Ro'moloristen thought, What a magnificent madness is the Path of Fury. Stretching across the horizon to north and south as far as the God King could see from his lofty tenar, marched wave upon wave of the People.
They marched in knots of twenty to fifty, each knot carrying by main strength a crudely lashed together wooden raft. Half the forests of France and Belgium had gone into those rafts.
Above rode the God Kings, in numbers even greater than the leading ranks of the People warranted. But from each tenar dangled a rope. The tenar would pull the rafts, and drag the People across the river to victory. The plasma cannon and hypervelocity missiles carried by the tenar flashed fire and hate at the defenders on the other side of the great river which fronted the host.
The cannon of the threshkreen were not silent. Even at this distance the thunder of thousands upon thousands of the thresh's frightful artillery was a palpable fist. Their shells splashed down among the People, churning them to yellow froth and splintering their crude rafts.
But always there were more of the People, more of the rafts approaching the river. The artillery could kill many. It could never kill all. Slowly, the People, stepping over the bodies of the slain, reached the near bank of the river.
Ro'moloristen watched the first rank, what remained of it, disappear down into the steep river valley. He knew the People would have a nightmare of a time descending that frozen bank.
But after that, Ro'moloristen expected things to be easier for them . . . once the threshkreen on the far bank saw that lashed to each raft, upright on posts, were anywhere from a half a dozen to a dozen thresh nestlings.