by Logan Jacobs
“Watch out, everyone,” I warned them. “I need a lot of space. You don’t want this hooked through any part of you. I’ve seen it happen, and it’s not pretty.”
I was referring to an entirely accidental kill by Elis last year when he was really just trying to scale a wall. He had been as shocked as anyone when his hook instead burst through Peter’s chest in a fantastic display of gore, since he hadn’t noticed that Peter was sneaking up on him from behind. We’d all been obsessed with replicating the move ever since but had no luck. A grappling hook just wasn’t much of a precision weapon, not while it was hurtling through the air, anyway. It was easy enough to insert a grappling hook in someone’s body by hand, but you didn’t score any style points that way.
While I reminisced, the centaurs had led the ponies out of range while Florenia scrambled back too. Willobee moved too slowly for Lizzy’s liking, so she grabbed him by the back of the shirt and dragged him along, in a way that reminded me of how she had carried him by the scruff of his neck in her teeth.
I started whirling the grappling hook in circles at my side to gain momentum and then I tossed it at the tree I had selected almost thirty feet away. On my first throw, it merely crashed through some of the tree’s weaker branches and fell down to its roots. So I reeled the hook back to me over the river, whirled it again, and tossed. This time it caught on securely to the V-shaped juncture where a thicker branch met the tree’s trunk.
I wrapped the other end of the rope around the most convenient tree and held it fast for myself while I traversed across the river hand over hand, my feet also hooked over the rope at the ankles. Once I was over, I examined the problem from both sides. I looked at the river. I looked at the gap in the middle of the stone bridge. I looked at the surrounding trees. I looked at my companions and assessed their respective athletic abilities. I looked at our carriage and estimated its weight. And I came to a conclusion.
“The carriage is going to have to go,” I announced from the far shore.
Over the roar of the river, no one seemed to hear me.
“The carriage is going to have to go!” I bellowed from the middle of the group.
Ilandere shied away, and Florenia jumped.
“Sorry,” I said.
On the other side of the river, I removed all the weapons from my body and set them safely aside to retrieve once we crossed. Then I detached the grappling hook so that my other self could reel the rope back in, because we were going to need it for my plan, and re-assimilated to the same side as the rest of the group.
“Sorry?” Willobee repeated. “But Master, that carriage is all I own in the world! Besides my snow-white beauties and what is on my person.”
Lizzy and Florenia also exchanged stricken looks with each other about the impending loss of the carriage, which I suspected had more to do with the loss of privacy that that would entail than the destruction of the gnome’s property. There was nothing I could do about that right now. But at least I could soothe Willobee’s feelings.
“Those gems that you took from me,” I said to him. The gnome’s expression filled with a mixture of guilt and guile. Just as he opened his mouth to prevaricate, I continued, “They are yours now. Yours for keeps. That should be enough to buy a nice new carriage, as long as you don’t squander it all on honey mead, right?”
Willobee’s lantern eyes glowed with delight. “Oh, Fairlands, yes, Master!” He fell to his knees and prostrated himself just like he had when I first saved his life from Lizzy’s bandit crew. “Thank you. You are the bravest and noblest and most generous of masters.”
“Get up, Willobee, we have work to do,” I told him.
He scrambled up happily and chortled, “Willobee of Clan Benniwumporgan shall have a fine fleet of carriages, and a herd of stalwart ponies.”
“You will?” I asked in surprise. I really needed to learn more about how this whole bribery system worked. “All right. Well. First of all we’re going to have to pull down some trees. I think two will do nicely. Then we’ll chop the branches off and use just the logs as the main support for a bridge. Then we can take the carriage apart and use its planks to build a platform on top that we can walk across.”
“Why can’t we just walk across the logs and keep the carriage?” Lizzy asked huffily. “There are all sorts of other positions we haven’t even tried yet on those benches--”
“The ponies can’t balance across logs,” I interrupted. I was also thinking that the centaurs couldn’t either, but I didn’t want to give the she-wolf the chance to make any unkind comments about that. “And splitting a tree into planks would take a long time, and we wouldn’t have any nails to nail them together with, except the ones that are already holding the carriage together. So, we’ll dismantle the carriage and use it to build the platform.”
Willobee handed me an axe that he had pulled from the back of the carriage. “Thanks, Willobee,” I said with a smile as I took it from the diminutive gnome. “All right everyone, go ahead and empty everything out of the carriage and sort through what we need to take and what we’ll leave behind while I start on these trees. Remember, we can only take as much as we can carry.”
“Yes, my lord,” the she-wolf replied with an ironic curtsy. I noticed Florenia bite back a smile at that gesture and I guessed that Lizzy’s curtsying form probably wasn’t quite up to the standards of a ducal household. Lizzy taunted, “I’ll be sure to bring along your chamber pot, we wouldn’t ever be able to defeat any Thorvinians without that, my lord.”
“Very funny, Lizzy.” I stuck out my tongue at the pretty wolf-girl. I’d figured out pretty quickly that on the road everyone seemed to just piss against trees or squat over logs, no chamber pot needed, so I did the same.
I chose two suitable trees of about twenty-five feet in height with the slimmest trunks that I believed would still be broad enough to support Elodette’s weight. She was definitely the heaviest member of our party. She probably weighed about one-thousand five hundred pounds if not more. Then I sent out my second self, took up an axe each, and set to work chipping a downward-angled wedge-shaped notch into each trunk.
Once I believed the notches were deep enough, I switched around to the opposite side of each trunk and made another notch about a foot higher up than the first to create a sort of diagonal fault line. After that, I climbed up one of the double-notched trees with the rope from the grappling hook, after having untied the hook itself, and knotted it about halfway up the trunk, right above a sturdy branch so that it couldn’t slip down any further. Then I called over Elodette and Ilandere and led the ponies over to help me pull the tree down.
The four of them lined up with their backs to the side of the tree that had the lower notch in order of descending strength, with Elodette closest to the tree at the point of greatest pressure followed by Ilandere and then the ponies. Then they wrapped the rope around their horse chests and strained with all their might. I had thought my main job would be to guide Damask and Diamond to pull, but the ponies watched the centaurs and seemed anxious to imitate them and prove their own strength in front of their half-human idols, so instead I ended up just taking up a position at the lowest end of the rope outside of the ponies and contributing my own shoulder and leg muscles to the effort.
After a few seconds of our combined maximum effort, a satisfying crack rang out, and then the tree toppled over. We all screamed with excitement and triumph, both pullers and spectators alike.
“Lizzy, Florenia, and Willobee, take those axes and start clearing all the branches off that trunk,” I instructed them. “Don’t worry about the really skinny ones, just anything big enough to get in the way of laying down a stable platform.”
While they hurried to comply, I untied the rope from the fallen tree and climbed up to tie it halfway up the other notched tree so that we could repeat the whole process.
After both trees had been felled, I used one axe to clear the branches from the second tree, with the help of the centaurs, who could stomp bran
ches hard enough to crack them, and Lizzy and Willobee, who sawed off the cracked branches the rest of the way with knives.
Meanwhile I took the other axe to the now-emptied wooden carriage. I cracked every corner apart, laying out the walls, ceiling, and floor separately, as well as disassembling the driver’s box with the bench and platform. I called Florenia over to help me pry the nails out of the planks so we could reuse them. She used a small dagger to pry out nails from along the edges of the separated planks where they had become superfluous.
At first I had been a little concerned that her delicate hands would not be accustomed to any kind of construction work and kept an eye on her out of my peripheral vision to make sure she wasn’t doing anything stupid that was going to end in severed fingers. But despite her obvious inexperience with the task, the golden-skinned beauty clearly had manual dexterity, and she approached her work thoughtfully, so that as she began to figure out the mechanics of working the dagger tip under the nail heads and then positioning the blade in such a way that it could be used as a lever to force them out of the wood, she became more and more adept at it. I reflected that the highly educated duke’s daughter was intelligent in a different way than world-wise and pragmatic Lizzy, the wily and imaginative Willobee, or Elodette with her thorough knowledge of woodcraft and, I was willing to bet, battle tactics.
I had not thought I would need anyone but my selves to defeat Thorvinius, but I could see now how it was possible that this “alliance of the faithless” would have its various roles to play.
As these happy thoughts ran through my head, I took the longer planks once Florenia had removed the unused nails from them and lined them up to form a rectangle. I had split the planks just as broad as they needed to be in order to accommodate the centaurs’ girth, so I did not need to attach them side by side, but I did need to overlap several in order to extend them to the length that I estimated would be needed to replace the shattered bridge.
The carriage did not provide enough wood for me to be able to lay this makeshift platform double-thick, but what I did do was set the shorter leftover pieces horizontally across my base rectangle at intervals of every couple feet to reinforce it.
Then, I set out the loose nails that Florenia had amassed in the places where I believed they would be most critical, connecting the overlapping sections of the main platform and securing the crossbeams, but making sure to save enough for nailing the platform to the thick logs that would really be bearing our weight.
Then the whole group converged to help me hammer in the nails using rocks, except for the centaurs, who could not easily reach the ground unless they lay down.
“It looks as though it might actually work,” Elodette remarked as she surveyed our progress.
Both of me looked up and smiled at her. She had her bow in hand, but for once she wasn’t pointing it at any members of the party. Instead her intention seemed to be to keep watch over us while we worked.
“Why the tone of surprise, Elodette?” I asked.
The perpetually angry-looking centaur actually smiled back at me. “Well, I’ll reserve my real surprise for when it actually does work,” she retorted. “I’m not exactly light as a feather, you know. The ponies can use this human crutch of yours, but I still might be better off jumping.”
“It’s up to you, but at least wait to see how it holds up for the ponies before you take any unnecessary risks?” I suggested.
She nodded her agreement.
Ilandere made no remark as she watched our exchange, but her angelic little face was alight with joy to see her handmaiden and me getting along for once. I was also pleased, but not surprised. It was easy to predict from their personalities that whereas kindness was the way to the heart of the little princess, competence was the way to the heart of her warrior handmaiden.
Once all the nails were implanted, the carriage planks were united into one piece, albeit a rickety one.
The only things left to do were getting the logs propped across the gap which was going to be a precarious process, and then positioning the carriage-come-platform on top.
The rest of us “short ones,” as Elodette called all the humans and humanoids in our party, rolled the logs over by the shore. Then, it took a lot of ingenious rope-rigging on my part using other nearby trees as anchors, and a lot of equine muscle power, to maneuver the bare trunks into an upright position again and drop them with enough directional control that they each landed with one end on the other shore and successfully spanned the river.
Once we had both logs across, and spaced correctly to accommodate the platform, Lizzy, Florenia, Willobee, and I dragged the platform over, propped up one end onto the ends of the logs on our side of the shore, and went around to the other end of the platform to push it across the logs.
We were very careful to move slowly and keep the platform as straight as possible, so that we wouldn’t accidentally just shove it into the river, but the surface of the logs was uneven, and the platform itself was even more uneven so eventually it got skewed, anyway.
“Stop,” I yelled. Everyone froze. I carefully darted out across the crooked platform, and then after I reached its foremost edge, which was only about halfway across the gap at this point, I stepped down onto the logs themselves. I moved forward a little with my legs spread to straddle the two logs, which had about a foot-and-a-half gap between them. Then, I moved both feet over to one log. That was a precarious move. I was tensed to re-assimilate in case I fell. I didn’t really relish the idea of drowning in the icy river below or getting dashed to pieces on its rocks. Then I crouched down on the log and flipped myself sideways so that the log was across my hips while my torso hung off one side, and my legs hung between the two logs. I wrapped my arms around the log for stability while I brought my legs up to hook them over the other log so that my body was extended awkwardly across the two. Then I grabbed the edge of the platform that was jutting off the logs and called back to my friends, “All right, start pushing again! Slowly!”
While they pushed from the shore, I pulled to correct the platform’s course. Each time its foremost edge bumped up against my body, I scooted farther down the logs, toward the other shore. It was a slow and arduous process that resulted in scrapes all over my body. But eventually, the platform reached all the way to the other shore, across almost the full length of the logs, which still protruded by several feet at each end.
I leapt onto shore and started stretching my stiff and aching limbs with satisfied groans.
For a minute we all stared in silent awe at our creation. I knew it would have looked like pretty shoddy craftsmanship to someone who just walked up without witnessing what the process required, and compared to a stone arch bridge that took skilled masons years to complete, it certainly was. But for something that we had thrown together in the space of mere hours with only the materials at hand, I thought it was a solid testament to our ingenuity, teamwork, and sheer determination.
My self that was still on the other side of the river surrounded by my companions swung one of my packs, lightened after the others’ sorting efforts, onto my back. Then I took the nails we’d saved before in one hand, a rock in the other, and stepped out onto the bridge. It felt awfully nice to walk upright on the platform compared to the unpleasant experience of wriggling horizontally across the logs.
On my way across I paused every few feet to hammer a nail through the platform into one of the logs below. I also stomped my feet and jumped up and down to test the carriage planks. No effect but some creaking and barely perceptible flexing. My weight didn’t seem to affect the logs at all. But then again, my weight wasn’t the real test of my bridge, the ponies’ and the centaurs’ would be.
Next, my other self led Diamond the pony over to test the bridge further. Whether she hated the fact that it had no walls between us and the thirty-foot drop into a raging river, or simply had no faith whatsoever in my engineering skills, I do not know. But as soon as she reached the start of the bridge she made
it very clear that she wanted absolutely nothing to do with it by neighing frantically and even halfheartedly rearing as she struggled to break my grip on her reins and back away.
“But Diamond, you have to, or you won’t be able to come with us,” I tried to explain. “Do you understand that? You could look for another crossing elsewhere, but I don’t know if there is one. And if there is, then it seems to me there’s a good chance that whoever destroyed this bridge so thoroughly probably got to that one too. I would hate to leave you behind in the wilderness. Diamond, please trust me. Be a brave pony. I worked hard on this bridge. I won’t let you fall. You and I are going to cross together, all right?”
Then a tinkling voice like silvery bells rang out from behind me. “Diamond, look!” Ilandere called as she danced past us onto the bridge.
My heart caught in my throat. I had really wanted to test the bridge with another equine first, any other equine but the delicate princess. But she was already out in the middle of it, and she seemed fine. She trotted all the way over to join me on the other shore.
“Diamond, it’s safe, my darling! Please come join me,” she called back over, and just like that, the pony succeeded in ripping her reins from my grasp and then instead of running away as she had clearly intended originally, she bolted across the bridge to join Ilandere and nuzzled the princess with her white snout.
“Oh, sure, now that she tells you to,” I grumbled. “Damask, I suppose you feel the same way?”
I nearly got smacked off the edge into the river by her white hindquarters as she bustled past. The clip-clopping of her hooves was louder than the creaking of the platform, although that was loud enough to make me a little nervous.
“Who’s next?” I asked.
Her ears pricked up, and her tail swished with excitement, Lizzy sashayed across with my other pack on her back. Willobee waddled after her, and Florenia glided after him.
That left Elodette, who probably weighed as much as the two ponies put together.
I tried not to let any concern show on my face as I looked over at her and smiled encouragingly. She did not smile back, but neither did she betray any flicker of trepidation. The stern black centaur simply gave me a nod and trotted forward.