Gird shook his head, half in admiration of their ingenuity, and half in concern. "Not all brigands are that gullible," he said, and told Felis about that other band he'd run into.
"So what will you do?"
"Fight my war, and let them fight theirs. People will recognize the difference soon enough." He told Felis about the shepherds of Farmeet. Felis chuckled.
"Everyone thinks farmers are stupid, and shepherds are the stupidest: lords and thieves alike. But tell me, what is 'your war'—how will we fight, and when, and where?"
"And have I seen the gods themselves, and is the overworld paved with gold and walled in crystal? You want all the answers at once? In the dark?" Beside him, Felis made a sound between a snort and a sniff; Gird relented. "All right. What I heard is that the lords have raised their army, and plan to start by clearing from Kelaive's domain east. We will take all the bartons from Hardshallows eastward, and move north—away from them, for now—and strike for the River Road."
"Why?"
"Even if we won here, we'd still be caught between the south trade road, the River Road, and the trade road between Finyatha and Ierin. Their supplies would flow freely; ours would not. If we cut the River Road, we've cut Finyatha from Verella, in Tsaia—"
"Tsaia! You're not thinking of fighting there—"
"Tsaia's king is kinbound to this one. The gnomes say things are as bad there. Our bartons on the east reported interest in neighboring vills inside Tsaia."
"But I don't know where Tsaia
is
, except eastward."
Gird grinned, in the darkness; Felis sounded as much affronted as frightened. That was good. "You will know, when we get there. Now: this is what we must do to win in Finaarenis alone. We must be able to feed ourselves, control the food supply—and that means the trade roads, as well as protection for the farmers, and certain towns—"
"You sound—different—" Felis sounded uncertain again.
"I am, in a way. It's all very different than we thought. It's more than raising three or four bartons at a time to attack a small force. Right now the lords have trained soldiers with good weapons; they have stores of supplies; they have control of towns and roads—and, if we're honest, of much of the countryside. We should have more yeomen overall, but you know how it is—if we seem to be losing, some of those will go home and forget they ever heard of us. Our people have almost no experience, our weapons—Oh. That reminds me. Changes there, too."
Felis rolled over; the straw rustled. "All right. I'm convinced. You've come back ready to lead us to glory, full of as many new ideas as when you came into my camp that first day. But unless the gods put their touch on you, you still need sleep, and so do I."
In less than a hand of days, Gird stood facing his first army: the bartons from Hardshallows, his own village, Fireoak, Whitetree, Harrow, Holn, and the original two Stone Circle groups. After his experience with the gnomes, their "straight" lines looked crooked, and their marching seemed as ragged as goats dancing along a path, but he said nothing of that for the moment. They were there, bold, timid, nervous, confident, in every possible mood he might have expected. With them had come the food he had told them to put by for this purpose; each had brought his or her sack of grain and beans, onions and redroots, even strips of dried meat.
What he had not expected so soon was the ragtag clutter of refugees that had come with them. His own village had come all in a lump, convinced that anyone left behind would die. After all, everyone knew where Gird had come from, and Kelaive had never been slow to make reprisals. Most of Hardshallows followed its yeomen, for the same reason, and Fireoak, in the same hearthing, feared the same trouble.
So besides the yeomen, Gird had all the others to worry about: small children, pregnant women, old men and women who could scarcely totter. They knew nothing of camp discipline. He had to double, then triple, the size of the jacks; smoke from the cookfires marked the sky with unmistakable evidence of their presence. When nothing happened for a few days, the oldest and youngest began to treat it as a holiday—spring, and no work to be done. Grandparents sat and chattered, children screeched, mothers festooned every bush with laundry.
Most of those who were young and strong wanted to join the bartons—better late than never—but Gird took only a third of them. The others he assigned to his traditional tally groups, with Pidi (now beginning to show his growth) to teach them the necessary foodgathering and camp skills. This group he knew could not keep up when the army began to move, but he had no safe place to send them; they would have to do as best they could.
As for the bartons, he had all of them change from varied farm tools to the long stick and the hauk for weapons. The farm tools went to the nonfighters, with a few hours of instruction. Once all his units had the long sticks, drilling them began to look more like drilling a real army. Gird imagined good, hard, steel points on the ends of those sticks, but what they had were sharpened wood: not good enough, but cheap and available. He imagined a lot more drill, but they had no more time than they did steel.
What he did have was willing spies. When the enemy army set out from Finyatha, runners passed the word from barton to barton. Gird knew within a few days, while the army was still days north of Hardshallows.
"Why don't we move
now?
" asked Ivis and Felis. Gird tapped the map the gnomes had made him.
"We can't be sure they aren't getting information the same way we are."
"But no one would tell the lords about us—not farmers—"
"Felis, think. They burned Berryhedge, didn't they? Took the survivors, beat them—do you think there's anything about the Berryhedge barton they don't know? They burned three other villages we know of last winter, taking prisoners each time. Some yeomen got away; some didn't. Some of those they caught will have told all they know—from pain, from fear, from hope of saving a child . . . whatever. Most of our people want to be free, but many of them are scared—and so they should be. Some of those scared ones will help the lords, simply out of fear."
"But I still don't see why—"
"Look again. If they know we're moving north, they'll most likely turn and come after us. They could catch us on the move, before we get to the River Road. I don't know all that country; I need to see it, so that when we come to fight there, I can choose good ground."
"The gnomes taught you that, too?"
"Yes." He looked up, and saw a sulky expression in Felis's eyes. Ivis was merely puzzled. "Felis, I'll be glad to teach you all the gnomes taught me—to teach all of you—but right now I don't have time. Now. When the army has passed the lower ford, there, they'll be unlikely to turn back until Hardshallows. In spring, that stream runs deep and rough. That gives us time to get well north of them before they turn—and if we're lucky they'll go on to my old village, to get word from the steward there."
Cob said "What about the lords' magic—did you learn anything about that? Is it real, and what can they do?"
"It's real." Gird rumpled his hair with both hands. He could have done without that question. The next would be what could he do about the lords' magic, and the answer was, nothing. "Some of them have lost it—that may be why they've changed for the worst. They're afraid they'll lose all their power without their magic to fight for them. But some have enough left—they can make light, call storms, compel men to obedience, change their faces—"
"Are you sure?"
"Yes. Lucky for us that most of them don't have it any more; we'll be fighting soldiers who have no more magic than we do."
"Better weapons," said Cob gloomily.
"Better for fighting unarmed peasants. Remember that most of 'em have been sitting around guarding some noble's home; the ones that have experience got it with horse nomads—not with foot troops who use polearms. They belong to different lords; they'll have a divided command; they aren't used to drilling together. We are."
The lords' army did exactly what Gird had expected. They moved at a leisurely pace down the trade road from Finyatha toward Ierin, waited for a contingent of troops from Ierin, then swung southeastward, following the west bank of the Blue all the way to Hardshallows. His spies told him they burned that deserted village after fording the stream, then stopped to celebrate a victory. Supposedly, the enemy forces now numbered about 300 soldiers, and that many again of servants, guides, packers, and other noncombatants. This was by no means all the force the lords had at their disposal. Ivis's duke was rumored to be on his way with his personal guard—a hundred strong, some of them fresh from the northern frontier.
By this time, Gird and his army were on the move. His original Stone Circle troops now numbered just over fifty; these he considered his best trained and hardiest. The bartons already risen contributed over a hundred, and the newest yeomen—the hardiest of the refugees—added another sixty or so. Then there were the refugees themselves, some of whom might be able to fight, at least a single blow: over two hundred of them.
Moving this motley group turned out to be harder than Gird had expected. Although he and his Stone Circle troops were used to traveling, many of the others had never been out of their villages until now. They did not understand maps, and the farther Gird led them from familiar country, the more unhappy and nervous they became. Some of the older people simply stopped, refusing to go on. For the first few days, it seemed that Gird was constantly being asked to persuade someone's father or mother to keep going. "Not another step!" burned itself into his memory, along with "How many times have I told you—!" addressed to a wailing child.
It was not what he'd planned. It was not anything like what the gnomes had advised. But what could he do? They were his people; he had to take care of them. He led them by the safest ways he could find, avoiding villages where soldiers were quartered. He could not hide the movement of so many from everyone, but most of the peasants would not report them. What worried him were the few who might.
Gird paced back and forth nervously. It was much harder to hide a camp for three hundred than a camp for fifty; the jacks stank almost as far as the road when the wind blew right, and he could not convince his yeoman marshals that any guard sergeant would know what that smell meant. They would not make the trenches deep enough, and insist that the users cover it all. As for the cookfires—he looked back over his shoulder at the wisps of smoke rising into the forest canopy. At least they had trees here, and something to cook. He had to remember that, and the times when they'd had nothing. Farmers around here had been generous, though it was hard to persuade them to stay on their farms and grow food when their barton training gave them confidence. They wanted to fight, now, not plow and plant and reap. He himself would have changed places gladly, in peace, but they wouldn't believe it. For a moment he felt a scythe in his hands, the lovely long swing back and forth, the bite of the blade into ripe wheat. But that was past, and now he had a camp to care for.
"Gird?" Raheli had come up to him, more quiet-footed than he would ever be. In the dimming evening light, the scar on her face stood out whiter than ever.
"What, lass?" His lass she would always be, the child he had held in the moments after birth, the laughing girl who had put flowers on the endstones and danced in the starlight with her lover . . . the girl he had not been able to protect. He could not get away from that.
"There's trouble nearby; a runner came in."
"How much trouble?"
"Farmer's place burning, soldiers all around."
"One of ours?"
"They say not. He came to a meeting awhile back, over to Whitford, and he'd been giving food to the local barton, but not drilling there. Tis said he's a lord's bastard, and got his cottage-right that way."
Gird grunted. Peasant jealousy again. "Not his fault, if it's true. Family?"
"Young wife, two children. Quiet man, they said. Hard worker, but kept to himself."
Gird interpreted that his own way. If his village had resented his getting the cottage, they'd have made life hard on him; such a man might keep to his own hearth with good reason. Had the soldiers interpreted his solitude as rebellion? "What of him and the family?"
Raheli shook her head. "Don't know yet. Soldiers took two off along the road, but it looked like a woman and girl." Her voice shook; Gird's would if he spoke, and he knew it.
"They killed him, then," Gird said huskily. "Otherwise, they'd take him along." To watch, to feel his own shame. The same shame and rage he felt still, when he thought of it. He turned away, blinking back the tears. "Well—we'll have to keep a good watch; there's naught more we can do."
It was near dawn when a sentry found someone crawling through the wood on elbows and knees, sobbing. Instead of killing the intruder at once, he dragged him along to the main campsite. Gird, coming from the jacks to the cookfire in hopes of a quiet mug of sib, heard the commotion as the sentry reported to the night marshal.
"What's this?" he asked, strolling over. The sentry's catch was a lean, dark-haired man who stank of smoke and burnt wood. He stood hunched and shivering, his hands cradled to his chest.
"Says he's a farmer, got burnt out," said the sentry. "Says they beat 'im, burned his hands."
"Come to the fire," Gird said. The sentry and the night marshal both helped the man, who staggered as if he was near collapse. They got him seated by one of the firepits, where the flickering light of the morning cookfire showed a strongboned face smudged with ash and soot. A welt stood out along one side of his face; one eye was swollen, and his hands, when he held them out, were blistered on the palms, as if someone had forced them onto a hot kettle. His shirt was scorched up one arm, with the red line of a burn beneath.
"You need to drink," Gird said. The morning cook had shifted to the other side of the firepit; he reached for the dipper in the sib kettle and paused. "Is your mouth burnt? Would cool water be better?"