Читать книгу Crystal Gorge - David Eddings - Страница 11

The meadowlands of the clan of Ekial of Malavi lay near the north coast, and that gave the clan a certain advantage over the clans that lay farther to the south. The cattle-buyers from the Trogite Empire did business in the coastal towns surrounded by extensive cattle-pens and with loading piers jutting out into the sea, and that made things very convenient for the northern clans, since there were no long cattle-drives involved when the time came to sell cows.

The village of the clan was a pleasant place near the southern edge of the clan territory where a sparkling brook came tumbling down out of the hills which lay to the south. The meadows surrounding the village were lush and green, so the cattle had little reason to wander off.

The pavilions in the village were made of leather, of course, and there was a certain advantage to that. The Trogite cattle-buyers in the coastal towns lived in houses made of wood, and once those houses had been built, they stayed where they were. Leather pavilions, however, can be moved without much difficulty if necessary.

It was not uncommon among the Malavi for a proud father to announce that his son had been riding horses since before he learned how to walk. That was probably an exaggeration, but Ekial couldn’t remember a day when he hadn’t spent most of his time on horseback.

There were several other boys of about the same age as Ekial in the village, and, quite naturally, the boys spent much of their time racing. The horses their fathers had given them when they were still quite small had been rather old and tired, so they didn’t run very fast, but the boys still enjoyed those races. Ekial had several friends among the boys of the clan, and those friends were about the same age as he was. Ariga was maybe a year younger than Ekial, and Baltha and Skarn were a bit older, but they all got along well with each other.

Ekial wasn’t quite sure just why it was that the other three boys deferred to him as they played together. He wasn’t the biggest, certainly, and the horse his father had given him wasn’t the fastest, but for some reason, they seemed to expect him to make the important decisions – ‘let’s race,’ ‘let’s give the horses time to catch their breath,’ or ‘isn’t it just about lunchtime?’

As the years moved on, the boys learned many things by listening to the conversations of their elders around the fire after the sun went down. The standard myth in the meadowland of Malavi was that in times long past, horses had been a gift from the god Mala. It was an entertaining story that was often repeated around the fire after supper, but Ekial and his friends were quite sure that there was little truth in the story. An untamed horse could hardly be called ‘a gift’.

Ekial learned that the hard way when he was about twelve years old. Custom demanded that every man should tame his own mount before he could be recognized as a real Malavi. The wild horse his father gave him on his twelfth birthday was ‘spirited,’ a common term among the Malavi that glossed over the true nature of wild horses. Ekial privately believed that ‘vicious,’ ‘savage,’ and ‘evil’ might come closer to the truth.

Of course, the fact that his gift horse broke his right arm the first time he tried to mount the beast might have played some part in his opinion. After his arm healed, Ekial approached his ‘gift’ with a certain caution. He had a fair amount of success with twisting the horse’s ear – very hard – but then the problem of biting came up. Ekial learned never to turn his back on his horse, and he took to carrying a stout strap. After he’d slashed the horse across the nose with the strap a few times, the beast evidently decided that biting his owner wasn’t a very good idea.

In time, Ekial and ‘Beast’ grew to know each other better, and a wary sort of peace was established. Ekial still avoided turning his back on Beast, but otherwise things went rather well.

Ekial even developed a certain pride when it became increasingly obvious that Beast could outrun any other horse in the clan. Races were quite common in the meadowland, and there was usually quite a bit of betting involved. Ekial was hardly more than a boy at that time, and Beast was obviously still about half-wild. The men of the clan spoke rather disparagingly of ‘that little boy and his barely-tamed horse,’ and they feigned a certain reluctance to put any sizeable amount of money on them. They always insisted on what the Malavi called ‘odds’. Two-for-one was fairly common in Malavi horse-races, but the men of Ekial’s clan usually demanded four-for-one, and the men of other clans almost always agreed.

The men of Ekial’s clan won a great deal of money that first summer, but the word that Ekial and Beast could probably outrun their own shadows spread rapidly, and the odds turned around significantly. The men of some tribes even went so far as to demand ten-for-one. But, since Ekial and Beast never lost, the men of the clan still won money.

By the third summer, however, nobody in any other clan would accept any odds at all, and Ekial and Beast retired – undefeated.

Despite the fact that the clans of the meadowland of Malavi found the racing of horses most entertaining, their primary business involved the raising and selling of cattle. It was generally known in that part of the world that the lush meadows of Malavi produced the finest beef to be found anywhere at all. There had been occasional attempts by the Trogites off to the east to incorporate Malavi into their growing empire, but that hadn’t turned out at all well for the men who called themselves ‘civilized’. Since the Trogites had no horses, they couldn’t move as fast as the clansmen of Malavi could, and their occasional incursions into the meadowland had turned into unmitigated disasters.

The most recent incursion by the Trogites had occurred when Ekial and his friends were still boys, and the response of the clans had been brilliant. Rather than fight the invaders, the clans sent word to the Trogite cattle-buyers along the north coast that they would not sell so much as a single cow to anybody until all the soldiers had been removed from the meadowland.

Since all Trogites worshiped gold, the cattle-buyers were able to persuade the Palvanum, the ruling body of the empire, to pull their armies out of the meadowland and keep them out.

After that incident, the Malavi realized that they controlled the cattle-market, and that they did not have to accept the first price for their cows offered by the unscrupulous cattle-buyers. And so it was that the clan-chiefs of the meadowland gathered together each spring to decide what price they would demand when the Trogite cattle-buyers came to the land of the Malavi.

The complacent, superior expressions on the faces of the cattle-buyers faded to be replaced by expressions of horror when the clans all rejected the buyers’ offers and came back with a much higher price. And the flat statement, ‘That’s the price, take it or leave it,’ cut off all the haggling.

Rumor had it that the price of beef in the empire went up significantly that year, and that there were many speeches denouncing the Malavi delivered in the hallowed halls of the Trogite Palvanum.

A few Trogite adventurers saw what they thought to be a glorious opportunity to make huge amounts of money in what had come to be called ‘the beef crisis’. There were cows by the millions in Malavi, and it appeared that nobody was watching them. The cattle trade could be enormously profitable if they weren’t required to pay for the cows they sold. There were a couple of problems, however. The Trogite adventurers overlooked the fact that cows have horns, and that despite what appeared to be the fact, the Malavi – armed with sabres and long, sharp lances – always kept watch over their herds. There were several unpleasant incidents, and the notion of ‘free cows’ was quickly abandoned.

Ekial’s clan elevated one bad-tempered old bull who had gored five Trogite cattle thieves in rapid succession to the status of ‘defender of the herd,’ and they’d fed him much more than was really good for him. He died not long after his elevation – either of old age or overeating.

The clan gave him a very nice funeral, though.

Ekial and the other young men of their clan found the story of ‘one price’ to be very amusing, but they had other, more serious things on their minds just then. The herding of cattle might appear to be quite simple, but the young men of the clan soon discovered that it was extremely complicated. Cows are not the world’s brightest or bravest animals, and it doesn’t take very much to frighten a cow. One frightened cow isn’t much of a problem, but a hundred frightened cows could quickly turn into a disaster. The standard practice involved ‘turning the herd,’ and that was extremely dangerous. Ekial’s boyhood friend Baltha was killed when his horse stumbled and threw him during one of those stampedes.

There were other things involved in the lives of Malavi herdsmen that had very little to do with cows. Disagreements about the ownership of streams and lakes were quite common, and there were frequent disputes about which clan owned a stray cow. Those arguments were quite often settled with sabres or lances.

As Ekial, Ariga, and Skarn matured, the older men of the clan gave them instructions in how to use the sabre. ‘Slash, don’t poke,’ was the cardinal rule when it came to sabres. As one scar-faced old man put it, ‘If your sabre happens to get tangled up in your enemy’s innards, there’s a fair chance that it’ll get jerked right out of your hand as your horse runs past him, and that’s a very good way for you to wind up dead.’

The lance, on the other hand, was made for poking. The Malavi lance was about twenty feet long, and its original purpose had been to turn a running cow. Back in those days, the Malavi lance had been blunt-ended, and it could literally push a cow in a different direction. The addition of a sharp metal point was a recent development that had appeared during the Trogite invasion, and that in turn had led to the extension of the Trogite shield. The world of weapons seemed to be changing all the time.

As the seasons passed, Ekial’s reputation became based more upon his skills as a herder and warrior than upon those early years when he and Beast won every race they entered. The older men of the clan approved of his growing maturity and skills as a herder.

And then, not long before his twenty-eighth birthday, there arose a dispute with a neighboring clan about the other clan’s decision to dam off a small brook. There was no question that the brook originated in the other clan’s territory, but damming off streams of water that flowed into the lands of a neighboring clan had always been considered to be an act of war.

Ekial’s response, however, was somewhat unusual. Instead of mounting a daylight attack on horseback, Ekial, Ariga and Skarn waited until nightfall and then followed the now dry stream-bed into the other clan’s territory on foot.

‘This is so unnatural,’Ekial’s friend Ariga muttered as they quietly clambered over the large dry rocks and through the dense brush.

‘Quit complaining so much, Ariga,’ Skarn said. ‘One of the main rules when you go to war is “always surprise your enemy”. The last thing those water-stealers are likely to expect is just exactly what we’re doing now. We’re not attacking them on horseback in broad daylight. We’re attacking their dam at night on foot.’

‘The moon’s coming up,’ Ekial whispered. ‘We’d better stick to the shadows until we get farther on up this draw. The enemy clan’s probably got patrols out along the border.’

The pale moon rose up over the meadowland, and it seemed to Ekial that she was leaching all color out of the surrounding countryside, and everything looked different now. The bushes along the now-dry streambed were not green as they were supposed to be, but rather were black, and almost threatening. Ekial didn’t like bushes very much. They always seemed to get in the way, and they seemed to irritate horses – probably because they didn’t smell like grass. In the present situation, however, the bushes were quite useful, since they filled the dry stream-bed with shadows, and shadows concealed him and his friends from the dam-builder clan.

The pale moon rose higher and higher in the star-studded night sky, and she was almost directly overhead when Ekial and his friends reached the enemy dam.

‘Maybe we should have started just a bit earlier.’ Skarn whispered. ‘It’s going to take us quite a while to tear that thing down.’

Ekial studied the dam in the bright moonlight. ‘Not quite as long as you might think, Skarn,’ he disagreed. He kicked a fairly substantial boulder in the center of the structure. ‘This is the real dam. The rest of this gravel was piled up around it to keep the water from dribbling on down into the stream-bed.’ He looked at his friends. ‘Do either of you know how to swim?’

Ariga laughed. ‘Where have you been, Ekial? We ride horses, not fish.’

‘If we manage to pry this boulder out of place, that pond behind the dam’s going to start going downhill in a hurry,’ Ekial said. ‘I think we’d better be just a little careful here.’

Ariga shrugged. ‘All we’ll have to do is use longer poles, Ekial, and longer poles will give us more leverage.’ He muffled a sudden laugh.

‘What’s so funny?’ Skarn demanded.

‘The dam-builder clan’s going to go wild when they see what we’ve done,’ Ariga chuckled.

‘They’re the ones who broke the rules,’ Ekial replied. ‘All we’re doing is putting things back to the way they’re supposed to be.’

‘You know that, and I know that, but I don’t think they’ll see it that way. They must have spent weeks building this thing, but it won’t be here tomorrow morning.’

‘You do know that this will probably start a war, don’t you, Ekial?’ Skarn said.

Ekial shrugged. ‘We haven’t had a good war for quite some time, Skarn. The horses are starting to get lazy, and a nice little war should pep them up a bit.’

‘That’s true,’ Skarn agreed, ‘and, since we’re doing this for the benefit of the horses, nobody should really object, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Of course,’ Ekial piously agreed. ‘Looking after the horses is one of our main obligations. Let’s see if we can work that center boulder loose. I’m sure that once we roll that one out of the way the whole dam will collapse, and our little brook will come back to where she belongs.’

It took them the better part of an hour to pry the center boulder loose, and then the pond behind the dam quite suddenly took over. Ekial and his friends got very wet as they scrambled on up out of the stream-bed, and they stood staring in awe at the huge wave that went roaring on down toward their own clan-lands.

‘I hope the cows aren’t bedded down too close to the streambed, ’ Ariga said.

‘This would be a quick way to deliver a herd of cows to the Trogite cattle buyers out on the coast,’ Skarn noted speculatively.

‘I don’t think you’d get a very good price for drowned cows, Skarn,’ Ariga disagreed.

‘I’d say that we’ve pretty much taken care of what we came here to do,’ Ekial told them. ‘Why don’t we go on back home and get some sleep?’

‘What a great idea!’ Ariga said. ‘I think we might just want to step right along. If the dam-builder clan has patrols out, that wall of water running on down the hill will probably get their attention in a hurry. I don’t want to be too obvious here, but there are only three of us, and we are on foot.’

‘Shall we go, then?’ Ekial said.

The neighboring clan mounted their first attack about mid-morning on the following day, but Ekial and his friends beat them back without much difficulty, since they’d more or less expected that response.

All in all, it turned out to be a rather nice little war. The lands of Ekial’s clan lay somewhat to the north of the lands of their enemy, and they were able to block the enemy’s customary route to the north coast where the Trogite cattle-buyers eagerly waited to buy cows. The enemy clan didn’t make very much money that year, but from the point of view of the northern clans, that turned out to be very nice. Since there weren’t as many cows for sale that summer, the price went up.

It was during a skirmish along the southern edge of the clan-lands that Ekial picked up his first sabre-scar. It was a rather nice scar on his left cheek, running from just below his ear down to the point of his chin. He was quite proud of it, and he kept one of the ears of the enemy who’d slashed him across the face as a memento.

The clan-war continued for about two more years, and then the wiser heads in the enemy clan prevailed. Their cattle-herds had continued to expand during the war, but since they no longer had access to the Trogite cattle-buyers, their meadows had been grazed almost down to the roots.

The negotiations continued for quite some time, because the elders of Ekial’s clan imposed some fairly harsh conditions upon their enemy. They were required to deliver five hundred cows for every man of Ekial’s clan who’d been killed during the war, and one hundred cows for every injury.

That produced a great deal of screaming, but not nearly as much as the demand that the border between the two clans should be adjusted so that the source of that brook would now and forever be in the lands of Ekial’s clan. The alternative, ‘back to war, then,’ reduced the screaming to a few whimpers, and the matter was settled right then and there.

Ekial thought that all in all it had been a rather interesting war, but now it was time to move on. Wars are rather nice, but they tend to interfere with more important matters.

As the years plodded on, Beast began to slow down quite noticeably, and Ekial decided that it was probably time for him to train a new mount and put Beast out to pasture.

It took Ekial several weeks to choose his new mount, but he ultimately chose a chestnut stallion with a white patch on his forehead. The owner of the young horse called him ‘Bright-Star,’ probably because of that patch. Bright-Star was not as aggressive as Beast had been, but he ran nearly as fast, and he seemed to have a great deal of endurance. That was very important in the Land of the Malavi. It didn’t take Ekial nearly as long to break Bright-Star in as it had taken him to train Beast, and the two of them got along quite well. Bright-Star was more playful than Beast had been, but he was obviously younger than Beast was when Ekial had begun his training.

There were several other clan-wars in the next few years, and Ekial collected more sabre-scars – and ears – as time moved on. His reputation seemed to grow with each scar – and ear – and by the time he reached his mid-thirties, he was generally believed to be the finest horse-warrior in the Land of the Malavi.

In all probability it had been that reputation that had persuaded a foreigner named Dahlaine to seek him out in one of the north-coast enclaves where the Trogite cattle-buyers had set up shop. Dahlaine was an older man with burly shoulders and an iron-grey beard. ‘I’ve been told that you’re the finest horseman in the entire Land of Malavi,’ he said.

‘That’s probably true,’ Ekial replied, ‘but I don’t get involved in horse-races anymore.’

‘I wasn’t really talking about horse-races, Ekial. There’s a war in the Land of Dhrall, and I need soldiers. Have you been involved in many wars?’

‘Once in a while, yes. Not very many here lately, though. The word seems to have been spread around that it’s not a good idea to get involved in a war where I’ll be a member of the opposing clan.’

‘Are you really all that good?’

‘I’m the best. Of course, my horses probably have something to do with that. Bright-Star isn’t quite as good as Beast was, but he’s still better than any other horse in the Land of Malavi.’

‘Isn’t “Beast” a peculiar sort of name for a pet?’

‘I didn’t really think of Beast as a pet. The first time I tried to ride him, he threw me off and broke my arm. It took me quite a while to persuade him to behave himself. He was the fastest horse in the Land of Malavi, though, so we won every race we ran.’

‘What sort of weapons do the Malavi use?’

‘Sabres and lances. We slash with the sabre and stab with the lance.’

‘You seem to have quite a few scars on your face. That sort of suggests that you’ve lost a few fights, doesn’t it?’

Ekial shook his head. ‘I came out of those fights alive; my enemies didn’t. That’s how we define winning and losing here in Malavi. I don’t really think I’d be very interested in fighting a war in some foreign land, Dahlaine. Wars are fun, I suppose, but we make our money by selling cows to the Trogites – for gold.’

‘I think we’ll get along just fine, Ekial,’ Dahlaine said with a faint smile. ‘You like gold, and I pay with gold.’ He reached under his furry tunic and pulled out a bright yellow block. ‘Pretty, isn’t it?’ he asked with a sly smile as he handed the block to Ekial.

Ekial noticed that his hand was trembling violently as he hefted the block. ‘Why don’t we go someplace quiet and talk about this?’ he suggested.