I got a warning by the way that Saloninusglanced up at Mus before he answered, “We stopped counting at athousand.”
“A thousand?” I gasped. “But Ivomagus told us thatthat town was a bit smaller than Petuar, so how could there be morethan a thousand warriors in that town?” Then the implication hitme, and I sat upright, my head suddenly throbbing even more.“Unless,” I spoke slowly as I thought things through,“they’re not from that town.Which means that their king, or maybe some powerful lord, summonedas many warriors as he could find.”
“The Parisii only have about fivehundred men in and around Petuar,” Alex pointed out.
“Maybe,” Saloninus offered, “thisdoesn’t have as much to do with us as we thought. We’ve only beenhere going on three days now, and I have to think that it wouldtake longer than that for that many men to assemble. Unless,” heallowed, but he sounded skeptical, “whoever it is has the powersent messengers out the instant he saw us reach theriver.”
I shook my head.
“No,” I said flatly, “they werealready here. They must have something planned.” I thought ofsomething. “Did you wait long enough for the Parisii to get to youbefore you came back upriver?”
“Yes,” Saloninus answered, but I sawsomething flash across his face.
However, it was Mus who spoke up next,beginning with a groan, then said, “That is why those bastards vanished. They sawthe Parisii coming and didn’t want to be spotted.”
“What are you saying? That they cameup to the riverbank, then turned around and left?”
“That’s exactly what we’re saying,”Saloninus confirmed. Then he added ruefully, “And here we thoughtit was because once they got a good look at us, they wanted nothingto do with us and turned tail and ran away.”
We lapsed into a silence, then Alex asked,“Are you going to tell them, Pilus Prior? Are you going to letIvomagus and Cogidubnus know the Brigantes appear to be planning onsomething?”
It was the question that I was strugglingwith, but all I could do was answer honestly, “I don’t know. Ithink,” I sighed, “a lot depends on how Cogidubnus reacts to whatwe did today.”
As Acisculus predicted, it took lessthan half a day for the frame of the crane to be erected, but theforging of the cog and ratchet that makes the crane work turned outto be as problematic as the Immunehad worried about, though not for the reason I hadthought.
“It’s not actually the smith or thequality of the iron ore,” he explained. “He just can’t get hisforge as hot as we’re used to, so the pieces aren’t as tempered asthey should be.”
“What does that mean?” I askedhim.
His face turned grim. “It means that theiron might be too brittle, and it could crack under the strain ofsuch a heavy load.”
He did not need to go into detail; Icould easily imagine the catastrophe that would occur if atrireme that was several feet offthe ground came crashing down.
I felt foolish for doing so, but I stillbrought up. “I suppose it’s impossible to make the pieces out ofwood?”
To my surprise, Acisculus did not snort orgive any indication that this was a ludicrous idea, although heanswered, “If this wasn’t being used to lift a ship, I would sayyes, we could carve one as long as we had hard enough wood. But,”he shook his head, “not with something this heavy.”
“So we have to gamble that it willhold up,” I said, and he nodded.
It was not all bad news; under Motius’supervision, four of my men were busy stripping the bark from thetree, and it is probably easy to imagine our collective relief whenboth Cador and Motius examined it and immediately pronounced itsuitable.
“It is a bit smaller than the oldmast,” Motius told me, “but we can use wedges to fill thespace.”
Most importantly, Ivomagus made no attemptto stop us; in fact, he did not even glance at the men at work ashe came to inspect our activities. He was not unfriendly, butneither did he stop to talk as he had the days before. The men whowere not involved in the work were confined to the camp, which wasnot popular, but I did not care. Frankly, I was having a hard timekeeping my attention on the work as I paced up and down the dock,pretending to watch them while I was really keeping an eye on thestreet that led out of Petuar, watching for the return of theParisii king and whatever trouble came with him. The townspeopleseemed to have mostly adjusted to our presence, going about theirdaily business with only a sidelong glance thrown our way. Therewas the equivalent of a forum, although it was unpaved and neverseemed to dry out completely, but like in a Roman town, this openarea served as the marketplace, and I noticed that for the firsttime, some of the females were paying us more attention. They werenot being openly flirtatious, of course, but there was a boldnessin some of them when our eyes met that was not something one findswith Roman women. Not lost on me was that the boldest were also themost attractive, and there was one woman in particular who I foundmy eye kept returning to. I say she was a woman; she looked to beabout seventeen or eighteen, but she had hair the color of highlyburnished copper, with full lips that were perfectly formed,although I did not get close enough to her to see what color hereyes were. She was wearing a gown that was gathered at the waistthat was a rich, deep green in color, and I guessed that her eyesmight be green as well, knowing that women with striking eyes liketo enhance it by matching their attire. And, I confess, it did helppass the time as we pretended not to notice each other.
Acisculus had been true to his word;the work was completed just before noon, with the shed now nothingmore than a pile of neatly stacked lumber, the crane standing morethan fifteen feet tall and the large round wooden drum that servedas the method to raise and lower
