4
Gunda’s men were putting the finishing touches to the wall a few days later, and Gunda felt that it had turned out rather well. The flat basalt rocks were solid, even though they were a bit rough. He was sure that if he’d erected such a wall down in the Empire, it would have generated quite a few sneers, but this warn’t the Empire, and Gunda hadn’t had time enough - nor the inclination - to sheathe his wall with polished marble slabs.
It was about noon that day when a large cloud of dust began to rise up from the floor of the Wasteland far on below the slope. Gunda immediately sent word back to Commander Narasan, and it wasn’t too long before the top of Gunda’s wall was cluttered with observers - including a couple who quite obviously came from alien lands. The scar-faced Ekial didn’t seem out of place, but Gunda was a bit startled - and awed - by the warrior queen Trenicia.
‘I’d say that we’ve got visitors on the way,’ Andar rumbled.
‘But I don’t have a thing to wear!’ Padan protested.
‘Does he do that very often?’ Andar asked Gunda.
‘All the time,’ Gunda replied. ‘He thinks he’s funny, but I stopped laughing years ago.’ He squinted on down the slope. Then he looked at Veltan. ‘I might be wrong,’ he said, ‘but it seems to me that the desert out there’s quite a bit lower than it was when we were fighting the war in the ravine above Lattash.’
‘This was the deepest part of the inland sea that covered the Wasteland in the distant past,’ Veltan explained. ‘I’ve never actually taken any measurements, but I rather think that depression out there’s even lower than the floor of Mother Sea.’
‘Maybe if you talked with Mommy real nice, she’d fill that sinkhole out there with water again,’ Padan suggested.
‘Mommy?’ Veltan looked a bit confused by the word.
‘Wouldn’t that sort of get you on her good side?’ Padan asked with a feigned look of wide-eyed innocence.
‘I don’t think our baby brother would want to take any chances there,’ Lady Zelana advised. ‘He made a mistake when he was talking with her once, and she sent him to the moon without any supper.’
‘Are there really that many enemies down there?’ Andar asked, staring at the dust cloud with awe.
‘They’re probably just kicking up dust to conceal their real numbers,’ Danal suggested. ‘That’s not an uncommon practice, you know. If you don’t have as many men as your enemy has, you don’t want him to know it, and if you’ve got more, you want to hide that as well.’
‘It’s possible,’ Lady Zelana said, ‘but this is probably a new hatch. After what happened in the ravine above Lattash, the Vlagh didn’t have many servants left, so it had to spawn more. It might just be that it’s been experimenting again. The Vlagh’s always coming up with different varieties of children.’
‘I’m still having trouble with that,’ Keselo admitted. ‘Are we really being attacked by women?’
The burly warrior woman from the Isle of Akalla reached for her sword.
Veltan put a restraining hand on her arm. ‘He wasn’t trying to offend you, Queen Trenicia,’ he said. ‘It’s just that he’s not at all familiar with your culture.’
‘Somebody should explain it to him,’ the warrior queen declared.
‘I wouldn’t really think of the servants of the Vlagh as “women”, Keselo,’ Lady Zelana cautioned. ‘They’re females, of course, but the majority of all insects are female. The males only have one responsibility - which I don’t think we need to discuss just now.’
Young Keselo suddenly blushed a bright red.
Lady Zelana laughed with delight. ‘Isn’t he just the dearest boy?’ she said to the rest of them. ‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘when the Vlagh produces a hatch, it numbers in the tens of thousands.’
‘But those would only be babies,’ Andar protested.
‘Very true,’ Zelana agreed, ‘but the childhood of an insect is only about a week long. After that, they’re full-grown adults.’
‘And females as well?’
‘Exactly.’
‘The life of a boy-bug might be very interesting,’ Padan mused.
‘It does have some drawbacks, young man,’ Zelana warned him. ‘After he’s performed his duty, he’s of no particular use any more, so the servants of the Vlagh - females, of course - bite off his head and throw him out with the rest of the garbage.’
‘Does a career as a boy-bug still interest you, Padan?’ Gunda asked rather blandly.
‘I’m starting to have some second thoughts,’ Padan admitted with a shudder.
A breeze came up an hour or so later, and it blew most of the dust cloud away, and the onlookers atop Gunda’s wall were stunned by the sheer numbers of enemies they now saw moving purposefully across the ruddy desert far below. ‘I think it’s time for us to take up our positions, gentlemen,’ Narasan said grimly to his officers.
‘Is it my imagination, or are the ones down there quite a bit bigger than those we encountered in the ravine?’ Padan asked.
Gunda squinted down the slope. ‘It’s sort of hard to tell for sure at this distance, but I think you might be right.’ He turned to Veltan. ‘Can that Vlagh thing do that? I mean, can it just double the size of its soldiers in no more than a month?’
‘Probably,’ Veltan replied. ‘The Vlagh’s an imitator. When it sees a certain characteristic that seems to be useful, it modifies the next hatch to include that peculiarity. The men of the Land of Maag are very tall, so I’d say that the Vlagh imitated that characteristic in this current hatch.’
‘Why didn’t it just build bigger warriors right from the start?’ Rabbit asked.
‘Bigger creatures need more food,’ Veltan explained, ‘and there’s not really very much to eat out there in the Wasteland. There’s been much more food available since the war in the ravine, so now the Vlagh can afford to spawn out bigger servants.’
‘Trees and bushes, you mean?’
‘Probably not,’ Veltan replied. ‘Wars produce dead people, and other dead things as well. There was plenty to eat after that war. The volcanos burned a lot of that food, but apparently the servants of the Vlagh managed to salvage enough to feed the larger warriors.’
‘That’s disgusting!’ Keselo exclaimed.