Feathered Dragon - Douglas Niles [90]
In the center, we have five humans-six, to count the one carried by Erixitl. With us walks the great war-horse, Storm. The creature is a wonder to all of us Mazticans, far most of us have never seen an animal so large, and none of us have known one so useful.
And now our column is trailed by more warriors, hundreds of tiny bowmen who have sworn allegiance to Halloran because he answers the call of their prophecy. They
call it a miracle, and though I know it was his magic that “turned night into day” and caused him to be “a giant, even among the Big People,” 1 am not inclined to dispute the miraculous explanation.
Now we pass through the rolling country to the west of high, forested mountains. Though more adventures doubtless lay in our path, I cannot help but feel that our march to Payit gains unstoppable momentum.
A MOUNTAIN RAMPART
The summit of the narrow pass loomed as a tight bottleneck in the rugged ridgeline known to the Itza as the Verdant Crest, the range that formed the border of the Far Payit country. Here Gullet: stood with the men of Tulom-Itzi, prepared to make a final stand against the army of ants that had ravaged their city and their lands. Those who could not fight had already proceeded down the western slopes of the range, there to await the resolution of their future.
Climbing the east side of the range, following the tracks of the Itza warriors toward the high pass on the crest, came the steadily advancing swarm of giant ants. Devouring, destroying, and always marching inexorably forward, the monstrous insects swept upward like some malevolent tide. In places, Gultec and his warriors had crossed slopes and valleys of dry brush. These they torched now, in the face of the ants. But the living wave simply swept to the sides of such obstacles, and the few ants who perished in the flames) were left unmourned in the wake of the steady advance.
Through the narrowest valleys they pressed, and up the steepest slopes. The humans outdistanced them, taking temporary refuge in the sheer heights of the range’s central divide. Yet the monsters below and their masters, the driders, had only to look up and they would see their ultimate objective looming before them.
Darien welcomed the chance to battle the humans who had fled before her horde for so long. The fact that the warriors had chosen good ground to defend meant little to her and to her army. What problem were vertical cliffs and sheer heights to creatures that could scale the smoothest shelves of overhanging granite?
The rocky crest stood barren of trees and bushes. Composed mostly of crumbling granite covered with mosses and lichens, the snakelike summit of the ridge towered above the rest of the range. All around, lower ridges, covered with lush foliage, dropped away to the distant, jungled flatlands. The trail from the lower reaches crossed back and forth across the sheer face of this highest ridge until it finally crested the long, rolling peak.
For the last thousand feet of this ascent, the trail broke free of its verdant surroundings, winding in the sunlight and open air through this region of broken, rocky ground. Gultec looked back across the trail below. The slopes to the east dropped steeply away into a flat, dishlike valley. Water and silt had collected in the bottom of this valley, forming a wide, tangled swamp. Hours before, the last of the Itza warriors had pressed through that swamp and made their way up the tortuous trail to this crest,
Gultec knew that the fetid waters of that dank marsh swarmed with snakes and crocodiles, yet he didn’t delude himself into thinking these would provide any obstacle to the ant army. If anything, the tangled vegetation and finger-length thorns sprouting from many a bush would delay the beasts only momentarily. The respite would delay the inevitable attack by a mere few minutes.
Beyond the muck and mire of the marsh, the jungle commenced again, cloaking the lower slopes of the range in green velvet as far as the