The whole process was to be repeated, and the two chains of logs fastened together side by side, with wagon planks spiked to the logs. The army would then have a narrow bridge. Unstable, wet and slippery, perhaps, but a bridge.

That was the theory. The colonel's engineers, all of them human, were not as confident. But they kept their mouths shut. After his log cutters had disappeared upslope into the forest, the colonel sent word of the situation to Chithqosz, via his communicator. Chithqosz started back at once along the stalled ten-mile column.

The first object to come down the falls was a dead soldier, soon to be followed by others. Grim and angry, the colonel sent up another team of log cutters, this time preceded by a company of infantry to protect them. Soon logs began coming down the falls. The colonel decided there'd only been a few of the enemy, probably those sent to destroy the original bridge. And they'd slipped away when they saw the infantrymen with their crossbows and swords.

On the other hand, they may have heard what the colonel had not: distant thunder over the western slope of the mountains.

The storm first struck what had been the lead battalion. They'd seen the storm clouds, and over the river noise had heard their rumbling, so they were not taken totally by surprise. An onslaught of hail and icy rain swept them, with swirling wind, blinding flashes, crashes of undelayed thunder. The troops were soaked in the first seconds. Hail fell for only four or five minutes, but the extreme rainfall did not slacken for thirty. And when it did, it was only to a heavy, steady downpour.

It seemed to Chithqosz he'd never seen it rain so hard. With his orderly and his bodyguard, he picked his way among the miserable soldiers huddled and shivering in the road. Hundreds of new rivulets poured down the side of the gorge in miniature waterfalls. Within half a mile he came to one of the tributaries, previously small. It was already storm-swollen, surging from its ravine.

Below it he saw no further casualties, and wondered if the storm had driven their assailants to cover. If so, it might prove a life saver. At about five miles he wasn't so sure. A new squall line had passed over them, and he'd never realized that water could be so deafening, short of a major cataract. The side streams had swollen beyond recognition, and the river itself was a raging torrent. Close ahead it had flooded a stretch of road that before had been six or eight feet above the water. It was impossible to go farther downstream.

Then, loud as the river was, it took on a new tone-a booming and rumbling that was not thunder.

Here and there were trees along the margins of the road, mainly on the uphill side. Abruptly his bodyguard grabbed the prince, manhandled him to a large hemlock, and shouted unheard words in his face. Then grabbing him, turned him to face the tree, and boosted him. Chithqosz realized the rakutu wanted him to climb.

It was a thick-boled tree, but well equipped with dead branches, and gripping them, Chithqosz began to climb. When he paused, ten feet up, his bodyguard shoved him, and he climbed again; the rakutu would not let him stop. The booming grew louder, more alarming, and he no longer needed urging.

At twenty feet he saw it: a wall of water ten feet high, carrying at its front a crest of fallen trees, like battering rams. Men were swept off the road and disappeared. Chithqosz realized now what the booming was-great boulders carried rolling and bounding downstream by the torrent. One struck his tree a heavy blow,: the shock almost dislodging him, and for a moment he feared the hemlock would be torn from its roothold. Swiftly the water climbed the trunk, and panicking, Chithqosz began to scramble upward again, into green branches, pursued by the water.

He spent the evening and night there, the rain never stopping, though gradually it slowed. Exhaustion and hypothermia weakened the prince, and long before midnight he'd have dropped into the river, had it not been for his bodyguard. The rakutu somehow got out of his own breeches and used them to tie the prince to the tree. Then, clinging to the trunk with powerful arms and hands, the half-breed jammed a broad shoulder under the prince's rear, for support.

Numb with cold, Chithqosz slipped into a sort of sleep, dreaming, but always aware of the rain. Were he not tied to the tree, he'd have fallen. At some point he became aware that his bodyguard was no longer there.

Eventually the rain nearly stopped, and although he couldn't see it, the water level had dropped somewhat. It seemed to him he was alone in the gorge, his whole army drowned, carried away. He was sure he would die.

He was wrong on both counts. Dawn thinned the darkness. The river was less loud, and he heard shouts! Then the sun came up! The sun! Sections of the road had remained above the flood. Men had retreated to them. Others, where the slope allowed, had scrambled up out of the gorge. The base of his tree became visible, then the road surface beside it. With his dagger he cut the breeches that held him in place. Then, with exaggerated care, he climbed unsteadily down from the tree.

He was shivering with cold and shock. Other voitar found and fed him, and together they worked their way down the gorge. In places the road was still under water, and they waded, or waited. Late in the day they came to the ruined bridge. Some soldiers had crossed on the deck cables, holding on to the hand lines. Others had butchered horses and cows, and lacking dry wood, were eating the meat raw. Many were coughing, harsh hacking coughs rooted in shock and hypothermia.

Using his communications aide, a colonel had reached the hive mind, and reported the catastrophe to the crown prince's headquarters, then to the brigadier left in command on the Scrub Coast.

Meanwhile they ate, stashed raw meat in their packs, and took their turns crossing on the cables.

Two days later, coughing, wheezing, wobbling, sweating with fever, Prince Chithqosz emerged from the gorge. A remarkable percentage of the troops who emerged were similarly ill. Someone had ordered camp set up near the stone dock, with fires and crude lean-tos. The weather was clear, the nights cold, even frosty. They ran out of the meat they'd brought with them. Many died of pneumonia.

A relief column arrived from the coast. Ships from Balralligh came up the river channel through the great swamp, and loaded men at the dock.

The magnitude of the losses in the gorge would not be sorted out for another week. Nearly six thousand men were missing or known dead.

And of course, the army had a new enemy, though it occurred to no one that their significance would go beyond this one encounter.

Many of the bodies snatched away by the flood were swept out to sea by the current. There, some were taken by sharks and other marine scavengers. Many were carried along the coast by offshore currents, then deposited by waves on the beach, to be scavenged by an assortment of beach fauna, from gulls to vultures, crabs to possums.

One very long corpse, face down in the sand, was examined curiously by a fish crow. Earlier scavengers had reduced the clothing to shreds, the body to bones and cartilage. Lying beneath the ribcage was a shiny stone-a blue crystal, round and polished, about the size of a hickory nut with the husk on. The fish crow walked around the ribcage, looking for a way to get at the stone.

Circling above, a great raven watched, large as a vulture but incomparably more intelligent. Deciding to investigate, it swooped down. Complaining, the fish crow flew off a few yards and waited.