Author: Loden; Dec 2000
This is actually the first three chaptera of a novel Loden was working on. These are the only chapters publically available.
Loden's Tale - Chapter 1
Loden MacLear became aware he was in a grove of trees. Even though it was still dark, he could hear the first stirrings of the creatures that know better than we the coming of dawn. As was his long habit upon waking, he did not move at all or even change his breathing, but extended his senses around him warily. He could hear the horses nearby and smell the familiar odor of their sweat and the leather of the packs and saddle. On his left he heard a small shift in position as Shanna, his dog, awakened. The spirit bind that linked them strengthened as the dog's senses came fully awake. She too extended her far sharper senses of hearing and smell around them, sampling the gently moving night air close to the ground.
Carefully, he accounted for all the sounds and smells in the small grove of twisted live oaks. Just as importantly, he verified that there were no voids in the quiet rustlings of the small creatures that would have announced danger as surely as the sudden snapping of a twig. He smoothly pushed the dew coated sleeping cover from his body and rose with a fluid motion. A sword appeared in his hand as if it had sprung from his palms rather than being pulled from the hidden sheath beneath cover. The light of the countless stars that seemed to hang just over the trees revealed a lithe warrior who's short beard was mostly gray and whose face was no longer young. Looking at him carefully, an observer could see the confidence in his movements born of command.
As if linked by a physical bond, the large wolf-like dog rose to his left and quickly disappeared into the darkness. The insect sounds came reassuringly from all sides leaving no void in which a wraith warrior could be hiding. Satisfied, the man again sat down. The sword disappeared as silently as it had appeared. He reached into the pack he had been using as a pillow and pulled out a fresh pair of socks. The socks were quickly on his feet and, after a careful shaking in the inverted position, so were a well-worn pair of leather boots.
Rising again with that smooth motion that looked almost unnatural, he rolled up the sleeping mat and cover and moved silently across to the nearest horse. He ran his hand gently along the side of the tall mare and then reached up to her head and scratched around her ears. Still without making a sound, he bent down to the ground and lashed the sleeping roll to the back of a well used military saddle. He hoisted first a blanket and then the saddle across the back of the unresisting horse. With the same economy of motion he quickly greeted and then loaded a second horse with packs tightening the girth with a quick smooth pull.
An observer who knew horses would have been amazed to see the practiced ease of the man and even more so the discipline of the horses that stood so silently as they were loaded in the slowly graying darkness. Within moments from the first sign of visible movement in the grove of trees, the man, the dog, the gear and the horses had disappeared as if they had never been there. As the gray bearded human led the horses up a nearby draw towards the dimming northern star, he thought how foolish many travelers were to have a camp fire in the camp and to begin the morning by relieving themselves then creating even more smell and light by building up the fire and beginning to cook right where they had spent the night. In the long years of war recently behind him he had seen and caused many such camps to be the last their makers had the chance to experience.
After about thirty minutes silent walking, he dropped the lead of the riding horse on the ground. Both horses stopped and stood silent in the darkness. The man carefully circled back to the left and up the side of the ravine. Slowly, carefully, he extended his head around a rock near the crest of a small ridge and watched his campsite as it came into view with the graying eastern sky. To his right he sensed the presence of his canine companion. As the light grew he could see that nothing moved around the grove of trees. Slowly his eyes scanned the surrounding terrain for any sign of movement. The only life he saw was a small herd of deer crossing to the east as they slipped along in the shadows of darkness remaining like puddles of water after a rain. Soon the sun would evaporate the darkness as readily as it did water in the desert. By that time the deer too would have vanished to their daytime hiding places.
He turned his attention to the west, his presumed direction of travel this day and for days to come. To his left was a wide river valley threaded with a meandering dark line of trees that marked the course of the small stream that qualified for a river in this parched country. Scattered here and there were groves of gnarled and twisted oaks like the one in which he had sheltered for the night. Unlike the soft wooded trees along the stream banks, he knew these ancient groves were sacred to the dark skinned tribes who held claim to this harsh country. He understood their awe of the groves that sometimes covered areas hundreds of paces across but were actually only one tree linked together underground. Their huge trunks and broad limbs rarely rose more than four man-heights above the ground, but their size and slow growth gave evidence of a life more ancient than any other in that land. The paths in and out of the groves, where they existed at all, were twisted and maze like, weaving in and out of the huge limbs that often ran along just above or even on the ground.
The Warunga or Wraith People, as his people sometimes called them, considered the groves places of intense spirit activity and power. They believed that each grove, or more properly, tree, was inhabited by an ancient spirit being that spent most of it's time sleeping. Awakening such a spirit was to be done with great care for it could take control of any person that came within the grove and cause him to go forth under its control for good or for evil. They called those spirits Chisos and believed the Chisos had formed this land and lived as the first people here.
In those ancient days, so it was said, the Chisos walked freely in forms not unlike those who walk today. The Chisos were all male and their wives were the sky gods, the Tarcuna whose forms still march across the sky in late summer flashing bolts of lightning and calling to their sleeping husbands with voices of thunder. As they pass over their sleeping forms, the Tarcuna pour out their sweet tears bringing life again to the land. Sometimes in their anger that their husbands will not arise and go with them to dance in the wet country to the east, they lash out with bolts of fire and blast the ancient trees or even the very mountain tops.
Sometimes a Chisos awakens and reaches up to greet his bride in her cloud form. When that happens the Tarcuna will reach down to the earth with a clear, slender arm. When the arm touches the ground it is filled with the Chisos' spirit and he, in turn, draws his ancient body up into the arm, making it his own. The howling and roaring of the Chisos as he rises to meet his bride is the most terrifying of all the sounds of the earth. He takes the strength of the Tarcuna and makes it his own. The dance they make across the land is like nothing else in the world as the Chisos jumps from place to place stripping the land bare wherever his foot touches the ground. Often several Chisos dance together with one Tarcuna. Whenever that happens a great chief of the Chisos is always near and the path of destruction he leaves on the land is evident for many years to follow.
The river valley led upstream to the west and then turned through a ridge to the north before again resuming its westerly path as a line of green in the brown and gray terrain. With the lightening sky to his back, Loden could see no evidence of movement anywhere in the valley or the hills around.
He slipped silently back down into the draw and squatted to remove the skins from the hooves of his horses. Any tracks he would leave all seemed to start from nowhere and end the same way. The horses had already taken advantage of the stop to relieve themselves and continue the never-ending task of processing the sparse grass into strength and droppings for the bugs to eat. Loden followed suit, at least with regard to the emptying of waste product, which he carefully concealed off to one side of the draw. He then opened a pack on the second horse and removed trail cakes made of dried meat and grain. Mounting the saddled horse, he turned its head to the west and continued his long journey.
As he rode in and out of draws well up the north side of the valley hidden from view by the low cedar and thorn trees, his thoughts turned to his home now many weeks behind. Coming home from the great orc war, he found his manor and estate in disarray but his wife, daughters and servants all none the worse for wear. His sons, though, were a different matter. Father and sons had all gone together at the call to arms when the orc army invaded from the great swamp in the far southeast where they had long held sway. For three years, the humans had first retreated then rallied and finally emerged victorious. As the leader of one of the companies that had penetrated the orc lines and set up ambush to their rear, he could believe the rumor that few of the invaders had survived to return to their swamp kingdom.
Just before the tide of war turned, a cache of documents had been captured from the orcs. In it was an ancient tome that described an artifact of great power. The artifact was reported to have the power to transport people and even bands of warriors to other places in the twinkling of an eye. Only a small part of the original document was preserved, but even without the instructions for controlling the item the tremendous potential for either side was immediately recognized. The company of orcs carrying the document had, apparently been on a mission to penetrate the human lines and proceed far to the west where the manuscript indicated one of the magic teleporters was hidden. According to the ancient writings and the map fragment with it, beyond the hill country and the high plains, there was an island of mountains deep in a forbidding desert bounded on its south side by a river flowing out of a great canyon cut through a gigantic cliff and reentering another canyon on the eastern side of the mountains. To the north and east was a great vertical wall of stone thrust from the ground with but one entrance. To the northwest was a volcanic waste indicated on the map as a place of death for those who entered.
Among Loden's people there had long been a legend of an isolated group of mountains to the west full of strange magic and wonders. He had assumed it to be one of the superstitions of the Warunga and had paid it no mind. As he replenished his supplies in the most western human outpost, the town of Junction, he had again heard rumors of those mountains. Junction, where the river he was following upstream met another before continuing east, was the only town in all of humandom where the Warunga and humans mingled willingly. The Warunga wanted the rare steel weapons and tools the humans had and the humans wanted the gold, silver and skins the Warunga seemed to have in abundance. Neither allowed the other to trespass on their territory so a place of trade was a matter of necessity. There too, he had heard that his sons had passed through over a year before. They told no one there their destination, but as soldiers on a secret mission, that was to be expected.After the human wizards had pondered over the captured documents and maps, they convinced the king and his counselors that it was critically important to have the artifact referred to in the document, if only to prevent the orcs from having it. At first the plan was to send a reinforced company west to seize the artifact from its resting place in the Chisos Mountains. Loden, among others, had been called to advise the generals on how to best do this. He, not knowing the effect it would have on him and his family, advised them that the land to the west of Junction would not support a large band of soldiers. Worse, the Warunga would consider it an act of war to send a large force into their territory. In his opinion, having long dealt with them from his holdings on the west border of humandom, the Wraith warriors would take the company out one at a time as they slept and as they traveled. Many times over the long years since humans had first come to the country, groups of adventurers or even warriors had disappeared into the western hills. Only rarely had even one or two survivors returned to tell what had befallen the others.
After he had returned to his ranger company a call went forth through the human army for any who had knowledge of the Warunga or the land to the west of human civilization. Loden and his men had been deep in orc territory and had missed hearing of it until after they returned. By then the call had been cancelled and he was thankful, as he would have felt obliged to answer but questioned the sanity of any such mission. His advice to the generals was that the artifact was probably quite safe as it was in the most holy place of the most fearsome people known, the Warunga. It did not occur to him that the reason the call had been lifted was that it had been filled. More specifically, three young officers had come forth who claimed to know the ways and the language of the Warunga and were eager for adventure and fame. The three were his sons.
The Warunga, as they called themselves, or the Wraith, as the humans called them, never would stand in battle like men or even orcs. Rather they would raid and snipe at their enemies always leading them deeper into the dry and deadly land they called their home. He knew it was a matter of great pride to them that outsiders had never escaped from their land to reveal the location of the secret water places, or even the trails within their homeland.
Living as he had for so many years on the boundary of civilization with nothing to the west of his land but the steep hills and deep canyons of the Warunga Hill Country, he had thought it wise to offer gifts to the local tribe. Shortly after coming to the narrow hidden valley he now called home, he had noticed a group of Warunga outlined on a ridge to the west each evening at exactly the same time. Knowing that the Warunga rarely allowed themselves to be seen by humans, he guessed that he was being tested or that a message of some kind was intended by their obvious presence.
After four evenings of seeing the line of warriors sitting on their ponies as the sun set behind them, he determined that the several previous owners of the narrow but very fertile valley had failed in this test. Each had been effectively run off by the slow, harassing slaughter of their livestock one by one. If that had not been enough, next they would find a dead watch dog on their porch one morning with its throat slit by a stone knife. Failure to get the message at that point resulted in the death of one of their workers. In each case, the worker would have his throat slit while he slept in a bunk house full of other workers and sentries walking guard. Each time that had happened, the owner himself would awaken to find yet another dead dog, but this time the dog would have been killed at the foot of its master's bed.
In the 150 or so years that humans had been trying to farm and raise livestock in this beautiful, fertile valley, not one had stayed after that night. Within a day of abandonment, any buildings or structures the humans had erected would be disassembled and have disappeared as if they had never been there. It was rumored that smoke would rise up from within the hills within a few days as the Warunga burned the timbers and furnishings of the abandoned holding as a sacrifice to the Chisos and the Warunga.
When he heard of the valley and noted that it was for sale by its most recent owner, or victim, depending on your perspective, he had purchased it for a fraction of what he presumed it to be worth. Before he made any attempt to move into the valley, he had carefully questioned all the people in the area who claimed to have any knowledge of the Warunga. He first concluded that every one of the previous owners had made the potentially fatal error of cutting down one or more live oak trees. The Warunga, believing as they do that they are the descendants of the Chisos, saw that as desecration of their ancestors. Secondarily, he concluded that the previous owners had made no attempt to 'redeem' the land from the Warunga with a gift of some kind.
On the fifth day of the Warunga visitation, he purchased a fattened calf from a nearby farm. As the afternoon matured, he led the calf to the flat rock upon which he had seen the warriors the previous nights. He tied the calf to a small live oak growing out of the center of the rock and laid a well shaped steel knife in front of the calf. The knife alone was worth more than he had paid for the land from the previous owner but he figured that it was a simple case of two parties each having claim to the land. As he laid the knife on the rock he had a sudden strong feeling that he was being watched. A chill went down his spine and despite his long experience and many brushes with death he had to force control over his body to keep from shuddering.
One of the reasons he was alive by the end of the war was his nearly magical ability to sense when someone was looking at him. He had long known that he had such a talent for men and animals, but was surprised to find that it was even more acute when the watcher was an orc. The knowledge of presence that he had was a comfort to him and had saved both his and his soldiers' lives on many an occasion when they otherwise would have fallen to ambush or raid. The only way a person could hide his presence from him was to concentrate on not looking at or thinking about Loden.
Since anyone not even thinking about him was normally not a great threat the talent was quite useful. He also knew it was dangerous to rely too heavily on it. One time, while on a raid into the orc army's rear, he had stumbled across a company of orcs just settling down for the night. Because of their exhaustion from a long day of marching and the skill of their leader, they had neither kindled a fire nor were engaging in the normal loud bickering and boisterousness that marked orc encampments. He and his men were among the orcs before either they or the humans were aware of the other's presence. Since the orcs did not know he was there, they were not thinking about him and were as invisible to him as he was to them. On that occasion they had been saved by the relentless drills he had put his men through until they could be aroused from a sound sleep and instantly react to an ambush, each man knowing exactly where the others were, even in complete darkness. The well-trained and coordinated humans responded as one organism, chewing through the orcs like a sharpened saw through rotten wood. Only later did they realize they had been outnumbered more than three to one.
The Warunga were a different story. They alone of all the beings he had encountered were able to come into his presence without notice. On several occasions, upon entering his land or the hills around it, he had backtracked to find that he had been followed without ever having sensed the presence of his followers. There were two opinions among the few rangers who had experienced their unsensed presence and lived to speak of it. One was that the Wraith had some power to blind the inner eye of humans. Others believed they could mask their presence somehow by some inner discipline or talent. Loden's conclusion was in agreement with the second group. In either case though, the Warunga had made themselves known to him here and now.
The question that raced through his mind was, 'Why now?' He had heard tales of the Wraith allowing their presence to be known only after they were in the midst of a camp in order to panic the ones they wished to destroy. The fact that he could sense their presence only a few paces from him so clearly confirmed the rumor that they had complete control over the sense and that bothered him too. Few humans had such a sense as did he and the fact that the Warunga could and had announced their presence in such a manner could be a very strong indication they knew of his talent.
Once again the long, difficult ranger training he had received so many years ago came to the fore. It is not uncommon for a ranger to encounter an unexpected situation when ranging ahead or to the flanks of an army. In every unexpected situation there were nearly endless possibilities. Trying to sort through such a tangle was confusing at best and paralyzing at worst. Deep within the ancient wooded hills of the Ranger Forest he had learned to focus on that which is known and leave the speculation of what might be to a later time. He activated that discipline now, clearing his mind of thought and allowing his training to take over.
Rising from where he had deposited the knife he turned toward the thick oaken underbrush to the west where he sensed the presence of the Warunga. He first bowed in the direction of the setting sun then drew his sword, placing the guard against his forehead with the blade pointed upward. He then swung the blade down and to the right, opening his chest to those in front of him in the formal military salute of an officer to his superiors. He held the position for what seemed like an eternity while he waited to see if an arrow would suddenly appear protruding from his exposed torso.
Just as he was beginning to be convinced that exposing the top of his head and then his chest to the hidden warriors was probably a foolish impulse, five dark warriors seemed to appear from nowhere to stand in the shade just in front of the tree line now silhouetted by the lowering sun. With the sun at their backs above them it was difficult to see any great detail about them but he was sure he saw no movement before they became visible. For the first time he truly appreciated how they had earned the name 'Wraith' from the humans along the frontier.
By instinct, luck or perhaps telepathy, he had done the only thing that would have made them expose themselves and later acknowledge him as a fellow being worthy of life. That moment was the beginning of a relationship that was as far as he or the Warunga knew was unique in the history of their peoples. He had chosen the right moment to expose himself and offer his sword, not to the Warunga as he thought, but to the sun. It was only later after learning their tongue that he discovered they worshiped the sun as the great high god. He also learned why they so greatly desired steel weapons.
With the Warunga as with all the races, steel or even iron was greatly prized and extremely valuable. Among the humans the rare find of a meteorite, or the even more rare vein of iron, provided them with the raw material for a steel implement that would not chip and would hold its edge longer than other materials. Knowing that iron was born either from the fiery descent of a meteor or in the fire pit of a volcano and gained its great strength from only the hottest of fires, the Warunga had concluded it was far more than the raw material for making tools. It was to them a gift of the great fire god, which men called the sun and the Warunga called Chi. When he made the snap decision to offer a formal military salute to the wood line where he knew the warriors were waiting, he had faced the sun on the day of equinox within the hour of its setting and unknowingly offered his steel to the service of Chi. The question he could not answered was from where or whom the desire had come.
At least one of the warriors he later discovered had desired him to do exactly what he did. Just as they had communicated their presence to him by an act of their will, he guessed that he could have received the impression of what he should do. The combination of the impression along with the ranger mind-clearing discipline could have allowed him to respond to the thought and desire communicated to him by the warrior. He knew that on more than one occasion he and his company of rangers had responded to attacks without sound passing between them and each known exactly what to do to support the others as if they all were an extension of one being rather than the individuals they had been before becoming a unit. If that same talent had somehow been activated, it would account for his odd reaction to the Warunga.
The Warunga had a rather different opinion of what had happened on that rock. They had shown themselves for four days and had returned for the fifth, the holy number of The People, the translation of the word Warunga into human language. It was their custom to show themselves to any who trespassed upon the land they considered under their stewardship five times. If by the end of the fifth showing the intruder showed no recognition sign that he or they were indeed People, then they were to be considered demons and either expelled or killed. If intruders damaged any of the sacred oaks then there was no need for showing but only exorcism or death remained as possible solutions.
The high priest of the local Warunga had prophesied that the five days for this one should end on Chithane, the day when the Chi, the sun, began to spend more time under the ground than above it. According to their legends, that was the day the tide of darkness begins to win the eternal war and the warriors of the Warunga prove their courage and loyalty by dedicating themselves to Chi to hold off the darkness with fire, steel and flint on the surface so that Chi could be victorious over the darkness under the earth and return again to rule the heavens. The priest had prophesied that on the day of Chithane, blood would be shed and steel would be dedicated to the service of Chi and his sons, the Chisos.
Loden often wondered later just how unhappy the priest had been when told of he miraculous conversion of the human to be recognized by the Warunga as one of the People. His prior prophecies had indeed come true as the blood of humans in the small valley was shed and steel tools and weapons had been captured. In his experience, when priests called for bloodshed, a single calf was not what they had in mind. On this Chithane, the blood shed was that of the fattened calf and the steel dedicated was that of Loden's sword and the knife he had laid at the head of the calf.
Although Loden had, at that time, long despaired of finding any truth or practicality in religion, the thought now often crossed his mind that he knew of no other source from where the inspiration might have come to bring a calf and a knife to that rock on that day. Nor was he sure from where the impulse came that caused him to turn his back on the warriors, pick up the knife from the rock and use it to slit the throat of the calf, causing a geyser of blood to pour out on the rock and drain into the hole from which grew the single oak in the middle of the rock. Once again he had done not only the right thing but the exceptional thing. He had watered a sacred oak with blood, an obligation of a warrior of the Warunga to seal the covenant of steel. With no knowledge of the ways of the Warunga and precious little even of their language, he had managed to perform the sacred rites on exactly the right day and even in front of the right Warunga to become the only human admitted to the Band of Steel, the secret society of the most elite Warunga warriors.
2000, Jeffrey W. McClure. All rights reserved.
Chapter 2
As he continued to ride along the north side of the valley with the sun still to his back, Loden looked down at the band of steel that incased his left arm from the wrist nearly to the elbow. Were it not for the stark reality of that strange unrusting metal that had become as much a part of him as the very arm it covered, there were times when he would have not been able to believe the weeks that followed the meeting on the rock were anything but a dream.
Three times during the great orc war, the band on his left arm had saved him from death, or at least serious, disfiguring injury. Each time he had been at least as surprised as the orc who thought he was delivering a killing blow to the ranger captain. When he instinctively threw his arm up at becoming aware of an axe or sword swinging toward his exposed neck or head, he should have seen his arm severed, or at least knocked aside by the tremendous energy of the swinging blade. Each time, though, the strange metal from which the band was made seemed to absorb the entire energy of the swing, and then reflect it back down the blade to the hand of his assailant. Each of the three times he had seen almost certain death recoil upon his opponent, as the hilt seemed to jump from the orc's hand leaving the hand itself unusable. In each case Loden, reacting from training rather than thought, returned a blow to his enemy that ended the orc's life before the rather interesting academic question of whether the apparent lifelessness of his opponent's hand was temporary or permanent could be answered. Only after the battle had ended and he had time to reflect, did he realize the force of the blow would have been sufficient to break his arm even with a metal guard.
The first time it had happened, the orc must have weighed ten times as much as he, and that bulk included arms nearly as large as Loden's torso! The monster of an orc had swung a two handed axe larger than any he had seen before or since. A rather ordinary orc (if you can bring yourself to believe that a hulking, hairy, slobbering beast whose normal mass was twice that of the typical barbarian, and sported five inch fangs extending over his lower jaw, qualifies for the word normal) had attacked Loden from the right. He turned and engaged the brute and was quickly assisted by another ranger who was able to impale the orc in the vulnerable spot just under the arm where the armor did not quite cover.
As the orc began to sag with that puzzled look on his face that seemed to be fairly normal as bullies, orc or otherwise, found themselves defeated by what they considered to be inferior beings, Loden became intensely aware of a distinctly unfriendly presence on his left. He spun to face the threat and immediately noted that a very large something was where nothing had been a few moments before. The next thing that struck him was that the very large thing now to his front had both arms extended upwards so far as to be outside of his range of sight. He rapidly concluded that a very large, very hostile, being with his arms extended upward, but rotating them downward was, in all likelihood, not a good sign. In the split second or so he had to react, he was intensely aware that his sword was hung up in some part of the smaller orc's equipment or limbs and all he could throw between his body and the gigantic, double edged axe blade being propelled toward the point where his neck and shoulder met, was his left forearm! Had he time at that moment to consider the probable outcome, he would have rightly concluded that he was effectively dead.
He couldn't actually say he saw the axe hit the metal band covering his forearm because it was moving so fast it had become a dark blur. He did know that his mind had formed the question, 'I wonder how it will feel be to cut in half?' followed by, 'This should answer my questions about what, if anything, follows life.' but when the axe made contact with the metal he felt' nothing'
He held his arm in place, slightly in front and above his head and stared at it in disbelief. His first thought was that he must have died so quickly he didn't notice it and now had his spirit body while his physical body was sliced in two pieces on the ground. He tore his eyes away from his arm and looked down the front of his armor expecting to see either his chest ripped into two pieces or some sort of perfection from the spirit world. His disbelief multiplied as he was clearly in one piece and still wearing the bloody, stinking, dirty raiment he had been longing to scratch under for the past several hours.
He continued staring down the front of his chest for a moment and it suddenly occurred to him that even if he was unharmed, there was probably still a seriously massive and undoubtedly very angry orc standing in front of him, who recently had been reported to be in possession of a deadly weapon of immense proportions. His head snapped up and focused on the orc-mountain, which, sure enough, was still standing right where he was last seen. Possibly because of the greater distance nerve impulses had to travel to reach whatever orcs use for brains, the extra-large-would-be-ranger-captain-killer standing in front of him, was still in the staring-at-body-parts mode, as he attempted to account for what had, or more accurately, had not, happened. In his case, it was his hands at which he was staring.
In one of those odd events of hand-to-hand combat that those who have never been there cannot appreciate, both the monster-orc and Loden were frozen in place staring at the orc's hands. Two things registered immediately to Loden. First, they were empty! It was as if the small tree sized axe handle had simply vanished. Second, they were apparently frozen with the fingers spread out and back as far as they would go.
Perhaps because Loden partially considered himself already dead, a stray, objective, thought flipped through his mind, 'Whoa! I bet that hurts a bunch!' The feeling came to mind of the time he had swung an axe at a tree in his youth only to have it glance off the wood and make a square impact on very solid rock. The stinging numbness had shot all the way up his arms and down his spine and left him unable to grasp anything for several minutes afterward.
Of course, the orc's axe had not simply vanished but had flown backwards over the orc's shoulder and, as such things happen, it was determined afterward that it did split a warrior pretty much in two. Unfortunately for the orcs, the splitee was determined to be the orc captain rather than the ranger captain. Said orc captain had apparently considered a position several steps behind his behemoth-in-residence the most advantageous for leading the battle, in retrospect, a clearly incorrect tactical decision.
After what seemed like an eternity, but probably was about five seconds, it occurred to Loden that although the orc was now unarmed, and in possession of what appeared to be either very painful or numbed hands, staring at said hands was unlikely to resolve the personal difference of opinion that had arisen between them. It was quite clear to Loden, that the unfulfilled purpose-in-life of the rather substantial mass to his front, was to create ranger-mulch from rangers, captain or otherwise. This presented the intellectual challenge of exactly how does one take down an armored being so enormous, that a full sized man was at that moment staring it directly in the stomach?
Given the rather significant size of said stomach as it protruded from under the chest-plate, Loden surmised that, like many who preferred eating to armor, the orc had no armor over his stomach parts. He glanced up toward the top of the mass and noted that the familiar puzzled look was still wrinkling the incredibly ugly brow as it continued to stare at the place where quite recently an axe handle had been in residence.
Satisfied that the mountain would not be coming to him, for a few more moments at least, Loden backed up about five paces, and in doing so managed to extricate his two handed sword from whatever unseen tangle had been holding it. He leveled the sword directly in front of him with the blade edges horizontal and the tip pointed slightly upward, locked his arms, and ran at the orc with all the strength in his being. Sure enough, the blade slid under the monster-sized breastplate as Loden forced his body upward, driving the sword into the chest cavity above his head.
As the hilt of Loden's sword encountered the bottom of the orc's breastplate, it came to a stop. With four feet of steel extended upwards to the vicinity of where the orc heart ought to be, presuming he had one, Loden felt rather satisfied that he had chosen the correct approach to this problem. Then it occurred to him that the sword he was grasping so firmly was still above his head! According to all he knew about sword wounds and similar subjects, the insertion of four feet of steel into even the largest orc's chest should have resulted in some movement. Although in the rush of the moment he had not considered exactly what result he expected from his charge, and the resulting penetration of the giant's defenses, he was sure complete non-movement was not included in the desired results.
Faced with this new and intellectually challenging problem, Loden exercised his sharp wit and intellect by rotating his head to look up at the still rather distant face directly above his. The first point of new information his eyes reported was that the rather unintelligent eyes were no longer focused on the orc's hands. Rather, the still puzzled brow now surmounted a set of rather displeased and pig-like orbits that were staring directly at him! Then he realized that the probable reason its hands were no longer the focus of attention was that they were now behind Loden. That would explain that the sudden tightening in his chest was not from fear, although that was beginning to reassert itself now that he was gradually becoming convinced he was not dead, but from the fact that the orc was embracing him with a hug not exactly intended to convey affection.
Fortunately, as with everything else that had happened in the past few seconds, things had gone significantly more right than wrong for Loden. As he followed his sword into single combat, the orc's hands and arms had been extended downward. When the orc began to close them around Loden they were also coming up, and in doing so were pulling Loden up over the rounded top of the previously mentioned stomach bulge. Loden kept his arms extended and locked as the orc squeezed him upwards and watched in amazement as the hilt of his sword was forced under the breastplate. His hands, then his wrists, and finally his metal covered forearms followed his sword into the chest cavity. About halfway up the forearms, the orc-mountain gave a great shudder, rattling Loden's now well off the ground bones, and began to weave first forward, then backwards.
Just as the weave switched again from backwards to forwards, a veritable waterfall of blood came gushing from the cavity now being held open by Loden's arms. As he wrenched his head to the side to avoid the flood poring over him, another odd, objective thought crossed his mind, "It would certainly be noteworthy to be the only ranger ever to have drowned in orc blood."
That thought was quickly banished by the realization that if this particular orc continued to fall forward, drowning would not be the issue, nor would he need to be buried as he would already be flattened under a small mountain of orc. With all his will he commanded the orc to fall backward! Noting that even non-mountainous orcs were not too responsive to his will, he began to pray fervently for backwardness to assert itself on just this one orc.
As if in response to his prayer or perhaps his willed command, the orc seemed to regain his strength for a moment and attempted to stand up. Of course, that meant his not-insubstantial mass was propelled backwards to correct his recent forward leanings. Just as he should have been arresting his rearward momentum to arrive at the upright position, the orc shuddered one more time and sagged, finally, to the rear!
As his forearms were now locked rather solidly under the breastplate and ribcage of the giant, Loden had no choice but to go along for the ride. First slowly, and then with increasing speed, he felt himself going both forward and down. The orc hit the ground with a tremendous 'thud.' Although he had ended the ride on top of the giant, the weight of the orcish arms still above him were enough to knock the small amount of remaining breath out of Loden's lungs.
A strange silence seemed to settle over everything. Loden attempted to open his eyes, but could see nothing but a dull red glow. He tried to move, but the great weight of the orc's arms over his back, combined with the fact that his forearms were still trapped by the breastplate, prevented him from moving anything but his legs. He strained to breathe and found he could, but just barely, and with great difficulty and pain. Once again he called upon his reportedly superior intellect and quickly concluded he was dead meat if he did not somehow find a way to correct the current situation. All he had to do was make a dead orc giant release him while simultaneously find a way of extracting his arms from said orc's chest cavity. His intellect also noted that it was statistically impossible for a sufficient number of those things to happen in the few minutes until he suffocated, so he was once again effectively dead.
Noting that his intellect had incorrectly pronounced him dead several times in the last few minutes, he decided that it had been rendered unreliable by current events and should be ignored. Loden switched to plan B, commonly entitled: 'When in Doubt and Imminent Danger of Death, Kicking and Screaming Probably Won't Hurt Anything and Just Might Help.'
The Kicking and Screaming plan was immediately initiated over the feeble objections of his intellect. He began to kick his legs with all the energy he could muster while using the limited air he had been able to draw into his lungs to attempt a yell for help. He was disappointed to note that the attempted bellow sounded much more like a protest from a drowning mouse than the commanding cry for assistance he had intended.
Suddenly, the weight on his back lifted and he felt his legs being pulled by great strength. His arms threatened to completely abandon the operation and remain in the orc's chest but finally agreed, after signaling their displeasure, to come along with the rest of the body. Surprisingly enough, they were good enough to drag along the hands, which were still firmly grasping his longsword.
Numerous unseen hands raised him to his feet and he felt his face wiped sufficiently clear of blood to enable him to see and breath again. His first action was to draw in a deep breath of wonderful air! That action, although greatly appreciated by the rest of his body, brought extreme protests of pain from his thoroughly bruised ribs.
Opening his eyes, he found himself surrounded by several rather shocked looking rangers who were staring at him as if he were a monster himself. He looked down at his aching chest and promptly realized the cause of their expressions. He was absolutely and completely bright red with orc blood draining from under his armor and down his arms. His clothes and armor were ripped and awry with blood streaming out of every tear and gouge. He looked back up at the pale and shocked expressions on the ranger's faces.
The thought ran through his mind, "Sure, this was a heck of a lot of orc blood, but it was just more of what all of us have seen before." Then it occurred to him that they thought it was his blood that was draining out on the ground!
Loden threw his head back, drew in another lungful of air, and laughed a deep and heartfelt laugh. Painful as it was for his bruised ribs, that laugh was the best laugh he believed he had ever experienced. Within seconds, they were all laughing and cheering at the victory.
Those who had witnessed the battle between Loden and the giant orc later told him it had all occurred in but a couple of minutes. To Loden it seemed to have taken hours or even days. They told him too, that when the giant's axe split the orc captain in two, the rest of the orcs had panicked. Few had escaped as the rangers put their bows to good use bringing down the fleeing monsters. The rest of the company had pursued the stragglers, but those directly around Loden had turned at his bellow, 'For MacLear!' as, seemingly being pulled forward by his sword, he charged the giant as if he were on the jousting field. They had then watched, frozen in place as his sword and then arms had disappeared into the orc's body even as the orc had seemed to be assisting Loden in its own demise.
The rangers extracted the giant's axe from the body of the orc captain and offered it to Loden as a trophy. He had considered keeping until he attempted to pick it up. He could lift it'just barely, but not on the first try! It would have taken a packhorse to carry the gigantic weapon, not something ranger companies had in great numbers. Instead they buried it and later made a gift of the axe to the king.
The Warunga priest had promised him that the magic that bound the band to his arm would do more than keep the metal from rusting and his arm from chafing, much more, but refused to say just what that was. Actually, during the first week he was among the Warunga, and for many weeks to follow, he didn't have a clue what was being said, other than what they chose to explain by much pointing and gesturing. He did recognize that a great gathering of senior Warunga was convened in the camp to which they took him about a week after he arrived. He figured it took that long for the call to go out to wherever they had come from and for the senior Warunga to journey to the camp. Later he understood that many of them had come from such a distance that the call must have been transmitted instantly, and the ensuing week was even far too short for any human to have traveled the distance some of them had come.
During that time he waited, first unknowingly, for the arrival of the elders and senior priests of the tribe, and then while they deliberated and examined him again and again. During that entire period, four of the five warriors who had appeared in front of him stayed with him almost constantly. Occasionally one of them would disappear for a short period of time, but it was clear that they considered remaining in his presence the most important thing in their life for those days. He was well fed and allowed to wander almost anywhere in the village. The notable exceptions were the grove of oaks in the center of the encampment where the elders were meeting and anywhere more than about a bow shot from the camp. Even when he would try to go further they were never violent about restraining him. They almost seemed afraid of him as they showed great agitation when he would near the invisible boundary of his captivity. Even with almost no knowledge of their language he could tell they were pleading with him not to go further. As much as he wanted to return to his wife to tell her he was all right, he recognized the danger of offending his 'hosts.' As the days went by he became more and more convinced they would not attack him if he left but that they would consider it a serious breach of trust and honor.
At the beginning of his forth week among The People, as he later knew they called themselves, he was awakened and taken to a deep pool of water near the camp. There his companions, as he now called them, stripped him of his weapons and clothes and scrubbed him thoroughly from head to foot. As he emerged from the water, they dressed him in a Warunga loincloth and produced a bowl of some blue substance. They carefully applied the blue pigment to his face, his arms and his upper torso in strange swirling patterns that appeared to his rather incomplete observation to be a series of mazes or labyrinths. After they had finished and the four of them stood around him studying and commenting on their art work for a few minutes, the fifth member of the original party appeared.
He too was painted in complex patterns although several colors made the labyrinths on his body appear to be almost three-dimensional. As he moved, the shifting patterns seemed to blur and move around creating a strange sense of seeing through him, but not to what was on the other side of his body. The sense was that he had become a window to another place or time and looking at him made Loden dizzy. The newly arrived Warunga, clearly the leader of this band, carefully examined the blue patterns on Loden's body and seemed to find them acceptable. He uttered a sharp word Loden immediately recognized as a command, turned and began to walk slowly back to the camp. A wave of disorientation swept over Loden and he had to struggle not to stagger. The others lined up on both sides of Loden, forming a box with him in the middle. It took little effort for them to communicate to him that he was expected to remain in that position as they walked.
Normally, if such a term could be applied at all to what was happening around him then, he would have had to force himself not to stare at the strangely painted creature ahead of him. Averting his eyes was not a bit of trouble on that day, as looking at the leader as he walked would have quickly rendered Loden unable to walk himself. Even looking away, the patterns seemed to loom larger than the Warunga's body and to pull him into a depth so that he felt as if he were looking down from the top of a high cliff. Finally, he found that by staring at the ground between him and the leader, he could keep his wits about him.
It was then he noticed the silence. He looked around as they walked between the skin and wood structures that in all the days past had been surrounded by men, women, children and dogs in a mad chaos of life. It was as if every living being in the community had disappeared from the earth. Even the sounds of the birds were absent. For the first time since meeting the Warunga warriors on the rock, he felt fear. The dizziness he had felt when he first looked at the back of their leader gave way to a sense of 'otherness' unlike anything he had felt before.
He glanced at the four warriors walking beside him and found that somehow they too had become painted with strange shifting patterns. Unlike his or the leader's bodies, their patterns were composed of two colors, blue and green. Even the two colors seemed to shift and flow, making their forms appear unsubstantial as if they were both there and not there at the same time. He looked down at his own body and was shocked to find that he too was covered with shifting variations of blue that seemed to almost allow him to look through himself into a deep blue sky or body of water. He almost fell as the disorientation swept over him and would have collapsed to the ground if his companions had not reached out to steady him. After that he made a point of not even glancing at his own form until long after what followed.
As they continued through the village, he had a sense that the people, the dogs and the birds were still there, but he simply could not see or hear them. For the first time he understood the ability of the Warunga to penetrate even into the interior of a guarded building and escape without detection. Sure, he could not see any living thing, but he would be willing to bet no living thing, other than those who were under the same spell as he, could see him either. He guessed that the blue lines made him both invisible to and unable to see those who did not have any of the colors at all, while the green lines allowed the warriors to see others while not being seen themselves. That would explain why he was carefully kept in the middle of the four companions, so he would not accidentally collide with one of the people in the village. He could not help but think this ability to become invisible was a very valuable thing. His respect for the Warunga moved up several notches as he realized they could have slaughtered anyone they desired any time they wanted among the humans.
Soon they were past the last of the hide-covered huts in which the Warunga seemed to spend very little time except for the very young or very old. The forest grew thicker here and then suddenly ceased as they began to climb a slight hill. At the crest of the hill, surrounded by a circle of short grass and rock about a bow's shot across, was a magnificent grove of huge live oaks. The trunks of even the outer trees were as thick as a man is tall. They entered into the green semi-darkness of the grove at a point where the grass had been worn down to a dirt trail and began to wind about between the huge limbs and branches of the trees. As they penetrated, the trees became bigger and bigger and the limbs began to be higher and higher until, at the center of the grove, they walked into what almost appeared to be a cathedral, with one huge tree in the center, whose gigantic branches started about five man-heights above the ground They reached over to join the branches of the inner circle of oaks in an almost perfectly symmetrical ceiling.
On the far side of the circle were about a hundred Warunga, seated with their backs to the inner circle of trees and all facing the base of the trunk at the center. At least, he presumed they were Warunga. Like the leader of his small group and his companions, it was nearly impossible to focus on any one of them. Some were shifting patterns of blue and green, like the warriors who walked beside him. They tended to be towards the back of the group. Others were far more colorful, with the intensity and variety of the colors increasing with nearness to the central tree. On the side of the tree facing the seated observers, the trunk was slightly concave and the surface of the ground seemed to have been raised by the roots of the mighty tree. Two of the tree's gigantic roots fanned out to either side of the raised ground, creating something very much like a stage.
He did not need his sense to know that every being seated in the clearing, which he began to think of as a temple, was focused on him intently. His sense did tell him that there were watchers other than the ones he could see. Suddenly, he became aware that someone or something else was focused on him. The feeling was so intense that for a few moments he was almost blinded by the intensity of the feeling. At first it was very confusing because the sense indicated that he was surrounded by unseen beings observing him and that the one with the overwhelming presence was also seeing him from several directions. Then, he realized what he was sensing. The huge tree itself was aware of and quite interested in his presence. Each of the other trees echoed that same interest, but with less intensity. The confusing thing was that each of those beings was really only one being, something he had never encountered before.
They led him to the platform and up into the concavity of the trunk. The four companions walked away, two to each side until they were no longer between Loden and the assembly. The Leader, as he had come to call the obviously senior member of the group he had met on the rock, stood alone before him. It was then that he realized the Leader's colors were a match or better than any other being in the grove.
The leader turned his back to the beings seated on the ground and faced the tree and Loden. He began to sing, at least that is the best way to describe what he was doing for anyone who has not witnessed it. His singing was more than voice as the colors that permeated his being moved with the sound, shifting across the spectrum and growing with each note until Loden could no longer see the assembly for the Leader's enlarging and brightening aura. Then he sensed the tree behind him beginning to respond to the singing and he was engulfed in something he referred to from that day as Treesong. Within moments he lost all sense of being in the physical world and was being pushed and pulled through a universe unlike any he had every imagined or heard of from any wizard or priest. He knew the presence of the Chisos, the great chief that dwelt in that grove of trees. He felt the longing to be free and dance across the sky with the Tarcuna as well as the great peace that comes from having roots that run under the earth from tree to tree. He felt the sweetness of the rain-tears from the Tarcuna and the energy from the sun. For him from that day, time changed, for to the Chisos, a hundred turnings of the year is a short season and the coming of man and even the Warunga is something that just happened in the last couple of days.
Loden became aware that the song had changed and the whole assembly seemed to be joining in. Then he heard a new voice that was very different from the others. It was deeper and had a different quality. At first it did not seem to fit at all, but then all the others began to change and take on some of the qualities of the voice. The he felt the voice itself change and it too began to take on some of the hues of the other voices. It was only then he realized, the voice was his. After what felt like a very long time but in another way only a moment, the voices became one voice then began to slowly die away. Loden became aware that he was again standing on the platform at the base of the tree trunk in the grove. The colors of the Warunga in front of him were shrinking and dulling back to what they had been before the song began.
The Leader was standing to his left front and had encased Loden's left forearm in what appeared to be tree bark. Loden found that his mind was in an almost dreamlike state and as a result, the idea of having part of his body covered with tree bark was quite acceptable. At that moment he was willing to accept just about anything. He felt a harmony within him that made his prior existence seem like a crude drawing when compared with the multidimensional reality he had just experienced. It was then that Treetender spoke to him.
His clear and authoritative voice sounded much like the song he had just sung to Loden's ears. The one Loden had thought of as Leader said/sung, 'I am Treetender and I welcome you to the People and to the brotherhood of the Chisos.' It took Loden a moment to realize that Treetender was speaking in the language he previously had not understood. Now it seemed so simple and harmonious that his native language was made to sound crude and harsh.
Treetender continued, 'You are Treefeeder-Who-Brings-Steel and you are the first of your kind to join our brotherhood.'
Loden answered, 'Do you mean I am the first of the'' At this point he hesitated and struggled between the word he had called his people from childhood and the word that came to mind. He chose the Warunga word and continued. ''blind-tree-killers to be admitted to your brotherhood?'
'No, although that is true.' Treetender answered. 'You are the first to answer the call to feed the tree who may also wield the sharpened steel blade. Among The People from the beginning, the priesthood has been called to tend and feed the Chisos within the trees but the Chisos have never called one who carries steel weapons dedicated to the Chi before. There are two brotherhoods that are here assembled together for the first time, the brotherhood of steel who are dedicated to Chi, the god of creation and war, and the brotherhood of the Chisos, who are dedicated to life and harmony. Each is part of The People as both life and death are part of existence. You are the first to be called to both.'
'We have spoken and sung much over the past days and weeks both among ourselves and with the Chisos who dwells here. He, in turn has sung with the tree that grows from the rock near where you dwell and called you to feed it. That tree is but a small branch of the great grove that stands nearby. As with many of the Chisos, he does not allow us to penetrate his grove, but allows us to feed the small tree where we met you. We had arrived that day to give you one more chance to present yourself before us for judgment and then, had you failed, to feed the Chisos with blood from one of your animals before banishing you from The Land.'
'His brother, the Chisos that dwells in the valley where others of your tribe have come, has been injured by them and is only now healing from the last Tree-Killer who dwelt there. The Chisos of the valley spoke to your heart and you heard him. The rock Chisos, where we met you, doubted your heart but spoke to see if you would hear and respond. Never before has the Chisos chosen to call one who had dedicated his steel to Chi. The Chisos have long spoken of the joining of the two brotherhoods, but neither they or we expected it to be one of your tribe who would be the first to dwell in both lodges.'
'The Brotherhood of the Tree, as we who serve the Chisos are called, has chosen to grant you the gift of language and life. You are now alive with us and you sing our song. The Brotherhood of the Rock, as are called those who have dedicated their steel to Chi, has given you the steel rock for your arms. Under this tree bark, the strength of the earth is being bound to your body. Within one moon the bark will fall away and the steel stone will be part of you as you are part of us.'
'I am the leader of the Brotherhood of the Tree in this part of The Land. The Brotherhood of the Rock, who has no permanent leader but choose their leader for each battle, is represented by the Four who have stood both with you and witness to your worthiness. Had you abandoned us to return to your people during the time of testing, they would have been put to death by their brothers.'
'Know too, that the Tree commands the Rock, for the Rock exits to support and nourish the Tree. Your role in The People is unknown to any of us. Chi and the Chisos must be the ones to determine your path and we are but their servants.'
While he lived with the Warunga, he learned the Chisos had not always been spirits that slept within the great oak groves. In a distant past, when great creatures, more terrible and wonderful than any man had ever, seen roamed the earth, the Chisos were the rulers of all that was beneath the sky, and according to the legend, much that lay beyond it. Treetender had taken him far to the west to the stones that told the tale of the ancient ones. He had sat with Loden for long hours as they first sang to the stones and then, to Loden's amazement the stones began to sing back in the same language he had first heard from the tree. The stones sang that the Chisos had walked the earth for far more years than Loden could understand. They sang of a people that had much knowledge and much power. They had learned the secrets of life and death and had used them to extend their lives indefinitely. They had learned the secrets of the very rocks and could somehow extract things from the stones themselves that could convey images from one place to another in an instant. At first Loden had trouble believing it, but the ancient ones seemed to have iron in abundance that they dug from great pits in the ground. They used steel as if it were clay or wood. He finally understood that they had somehow used it up!
Later they used the very sand to make magic that neither Loden or Treetender had any understanding of. That very magic was what was allowing them to listen to what he now knew to actually be a voice of one of the ancient ones. Only after some time had passed did he realize that the voice he was hearing from the stones was actually the same voice he had heard from the tree. Thousands of years ago the spirit that now dwelt in a grove of oak trees had been one of those he had come to think of as gods, with powers beyond those of the greatest wizards of his people.
The stones went on to tell that the Chisos had split into three groups. One wanted to continue to extract power and new items directly from the rocks and from space itself. The other wanted to use the knowledge and power they had to nourish the life that was on the earth. At first they went their separate ways in peace with one group reshaping the very earth to their desires and the other attempting to reestablish a balance of life as it was before the Chisos began to extract the vital minerals from the soil and the rocks. As time went by the two groups began to be more and more hostile to each other.
After years of increasing hostility between the two groups, a third group appeared with members that had originally been in both groups. The new group advocated using the magic and knowledge the Chisos had gained to join the things of the earth with the things of power to unite the good of nature with the blessings they had obtained from the magic. Sadly only a few of the Chisos chose the third way. Those that did learned to become one with the very nature the second group claimed to be trying to defend.
Finally, the group who claimed to defend the earth itself declared war on those who still sought to use it. The war was lost before it began. The wizards who had been using the earth had powers far beyond the understanding of those who wanted to simply turn back history to what they claimed was a simpler time. The victory destroyed not only the losers but the winners as well. The forces unleashed by the wizards tore open the earth and blackened the sky.
The war ended as a gigantic ball of ice and rock smashed into the sea near where the Nature Wizards had their capital. Walls of water and great winds tore the very plants from the ground. Volcanoes roared from the ground where none had been before and the very earth split open, creating oceans where land had stood.
The Chisos of the Third Way had stood apart from the war and sought ways to preserve some of what they had learned as well as some of all manner of life that they could. They retreated underground to wait for the end of the violence. After the destruction of the forces that sought to turn back history, they emerged from their shelters deep under the land only to find that the Users of the Earth had gone mad in their quest for power. They had declared themselves the creators and destroyers of creation. They had raised up for themselves a great fortress pulled from the very roots of the earth. In it they had hidden away their implements of power and created a paradise where they believed they could hide themselves away from the destruction they had rained upon the earth.
They did not plan though for what happened next. The faction that had wanted to reverse history had prepared a surprise for the Chisos in the event they lost the war. They had released a disease that would kill every Chisos and every Tarcuna. Despite feverish work to find a cure, the nature wizards had created an infection so deadly that none of the survivors of the cataclysm could find any way to fight it.
The wonders they created and extracted from the ground and the sky had long been long worn to dust or extinguished by volcano, or flood, or wind, but a few things remained of their arrogance. The skeleton of the place the Earth Users created still survived. They had built it as a paradise and a fortress to protect themselves and their creations, but it survived only as a broken, shattered landscape, bearing witness to the end of the works of mortals who dared to challenge their Creator.
The few Chisos to survive the disaster were those who had learned to dwell outside of their own bodies. Soon though, they realized that without physical bodies, they would begin to fade away until they ceased to exist. The males, the Chisos, had chosen the oak trees in which to dwell. The females, the Tarcuna, had chosen to dwell in the very air with their spirits sweeping across the earth. When enough energy gathered in the form of thunderclouds, the Tarcuna would assume the body of the cloud even as the Chisos had assumed the body of the tree. The women were always drifting with the wind to see one another and to dance in new places, continually changing their billowy attire. The men were quite satisfied to remain where they were and tend what was around them.
According to Treetender, the Chisos had told him that only the smallest of animals, those that could live in burrows under the ground, survived the war of the Chisos. Afterward, it took so long that the numbers of years were meaningless, for life to return in the profusion that had existed before the cataclysms. When life did return, it was in a form very different than that the Chisos had known before. After many, many more thousands of years, there appeared those who would later be called The People. Later came humans and then the orcs. Treetender told him that there existed in other places, other intelligent beings, some who dwelt in the earth itself and others who dwelt in the trees and were closely related to the Warunga.
He went on to warn Loden that the Chisos had called them to guard the way to the mountain fortress in which the Chisos Earthusers had once dwelt. Apparently some of them and even some of the Nature Wizards had not been killed. Some of the Earthusers had transferred their existence to stones not unlike the ones that had sung to them. Among the Nature Wizards, it was not as clear what they had become. The Chisos of the Trees did know that the orcs were not natural but had been perverted from other beings, perhaps even humans. The Nature Wizards that survived had done so by the force of their hatred for all intelligent life. They believed that all thinking beings were an infection on the face of the earth and existed to cleanse the earth of them. The Chisos of the Trees believed the Nature Wizards had gone mad in their hatred and guilt. They refused to accept that the war they started against the Earthusers was the cause of the destruction of all they claimed they wanted to save.
Both the surviving Earthusers and the Nature Wizards wanted access to the secrets of the Chisos hidden away in the ruins. The Earthusers longed to find a way to take back some form that would allow them to move about and reestablish their rule of the earth and all in it for their own pleasure. The Earth Wizards wanted to capture the weapons and secrets so that they could destroy the life that existed today in order to restore the life that had existed when they walked on the earth. Each wanted to return to what they had before the war, but alone and in control of the earth. For them the war was not over and they dwelt in their hatred of all who disagreed with them.
It made Loden more than a little uncomfortable to learn that two such groups of powerful spirits existed, one desiring to enslave all who lived to serve them and the other to destroy them. But Treetender had yet one more warning for Loden.
Apparently some of the Chisos of the Trees had also lost their sanity. In the many thousands of years they had dwelt away from their original bodies, some of them had come to desire to live in a mobile body again. Some rose up to dance with the Tarcuna, and in their madness spread destruction everywhere they put their feet. Once they had don so, they would die, unable to find a tree in which to dwell after destroying so many trees in their dance. Others were what Treetender referred to as 'grouchy.' They had forgotten why they existed and would strike out at any intelligent creature that ventured into their presence. Sometimes they would even take over the body of the person as if it were a puppet and cause a destructive madness that almost always required the death of the person.
He returned to his people and over the years to come, established a prosperous holding and a family to make any man proud. His sons learned to walk with the Warunga but never were called to either of the brotherhoods. They did become accomplished warriors among the humans and were much sought after as officers and leaders when there were battles to be fought. Each year he would return with a calf to the tree in the rock and make the sacrifice to the Chisos. Each time he would hear the Chisos sing his thanks and bid him well.
He carefully protected the trees in the valley where he held his land. He taught the people that lived on the frontier what he knew about how to not offend the Warunga. For many years the community of humans and the Warunga of the White Hills, as they were known among the greater Warunga, lived in peace and as much harmony as such different people could.
Other than his ability to understand the Warunga, which was certainly no small gift, he had the shields on his forearms that, thanks to the current style of wearing long sleeves, were not too much noticed. Prior to the beginning of the Great Orc War, his ability to hear the Chisos sing was the gift he most appreciated. Many were the times he would be traveling in the forests when he would sense the presence of one of the ancient ones. He enjoyed turning aside to sing to the tree. The tree, in turn would give him a grant of peace and strength. Later, during the orc war, he gained a reputation of being able to know where the orcs were before anyone else. He knew that no one would understand, so he did not reveal that there were spirits in the great oaks even in the eastern lands. He found that he could ask one tree spirit and the word would spread across the land. As much as the tree spirits did not like the humans, they hated the orcs. The orcs would fell trees simply for the sport of seeing them fall. Some of them could hear the tree sprits and seemed to greatly enjoy hearing them suffer as their ancient home was destroyed.
So it all might have ended had not the orcs been determined to find and use the secrets that were hidden in the Chisos Mountains far to the west beyond the hills of the Warunga, beyond the high plains, and beyond the Killing Desert.
Chapter 3
The sun was growing hot on his back as Loden climbed yet another of the low ridges between the innumerable draws that drained into the valley to his left. At the top he stopped his horse, and benefiting from the additional height of being horseback, was able to see the terrain to the west that he would have to cross on his present course.
He was about half way up the ridge that ran east and west on the north side of the valley. The ridge was wrinkled with washes, draws and ridges where the sparse rain had washed the soft, chalky rock down to the valley on his left. That was exactly why he was using it. No traveler in his right mind would take such a rough and difficult route when he could either follow the bottom of the valley and have relatively even ground and water to boot, or, if he wanted to be less likely to encounter others, the ridge top where there would be no water but the traveling would at least be on fairly even ground. The other side of that coin was that anyone wanting to set an ambush or look for tracks would also make the same choice.
Even those who had lived in the wilds for most of their lives often did not realize that there was almost always a trail running part way down a ridge or hillside and parallel to it. Those who could defend themselves traveled high or low, but the deer and anyone who did not want to be noticed traveled between the two.
Not that he was being hunted at the moment, or at least he hope he wasn't, but he was quite sure he would be if the Warunga knew he was here. Brother to the White Rock Warunga he might be, but he had already passed through the lands of the Red Rock branch of The People and now was in the lands held by yet another branch. He had never met any of this tribe but he knew they were called the People of the Cave.
At the moment he faced the problem that the stream on his left forked ahead of him. The main branch split to the right where it had long ago cut through the ridge on which he had been traveling. The left fork continued straight ahead up the valley but looked as if it were little more than an extended draw with little or no water. This meant he either needed to cross the ridge to the right and cross the valley beyond or continue straight ahead and cross the stream. He knew that the main trail that passed through this area followed the next valley to the north and he strongly suspected that by crossing the ridge he would be visible from it and soon have to cross it. Going straight ahead presented the problem of crossing the stream without leaving a trail clear enough for a blind man to follow.
As is often the case in dry country, the need of both the man and the horses for water decided the issue. By electing to cross the stream and continue to the west he would have the opportunity to both drink and fill the water skins that now hung limply on the sides of his packhorse. He knew better than to proceed straight ahead as that would also be the place where someone following the stream valley would cross.
Just ahead of him was one of the many draws leading off the ridge downward to the south. This one was considerably wider and deeper than most of the others and, more importantly, continued as a tree line all the way to the stream. He eased his horse slowly down to near the bottom of the draw and saw what he was looking for, a game trail following the ravine about a third of the way from the bottom.
Suddenly his horse jumped under him as a herd of about ten deer came rushing down the ravine, rattling the bushes, knocking rocks to the bottom and stirring up a cloud of dust. Loden froze and mentally commanded his horses to do the same. At almost the same instant, Shanna, the great wolf-dog that was his spirit partner, flashed an image of running deer. For a moment Loden was confused and then he realized that Shanna was two ravines to the west and seeing another herd of deer rushing in the same direction. All he sensed from the deer was fear of something totally unknown.
He commanded Shanna to work her way toward the top of the ridge and attempt to find what was causing the deer to panic. Unfortunately, the wind was from the south so neither he nor Shanna were able to get any sent from the direction the deer had come. Meanwhile, Loden saw an opportunity to take advantage of the situation. He urged his horses forward; following the path the deer had so recently taken. He reasoned that any watcher with any degree of skill would be focused in the direction he had sent Shanna and not likely to be watching as numerous herds of deer stampeded across the valley. An additional virtue of this course of action would be that it would put more distance between him and whatever was scaring the deer.
In a few moments, Shanna reported there were more deer and some antelope behind him in the ravine. He urged more speed out of his horses and crouched down over the saddle to avoid being scraped off his horse's back by low hanging limbs. Soon the ground leveled off and he was out of the ravine with his horses running along between two thick lines of trees to either side of the dry stream bed. A moment later he was to the stream and heard the deer in front of him splashing their way across. The draw came out at a place where the stream spread out and ran across a wide rock shelf. The horses splashed down onto the shelf and started across. As they neared the other side, Loden pulled them to the right and headed them up stream. He figured that one of the possible reasons the deer were all running in the same direction so close together was that they were being driven to some sort of ambush. Since the upstream direction turned back toward the same general area they seemed to have come from, it was unlikely that any drivers of game would expect anything or anyone to turn in that direction. It was also likely that the water would cover any sent the horses left and help hide their tracks.
He worked his way upstream for about two hundred paces then urged his horses out on the opposite side from which he entered. Up on the bank, he stopped the horses in a thick grove of trees and dismounted. Shanna was still working her way carefully downwind across the ridge. She was very nervous and that emotion transferred itself to Loden. He commanded her to find a place to hide and wait for whatever was coming. He grabbed the water skins off the packhorse and ran to the stream to fill them. In just a few, but very tense, minutes, he had them filled and back on the packhorse. He made one last trip down the bank to fill his water skin. He bent over and slipped his water skin under the water, then pulled it up and tightened the thong that held it shut. Just as he was standing up, a huge buck burst out of the tree line on the other side of the stream and made a mad lunge across the water. Loden jumped to the side to avoid being run down.
As the buck reached the bank were Loden had been standing his legs suddenly collapsed under him and he smashed into the bank, kicked a couple of times, then lay still except for his heaving chest. A bloody froth foamed from his nose and mouth as he gasped for air. After less than a minute even the heaving chest was still. Loden's first impulse was to flee from the scene before the hunters who were surely following this magnificent animal could come upon the scene. His desire to know who was causing this great disturbance overcame his caution. He cautiously approached the fallen buck. Sticking out of the side of his chest was the broken shaft of an arrow. As he drew closer a cold chill settled over Loden's heart. The arrow was black. He moved to the side of the deer, pulled out his knife, and in a moment had extracted the arrowhead from the chest. The jagged edges of the point confirmed his worst suspicions. Orcs!
He quickly moved to his horses, mounted and headed upstream on the left side. From what he had seen of the buck, the Orcs were probably in the valley on the north side of the ridge on which he had been traveling until a few minutes before. He sent a mental warning to Shanna. He knew some orcs had been bred to have a sense of smell nearly as sharp as Shanna's. If one smelled her or him, there was little chance the orcs would not come after them and once they were on the track, there was even less chance they would turn aside until either hunter or prey were dead. He called Shanna back from the ridge and told her to come to the stream and turn right in the water. That well could throw any followers off long enough for him to put some well needed distance between him and the brutes.
Hidden from the ridge to his right by the trees that grew along the stream bank, he followed the stream towards the northwest as it approached the water gap in the ridge ahead. He could see that the tree line came within a few paces of the wooded hillside just before entering the water gap. At that point he would have an opportunity to leave the stream, hopefully without exposing himself to observation from the ridge to the northeast.
He felt Shanna enter the water at about the same time he turned the horses into the underbrush and up the slope to his left. He quickly found a ravine bottom to follow that would keep him and the horses out of sight. As the hillside steepened and the ravine shallowed, he dismounted and began to lead his horses up the hill. A short distance from the top he dropped the reigns and slowly eased his way up to the crest, being careful to not outline himself. By this time the sun was at its highest and only slightly south of directly overhead. As his heart began to slow back to something like a normal pace he became aware of the heat. Sweat dribbled down his face as he crawled along under the bushes, trying to avoid the thorns, sometimes not too successfully.
As he reached the crest, he had to negotiate a cluster of rocks that capped the hills. Carefully looking where he put his hands and feet lest he surprise a snake, centipede, or scorpion hiding from the midday sun, he extended his head up and looked out between two rocks. He had a good view of the valley from where the stream turned through the ridge on which he was hiding both up and down the valley for quite some distance.
The first thing he saw were the death birds circling and swarming over the other side of the valley. On the ground beneath them were a number of black dots. Several were smaller in size while the majority were larger. From the way they were laid out it appeared to him that there had been a battle, probably the day before from the number of birds that had gathered.