"But reality was even funnier. With a piece of clam meat, the fisherman actually caught a fish-and a whale at that," he said.
"Ha ha!" After a few brief seconds, laughter erupted through the legion. Naturally, they were laughing at the bait and the whale in his story. Without a doubt, those meant O'Connor and Idiveer's legion.
With the joke over, the Knights' Order resumed its pace. Hoofbeats rang out with renewed vigor as they crested a small rise. Beneath the autumn sun hanging overhead, the legion's long shadows stretched down the slope, leaving hoofprints and clods of mud in their wake.
Facing south from this slope, a mountain stood forty-three li away, named Mount Vast Sea. Its name came from a term preserved in ancient myths and legends, meaning as boundless as the sea, and so the landscape inevitably involved water.
Mount Vast Sea stood three hundred and forty-six meters tall. Rather than tapering to a peak, it resembled a rock, with a depression running through its middle. A waterfall plunged down this sunken valley into a creek valley below. The valley curved like a crescent, its inner bend following the waterfall toward the southeast. Idiveer's legion was camped within this inner bend of Crescent Creek Valley.
Crescent Creek Valley, roughly two hundred meters long, fifty meters wide, and ten meters high, had enough room for three thousand Vikings to camp. Although the Holy Temple and the Seven Kingdoms often disparaged them as "primitive," they were not backward in reality. On the contrary, they excelled at using primitive methods to get things done-anything at all.
They felled the trees above the valley with axes, gathered vines growing along both banks of the waterfall pool, and mixed in some earth to build one pointed hut after another. Each could accommodate