Tower Of The Gods

by Thomas A Easton

  Near the entrance to the Watching Place still stood a crude wooden statue, centuries old, of a male Rac. The top of his head was painted black with soot. Rusty red, blood the congregation had freely offered, marked chest and belly, back and limbs.

  The warrior Skyclaw had already bowed to the Founder. Now he stood beside the statue, clad in armor of bronze strips riveted to leather. He was looking at the bodies that littered the ground between the Watching Place and the Worldtree, wrinkling his nose at the stink already rising from them, and wishing that fewer of them had the tails that marked his own people.

  But that was as it had to be. War meant death, of attackers as well as defenders. He looked at the blood already drying on his bronze sword. He was lucky it had not meant his own.

  He looked toward the fringes of the battlefield, where the local noncombatants, mates and children and parents, were bringing baskets full of food to feed the spirits of the slain for their journey to the Makers. He would not interfere, not with the mourners, nor with his own warriors who would claim the food to fill their own bellies. And if some of that food came his way, he would eat it.

  Yes. The price of victory could have been far worse. He bared his teeth in a grin at the thought that his tail had been shortened by his descent from the tailless Firetouch. But that same line of descent had shortened these tails much more. It had been his cousin who had devised the long-armed stonethrower.

  He climbed the pyramid in front of the Watching Place and glanced at the toppled obelisk. He held up his arms to the Worldtree, and he thought: There was no need for symbols when the real thing stood so plainly in view. There was no need to climb a stump when the Worldtree waited patiently, knowing that it could not be long before it welcomed its worshippers into its high sanctum.

  He nodded, filled with both awe and confidence. His people would not lose the valley now that it was theirs. They would retain control of the Worldtree. And they would be the ones to climb it. The treasure of knowledge its bulbous tip held would then be theirs, and theirs alone.