Free The Wald by Jason Born

you around our hearth at the evening meal.”  The boy lied about the last bit.  “Why don’t we let some other men go ahead of you so that you may take a raft across with my father?   I know he would like to listen to your thoughts on the coming moves of the army.”
    The man reconsidered and at last tugged his horse’s reins toward the boy , swayed by Berengar’s play on his vanity.  Gundahar pushed the men who had been in line behind Eburwin toward the craft, which bobbed on the river bank.  Soon they scrambled onto the raft. Her pilot was a man nearly as thin and tall as the pole he used to propel it.  Both he and the long staff bent as the pilot heaved downward, shoving the raft across the lazy current.
    Berengar looked upstream in the direction where his father performed the same organizational tasks on which he and Gundahar worked.  The boy hoped his father wouldn’t be too angry at having to share a raft with a blustering fool, but in the end, he knew his decision was correct.  Better to take a slap sometime in the future than have the whole of the invasion fail at the river due to a dumb mule called Eburwin and his horse.
    “So your father speaks of me at home?” the man asked.   The boy rolled his eyes in the darkness, praying to the forest gods to rid him of this man and this conversation before his entire night was robbed from him.
    Calls and shrieks erupted from across the Rhenus, shattering the stillness that came with the dark.  In his native tongue he heard shouts, “Romans!  The Romans are here!”  But those cries were quickly snuffed out until the only sounds were the clear rings and thuds and indiscernible roars of battle.
    Both Berengar and Gundahar felt helpless.  Most of their warriors were still on the east side of the great river, but the glory was on the opposite bank.  Adalbern rode through the mass of men clustered on the shore, knocking more than one to the ground, to reach his son.  When he saw the boy, he shouted, “Forget horses.  When the boats come back, send men.  Stack them on top of one another if you must.  If Rome has sent a legion against those few hundred across the river, we’re lost.  Get them help!”  Before Berengar could answer, Adalbern spun his horse with a harsh jerk of the reins and disappeared into the faint moonlight.
    It felt like an eternity.  The battle raged.
    At last , a batch of rafts materialized in the darkness, approaching for more men.  The thin pilot had returned to the spot next to Gundahar and the boy.  He had an arrow jutting from his thigh, but showed no sign of giving up his pole, though he looked pale.  “What’s happening?” snapped Berengar.
    “We were ambushed,” the thin pilot answered , stating the obvious.
    “How many?” asked the boy.
    “Perhaps two or three hundred Romans.  Some cavalry too.”
    “So few?  We must have surprised a patrol.  We can take them if we get more men across,” shouted a hopeful Gundahar as men began piling onto the boat.  Berengar jumped aboard.  He would not miss a victory over the Roman filth.
    “No, we didn’t surprise anyone,” said the pilot as he was jostled by the mass of bodies pushing aboard.  “The Romans must have been there the whole time.  They came out of the brush.”  So many men crowded onto the raft that it sank into the mud of the riverbank, sticking fast.  Gundahar, still onshore, shoved.  Other men joined him in pushing to free the craft while the pilot leaned heavily on the pole, wincing in pain from his leg, wet with crimson.
    “By all the gods!” exclaimed Berengar just as the boat budged free.  “If they waited for us, that means they knew we were coming.”  The boy’s mind raced to catch up with the events unfolding around him.  “And if they knew we were coming, why only have a few hundred men lying in wait?”  They were ten feet into the river when he latched onto the reality of their position.  “Stop!” he screamed at the