The encampment at the river was vast, and in the very center stood King Fulrach’s main supply dump, a virtual city of tents and neatly stacked equipment. A long string of flat-bottomed barges were moored to the riverbank, patiently waiting to be unloaded.
“Your people have been busy,” King Rhodar observed to the dumpy-looking Sendarian monarch as they rode along a narrow alleyway between mountainous heaps of canvas-covered produce and stacks of stoutly boxed equipment. “How did you know what to have them bring?”
“I took notes while we were coming down through Arendia,” King Fulrach replied. “It wasn’t too hard to see what we were going to need – boots, arrows, spare swords, and the like. At present, about all we’re bringing in is food. The Algar herds will provide fresh meat, but men get sick on a steady diet of nothing but meat.”
“You’ve already got enough food here to feed the army for a year,” King Anheg noted.
Fulrach shook his head. “Forty-five days,” he corrected meticulously. “I want thirty days’ worth here and two weeks’ worth in the forts the Drasnians are building up on top of the escarpment. That’s our margin of safety. As long as the barges replenish our food supplies daily, we’ll always have that much on hand. Once you decide what your goals are, the rest is just simple mathematics.”
“How do you know how much a man’s going to eat in one day?” Rhodar asked, eyeing the high-piled foodstuffs. “Some days I’m hungrier than others.”
Fulrach shrugged. “It averages out. Some eat more, some eat less; but in the end, it all comes out about the same.”
“Fulrach, sometimes you’re so practical, you almost make me sick,” Anheg said.
“Somebody has to be.”
“Don’t you Sendars have any sense of adventure? Don’t you ever do something without planning it all out in advance?”
“Not if we can help it,” the King of Sendaria replied mildly.
Near the center of the supply-dump a number of large pavilions had been erected for the use of the leaders of the army and their supporting staff. About midafternoon, after she had bathed and changed clothes, Princess Ce’Nedra went over to the main tent to see what was happening.
“They’re anchored about a mile downriver,” Barak was reporting to his cousin. “They’ve been here for about four days now. Greldik’s more or less in charge.”
“Greldik?” Anheg looked surprised. “He doesn’t have any official position.”
“He knows the river.” Barak shrugged. “Over the years he’s sailed just about any place where there’s water and a chance to make some profit. He tells me that the sailors have been drinking pretty steadily since they anchored. They know what’s coming.”
Anheg chuckled. “We’d better not disappoint them, then. Rhodar, how much longer will it be before your engineers are ready to start lifting my ships ap the escarpment?”
“A week or so,” King Rhodar replied, looking up from his midafternoon snack.
“It will be close enough,” Anheg concluded. He turned back to Barak. “Tell Greldik that we’ll start the portage tomorrow morning – before the sailors have time to sober up.”
Ce’Nedra had not fully understood the meaning of the word “portage” until she arrived the following morning at the riverbank to find the sweating Chereks hauling their ships out of the water and manhandling them along by main strength on wooden rollers. She was appalled at the amount of effort required to move a ship even a few inches.
She was not alone in that. Durnik the smith took one shocked look at the procedure and immediately went looking for King Anheg. “Excuse me, your Honor,” he said respectfully, “but isn’t this bad for the boats -as well as the men?”
“Ships,” Anheg corrected. “They’re called ships. A boat is something else.”
“Whatever you call them – won’t banging them along over those logs spring their seams?”
Anheg shrugged. “They all leak quite a bit anyway,” he replied. “And it’s always been done this way.”
Durnik quickly saw the futility of trying to talk to the King of Cherek. He went instead to Barak, who was rather glumly considering the huge ship his crew had rowed upriver to meet him. “She looks very impressive when she’s afloat,” the big red-bearded man was saying to his friend, Captain Greldik, “but I think she’ll be even more impressive when we have to pick her up and carry her.”
“You’re the one who wanted the biggest warship afloat,” Greldik reminded him with a broad smirk. “You’ll have to buy enough ale to float that whale of yours before your crew’s drunk enough to try to portage her – not to mention the fact that it’s customary for a captain to join in when the time comes to portage.”
“Stupid custom,” Barak growled sourly.
“I’d say that you’re in for a bad week, Barak.” Greldik’s grin grew broader.
Durnik took the two seamen aside and began talking earnestly with them, drawing diagrams on the sandy riverbank with a stick. The more he talked, the more interested they became.
What emerged from their discussions a day later were a pair of lowslung cradles with a dozen wheels on each side. As the rest of the Chereks jeered, the two ships were carefully slid out of the water onto the cradles and firmly lashed in place. The jeering faded noticeably, however, when the crews of the two ships began trundling their craft across the plain. Hettar, who happened to ride by, watched for a few moments with a puzzled frown. “Why are you pulling them by hand,” he asked, “when you’re in the middle of the largest herd of horses in the world?”
Barak’s eyes went very wide, and then an almost reverent grin dawned on his face.
The jeers that had risen as Barak’s and Greldik’s ships had been maneuvered onto their wheeled carriages turned rather quickly into angry mutterings as the carnages, pulled by teams of Algar horses, rolled effortlessly toward the escarpment past men straining with every ounce of strength to move their ships a few inches at a time. To leave it all to artistry, Barak and Greldik ordered their men to lounge indolently on the decks of their ships, drinking ale and playing dice.
King Anheg stared very hard at his impudently grinning cousin as the big ship rolled past. His expression was profoundly offended. “That’s going too far!” he exploded, jerking off his dented crown and throwing it down on the ground.
King Rhodar put on a perfectly straight face. “I’d be the first to admit that it’s probably not nearly as good as moving them by hand, Anheg. I’m sure there are some rather profound philosophical reasons for all that sweating and grunting and cursing, but it is faster, wouldn’t you say? And we really ought to move right along with this.”
“It’s unnatural,” Anheg growled, still glaring at the two ships, which were already several hundred yards away.
Rhodar shrugged. “Anything’s unnatural the first time you try it.”
“I’ll think about it,” Anheg said darkly.
“I wouldn’t think for too long,” Rhodar suggested. “Your popularity as a monarch is going to go downhill with every mile – and Barak’s the sort of man who’ll parade that contraption of his back and forth in front of your sailors every step of the way to the escarpment.”
“He would do that, wouldn’t he?”
“I think you can count on it.”
King Anheg sighed bitterly. “Go fetch that unwhole-somely clever Sendarian blacksmith,” he sourly instructed one of his men. “Let’s get this over with.”
Later that day the leaders of the army gathered again in the main tent for a strategy meeting. “Our biggest problem now is to conceal the size of our forces,” King Rhodar told them all. “Instead of marching everybody to the escarpment all at once and then milling around at the base of the cliff, it might be better to move the troops in small contingents and have them go directly up to the forts on top as soon as they arrive.”
“Will such a piecemeal approach not unduly delay our progress?” King Korodullin asked.
“Not all that much,” Rhodar replied. “We’ll move your knights and Cho-Hag’s clansmen up first so you can start burning cities and crops. That will give the Thulls something to think about beside how many infantry regiments we’re bringing up. We don’t want them to start counting noses.”
“Couldn’t we build false campfires and so on to make it appear that we have more men?” Lelldorin suggested brightly.
“The whole idea is to make our army appear smaller, not bigger,” Brand explained gently in his deep voice. “We don’t want to alarm Taur Urgas or ‘Zakath sufficiently to make them commit their forces. It will be an easy campaign if all we have to deal with are King Gethell’s Thulls. If the Murgos and the Malloreans intervene, we’ll be in for a serious fight.”
“And that’s the one thing we definitely want to avoid,” King Rhodar added.