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There were barbarians eager to go to Hypat on what they called a “mighteous sack,” if he understood the tongue correctly, but there were several problems that seemed impossible to surmount, at least in any length of time that would make a difference.
First, the barbarians fought on foot. They had very few horses and pastureland in their crags and mountains was rare and reserved for more productive sheep and cattle. The lumber-cutters had a few, their warlords and merchants who could afford them rode, but the ordinary yeoman who picked up spear, sword, and axe when battle came marched and fought on foot. So to assemble even half of them at the northernmost stretches of the Old North Road would take days, and they would show up ravenous and thirsty.
Which was another difficulty. Barbarians on a raid ate as they went, barging into chicken coops, pigpens, vegetable patches, and granaries for their food. If they did that on the trip south to Hypat, he wondered if it was in the power of the local thanes to prevent violence—if the local thanes could be prevailed on to supply a horde of barbarians in the first place, especially with so much in doubt.
What he needed was some bit of magic to transport them south, like flying carpets from the old Hypatian tales of the sorcerers of Silverhigh.
Shipping was out of the question. The demen raid had wrecked everything bigger than a rowboat. Standing and running rigging had been cut, masts and spars chopped down, there were holes knocked in some of the hulls. There were some lighters left, and the small fishing boats that happened to be out among the lobster pots when the demen attacked, but not enough to float a force large enough to make a difference. Though there were probably glory-hunters who would go, just for the chance to die fighting in an important battle. A death in battle gave you some sort of special key to a hall of heroes in the afterlife, in their reckoning.
The fastest way was to fly them down, of course, but that presented greater difficulties than sailing them. A fully grown, healthy dragon could carry perhaps six men in flight, fewer if they were large, fewer still if they had heavy weapons, shields, and armor. Every barbarian went into battle with a huge shield and at least two weapons in case his favorite failed, so DharSii calculated it would be a strain to carry even four. On an all-day flight, two.
He could just see the dragons of the tower flying to Wistala’s aid with twenty or thirty warriors and arriving too tired to fight.
“Why don’t we swim ’em down?” Thunderwing asked.
“What’s that?”
“One time I was fishing, and I got bit by one of those big black-and-white beasties. They eat seals and so on. Ever seen one?”
“No,” DharSii said. “But I’ve never spent much time around oceans.”
“Well, doesn’t matter. Point is, they weigh a fair bit. This one must have been sick or blind—it thought I was food and started a terrible scrape. It tried to drag me down and drown me—that’s a terrifying experience. You’d do best to avoid it, Stripes, but I dug into its side good and got some vitals out and that was the end of that. Soon as I had some air in my lungs, I grabbed it by the tail and hauled it to shore. Lost a bit to some sharks, the louts, but there was still more meat than I could eat.”
DharSii reckoned himself a clever dragon, but he seemed to be missing the point. It had happened before, too. Sometimes he was so lost in mathematics and parabola that he missed the greater whole.
“You’re the one they call the philosopher-king?”
“Thunderwing philosopher-king. They make it rhyme, like a hatchling taunt.”
“You’re saying pull them down, like rats clinging to a rope after a shipwreck? Humans don’t last long in cool water, let alone cold, and the coastal water here is quite cool.”
“No, I mean we load them like bales of wool into coasters and barges and such. Haul them down on rafts on our backs if we have to.”
DharSii froze for a moment. “You’re—you may have something. But their craft are mostly wrecked.”
“All the gear and stuff for those wrecked ships, the rudders and masts and lines—they’re to make the boat sail, correct.”
“Those that aren’t rowed or pulled, yes.”
DharSii’s warnings fell on deaf ears, until refugees appeared from the south.
The demen were taking slaves and carrying off anything that could be pried up and dragged out. They made a clean sweep of Quarryness, leaving behind only bodies of those who fought.
“We will go south, but not as conquerors and pillagers. We will come as friends, so that north and south face this new threat together.”
“I suspect they’re moving on Hypatia, too.”
“They have to. The demen breed like rodents if there’s adequate food. It’s an elegant system: When food is plentiful, demen halls teem with life. When it runs out, they eat each other until their numbers match the current food supply. Most other creatures have their population adjusted by predators or disease. Demen self-regulate.”
The boatwrights and shipfitters went to work with a will. The challenge and uniqueness of the task appealed. Even Seeg’s dwarfs joined in. At first the locals were suspicious and hostile, refusing to share a tool or tell them where they could find more cordage. But once they saw how neatly their clinker hulls overlapped and the tight staving, they were gradually won over to the dwarfs’ two-prow design.
“It’s so in the underground rivers we can go either direction if there’s no room to turn,” Seeg explained. The men of Juutfod followed the Hypatian tradition of putting a woman on the prow—their unsleeping eyes maintained a steady vigil ahead for ice and shoal, protecting the men with maternal instinct—but the dwarfs carved dragon heads, or wings, or a griff-and-tail design that looked like an elaborate battle-axe, and soon there were so many requests for the art that the dwarfs were working days on the clinker hulls and nights on the figureheads.
The grounded dragons were more used to swimming than the others, so they made the best “drak-kaar” pullers, as the barbarians called the queer hybrid craft.
DharSii learned another advantage to the craft when he observed some sea trials with strong-swimming volunteers filling the hulls. With no mast and sail, the ships vanished into the Inland Ocean mists where warm southern water met cool northern air, and disappeared over the horizon more quickly than a regular sailing vessel would. They could still hug the coast for safety and travel unnoticed; without the aid of powerful—and rare—optics the whole fleet could be mistaken as whales at a distance. To aid in this they rigged weathered and gray canvas covers on the hulls, which would both keep out the rain and disguise the outline.
Among the tower’s stores were old helmets from the Wyrmaster’s days. His warriors had fixed dragonhorns on their heads, or high ridges in imitation of a male dragon’s crest or a female dragon’s fringe. The barbarians who could speak Parl well enough to take orders were given those helms to wear, so dragons could instantly recognize a man who could understand instruction. The others made fun of the outlandish headgear at first, but were soon scrounging for dragonhorn of their own.
