Enchanters' End Game

"Men!" Ce'Nedra said.

In the camp of the Sendars they met Durnik. With him there was an oddly matched pair of young men.

"A couple of old friends," Durnik said as he introduced them. "Just arrived on the supply barges. I think you've met Rundorig, Princess. He was at Faldor's farm when we visited there last winter."

Ce'Nedra did in fact remember Rundorig. The tall, hulking young man, she recalled, was the one who was going to marry Garion's childhood sweetheart, Zubrette. She greeted him warmly and gently reminded him that they had met before. Rundorig's Arendish background made his mind move rather slowly. His companion, however, was anything but slow. Durnik introduced him as Doroon, another of Garion's boyhood friends. Doroon was a small, wiry young man with a protruding Adam's apple and slightly bulging eyes. After a few moments of shyness, his tongue began to run away with him. It was a bit hard to follow Doroon. His mind flitted from idea to idea, and his mouth raced along breathlessly, trying to keep up.

"It was sort of rough going up in the mountains, your Ladyship," he replied in answer to her question about their trip from Sendaria, "what with how steep the road was and all. You'd think that as long as the Tolnedrans were building a highway, they'd have picked leveler ground - but they seem to be fascinated by straight lines - only that's not always the easiest way. I wonder why they're like that." The fact that Ce'Nedra herself was Tolnedran seemed not to have registered on Doroon.

"You came along the Great North Road?" she asked him.

"Yes - until we got to a place called Aldurford. That's a funny kind of name, isn't it? Although it makes sense if you stop and think about it. But that was after we got out of the mountains where the Murgos attacked us. You've never seen such a fight."

"Murgos?" Ce'Nedra asked him sharply, trying to pin down his skittering thoughts.

He nodded eagerly. "The man who was in charge of the wagons - he's a great big fellow from Muros, I think he said - wasn't it Muros he said he came from, Rundorig? Or maybe it was Camaar - for some reason I always get the two mixed up. What was I talking about?"

"The Murgos," Durnik supplied helpfully.

"Oh, yes. Anyway, the man in charge of the wagons said that there had been a lot of Murgos in Sendaria before the war. They pretended that they were merchants, but they weren't - they were spies. When the war started, they all went up into the mountains, and now they come out of the woods and try to ambush our supply wagons - but we were ready for them, weren't we Rundorig? Rundorig hit one of the Murgos with a big stick when the Murgo rode past our wagon - knocked him clear off his horse. Whack! Just like that! Knocked him clear off his horse. I'll bet he was surprised." Doroon laughed a short little laugh, and then his tongue raced off again, describing in jerky, helter-skelter detail the trip from Sendaria.

Princess Ce'Nedra was strangely touched by her meeting with Garion's two old friends. She felt, moreover, a tremendous burden of responsibility as she realized that she had reached into almost every life in the west with her campaign. She had separated husbands from their wives and fathers from their children; and she had carried simple men, who had never been further than the next village, a thousand leagues and more to fight in a war they probably did not even begin to understand.

The next morning the leaders of the army rode the few remaining leagues to the installations at the base of the escarpment. As they topped a rise, Ce'Nedra reined Noble in sharply and gaped in openmouthed astonishment as she saw the eastern escarpment for the first time. It was impossible! Nothing could be so vast! The great black cliff reared itself above them like an enormous wave of rock, frozen and forever marking the boundary between east and west, and seemingly blocking any possibility of ever passing in either direction. It immediately stood as a kind of stark symbol of the division between the two parts of the world - a division that could no more be resolved than that enormous cliff could be leveled.

As they rode closer, Ce'Nedra noted a great deal of bustling activity both at the foot of the escarpment and along its upper rim. Great hawsers stretched down from overhead, and Ce'Nedra saw elaborately intertwined pulleys along the foot of the huge cliffs.

"Why are the pulleys at the bottom?" King Anheg demanded suspiciously.

King Rhodar shrugged. "How should I know? I'm not an engineer."

"All right, if you're going to be that way about it, I'm not going to let your people touch a single one of my ships until somebody tells me why the pulleys are down here instead of up there."

King Rhodar sighed and beckoned to an engineer who was meticulously greasing a huge pulley block. "Have you got a sketch of the rigging handy?" the portly monarch asked the grease-spattered workman.

The engineer nodded, pulled a rolled sheet of grimy parchment out from under his tunic, and handed it to his king. Rhodar glanced at it and handed it to Anheg.

Anheg stared at the complex drawing, struggling to trace out which line went where, and more importantly why it went there. "I can't read this," he complained.

"Neither can I," Rhodar told him pleasantly, "but you wanted to know why the pulleys are down here instead of up there. The drawing tells you why."

"But I can't read it."

"That's not my fault."

Not far away a cheer went up as a boulder half the size of a house and entwined in a nest of ropes rose majestically up the face of the cliff to the accompaniment of a vast creaking of hawsers.

"You'll have to admit that that's impressive, Anheg," Rhodar said. "Particularly when you note that the entire rock is being lifted by those eight horses over there - with the help of that counterweight, of course." He pointed at another block of stone which was just as majestically coming down from the top of the escarpment.

Anheg squinted at the two rocks. "Durnik," he said over his shoulder, "do you understand how all those work?"

"Yes, King Anheg," the smith replied. "You see, the counterweight off balances the-"

"Don't explain it to me, please," Anheg said. "As long as somebody I know and trust understands, that's all that's really important."

Later that same day, the first Cherek ship was lifted to the top of the escarpment. King Anheg watched the procedure for a moment or two, then winced and turned his back. "It's unnatural," he muttered to Barak.

"You've taken to using that expression a great deal lately," Barak noted.

Anheg scowled at his cousin.

"I just mentioned it, that's all," Barak said innocently.