“Malloreans ahead! On the north bank!” the lookout at the mast shouted. “About a half a mile!”
“Wet down the decks,” Barak ordered.
The sailors tossed buckets on long ropes over the side, hauled up water, and soaked the wooden decks.
“Signal the ships behind us,” Anheg told the bearded sailor standing in the very stern of the ship. The sailor nodded, turned and lifted a large flag attached to a long pole. He began to wave it vigorously at the ships strung out behind them.
“Be careful with that fire!” Barak shouted to the men clustered around a raised platform filled with gravel and covered with glowing coals. “If you set us ablaze, you’ll all have to swim to the Sea of the East.”
Just to the front of the platform stood three heavy-limbed catapults, cocked and ready.
King Anheg squinted ahead at the Malloreans gathered around a dozen or so siege engines standing solidly on the north bank. “Better send in your arrow-boats now,” he suggested.
Barak grunted and waved his arm in a broad chopping motion to the six narrow boats in his wake. In answer, the lean little boats leaped ahead, cutting through the water. Mounted at the prow of each arrowboat stood a long-armed catapult armed with a loosely packed bundle of arrows. Aided by the current, the narrow little boats sped past, their oars bending.
“Load the engines!” Barak roared to the men around the gravelbased fire. “And don’t slop any of that tar on my decks.”
With long iron hooks, the sailors lifted three large earthenware pots out of the coals. The pots contained a seething mixture of tar, pitch, and naptha. They were quickly dipped in tar barrels and then hastily wrapped in naptha-soaked rags. Then they were placed in the baskets of the waiting engines.
As the arrow-boats, speeding like greyhounds, swept in close to shore where the Malloreans struggled to aim their catapults, the arrow-bundles were suddenly hurled high into the air by the lashing arms of the Cherek engines. The arrows rose swiftly, then slowed at the top of their arching flight, separating and spreading out as they flew. Then, in a deadly rain, they fell upon the red-tunicked Malloreans.
Barak’s ship, trailing just behind the arrow-boats, ran in close to the brush-covered riverbank, and the red-bearded man stood with both of his big hands on the tiller, staring intently at his catapult master, a gray-bearded old sailor with arms like oak stumps. The catapult master was squinting at a line of notches chipped into the railing in front of his engines. Over his head he held a long white baton and he indicated direction by pointing it either to the right or the left. Barak moved his tiller delicately in response to the movements of the baton. Then the baton cut sharply straight down, and Barak locked his tiller in an iron grip. The rags wrapped around the pots leaped into flame as they were touched by waiting torches.
“Shoot!” the catapult master barked. With a thudding crash, the beams lashed forward, hurling the flaming pots and their deadly contents in a high arch toward the struggling Malloreans and their siege engines. The pots burst open upon impact, spraying fire in front of them. The Mallorean catapults were engulfed in flame.
“Good shooting,” Anheg noted professionally.
“Child’s play,” Barak shrugged. “A shoreline emplacement isn’t much of a challenge, really.” He glanced back. The arrow-boats of Greldik’s ship were sweeping in to rake the Malloreans with more arrows, and the catapults on his bearded friend’s decks were cocked and loaded. “Malloreans don’t appear to be any brighter than Murgos. Didn’t it ever occur to them that we might shoot back?”
“It’s an Angarak failing,” Anheg replied. “It shows up in all their writings. Torak never encouraged creative thinking.”
Barak gave his cousin a speculative look. “You know what I think, Anheg? I think that all that fuss you raised back at Riva – about Ce’Nedra leading the army, I mean – I think that it wasn’t entirely sincere. You’re too intelligent to be so stubborn about something that wasn’t that important.”
Anheg winked broadly.
“No wonder they call you Anheg the sly,” Barak chuckled. “What was it all about?”
“It pulled Brand’s teeth.” The King of Cherek grinned. “He’s the one who could have stopped Ce’Nedra cold if I’d given him the chance. Rivans are very conservative, Barak. I sided with Brand and did all the talking. Then when I gave in, he didn’t have any ground left to stand on.
“You were very convincing. I thought for a while that your reason had slipped.”
“Thank you,” the Cherek King replied with a mock bow. “When you’ve got a face like mine, it’s easy for people to think the worst about you. I’ve found that useful from time to time. Here come the Algars.” He pointed at the hills just behind the burning Mallorean siege engines. A great crowd of horsemen came surging over the hilltops to sweep down like a wolf pack upon the confounded Malloreans.
Anheg sighed then. “I’d like to know what’s happening to them back there at Thull Mardu,” he said. “I don’t suppose we’ll ever find out, though.”
“Not very likely,” Barak agreed. “We’ll all get sunk eventually, once we get out into the Sea of the East.”
“We’ll take a lot of Malloreans with us, though, won’t we, Barak?”
Barak’s reply was an evil grin.
“I don’t really care much for the notion of drowning,” Anheg said, making a face.
“Maybe you’ll get lucky and catch an arrow in the belly.”
“Thanks,” Anheg said sourly.
An hour or so later, after three more Angarak positions on the riverbanks had been destroyed, the land along the River Mardu turned marshy, flattening out into a sea of reeds and bending cattails. At Anheg’s orders, a raft piled high with firewood was moored to a dead snag and set afire. Once the blaze was going well, buckets of greenish crystals were hurled into the flames. A thick pillar of green smoke began to climb into the blue sky.
“I hope Rhodar can see that.” The King of Cherek frowned.
“If he can’t, the Algars will,” Barak replied. “They’ll get word back to him.”
“I just hope he’s got enough time left to make his retreat.”
“Me too,” Barak said. “But as you say, we’ll probably never know.”
King Cho-Hag, Chief of the Clan-Chiefs of Algaria, sat his horse beside King Korodullin of Arendia. The fog was nearly gone now, and only a filmy haze remained. Not far away, the twin sorcerers, Beltira and Belkira, exhausted by their efforts, sat side by side on the ground, their heads bowed and their chests heaving. Cho-Hag shuddered inwardly at the thought of what might have happened if the two saintly old men had not been there. The hideous illusions of the Grolims that had risen from the earth just before the storm had struck terror into the hearts of the bravest warriors. Then the storm, its intensity deafening, had smashed down on the army, and after that had come the choking fog. The two sweet-faced sorcerers, however, had met and overcome each Grolim attack with calm determination. Now the Murgos were coming, and it was time for steel instead of sorcery.
“I’d let them get a little closer,” Cho-Hag advised in his quiet voice as he and Korodullin watched the veritable sea of Murgos advancing against the emplaced ranks of Drasnian pikemen and Tolnedran legionnaires.
“Art thou sure of thy strategy, Cho-Hag?” the young Arendish King asked with a worried frown. “It hath ever been the custom of the knights of Mimbre to meet an attack head-on. Thy proposal to charge the flanks puzzles me.”
“It will kill more Murgos, Korodullin,” Cho-Hag replied, shifting his weak legs in their stirrups. “When your knights charge in from either flank, you’ll cut off whole regiments of the enemy. Then we can grind the ones who’ve been cut off up against the infantry.”
“It is passing strange to me to work thus with foot troops,” Korodullin confessed. “I have a vast ignorance of unmounted combat.”
“You aren’t alone, my friend,” Cho-Hag told him. “It’s as alien to me as it is to you. It would be unfair of us, though, not to let the foot troops have a few Murgos, wouldn’t it? They did walk a long way, after all.”
The King of Arendia considered that gravely. He was quite obviously incapable of anything remotely resembling humor. “I had not considered that,” he confessed. “‘Twould be selfish in the extreme of us to deny them some part in the battle, I must agree. How many Murgos dost thou think would be their fair portion?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Cho-Hag replied with a straight face. “A few thousand or so, I imagine. We wouldn’t want to appear stingy – but it doesn’t do to be over generous, either.”
Korodullin sighed. “It is a difficult line to walk, King Cho-Hag – this fine division between parsimony and foolish prodigality.”