It was dark, an hour after sunset.  He did not care.  On the far shore his advance scouts had lit their torches.  A string of lights a league long outlined the far side of the Anduin to their west and south. Dezoch boarded the raft last, making way through the crowd of forty warriors, packed tight for the crossing.  He reached the far side, facing the river, where a flaming torch was ensconced in the wooden side rail.  Dezoch leaned out over the rail and looked north and south.

He grunted with satisfaction.  Torches lined the east bank of the river, each one a raft of forty men.  He gave the signal to a man onshore standing next to a huge stack of wood and kindling.  He tossed a torch into the pile which quickly flared up, then burst into a roaring column of flame easily seen a league away north and south.

Dezoch shouted orders and men along each side thrust poles in the water, pushing the raft out into the river.  It eased along sluggishly at first, laden with men and supplies.  Then he could feel it, the current starting to clutch at it, starting the long pull down the river.

He shouted at the men to pole harder, insuring that they made their way across and not find themselves dragged miles downstream beyond the torches on the far side.  It was no easy task.  The river was plagued with sandbars and small islands covered in scrub.  It was a good mile to cross the river.  But there was no choice.  It was waist to occasionally neck deep.  The river bottom was a tangle of dead trees in spots. Had they tried to cross on foot they would have been scattered, many perhaps drowning if the current caught them. 

Dezoch glanced up and down the river.  In the night he could make out the other rafts, all disembarked now, men poling furiously to get across. 

He allowed himself a smile of satisfaction.  Overnight he would put over 2000 men of his tribe on the far shore.  They would land, camp overnight, then regroup in formation and march west in the morning.  Farther to his north, ten other groups of fifty rafts were making way across the Anduin. 

His tribe would join with two more to his north.  Dezoch would command all three.  Eight other tribes would form up as the main attack.  Once the main attack engaged, he would stealthily flank Gondor’s army from the south, then charge north crashing into the rear of its formation, fomenting chaos and disorder in their ranks.  Gondor would be squeezed between his six thousand men on the south and the main force of sixteen thousand on the east. 

It would be the end of them.