The Line of Illeniel

Chapter 20

The resolution of my differences with Penelope had taken a bit longer than they had anticipated so we had lunch before returning to the table. Actually that’s inaccurate; we had lunch before clearing the table and returning to business, since we were using the same table for both. Everyone seemed much more relaxed now that we had settled things between us.

“Where were we?” I said, starting the discussion again.

“I think we were at the part where we were trying to decide how we wanted to lose,” Marc joked. It wasn’t particularly funny since it was largely true, but it did set me to thinking.

“You’re right,” I agreed.

“So you’ve decided to see sense and join the king?” Cyhan asked.

“Nope, I just thought what Marc said was spot on. We’ve been going at this from the viewpoint of limiting our losses… planning our defeat. No war has ever been won that way,” I stated.

“You don’t honestly think there’s any hope of us winning do you?” he responded.

“I’m not sure, but I’m not giving up yet. We haven’t even finished listing our resources yet, which may be greater than we realize,” I returned.

“What else do we have?” Dorian asked.

“Money for one… we have a lot of money, and time to use it,” I said.

“Well that’s fine… if you’re planning to throw it at them,” Joe put in, “but all the money in the world won’t create an army out of thin air.”

“You’re right. There’s no way we can match their numbers, whatever they may be, but I have Rose Hightower back in the capital recruiting as many as she can find. It might be the case that she can find enough to keep us from being completely overrun,” I told them.

“Not many men are going to take your coin to join a lost cause,” Marc informed us, “especially when the king will also be opening his coffers to recruit for a far less suicidal battle.”

“I’m offering more than the king, remember? Land may draw men that money alone could not tempt.”

“That still doesn’t get around the fact that it won’t be enough men. Even the king won’t face them here. The terrain offers no advantage, leaving the battle largely a matter of who brings the largest army,” Cyhan said.

“We have something that they don’t,” Dorian responded calmly.

“What?” the older warrior asked him.

“Him,” my friend pointed at me across the table. “We have the only remaining wizard in the civilized world. We have magic… they don’t.”

“I appreciate your confidence in your friend,” Cyhan placated him, “but no amount of magic can stop an army of over ten thousand.”

“You weren’t there at Lancaster. I was. He killed over a hundred of them in one fell swoop,” Dorian replied, unshaken.

“And it nearly killed him,” Penny added. “Besides, I don’t think Vendraccus will be so kind as to gather his army all in one place where Mordecai could conveniently annihilate them all at once. At Lancaster he had the enemy confined in one room.”

“Hah!” Royce shouted. Everyone looked at him wondering at his odd exclamation. “Say that again girl.”

“It nearly killed him…,” Penny responded uncertainly.

“No, no, the last bit… about the room,” my father’s sharp blue eyes were piercing as he spoke. I knew the look. He usually got it when he had overcome a difficult problem crafting something in the smithy.

“At Lancaster he had the enemy confined in one room?” she repeated.

“Aye, that was it. You…” he pointed at Cyhan, “you said that the terrain here held no advantage, so the king wouldn’t fight here. That may not be true.”

“What are you talking about Royce?” Joe asked. A look of hope was forming on his face already. He had a lot respect for the smith’s ideas, especially after the fight with the shiggreth.

“The river… here see,” he moved a few cups aside and tried to trace out the terrain with his finger on the table top. “Bah, this won’t work! Someone fetch me some paper and a piece of charcoal.”

I got up to fetch it for him. Paper was in short supply so I doubted anyone else would know where to find a piece large enough. I happened to know where he kept his back at the smithy. He frequently liked to plan his work out with large sketches. Ten minutes later I was back and we laid a large sheet out on the table.

“Alright… look here,” Royce started drawing a rough map of the area surrounding Castle Cameron, including Lancaster and Arundel. To the north a long line of mountains formed a rough border between Lothion and Gododdin. South of that were my lands, with Lancaster to the east of us and Arundel to the west. A break at the western end of the mountain range was the common passage between Gododdin and Lothion. A road crossed there and went past the Barony of Arundel, leading onward to Cameron and then Lancaster before turning south to head into the interior of Lothion.

“Here’s where they’ll be coming from, and they’ll have to follow the road past Arundel,” he drew a line to represent the road. It went south from the mountains toward Arundel before turning to run eastward past Cameron and Arundel. “You’ll notice that the road is paralleled by the Glenmae River for most of its length.” He added another line a bit north of the road. “The river runs just a half mile north of the road for most of the valley before it leads back up into the mountains north of Lancaster.” The valley itself was very gentle, a sloping grassy plain that stretched for miles between the road and the mountains. A large part of the farming for the three fiefdoms was done there. It was bordered to the north by the mountains and rose again on the southern side where the road ran. Near the road the forest started, stretching for many miles to the south.

“So they follow the road, making short side stops to wipe out Arundel, then us, and finally Lancaster as they go. After that they follow it south into Lothion proper, unless they want to try to drag their entire army through the forest and then into the foothills of central Lothion. I’d say that was unlikely.” He looked up from his rough map, catching us with his sharp eyes, “You follow so far?”

I nodded but Cyhan stopped him, “You’ve laid out a map for disaster. There are no choke points, no bridges, and no narrow passes, just an open gently sloping valley with a road and a river. I don’t see how any of that is going to help us.”

“Well there is one bridge,” Dorian put in, “the small one where the road crosses the river before heading into Gododdin.”

“Not that it helps,” Cyhan remarked. “The river is shallow enough to walk across in most places. You could burn the bridge and it would hardly slow them. Even the road is almost a joke, most of that valley is so smooth and even you could march across it almost as easily as take the road.”

“Let me finish,” Royce groused. “The valley slopes gently downward to the river, from the mountains to the north and from the forest and the road to the south. Its source lies in the mountains on the eastern end, north of Lancaster. There’s a much smaller valley there, where the mountains come together around the river before it enters the main valley. There are rocky hills that come within a few hundred yards of each other on either side of the river there, roughly dividing that smaller valley from this one.”

Joe interrupted, “Not to be rude Royce, but I don’t see any reason why they would head up there? Assuming you’re suggesting we somehow try to defend ourselves in Shepherd’s Rest.” That was the name of the smaller valley; Royce had avoided using it for the sake of those who didn’t know the area.

“No Joe, you’re missing my point,” he pointed at the narrow entrance into Shepherd’s Rest that the river passed through, “Here… Damn it.” He grinned at us.

“Excuse me?” said Penny.

“Dam it!” repeated my father chuckling. He sometimes had an odd sense of humor and he was enjoying his joke.

“Oh! That’s genius Roy!” shouted Joe. “We dam it!” He looked around to see who else had caught on.

“You think we should dam the river there?” I said; putting an end to the confusion everyone was in.

“Yep, we dam it there, and turn Shepherd’s Rest into a reservoir. Then when those bastards march into the valley we unstop it and watch ‘em drown.” He put his thumbs in his belt and leaned back, obviously pleased with himself.

Cyhan still had concerns, “Not to get ahead of ourselves, there are still several large problems with your plan. One, the road is too far from the low part of the valley. You’re not going to have enough water to wash them away if they’re on it. Two, if you try to get them crossing the bridge; you won’t be able to time it properly. Your dam is over ten miles from where the bridge is. You’d have no way of knowing when they were crossing, much less figuring out how long the water will take to reach that point. Third, it takes time to fill up a reservoir that large and the Glenmae isn’t a very big river. Even if you could snap your fingers and have it dammed today it would still take over a year to fill. Fourth, you can’t build a dam instantly, by the time you build it they’ll be knocking on your doorstep.”

“I’ve already got that covered,” said Royce. “We don’t try to get them on the bridge. It’s too far like you said already, plus that many men will be strung out for miles on either side. We wait till they’re on the road, close to here,” he pointed at the map marking the point at which the road came close to Washbrook. “We set something up to force ‘em to leave the road, make ‘em march through the valley there close to the river. That way when we set it loose we catch ‘em with their pants down.”

“There might be a way to do that,” Cyhan mused, “but what about the building time… and the water?”

“We start building right away, and we build from the bottom up. We lay the foundation and the first ten feet or so and then we block the river. We keep building upward from there, trying to stay ahead of the water’s rise. You said yourself the river isn’t that big, it won’t fill too quickly for us.” Royce stroked his beard as he thought about it.

Cyhan gave up, “I don’t know anything about building dams. It might be possible but I think it will be much harder than you think.”

Marcus stepped in, “It will be damn near impossible. You’ll need massive stones for the foundation, and those take time to quarry and move. After that if you build too fast and sloppy the water will wash out your upper courses before the mortar can fully set. Assuming you have that much stone ready to lay the upper courses anyway. The base will have to be at least twenty feet thick if not more… I dunno maybe Mort can work that part out. It’ll take a lot of math to calculate the water pressure at the base as the dam gets higher. I’m no engineer.”

I spoke up, “We won’t need mortar; I can probably fuse the stones together. We will have to do some calculating though, to figure out how thick it needs to be. I imagine I can help with the quarrying as well. I’ll have to think about that.”

“How do we let the water out?” Joe asked, “Are you going to build sluice gates into it? Seems like that would make the construction a lot more complicated.”

I looked at my father and our eyes met. He smiled at me. “We blow it up,” I said.

“You’re talking hundreds, maybe thousands of tons of solid stone. There’s not that much powder in the whole kingdom!” Joe remarked.

“He won’t need powder Joe,” said Marc waving his arms in the air. He was miming some sort of spell casting, either that or inventing a new type of erotic dance. “Boom!” he finished dramatically.

Penny eyed Marc’s antics dubiously, “Before we get ahead of ourselves there are certain basic hurdles we have to get past. We need workers to build a dam, and lots of them. There are only so many people available and if they’re spending the next few months building a dam they won’t be doing much else.”

“The dam is the only idea we’ve had that has any possibility of giving us a victory,” I replied.

“And if it doesn’t work? If there’s a construction failure or the enemy doesn’t do what you want, what then? It will take most of our resources and there won’t be much left over for a backup plan,” she said seriously.

I looked at my father and then back at Penny, “If it can be built he can do it.” I pointed at my father. “He’s the best damn blacksmith for a hundred miles.”

“No disrespect Royce,” Cyhan spoke up, “but you’re a smith, not an engineer or a stone mason.”

Royce wasn’t put off, “Where do engineers come from eh? Somebody somewhere woke up one day and said… ‘Hey maybe we can build this.’ I may not have gone to any fancy colleges back in the city, but I know how to build. My boy here can help with the math. Get me the men, the stone, and enough time and we’ll build the finest dam you ever saw.”

Cyhan must have seen something in my father’s face, “Alright. I believe you. You build that dam. We’ll still need to figure out how to make sure the enemy is where we want them when the time comes.”

“Let me worry about that,” I said. “I have some ideas.”

“Such as?”

“Give me a few days to work on ‘em and I’ll show you all what I’m thinking of,” I replied. “For now we need to start moving. The dam has to start immediately if we’re to have any chance of finishing it in time.” I did a mental head count. “Dorian… head to Lancaster. If James is there tell him we need every able bodied man he can spare. Explain what you can and if he still has doubts tell him to come see me. If he isn’t there tell Genevieve, she’s not afraid to take the initiative when needed.”

“When do you want me to go?” Dorian asked.

“Now,” I answered immediately. “Marcus, I need you to visit the Baron of Arundel. He needs to know what’s going on, tell him I would be greatly honored if he would pay me a visit.”

“I’m not sure if Sheldon will be happy about being ‘summoned’ by his neighbor,” Marc suggested. “What should I tell him?”

“Excuse me?” I said blinking at him.

“What should I tell him?” Marc repeated.

“Did you say his name is ‘Sheldon’?” I asked.

Marc laughed, “Yeah he caught a lot of hell over that in his younger days. I wouldn’t make any jokes about his name when you meet him though; he’s still a bit sensitive about it.”

I shook my head, “Alright, at least I had some warning. Tell him there’s rumor of war brewing with Gododdin. Given his location I’m sure he’ll be more than ready to come discuss it as soon as possible. Don’t give him any more information though. I’ll give him the rest when he comes.”

“I can do that. He won’t be happy about it but that’s your problem not mine,” Marc headed for the door.

“Hey!” I shouted after him. “I didn’t tell you to go yet!”

He spun as he walked, “You were about to!” and kept going. I had to admit he knew me better than myself some times.

“Joe,” I addressed the older man next.

“Yes sir!” he snapped to attention.

“You don’t have to do that Joe, I’m not a general.”

“I did a stint in the royal guard, old habits die hard. Anyway as far as I can see… you’re about to be one,” he answered without giving an inch. He was still standing at attention.

I sighed, “Fine, whatever… Joe, Rose Hightower is in the capital arranging supplies and recruiting for us. She needs to know what we’ve decided. We’ll need more workmen, lumber, stone masons, food, and… hell I don’t know what else. Get with my father he’ll have a better idea of some of the specific materials.”

“Cyhan I’ll want you to go with Joe. I can’t risk losing him on the road and the journey needs to be made as speedily as possible,” I said looking into the grim warrior’s eyes.

For a moment I thought he might argue, “Alright. Have Dorian work on the sword with her while I’m gone. She needs to keep up the training.” He nodded at Penny.

Last I looked to my father, “Dad…”

“I’ll be taking a horse out to look at the site for the dam,” he responded without waiting for me to finish.

I grinned at him, of course he knew his job better than I did, “Penny and I will ride with you. I need to see this myself.” The day was already half done so we wasted no more time.