"You and I aren't particularly fond of each other, so there's no point in dragging it out. I've given my word to her Grace, the Duchess of Erat, that I'll come to your aid when Kal Torak assaults your city, and I'll do that. In return, however, I want your oath that when the battle's done, my people will be permitted to return to Asturia unmolested by Mimbrate knights."
"Asturia no longer exists," Korodullin asserted.
"Come up to our forest and say that, foolish boy," Mayaserana told him.
"Mimbrate bones are turning green and mossy under every bush. One more set won't seriously add to the clutter."
They were getting along just splendidly.
Polgara stepped in at that point and badgered Eldallan and Al dorigen into exchanging oaths. Eldallan swore to take his assigned place beside the Rivans and Sendars on Kal Torak's north flank, and Alodrigen vowed that the Mimbrate knights wouldn't interfere with the Asturians on their way home. The entire matter could have been resolved by the Sendarian intermediaries, of course, but Eldallan had another reason for coming to Vo Mimbre. He broached it after he and Aldorigen had exchanged oaths.
"It occurs to me that we've got too good an opportunity to pass up, Aldorigen," he said in an insolent tone of voice.
"I will hear thy words, Eldallan." Aldorigen's tone was cool and offensively superior.
"Whole generations are likely to pass before the rulers of Mimbre and Asturia are so conveniently close to each other, wouldn't you say?"
Aldorigen's eyes brightened.
"A most acute perception, my Lord,"
he replied. It was the first time either of them had addressed the other with any kind of respect.
"Why not seize the day, my Lord?" Eldallan suggested.
"Once we've eliminated the annoyance of Kal Torak, you and I could go to some private place and discuss our differences--at length." He laid his hand suggestively on the hilt of his sheathed rapier.
"I'm sure you'll find my arguments very pointed."
An almost beneficent smile came over Aldorigen's face.
"What a splendid suggestion, my Lord," he said warmly.
"Until that day, then, my Lord," Eldallan said with a deep bow.
"Stay out of it, Poll" I sent the thought out sharply.
"This is supposed to happen!"
The thought she threw back at me doesn't bear repeating.
"And you, rash youth, will stay away when our fathers meet,"
Mayaserana said to Korodullin.
"I'm Asturian, and my hand was built to hold a bow. Your bones can turn green here in Mimbre just as well as they can in Asturia."
"Come not within bow-shot of my father, outlaw wench," he replied, "not if thou wilt have further need of thine head."
Then Eldallan and his feisty daughter were escorted out.
"Now is my day complete!" Aldorigen exulted.
"Were it not so unnatural, I could almost embrace that foul villain, Eldallan!"
Arends, I sighed, rolling my scroll back up.
It took Kal Torak another week to reach the upper end of that large plain that surrounds Vo Mimbre, and he stopped there to regroup and to send out scouts. I started getting nervous at that point.
"What's keeping you?" I threw the thought at Beldin.
"I've still got ten legions coming down the river," he replied.
"Beldin, Torak's almost in my lap here! Can't you send the ones you've already got on hand?"
"Didn't we decide not to do it that way? Torak's not going to be very intimidated by the legions if I just dribble them in. The whole force has to arrive at the same time."
"How much longer before you'll be able to sail?"
"A couple of days. Then Eldrig's got to pick up the Imperial Guard at Tol Honeth and those training legions there and at Tol Vordue. Give us a week."
"If Torak starts his attack in the next day or so, you'll get here after it's all over. The Mrin says that the battle's going to last for three days. The first two days will probably only be skirmishes, but you absolutely must be here on that third day."
"You've got your work cut out for you, then. All you've got to do is keep him away from the walls of Vo Mimbre for five days. Then fight him for the first two days of the battle. I'll be there on the third day, and we can get down to business."
"Don't be late."
"Trust me."
I went to the door of my room in Aldorigen's palace.
"I need a large current map of southern Arendia," I told the sentry patrolling the hallway.
"At once, Holy Belgarath," he replied, clashing one steel-gauntleted fist against his breastplate. Mimbrates are so noisy!
When he returned with the map, I spread it out on the table and got down to work. The more I studied the map, the more feasible the half-formed plan in my mind began to seem.
"Polgara," I silently called my daughter.
"I need you."
It only took her a couple of minutes to reach my door.
"Yes, father?"
she said.
"I want you to go have a talk with Eldallan," I instructed.
"I need a thousand or so of his archers. Beldin's still a week away, so we've got to delay Torak for five days."
"I don't think a thousand bowmen could quite manage that, father."
"They can if the people they're shooting at are out in the middle of a river trying to rebuild a bridge." I showed her the map.
"There are a dozen tributaries feeding down into the River Arend," I pointed out, "and twenty-five years of steady rain has them all running bank-full. I'm going to have Aldorigen send out a force of Mimbrates to destroy the bridges. I want archers on the west banks of those streams. It's very hard to concentrate on building bridges when it's raining arrows. That might just delay Torak for the five days we need."
"I'd imagine so, yes. You can be a very nasty old man when you set your mind to it."
"I try." I scowled at the map for a moment.
"You'll have to stay with those archers," I decided, "and I'll be with the Mimbrates. The two forces have to be coordinated, and direct contact between Mimbrates and Asturians isn't a very good idea. Get started, Pol. I'll go explain the plan to Aldorigen."
It just so happened that the commander of the Asturian archers Pol brought down onto the eastern side of the plain of Mimbre was a fiery young nobleman, the Baron of Wildantor, and the knight who led my Mimbrate bridge-wreckers was the Baron of Vo Mandor. Garion's friend can be very obvious at times. Pol and I were careful to keep Mandorallen's ancestor some distance away from Leildorin's. I'd devoted a lot of time to those two families, so I didn't want any accidents.
Our strategy wasn't particularly profound. We advanced eastward until we began encountering Kal Torak's scouts. The Mimbrate knights trampled them under, and we pressed on, crossing bridges every few miles. When we began to encounter stiffer resistance, the archers raked the opposing force with arrows, and then the Mimbrates charged.
It doesn't sound very complicated, but it kept Pol and me hopping. I had to go through the ranks of the Mimbrate knights each and every time, pointing out the fact that they were supposed to charge the Angaraks rather than the Asturians. At the same time, Pol had to remind the archers that they weren't supposed to shoot at Mimbrates.
We eventually reached a wide tributary that had several thousand Murgos camped on its east bank. I called Pol and the two barons in to discuss strategy.
"This is about as far east as we need to go," I told them.
"Let's wreck the west end of the bridges crossing this river and then pull back to the next stream."
"I will delay their pursuit," Wildantor declared.
"No, actually you won't," I told him firmly.
"You're not going to start doing that until we've crossed two more rivers."
"I'm sworn to delay them!" The young baron had red hair--and all that implies.
"Listen carefully, Lord Baron," I told him.
"I don't want the Murgos to even kn
ow that you're here for a while yet. Mandor's Mimbrates will destroy the bridges here; then we'll pull back to the next river, and he'll do it again. Then we'll do it for the third time on the next river to the west. The Murgos will have developed a pattern by then. They'll rush forward in a mass carrying timbers with them to repair the bridges. When they come to the fourth river, you'll have lots of targets out there in the water. I want the surface of that river absolutely covered with the floating bodies of dead Murgos. After that, they're going to be very cautious when they come to a river."
He frowned and thought it over. It took him a while. Then his eyes brightened, and his face broke into a broad grin.
"I like it!" he exclaimed.
"Though it seemeth me a most unnatural thing, my Lord of Wildantor," the Baron of Vo Mandor said,
"I find myself growing fond of thee. Thine exuberance is contagious, methinks."
"You're not so bad yourself, Mandor," the Asturian admitted.
"Why don't we agree not to kill each other when this is over?"
"Doth that not violate the precepts of our religion?" Mandor said it with an absolutely straight face, and that sent Wildantor off into gales of laughter.
It wasn't much, but it was a start in the right direction.
My rudimentary plan worked surprisingly well--although, given the limited mentality of Murgos, I don't know why I was surprised. Lulled into a sense of security by the lack of any opposition to their bridge-building operations, the Murgos, as I'd predicted, rushed whole regiments carrying timbers to the east bank of the fourth river. Wildantor held his archers in check until the Murgos had their spans reaching out to the middle of the river. Then he sounded his horn as a signal to his hidden archers.
The Asturian arrows arched overhead like a slithering rainbow, and the Murgos quite literally melted off their half-completed bridges to fill the river with floating corpses.
Then Wildantor waited, exercising remarkable self-control for an Arend.
The Murgos left on the banks crept forward fearfully, their shields held protectively over their heads.
Still Wildantor waited.
Eventually the Murgos decided that the archers had withdrawn, and they resumed their construction.
Then the second rainbow of arrows swept the bridges clean again.
The surviving Murgos gathered on the east bank, screaming curses at the still-unseen archers.
It was at that point that the Baron of Wildantor gave the shrieking Murgos a pointed demonstration of the incredible range of the Asturian longbow. His third rainbow piled heaps of dead Murgos along the east bank of a river that was fully two hundred paces wide.
"Splendid!" Mandor cheered.
"Capital!"
Then we withdrew again, retreating back to the fifth tributary of the River Arend. Wildantor and his archers brought up the rear, pausing every few hundred paces to rake the pursuing Murgos with yard-long arrows, thus giving the Mimbrate knights time to tear down all the bridges except one. Then the Asturians sprayed the Murgos with a prolonged arrow-storm, closed up shop, and retreated across the lone remaining bridge.
As you might expect, Wildantor stood his ground at the east end of the bridge until all his men were safely across. His hands seemed almost to blur as he loosed arrow after arrow into the faces of the advancing Murgos. Then he ran out of arrows, turned, and started across the bridge.
The Mimbrate knights had weakened the bridge timbers to the point that a good healthy sneeze would have made the whole thing collapse, and somewhere up in the mountains to the northeast, Garion's friend sneezed. A cloudburst, one of the last gasps of that quarter-century-long rainstorm, had filled every ravine and gully with rushing water; it all came down that tributary in a ten-foot wave.
The bridge dissolved under Wildantor's feet.
I rushed to the west band, drawing in my Will.
"Stay out of it, father!" Pol snapped at me.
"But--" "It's already been taken care of."
The Baron of Vo Mandor set his spurs to his horse's flanks, galloped down to the next bridge, and rolled out of his saddle with a vast clanking of armor. He ran out on the shattered remnants of that wrecked bridge to its very teetering end, knelt, and stretched his arm down toward the seething water.
"Wildantor!" he bellowed in a voice they probably heard in Vo Mimbre.
"To me!"
The red-haired Asturian was being carried down-river at a ferocious speed, but he angled across the current and reached up his arm as he was swept past the splintered end of the ruined bridge. The hands of the two men came together with a resounding smack, and the Mimbrate leaned back, literally jerking the Asturian up out of the current. Then he caught hold of the back of Wildantor's tunic and swung him up to safety.
Wildantor lay face-down for a minute or two, spluttering, coughing, and spitting out a quart or so of muddy water. Then he raised his face with a broad grin.
"You've got a nice firm grip there, Mandor," he said.
"You could probably break rocks without using a hammer." He sat up, massaged the hand the Mimbrate had nearly crushed, and looked around.
"I guess I'd better get my bowmen in place," he said as if nothing had happened.
"We'll hold off the Murgos while you and your knights go tear down some more bridges."
"Right," Mandor said. He rose, clanking, pulled Wildantor to his feet, and went back to his horse.
Neither of them ever spoke of the incident again, but the sound of that resounding smack when their hands met still seemed to echo in my mind, and it somehow gave me hope for the future.
We continued our slow withdrawal, but after that fifth tributary, where Wildantor's archers took a dreadful toll on the advancing Murgos, King Ad Rak Cthoros of Murgodom found something very pressing for his soldiers to do elsewhere, and the Thulls were given the chore of rebuilding bridges. Somehow it always seems to work out that way in Angarak society.
All right, our little exercise wasn't really very creative, but it slowed Kal Torak's advance for the requisite five days. Always look for the simplest solution to any problem. It's when you start getting exotic that things begin to go wrong.
The clouds began to blow off during the afternoon of the day when the Thulls finished repairing the bridges crossing the last remaining tributary of the River Arend. Pol and I decided that there wasn't much point in wasting lives trying to hold back the advancing Angaraks any more. We'd achieved the delay we needed, so we took our forces inside the walls of Vo Mimbre and closed the gates behind us.
The sunset that evening was glorious, and it promised that we would have clear, sunny skies for the first day of the Battle of Vo Mimbre.
CHAPTER FORTY
The southern wall of the city of Vo Mimbre rises out of the River Arena, and the seemingly endless rains of the past quarter century had filled the river to overflowing. That made an attack from that front highly unlikely, so we only had three sides to defend.
I went along the top of the golden walls as dusk gathered over Vo Mimbre to check the defenses before I settled in for the night. I'm sure the Mimbrates knew what they were doing, but it never hurts to make sure, particularly when you're dealing with Arends. I found my two barons, Mandor and Wildantor, standing on the parapet over the main gate looking out gravely at the gradually darkening plain.
"Is One-eye moving at all?" I asked them.
"A few advance parties is all," the green-tun iced Wildantor replied.
"He'll probably wait until after dark to take up his positions. If we get a decent moon tonight, my archers can make camping right under our wall very expensive for him."
"Save your arrows," I told him.
"There'll be plenty of targets when the sun comes up."
"We've got lots of arrows, Belgarath. Mandor here's got Mimbrate fletchers turning them out for us by the barrelful."
"I did note that Asturian arrows are much longer than ours by reason of the extreme length of the Asturian bow." Mandor noted, shift
ing his armor.
"Since we are temporarily allies, it seemed to me provident to give our friends an ample supply."
"Isn't he a nice boy?" Wildantor said outrageously, flashing his friend that infectious grin of his.
Mandor laughed. The impudent young redhead seemed to charm him to the point that he was willing to lay aside two eons of hereditary enmity. I approved of that. Their friendship was a good sign of things to come.
"You gentlemen might as well get some sleep," I told them.
"Tomorrow's going to be a long day." Then I left them and went on down to my room.
Polgara was sitting by the fire waiting for me.
"Where have you been?" she asked me.
I shrugged.
"Having a look at the defenses."
"The Mimbrates have been preparing for a siege of this city for over two thousand years, father. They know what they're doing. I'm going to be gone for a look around."
"Be careful out there."
"Of course. Are you going to bed?"
"Why bother? I'm not going to be able to sleep. I want to talk with Beldin anyway. Don't be out all night." How many fathers have ever said that?
She nodded a bit distantly, and then she left.
"Beldin," I sent out the thought, "are you making any progress?"
"We're at Tol Honeth," he replied.
"We'll start down-river in the morning. How are things going there?"
"We managed to delay Torak. We're inside the city now. I expect he'll try to pay us a call first thing in the morning. Are you going to make it in time?"
"It shouldn't be any problem. It's only forty leagues down the river and another forty to Tol Vordue. We should reach the mouth of the River Arend sometime day after tomorrow."
"You won't be able to count on a following wind when you start up the river, you know."
"Then we'll row. That's why oars were invented. Do me a favor and keep Torak out of Vo Mimbre. We're working on a tight schedule, so I won't have time to take the city back from him. Don't pester me any more, Belgarath.
I'm busy."
I grunted and wandered down the hall to talk with the twins. I didn't really have anything important to say to them, but I was feeling edgy, and I needed some company.
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