Chapter 17 Page 9
April 30th, 2018The Saronnan army sings the dwarven work song from Snow White. There’s a lot of digging and hauling when you’re creating defensive earthworks. Why all the digging? Why leave the fort? Because while the fort commands the water, it’s vulnerable to a land attack because of the heights that Marguerite is entrenching.
Vote for Snow by Night on Top Web Comics to see what happens next. Also, Julian and Steph have started streaming their work on these pages. Check it out! It’s pretty cool to watch.
The abatis was one of my most profitable dives into the Oxford English Dictionary and a historical illustrated dictionary and Britannica when I was in school. I was taking Russian Civilization at the time as part of the Core Curriculum and stumbled across what may be the single most revelatory feature of Russian history and consciousness – The Grand Abatis Line. To keep out slaving Steppe Nomads, who early on weren’t just Muslim but also Jewish (the Kazars), this feature of the landscape made choke-points through which raiders would have to pass on the way into the country and on the way out. It worked quite well and steadily moved south, even though the massive slave markets of Constantinople and Cairo (the next largest on earth was in Zanzibar, just for scale -nothing anywhere else came close since the end of Roman slavery and that of the Aztecs) were filled with human Slavic booty – in Egypt’s case those who would become the Mameluke slave-soldier rulers of the country until Napoleon slapped them down and Mohammed Ali nearly exterminated them with his Abyssinian musketeers backing his few fellow Janissaries (a different kind of slave soldier, one to whom the little Albanian belonged).
If Ald doesn’t come out of this alive, then I will NOT be happy. :-(
… poor scribes.
NO! Not Ald!