Crystal Gorge: Book Three of the Dreamers

by Alan Dean Foster

  Tlantar didn’t know very much about the process of giving birth, but it seemed to him that Tleri was taking much longer than the other women of the tribe had when they’d produced children. After two days of listening to her screams, Tlantar was beside himself.

  Then her screams began to subside, and Tlantar was sure that the worst was almost over.

  After the women of the tribe had summarily turned him out of his lodge, he stayed in the lodge of the elder Tlerik, who spent most of the next two days talking about Dahlaine’s “Nation” concept. “It does make good sense, My Chief,” he said. “All this bickering and wars between the tribes don’t make much sense when we’re right on the verge of being invaded by the creatures of the Wasteland. We need to set our differences aside and start preparing for a real war.”

  “Do you suppose we could talk about this some other time, Tlerik?” Tlantar said. “I’ve got something else to worry about right now.”

  “I was trying to take your mind off that, Two-Hands,” Tlerik replied. “Quite often, childbirth is harder on the men than it is on the women. Don’t worry so much, Tlantar, Tleri is young and strong. She’ll come through this just fine.”

  Tlantar awoke with a start. It had seemed to him that going to sleep while Tleri was in such pain would have been an act of profound disrespect, but all those sleepless hours had finally overwhelmed him. He had no idea of how long he had slept, but peculiarly, it had been silence that had aroused him. There were no screams now, and Tlantar heaved a vast sigh of relief. Tleri’s suffering was over, and he was now a father. “Why didn’t you wake me up?” he asked the elder Tlerik.

  “You needed some sleep, My Chief,” the old man replied.

  “Is the child a boy or a girl?”

  “Well, it was a boy, My Chief,” Tlerik replied rather somberly.

  “Was? What are you talking about, Tlerik?”

  “Things didn’t turn out well, My Chief. The birthing took too long, and Tleri was too weak to complete it. I’m sorry, My Chief, but your son was born dead.”

  Tlantar felt a sudden wrench in his heart. “Was there no way he could have been revived?” he asked in a choked voice.

  “None, My Chief. As nearly as the women who were helping Tleri could determine, the child died before he left Tleri’s womb.” There was a somewhat evasive quality in Tlerik’s voice.

  “There’s something you’re not telling me, old man,” Tlantar accused.

  Tlerik sighed. “Your son will not go alone into his grave, Two-Hands,” he said very quietly.

  Tlantar stared at the old man in horror as the full meaning of what he’d just heard came crashing in on him. Then he threw back his head and howled in his grief.

  3

  Your mate’s hips were too small,” the stout woman who had tried to help Tleri said a few weeks later when Tlantar had partially regained his senses and questioned her about his mate’s death. “They were so small that the baby, who was quite large, couldn’t come out. Tleri tried very hard to force him out, but then she started to bleed, and much more blood came out than is usual. There was nothing we could do to stop the bleeding, so we couldn’t save her. I’m very sorry, Chief Tlantar, but these things happen all the time. More women die in childbirth than most people realize.”

  “I’d heard that it happens now and then,” Tlantar conceded.

  “‘Now and then’ isn’t too accurate, My Chief,” she said in a grim voice. “I’d say that almost half of the women with child die during the delivery.”

  “Half?” Tlantar exclaimed.

  “She’s right, My Chief,” Tlerik agreed.

  “That doesn’t happen that often with animals, does it?” Tlantar demanded.

  “No,” the stout woman said. “I asked Dahlaine about that once, and he told me that it happens to people more often than it does to animals because we walk on our hind legs instead of all four. Our hands are more useful than paws or hooves, but our bodies aren’t as strong as they should be, since the muscles in our lower bellies haven’t switched over from four legs to two yet. He told me that it might take several thousand years for our belly-muscles to change over and do things right.”

  “Couldn’t Dahlaine just—” Tlantar left it hanging.

  The stout woman shook her head. “I asked him about that myself, but he told me that he wasn’t supposed to tamper with us that way.”

  “You might want to consider something before too much longer, Chief Two-Hands,” Tlerik said, pursing his lips. “Not right at once, of course, but after your grief has subsided, you should probably consider finding another mate.”

  Tlantar shook his head. “No. Tleri was my mate, and in my heart she always will be.”

  “I just wanted to raise the issue, My Chief. You absolutely must have a son who’ll become Asmie’s chief after you pass on. If you don’t have a descendant, arguments about who’ll be our next chief will break out before your body even turns cold, and those particular arguments are the ones that usually lead to bloodshed. There have been many tribes in the past that aren’t around anymore for exactly that reason.”

  Tlantar firmly shook his head. “I won’t betray my Tleri for all this political nonsense, Tlerik. You should know me well enough by now to realize that.”

  “You could just choose somebody else’s child,” the stout woman suggested. “That might even be a better way to do this than hanging the title on a son who might not be bright enough to tell his right hand from his left.” She hesitated. “No offense intended there, Chief Two-Hands—but just because you’re intelligent, it doesn’t really follow that your son will be as well. If everything I’ve heard about Atazakan is true, that’s the perfect example of what happens when leadership is handed off to a long succession of descendants that are increasingly incompetent—or insane.”

  “She has a point there, My Chief,” Tlerik said, frowning slightly. “Sometimes bloodlines grow weaker and weaker with each passing generation, and what began as genius slides down toward idiocy eventually.” Then he looked appraisingly at the woman. “You seem to have an unusually firm grasp upon a fair number of unpleasant realities, good lady,” he observed.

  “How nice of you to say so, honored elder,” she replied with a little curtsy.

  “For some reason, I can’t remember ever having seen you before here in Asmie,” Tlerik said with a slight frown.

  “That’s probably because you weren’t looking, old man,” she replied. “If that’s everything we have on the fire for right now, I have some other things that need my attention.” And then she turned and left Tlerik’s lodge.

  One of the things Tlantar’s father had told him many times was that he should always be familiar and friendly with the other men of the tribe. “A chief can’t have too many friends.”

  Given the circumstances of Chief Tladan’s death, however, Tlantar had some serious doubts about the wisdom of his father’s suggestion. Chief Tladan had been aware of the fact that his back and legs were not as strong as they’d been when he was younger, and even though he’d tried very hard to keep the other men of the tribe from realizing that his legs ached almost all the time, his limping had been very obvious when he’d been alone with his son. Given his condition, he should never have agreed to go to the hunt with his friends, but once someone had suggested it, he’d felt obliged to join in. Casual friendship might be nice, Tlantar admitted to himself, but it definitely wasn’t nice enough to die for.

  Tlantar’s recent bereavement gave him a sound reason to distance himself from the other men of the tribe, so he made a point of maintaining a somber expression when he was in the presence of others and going straight to the point in his discussions with the men of the tribe. Even the more boisterous tribe members took him seriously. It seemed to Tlantar that even now Tleri was helping him.

  Despite Dahlaine’s concept of “The Matakan Nation,” there were still periodic outbreaks of tribal war, and the usual reason for these outbreaks of violence had to do with what the Matans r
eferred to as “poaching.” Tribes were supposed to do their hunting within the bounds of their own territory, but the bison were not even aware of boundaries, and once they’d been frightened, they would run, and the hunters who’d frightened them would run after them.

  That started many arguments and quite a few wars. Tlantar took a rather stiff-necked approach in these situations, pushing aside the “hot pursuit” justification many nearby tribes tried to assert, and firmly announcing, “When you reach our boundary, you stop. If you don’t, we’ll fight you.”

  It took several rather bloody demonstrations to convince the neighboring tribes that Chief Tlantar Two-Hands meant exactly what he said.

  As time went on, Dahlaine continued to push the southern tribes toward what he called “Nationhood.” Tlantar, despite some serious reservations, met with the chieftains of several nearby tribes to examine the possibility, and his growing reputation helped to persuade them that Dahlaine’s peculiar notion might have a certain value. “If Dahlaine’s right—and he usually is—we have a much more dangerous enemy out there in the Wasteland,” Tlantar advised his fellow chieftains. “In the not too distant future, it’s very likely that hordes of creatures that aren’t anything at all like us will come up into our part of the world with the intent of killing us all. If the tribes remain separate and hostile to each other, our alien enemies will be able to take us one tribe at a time, and we’ll all be gone in a very short period of time. At that point, our little squabbles about who owns that particular herd of bison won’t mean much anymore. We must learn to live together, or we’ll die alone.”

  It was not long after Tlantar had turned thirty-four when Dahlaine came into possession of an infant child he called Ashad. Tlantar had not the faintest idea of where the child had come from, and he was very disturbed when the local god advised him that he’d placed the child in the care of a she-bear called “Broken-Tooth.”

  “As soon as she wakes up, she’ll eat your little boy,” Chief Two-Hands told his friend.

  Dahlaine shook his head. “Oh, no, Tlantar,” he disagreed. “Mama Broken-Tooth will believe that Ashad is her cub, and she’ll destroy any creature that tries to hurt him. You don’t ever want to get between a she-bear and her cub. Ashad will be fed and protected by the most savage creature in the vicinity.”

  “Well, maybe,” Tlantar said dubiously. “Have you been picking up any hints about when the creatures of the Wasteland are likely to attack us?”

  Dahlaine shook his head. “Noting that’s very specific, Chief Tlantar,” he replied. “I’m getting a strong feeling that their attack is still several years away, though. They don’t really know very much about us, but they’ve been sneaking around in the forests of my sister’s Domain trying to find out as much as they can about her people. I’m fairly sure that they’ll attack Zelana first.”

  “Will her people be able to drive them off?”

  “We’re working on that. Keep talking with the other tribes, Tlantar. The time’s not too far off when they must be unified into a single Nation.”

  “They’re starting to come around, Dahlaine,” Tlantar assured his friend. “I’ve been waving a few horror stories in their faces, and joining up with other tribes doesn’t seem quite as unnatural as it did before. When I start talking about thousands and thousands of enemies charging up out of the Wasteland, friendship between the tribes starts to look very nice.”

  “It might look even nicer if you were to say ‘million’ instead of ‘thousand,’ Tlantar.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever heard that word before. How many is a million?”

  “A thousand thousands, Tlantar,” Dahlaine replied.

  “There aren’t that many of anything, Dahlaine!” Tlantar exclaimed.

  “You’re wrong, I’m afraid. There probably isn’t a word that even begins to describe how many of those creatures are really out there in the Wasteland. Keep working on the other tribes, Chief Two-Hands. The time isn’t too far off when we’ll need all the help we can get.”

  Tlantar realized that the more tribes he had loosely joined together in his rudimentary “Nation,” the more anxious the still-independent tribes would become. In theory, at least, Tlantar could bring several thousand warriors to any battle that might arise. Tlantar didn’t make a big issue of that, but he was certain that the other tribal chieftains could count almost as well as he could.

  Dahlaine’s little boy had grown teeth, so he no longer lived on a steady diet of bear’s milk. He still spent much of his time playing with the bear-cub he called Long-Claw, but after a couple of years he found a new friend in the village of Asmie. His human friend was a boy called Tlingar, and the two of them seemed to get along fairly well.

  It was when Ashad was five or six years old that Dahlaine came by in the early spring to advise Tlantar and the other tribal chieftains that the creatures of the Wasteland had invaded his sister Zelana’s Domain. Dahlaine was a bit vague about the outlander armies that had come to Zelana’s Domain to help with the fighting, and he also glossed over a couple of natural disasters that had proved to be quite helpful. “I think you’d better order your assorted soldiers to practice with their spear-throwers, Tlantar. They work very well, but our people will be much safer if they can throw their spears farther.”

  “I’m not sure that ordering them to practice with their spear-throwers will accomplish very much, Dahlaine. They may all say they’ve been hard at it for hours and hours every day, but if I’m not right there watching them, they’ll probably exaggerate the amount of time they really spent practicing.” He gave it some thought. “Maybe a contest of some kind would encourage them to do what we want them to do. There are twenty tribes in this general vicinity, and they’ve been more or less at war with each other for as long as I can remember. If I suggested competition—which tribe can throw their spears farther and more accurately or something like that—it might just be seen by those tribes as a substitute for war, except that nobody gets killed. If I were to tell them that you want to find out who’s the finest spearman in all of Matakan, they’ll start practicing day and night. Eventually, I suppose, somebody will turn out to be the best, but by the time we find out just who he is, they’ll all be better than they are right now.”

  “That’s brilliant, Tlantar!” Dahlaine exclaimed. “Animosity suddenly turns into friendly competition, and we get what we want without shedding any blood.”

  “None of ours anyway,” Tlantar added.

  “I almost never ask Dahlaine why he wants something, Chief Tlartal,” Tlantar told the chief of one of the western tribes. “When he wants something, I just do what I can to make sure that he gets it. Right now, he seems to have a burning desire to find out just who the best spearman in Matakan is. That’s why I came up with this ‘contest’ idea. I don’t know if it really means very much, but if it makes Dahlaine happy, we should go ahead with it, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I don’t suppose you could just ‘accidentally’ forget that my tribe’s part of your ‘Nation,’ could you, Two-Hands?”

  “I’m afraid not, Tlartal. Besides, it just wouldn’t be the same without you. Tell your men to start practicing. It’s early spring now, and Dahlaine would like to find out just who the best spearman in Matakan is sometime in the autumn, so your men have all summer to practice. You might want to make an issue of ‘the best in all Matakan.’ If your men start yearning to be famous, they’ll probably practice even harder.”

  “We’ll see, Tlantar,” Tlartal replied without much enthusiasm.

  As Tlantar Two-Hands had been quite certain would be the case, the younger Matans enthusiastically accepted the challenge he’d placed before them, despite the nearly unanimous skepticism of the tribal chieftains. Being “the best” can be tremendously important to men who had only recently left their childhood behind them, while the notion that some gangly juvenile was far more likely to reach that goal than a middle-aged, flabby chief probably gnawed at the innards of almost every chief in all of sou
th Matakan.

  As Dahlaine had suggested, Tlantar laid a great emphasis on “greater accuracy” and “farther away.” As he’d been sure would be the case, the taller young men of almost every tribe outperformed their shorter friends. Longer arms made longer casts in most cases. The shorter men concentrated on accuracy, and even though they couldn’t cast a spear as far as their taller companions could, they almost universally drove their spears into the exact center of their targets. Longer range and greater accuracy almost never came out of the same hand.

  Tlantar had some other things that he needed to consider. People who hunt with spears almost never carry more than one spear, but he quickly realized that there were many differences between the hunt and a war.

  It was later that spring when Dahlaine briefly returned to North Dhrall to advise Tlantar Two-Hands and other leaders of his Domain that the war in his sister’s Domain was going quite well—largely because of the presence of the outlanders.

  “Just exactly how are those outlanders and your sister’s warriors dealing with the invaders?” Tlantar asked.

  “They’re building things called ‘forts’ for the most part,” Dahlaine replied.

  “What exactly is a fort?”

  “Basically, it’s a wall that’s made out of rocks—a fairly high wall, actually.”

  “And is it likely that they’ll do things the same way when they come here?”

  “I’m sure they will. Why do you ask, Tlantar?”

  “It came to me several weeks ago that Matan hunters usually carry only one spear, and once they throw it, they’re out of business. That had me more than a little worried, but these fort things the outlanders build might solve that problem. If our people make lots and lots of spears, they can carry bundles of them to the fort, and the creatures of the Wasteland will run out of people before we run out of spears.”