Did the way lie through a forest, Fanaer fired it, and Ruthar marched in flames and smoke. Did the road follow the turn of a hill, there were men at the crest to roll huge rocks down on the tramping legions. Was a gorge to be passed, the bridges were ruined. Days wore away, days which Ruthar could ill spare, and which Polaris counted with a sinking heart, seeing his army go forward so slowly. Still it did advance--slowly, painfully, but surely, the steel lines made progress. Craft against craft Oleric matched with Fanaer. Ruthar had her light horsemen, too. Right and left Oleric sent them into the uplands to clear his path of the stinging pests of Fanaer. Scores of times in a day, on hilltop or in wooded glen, short, fierce engagements were fought, but never a pitched battle. Maeronica was playing for delay. Far behind the shifting screen of Fanaer's operations Bel-Ar and his generals were consolidating the main strength of Maeronica in the lowlands along the river Thebascu. When hill-riding and skirmishing was done, the generals of both armies knew that the real war would begin--that the issue would be joined and decided on the plains of Nor. Careful as any general in modern warfare was Oleric with regard to his flanks and rear. Well he knew, did the red captain, that in the slow-moving trains of provisions that crept ceaselessly along the isthmus from Ruthar was the strength of his host in the field. Once that line was cut, Bel-Ar might laugh indeed. It took many men to keep the rear ways open and man the isthmian passes. On the morning when the Rutharian army writhed forth from the forests like a wounded but tenacious serpent onto the level stretches of the plains of Nor, Oleric had under his banners a scant hundred thousand men. Thirty thousand more warded the rear. Fifty thousand in reserves were massed in the forests and on the isthmus. Twenty thousand were with the slain. The sun was shining as the host wound out from the gloom of the forests. To right and to left were wooded hills and beyond them the peaks of mountain ranges, blue against the skies. Ahead, the plains, a reach of level land some thirty miles broad from east and west and a score of miles across, were divided by the gleaming, irregular ribbon of the river Thebascu. In a loop of the river in a camp that was strongly entrenched, for all the haste with which it had been constructed, lay the army of Ad, fresh and unwearied and ready for battle. And it outnumbered the host of Ruthar by nearly two to one. Across the river, down the hundred miles to Adlaz, the Mazanion Road was choked with supply trains and reserves. Snow still lay in patches in the forest defiles; but the plains were faintly green with a promise of the spring-time. On the trees the buds were swelling. Through a month of wearisome marching Ruthar had come. In less than forty-five days the trumpets would sound from the towers of Adlaz for the Feast of Years.