Authors: Christopher Rowley
In great part this steady progress through wild country was the result of tremendous efforts by General Baxander and his staff, allied with the engineers and supply teams that had been working for Baxander since he first arrived in Sogosh. These young men saw to it that the scouting reports were evaluated and checked so that bridges could be built and ponds dug in order to collect spring water in advance of the arrival of the thirsty columns. It was these men who ensured that food supplies were received promptly. The planning staff slept barely an hour a day during this incredible march. More than anyone else, they understood what a feat their army was attempting.
Far ahead, ranging from tribal capital to tribal capital went the Grey Lady and her companion Lagdalen of the Tarcho, soaring on the back of a great batrukh. Here Lessis was in her element, casting subtle attraction spells, overawing the simple, stouthearted Impalo men with the power of her witchcraft, not to mention the appearance of the monstrous batrukh, dropping out of the skies upon their villages. Batrukhs were known only from nightmarish legends. They came from the Lands of Terror in the uttermost west and swooped down to devour whatever caught their eyes. To find one as peaceable as a horse, under the guidance of the Great Witch Lessis was a stunning experience for these men.
And so they were as pliable as rope in the hands of Lessis and gave every assistance they could to the marching army.
All day the mountains hung there ahead of them, growing larger imperceptibly as they crept westward. Wrinkles on their distant outlines turned into vast buttresses of grey stone, overhanging green shoulders and rippling foothills. Clouds often clung to the higher elevations, cloaking the snow from their view, providing spectacular banners of crimson glory at sunset.
The army marched, making history as it went.
This advance did not go unnoticed by the enemy that was its target. Most nights their campfires were overflown by other batrukhs, fell servants of the power in the West. That power watched the army's remorseless progress with mounting anxiety. In furious reaction it drove its slaves to fashion the great sword for its right hand.
Alas, there were difficulties. Such enormous quantities of metal were hard to smelt and harder to cast successfully. One accident slew sixty men who were standing too close.
Thus the enemy read each day's report of the army's march with growing anxiety. The days ahead were measured with passionate concern.
"I thought that if they were the Ramparts of the Sun, that we'd at least see some sun. Not just this accursed cloud."
The speaker was Swane of Revenant, wrapped, like everyone else, in every stitch of clothing from his pack, and still shivering as they tramped along a trail over harsh-edged shale, drenched in cold mist.
"The sun, the sun, what I would give to see the sun," groaned Endi.
"Dragons are better off, not so hot for them," said Relkin, groping for a positive point.
"Speak for yourself, boy," grumbled Bazil, directly behind him. "This dragon would welcome a little sunlight. Anything to lift our spirits."
"This air is too thin, too cold," moaned Mono.
"Look at the bright side," said Manuel, "the way is level now, we're over the climb."
"By the breath, Manuel's right."
"That is one boy with wits about him," said Alsebra.
"We've reached the top," shouted someone else.
A cheer went up that quickly died away beneath the cold, muffling fog. Shivering, they pulled their kit around themselves and went on.
The cold was the worst thing for the dragonboys, who had only tropical kit. That morning they had had to melt drinking water again, and they would have to do it in the evening, too. This came on top of the general irritability, the constant fatigue and headache caused by the thin air.
The dragons didn't mind the cold, but they disliked the thin air, all except for the Purple Green, who was positively cheered by the experience. High gloomy places such as this pass winding through the mountains had once been a favorite haunt. But that had been in his previous life when he still had the power of flight. However, the lack of sunshine made the wyverns snappish.
For days it seemed they had been on this road to nowhere, tramping ever upward into white banks of cold mist that only seemed to grow thicker the higher one went.
At night they could see no stars, no glimmer of the moon. In the chill night air, they shivered on the ground or gathered together around the few fires that could be allowed from their dwindling supply of firewood and tried to warm themselves. It wasn't easy with so many gathered around them. They slept poorly and grew more irritable as a result.
Most irritable of all was Dragon Leader Wiliger. Now Wiliger came striding past, en route from somewhere behind them in the column to somewhere ahead. He rarely spoke to them or passed on any information. Now he passed with barely a nod, then he stopped and turned to bark.
"I want to see that joboquin fully repaired by lights out, Dragoneer Endi."
"Yes, sir."
"And, Dragoneer Relkin, I haven't forgotten those wood-splitting details. As soon as we reach a woodlot, you'll be busy again."
"Yes, sir."
Then Wiliger was gone, hastening away along the line of march.
"Where's he off to in such a flaming hurry?" groused Swane.
"Who cares as long as he stays there," said Relkin.
"I wish he'd fall off a cliff and break his neck," said Endi. "He's been riding me about the joboquin for two days now, all because a single strap was broken."
"The higher we go, the worse he gets."
"He's been strange ever since Koubha."
"He ought to be, he pulled a stupid prank. Could have been killed."
Swane shook his head in disgust. "I never thought I'd say this, but I really wish we had ol' Turrent back."
"To think that we've come to that," said Manuel from the back.
They continued to march, one foot after the other across the wet shale. It was slippery in places, and after negotiating some of these, they noticed that they were trending down.
They had gone over the top of the pass and were on the downward path.
It was an hour later that they finally broke out of the dense mists. Slowly these thinned and then all at once the sun broke through and they were out of the fog and under the bright warm sun once again.
They turned around a bend in the course of the road and emerged onto a view that took their breaths away. A green world of endless forest that stretched away into the dim distance. They cheered, but looking at that forest Relkin felt a premonition. Once they were over the mountains, they would be in a new world, completely cut off from their own. How many of them would ever return?
The raft was a beauty. Confronted with untouched virgin forest, the legion engineers had selected only mature keem and menelo trees. These provided straight trunks sixty to one hundred feet long that were highly water resistant. They had been lashed together in threes, then these triples were combined into larger and larger platforms to carry men, dragons, horses, and oxen.
Baxander blessed the planning that had gone into every facet of the expedition. The witches had suggested the route and located the prime stands of keem and menelo that they had converted into rafts. The engineers and their teams of workers had been ready to build the selfsame rafts and had brought special equipment and joiners for the task. The men and the dragons had thrown their effort into the task with a will.
In just a matter of a few days they had cut the forest, trimmed the timber, and built rafts to ferry twenty thousand men, horses, dragons, and oxen down the great river Chugnuth, which was marked on their maps as flowing toward the vaguely delineated "Lands of Terror."
The Czardhan knights had been perhaps the most astonished of all. At breathtaking speed they had seen trees cut, trimmed, assembled, and then built into rafts. They had stripped to the waists themselves to aid in this effort, under the orders of humble born Cunfshon engineers and witches. The whole thing had been an amazing overthrow of aristocratic precedent, but they had done it willingly. They and their horses were now afloat, drifting downstream at a steady pace, and they were still marveling at it.
If it had been simply left to them to do, they would still have been arguing about whose job it was to cut the trees and whose to trim them. Most likely there would have been fighting over the matter. Count Felk-Habren would have had to adjudicate half a dozen duels.
The knights had been deeply impressed by the ingrained efficiency of the legions. The Czardhans had taken part in dozens of military campaigns, all of them fought at a lethargic level, and they were thus well aware of the contrast.
It brought up unwelcome thoughts about the very nature of their quarrelsome societies. Each state in Czardha, large or small, was a seething nest of intrigues, quarrels, and constant small-scale wars.
The raft for dragons had a layer of keem trunks on the bottom and a layer of roughly trimmed menelo planks on top to provide decking. Around the sides was a stout rail and at the front end there was an outrigger fender, constructed of keem branches bound together into a huge, fat roll that was then propped up on menelo beams fastened to the raft. At the rear of the raft stood piles of firewood. The rest of the surface, forty feet across and sixty long, was given over to dragons and men.
The river they floated on was enormous, considerably wider than the Argo, and it ran smoothly enough that they had little to do other than pole off occasional snags and waterlogged trees and avoid the other rafts—a veritable armada of rafts, that was bearing the allied army down the river toward its goal at a pace somewhat faster than that of a walking man. They went steadily, with hardly any interruption, bearing the sword to their great enemy.
The river trended south and west, and bore them toward the Inland Sea and the heartland of the Kraheen empire.
The fleet of rafts was lashed together at night, anchored in the middle of the river, since Baxander could not risk losing rafts in nighttime travel. In the mornings, after a brisk boil-up on the shore, a vast breakfast was consumed and then the fleet broke up and drifted downstream all day. In the early evening, they gathered together once more and parties were sent out to find food in the forest. So far they had been able to supplement their stocks of grain with considerable amounts of game and edible foods from the forest.
In just a few weeks they would reach their target. They had made the journey from Koubha in astonishing time. With luck they would reach the enemy before he could truly concentrate his strength. General Baxander felt a surge of pride at the thought. The Empire of the Rose had thrown this expeditionary army right across the world like some enormous dagger, aimed at the throat of the enemy's enterprise here on the dark continent. They would earn a glorious place in the history of the empire, and indeed of the entire world.
The men and the dragons were, frankly, enjoying this part of the expedition. They had marched more than four hundred miles in not much more than a month. After that they were ready for the rest and here it was, floating lazily downstream day after day, beneath the equatorial sun. Being soldiers they took the opportunity to sleep as much as possible. The evening foraging was something that many looked forward to eagerly. They brought in everything, from bushpigs to edible gourds.
Relkin's raft held four dragons: Bazil, Vlok, the Purple Green, and Alsebra. In addition to dragonboys, there were a dozen legionaries, tucked in wherever they could find a crack. Traveling on another raft, Wiliger had put Manuel in charge of the unit. The legionaries were under Corporal Klake, a bluff, no-nonsense veteran of seven years. Everyone was a little crowded, since dragon equipment took up a lot of space on its own, but they had found ways to cooperate.
One dragon at a time was equipped with the big pole. Several men were assigned smaller poles and designated to assist the dragon in pushing away snags and other rafts.
Having more than one dragon moving around much on the raft tended to make it pitch, so the dragons were forced to sit in their respective places for most of the time.
When the fleet came to a halt and cooking fires were lit, the dragons would all go over the side for a swim about the river. They hunted for fish and proved adept at catching the slower ones. There were crocodiles and river sharks, too, but neither proved much of a problem since they were much smaller than the dragons and generally avoided them.
Meals were enormous, and the dragons usually contributed a few of the larger river fish to the daily pot of stew. There were some kinds of river fish that grew to ten feet in length and several hundred pounds in weight. A few of these fed a whole regiment.
During these mealtime gatherings, the witches and medics were active, making sure that everyone took their quinine-laced drink that day.
Thus they made progress, moving quite swiftly down the river, heading west and south, leaving the Ramparts of the Sun behind them and with them all connection to the rest of the world. And throughout this period they saw almost nothing of native peoples. Once they saw distant columns of smoke, and another time they glimpsed some small canoes hurrying away from them, but that was all. They were left with the immense river, the jungles on either side, and the raucous creatures that inhabited them.
Relkin, Jak, and Swane had formed a hunting party that afternoon. Once the cookshacks had been set up and water put to boil, they took their bows and stalked the forest downstream.
Once under the trees, they moved through a twilight world in an atmosphere of hushed peace redolent with the stink of mud and decay. The trunks of trees were like grey pillars supporting the distant canopy. Poisonous frogs of glorious red and yellow clung to the bark. Insects murmured in the warm air. Every now and then they came upon a clearing where some forest giant had fallen. In these clearings a riot of small trees and vines competed for the light. Such places were good for finding game. Forest antelope or bushpigs might be spotted at this time of day. Bushpig was especially popular among the dragons.