Crystal Gorge

“We took the gold, Skell,” Sorgan reminded his cousin. “We’re pretty much obliged to stay here now.”

“Just exactly what do you expect to see down in that gorge, cousin?” Torl asked.

“I’m not sure,” Sorgan admitted. “That’s why I think it might be a good idea to go have a look. The bug-people are full of surprises, and getting surprised during a war is the best way I know of to end up dead.”

“He makes a lot of sense, big brother,” Torl said to Skell. “Why don’t you stay here and try to get over your grouchies. I’ll go along with cousin Sorgan and see if I can keep him out of trouble.”

“Thanks a lot, Torl,” Sorgan said in a flat, unfriendly tone.

“Family responsibility, cousin,” Torl said, shrugging. “Who else will be coming along? If that warrior woman will be one of the party, I might just change my mind, though. She gives me a lot of creepies, for some reason—probably because she never learned how to laugh.”

“Do you get along with Padan at all?” Sorgan asked.

“Very well,” Torl said. “Padan can be almost as funny as I am.”

“We’re not going down there to laugh, Torl.”

“I’ll try to keep it under control. Let’s go find Padan and get started.”

Padan was waiting for them near the third breastwork up the hill—the one where Narasan’s men had doused the charging bug-men with fire. “Narasan told me to join up with you on your scouting expedition down the rim of the gorge, Captain Hook-Beak,” he said. “What are we supposed to be looking for?”

“If I knew that, we wouldn’t have to go,” Sorgan replied. “Those fires your men splashed all over the bug-men worked out very well.”

“I sort of liked it myself,” Padan replied. “I just wish that somebody could come up with a way to throw fire at our enemies without using those cumbersome catty-pults.”

“Catty-pults?”

“There was a sergeant back when we were only boys in the fort in Kaldacin,” Padan explained. “For some reason, he just couldn’t pronounce ‘catapult.’ Every time he said it, it came out ‘catty-pult.’ I’ve got a sort of a hunch that the first time he ever heard the word, ‘catty’ was right there at the beginning.”

Torl laughed. “I did that to a fisherman one time. I deliberately mispronounced the names of certain kinds of fish, and after that he’d talk for hours about ‘habilets’ and ‘clodfish.’ It drove the other fishermen crazy, but he just couldn’t help himself. Just exactly what do you think we should be looking for down in the gorge, cousin?”

“Numbers, for the most part,” Sorgan replied, “but I think that what we really need to know is whether or not the bug-people have picked up bows and arrows, and whether they know how to use them or not. We definitely don’t want to come up against bug-men who can shoot arrows at us.”

“Let’s get started, then,” Padan suggested. “If there are any bug-archers charging up the gorge, we’d better come up with some way to kill them off before they get up here. Things are likely to fall apart on us if the bug-people start showering us with arrows.”

They climbed up the steep slope to the west side of the Trogite breastworks and then went on down to the little brook that crossed the mouth of Crystal Gorge. Sorgan tried his very best not to think about how long it must have taken for a stream that small to eat its way down through solid rock to form its current bed. Sorgan knew exactly what the word “hundred” meant, but when numbers wandered off toward “thousand”—or even “million”—and the people who used those terms were talking about years, Sorgan’s mind shied back in horror.

The sun was all the way up now and the shadows back under the stunted mountain trees had that bluish cast to them that always seemed to come out in the early morning up in the mountains. Sorgan rather grudgingly admitted that mountain country could be very beautiful—not as beautiful as the sea, of course, but not really all that bad.

They followed the little brook on upstream until they reached the steep slope that led up to the rim of Crystal Gorge. “You missed a lot of fun up here, cousin,” Torl said. “You should have come along when we helped Keselo fill the mouth of the gorge with chunks of that pink quartz. If I understood what he told us right, there are a lot of cracks and fissures in that quartz. A good healthy sneeze is all it takes to break the quartz loose, and it tumbles on down to the bottom of the gorge. I had a good solid iron pry-bar, and I broke loose about a half acre of quartz in one afternoon.”

“That’s Keselo for you,” Padan declared. “He can come up with the most exotic things I’ve ever seen or heard of every time he blinks his eyes.”

“He’s good, all right,” Torl agreed. He squinted up the steep slope. “Here comes the chief of Athlan’s tribe. I think his name is Kathlak,” he said. “He might be able to give us enough information to save us the long hike down to the bottom of the gorge.”

“You’d better let me do the talking, Torl,” Sorgan said. “These natives are very formal, and I’m sort of what they’d call ‘the chief’ of the Maags around here.”

“Was there something you needed?” the silvery-haired chief of the Deer Hunter Tribe asked.

“Mostly just information, Chief Kathlak,” Sorgan replied. “The bug-people have been attacking for the past several days. Are there very many more of them coming up the gorge?”

“Oh, yes,” Kathlak replied in a somber tone.

“Is there trouble of some kind?” Torl asked.

“The young men of my tribe made a foolish mistake, that’s about all. The bottom of the gorge was completely covered with our enemies, so our young archers had many, many targets to shoot arrows at, and they got carried away. Can you believe that they wasted all of those metal arrowheads that the little fellow from the Land of Maag made for us? Now we’ll have to go back to using the old stone ones.”

“I’ll have a talk with Rabbit when we get back,” Sorgan promised. “We’ll have him set up his arrow factory again.”

“I’d appreciate that,” Kathlak said.

“The bug-people we’ve seen so far seem to be carrying various kinds of weapons, Chief Kathlak,” Sorgan continued. “I’d say that it’s likely that they wandered around the battlefields during the first two wars stealing the weapons of our dead friends. We’ve seen them carrying swords and axes and spears.”