“Not that I know about. There’s a young Matan over on the other side of our mountains who wants to talk with you, but he’s afraid of bears, so he won’t come into the mountains.”
“Are the Matans having problems of some sort?”
“I think maybe they are. The young one said a few very ugly things about the Atazaks. Of course everybody dislikes the Atazaks, so there wasn’t anything in what he said that I haven’t heard before.”
The young Matan was named Tlingar, and it was fairly obvious that Dahlaine’s young Dreamer, Ashad, knew him very well. They spoke with each other at some length, but Athlan wasn’t really listening. He looked rather closely at the young Matan’s “spear-thrower” instead. So far as he could tell, it was just a long stick with a slightly hollowed-out cup at one end. He couldn’t exactly see how it worked. He’d frequently heard about the Matan spear-throwers, but this was the first time he’d ever seen one.
“Tlantar thought that you should know that the Atazaks have been raiding across our border, Dahlaine,” Tlingar reported. “They haven’t caused us too much trouble yet, but Tlantar says that they’ve got a huge army, and if they really wanted to, they could send more men than we could handle. What’s the matter with their chief, anyway?”
“He’s crazy, Tlingar,” Dahlaine replied bluntly. “He thinks that he’s a god. He goes out of his palace every morning and orders the sun to rise. Then, when evening comes along, he goes out again and tells her that it’s all right for her to set.”
“That does sound sort of crazy, all right,” Tlingar said. Then he grinned. “You could turn your thunderbolt loose on him, couldn’t you?”
“I’m not allowed to kill people—or things—Tlingar,” Dahlaine replied. “You know that.”
“You wouldn’t really have to kill him, Dahlaine. If your tame thunderbolt started to bounce around on the ground near his feet when he was commanding the sun to rise, he’d probably give up the idea that he’s a god, don’t you think?”
Dahlaine’s answering grin covered the front of his face.
“I think you might get in trouble if you tried that, big brother,” Zelana said.
“I wouldn’t hurt him, little sister. It would frighten him, though, don’t you think?”
“Probably, yes, but if your thunderbolt happened to miss even just a little bit, she’d burn him down to ashes right there on the spot.” She frowned. “I think I’m catching a faint smell of more tampering, aren’t you? First we have bug-people telling Kadlar of the Reindeer Tribe that he’s been insulted, and now we’ve got somebody who should know better thinking that he’s a god. A little squabble between two tribes in the Tonthakan Nation is one thing, but a religious war between the Atazak Nation and the Matans could be disastrous.”
Dahlaine frowned. “I think we’d better move right along, Zelana,” he said. “Let’s get our friends settled down at Mount Shrak. Then I’ll go out and see if I can find out what’s going on around here.”
Athlan was more than a little awed by the sheer size of Mount Shrak. Of course the fact that Dahlaine’s mountain rose up alone out of the plains of Matakan made it appear even larger. He was fairly certain that there were mountains almost as tall in the coastal range of Tonthakan, but the surrounding peaks sort of concealed their size.
“Impressive,” Longbow said, “but it looks just a little bare to me. Not very many trees on its sides. I don’t think the hunting would be very good, do you, Athlan?”
“As I understand it, the Matans don’t hunt deer the way we do. They hunt bison instead. I’ve heard that bison meat tastes very good, and an animal that large would feed a lot of people.” He turned to speak with the young Matan, Tlingar. “I’ve heard tell that the bison here in Matan are herd animals,” he said. “How many of them would you say would it take to make up a herd?”
Tlingar shrugged. “It sort of depends on what part of Matan you’re talking about. The herds around Mount Shrak aren’t usually very large—four, maybe five hundred. Chief Tlantar told me that he saw a herd up in central Matan once that took three days to run past the hill where he’d set up his camp. I can’t come up with a word for that many bison. A thousand is about as far as I can count, and the herd Chief Tlantar saw that time went quite a bit past a thousand, I’d imagine.”
“That would be a lot of meat,” Athlan said.
“They aren’t meat until after you kill them, Athlan, and it usually takes three or four spears to kill one bison. It’s worth the trouble, though. The meat tastes very good, and we make our winter robes out of their hides. A good bison robe will keep a man warm no matter how cold the winter is.”
“We might want to look into that, Athlan,” Longbow said. “There aren’t any trees here to hold back the cold, and we might be here for quite a while.”
Dahlaine led them around the base of Mount Shrak, and they reached the mouth of his cave in the late afternoon of a chilly day.
“I’d say that Dahlaine’s cave’s quite a bit larger than your cave back in the forest, Athlan,” Longbow observed.
“Do you actually live in a cave, Athlan?” Zelana asked.
“It holds off the weather much better than a lodge does,” Athlan replied.
They followed Dahlaine into the large cave, and Athlan saw that the cave was even larger than he’d thought at first. “What are those things hanging down from the ceiling?” he asked Zelana.
“It’s a form of rock,” she explained. “Water seeps down through the mountain, and it picks up small amounts of certain minerals along the way. When it reaches the cave the minerals sort of stick together.”
“Judging from the size of those things, I’d say that small amounts of minerals wouldn’t come very close to what’s getting washed on down here.”
“It’s not the sort of thing that happens overnight, Athlan,” Zelana replied. “It might take as long as a thousand years for just a foot of one of those to develop.”
Athlan swallowed very hard.
“I wouldn’t pursue that much further, Athlan,” Longbow advised. “Zelana has a habit of answering questions, and if you ask her the wrong ones, you might have a lot of trouble with the answers.”