done there. It was bordered to the north by the mountains and rose again on the southern side where the road ran. Near the road the forest started, stretching for many miles to the south.
“So they follow the road, making short side stops to wipe out Arundel, then us, and finally Lancaster as they go. After that they follow it south into Lothion proper, unless they want to try to drag their entire army through the forest and then into the foothills of central Lothion. I’d say that was unlikely.” He looked up from his rough map, catching us with his sharp eyes, “You follow so far?”
I nodded but Cyhan stopped him, “You’ve laid out a map for disaster. There are no choke points, no bridges, and no narrow passes, just an open gently sloping valley with a road and a river. I don’t see how any of that is going to help us.”
“Well there is one bridge,” Dorian put in, “the small one where the road crosses the river before heading into Gododdin.”
“Not that it helps,” Cyhan remarked. “The river is shallow enough to walk across in most places. You could burn the bridge and it would hardly slow them. Even the road is almost a joke, most of that valley is so smooth and even you could march across it almost as easily as take the road.”
“Let me finish,” Royce groused. “The valley slopes gently downward to the river, from the mountains to the north and from the forest and the road to the south. Its source lies in the mountains on the eastern end, north of Lancaster. There’s a much smaller valley there, where the mountains come together around the river before it enters the main valley. There are rocky hills that come within a few hundred yards of each other on either side of the river there, roughly dividing that smaller valley from this one.”
Joe interrupted, “Not to be rude Royce, but I don’t see any reason why they would head up there? Assuming you’re suggesting we somehow try to defend ourselves in Shepherd’s Rest.” That was the name of the smaller valley; Royce had avoided using it for the sake of those who didn’t know the area.
“No Joe, you’re missing my point,” he pointed at the narrow entrance into Shepherd’s Rest that the river passed through, “Here… Damn it.” He grinned at us.
“Excuse me?” said Penny.
“Dam it!” repeated my father chuckling. He sometimes had an odd sense of humor and he was enjoying his joke.
“Oh! That’s genius Roy!” shouted Joe. “We dam it!” He looked around to see who else had caught on.
“You think we should dam the river there?” I said; putting an end to the confusion everyone was in.
“Yep, we dam it there, and turn Shepherd’s Rest into a reservoir. Then when those bastards march into the valley we unstop it and watch ‘em drown.” He put his thumbs in his belt and leaned back, obviously pleased with himself.
Cyhan still had concerns, “Not to get ahead of ourselves, there are still several large problems with your plan. One, the road is too far from the low part of the valley. You’re not going to have enough water to wash them away if they’re on it. Two, if you try to get them crossing the bridge; you won’t be able to time it properly. Your dam is over ten miles from where the bridge is. You’d have no way of knowing when they were crossing, much less figuring out how long the water will take to reach that point. Third, it takes time to fill up a reservoir that large and the Glenmae isn’t a very big river. Even if you could snap your fingers and have it dammed today it would still take over a year to fill. Fourth, you can’t build a dam instantly, by the time you build it they’ll be knocking on your doorstep.”
“I’ve already got that covered,” said Royce. “We don’t try to get them on the bridge. It’s too far like you said already, plus that many men will be strung out for miles on either side. We wait till they’re on the road, close to here,” he pointed at the map marking the point at which the road came close to Washbrook. “We set something up to force ‘em to leave the road, make ‘em march through the valley there close to the river. That way when we set it loose we catch ‘em with their pants down.”
“There might be a way to do that,” Cyhan mused, “but what about the building time… and the water?”
“We start building right away, and we build from the bottom up. We lay the foundation and the first ten feet or so and then we block the river. We keep building upward from there, trying to stay ahead of the water’s rise. You said yourself the river isn’t that big, it won’t fill too quickly for us.” Royce stroked his beard as he thought about it.
Cyhan gave up, “I don’t know anything about building dams. It might be possible but I think it will be much harder than you think.”
Marcus stepped in, “It will be damn near impossible. You’ll need massive stones for the foundation, and those take time to quarry and move. After that if you build too fast and sloppy the water will wash out your upper courses before the mortar can fully set. Assuming you have that much stone ready to lay the upper courses anyway. The base will have to be at least twenty feet thick if not more… I dunno maybe Mort can work that part out. It’ll take a lot of math to calculate the water pressure at the base as the dam gets higher. I’m no engineer.”
I spoke up, “We won’t need mortar; I can probably fuse the stones together. We will have to do some calculating though, to figure out how thick it needs to be. I imagine I can help with the quarrying as well. I’ll have to think about that.”
“How do we let the water out?” Joe asked, “Are you going to build sluice gates into it? Seems like that would make the construction a lot more complicated.”
I looked at my father and our eyes met. He smiled at me. “We blow it up,” I said.
“You’re talking hundreds, maybe thousands of tons of solid stone. There’s not that much powder in the whole kingdom!” Joe remarked.
“He won’t need powder Joe,” said Marc waving his arms in the air. He was miming some sort of spell casting, either that or inventing a new type of erotic dance. “Boom!” he finished dramatically.
Penny eyed Marc’s antics dubiously, “Before we get ahead of ourselves there are certain basic hurdles we have to get past. We need workers to build a dam, and lots of them. There are only so many people available and if they’re spending the next few months building a dam they won’t be doing much else.”
“The dam is the only idea we’ve had that has any possibility of giving us a victory,” I replied.
“And if it doesn’t work? If there’s a construction failure or the enemy doesn’t do what you want, what then? It will take most of our resources and there won’t be much left over for a backup plan,” she said seriously.
I looked at my father and then back at Penny, “If it can be built he can do it.” I pointed at my father. “He’s the best damn blacksmith for a hundred miles.”
“No disrespect Royce,” Cyhan spoke up, “but you’re a smith, not an engineer or a stone mason.”
Royce wasn’t put off, “Where do engineers come from eh? Somebody somewhere woke up one day and said… ‘Hey maybe we can build this.’ I may not have gone to any fancy colleges back in the city, but I know how to build. My boy here can help with the math. Get me the men, the stone, and enough time and we’ll build the finest dam you ever saw.”
Cyhan must have seen something in my father’s face, “Alright. I believe you. You build that dam. We’ll still need to figure out how to make sure the enemy is where we want them when the time comes.”
“Let me worry about that,” I said. “I have some ideas.”
“Such as?”
“Give me a few days to work on ‘em and I’ll show you all what I’m thinking of,” I replied. “For now we need to start moving. The dam has to start immediately if we’re to have any chance of finishing it in time.” I did a mental head count. “Dorian… head to Lancaster. If James is there tell him we need every able bodied man he can spare. Explain what you can and if he still has doubts tell him to come see me. If he isn’t there tell Genevieve, she’s not afraid to take the initiative when needed.”
“When do you want me to go?” Dorian asked.
“Now,” I answered immediately. “Marcus, I need you to visit the Baron of Arundel. He needs to know what’s going on, tell him I would be greatly honored if he would pay me a visit.”
“I’m not sure if Sheldon will be happy about being ‘summoned’ by his neighbor,” Marc suggested. “What should I tell him?”
“Excuse me?” I said blinking at him.
“What should I tell him?” Marc repeated.
“Did you say his name is ‘Sheldon’?” I asked.
Marc laughed, “Yeah he caught a lot of hell over that in his younger days. I wouldn’t make any jokes about his name when you meet him though; he’s still a bit sensitive about it.”
