Crystal Gorge

“That sort of explains why everybody was talking about ‘crumbly quartz’ when they were describing this end of the gorge,” Sorgan noted. Then he frowned. “If it happens up here at this end of the gorge, wouldn’t the same thing happen farther on down?”

“Not necessarily,” Narasan replied. “Dahlaine told me that there’s water involved in the process of breaking the quartz free from the wall. There are springs and brooks up on top here in the north end of the ravine, and the water seeps down through the cracks in the quartz. It’s drier on down to the south, so there isn’t enough water down there to break the quartz away. That means that there’ll be good solid walls on both sides of Gunda’s fort.”

“That’s all that really matters, I guess,” Sorgan said. Then he looked at Ariga. “You’ve been up and down this gorge several times, I take it,” he said.

“Often enough to get the general lay of the land,” Ariga replied.

“Then you’ll pretty much know where these ‘wade across the river’ places are located, won’t you?”

“Approximately, yes.”

“Where are we going with this, Sorgan?” Narasan asked his friend.

“We’ve got Matans and Tonthakans with us,” Sorgan explained, “and they can move around in rough country quite a bit faster than your men can. Suppose that we send them on ahead of us tomorrow morning. Ariga can show them those ‘wade across the river’ places, and then several of them can sit down and wait for your men to come marching along and then guide them around the rough places. That should save quite a bit of time, and we should all make it down to Gunda’s wall-base before the sun sets tomorrow. That way, the men’ll be able to get a good night’s sleep, and they’ll be ready to start building the real wall.”

“You’re getting better and better at this, Sorgan,” Narasan told his friend. “I’d always assumed that ‘planning ahead’ was an alien concept for Maags, and that ‘making it up as you go along’ was the standard procedure.”

“I’ve had some good teachers here lately,” Sorgan said. “You’re one of the best, of course, but the really best goes by the name of Keselo.”

“You just had to remind me of that, didn’t you, Sorgan?”

“It’s good for you, Narasan,” Sorgan replied with a broad grin. “I’m told that humility is a virtue, and Keselo splashes humility all over everybody who goes anywhere near him.”

2

It was late afternoon, and the sky to the west was red. For some reason that Narasan couldn’t quite understand, the sky here in Dahlaine’s part of the Land of Dhrall was always—or almost always—red. Things had gone quite well that day as the horse-soldier Ariga had guided them around the numerous places that had been blocked off by the shattered heaps of quartz.

Then Narasan and Sorgan rounded a rather sharp turn in the gorge, and Gunda’s solidly constructed base came into sight.

“We made good time,” Sorgan noted. “I’d say that Ariga earned his pay today.”

“He was sort of useful,” Narasan agreed as he studied Gunda’s base. It had been constructed out of solid blocks of the pink quartz, obviously, and Narasan was more than a little dubious about that. Quartz was pretty enough, but it was very brittle.

Then Gunda came out of the partially completed base. “What kept you?” he called.

“We stopped a few times to see if the fish were biting,” Sorgan called back.

“You’re starting to sound a lot like Padan,” Narasan told his friend. “He comes up with that excuse every time he’s late. Couldn’t you have come up with something just a bit more original?”

Sorgan shrugged. “Like they say, the old ones are the best.” He peered down at the wall-base. “That looks to be just about right,” he noted. “Now that your men are here, they should be able to complete our fort in just a few days.”

Gunda came on up the slope. “You might want to look the base over,” he said to Narasan, “but I don’t think you’ll find much to complain about.”

“Except that you built it out of quartz instead of granite,” Narasan replied.

“Quartz was all we had to work with,” Gunda said. “Skell and Torl went looking for granite, but the nearest outcropping of it is about ten miles on down the gorge. They said that it’d take all winter to break granite loose and drag it up here. We probably won’t have that much time, so we used quartz instead. It’s just a bit on the brittle side, I guess, but Torl reminded us that about the only tools the bug-people have are their teeth and knuckles. If the bug-people try to break through our wall with their bare hands and teeth, it’ll probably take them ten or fifteen years to even put a noticeable dent in our wall, and by then, the only enemies we’ll have out front will be toothless cripples.”

“You’ve got some fairly massive blocks there, Gunda,” Sorgan said.

“It was easier to make big ones than it would have been to make little bricks. I can flat guarantee that nobody’s going to be moving those big blocks around—particularly not when we’ve got them jammed up against the walls of the gorge.”

“This looks to be just about the narrowest place in the entire gorge,” Sorgan said then.

Gunda nodded. “Forty feet is about all. Now we’ll be able to concentrate on ‘high’ instead of ‘wide,’ and higher forts are always the best.”

“How would you describe the slope on down to the south?” Narasan asked.

“Steep, narrow, and without much of anything to hide behind,” Gunda replied with an evil grin. “It was just a bit cluttered when we first got here. There were quite a few large boulders on down there, but we used most of them to construct our base, and we’ll probably use up all the rest when we start erecting the main wall. We won’t leave any kind of shelter on that slope, so the bug-people will have to come at us right out in plain sight.”

“Let’s go take a look,” Sorgan suggested.

“Whatever makes you happy, Captain Hook-Beak,” Gunda agreed.

Narasan found Gunda’s base blocks to be massive, and the numerous chip-marks strongly told him that the Maags who’d been shaping the blocks had worked very carefully.

The slope just to the south was very steep and totally devoid of anything that the bug-people could use for concealment. “Nice job, Gunda,” he complimented his friend.