“What a shame,” Red-Beard said in mock sympathy.

“If you two have finished, do you suppose we could get down to business here?” Narasan suggested firmly. “How do things stand right now, Red-Beard?”

“We had a little trouble over in Tonthakan,” Red-Beard replied. “The bug-people were trying to start a war between some of the tribes over there, but Sorgan’s friend, Ox, bashed the troublemakers in the head with his axe, and a real bad case of peace broke out. We discovered that the bug-men have started to use fragrance to win people over to their side.”

“Fragrance?” Narasan asked.

Red-Beard shrugged. “It’s a nicer word than ‘stink,’ wouldn’t you say? Anyway, this peculiar smell made people—the real ones—believe anything the bug-people told them. The ‘grand plan’ the bug-people had come up with had a small hole in it, though, and the hole’s name was Ox. It seems that poor old Ox is one of those unfortunate people who start sneezing every time they see a flower, and during the sneezing season, Ox can’t smell anything—flowers, dead bodies, or anything else—because his nose is so stopped up that he has to breathe through his mouth. The two bug-people who were trying their best to make everybody believe them were spewing out that smell of theirs for all they were worth, but their ‘fragrance’ didn’t have any effect on Ox, because his nose doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to. That’s when he solved the problem for us—with his axe. After he’d brained the two bug-people, everybody seemed to wake up, and that ended that particular problem right there on the spot.”

“They’ve never done that before,” Narasan observed. “It seems like every time we turn around, they’ve come up with something new—and even more dangerous.”

“Red-Beard,” Padan said curiously, “what sort of an animal is the one you’ve got tied to a tree on the upper side of the beach?”

“That’s one of the creatures that gave the ‘horse-people’ their name,” Red-Beard replied with a smile. “That one’s called ‘Seven,’ and he’s mine.”

“The horse-people don’t even give their pets names?” Padan asked. “Do they just give them numbers instead?”

Red-Beard shook his head, and then he told Padan the story of Seven’s previous owner, the gambler who cheated. “After that, poor old Seven didn’t have an owner anymore, so Ekial and Ariga gave him to me.”

“What’s it like—riding a horse, I mean?” Andar asked.

“A lot easier than doing your own walking. Seven and I don’t cover as much ground as a Malavi on horseback can in one day, but we can still cover about three times as much as I could on foot.”

“What kind of terrain are we going to encounter on the way to Mount Shrak?” Narasan asked.

“There’s a mountain range off to the west,” Red-Beard said. “I don’t know if I’d call those hills ‘mountains,’ though. The slopes are fairly gentle, and I didn’t come up against anything that I’d call rugged. The passes we’ll follow are wide enough to give your army plenty of room to march through. Then we’ll go on down to the grassland of the Matakan Nation. It’s pretty much like one vast meadowland with almost no trees. We might encounter a herd of bison out there, and that could delay us just a bit. The herds here to the south aren’t as big as the ones off to the north are, though, so we won’t have to set up camp and wait for three or four days the way we might have to farther north. Tlantar Two-Hands told me that he had to sit on a hilltop for a week once when a bison herd up there had him blocked off.”

“Who’s Tlantar Two-Hands,” Padan asked, “and how did he come up with a name like that?”

“He’s the chief—or headman—of a village called Asmie in the vicinity of Mount Shrak, and I guess the people of Asmie call him ‘Two-Hands’ because he doesn’t know one hand from the other.”

“We can discuss this as we go along,” Narasan said. “For right now, let’s get our men ashore and prepare to march. We’ve got about twenty days of hiking ahead of us, so we’d better get started.”

There were quite a few strange things about this part of the Land of Dhrall that troubled Trenicia a bit, but she was sure that she’d be able to adjust to them. Her main purpose right now was to more firmly establish her relationship with Narasan, and that seemed to be coming along very well.

2

It took the better part of two days for Narasan’s army to come ashore and make the necessary preparations for the march to Mount Shrak. There were so many details! Sometimes Trenicia almost wanted to scream. Why didn’t they just get on with it?

“Does he really have to go through all of this again and again and again?” she asked Padan, about midday on their second day on the beach.

Padan shrugged. “He made a few serious mistakes once during a war in the southern part of the empire, Your Majesty, and he learned quite a few things the hard way.”

“Oh?” Trenicia was quite interested in such things. “What happened?”

Padan sighed. “After his father was killed in a senseless little war, Narasan’s mother went all to pieces with her grief, and Narasan decided that he should never marry.”

That got Trenicia’s immediate attention.

“Anyway,” Padan continued, “after he became the commander of our army, Narasan grew very attached to his nephew, Astal—a young man with an enormous potential. In many ways, Astal was the equivalent of the son Narasan would never have. Then a duke named Bergalta hired us to fight a small, meaningless war with one of his neighbors. The money was good, and it appeared that this would be one of those easy wars. As it turned out, though, it wasn’t the least bit easy. Our army’s the best in the entire empire, and we’ve made a lot of enemies over the years. Evidently, a number of those enemies got together and came up with a fairly elaborate scheme, probably in the hope of killing us down to the last man.”

“You Trogites have a very complicated sort of society, don’t you?”

Padan grinned at her. “Money seems to do that, Your Majesty. Rich people make enemies, and sooner or later they feel that they need an army—and they pay very well. Anyway, we marched south, and Narasan decided that his nephew should lead several cohorts in our advance force—ostensibly to give Astal a bit of experience, but actually to boost Narasan’s pride. There was an ambush, and Astal and twelve cohorts were killed.”