Judgment at the Verdant Court

by M. C. Planck

  “You’ve married off a fistful of daughters, or close enough. That’s something to celebrate.” Tom could always find the bright side of any coin. “And I hear you’re commissioning a grand new house for other people to live in while you’re stinking in a swamp.”

  “Indeed,” Christopher answered with a laugh. “Don’t bankrupt me, though. It’s a house for a village lord, not for a grandee of the realm.”

  “For now,” Tom said with a wink. “For now. Also, I bring you Mistress Fae’s heartfelt regrets. She was unable to attend, as she was deep in the pains of childbirth last I saw her.”

  Christopher remembered what Tom’s wife had told him about wizards getting pregnant, and wisely decided not to ask Tom anything impolitic.

  “A fine state for her, if you ask me,” Tom went on. “Hopefully it will teach the witch a little humility.”

  “Do they know if it is a boy or a girl?” Christopher asked, trying to make conversation.

  “They don’t even know if it’s human yet,” Tom’s wife said. “Gods know what kind of creatures that creature was consorting with. I’ve heard talk of wings from her window on starless nights.”

  “Hush, woman,” Tom said. “The Lord Vicar doesn’t want to hear your old wives’ gossip. Still,” he continued, tipping his head apologetically to Christopher, “it’s clear the father is no man of the town. The witch has been as cold as ice since you elevated her to the gentry.”

  “No man at all,” muttered his wife.

  “Are you sure?” Christopher asked, meaning was Tom sure he wasn’t the father, but Tom misinterpreted the question.

  “Quite certain, my lord. It’s not only the women’s gossip. If there were a man bedding her, I can’t imagine he wouldn’t be bragging about it, and neither I nor any of my lads have heard a peep.”

  Christopher could think of one man Fae had slept with in the last nine months. But there didn’t seem to be any purpose in mentioning it.

  “I’m not worried about it, Tom. I don’t think anybody else should be, either.”

  Tom shrugged good-naturedly. “That’s good enough for me, then. And it will be for you, too,” he said to his wife. “The Lord Vicar knows how to maintain his own stable.”

  “The Lord Vicar’s not the one who needs minding,” she said. “Every woman knows the quality of his household. It’s the rest of you men what need be paying attention.”

  Tom gave him an aggrieved look, as if to say, Look what you’ve started. Christopher wasn’t particularly sympathetic, so he grinned and bowed to the man’s wife, which made the woman beam with pride and blush with happiness.

  It was a wonderful sight, one of many that stayed with him for days. As he saddled up in front of the chapel on another frigid morning, men and horses stamping in the snow with steaming breaths, harnesses jingling and wagons creaking, he looked over his stone chapel and pictured the wedding it had held. Not just booty piled in front of the god for a change, but joy and hope. It warmed him inside, a secret fire he kept hidden from the rough soldiers cursing perfunctorily in the cold.

  15

  CAMPAIGN SEASON

  The cold melted with every mile they rode. By Carrhill it was no more than coolness even in the dead of night. Christopher was annoyed, recognizing that this weather was wholly unnatural and therefore not subject to his analysis or understanding. A journey of a hundred miles should not turn Nordic snow into tropical rain.

  The cloaks they had hugged tight a few days ago they now cast off, groaning under their weight. The boots were worse. In Knockford they had doubled their socks against the snow. Here they wanted to go barefoot. Christopher was of half a mind to let them, but he didn’t dare. If hookworm broke out, he wouldn’t be able to heal them fast enough. Leather-strap sandals would serve them better than boots. But where could he buy four hundred pairs of sandals while on the march?

  The answer turned out to be magic. He accidentally let slip the topic in his obligatory meeting with the Lord Wizard of Carrhill, who could not be dissuaded from showing off. The wizard sent out for a dozen bullhides and a hundred yards of twine. When they were piled at the foot of his tower, he cast a spell, and purple-hued mist swarmed over the materials, leaving behind stacks of neatly crafted footwear.

  Christopher recognized the effect as similar to Lalania’s lyre, but he didn’t mention that, confining his remarks to gratitude.

  “I should thank you,” the wizard said. “It’s a tragically worthless spell. Who the hell needs hundreds of mundane objects in an afternoon? I can’t imagine what the dark was going through the mind of the fool who created it. This is probably the only time I’ll ever be able to make a profit off that cursed waste of ink.”

  The wizard charged him a hundred tael, which was tragically overpriced. As Christopher was leaving, he found he was expected to pay for the materials, too. The tradesmen waiting for him at the gate looked so unhappy that he didn’t even argue. He’d robbed them of a profitable contract, after all, just to indulge a wizard’s ego.

  He left half the sandals in the stone barracks dedicated to the King’s garrison. Gregor’s regiment was still up in Knockford, forming for the march south, and they would appreciate getting the new shoes before they plunged into the swamp. The garrison was mostly empty now that his men lived in the fort, but it wasn’t deserted. Several of Finn’s teamsters stayed there, overseeing the stocks of supplies that flowed down from the north.

  “Some of you are going to have to come out to the fort,” he told them. “The King has ordered my regiments south, to engage the ulvenmen. The fort is going to have to become just another supply depot.”

  “Aye,” their leader grunted. “Major Tom’s already made that known. But the major said the men what went south would be given rifles? Is this truth?”

  Christopher had no idea what the production schedules looked like these days. “If he says so, then it must be,” he said, and hoped it was true.

  They spent another two weeks improving the road from Carrhill to the fort. The men wanted a name for the place, now that it was at the end of a road. The only fort Christopher could think of was Fort Sumter. It wasn’t really appropriate—he wasn’t trying to start a civil war—but nobody here would understand the connotation. In a few days they had mangled it anyway, to Fort Sump. It was very much like a sump, the lowest place in the Kingdom where the noxious dregs pooled.

  Then Gregor and his men came marching down the road, and the waiting was over. Wagons had preceded them, and more followed; indeed wagons rolled day and night, escorted by armed patrols to keep the dinosaurs at bay. Christopher’s one military virtue was an overabundance of supply. It was expensive, but the commerce drove the economy that let him print bonds, so in a sense he was getting it all for free. Or rather, at no more cost than his reputation. As long as the tael kept flowing out of the swamp, people would keep believing in his future, and they’d keep buying his promises. It all uncomfortably reminded him of national economics back home, so he decided not to think about it.

  “Do we have any idea what we’re facing?” he asked. Marching off to military adventures without proper planning also reminded him too much of home.

  “We know enough,” D’Kan said. “Well, enough for your purposes. A Ranger would slip down there in stealth with two or three trusted companions, locate the shaman, assassinate him in the middle of the night, and leave the rest of the ulvenmen to fight amongst themselves. But that’s not your way. Your way is to make a huge noise and stink until every monster within a hundred miles gangs up on you.”

  “It’s an efficient plan, you’ve got to give it that,” Gregor said. “Fifteen hundred ulvenmen in a day is the sort of thing your Lord Rangers can only dream of.”

  “That’s not combat, that’s slaughter,” D’Kan grumbled. “Nonetheless, it is what you have. So you will blunder about like a drunken bull until they attack. For that, the strategy is easy: go south.”

  “I would like to avoid any surprises like the Moaning Lands,
” Christopher said. His army would be all but helpless against an army of shadows.

  D’Kan was unworried. “Easy enough. As long as you’re being attacked by ulvenmen, you won’t be attacked by anything else. Either the ulvenmen would have killed it, or it would have killed the ulvenmen.”

  “How far south?” Torme asked.

  “A hundred miles, maybe less. Then the swamp ends. We know no further than that.”

  “Can you estimate the number of ulvenmen we will face?” Christopher asked.

  The Ranger shrugged. “I am surprised the swamp could feed as many as we have already seen.”

  “So there may be surprises after all,” Torme said. Christopher approved of the man’s relentless cynicism. It was perilously close to logic.

  “I would hazard that the shaman is the pin that holds the cart together. Remove him and the ulvenmen will revert to individual tribes.”

  Unless the shaman himself was a puppet of some greater force. Christopher looked at Lalania with concern, but she quickly shook her head. The hjerne-spica had no allies, she had assured him; the ulvenmen would be even less tractable servants than the erratic Black Bart had been.

  “He must maintain that power through reputation,” Christopher said. “If we march into his territory, he’ll have to come and throw us out, or lose face. So that’s our plan. We go down there and build a fort, and wait for him to come and get us.”

  Gregor laughed. “Madness, absolute madness. To sit and wait for your enemy to strike first is the height of folly.”

  “We can do little else,” Karl said. “Our strength lies in size, not the keenness of our edge. We cannot maneuver an entire army like a band of heroes.”

  “Oh, I didn’t say I disagreed,” Gregor said. “It’s such a stupid plan that no rational foe would even recognize it as a trap. Our only danger is if your shaman is completely insane. A madman might be able to see through your plot.”

  “The shaman will respond traditionally,” Karl warned. “He will swarm our camp with soldiers, and when Christopher spends his magic to save the men, the shaman will strike at him directly. His previous failure will not dissuade him. Rather, he will use the knowledge gained then to strike more effectively. We must expect surprises.”

  “What surprises do we have left?” Christopher asked.

  “You have a new rank, as does Gregor. Disa has three.” Karl added up their advantages. “We have Cannan. And we have twice as many men, with a greater wealth of carbines.”

  “And me,” Lalania said. “What am I, sour milk?”

  “What if he ignores us and cuts our supply lines?” It was what Christopher would do. After all, he couldn’t be everywhere at once. His men would be severely outclassed by an invisible, flying foe armed with lightning bolts. It would be as pitiful as pitting infantry against a stealth fighter plane.

  “He will not spend himself in combat against commoners,” Karl said. “He cannot be that stupid. You would lose a few dozen men, but eventually you would catch him in an ambush.”

  Torme agreed. “We can lose many men, and revive them. The ulvenman shaman can only afford to die but once. Every time he steps out from behind his horde he risks his fate.”

  The shaman was constrained by the same math that bound Christopher. Both of them had to hide behind their merely mortal servants. The difference was that the shaman did not seem to care how many of his servants he lost.

  The other difference was that Christopher’s men had guns. Lord Nordland could credibly threaten his entire company with just his sword and his wife; the King was arguably the equal of all the mundane regiments in the Kingdom. But a single troop of Christopher’s cavalry would blast himself and his magic to pieces. Even the ulvenman shaman had ultimately retreated in the face of gunfire, despite protective magic. The age-old equation balancing a high rank against an army of mortals had been severely tilted by technology.

  It remained to be seen if it was enough.

  Once again Christopher rode his magnificent stallion through the swamp, looking for trouble, but this time he was in a much better mood. The ride was vastly more tolerable in chain than in plate. The ranked men rode at the center of a cloud of cavalrymen, so the track was well beaten and free of hanging branches by the time he rode it. The only difficulty was convincing his imperious horse to stop trying to take the lead.

  There were over eighty horsemen now. Karl had been hiring steadily throughout the year, bolstering the ranks of the draft with mercenary veterans tempted back to battle by a commander who wouldn’t leave them dead. Not just cavalrymen; Christopher had seen many older faces in Gregor’s new regiment, a welcome seasoning to the greenest branch of his army. And armed contractors rode at the rear of his column, driving wagons and carrying rifles. This was the most professional army this realm had ever seen. He’d won two battles with his New Model Army. Now it would be seen if he could win a war.

  Disa and Lalania also rode with the tiny knot of nobility—Christopher, Gregor, and the ever-present Cannan. The other priestesses were dispersed into the infantry, where their healing might save a life. D’Kan was with the horsemen, out in front where he preferred to be, but Torme and Karl had duties in the column. Christopher missed the presence of both men, but they’d already died for him. It was somebody else’s turn.

  The first day went as expected. They made half the distance they’d planned and shot twice as many crocodiles as they’d feared. They made campfires out of the reedy, gnarled trees, and pitched their tents on the dry patches. Christopher had an army of black-powder weapons with paper cartridges. Rain was his nemesis, and it rained every single night, sparking nightmares of hordes of ulvenmen in glistening fur. If the mob that had broken on his fort attacked him on this open ground, he was doomed. D’Kan swore that even ulvenmen couldn’t assemble such a force overnight, so they had a grace period—unless they got unlucky and stumbled into an invasion already in progress. Even then, D’Kan said they’d have a day or so to respond while the ulvenmen converged, asserting that their supply system—or rather, total lack of one—required them to spread out and forage on the march. Christopher wasn’t so sure, remembering the Triceratops with houses on their backs.

  The night passed with only a few gunshots, and in the morning they all got up and did it again. The highlight of Christopher’s day was signing a requisition slip for more lard. Keeping the guns protected from moisture was a full-time job. He really needed to invent bluing. Or better, stainless steel. Or even better, bug spray.

  “Is there some kind of gas cloud spell?” he asked Lalania. “Can we hire a wizard to fumigate this blasted swamp?”

  She frowned at him sourly. “That would please the Dark, no doubt. A spell to kill an entire land. Fortunately wizards are limited to murdering people by the yard, not the acre.”

  Christopher thought about atomic bombs, whose killing radius was measured in miles, and kept the rest of his comments to himself.

  On the fourth day they stopped marching and built a fort. Although it had taken them three days to get here through the mud, it would only take one day by road. Once they actually built a road, that was.

  This fort was made of mud and scrub wood, but it still represented a huge advantage for his riflemen. They spent two whole days clearing the surrounding land, building walls, and digging ditches. The Romans had built a fort every single night on the march. Christopher couldn’t quite match that, and he wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was density. A legion had five thousand men, which increased their labor by a factor of ten over his two regiments, but only increased the circumference of their walls by some smaller number that he couldn’t be bothered to work out. He needed to invent calculators, too.

  Fort-building was even more boring than marching, at least for him. They were resting the horses, so there were no patrols, and the mechanics of ditch-digging and wall-raising were well understood, so there was nothing for him to do there. He spent the time leading Lalania around, explaining every detail and feature of the
preplanned structure to her. She seemed to have concocted an intense interest in the minutia of fort-building. He concluded she must be even more bored than he was.

  Once they had their fort, the infantry spent a day resting while the cavalry rode a wide circle. They had a brief moment of excitement when D’Kan discovered a circle of crude, dilapidated huts, but the Ranger declared them old and abandoned.

  The next day they started the sequence over: march, march, march, and build. This time it was much more exciting. On the third day of the march the cavalry had been ambushed by a dozen ulvenmen. It was probably supposed to be a hit-and-run attack, but the ulvenmen didn’t get a chance to run before the carbines cut them down. None of Christopher’s men died, though several would have without Disa’s healing. They let Gregor heal the wounded horses, for practice. That day the fort-building went off with considerably more alacrity and dispatch, seeing as how everyone was expecting a deluge of slavering dog-men by nightfall.

  When the cavalry went out for patrol, they found another group of huts. To Christopher’s untrained eye they were in as poor a shape as the others, but D’Kan swore they had been occupied only moments ago. Gregor lit a torch.

  “What are you going to do with that?” Christopher asked him.

  The knight paused, confused. “Our goal is to provoke them, I thought.”

  “Well, yes, but—”

  Gregor held the torch against a straw-thatched roof, setting it ablaze. He handed the torch off to a cavalryman, who shared the flame with two others and set forth to burn the village.

  Lalania twisted her mouth up. “This is warfare, Christopher, as the lords practice it. Eventually we shall damage the purse of the master enough that he sallies forth. Until then, the peasants suffer.”

  Disa tried to defend her man. “They aren’t peasants. Each one of them is a warrior, and our enemy.” The disquietude in her face belied her words.

  Cannan’s defense was more effective. “I could build a better hut in an hour. They’ll spend less time worrying over this than you have.”