‘Their teeth?’
‘Beavers chew trees down all the time, Padan,’ Rabbit said, grinning broadly. ‘And there’s a bright side to that as well.’
‘Oh?’
‘If they’ve been chewing on trees all day, their teeth will probably be so sore that they won’t want any dinner after the sun goes down. Look at all the money you’ll save if you don’t have to feed them.’
There were some violent protests when Padan ordered his men to start chopping down trees with their swords, but that came to an abrupt halt after Padan had given them an alternative. ‘Report back to Commander Narasan. I’m sure you’ll find chopping at turtle shells with your swords much more entertaining and a lot less boring than hacking down trees with them.’
Padan’s men used the simplest means of delivering the trees they’d cut down to the church armies below. They simply pulled them down the slope and rolled them into the River Vash. The two-hundred-foot-high waterfall effectively put the trees fairly close to the church soldiers.
It took the armies below a while to come up with the concept of a bridge, and their first attempt was woefully unstable.
‘If those amateurs down there try to roll one more log out on the ones they’ve already got in place, the entire thing will tumble down into the gorge and the whole crew will get killed,’ Sergeant Marpek predicted.
‘Oh,’ Sorgan said with mock concern, ‘what a shame.’
The always serious Marpek actually broke down and laughed along about then.
There were several minor disasters during the next few days as the church soldiers kept trying various short cuts to avoid building a bridge in the standard manner. Padan found the blunders moderately amusing, but the despairing screams of soldiers falling toward their deaths on the rocks far below started to get on his nerves after a while.
Sorgan dropped back from the region just upstream where his men were digging deep, twenty-foot-wide trenches and erecting rudimentary barricades on the far sides of each trench to check on the progress of the church soldiers. He arrived at the edge of the gorge just as another bridge collapsed, carrying yet another bridge crew plunging to their deaths.
‘How many times has that happened so far,’ Sorgan asked Padan.
‘I think I’ve lost count,’ Padan replied. He looked over at Rabbit. ‘Is that the sixth failure or the seventh?’ he asked.
‘I make it seven,’ Rabbit replied.
‘They’re just wasting time,’ Sorgan fumed. ‘Maybe we should stop giving them all those trees and build a bridge for them ourselves. Lowering the south end of the silly thing down to the upper edge of their ramp would be quite a bit easier than trying to lift the upper end here to the brink of the gorge. Lowering is always easier than lifting.’
‘It might come to that,’ Padan conceded. ‘How are your trenches and barricades coming along?’
‘The first three are all complete,’ Sorgan declared, ‘all except for the final decoration.’
‘Decoration?’
‘Ox came up with the notion, and I think it’ll work out just fine.’
‘What is it, Sorgan?’
‘We go back to using those poisoned stakes,’ Sorgan replied. ‘We want them to slow down, don’t we? After a dozen or so of a man’s close friends fall over dead when they’ve stepped on those poisoned stakes, that man will start to be very careful where he puts his feet down. The ones who come across that bridge later will see all that imitation gold out there and start running as fast as they can, but when a man comes to a ditch that’s about half full of his dead friends, he’ll stop running right there, wouldn’t you say? And the more they slow down, the more of their friends will catch up to them. If they dawdle around building that bridge right, they’ll give my men enough time to dig two more trenches, and that’ll probably fix it so that their whole army is up here before any of them come out of that last trench. Then we’ll warn Narasan that they’re coming and run off to the west just as fast as we can.’
‘Slick, Sorgan,’ Padan complemented the burly Maag. Then he paused. ‘Don’t you mean east?’ he asked. ‘That’s where Nanton’s pass is located.’
‘I know,’ Sorgan replied, ‘but the river runs along the east side of those trenches and barricades. I swim fairly well, but the current in that river is fierce. I don’t think I’d care to get swept over those falls, would you?’
‘Not one little bit,’ Padan agreed.
It was early the following morning when Narasan came down to Padan’s temporary camp on the west side of the River Vash. Padan had just awakened and he was kneeling by the river splashing icy water on his face to push away the usual grogginess that clouded his mind every time he woke up.
‘I thought you quit doing that a long time ago, Padan,’ Narasan said.
‘Not too likely, Narasan,’ Padan replied. ‘I need to be alert.’
‘The world always needs more lerts,’ Narasan repeated the tired old joke. ‘How are the church armies doing now that they’ve decided to build a bridge instead of a ramp?’
‘Quite a bit better than they were right at first,’ Padan replied. ‘They were in such a hurry to get to the land of gold that their first eight or ten bridges were awfully sketchy - like three trees tied together end to end with chunks of twine. After a goodly number of soldiers, priests and Regulators took up high-diving for a hobby, though, the rest of them started to wake up. A man who’s just been splattered all over a few hundred feet of river beach after he’s fallen about a hundred and fifty feet is a fairly convincing object lesson, wouldn’t you say?’
Narasan winced.
‘Their latest bridge - which isn’t finished yet - looks to be strong enough to stay in place even if a thousand men try to come across all at the same time. They’ve got braces jammed up against the underside of their new bridge every few inches, I’d swear.’
‘How much longer do you think it’s going to take them to finish?’
‘A couple more days is about all. Then they’ll all dash north, shouting “Gold! gold! gold!” right up until they reach Sorgan’s trenches and those poisoned stakes.’
‘He told me about them when I passed through his camp. He can be a very evil man when he sets his mind to something, can’t he?’
‘Fun, though,’ Padan replied with a broad grin. ‘Those poisoned stakes at the bottom of this trench will make it almost certain that the entire five church armies will be coming up to Gunda’s wall all at the same time, and that’s all we’ve ever wanted.’