewood smoke to drive bugs away have been trapped by a change in wind direction, and, just like the bugs, they’re choked to death.”
Keselo shuddered. “Sometimes it seems that being a farmer is even more dangerous than being a soldier.”
“Let’s move, people!” Gunda shouted. “That smoke’s coming up the gorge faster and faster.”
“Veltan and I’ll do our best to hold the smoke back,” Dahlaine told them. “We’ll pull in rain clouds and unleash as much rain as we can, but this isn’t a good time of the year for rain, so you’d better tell your men to hustle right along.”
“I’ll take the children to safety, big brother,” Zelana said. “Don’t let that smoke get ahead of you.” Then she turned and hurried along the top of the wall to the tower where the children were staying.
“You were talking about wet cloth, Omago,” Gunda said. “If we went back inside the fort and covered all the doors and windows with yards and yards of wet cloth, would that keep the smoke from reaching us?”
Omago shook his head. “You’d have to keep throwing buckets of water on the cloth,” he said, “and the brook coming down through the
gorge is hardly more than a trickle.”
“I hate running off like this!” Gunda fumed. “We’ve got a perfectly good fort here, but that cursed smoke’s going to force us to abandon it.”
“We don’t have any choice, Gunda,” Narasan said. “We’re going to have to retreat.”
“Or run away,” Sorgan added, “whichever works best.”
They started north from the fort at what was called “quick time” in the standard army usage. They weren’t exactly running, but they were moving right along.
“This smoke sort of means that the bug-people have learned how to make fire, doesn’t it?” Rabbit suggested as they splashed across the small brook to avoid another of those heaps of shattered quartz.
“I wouldn’t go quite so far as to say ‘make’ fire,” Keselo replied. “It’s much more likely that they found burning branches or bushes. One of my teachers said that early man carried fire rather than starting it with flint sparks.”
“That sort of says that the bugs are following the same road that people did, doesn’t it?”
“Approximately, yes,” Keselo replied, “but they’re moving much, much faster than people did. These wars here in the Land of Dhrall started last spring—about six or seven months ago—and the creatures of the Wasteland have already gathered a lot of our weapons, and they seem to know what smoke can do.”
“It’s almost like a race, then?”
“Well, sort of, I suppose, but I’m afraid that they’re moving a lot faster than we did way back when. It took us thousands of years to cover as much ground as they’ve covered in two seasons.”
“We’d better find some way to slow them down, then,” Rabbit declared.
“When you come up with something, Rabbit, let me know about it. I’ve been beating myself over the head about this for quite some time now, and I haven’t found anything that’ll work yet.”
“I’ll see what I can do, Keselo, but I’m just a little busy running away right now.”
“How much farther would you say we’ve got to go before we get out of this silly gorge?” Gunda asked Longbow as they hurried along.
Longbow looked around. “I make it be about six miles, but I don’t think we’ll be able to stop just because we’ve reached the head of the gorge. We need to find someplace to get us out of the smoke.”
“Like a cave, you mean?”
“It seems to be working for our enemies,” Longbow replied with a shrug. “If it works for them, it should work for us.”
“I don’t think that’s going to solve the problem, gentlemen,” Commander Narasan said. “We’re here to stop the enemy, and I don’t think hiding in a cave is the best answer. What we really need to find is some way to block off the mouth of this gorge. If the bug-people manage to get out into open country, they’ll spread out and kill all the people and take the land.”
“We could try breastworks, I suppose,” Gunda said, “but the cursed smoke coming up behind us would make that a bit dangerous, wouldn’t you say?”
“I suppose we could collapse the mouth of the gorge,” Keselo suggested.
“How could we possibly do that?” Gunda demanded with skepticism written all over his face.
“Well,” Keselo said, “if I remember correctly, one of the people who described this gorge for us back at Mount Shrak said that the quartz at the upper end of the gorge is all crumbly because of the water that seeps down through it and then freezes. If there’s some way that we can get people up to the top with hammers and long iron bars, they could break a lot of that quartz free, and it would fall down into the gorge up near the mouth.”
“And that would spread that smoke out even farther,” Gunda added.
“I don’t really think so, sir,” Keselo disagreed. “The smoke is coming up the gorge because the gorge walls are protecting it from the prevailing wind, which comes in out of the west. The smoke will have to rise up to get over our barrier, and that would get it up quite a bit higher. Then, when it came out of the gorge, the prevailing wind would carry it off to the east—toward a region that’s almost totally uninhabited.”
“Would that really work?” Gunda asked Commander Narasan.
“It sounds feasible to me,” Narasan replied. “Why don’t we try it and find out?”
2
It was about midafternoon when they reached the mouth of Crystal Gorge. The almost continuous crashing of thunder back on down the gorge indicated that Veltan and Dahlaine were still hard at work, and the smoke cloud had noticeably slowed.
“If those two are dropping that much rain down in the gorge, there’s probably a wall of water rushing out of the southern end,” Rabbit suggested. “That might be making things unpleasant for the buggies, I’d say.”
“Buggies?” Gunda asked.
“Never miss a chance to insult your enemy,” Rabbit said with a wicked little smirk.
“If I remember the map Lord Dahlaine had set up under Mount Shrak correctly, there’s a fairly steep slope off to the west that leads up to that side of the gorge,” Keselo said.
“It’s there, all right,” Chief Two-Hands confirmed.
“Then it won’t be too hard for me and a crew of men to get up there and start plugging off the mouth of the gorge,” Keselo said. “We don’t know for sure just how far behind the smoke-cloud the bug-men will be coming, so I think we should close the door on them as soon as possible.”
“This young man spends a lot of his time thinking, doesn’t he?” Chief Two-Hands said to Longbow.
“Almost all of his time,” Longbow said. “His thinking has saved us a lot of hard, honest work, though, so we try to encourage him to think as much as he can.”
“All right, then,” Rabbit said, hefting his hammer, “let’s go up topside and start crumbling quartz.”
As it turned out, the quartz wall on the west side of the mouth of the gorge was even more fragile than Keselo had anticipated, and his “crumble-crew” was mostly Maags, who were bigger and stronger than Trogite soldiers. Oddly, the Maags seemed to find shattering quartz very entertaining, and they soon had an almost continuous avalanche pouring down into the gorge. Several of them even went so far as to loop a rope around one of the many trees lining the top of the gorge and then slide down several yards and bash even more quartz off the gorge wall, shouting “Look out below!” every time they swung their hammers.
“I’ll never understand those people,” Keselo murmured to himself as he walked on down the gorge-rim to see how far up the smoke had come.
It was noticeably thinner than it had been when they’d first seen it boiling up the gorge toward Gunda’s fort. The continuous rainstorm Dahlaine and Veltan had been pouring down into the lower end of the gorge appeared to be working out quite well. If things continued to go the way they were going now, the bug-people’s “greasy smoke” scheme wasn’t going at all the way they’d believed it would.
It was almost evening when Keselo and his “crumble-crew” came down the steep slope to rejoin their friends.
“This seems to be working even better than we’d hoped,” Commander Narasan said to Keselo. “The smoke has to rise to get over all the rubble you and your men dropped down on the bottom of the gorge, and the wind from the west is carrying it out of our general vicinity. I think we’ll want to wait until morning to make sure that the smoke will go away. Then we’ll start building breastworks. The bug-men won’t be able to come up the gorge until their fires go out, so we’ve got some time to play with.”
“I just had an idea that you might want to consider,” Longbow’s friend Athlan said then. “The ground on this end of the gorge is mostly just ordinary dirt.”
“There are quite a few rocks,” Gunda pointed out, “but we’ll probably be using them to build our breastworks, so what’s to the front will be mostly dirt. What did you have in mind?”
“There are several streams nearby,” Athlan said, “and when you mix dirt and water, you get mud, right?”
“Almost always, yes. W
here are we going with this, Athlan?”
“There are quite a few swamps over in Tonthakan, and I’ve learned over the years that wading through soft mud makes for very slow going. If there just happens to be a lot of soft mud in front of each one of your little forts, it’s going to slow the bug-people down to the point that they’ll be easy targets for the archers. I don’t think very many of them will reach your forts if we do it that way, do you?”
“It’s called a ‘fosse,’ Athlan,” Keselo told Longbow’s friend. “They’re fairly standard in the empire.”
Athlan looked just a bit crestfallen. “I thought I’d come up with a notion that nobody had ever tried before,” he said.
“Don’t give up on it just yet,” Keselo advised. “We’ve always used just plain water to fill the fosse to the front of any fort or breastworks. I don’t think anyone’s ever considered mud before. Water would slow the enemies down, but I think mud would slow them even more.”
“It might take your people a while to divert the nearby streams,” Padan said, “but we have a lot of friends here. Some of them will be helping us build the breastworks, but then there are others who’ll be able to help you and your people build mud-pits.”
“I think we might run out of water if we try to put these mud-pits in front of every breastworks we build,” Rabbit said. “Wouldn’t it work better if we just left plain, open ground in front of the second breastworks? That would give the horse-soldiers good solid ground to ride on, then they kill off all the bug-men who try to attack that second wall.”
“And maybe we might want to use catapults and fire-missiles to stop the ones who try to attack the third breastworks,” Keselo added. “The creatures of the Wasteland have a lot of trouble with changes of any kind, so if we use a different form of defense for each breastwork, we’ll have some very unhappy enemies out there.”