Already some of the sier’s pikes were atop the breastwork, forcing a wedge into his line. If they divided his force, all was lost. Gird raised his voice over the din, calling them back to rally around him. Rahi looked over her shoulder, nodded, and got her unit rearranged into a tight mass, backing away from the breastwork one careful step at a time. Keris, on the upstream side, did the same, not quite as neatly. The sier’s pikes overran the breastwork and pressed them hard, but the yeomen managed to come together and sort themselves into rows and columns again.
Gird could just see the approaching cavalry over the heads of the fighters. Would they surround his force, or attack one side? And how would the sier’s commander order the pikes? He felt no fear, only disgust with himself for leading his people into this trap— a mistake from start to finish—and the stubborn determination to get them out if possible.
The sier’s commander (Gird had finally picked out the dapper little man in a helmet decorated with streamers) had no doubts at all. He disengaged abruptly what had been the front, shifted his pikes sideways, and left Gird’s flank open to his bowmen. Gird’s own archers, gifted for once with both initiative and skill, let fly before Gird even realized what had happened, and skewered the front rank of enemy bowmen. But the second rank sent fiery arrows into Gird’s closely-packed troop—and anyone hit was instantly engulfed in flame. Gird himself tripped one victim and tried to roll him, but the man was dead—consumed—after the second scream. Gird hardly felt the blisters rising on his arms for the cold chills that raced down his back. It had to be more magicks—no fire burned like that. His formation rolled; he could feel their terror. Frantic, his bowmen tried again, downed four more of the enemy.
And the enemy pikes slammed into what had been their right flank.
Gird struggled with his own fear and confusion, shouted orders he only hoped were right. Their poles were as long as the enemy pikes—just longer—they could hold them off if they made no mistakes. He threw himself into that line, giving his yeomen his own energy, his own strength. His line stiffened, straightened… and behind him, he heard the cavalry coming, a thundering roar.
War is full of mistakes; it forgives none. The gnomes had said that, too. Sometimes the winner was the commander who made the fewest mistakes, or managed to correct them. Gird spun, with a final slap on the shoulder to one of the line facing pikes, and bellowed encouragement to those facing horses.
This, so apparently dangerous, they had done before. The yeomen braced their sticks and pikes, ready to prod the riders off balance. The horses, as usual when faced with an obstacle too large to jump, slowed, shied, ducked away from the line. Their riders spurred them on, whacked them with the flats of their blades, but the horses refused. Gird would have called his line to attack, but he could not do that with the pikes opposite. He heard a yell from the remaining enemy archers, and several horsemen turned aside, to return with archers riding double.
“Look out!” someone yelled, as if there were anything they could do. The archers grinned—six of them, Gird counted. The riders backed off slightly; those with archers mounted turned their horses’ heads away, so that the archers had the best possible angle. Gird sent up a wordless prayer to any god who might be paying attention—though he suspected he had been stupid enough to make them all turn their backs—and received no miracle. The archers made a slow and elaborate dance of taking arrows, nocking them— “Front two, now—second two, reverse!” It was outrageous, hopeless, and impossible, but better than standing like sheep in a pen. The front two ranks on that side of Gird’s formation followed him in a ragged charge at the horsemen; the second two—who had been supporting the two on the pike side—spun and faced outward to replace them. Gird did not stop to see if it worked, or how neatly they turned. He was running straight for the mounted archers, screaming as loud as he could; when he saw one archer draw, the arrow aimed at him, he threw his stick, end over end, and dove for the ground.
He felt the heat of the flames, but the arrow missed him. The horse, alarmed at an attack from the rear, crowhopped and whirled, fighting its rider; the archer grabbed too late for the rider’s belt and slid off, landing hard on his back. He heard screams: one of his men had been hit by a fire arrow. But more had followed Gird’s lead; horses squealed and bucked, spun and reared, and all but one archer fell off.
The other riders tried to cut Gird and his yeomen off from the fallen archers. Gird ducked under one horse’s neck, got his arm under the rider’s leg and heaved; the man fell off the opposite side, cursing, and cut his own horse trying to strike at Gird. The horse squealed, shied, and collided with another in time to spoil that rider’s stroke. Gird had his hauk out, and popped the next rider hard on the knee. He heard it crunch. Then he saw one of the archers, standing, with his strung bow over his shoulder, reaching up for a lift onto horseback. The rider was leaning out and the archer took his wrist. Gird’s hauk got the archer in the angle of neck and shoulder just as he left the ground. The man sagged, pulling the rider down and sideways; before the rider realized his danger, Gird had yanked back on the archer, and dragged both off the horse. He put a deliberate heel on the bow as he smashed the archer’s head, and then the rider’s.
“Gird! Here!” He followed that yell and found a tight cluster of his men, protected by their sticks, holding off a milling crowd of horsemen. Gird dived into that protection just as a sword opened a gash across his shoulders.
“We got the archers,” said one of the men proudly.
Without archers, the horsemen could not quite reach and kill the yeomen; Gird was able to maneuver the survivors of his raid back into the main group. These had recovered enough control to withstand the pressure from the sier’s pikemen, though Gird realized he no longer outnumbered the enemy by anything like two to one.
Time passed, with sweating, grunting, miserable fly-bitten flurries of effort and equally sweating, miserable, and fly-bitten stretches of exhaustion, when both forces had run out of breath and will. The sun moved on towards evening, and Gird had not been able to move his yeomen anywhere. But no reinforcements had come for the sier’s troops, either. They were locked together like two stubborn bulls that have shoved head against head without yet establishing dominance.
What broke the stalemate was Gird’s twenty other yeomen, coming back from the distant campsite to find out why they had had no orders. They came marching along, singing “The Thiefs Revenge” as loudly and unmelodiously as twenty men could do, while behind them came such of the noncombatants as wanted to flourish a shovel or pick and learn to march in step. In actual numbers, they were too few to matter, but as fresh troops coming onto a field where all are exhausted, they had an effect beyond their numbers. The sier’s men withdrew a step, and then another. Gird did not order a charge; he was near falling down himself, and knew his yeomen did not have strength left for a charge. The sier’s pikes withdrew an armslength, a pike’s length—the horsemen rode between, and the sier’s pikes turned to march away. Gird let them. He was glad enough to see them go.
There was no question of holding his position. Too many had died, demonstrating that he did not have what he needed to hold it. Gird watched the low evening sunlight gild the backs of the sier’s men as they withdrew to the far side of the bridge, and formed again. His own yeomen gathered the bodies of their dead, ignoring the sier’s fallen. It would be foolish to strip the bodies in sight of their companions. Too many, too many: Gird cursed his foolishness, his stupidity, and even the time he wasted cursing them.
“At least you got us out of it,” Rahi murmured, as he gathered them again to march away.
“No thanks to me,” Gird said. “I got us into it.”
“You always said a lesson that leaves bruises is never forgotten.”
He looked at her, but her steady eyes did not reproach him. “I said that?”
She grinned, a white flash out of her dusty face. “Often and often. When that witch of a dun cow kicked me. When Gori hacked his ankle with th
e scythe—” Gori, her older brother, his first son, who had died of a plague. Rahi went on. “One of your favorites, that was, along with Think first, and you won’t bleed after.”
Gird snorted. “I didn’t remember that one, did I? Gods above: I thought about what I would do, not what they would do.”
But if Rahi did not reproach him, others would. He would reproach himself for this day’s stupidity. He would learn from it— he had to, to make the deaths worthwhile—but he would not forget that he could have chosen differently, and those men and women would still be alive.
Chapter Twenty-four
In this chastened mood, Gird spent the next hand of days ensuring that his camp was as safe as it could be. He examined those who wanted to train as yeomen, and assigned them to units to replace those who had died. He visited the wounded, steeling himself to endure criticisms which no one actually voiced. He was sure they said more behind his back.
To his surprise, his recent defeat brought in as many recruits as his earlier victories. Hardly a day passed without one or three or six men or women straggling into camp, asking a chance to train and fight for “the new day.” Some had traveled hands of days from distant farmsteads; others came from villages and towns only a few hours away. Some were enthusiastic youths, children—as Gird saw them—hardly off their mothers breasts. They stared wide-eyed at his veteran yeomen; he could practically see “glory” written on their foreheads. When he tried to explain how hard a soldier’s life could be, they hardly listened, their eyes wandering to the alluring strangeness of campfires, women in trousers carrying pikes, men practicing archery. Gird sighed, turned them over to one of the more dour yeoman-marshals, and tried to ignore their eager glances when next he passed them as they scrubbed pots or dug jacks trenches.
Older recruits posed other problems. Some had a grievance against a particular lord, and wanted Gird to ensure vengeance. These could turn sour when they found that everyone had a grievance, and Gird thought no one’s private reasons more important than another’s. Some were obviously the misfits of their villages, quarrelsome bullies who thought Gird would supply weapons and food and an excuse for their violent behavior. Some were spies, as Selamis had been originally, some were crochety old men who were sure they knew how Gird should run his army, and some were soldiers changing sides, born peasants and now returning to their people—who also knew how Gird should run his army. Few of them shared Gird’s concern for the time after the war, for the kind of land they would have. And they all knew less than they thought they did.
Gird dealt with these as well as he could. What bluff honesty and forthright explanation could do, he did, but when that failed he resorted to his strong right arm and a voice that could, as one of his marshals said, take the bark off a tree at twenty paces. He had the least patience with whiners and those who could find, as the saying went, one grain of sand in a sack of meal.
The army grew, nonetheless, and Gird found that Selamis’s ability to read, write, and keep accounts was invaluable. He no longer had to keep in his head the members of each unit, with its marshal and yeoman marshal. Selamis suggested—tactfully—changes in nomenclature, preserving the name “barton” for the original use, and calling tactical units “cohorts” no matter how many bartons went to make them up. Gird agreed, after scowling at Selamis’s neat script for a long moment. The gnomes had had names for the units, based on size, from the five-gnome pigan to the hundred-gnome gerist, but the language of his own people had nothing but “horde” and “skirra.” The former meant everyone in the steading or hearthing who could fight, and the latter meant a small raiding party sent to steal livestock. He did not like using one of the mage-lords’ words, but cohort was better than the others.
With Selamis and his most experienced yeomen, Gird worked out a new, more uniform, organization. His cohorts were upwards of 120 hands—though the term “hand” began to fall out of use with the larger unit. Each cohort would have a marshal, and at least four yeoman-marshals. Where bartons had joined to form cohorts, their yeoman-marshals would serve, otherwise the most experienced yeomen could be chosen. Each cohort would divide into tally-groups for camp work, and each tally-group would be supervised by the yeoman-marshal for that section. When the army divided for some reason, Gird would appoint one of the marshals to command whatever group he himself was not with—which led to the title of “high marshal” for such a situation, and—over Gird’s initial protests—“Marshal General” for himself.
“They don’t have to call you that,” Selamis pointed out.
“Thank the gods! Why should they? A general is one of those fancy officers in gold-washed armor with a plume to his helmet; I’m not—”
“But you are, in one way. Commander of the whole army. It’s for the records, Gird, and if you send orders—”
“Flattery.” Gird eyed Selamis dubiously. The man had good ideas, but he had too many of them, too fast, and was too tactful by half in presenting them. Gird could not doubt his bravery—he had asked to start training while his hands were still sore—but he could not overcome the feeling that Selamis was just a little too smooth.
Somewhat to Gird’s surprise, the sier had caused no more trouble—no patrols had come in pursuit, and the guardpost near the bridge was left a pile of rubble. Gird’s eastern troop—half-cohort, he reminded himself—returned after several hands of days, full of their own stories of battle. They had “almost” held the sier’s cavalry; they had seen no sign of magicks.
Ivis made no comment on Gird’s mishaps, but did get him aside to discuss Selamis. “Are you making a yeoman-marshal out of him?”
Gird raised his eyebrows. “I hadn’t thought. Why?”
“He wasn’t in the barton in his village.”
Gird sighed. “We went over that. He was an outsider; he’d been given someone’s cottage—”
“I don’t entirely trust him.” Perversely, Ivis’s distrust made Gird feel obligated to defend Selamis.
“He’s not like us, I’ll admit, but he’s good enough.”
“He was telling Kef what you thought about the lords’ powers,” said Ivis. “As if you’d told him to. Did you?”
“Well—no. But I don’t see that it matters, unless he lied about it. What did he say?”
“Just what you’ve told me, mostly, and you thought the others should tell you if they’d heard anything more.”
“That makes sense. If I’d thought of it, I’d have done the same.”
“Yes, but—” Ivis shook his head. “I can’t explain it, but he’s— he’s not solid.”
“His wife and daughter died. We heard three days ago, from someone who saw it. He knows—that would unsettle anyone.” Gird did not say how Selamis had taken the news; he was not sure himself what that white-lipped silence meant, that was followed so soon by apparent calm. He looked off across the camp, where Selamis at that moment was chatting with someone while scrubbing a kettle. Harmless enough; what was it that unsettled Ivis? Gird remembered that Diamod had unsettled him, with the difference between farmer and craftsman, an indefinable shift in attitude.
By this time they had moved the main camp, shifting west away from Grahlin, and south along one of the arcuate band of hills. Only one of the gnomish maps had been recovered; Gird was trusting Selamis’s memory for the rest. The maps looked much the same to him, barring the use of a brush instead of a pen.
The larger camps, and richer resources of summer, allowed refinements he had missed before. One of their number claimed to have made his own brews before, and combined the seeds of early-ripening wild grasses with gods only knew what to produce a potent brew. The taste varied widely from batch to batch, but no one was asking for flavor. Gird found it relaxing to sip a mug in the evening after dark, when the weight of the day’s worries seemed to bow his shoulders and put an ache in every joint. It had been a long time—many years—since he could end most days in a pleasant if hazy mood. He had, he told himself, earned it.
It was on on
e such evening, after a day spent settling the petty disputes which so often infuriated him, that he found himself faced with six newcomers, all women, and all with a grievance. His head had ached since before dawn with the coming storm that drenched the camp in afternoon, and brought a foul stench from the jacks. No one else admitted to smelling it; he’d had to bellow at the marshals before they reassigned their tally groups to digging a new one. Even after the storm, it was hot and sticky, with hardly a breath of breeze and clouds of stinging flies; nothing would dry, and his boots were sodden. For supper they had only cold porridge left from the morning; the storm had caught them by surprise, and all the fires had gone out. So Gird had retired to his favorite stump with a pot of Selis’s brew, and let the stuff work the day’s irritations out of his consciousness.
He was not happy to be interrupted by the newcomers, and the woman who talked the most had a sharp, whining tone that set his teeth on edge. She had a complaint about the duke’s steward in their village, and a complaint about the barton’s yeoman-marshal, who did not welcome women. She wanted to tell him in detail about a legal dispute involving one woman’s husband’s mother and a promised parrion which had then been withheld, as proof of the unreasonable attitude of the steward. His eyes glazed after awhile. He was acutely aware of her disapproval, and that made him even less willing to be sympathetic. The other five women stood shifting from foot to foot as they listened, clumping behind Binis, the speaker, as if she were some sort of hero able to protect them. She didn’t look much like a hero, a tall scrawny dark-haired woman with a big nose and very large teeth, hands too large for her wrists… He never did remember when the vague annoyance sharpened into active dislike, and the dislike into anger. Along the edge of his memory was the sight of Binis’s face, the expression changing from surprise to dismay to anger and contempt, the faces behind hers mirroring hers as if she were in fact the only real person there— his memory blurred, after that. The next thing he knew, Kef had waked him with the news that Binis was gone, and with her the five newest yeomen. That was the next morning, broad daylight, far later than he usually woke.
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