Wenlock, you will remember, thought I had stolen his son’s ring & was trying to ransom it back to him, a slight for which he has no intention of asking my forgiveness. He is brusque at the best of times, & if I am in the room his pale face grows paler still, while his blue eyes narrow with suspicion, & he barks like a ban-dog at anyone who approaches. Utterback does not take me with him when he dines with his father, & I am pleased enough to forgo these pleasures, as Utterback implies the talk is all of schemes for advancement, for the doing-down of enemies, the looting of the rebels’ land and goods, & the finding of places for Wenlock and his affinity. I have had enough of these speculations at court.
I have also met again the three rogues who tried to knock down my door in search of Lord Utterback’s signet, & it is clear from the way they view me that they wish to pay me back for the reversal they suffered at my hands. Yet I am protected by my lord Utterback, who (I believe) has also defended me before his father, who suspects I have joined the army only to steal the regimental silver.
I have been at pains to learn from Snype all the misfortunes that might befall us on campaign, in order to forestall them. He seems filled to the brim with the idiocies of generals, the badly-sited camps, the robbers & thieves who follow the army, the dishonest contractors & sutlers, the ephebes whose hunger for glory outraces their ability and good sense, & the food that spoils before the soldiers can eat it. He pointed out that cavalry were ever in the advance, & the supply train in the rear, so our supplies might not reach us during the course of a day, & our men go to bed hungry. To remedy this, I have persuaded Utterback to purchase a string of twenty mules to be kept back with the train, & to carry our supplies to us even if the wagons are bogged down somewhere in the rear.
As for the spoiled supplies, I could but recommend the commissary purchase from my friends in the Worshipfull Societie of Butchers, & I would see to it that the meat was of the finest quality. That some would come from my own beeves was unstated, but I saw no reason why I should not profit by the war, when all from Wenlock down to the lowest groom hope to do exactly that.
Anent the business of the commissary, I have met an old friend. Below a drizzling winter sky, as the drops chimed off the peak of my helmet, I returned from an errand into town & passed by the kitchens of one of the mercenary regiments of foot, & there saw a burly Aekoi woman standing proud amid the stewpots, bellowing at her assistants in a stridulous voice that grated in a v. familiar way on my bones. I checked my steed Phrenzy & nosed the horse toward the kitchen, & when the woman looked at me, I recognized those irises like birdshot, all surrounded by white.
“Well, Dorinda,” said I. “Surprised am I to see you here.”
Sir Basil’s cook took a while to recognize me, mounted as I was on a charger & plated in armor, & carrying one of Sir Basil’s own swords with its hilt of gold-wire inlay. And when she knew who I was, I could see that for a moment she was inwardly debating action, whether to flee the camp or assault me I knew not. For though I was formidably armed, & rode a horse that overmatched even the ferocity of the cook, nevertheless I felt her to be a doughty kemperie-woman, & she stood close to any number of sharp cleavers & knives.
“Peace, Dorinda,” I told her. “You need not fear me. You have not done me such harm that I need pursue you.”
Though I would take care never to have a meal with that regiment, for fear of being poisoned.
She cocked her head & regarded me with her strange eyes. “You seem to have risen in the world,” she said.
“And you have not,” said I. “I would have expected to find you in a palace, surrounded by a circle of half-naked lads singing of your beauty & carrying you golden cups of amber wine.”
She laughed at this. “If I am poor,” said she, “it is entirely as I deserve.”
“Your last employment did not prove as profitable, then, as you hoped?”
She glared. “You didn’t help, you & your thieving.” Then, coming close & lowering her voice: “After the ransoms from Stayne + his friends came, Basil decided to break up the troop. Each was to be paid according to the terms of our agreement, & the money divided before us all. But we were offered a choice—either the silver + a share of the other rings & jewels, or we could take the money as a draft on one of the Pilgrim’s monasteries. This was a safe way to shift money about, & Basil had done such a thing previously when we had moved our camp, & no harm had come to us, & none of the money was lost. So I took the bill, thinking I would recover the money when I got to Selford, but Basil had cheated us, & I found the note was worth nothing. I am a fool, therefore, & deserve my poverty for failing to take the coin when it was right there before me.”
So there we have the origin of Sir Basil’s fourteen thousand royals, much of it money he had cheated out of his own followers. Truly it must be admitted that he was refreshingly free of principle.
“Sir Basil has paid for his crimes,” said I. “He & Hazelton are both dead.”
“Hah!” she said, half in surprise, but on the whole she seemed to regard this news without satisfaction. “How did they die? Some militia raised by Stayne?”
I told her that Basil died on his own dirk & Hazelton was hanged. Lest she have any remaining loyalty or affection for her former captain, I left out my own part in the business.
“So perhaps you are lucky after all,” said I.
She gave me a baleful look, & gestured at the kitchen, the cold drizzling rain, the sad specter of half-rotted turnips & half-spoiled mutton lying on the tables ready for the stew-pot. “Do I look lucky?” she asked.
“Luckier than Sir Basil’s victims,” said I.
“It was that bloodthirsty knife of his,” she said. “It turned his mind.”
So Dorinda thinks it was not the renegado’s quarrels, or his vanity, or his greed, or his vengefulness that turned him outlaw, but the possession of a cursed knife.
I have no prejudice one way or another, but I am glad I never possessed that dirk. It seems to me that I am already pursued by a curse in the form of a nymph, & have no need of another.
I see that this letter has returned to a subject I seem unable to escape, that of the Lady of the Chill Waters. Yet I may at present be immune from her attentions, for she told me on our most recent encounter that her vengeance would not follow me into battle, that there was peril enough in war should I be fool enough to find it. So it seems that as a member of the Utterback Troop I may be safe from her for a while, as well as being surrounded by an armored bodyguard may save me from the vengeance of Stayne. All I have to do is somehow survive whatever battles may lie in the offing.
I find I have related all the news, & I will bring this despatch to an end. Sooner or later we will march to Selford, & from there take ship to Longfirth, & I hope I may find you one place or another, so that we may have a night or two of merry-making before the cannons begin their thunder.
I remain, as ever, your recalcitrant servant.
(From the Ae. recalcitrare. I made it up.)
Q.
* * *
I was not to meet Kevin in Selford, as he had gone to Ethlebight to see to the laying-down of a new pinnace he was building to replace one lost in the attack of the reivers. He now had the money to do it, for the prize court had ruled on the Lady Tern, and the ship and cargo were now ours. The ship had already been leased by the navy, and was now abuzz with dock workers preparing her for the sea. The cargo of spices was sold very quickly, and the Crown was happy with its twenty-percent commission. My share of the money for the most part remained in the banks, though I did purchase some comforts for my journey, and invested again in some of the Crown’s debt, which I purchased at a discount. As the Estates General had met and voted in the new taxes, I calculated that the government would be solvent later in the year.
Royal Stilwell sat off Innismore, swinging at its buoy, still awaiting the judgment of the court. The repair-work on the stern was plain to see, and the royal arms that graced the transom had been presented by K
evin to the Queen as a trophy of war.
The city was abuzz with the news that the young Queen Laurel, believed to be Clayborne’s prisoner, had given birth to a boy, and that the infant had been crowned King Emelin the Sixth by the usurper, who then proclaimed himself Lord Regent. Queen Berlauda’s government, of course, pronounced the whole thing a hoax. I sensed nevertheless that the city profoundly pitied Laurel and the babe, though such sympathy was expressed with discretion, least the speaker end up before the Siege Royal.
Utterback’s Troop was obliged to wait in Selford for ten days before being carried across the sea, and I tried to visit my friends. The Roundsilvers were absent—her grace’s sister was lying-in at the family home near Ruthers Gowt, and they had gone to attend the birth. I passed by Allingham House in hopes that Amalie might remain though her husband was banished, but she and Stayne were gone, and workmen moving in the furniture of the proud new tenants, a self-satisfied burgess and his plump wife. I asked one of the servants if Amalie’s child had come, but he knew nothing.
I took care where I walked, but I had left the city a Butcher’s son and returned a trooper in a buff coat, with a sword at his side and a plume in his hat. A paid assassin or sneaking crack-hemp might well find me too formidable to approach. The city was full of soldiers who would render me aid were I attacked, and I tried to keep soldiers always in sight as I went about the streets.
I stayed at Wenlock House with Lord Utterback, but I saw little of him, as his time was taken up with paying calls on the lords and captains who made up the army’s higher tiers. So, I followed his example, though at a somewhat lower stratum, and made merry with the Cannoneers, the Companie of Butchers, and Blackwell’s troupe of players.
One day we were reviewed by the Queen, and with some of the Trained Bands made a parade on the Fields of Mavortis east of the city. The Queen watched from her carriage, with some of her ladies and the handsome Ambassador of Loretto. The princess Floria shared another carriage with her mother. I doubt that they recognized me as I came trotting past on my noble and vicious charger, Shark, though I gave them a flourish with my sword as I brought it up to salute.
Then we embarked, the horses and grooms going on a ship that had been converted for the purpose. My own Sea-Holly had arrived, but was to carry men of the Trained Bands, who had decided to go to war even though, strictly, they were not so required. The Trained Bands were a militia intended to defend Selford itself, and not go abroad on expeditions, but their officers desired glory no less than other officers, and with some fine speeches and a little money, they convinced their battalions to cross the seas and fight the rebels. They had already been across once, after all.
The crossing was made with the protection of the warships of the navy, including the Lady Tern, now renamed the Sovereign, and beyond the weathering of squalls we arrived at the Island without incident, though with most of our troop being wretched and sick for the whole voyage. The wind backed just as we came to the River Brood, and so we spent a day warping up the river, capstans clanking, and arrived after nightfall, in freezing rain.
All the choice billets had already been taken up, so our horses were stabled in the prayer hall of a monastery outside the town, the troopers crowding the monks out of their cells and sending them into the world to beg for shelter. Lord Utterback and I enjoyed the quarters of the abbot, which were filled with the odor of incense, and graced with expensive hangings, with furniture imported from the Empire, and with a beautiful feather bed with a canopy, which Utterback appropriated for himself. I slept on a couch in the anteroom, and was grateful that the monks had not devoted themselves entirely to austerity.
I joined Utterback when he reported to the Knight Marshal, who had taken up residence in the citadel as a guest of Sir Andrew de Berardinis. I had nearly forgot my first impressions of the Queen’s Captain General, but the memory returned at the sight of the frail old man in the coat of sable fur, his charms hanging off his belt and around his neck. At first sight of the old man, I had a presentiment of onrushing catastrophe, a storm in bright armor fast approaching, and the Knight Marshal trying to hold it back it with his frail arms. I wondered what I was doing there, and then remembered that I had nowhere else to be.
Armies were full of men with nothing to lose, and I was one of them. I had failed at everything, and if I failed at soldiering, no-one would care.
At Roundsilver Palace, the Captain General had brought two young men as his supporters, and now he had a half dozen with him. I learned they were his grandsons. The old man greeted Utterback in his mumbling voice, and offered us mulled wine. My lord introduced me, and the puffy eyes viewed me without recognition, and moved away.
“I have taken your advice, Sir Erskine,” I told him.
The puffy eyes returned to my face, and as comprehension had clearly not dawned, I chose to clarify. “On the occasion, at His Grace of Roundsilver’s, when I related the story of how I had put a stop to the depredations of the outlaw Basil of the Heugh, you advised me to join the Queen’s Army.”
“I do not recall the occasion,” he said vaguely, “but I have long advised that all men should join the army and serve their Queen.”
I saw in the wan light the opalescent glimmer of cataracts in both his eyes, and realized that he was nearly blind. It struck me that he was a metaphor for this entire war, and perhaps all wars, a sightless, senescent groping for glory and treasure.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
* * *
looked down from the high ground above Mankin Clough to see the army toiling up the road, pikes sloped, heads bowed, and colors furled. Volleys of April rain beat down on helmets and armored shoulders, and the long, winding serpent that was the Queen’s Army dragged itself up a steep road that had become a river of mud. Mud had plagued the advance to Howel from the first day, and slowed not merely the army, but the wagons that drew the artillery and carried the victuals, plus of course the camp-followers, the sutlers, the speculators, the whores, and the officers’ mistresses.
We suffered inexplicable halts followed by inexplicable marches. Half the time the army went to bed hungry, with the wagons leagues back, the oxen dragging them from one ditch to the next with mud packed around the axles. Even the string of pack-mules I’d persuaded Utterback to purchase sometimes never found us.
The siege train, with the duke’s two great guns, was days behind.
We could have avoided this by taking either of the military coast roads built in ancient times by the Aekoi, but that would have allowed Clayborne to sweep in behind us and seize our base at Longfirth. And so we marched straight for Howel, or as straight as our mire-beset road permitted.
I had also discovered why I had purchased more than one horse. My gentle mare, Daffodil, had died in Longfirth of nightshade that had been mixed in her fodder by whatever careless person had cut the grass the previous autumn, and my bay courser, Shark, had died on the march of a colic. That left me with Phrenzy, an ill-tempered animal who over the weeks I had brought to a grudging obedience, and who I hoped would be as savage to the enemy as he was to me.
The whole campaign had been a shambles from the first day. I wondered if all wars were like this, or if I were simply unlucky.
On maps, the mountains of the Cordillerie were a neat line stretching from the northern coast of Bonille to the city of Lippholme on Lake Gurlidan, but I was in the act of learning that the Cordillerie was not a single row of mountains, but many long, irregular folds of ground rising up one after the next. Each time the army climbed one pass, it was only to view another, higher pass beyond.
Today was no exception. The army had toiled up from Mankin Clough, where the lucky among us had been billeted in the town, only to top the pass and view another, higher slope beyond. The next ridge was heavily crowned by dark pines that obscured the location of the pass, and for all I knew, Clayborne’s entire army might be hidden in those trees.
The dragoons, who I could see already dropping into the next valley, would be s
couting the pass by sundown.
No one knew where Clayborne or his rebel army was, but it was certain that we would have to fight before the Queen’s Army reached Howel. A defense of one of the passes was very possible, but Clayborne might choose to wait until the Queen’s Army descended to the plain of Howel, where the many rivers and bogs formed natural lines of defense, and where our supply would have to cross every pass in the Cordillerie before it reached us.
I turned my horse’s head and trotted across tall, sere meadow grass to where the Utterback Troop waited in an untidy mass by the side of the road. They were dismounted and resting their horses, which were splashed to the shoulder, and for lack of any other occupation cropping the brown grass. Lord Utterback stood apart, his eye to a glass as he viewed the ridge ahead. I drew Phrenzy to a halt and dropped the reins.
“My lord,” said I. “Can you explain to me the function of dragoons?”
For certainly I did not understand their purpose. They were cavalry, but they fought not with sword or pistol, but rather with a special weapon called the dragon, after which they took their name. The dragon was either a very heavy pistol or a very short blunderbuss, with a bell mouth sometimes cast in the shape of a dragon’s mouth, and intended to be used one-handed. It had a very short range and was very inaccurate, and once it was discharged the dragoons had to withdraw to reload. It seemed they would be quite useless in battle.
“The purpose of dragoons,” said Lord Utterback, “is to make we of the demilances feel superior to them.”
“That seems reasonable,” I said. I looked over my shoulder at the valley beyond.
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