Narasan shook his head. “No, Sorgan, our job is getting up to the head of the ravine before the enemy sends people here to replace all the ones that were drowned in the flood. If we can hold our ground at the head of the ravine, no enemies will ever get this far downstream.”
“Maybe,” Sorgan conceded, “but Longbow says that the enemies are very sneaky, and I don’t like surprises. I think we’ll all sleep a lot better if we know that we’ve got a safe place to hole up if things go to pot.”
“Would it be all right if I suggested a compromise, sirs?” Keselo asked them.
“We’ll listen, Keselo,” Commander Narasan agreed.
“Red-Beard’s model showed a narrow gap at the very head of the ravine. If we were to send a sizeable advance force up there at a fast march, we should be able to block off that gap within three or four days. In the meantime, we could put a goodly number of men to work building a temporary barricade across the ravine about a mile upstream from these more permanent forts—just in case the enemy’s already got people coming down toward Lattash. Of course, if that’s the case, our advance force won’t have much chance of reaching the gap anyway, and the barricade would give them some cover in an emergency.”
“This young fellow spoils a lot of good arguments, doesn’t he?” Sorgan suggested. “You and I could have yelled at each other for quite a while, Narasan, and now Keselo just took all the fun out of it.”
“Ah, well,” Commander Narasan said with mock regret, “nobody’s perfect, I guess.”
“I’ll peel off a fair number of my men to set up the barricade,” Sorgan added. “Logs aren’t quite as solid as boulders, but they’ll probably keep the snake-men back—particularly if we line the front with sharp stakes dipped in poison. I noticed down at Lattash that the snake-men that got drowned weren’t wearing any shoes or boots, and walking barefoot across a field of poisoned stakes wouldn’t be a good way to get any older, would it?”
“I’ll make a special point of not doing that, Sorgan,” Commander Narasan promised with a perfectly straight face.
About midmorning the following day, Keselo and Rabbit were a short distance in front of the main army, and Rabbit suddenly stopped. “Is that a village over there on the other side of the river?” he asked.
“Where?” Keselo asked his little friend.
“Up near the top of the ravine, under that rock overhang.” Rabbit pointed.
Keselo peered across the river. There appeared to be structures of some kind under the overhanging rock. “Ah,” he said. “It’s abandoned. We come across ancient ruins all the time down in the Empire. They’re places where people used to live, but nobody’s ever been able to come up with a reason for just exactly why everybody who lived there just packed up and left.”
“Maybe they didn’t, Keselo. There might have been a war or a pestilence that killed them all off.”
“That’s possible, I suppose. Those ruins across the river appear to be quite a bit more sophisticated than the houses down in Lattash. If we weren’t so busy, it might be sort of interesting to explore that place.”
“It doesn’t interest me enough to make me want to swim across the river to get there,” Rabbit said flatly.
Longbow had been up on the rim of the ravine, but he came down to the north bench late that afternoon. “It seems that the servants of the Vlagh were all washed down the river during the flood,” he reported to Sorgan. “We haven’t seen a single one yet.”
“Maybe they’re hiding in the bushes,” Sorgan suggested.
Longbow shook his head. “Not from me, they aren’t. I’ve been hunting them for many, many years, and if there were any of them in the ravine, I’d have seen them. I’ve seen a few deer, but no enemies.”
“They aren’t any too bright, then, are they?” Rabbit said. “Didn’t they know how dangerous it was to sit alongside that river when the snow started to melt?”
“They live in a desert, Rabbit,” Longbow replied. “Water’s very rare in the Wasteland.” He turned to Sorgan. “It won’t hurt to take a few precautions,” he advised, “but I’m fairly sure that the ravine is clear. We’ll keep watch from up on the rim of the ravine, and we’ll warn you if we see any of the Vlagh’s servants. Your army—and Narasan’s—should be able to reach the head of the ravine without any problems.”
“That was the only shaky part of our whole scheme,” Sorgan noted. “If Narasan and I can reach the head of the ravine before that Vlagh thing can get any replacements here, we’ll have just won us a war.”
“That was sort of what we had in mind,” Longbow said mildly.
As evening settled over the scattered, disorganized camp of the Maags, Keselo moved out of the firelight to put some distance between himself and the rowdy pirates.
“What seems to be the problem, Keselo?” Longbow’s voice came out of the darkness.
Without even thinking, Keselo reached for his sword hilt.
“Don’t do that,” Longbow chided him.
“You startled me, that’s all,” Keselo apologized.
“There’s something bothering you, isn’t there?”
“This all seems so unnatural,” Keselo admitted. “I’m not used to fighting battles in the deep forest like this. There aren’t any roads, and the trees make it impossible for me to see anything that’s more than five feet away.”
“The enemies can’t see you either, Keselo. When night falls, everybody is invisible. There’s something that goes just a little deeper, though, isn’t there?”
“I’m afraid,” Keselo blurted out the admission. “I’ve always been afraid of snakes, and now I’m facing the prospect of fighting enemies that are part people and part snake. What sort of weapons can I possibly use to defend myself?”
“You already have the weapon, Keselo. It’s called your mind. The servants of the Vlagh have very little in the way of minds. The Vlagh doesn’t encourage that. It wants to do all of the thinking. I do know quite a bit about them, but sometimes their stupidity even surprises me. The only weapons they have are parts of their bodies, so they don’t even realize what a sword or a spear or a bow is. I once killed thirteen of them in a single place. I’d have killed more, but I ran out of arrows. The ones who were still living just stood there—wondering why the others were all falling down, probably.”