"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. "Their proud giant ships will float against us from Arbor to-morrow; those which escape the midnight conflagration will not, I hope, be received again, when they fly homeward, in the eyrie whence these birds of prey went forth." "What! Arbor?" "I have long tried to persuade our eastern districts also to make common cause with us; they did not refuse reinforcements to the league, as people here suppose because they did not see the men of the eastern provinces. Besides,"--he smiled craftily,--"most of the eastern districts have kings. It was not necessary to have all these kings here, when Ebarbold's fate was to be decided. Meanwhile, they will help where I sent them: on the southern shore. But not they alone.