"Thanks!"
"Do not thank me! For I forbid you to fight for the girl; you must fight solely for victory. Yet have no anxiety. If she is still alive, she will be rescued. I have relieved Zercho and Sippilo from every other duty, and given them only one charge--to find and protect the young girl. But you I need for higher work. I fear one man only in the whole army," he added in a lower tone--"Saturninus. He is like the old leaders they had in their better days, the days of which my grandfather and father told me with horror, when it was almost impossible for the most heroic courage to defeat a Roman army. Who knows whether Ebarbold will strike him down? We must let the King have the first chance; he has the prior claim: but if the Roman should be the one who survives and I do not reach and kill him after the King's fall, before you (I shall make every effort to do it), do you, son of Adalger, provide that Saturninus shall not lead his army in closed ranks down to the lake: detain him as long as you can stand."
"As long as I can! But I wondered when you set the fisherman his task. If the Roman galleys cross the lake here, how can you know whether he will be able to reach them from the shore? They will anchor, not come to the land. How is Fiskulf to get from the storming of the Roman camp here?"
"He will not share the assault," replied Hariowald, laughing, as he stroked his beard complacently. "And he will not go by land to the galley, but by the lake."
"Swimming?"
"No, rowing. Know what no one has yet learned; for crowds are garrulous. Besides the most distant Alemanni districts, I have secretly won as allies the Hermunduri, who drink the water of the Main, and induced them to send us reinforcements for this war. You supposed that the boats in the two forest-covered swamps on the east and west of the Idisenhang were filled solely with people unable to bear arms, after I had brought most of the men here? No, my friend! The boats, almost three hundred, in the two marshes are not empty of men. The women and children are to be put ashore to-night; more than two thousand Alemanni and Hermunduri will leap into the boats. From left and right, from east and west, they will float in the stillness and darkness of the night against the high-decked galleys, and as soon as the first torch is hurled into the Roman camp on the Idisenhang, our boats will attack the Roman ships from the open lake and from left and right. Aha, do you think our fishing boats will be like nutshells against those giants? Probably: but have you never seen a flock of brave little swallows put a sparrow hawk to flight? Our skiffs are small, it is true; but more than two hundred against sixty. And the pitch and resin of the pine-trees in the forests by the lake, blazing in a thousand faggots of dry twigs, will burn merrily in the linen sails and the rigging of the triremes."
CHAPTER XXXIX.
"You have planned all this alone?" asked the young noble.
"Ha, more, far more than this! Like the wolf of hell, this Rome opens her jaws to swallow all Mittelgard. What? They are not willing to grant us land enough on the northern shore of the lake to feed our growing population? Well, let us see whether, in punishment to the insatiable robbers for new and old crimes, the gods will not deprive them even of the districts they have hitherto held by force,--the northern shore!"
Adalo's astonishment was increasing.