The refugee camp on the Green River bluff moved with the silent, practiced smooth speed of men who had spent their entire lives handling heavy freight under frontier conditions. There was no shouting, no panic, and no crying.
Sixty high-wheeled freight wagons. Their massive oak bodies were heavy with forged iron corner-brackets, were backed into a double nested ring enclosing the high promontory where Caleb Thorne’s granite milestone stood. The outer ring comprised thirty-six heavy four-horse wains, backed tongue-to-tailgate with their wooden tongue-timbers overlapping and secured with one-inch iron logging chains.
Between every pair of wagons, wagon drivers drove seasoned ash ‘deadmen’—six-foot logs of four-inch square ash—deep into the limestone crevices, lashing them to the wagon hubs with greased hemp cables. The heavy ash side-boards were raised and pinned into their iron stake-pockets. That created a solid timber low roof wall five feet high.
Sile Rook walked the outer edge, testing each chain with the iron heel of his boot. CLANG. CLANG. The wagons didn’t shift a fraction of an inch under his weight.
“The laager is locked,” Sile reported to Tomas. “A charging cavalry mount weighs twelve hundred pounds. At a full gallop, it generates eight thousand foot-pounds of dynamic moving shock. If a horse hits this timber wall, it will break its chest against solid oak backed by three tons of chained freight. They can’t push through. They will have to dismount and climb.”
