“He says that this is just about the best place, uncle,” Ashad called. “This is his favorite place when he’s looking for fish to eat.”

“Mark it, Ashad,” Dahlaine called.

“Right,” Ashad agreed, pulling a clump of fur off the sleeve of his tunic and poking it into a narrow crack in one of the crystal rocks.

“Thank him for us, Ashad,” Zelana called, “and then tell him to go back to Mama’s cave.”

“I’ll do that, Auntie,” Ashad replied.

“Auntie?” Zelana asked her older brother.

“It’s one of those ‘in the family’ things, Zelana,” Dahlaine explained. “It’s sort of like Eleria’s ‘Beloved.’ Not quite as pretty, of course, but then what is?”

3

It was several days later when Veltan, Red-Beard, Gunda, and the horse-soldier Ekial arrived at Mount Shrak with a large number of mounted Malavi behind them. Everybody in Dahlaine’s cave went outside to look at the horse-creatures, and, naturally, the Malavi began to show off. Omago had never really understood just why warrior people always seemed to want to do that.

Their friend Red-Beard was also riding a horse that he called “Seven,” for some reason. Red-Beard was obviously not as skilled at horse-riding as the Malavi were, but he didn’t fall off his horse as it trotted along with the other horses, so it appeared that horses weren’t totally wild.

That raised a very interesting possibility for Omago. It seemed to him that with a bit of proper training, a horse—or several horses harnessed together—might be extremely useful. He decided that he might want to talk with Rabbit the smith about that. If Rabbit could devise the right tool, it might just make the shovel obsolete when the time came to prepare the ground for planting.

The Malavi set up a kind of camp near the foot of Mount Shrak. It was fairly obvious that camping inside Dahlaine’s cave wouldn’t have suited them at all. Omago was becoming a bit more accustomed to living inside Dahlaine’s hole-in-the-ground residence, but he was never really comfortable with the idea, so he understood the reluctance of the Malavi to even go inside Dahlaine’s cave-house.

Omago and the others had seen a few of the local people before the arrival of the Malavi, but now that Dahlaine’s hired warriors were here, Veltan’s older brother decided that it might be a good time to bring the local Matans into his cave so that the Matans, the Tonthakans, and the Malavi could become acquainted with each other.

And so it was that Dahlaine’s little boy Ashad went on down to a nearby village called Asmie, and he soon came back with a young villager called Tlingar, who was about the same age as Ashad, and was obviously Ashad’s close friend. There was another native with the two boys who was an older man with greying hair and was called Tlantar Two-Hands the Chief. Omago couldn’t quite understand why his people had added “Two-Hands” to their chief’s name.

“It’s because he doesn’t favor one hand over the other, Dear Heart,” Ara quietly advised her mate. “The members of his tribe started to call him ‘Two-Hands’ when he was just a boy. He can throw his spear with either hand, and he almost always makes his spear go exactly where he wants it to go. The members of his tribe are terribly proud of that, so they’ve added ‘Two-Hands’ to his name to impress other tribes.”

“How did you manage to pick that up, Ara?”

“I just happened to overhear one of the members of his tribe boasting about that when he was talking with somebody who belonged to a different tribe. It’s not very common, but it does show up every so often.”

Then there was a general sort of get-together in Dahlaine’s war-chamber where the various warrior people examined Dahlaine’s replica of Crystal Gorge, and discussed a number of possible ways to hold back the invasion of the creatures of the Wasteland.

Gunda, the Trogite fort-builder, picked a slightly different location for the fort that would be their main line of defense, and he patiently explained that higher ground would give them a certain advantage.

Then Ekial and Ariga pointed out several places that would be ideal for their standard “hit-and-run” tactics. It seemed to Omago that much of what they were saying to each other was fairly obvious, and it also seemed that they were all being excessively polite.

“It’s called ‘getting to know you,’ Dear Heart,” Ara told him. “They discuss very obvious things while they’re becoming better acquainted with the nature of the people who’ll be their allies in the coming war. It’s not all that uncommon, and if it makes them more comfortable with each other, it’s not really a total waste of time.”

“If I remember correctly, there was quite a bit of that going on in Veltan’s map-room back home before the outlanders went on up into the mountains.”

“We’re bringing a wide range of warrior people together in the same place, Omago,” Ara explained. “They don’t know each other very well at all, so everybody is stepping very carefully until they become more familiar.”

“There is something that’s likely to happen when we encounter these bug-people—or whatever they’re called,” the horse-soldier Ariga declared. “If these enemy creatures really do have snake-fangs like you’ve all mentioned, won’t they be able to kill our horses with just one little nip? We could all wind up walking before the first day of the war is over.”

“I think there might be a way to solve that problem,” Tlantar, the chief of the local tribe, said. “We hunt bison for the meat, of course, but we also make use of their hides. A robe made of bison hide is very thick, and the fur is dense enough to keep us warm through the coldest winters. If those robes can hold off the weather, isn’t it possible that they’d be thick enough to keep the snake-fangs from getting in deep enough to wound your horses?”

“It might take our horses a while to get used to wearing clothes,” Ekial said, “but if those animal skins will protect them, it might just solve the problem. The horses might not like wearing robes very much, but they don’t really have to like it, I guess. They’ll just have to do it.”

“Are plagues really all that common in this part of the world?” the young Trogite Keselo asked. “The Dream mentioned a ‘plague that was not a plague,’ and that has me a bit confused.”

“I’ve heard a few accounts about this new disease,” Chief Tlantar told him. “Certain diseases aren’t all that uncommon here in Matakan, but this new one seems to be much more deadly than the ones that make people cough or cover their bodies with little pink splotches. The people of the northern tribes have told us that anybody who catches this new disease almost always dies in about a half a day.”