It doesn’t sound very complicated, but it kept Pol and me hopping. I
had to go through the ranks of the Mimbrate knights each and every
time, pointing out the fact that they were supposed to charge the
Angaraks rather than the Asturians. At the same time, Pol had to
remind the archers that they weren’t supposed to shoot at Mimbrates.
We eventually reached a wide tributary that had several thousand Murgos
camped on its east bank. I called Pol and the two barons in to discuss
strategy.
“This is about as far east as we need to go,” I told them.
“Let’s wreck the west end of the bridges crossing this river and then
pull back to the next stream.”
“I will delay their pursuit,” Wildantor declared.
“No, actually you won’t,” I told him firmly.
“You’re not going to start doing that until we’ve crossed two more
rivers.”
“I’m sworn to delay them!” The young baron had red hair–and all that
implies.
“Listen carefully, Lord Baron,” I told him.
“I don’t want the Murgos to even know that you’re here for a while yet.
Mandor’s Mimbrates will destroy the bridges here; then we’ll pull back
to the next river, and he’ll do it again. Then we’ll do it for the
third time on the next river to the west. The Murgos will have
developed a pattern by then. They’ll rush forward in a mass carrying
timbers with them to repair the bridges. When they come to the fourth
river, you’ll have lots of targets out there in the water. I want the
surface of that river absolutely covered with the floating bodies of
dead Murgos. After that, they’re going to be very cautious when they
come to a river.”
He frowned and thought it over. It took him a while. Then his eyes
brightened, and his face broke into a broad grin.
“I like it!” he exclaimed.
“Though it seemeth me a most unnatural thing, my Lord of Wildantor,”
the Baron of Vo Mandor said,
“I find myself growing fond of thee. Thine exuberance is contagious,
methinks.”
“You’re not so bad yourself, Mandor,” the Asturian admitted.
“Why don’t we agree not to kill each other when this is over?”
“Doth that not violate the precepts of our religion?” Mandor said it
with an absolutely straight face, and that sent Wildantor off into
gales of laughter.
It wasn’t much, but it was a start in the right direction.
My rudimentary plan worked surprisingly well–although, given the
limited mentality of Murgos, I don’t know why I was surprised. Lulled
into a sense of security by the lack of any opposition to their
bridge-building operations, the Murgos, as I’d predicted, rushed whole
regiments carrying timbers to the east bank of the fourth river.
Wildantor held his archers in check until the Murgos had their spans
reaching out to the middle of the river. Then he sounded his horn as a
signal to his hidden archers.
The Asturian arrows arched overhead like a slithering rainbow, and the
Murgos quite literally melted off their half-completed bridges to fill
the river with floating corpses.
Then Wildantor waited, exercising remarkable self-control for an
Arend.
The Murgos left on the banks crept forward fearfully, their shields
held protectively over their heads.
Still Wildantor waited.
Eventually the Murgos decided that the archers had withdrawn, and they
resumed their construction.
Then the second rainbow of arrows swept the bridges clean again.
The surviving Murgos gathered on the east bank, screaming curses at the
still-unseen archers.
It was at that point that the Baron of Wildantor gave the shrieking
Murgos a pointed demonstration of the incredible range of the Asturian
longbow. His third rainbow piled heaps of dead Murgos along the east
bank of a river that was fully two hundred paces wide.
“Splendid!” Mandor cheered.
“Capital!”
Then we withdrew again, retreating back to the fifth tributary of the
River Arend. Wildantor and his archers brought up the rear, pausing
every few hundred paces to rake the pursuing Murgos with yard-long
arrows, thus giving the Mimbrate knights time to tear down all the
bridges except one. Then the Asturians sprayed the Murgos with a
prolonged arrow-storm, closed up shop, and retreated across the lone
remaining bridge.
As you might expect, Wildantor stood his ground at the east end of the
bridge until all his men were safely across. His hands seemed almost
to blur as he loosed arrow after arrow into the faces of the advancing
Murgos. Then he ran out of arrows, turned, and started across the
bridge.
The Mimbrate knights had weakened the bridge timbers to the point that
a good healthy sneeze would have made the whole thing collapse, and
somewhere up in the mountains to the northeast, Garion’s friend
sneezed. A cloudburst, one of the last gasps of that
quarter-century-long rainstorm, had filled every ravine and gully with
rushing water; it all came down that tributary in a ten-foot wave.
The bridge dissolved under Wildantor’s feet.
I rushed to the west band, drawing in my Will.
“Stay out of it, father!” Pol snapped at me.
“But–” “It’s already been taken care of.”
The Baron of Vo Mandor set his spurs to his horse’s flanks, galloped
down to the next bridge, and rolled out of his saddle with a vast
clanking of armor. He ran out on the shattered remnants of that
wrecked bridge to its very teetering end, knelt, and stretched his arm
down toward the seething water.
“Wildantor!” he bellowed in a voice they probably heard in Vo
Mimbre.
“To me!”
The red-haired Asturian was being carried down-river at a ferocious
speed, but he angled across the current and reached up his arm as he
was swept past the splintered end of the ruined bridge. The hands of
the two men came together with a resounding smack, and the Mimbrate
leaned back, literally jerking the Asturian up out of the current. Then
he caught hold of the back of Wildantor’s tunic and swung him up to
safety.
Wildantor lay face-down for a minute or two, spluttering, coughing, and
spitting out a quart or so of muddy water. Then he raised his face
with a broad grin.
“You’ve got a nice firm grip there, Mandor,” he said.
“You could probably break rocks without using a hammer.” He sat up,
massaged the hand the Mimbrate had nearly crushed, and looked around.
“I guess I’d better get my bowmen in place,” he said as if nothing had
happened.
“We’ll hold off the Murgos while you and your knights go tear down some
more bridges.”
“Right,” Mandor said. He rose, clanking, pulled Wildantor to his feet,
and went back to his horse.
Neither of them ever spoke of the incident again, but the sound of that
resounding smack when their hands met still seemed to echo in my mind,
and it somehow gave me hope for the future.
We continued our slow withdrawal, but after that fifth tributary, where
Wildantor’s archers took a dreadful toll on the advancing Murgos, King
Ad Rak Cthoros of Murgodom found something very pressing for his
soldiers to do elsewhere, and the Thulls were given the chore of
rebuilding bridges. Somehow it always seems to work out that way in
Angarak society.
All right, our little exercise wasn’t really very creative, but it
slowed Kal Torak’s advance for the requisite five days. Always look
for the simplest solution to any problem. It’s when you start getting
exotic that things begin to go wrong.
The clouds began to blow off during the afternoon of the day when the
Thulls finished repairing the bridges crossing the last remaining
tributary of the River Arend. Pol and I decided that there wasn’t much
point in wasting lives trying to hold back the advancing Angaraks any
more. We’d achieved the delay we needed, so we took our forces inside
the walls of Vo Mimbre and closed the gates behind us.
The sunset that evening was glorious, and it promised that we would
have clear, sunny skies for the first day of the Battle of Vo Mimbre.
CHAPTER FORTY
The southern wall of the city of Vo Mimbre rises out of the River
Arena, and the seemingly endless rains of the past quarter century had
filled the river to overflowing. That made an attack from that front
highly unlikely, so we only had three sides to defend.
I went along the top of the golden walls as dusk gathered over Vo
Mimbre to check the defenses before I settled in for the night. I’m
sure the Mimbrates knew what they were doing, but it never hurts to
make sure, particularly when you’re dealing with Arends. I found my
two barons, Mandor and Wildantor, standing on the parapet over the main
gate looking out gravely at the gradually darkening plain.
“Is One-eye moving at all?” I asked them.
“A few advance parties is all,” the green-tun iced Wildantor replied.
“He’ll probably wait until after dark to take up his positions. If we