Luthien's Gamble

9 Preparations

Luthien walked the length of the Caer MacDonald line, the area beyond the city’s outer wall. Caer MacDonald had three separate fortifications. The tallest and thickest wall was inside the city, dividing the wealthy merchant section from the poorer areas. Next was the thick, squat fortification that surrounded the bulk of the city, and finally, fifty feet out from that, the outer defense, a bare and thin wall, half again a short man’s height, and in some places no more than piled stones.

Beyond this outer wall, the land was open, with few trees or houses. Sloping ground, good ground to defend, Luthien thought. The cyclopians would have to come in a concentrated formation—en masse, as Oliver had called it—for the city could only be attacked from the north or the west. East and south lay the mountains, cold and deep with snow, and though a few of the one-eyes might swing around that way, just to pressure the defenders, the main group would have to come uphill, across open ground.

And that ground was being made more difficult by Shuglin’s industrious dwarfs. Every one of them greeted Luthien as he walked past, but few bothered to look up, would not interrupt this most vital of jobs. Some dug trip trenches, picking through the still-frozen earth inch by inch. These were only about two feet deep and fairly narrow, and would afford little cover, but if a charging cyclopian stumbled across one, his momentum would be halted; he might even break his leg. Other dwarfs took the trip trenches one step further, lining the ridge closest to the city with sharp, barbed pickets.

Luthien grew hopeful while watching the quiet, methodical work, but, in truth, there were few dwarfs on the field. Most were over by the wall, and that was where the young Bedwyr found Shuglin.

The blue-bearded dwarf stood with a couple of friends by a small table, poring over a pile of parchments and every so often looking up toward the wall and grunting, “Uh huh,” or some other noise. Shuglin was pleased to see Luthien, though he didn’t even notice the man’s approach until Luthien dropped a hand on his shoulder.

“How does it go?” the young Bedwyr asked.

Shuglin shook his head, didn’t seem pleased. “They built this damned wall well,” he explained, though Luthien didn’t quite understand the problem. Wasn’t a well-built wall a good thing for defenders?

“Only eight feet high and not so thick,” Shuglin explained. “Won’t stop the cyclopians for long. A ponypig could knock a hole in the damned thing.”

“I thought you just said they built it well,” Luthien replied.

“The understructure, I mean,” said Shuglin. “They built the understructure well.”

Luthien shook his head. Why would that matter?

Shuglin paused and realized it would be better to start from the beginning. “We decided not to hold this wall,” he said, and pointed up Caer MacDonald’s second wall.

“Who decided?”

“My kin and me,” Shuglin answered. “We asked Siobhan and she agreed.”

Again Luthien felt that oddly out-of-control sensation, like Siobhan was tugging hard at those puppet strings. For an instant, the young man was angry at being left out of the decision, but gradually he calmed, realizing that if his trusted companions had to come to him for approval on every issue, the whole of them would be bogged down and nothing important would ever get done.

“So we’re thinking to fight from here, then retreat back to the city,” Shuglin continued.

“But if the cyclopians gain this wall, they’ll have a strong position from which to reorganize and rest up,” Luthien reasoned.

The dwarf shrugged. “That’s why we’re trying to figure out how to drop this damned wall!” he grumbled, his frustration bubbling over.

“What about that powder you put in the box?” Luthien asked after a moment’s thought. “The box I used to destroy the supplies in the Ministry.”

“Not nearly enough of the stuff!” Shuglin huffed in reply, and Luthien felt foolish for not realizing that the cunning dwarfs would have considered the powder if it was a practical option. “And hard to make,” Shuglin added. “Dangerous.”

The dwarf finally looked up from the parchments, running his stubby fingers through his bushy blue-black beard. He reminded himself then that Luthien was only trying to help, and was even more desperate about the defense of Caer MacDonald than were Shuglin’s folk.

“We’ll use some of the powder,” the dwarf elaborated, “on the toughest parts of the wall, but damn, they built it well!”

“We could knock it down now and just begin our defense from the second wall,” Luthien offered, but Shuglin began shaking his head before the young man even finished the thought.

“We’ll get it down,” the dwarf assured Luthien. “The trick is to get it to fall out, on top of the stupid one-eyes.”

Shuglin went back to his parchments; another dwarf asked him a question. Luthien nodded and walked away, reassured by the competence of those around him. Shuglin and his kin were trying hard to steal every advantage from their enemies, to hurt the cyclopians at every turn.

They would have to, Luthien knew. They would have to.

The two trapped friends sat glumly, listening to the passage all morning long. Marching feet, thousands of them, the clanking and bristling of heavy armor and shields, and the clomp of hooves: ponypigs, the cyclopians’ favorite mount, smaller than horses and not as swift, but thicker and more muscular. The two heard the caissons roll, packed with weapons, no doubt, and food.

It went on, and on, and on, and Katerin and Oliver could do nothing to stop it. Even if they found some way out of the Horizon’s hold, there was nothing they could do anymore to slow the Avon army, nothing anyone could do.

“When they are gone, we will be freed,” Oliver reasoned, and Katerin agreed, for it seemed to her that Gretel and the people of Port Charley held no grudge against the rebels. They merely wanted no trouble in their town. To proud Katerin, though, that position was not acceptable. The war had come, and in her mind, any Eriadoran that did not join them was, at best, a coward.

“Then we must ride so swiftly,” Oliver went on. “North and east around the army, to warn our friends.” He almost said “our friends in Caer MacDonald,” but at that moment, with the unending, unnerving rumble of the army on the dock above him, it seemed to the halfling that the city in the mountains might soon be known as Montfort again.

“For whatever good that will do,” Katerin replied, her tone bitter. She pounded a fist against the unyielding door and slumped back on her cot.

The procession outside continued, all through the morning and into the early hours of afternoon. Oliver’s mood brightened when he found some food in a compartment under his cot, but Katerin wouldn’t even eat, her mouth too filled with bitterness.

Finally, the clamor outside began to lessen somewhat. The solid rumble became sporadic and the voices of cyclopians were fewer, much fewer. And then, at last, a knock on the door.

It swung open before either could respond, and Gretel entered, her face somber but without apology.

“Good,” she said to Oliver, “I see ye’ve found the food we left yer.”

“I do so like my fish!” the happy halfling replied. “Oh,” he said, his eyes cast down when he noticed the scowl Katerin was aiming at him.

“You promised,” Katerin growled at Gretel.

The old woman held up her hand, waving away the remark as though it was insignificant. “We do what we must,” she said. “We do what we must.”

“Even if that means dooming fellow Eriadorans?” Katerin retorted.

“It was in all our best interests fer us to let the cyclopians pass, to treat them as friends,” Gretel tried to explain.

But Katerin wasn’t hearing it. “Our only hope was to bottle the fleet in the harbor, to keep them off-shore until the defense of Caer MacDonald could be completed and support could be mustered throughout the land,” she insisted.

“And what would yer have us do?”

“Deny the docks!” the woman of Hale yelled. “Drop the outer piers!”

“And then what?” Gretel wanted to know. “The brutes’d sit in the harbor, whittling sticks? Yer smarter, girl. They’d’ve gone to the north and found a beach o’ their own, and put in, and we could not have stopped them!”

“It would have bought us time,” Katerm answered without hesitation.

“We are a town o’ but three thousand,” Gretel explained. “We could not have stopped them, and if they then marched back to Port Charley . . .”

She let the words hang unfinished in the air, dramatic and ominous, but still Katerin didn’t want to hear the reasoning.

“The freedom of Eriador is all that matters,” she said through gritted teeth, green eyes flashing dangerously. She flipped her fiery hair back from her face so that Gretel could see well her unrelenting scowl.

“Gretel echoes my own words,” came a voice from just outside the door, and an old man walked into the small room. His hair and beard were snowy white, hair tied back in a ponytail, and his robes, rich and thick, were bright blue.

Oliver’s mouth drooped open, and he realized then who the man at the meeting, the man at the hearth, had been. Clever disguise!

“I do not know you,” Katerin said, as if to dismiss him, though from his clothing, and indeed his demeanor, he was obviously a man of some importance. She feared for a moment that he might be one of Greensparrow’s remaining dukes.

“Ah, but I know you, Katerin O’Hale,” the old man said. “The best friend Luthien Bedwyr ever had.”

“Oh?” said Oliver, hopping up from his cot.

Katerin looked to the halfling, and then to the old man, and saw that there was recognition between them, smiles friends might exchange. It hit her suddenly.

“Brind’Amour?” she breathed.

The old man fell into a graceful, sweeping bow. “Well met, Katerin O’Hale, and long overdue,” he said. “I am an old man,” he winked at Oliver, “and getting older every day, but still I can appreciate such beauty as yours.”

Katerin’s first instinct was to punch him. How dare he think of such an unimportant thing at this time? But she realized that there was no condescension in his tone, realized somehow that the beauty he referred to was much more than the way she looked. He seemed to her, all at once, like a father, a wise overseer of events, watching them and measuring them, like the old fisherfolk of Hale who trained the novices in the ways of the sea. Brind’Amour was akin to those old fisherfolk, but the training he offered was in the way of life. Katerin knew that instinctively, and so when she realized what he had first said in support of Gretel’s words, she found some comfort and began to hope that there was some other plan, some better plan, in motion.

“We must let the brutes through Port Charley,” Brind’Amour said to the pair, mostly to Katerin, as though he realized that she would be the hardest to convince. “We must let them, and Greensparrow, think that the revolt in Montfort—”

“Caer MacDonald,” Katerin corrected.

“No,” said Brind’Amour. “Not yet. Let them think that the revolt in Montfort is a minor thing, an isolated thing, and not desired by any outside of that one city. We must plan long term.”

“But the defenses will not be completed in time!” Katerin replied, her pleading voice almost a wail.

“Long term!” Brind’Amour said sharply. “If Eriador is indeed to be free, then this one force of cyclopians will prove the least of our troubles. Had we kept them out of the harbor, had we shown them that Eriador was in general revolt, they would have simply sent one of their ships sailing back to the south to inform Greensparrow and return with reinforcements. In the meantime, those cyclopians remaining would have overrun Port Charley and secured the defenses of this city, giving Greensparrow an open port north of the Iron Cross.

“How many warriors do you think Luthien would lose in trying to uproot fourteen thousand Praetorian Guards from Port Charley?” the old wizard asked grimly, and Katerin’s sails had no more wind. She hadn’t seen that possibility—neither had Luthien apparently—but now that Brind’Amour spoke, it seemed perfectly logical and perfectly awful.

“We are not ye enemies, Katerin O’Hale,” Gretel put in.

Katerin looked hard at her, the young woman’s expression clearly asking the question that was on her mind.

“But we are enemies of the one-eyes,” Gretel confirmed. “And whoever rules Eriador should be of Eriador, not of Avon.”

Katerin recognized the sincerity in the old woman’s face and understood that Port Charley had indeed joined the alliance against Greensparrow. Again because of her knowledge of her own town, Katerin understood that Gretel would not have made such a bold and absolute statement if she didn’t have the backing of her townsfolk.

“I still think that it would have been easier to keep them out of the docks,” Katerin had to say. “Perhaps we might have even sunk one or two of their ships, taking half a thousand cyclopians to the bottom with them!”

“Ah, yes,” Brind’Amour agreed. “But then they would have kept those ships we did not sink.” Katerin and Oliver looked at the old man, his face widening with a wicked grin. “Not tomorrow night, but the night after that,” he said, and he and Gretel exchanged a serious nod.

Brind’Amour turned back to the expectant companions. “The night after next will be a dark one,” he explained. “Dark enough for us to board the Avon ships. In two nights, Eriador will have a fleet.”

The wizard’s smile was infectious. The halfling spoke for Katerin and himself: “I do like the way you think.”