‘Isn’t it just a bit difficult to aim a sling?’

‘Not if you practice every day. After a while, the sling almost becomes an extension of your hand.’

‘Ah,’ Longbow said, ‘and you never miss when you send a rock out to touch a wolf or a deer, do you?’

‘Not that I can recall, no. How did you know that, Longbow?’

‘I have much the same link with my bow. It’s a bit difficult to explain that to people, isn’t it?’

‘I stopped trying to explain it years ago,’ Nanton replied. ‘Of course, it doesn’t come up very often. The life of a shepherd is fairly solitary, so I don’t have people standing around watching me when I chase off a pack of wolves.’

‘Don’t you just kill them when they start to pester your sheep?’

‘Not too often. Usually I hit a wolf in the haunch. That sends him off through the tall grass yelping and bawling. That frightens the other wolves, and they all run off. There are five or six wolf-packs in that basin up on top, and I’ve taught them all to stay away from my sheep. Wolves are very clever animals, and it doesn’t take them very long to learn that some things are dangerous.’

‘Are there any other animals in that area?’

Nanton spread his hands. ‘Just the usual ones - deer, birds, rabbits and squirrels, and then there are the bats that come out in the evenings to eat bugs.’

‘Now there’s a thought,’ Longbow said with a broad grin. ‘Bats eat bugs, don’t they? Since our enemies are at least part bug, maybe we should have a talk with the bats and advise them that supper’s coming up out of the Wasteland.’

‘I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a bat quite that big, Longbow,’ Nanton replied, ‘and I don’t speak fluent batish, do you?’

‘Maybe we should have a word with Veltan about that. If he were to fly around with the bats for a week or so, maybe he’d be able to pick up their language and form an alliance with them.’

‘It might be worth a try,’ the shepherd agreed. ‘I’ll take all the help I can get.’

Skell dropped back a bit. It appeared that Longbow wasn’t quite as icy as everybody seemed to believe he was. The casual conversation between the shepherd and the archer had been very revealing. Skell knew that Longbow and Red-Beard were close friends, and he was also aware of the friendship that existed between Longbow, Rabbit, and Keselo. Evidently, Longbow was now opening a door to the shepherd as well. Skell wasn’t quite certain just exactly why, but the icy archer apparently felt that the shepherd might be very valuable during the current war. It was something to think about, Skell admitted.

4

They reached the top of the narrow stream-bed about noon on the following day, and Skell was a bit surprised when he saw the pleasant-looking basin that lay there. Nanton the shepherd had spoken of a ‘meadow’ up here, but Skell had never before seen a meadow quite so large. It was easily ten miles from the southern end of the basin to the northern ridge. The grass was lush and green and there were a few clumps of trees here and there. Skell hadn’t completely understood what Veltan had described as ‘the geyser’ that was the main source of the River Vash, so he was awed by the tremendous amount of water spurting almost a hundred feet up into the air. Evidently, there were some very interesting things going on under the ground.

The basin was surrounded on three sides by rugged mountain ridges. There was a sharp depression in the south ridge where the suddenly released water from the geyser plunged on down as the Falls of Vash.

The ridge to the north had a much wider gap in the middle, and Skell was fairly certain that the break in that ridge would be very significant. Veltan’s map had indicated that the Wasteland lay to the north of this basin, and that break would almost certainly be the invasion route.

‘Pretty, isn’t it?’ Padan said, looking out across the meadow.

‘Not bad, I guess,’ Skell agreed. Then he pointed toward the break in the north ridge. ‘We might want to look around this basin just a bit, but I think we’d better concentrate on that area up to the north. Our enemies will be coming from that direction anyway, and that break in the ridge looks to me to be about a mile wide. Cousin Sorgan and your commander should be coming along in a few days, but I don’t think we’ll have enough people up here to block that break off until your friend Gunda gets here with the bulk of your army. If the enemy doesn’t come charging up out of that desert until next month, we might be all right, but if it just happens to be next week, we could be in a lot of trouble.’

The break in the ridge-line appeared to have been the result of some fairly recent event, since the sheared-off rock faces still in place showed little or no signs of weathering. The slope leading up to the break from the desert below was cluttered with rubble, which hinted strongly that some sort of natural disaster had demolished the ridge-line.

‘Do you get many earthquakes up here, Nanton?’ Longbow asked the shepherd as they all stood looking down toward the Wasteland.

‘Every now and then, yes,’ Nanton replied. ‘Usually, they aren’t severe enough to break down these ridge-lines, though.’

Skell was squinting down the slope. ‘It’s sort of a shame that all those rocks rolled down the north side,’ he observed. ‘They’d be a lot more useful if they’d stayed closer.’

‘I wouldn’t give up on them yet, Skell,’ Padan said thoughtfully.

‘When Commander Narasan and your cousin Sorgan get up here with their men, they could build a series of breast-works across that slope, you know. That’d definitely slow our enemies down, and that’d give our people time to build a more substantial wall up here. Then we’ll have a much better chance of holding the enemy back until Gunda gets here.’

‘That reminds me of something I’d almost forgotten,’ Skell said. ‘Ho, Grock!’ he called.

‘Aye, Cap’n?’ Grock replied.

‘I want you to go on back down that creek-bed and tell my brother that I want him to put the men coming up here through that steep gorge before long, and they’ll be able to come up a lot faster if we’ve got ropes in place - the way we did with that coil of rope you brought along when we came up. Tell my brother to set up several separate trails. If Narasan’s army comes up through that gorge one man at a time, it’ll take them all summer to get up here.’