really ought to be, every cattle-buyer in those towns will break down and cry.’
‘Poor babies,’ Torl said with mock sympathy. Then he squinted at Ekial. ‘As I understand it, your horses are usually just wild animals – until you and your people tame them. Is taming a horse very hard?’
‘That sort of depends on the horse,’ Ekial replied. He told Torl about Beast and his nasty habits. ‘Poor old Beast died last year, and I sort of miss having him around,’ he admitted.
‘Nothing lasts forever, Ekial,’ Torl replied, ‘ – except for the sea, of course.’
The war in the basin above the Falls of Vash turned out to be much more complicated than Ekial had expected. The invasion of the bug-people was pretty much as Dahlaine had told him it would be – except that the bugs were larger but not quite so agile. Gunda’s wall and Keselo’s breastworks seemed to be doing what they were supposed to do, and the machines that threw fire at the enemies would have made horse-soldiers redundant.
It was the second invasion that involved Trogite soldiers which opened all sorts of possibilities. It seemed to Ekial that the second invasion almost invited the standard Malavi ‘slash and run’ tactics. Foot soldiers sort of plodded along without paying too much attention to what was going on around them, and that would have made them almost perfect victims had there been any Malavi horsemen in the vicinity. Ekial frowned then and made a slight correction. If the red-uniformed church soldiers had been carrying bows and quivers of arrows, a Malavi charge could have turned into an absolute disaster. A sudden storm of bronze-tipped arrows raining down on a charging body of Malavi would kill men and horses indiscriminately, and the charge would never reach its goal. He made a mental note of that. No horsemen should ever attempt a charge against an enemy armed with bows.
The thing that disturbed Ekial the most, however, was what Longbow called ‘The Sea of Gold’. Even after the little smith called Rabbit had more or less proved that it wasn’t gold, Ekial could not take his eyes off what appeared to be the greatest deposit of the precious metal in the entire world.
‘Don’t keep looking at it, Ekial,’ Keselo advised. ‘It might just scramble your brains if you look too long.’
‘But it’s so pretty.’
‘I think that was the whole idea, but it’s out there for the church soldiers to look at – not you or me. We know that it’s almost worthless, but they don’t. I think that was the whole idea. The church of Amar is filled to the brim with greed, and that imitation gold out there raises that greed to the boiling point. As far as we’ve been able to determine, the church soldiers – and the priests – aren’t even thinking coherently any more, and that seems to have been the idea. The church people will charge down that slope right into the hands – or whatever – of the bug-people. The men will kill the bugs, and the bugs will kill the men. When it’s all over, there won’t be any enemies of either kind left alive. It’s nothing but an elaborate trap, and you don’t want to be one of those caught in it.’
‘You speak very well, Keselo,’ Ekial conceded. ‘Maybe I should go look at the mountains for a change.’
‘I would, if I were you.’
Ekial found the discussions of ‘the unknown friend’ more than a little confusing. It had seemed from the very beginning of this war in the southern part of the Land of Dhrall that Dahlaine and his family had been more or less in control of things, but it appeared that someone else had stepped in without any kind of warning, and this someone else could do things that were far beyond the capability of Dahlaine and the others. Dahlaine’s older sister seemed to take that as something in the nature of a personal insult, and Ekial found that to be a matter of great concern. He’d caught a few hints that Dahlaine and the others were nearing the end of what were called ‘cycles,’ and they were no longer completely aware of what was happening.
He began to have some second thoughts about having anything to do with this ongoing war in the Land of Dhrall. The pay promised to be very good, but still –
The Maags and Trogites, with the help of Longbow and the archers, seemed to have things pretty much under control. The bug-people weren’t making much headway in their charges up the slope to the north of Gunda’s wall, and the soldiers of the Trogite church were rushing up from the south with their minds shut down because of that ‘sea of gold’. The ‘unknown friend’s’ command to stand aside made good sense to Ekial, but it seemed to stir up even more bickering and wild speculation among the leaders of the Land of Dhrall.
Then when they were in the vicinity of the geyser that was the source of the Falls of Vash there came a deep rumble from far below the surface of the earth, and Dahlaine appeared out of nowhere in a blinding flash of light and told them to get clear of the area near the spouting geyser.
The earth began to shudder violently under their feet as they ran off toward the comparative safety of the east rim of the grassy basin, and that convinced Ekial that he wanted no part of these wars in the Land of Dhrall. He was more than willing to take on people in any war in any part of the world, but when the world itself began to rumble and shudder, it was time to go home.
‘These geysers are not uncommon, I’ve been told,’ Keselo advised them all as they stood on top of the eastern-most tower of Gunda’s wall staring in awe at the thundering spout of water blasting out over the north slope. ‘They’re the result of vast pockets of water far below the surface of the earth – water that’s under extreme pressure. When there’s an earthquake in the region, the solid rock that’s holding all that water in place will crack, and the water will suddenly come blasting up from far down below.’
‘The next question is how long it’s going to take for that underground pond to run dry,’ Sorgan Hook-Beak said.
‘I wouldn’t hold my breath, Captain,’ Keselo replied. ‘I’ve heard that there’s a geyser off to the south of the empire that’s been spouting up into the air for several hundred years now. There’s no way that we could verify this, since those bodies of water are several miles below the surface, but some people who’ve studied them tell us that there are vast seas down there waiting for the chance to come up to the surface.’
‘Well, good for them,’ Padan said with a broad grin. ‘If that part of the Wasteland is lower than the rest of it, and the water’s going to keep spouting out the way it’s doing right now, there’ll be a lake down there by the end of the week, and by this time next year, the lake will have become an inland sea.’
‘Well, gentlemen,’ Dahlaine said then, ‘I guess that pretty much takes care of everything up here. I suppose we might as well pack up and go on back down the hill.’
There was a certain amount of celebration when they returned to the house of Veltan. They had won yet another war against the bug-people, but it seemed to Ekial that the celebrators all tended to gloss over the fact that ‘unknown friend’ had stepped around them and won the war all by herself.
There were some extended discussions about which part of the Land of Dhrall would be attacked by the bug-people next, but Ekial found the bickering between Dahlaine and his sister rather tiresome and more than a little silly – an opinion he was almost positive was shared by Zelana and Veltan.
Ekial began to avoid the map-room and frequently left Veltan’s house to look over the farmland nearby. It was late summer now, and the farmers had begun to harvest their crops. The concepts of plowing and planting were alien to Ekial, but he could understand the value of having enough food to get through the coming winter. Beef was pleasant
