Twenty paces in front of the wagon wall, across the open limestone flat that formed the only natural approach to the bluff, Tomas had deployed the secret weapon of the heavy cart hauling guilds: the snubbing line grid.
A snubbing line was not a tripwire made of thin wire or cord. It was a three-inch-thick braided hemp thick ship rope used by lightermen and mountain wagon drivers to arrest fifty-ton river barges against granite docks or check runaway lumber wagons on mountain grades. Three parallel lines had been stretched eighteen inches above the ground, anchored to buried iron eye-bolts and heavy boulder deadmen, then held under light tension by counterweighted lever-arms.
Forty veteran wagon drivers lay flat in the dry scrub behind the lines, holding heavy timber brake-sticks pushed in into the rope eyelets, ready to snap the lines taut at the precise moment of contact.
“A horse can’t see a raw, unwhitened hemp rope in the dark against white limestone,” Old Kaelen Brant explained to his young grandson beside him. “A charging warhorse looks at the wagon wall sixty feet away. It thinks the ground between is flat and clear. Its shins hit a three-inch thick ship rope eighteen inches off the deck. Then, the horse’s balance point is four feet high. Gravity and driving force do the rest.”
