Chapter One
The weather had turned bitterly cold as Red-Beard, mounted on the horse he called "Seven," led Skell and the archers of Old-Bear's tribe south along a worn-down mountain range toward the upper end of Long-Pass. The Matans of Tlantar Two-Hands had given Skell and the other Maag seamen those densely furred bison-hide cloaks, but the chill was still brutal.
The archers of Old-Bear's tribe were very interested in Red-Beard's horse, and Longbow's friend described the "slash and run" tactics of the Malavi in some detail.
"That might be all right in open country," an archer called Sleeps-With-Dogs said, "but I don't think it'd work out too well in the forest."
"You're probably right," Red-Beard admitted, "but most of the country here in the North or off to the East is open. If I remember right, you were with us down in Veltan's Domain, and the country above the Falls of Vash didn't have very many trees. A forest is good for hunting, but when you get into open country, the distance between here and there seems to go on forever. That's when a horse becomes very useful. You don't have to do your own walking—or running—if you've got a horse." Then he gave the archer from Longbow's tribe a curious look. "How in the world did you come up with a name like 'Sleeps-With-Dogs?" he asked.
The archer shrugged. "I found out quite some time ago that having dogs in your lodge in the wintertime means that you're not going to need very much firewood. If you bed down with three or four dogs, you'll stay nice and warm. The fleas are sort of troublesome, but not as much as ice is."
"I might give that a try myself," Red-Beard said. "I'm sure that Seven here gives off heat when he sleeps, but he sleeps standing up."
"What made you decide to call him 'Seven?" the archer asked.
Red-Beard laughed. "That wasn't my idea at all. His original owner was a gambler, and he just loved to play dice-games. As I understand it, seven's a very important number when you're playing dice-games. When the Malavi were sailing north on board quite a few Trogite ships, they didn't really have much to do, so they gambled, just to pass the time. I've heard that Seven's original owner won a lot of money in those dice-games—right up until the other Malavi found out that he'd been cheating. They threw him off the ship into deep water, and since he'd never learned how to swim, he sank like a rock."
"Drowned?"
"You couldn't prove that by me, Sleeps-With-Dogs," Red-Beard replied, "but after he'd been under water for an hour or so the other Malavi divided up what he'd left behind, and they gave me old Seven here. He's a sensible old horse, and he and I get along very well. I don't have to walk much now, and I don't force him to run. It works out fairly well for the both of us."
"How much farther would you say it is to this Long-Pass place?" Skell asked Red-Beard.
"Dahlaine's map said that it's about a hundred and sixty miles from where we started down along this mountain range," Red-Beard replied. "I'd say that we're about halfway there, Captain Skell. Since it took us four days to get this far, it'll probably take us another four days to get to where we're going."
"I was sort of afraid that it might take that long," Skell said sourly.
"Have you heard anything at all about what cousin Sorgan's up to down in Lady Aracia's temple?" Skell asked Red-Beard as they set out the next morning.
"Deception for the most part, I've been told," Red-Beard replied.
"Zelana's big sister wants everybody in the world who owns a sword to run down there and defend her. I've heard that Sorgan told her that he could hold off the bug-people if she'd pay him a lot of gold."
"That's Sorgan, all right," Skell said with a faint smile. "My cousin is probably the greatest cheater in the world. Before I left to go fetch the archers from Old-Bear's tribe, people were saying that the bugs would attack through Long-Pass, and that Aracia's temple wasn't in any danger at all, and that Aracia herself wasn't either. How in the world did cousin Sorgan manage to squeeze any gold at all out of her?"
"He lied, of course. You know how Sorgan is. From what I've heard, his plan was to send people who can lie with a straight face out into the farmland and come back with all kinds of horror stories about bug-people living on a steady diet of people-people. That's supposed to keep Aracia's holy-holies penned up inside the temple while the real warriors are fighting off the bugs in Long-Pass." Then Red-Beard tugged at his whiskers. "If what I've heard about Zelana's sister comes anywhere close to being true, she wants—even needs—to have the bug-people attack her holy temple. If they don't bother to attack her, it would sort of mean that she's not very important to them, wouldn't it? She just couldn't stand that, you know. She has to be important, and if the bugs just ignored her, she'd shrivel up and blow away. I think that's what your cousin is counting on. Aracia will believe any lie he—or one of his paid liars—tells her, because she has to believe."
"That's the saddest thing I've ever heard," Skell declared. "She'd rather die than be ignored."
"Except that she can't die," Red-Beard said. "In some ways that makes it even sadder, wouldn't you say? She'll live forever, but nobody's ever going to pay any attention to her."
Skell shuddered and changed the subject. "Sorgan always manages to have all the fun," he said sourly. "A war against an enemy who isn't really there would be a lot easier than a real war."
"He took your brother Torl with him," Red-Beard said. "From what I've heard, Tori's probably one of the greatest liars in the whole world."
"He's good at that, all right," Skell agreed. "Have any new varieties of bug-people shown up yet?"
"I wouldn't know for sure," Red-Beard replied. "I've been riding poor old Seven here back and forth across this part of the Land of Dhrall since late last fall, so I haven't been anywhere near the Wasteland."
"Is learning how to ride a horse very difficult?" Skell asked curiously.
"That sort of depends on the horse. Old Seven here is fairly placid and easy to get along with. Most of the Malavi horses are much more frisky than Seven, and that doesn't hurt my feelings one little bit. Seven can't run as fast as most of the other Malavi horses, but I'm not in that big a hurry to get from here to there."
"I'll go along with you there, Red-Beard," Skell agreed.
A fair number of Old-Bear's archers had gone on ahead that afternoon, and along about sunset the main party reached the campsite on the bank of a wide river that flowed down out of the mountain range. Somewhat to Skell's surprise, the archers had managed to kill several of the bison that grazed nearby. "I've been told that it's very difficult to kill those bison with arrows," Skell said to the archer called Tracker.