Crystal Gorge

“Wild animals, for the most part. Zelana’s people are primarily hunters. The people of my Domain are farmers.” Veltan peered on ahead. “Well, finally,” he said. “I’d say that we’ve reached the place that we’ve been looking for.”

“How can you tell? The forest here looks about the same as it was farther south.”

“Pretty much, yes, but there’s a man in a canoe just ahead of us, and I think it’s Red-Beard. My older brother told me that Red-Beard would guide us to Mount Shrak—Dahlaine’s home.”

“You’re not going to have any trouble unshrinking our horses, are you?”

“Not really.” Veltan straightened. “Ho, Red-Beard!” he called. “I’m over here.”

“What took you so long, Veltan?” the man in the canoe called back, digging his paddle into the water.

“Have you encountered any of the creatures of the Wasteland yet?”

The native pulled his canoe in beside the front end of the Albatross. “We came across a few of them,” he answered. “We didn’t know what they were right at first, but once we recognized them, we did what needed to be done. They were trying to stir up trouble between the tribes around here, but now that they’re all dead, things are going more smoothly.” He looked out at the fleet of Trogite ships following the Albatross. “It’s going to take a while to get your people out on dry land, I’d say. There’s a little fishing village just on ahead. I’ll lead you there, and then I’ll tell you the wonderful story about how we got rid of those nasty bug-people.”

“I can hardly wait,” Veltan replied.

“That one exaggerates things a bit, doesn’t he?” Ariga observed.

“He’s a funny sort of fellow,” Veltan replied, “but we all like him. He’s Longbow’s closest friend, and that makes him quite important.”

“Ekial mentioned Longbow,” Ariga said. “It’ll be good to get my feet back on dry land again. Boats are all right when you have to cross water, I guess, but I still prefer dry land. There’s something you should probably know, Veltan,” he said then. “It’s going to take us a little while to get our horses settled down after we unload them. Horses start to get a little belligerent if they haven’t been ridden for a few days.”

“I thought that they’d all been tamed.”

“Well, sort of tamed. If a horse is really any good, though, he’s quite spirited, and it takes a little while to remind him that we’re the ones who make the decisions. He’ll get the point—eventually—but it does take some time.”

Ekial’s face had a slightly awed expression as what appeared to be an endless string of horses came down the wide ramp from the Trogite ship. “How did Veltan do that?” he asked Ariga.

“He didn’t go into too many details, Ekial,” Ariga replied. “He just said that he reduced the size of the horses when they went from the pier into that ship.”

“Reduced?”

“He shrank them down until they were about the size of mice—or so he told me. I’d say that he’s unshrinking them now. It’s going to take a while to get that many horses off of one lone ship, I’d say.”

Ekial shuddered. “That’s making my hair stand straight up,” he said. “Let’s go talk with Red-Beard. Veltan told me that they had some problems when they first came here. If we can persuade him to stop joking around, we might be able to get a few details about what happened.”

The two of them went a ways on down the beach to the shady grove where the native called Red-Beard was talking with Veltan, telling him about how the bug-people had deceived the Tonthakans and how their “clicking” that the farmer Omago had described gave them away. “I’m not sure just exactly how the ‘clickers’ persuaded that Tonthakan chief that he’d been terribly insulted, but, evidently, he believed them, even though they never told him just exactly what that insult had been all about. His mind cleared up immediately after Ox brained those ‘clickers’ with his axe.”

Veltan winced. “Wasn’t that just a little extreme?” he asked.

Red-Beard shrugged. “You know how Ox is. He doesn’t waste any time when he encounters an enemy. With Ox, it’s bash first and then talk. The chief who’d been causing all of the trouble apologized all over the place, and everything went back to normal again. I’m not trying to frighten you or anything, Veltan, but it looks to me like the bug-people are getting a lot smarter than they were in those earlier wars. We might want to start being a little more careful this time. A clever enemy is a dangerous enemy, so I don’t think we’ll want to rush into anything.”

“You had to go and say that, didn’t you, Red-Beard,” Veltan reproached his friend.

“I just thought you ought to know, Veltan,” Red-Beard replied. “Aside from this ‘Nation’ foolishness your big brother devised, the people here in Tonthakan are pretty much the same kind of people that those of us who live farther south are. They use bows and arrows and they spend a lot of their time hunting. Longbow has a new friend now. His name’s Athlan, and he’s a fair hunter. He’s not as good as Longbow, of course, but who is?”

3

He’s a pretty tired old horse, Red-Beard,” Ariga told the native from Zelana’s part of the Land of Dhrall. “He just sort of plods along, but he will get you to where we’re going. If Veltan was right about how far it is to this mountain, you probably won’t want to walk.”

“I do know how to walk, Ariga. I can cover a lot of ground when it’s necessary. What happened to the fellow who owns this tired old beast?”

Ariga shrugged. “He and some other men were playing dice on one of those Trogite ships, and they were using his dice. Things were going very well for him until one of the other players checked the dice rather carefully and found out that they’d been weighted on one side. If a man knew how to roll them just right, he could make any number he wanted come up every time.”

“Isn’t that cheating?”

“Indeed it is, my friend,” Ariga replied. “The other players weren’t very happy, so they threw him into the water behind the ship. I guess he’d never learned how to swim, so he sank like a rock. Now we’ve got a horse that doesn’t have anybody to ride him.”