He then sat and pondered what to do about these dangerous ad libs. O Shing was getting out of hand.
xiii) King Vodicka
Half an hour after the night had regained its natural darkness Volstokin's King concluded that he had been used by greater, darker powers to play attention-grabber while Evil slithered in to gnaw at the underbelly of the
West.
After writing brief letters to Kavelin's Queen, his mother, and his brother, he threw himself from the parapet of his prison tower.
FIFTEEN: Baxendala
i) The site
Baxendala was a prosperous town of two thousand twenty-five miles west of Maisak. Its prosperity was due to its being the last or first chance for commerical vices for the caravans. The mountain passage was long and trying. Ragnarson had chosen to fight there because of topography.
The townsite had once marked the western limit of the huge glacier that had cut the pass. The valley, that became the Gap, there narrowed to a two-mile-wide, steep-sided canyon, the floor of which, near the town, was piled with glacial leavings.
Baxendala itself was built against the north flank of a sugarloaf hill half a mile wide, two long, and two hundred feet high, astride a low ridge that ran to the flank of Seidentop, a steep, brush-wooly mountain constricting the north wall of the canyon. The River Ebeler ran around the south side of the loaf where the valley, in a long, lazy curve, had been dug a bit deeper, and, because of barriers a dozen miles farther west, had formed a shallow marsh three-quarters of a mile wide. The marsh lay hard against both the sugarloaf and the steep southern wall of the valley. A narrow strip of brushy, firm ground ran below the southern face. It could be easily held by a small force.
Atop the sugarloaf, commanding a good eastern view, stood a small fortress, Karak Strabger. From it Ragnarson could follow every detail of battle. By anchoring his flanks on Seidentop and Baxendala, along the ridge, he could defend a space little more than half a mile wide. There was no more defensible site to the west, and but one equaling it farther east. And Sir Andvbur, having fought there last autumn, knew that ground better than he.
Ragnarson descended on the town two weeks after the night of the demon. The Strabger family fled so hurriedly they left breakfast half-cooked in the castle kitchen. The rebel forces were training farther east, near the snow line. Three days after Bragi's arrival an attempt was made to dislodge him. Baron Berlich led the rebel knights into another Lieneke. His attack collapsed under a shower of Itaskian arrows. Berlich himself was slain.
The survivors, to Ragnarson's dismay, suffered an attack of rationality. When they selected a new commander they chose the man he believed most dangerous, Sir Andvbur Kimberlin.
Kimberlin opted for Fabian tactics. He took up a defensive position at the site of his previous year's battle. His patrols tried to lure Ragnarson into attack. Bragi ignored them.
Though Kimberlin's force, at eight thousand, was the largest Ragnarson had yet faced, he was more concerned with the sorcery-rich army the Captal would bring out of Maisak.
Bragi waited, skirmished, fortified, scouted, husbanded his resources. He constantly reminded his officers of the need to stand firm here. To, if necessary, endure the heaviest casualties. The enemy would be stopped at Baxendala, or not at all. The west depended on them. There would be no stopping Shinsan if this stand failed.
ii) The waiting
Ragnarson stood on the parapet of Karak Strabger's lone tower and surveyed the power that was, for the moment, his. He had twenty-five thousand Kaveliners, plus the men he had brought south. In the west, on the horizons and beyond, great clouds of dust hung in the spring haze. Surprising allies were hurrying to join him.
One cloud, on the caravan route, marked Shanight of Anstokin with the regiments raised to invade Volstokin. North of him came Jostrand of Volstokin and three thousand puzzled veterans of Lake Berberich and Vodicka's defeat. In Heidershied, rushing in forty-mile marches, was Prince Raithel of Altea, a hard-driving old warrior who had won glory and honor during the wars. Ragnarson hoped Raithel would arrive in time. His ten thousand were the best soldiers in the Lesser Kingdoms. He had heard there were troops on the move in Tamerice and Ruderin and kingdoms farther away.
This curdling of the Lesser Kingdoms into a one-faced force with chin thrust belligerently eastward had begun the night of the red demon.
The sudden power and responsibility awed Ragnarson. Princes and kings were coming to be commanded by a man who had been but a farmer a year ago...
There were others who awed him more than Shanight, Jostrand, or Raithel.
Beside the sugarloaf, above Baxendala, stood a dozen tents set off by ropes. One housed his old friend Count Visigodred of Mendalayas, another Haroun's dread (acquaintance, Zindahjira. The denizens of the others he knew only by repute: Keirle the Ancient; Barco Crecelius of Hellin Daimiel; Stojan Dusan from Prost Kamenets; Gromachi, the Egg of God; The Hermit of Ormrebotn; Boershig Abresch from Songer in Ringerike; Klages Dunivin; Serkes Holdgraver of the Fortress of Frozen Fire; and the Thing With Many Eyes, from the shadowed deeps of the Temple of Jiankoplos in Simballawein.
One tent stood alone, as if the others had crowded away. Before it stood a battered Imperial standard. Within lurked the man whose capital-hopping had started so many armies toward Baxendala, whose name frightened children into good behavior and made grown men glance over their shoulders. Varthlokkur.
His appearance guaranteed the gravity of the conflict. The high and the mighty, from Simballawein to Iwa Skolovda, would hold all else in abeyance till they knew what was afoot.
Even the Greyfells party, Ragnarson had heard, had joined the truce.
Ragnarson had mixed feelings about Varthlokkur's presence. The man could, without a doubt, be an asset. But what about old grudges? Varthlokkur owed himself and Mocker.
But Mocker, who had most to fear, was in and out of the wizard's tent constantly, when not hiding from soldiers he had bilked with crooked dice.
Ragnarson smiled weakly. Mocker was incorrigible. A middle-aged adolescent.
He spied signal smoke up the Gap. Heliograph operators bustled about him. He returned to the war room he had set up in the castle's great hall.
While awaiting the report, he asked Kildragon, "How's Rolf?" Preshka had insisted on coming east.
"The same. He'll never heal if he won't take time out." "And the evacuation?" He had been trying to get civilians to leave the area.
"About hit the limit. The rest mean to stay no matter what."
"Guess we've done what we could. Can't force people... Colonel Kiriakos?"
He had surveyed the man's work from the parapet. He and Phiambolos were working hard to complicate Shinsan's attack.
Kiriakos was the sort who, finding a pot of gold, would worry about getting a hernia hauling it away. "Too slow. I won't get done if you don't give me more men." His projects were straining the army already. Trenches, traps, fortifications, cheveaux-de-fris, a pontoon across the marsh a few miles west, and finding raw materials, were devouring hundreds of thousands of man-hours each day. But Kiriakos was a bureaucrat born. There was no project that couldn't be done bigger and better if only he were given more money and men...
Am I getting old? Ragnarson wondered. What happened to my penchant for motion? His cavalry commanders had been asking too. Shinsan's was an army mainly infantry in orientation, with little missile weaponry. But Sir Andvbur was out there... All he could say was that he felt right fighting positionally.