Gorruk Blackmane had counted the quilboar twice before he let himself believe the number, and then he counted them a third time because the first two had not been in his favour.
Forty, near enough. They came up the dry bed of the Redmane wash in no order at all, which was how quilboar came at anything, tusks down and squealing, with the thorn-shamans trotting behind under their bone poles. Against them the ford had eleven: six orc grunts of the Crossroads watch who had marched out that morning expecting nothing worse than a lost kodo, a tauren with a staff who had been passing and had simply stopped, three trolls from the river camp who owed somebody a favour, and Gorruk, who was in charge because the sergeant was lying under a blanket in the wagon with a spear through him and had said you in a voice that did not invite discussion.
The ford was the only crossing of the Southfury for a day's walk either way. Behind it, on the far bank, the road ran to the Crossroads, and at the Crossroads there were children.
"They will not stop at the water," said the tauren. Her name was Ashka Windhoof and she had not raised her voice once since she arrived. "Quilboar hate the river, but they hate hunger more, and the thorn has been dying all summer."
"Then we hold the water," Gorruk said.
He did not feel like a man who held things. He was twenty-four, which among orcs was old enough to have a name and young enough not to have earned it, and his shield had a split in it from a drunken bet in Ratchet that he had never got around to mending. But he had been at the ford since dawn and had walked it end to end, and he knew one thing the quilboar did not. The Southfury was not the same depth all the way across. There was a tongue of gravel on the near side where a kodo could stand dry to the knee, and on either side of it the bottom fell away into brown water that would take a quilboar to the snout.
"Ten paces wide," he told them, scratching the line in the mud with his spear. "That is the whole of the door. Everything that wants the Crossroads comes through those ten paces, and it comes through them slowly, and it comes through them with its feet in the river. We stand on the far lip of the gravel. We do not go forward. Whatever happens, we do not go forward."
The trolls looked at one another. The oldest of them, a long grey-blue creature called Zen'jai who had a necklace of other people's teeth, showed his tusks. "And if they go round, mon?"
"Then they are in the river," Gorruk said, "and I have never heard a quilboar swim."
They came at the hour when the light goes red and flat and the Barrens stop pretending to be anything but an oven.
The first rush was the worst, because it was all of them at once. Forty quilboar hit the near bank in a mass, and for a moment Gorruk thought the plan was a child's drawing and that the river would simply fill with them and they would walk across on each other's backs. Then the mass met the water, and the water did what he had said it would. The flanks went in to the chest and squealed and floundered and fell back, and the centre came on up the gravel tongue in a column eight wide, and the column met the shields.
Nobody had taught the Crossroads watch to hold a line. Gorruk had taught them that morning, in an hour, with a stick. It held anyway, because the alternative was in front of them. The first quilboar to reach the shields died on a troll's spear; the second broke its tusk on Gorruk's split shield and took the edge of his axe in the throat for its trouble, and the ones behind it tried to climb over the two bodies and found that two bodies in a river are a wall.
Ashka Windhoof did not fight in the line. She stood behind it with her staff planted and her eyes shut, and the gravel under the grunts' feet, which had been loose, was not loose any more; and twice when a thorn-shaman on the far bank lifted its bone pole and the air began to smell of rot, she said one word, and the smell went away.
"Hold," Gorruk said. He said it perhaps two hundred times that evening. He said it when the second rush came, and when the third one broke on the bodies of the first, and when a grunt called Mok went down with a tusk in his thigh and had to be dragged back by his collar and sat in the shallows with his axe across his knees, shouting at the quilboar to come and finish it. He said it when Zen'jai laughed at something nobody else could see and when the youngest troll stopped laughing at anything. He said it until it stopped being a word and became a sound the line made, like breathing.
The quilboar did not break. Quilboar do not. They came until there were not enough of them to fill the ten paces, and then the thorn-shamans on the far bank looked at the river full of their dead and began, without any signal that Gorruk could see, to walk back up the wash into the dark. The last of the warriors went after them. One turned at the bend and squealed something at the ford that was probably a promise.
"Let it," said Gorruk, and sat down in the river.
They had lost none. That was the thing he kept coming back to, later, on the walk to the Crossroads with Mok on the wagon beside the sergeant, who had lived, and was already explaining to anyone who would listen that the gravel tongue had been his idea. Eleven had stood on the far lip of a ten-pace door and forty had come through it, and the river had done the rest.
"You will be asked to tell it," Ashka said. She walked beside him with her staff over her shoulder, and she had still not raised her voice. "At the Crossroads. They will want to hear how you drove the quilboar off."
"I did not drive anything. I stood in a river and said hold until my throat went."
"Yes," she said. "That is the part worth telling. Anyone can go forward."
Behind them the Southfury went on about its business in the dark, as it had before the Horde came to the Barrens and would after, carrying what the quilboar had left of themselves down toward the sea.