“What’s impossible, Keselo?” Commander Narasan asked.
“I don’t think this slope is any sort of natural formation, sir,” Keselo replied. “It looks to me as if it might just be a stairway.”
“You’re not serious!” the commander scoffed.
“Look for yourself, sir,”
They all began clearing sand away at that point, and more and more stone steps were exposed. “If this goes all the way down to the desert floor, it would have taken an army centuries to build it,” Narasan said in an awed voice.
“The Vlagh’s very patient,” Longbow told him. “This is the lowest place in the wall that separates the Wasteland from the Domain of Zelana, so if the Vlagh was thinking about paying us a call, it needed some way for its army to reach the top of the ravine—a way that wind and weather and time couldn’t destroy. I’d say that this invasion’s been in the works for a long, long time.”
“Well, that’s just too bad,” Sorgan said with a broad grin. “They might have built this silly stairway, but we’ll tear it apart. Life’s going to get very exciting for anybody who tries to come up the stairs when we start rolling blocks down.”
“Let’s not be too hasty here, Sorgan,” Narasan said. He went a short distance down the stairs, kicking dirt off the steps as he went and stopping every so often to turn and look back up at the gap. “It’d be a shame to waste all this perfectly good building material, don’t you think? This stairway’s at least four or five times wider than the gap, so there’d be enough stone blocks to build an even bigger fort than I’d originally intended. I wasn’t really thinking about anything much higher than an ordinary barricade. Now that we’ve got all these building blocks, though, I should be able to block off the gap completely. That would give the enemies a pretty stone wall to look at while they’re charging up the stairway. I rather think they’ll get the message, don’t you?”
“They should,” Sorgan agreed, “particularly if we leave little holes in the wall to poke our spears through if they try to climb up over it. Are your people any good at building? My cousin Skell’s got every Maag in the fleet who knows the least bit about that sort of thing working on the forts near the bottom of the ravine.”
Narasan came back up the stairs. “Trogite soldiers spend more time building fortifications than they do fighting, Sorgan. If your men tear the stairway apart and carry the blocks up to the gap, my men can put the fort together in short order. Our advance forces should be joining us before the day’s out, so we’ve got time to work out the details.”
Something occurred to Keselo. “Excuse me,” he said politely. “Wouldn’t it be better if the enemies down below can’t see what we’re doing up here?”
“Do all the work at night, you mean?” Sorgan asked.
“Well, no, not really,” Keselo replied. “The prevailing wind comes up the ravine from the west, and smoke goes where the wind takes it. A few bonfires with fresh evergreen boughs piled on top of them would put out enough smoke to conceal us from the enemy down below, wouldn’t you say?”
“It would, wouldn’t it?” Hook-Beak mused. “This is a very clever young man you’ve got here, Narasan.”
“He earns his pay,” Narasan agreed.
“It comes with being a sailor,” Rabbit explained the next morning when Keselo noted how smoothly the Maags were taking the top of the stairway apart and passing the stone blocks from man to man. “A ship’s crew learns early that they’ve got to cooperate. We row the ship when the wind’s not right, and the ship won’t go anywhere if the oars aren’t working in unison, and when we raise the sail, we have to pull together.” He looked down at the Maags working just below the gap and then over at the steadily growing stacks of building blocks behind the gap. “If every Maag working on this just picked up a block and carried it all the way to those stacks, they’d be falling all over each other.”
“They would, wouldn’t they?” Keselo agreed.
It was about midafternoon when Ox came up the center portion of the stairway the Maags were leaving intact to facilitate the chore of passing the stone blocks up to the gap. “You want we should put on a fresh crew and work on through the night, Cap’n?” he called up to Hook-Beak. “Those bonfires should put out a fair amount of light, so we’ll be able to see what we’re doing after it gets dark.”
“We might as well, I guess,” Hook-Beak agreed. “The sooner we get all those blocks up here, the sooner the Trogites can start building the front wall of the fort.”
“Do you people actually work after the sun goes down?” the balding Gunda demanded incredulously.
“When you’re out at sea, you almost have to keep working,” Sorgan replied. “The tides and wind don’t stop just because the sun goes down.” He looked over at Narasan. “It’s something to think about, you know,” he said. “The rest of our people—both yours and mine—should be joining us tomorrow, so we’ll have fresh men to take over the chores. If we both put fresh men to work on this even after it gets dark, we’ll be able to finish up in half the time it’d take if we only work when the sun’s out.”
“Good point,” Narasan agreed. “About how much longer do you think it’ll take your men to finish?”
“If they stick right with it, I’d be willing to bet that they’ll have that top fifty feet cleared away by noon tomorrow,” Hook-Beak replied. “Then the rest is up to you. My people tear things apart. Your people have to build things.”
“You’re all heart, Sorgan,” Commander Narasan replied sardonically.
Keselo was fairly sure he’d just be in the way if he stood watching the Maags dismantling the top of the stairway, so he went back through the gap to the little glade at the top of the ravine. The bulky Dhrall known as Red-Beard was seated beside a small fire near the sparkling little brook that seemed to be the source of the river that had carved out the ravine.
“Maybe you can explain something for me, Red-Beard,” Keselo said.
“If I happen to understand it myself, maybe,” Red-Beard said, scratching his hairy cheek.
“Did your tribe live up here in the ravine at some time in the past? When we were coming up the north bench, Rabbit and I saw several abandoned villages over on your side of the river.”