Crystal Gorge
“I sort of like it myself,” Gunda said.
“Have you installed that up-and-down gate yet?” Sorgan asked. “Keselo and Rabbit described it, but I think I should see the real thing.” He paused. “Does it really work the way Keselo told all of us that it would? I’ve seen a lot of side-to-side gates, but I’ve never seen one that goes up and down.”
“It takes a lot of grease,” Gunda said, “but Ox has it pretty well moving like it’s supposed to.”
“How were you able to install it when the wall wasn’t complete yet?” Narasan asked.
“I cheated just a bit,” Gunda admitted. “We set up the frame and then braced it with quartz blocks. I was quite sure that gate would be about the first thing you’d want to see, so we went ahead and got it set up. Ox is our gate-man, and he fiddled around with it for almost a week. It does just exactly what Keselo told us it would do. Ox has a crew of men who all have shoulders about four feet wide. When those burlies pull the rope, the gate goes up so fast that if you blinked, you’d miss the whole thing.”
“Open is all right, I guess,” Sorgan said, “but wouldn’t you say that the important thing is how fast it comes down?”
“That’s the easy part,” Gunda replied. “All they have to do when they want to close the gate is let go of the rope. The gate drops like a rock. It makes a loud bang when it hits the bottom, and that tells us that the gate’s closed. When Keselo and Rabbit designed this gate, they wanted to keep the weight down to make it easier for the gate-crew to raise the thing, so they used iron bars instead of thick iron plates. I’m not sure if they saw a terrific advantage there. Our people will be able to see through the gate, so they’ll know exactly what the enemies are up to. Then, if our people don’t like what the enemies are doing, they’ll be able to shoot arrows right through the gate. That should make things terribly exciting for anybody on the other side, wouldn’t you say?”
“Let’s go take a look, Narasan,” Sorgan suggested. “I really want to see this fancy new gate.”
“Have you heard anything at all about how things are going up in the north?” Skell asked Narasan that evening.
“Much better than we’d expected,” Narasan replied. “After we’d discovered that the ‘pestilence’ wasn’t really a disease, things went more smoothly.”
“If it wasn’t a disease, just exactly what was it?” Gunda demanded.
“It appears that the creatures of the Wasteland are growing more clever than they were when this all began last spring,” Narasan replied. “Somehow they discovered that their venom was just as deadly if the victim breathed it in as it was if they bit him and pumped some of it into his blood. They started to spit it up into the wind, and anybody who was standing on the downwind side—and breathing, of course—would inhale the venom and die within a few hours.”
“That’s terrible!” Gunda exclaimed.
“Moderately terrible, yes, but the disgustingly clever little Maag called Rabbit came up with a very simple solution.”
“Oh?”
“He called it ‘shut off the wind,’ as I recall. Mighty Dahlaine, who can perform miracles without so much as turning a hair, looked just a bit sheepish when Rabbit explained his notion. If the wind’s not blowing, spitting venom up into the air would be a very bad idea, since the venom would settle right back down and contaminate the air that whoever—or whatever—had spit it up would breathe in himself. They’d end up poisoning themselves—and the Atazaks who were on their side.”
“Did it work like it was supposed to?” Gunda asked.
Narasan shrugged. “We left Mount Shrak to come on down here before any reports from the north came in, but I’d say that any time you’ve got Longbow, Keselo, and Rabbit working together, life will be very unpleasant for the enemy.” He paused. “Can you give me any kind of an estimate of how long it’s likely to take our men to complete this wall? The creatures of the Wasteland have been trying to divert us from this gorge, so I’d say that it’s going to take quite some time for their main force to reach us here, but we’d better get the fort in place as soon as we possibly can.”
“It won’t really take us all that long, Narasan,” Gunda replied. “We’ve got most of the Maags down here to lend us a hand. They’ll carry the raw, unshaped rocks to the fort here, and our men will be able to concentrate on wall-building. I’d say give it a week or so, and then the bug invasion will stop right here.”
“We didn’t see anything at all down there that even comes close to mortar, Commander,” a lean old sergeant reported, late the following day. “This ravine—or gorge, I guess they call it—is nothing but quartz. We could try farther on down tomorrow, sir, but I don’t think we’ll have any luck there, either.”
“I was sort of afraid of that, Narasan,” Gunda said.
“How can we build a fort without mortar?” Narasan demanded.
“We’ll have to go to lock-stone, I guess,” Gunda replied.
“That’s sort of shaky, isn’t it?”
“It’s not all that bad. It takes longer to build, but it does the job. It’s not as if the bug-people were armed—or even knew anything at all about catapults and rams. Their weapons are limited to teeth and fingernails. If they try to chew their way through our wall, it’ll take them several years to get through, and it’ll be sometime next spring before they can even get past the outer layer of blocks.” He stamped his foot down on one of the huge base-rocks. “If we had more time, this would be the simplest answer. If we built the whole fort out of these foundation blocks, the silly thing would probably still be here a thousand years from now.”
“I’ll settle for ten years, Gunda,” Narasan told his friend. “If we do things right, there won’t be any creatures of the Wasteland ten years from now. Build your wall, Gunda. I need to go see how the men building the catapults are coming along.”
He carefully lowered himself to the ground on the back side of Gunda’s fort and went on back to what the men of his army called “the catapult factory,” a fairly obvious variation of Rabbit’s “arrow factory” on the beach near the village of Lattash.
The warrior queen Trenicia was watching as the highly skilled engineers constructed the standard Trogite catapults. “Ah, there you are, Narasan,” she said. “I thought that these things were used to break down the walls of cities or forts. What good are they going to be here?”