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With this arrangement they had greater mobility of their forces, for men might leap, say, from the foredeck of one barge to the tiller deck of the other. If boarding were attempted toward the center of the line, the boarding party could thus be crushed on both flanks by warriors pouring in from adjacent barges. This arrangement, in effect, transformed the formerly isolated barges into what was now, for all practical purposes, a long, single, narrow, wooden-walled fort. These defensive conditions dictated that the offense, putatively the male population of one or perhaps two rence communities, say, some seventy or eighty men, would most likely attack at either the first or the last of the barges, where they would have but one front on which to attack and little, or nothing, to fear from the rear. That the punt might be used to bring men behind attacking rencers was quite improbable; further, had it been used, presumably it would have encountered rencers in their several rence craft and been thereby neutralized or destroyed. In this situation, then, it was natural, expecting an attack on either the first or the last barge, that the officer, he of the golden slashes on the temples of his helmet, would concentrate his men in the first and last barges. We had come now to the hull of the fourth barge, and we had come to her as silently as a rence flower might have drifted to her side. - (Raiders of Gor, Chapter )