For the next couple of generations the dispute simmered, sometimes breaking out in armed forays from Huy across the stream to the land they claimed on its western bank. About a mile and a half of the length of the stream was in dispute. The Alуn was some thirty yards wide at its shallowest, narrower where it ran between banks five feet high. There were some good trout pools in the northern end of the disputed reach. The forays from Huy always met fierce resistance from Meyun. Whenever the Huyans succeeded in keeping the piece of land west of the Alуn, they put up a wall around it in a semicircle out from the stream and back. The men of Meyun would then gather their forces, lead a foray against the wall, drive the Huyans back across the Alуn, pull the Huyans’ wall down, and erect a wall running along the east side of the stream for a mile and a half.
But that was the part of the stream to which the Huyan herders were accustomed to drive their cattle to drink. They would immediately begin pulling down the Meyunian wall. Archers of Meyun shot at them, hitting sometimes a man, sometimes a cow. The rage of Huy boiled over, and another foray burst forth from the gates of the city and retook the land west of the Alуn. Peacemakers intervened. The Council of the Fathers of Meyun met in conclave, the Council of the Mothers of Huy met in conclave, they ordered the combatants to withdraw, sent messengers and diplomats back and forth across the Alуn, tried to reach a settlement, and failed. Or sometimes they succeeded, but then a cowherd of Huy would take his cattle across the stream into the rich pastures where since time immemorial they had grazed, and cowherds of Meyun would round up the trespassing herds and drive them to the walled paddocks of their city, and the cowherd of Huy would rush home vowing to bring down the wrath of Bult upon the thieves and get his cattle back. Or two fishermen fishing the quiet pools of the Alуn above the cattle crossing would quarrel over whose pools they were fishing, and stride back to their respective cities vowing to keep poachers out of their waters. And it would all start up again.
Not a great many were killed in these forays, but still they caused a fairly steady mortality among the young men of both cities. At last the Councilwomen of Huy decided that this running sore must be healed once for all, and without bloodshed. As so often, invention was the mother of discovery. Copper miners of Huy had recently developed a powerful explosive. The Councilwomen saw in it the means to end the war.
They ordered out a large workforce. Guarded by archers and spearmen, these Huyans, by furious digging and the planting of explosive charges in the ground, in the course of twenty-six hours changed the course of the Alon for the whole disputed mile and half. With their explosives they dammed the stream and dug a channel that led it to run in an arc along the border they claimed, west of its old course. This new course followed the line of ruins of the various walls they had built and Meyun had torn down.
They then sent messengers across the meadows to Meyun to announce, in polite and ceremonious terms, that peace between the cities was restored, since the boundary Meyun had always claimed—the east bank of the river Alon—was acceptable to Huy, so long as the cattle of Huy were allowed to drink at certain watering places on the eastern bank.
A good part of the Council of Meyun was willing to accept this solution. They admitted that the wily women of Huy were bilking them out of their property; but it was only a bit of pastureland not two miles long and less than a half mile wide; and their fishing rights to the pools of the Alon were no longer to be in question. They urged acceptance of the new course of the river. But sterner minds refused to yield to chicanery. The Lactor General made a speech in which he cried that every inch of that precious soil was drenched in the red blood of the sons of Mey and made sacred by the starry cloak of Tarv. That speech turned the vote.
Meyun had not yet invented very effective explosives, but it is easier to restore a stream to its natural course than to induce it to follow an artificial one. A wildly enthusiastic workforce of citizens, digging furiously, guarded by archers and spearmen, returned the Alуn to its bed in the course of a single night.
There was no resistance, no bloodshed, for the Council of Huy, bent on peace, had forbidden their guards to attack the party from Meyun. Standing on the east bank of the Alon, having met no opposition, smelling victory in the air, the Lactor General cried, “Forward, men! Crush the conniving strumpets once and for all!” And with one cry, says the annalist, all the archers and spearmen of Meyun, followed by many of the citizens who had come to help move the river back to its bed, rushed across the half mile of meadow to the walls of Huy.
They broke into the city, but the city guards were ready for them, as were the citizens, who fought like tigers to defend their homes. When, after an hour’s bloody fighting, the Lactor General was slain—felled by a forty-pint butter churn shoved out a window onto his head by an enraged housewife—the forces of Meyun retreated in disorder back to the Alуn. They regrouped and defended the stream bravely until nightfall, when they were driven back across it and took refuge within their own city walls. The guards and citizens of Huy did not try to enter Meyun, but went back and planted explosives and dug all night to restore the Alуn to its new, west-curving course.
Given the highly infectious nature of technologies of destruction, it was inevitable that Meyun should discover how to make explosives as powerful as those of their rival. What was perhaps unusual was that neither city chose to use them as a weapon. As soon as Meyun had the explosives, their army, led by a man in the newly created rank of Sapper General, marched out and blew up the dam across the old bed of the Alуn. The river rushed into its former course, and the army marched back to Meyun.
Under their new Supreme Engineer, appointed by the disappointed and vindictive Councilwomen of Huy, the guards marched out and did some sophisticated dynamiting which, by blocking the old course and deepening the access to the new course of the river, led the Alуn to flow happily back into the latter.
Henceforth the territorialism of the two city-states was expressed almost entirely in explosions. Though many soldiers and citizens and a great many cows were killed, as technological improvements led to ever more powerful agents of destruction which could blow up ever larger quantities of earth, these charges were never planted as mines with the intention of killing. Their sole purpose was to fulfill the great aim of Meyun and Huy: to change the course of the river.
For nearly a hundred years the two city-states devoted the greatest part of their energies and resources to this purpose.
By the end of the century, the landscape of the region had been enormously and irrevocably altered. Once green meadows had sloped gently down to the willow-clad banks of the little Alуn with its clear trout pools, its rocky narrows, its muddy watering places and cattle crossings where cows stood dreaming udder-deep in the cool shallows. In place of this there was now a canyon, a vast chasm, half a mile across from lip to lip and nearly two thousand feet deep. Its overhanging walls were of raw earth and shattered rock. Nothing could grow on them; even when not destabilised by repeated explosions, they eroded in the winter rains, slipping down continually in rockfalls and landslides that blocked the course of the brown, silt-choked torrent at the bottom, forcing it to undercut the walls on the other side, causing more slides and erosion, which kept widening and lengthening the canyon.
Both the cities of Meyun and Huy now stood only a few hundred yards from the edge of a precipice. They hurled defiance at each other across the abyss which had eaten up their pastures, their fields, their cattle, and all their thubes of gold.