Crystal Gorge. David Eddings
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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