"We were all standing around the riders, having poked and prodded them into a huddle, wondering what to do next, when you jumped out and—"
"I remember that," Gird said. "It's what comes after—"
Cob shrugged. "You grew about four hands taller, sprouted wings and horns, and started throwing horses around like sheep. No: you didn't really get bigger, but you
looked
bigger. Yelling your head off and covered with blood, and you did throw at least one horse right on its side—I saw that, and so did everyone else. The rider that sliced your arm—you threw him, too, across one horse and into another. The riders panicked, even the bowmen. I think we could have stood there watching you finish them all off, but that was boring after awhile, so we tried it for ourselves."
"What hit my head?"
"I didn't see that. We heard the others coming, and Fori's attack yell, and you told us to go help him. I ran off with my group; when I got back, you were sitting against a tree, not saying much of anything, while Elis here cleaned you up. It was hard to tell which blood was yours."
Felis broke in. "The new formations work perfectly, Gird. Even in the trees—I admit I'd wondered if that practice going between trees was good for anything, but now I know it is."
"Of course, we outnumbered them," said Ivis. "Two to one."
"More than that." Gird shifted, testing the limits of his pain. "They were stupid enough to come to us in pieces. We had three to one on the first group, more like five to one against the horsemen."
"But—oh." Gird could see by their faces that they were working this out for themselves.
"Remember what I told you. What counts is how many against how many at the point of contact. If they're not in the fight, they don't count."
Fori spoke up. "But we were even against their reinforcements, at first. And we were moving them—I think we could have won."
"Probably. I hope so. But you'd have had more losses, and a harder fight. We're good, lads, and better than before, but it never hurts to let them make it easy for us. If we can take them at good odds, why not? Now—where are we?"
They chuckled, slightly sheepish chuckles. Cob said. "You aren't going to like this."
"What?" He tried to roar, but it didn't come out as a roar, more as a peevish growl.
"We're in Overbridge. In the soldiers' barracks."
"You
idiots!
" That time it did come out as a roar, and faces turned to him. He struggled to sit all the way up, and nearly made it.
"Listen to me." Cob had a hand on his chest, with weight behind it if he didn't lie back. He lay back, simmering. "There are no more soldiers in Overbridge. The ones we killed were stationed here; the barton is sure none got away. The nearest beyond are past Burry, at a road crossing. We sent word to Burry—and you know the Burry yeomen." He did know the Burry yeomen, as determined as any; if they swore no one would get through from Overbridge, no one would. "This village is delighted with us—those guards camped here all winter drinking up the ale and rolling the local girls, even a few with babies coming. We killed them without trampling the fields, or involving the local yeomen. They
begged
us to come in, offered us food, even the little ale the guards hadn't found—"
"Ale—" said Gird meditatively.
That
should dull his headache. "But we can't stay here," he said, looking around to see if he could spot a likely jug.
"Of course not." Cob reached back, and someone handed him a jug. He dangled it in front of Gird's nose. "But for one night, while certain persons take their well-earned rest—"
"You do have sentries out?"
"Of course. Don't we always do what you tell us?"
Gird heaved himself up on his uninjured elbow; someone behind him helped him up until he was braced against the wall. He got his hands around the jug, and sniffed it. Yes, just what he needed. He took a long swallow that warmed his throat on its way down. He offered the jug to Cob, who shook his head.
"I've had some. Now, about our wounded: three of them won't be able to travel for days, maybe weeks—" Gird took another swallow, and felt the edge come off his aches and pains. Behind the throb in his head, his mind was beginning to work again. Wounded who could walk tomorrow—in two days—not for a long time. Members of the Overbridge barton who wanted to come along rather than stay home and farm. Villagers who wanted to meet the man who had thrown down a horse. Felis wanted to tell him about the weapons they'd taken from the dead soldiers and those found in the armory. Ivis had questions about food supplies for the next march, and Rahi—when had she appeared at his side?—Rahi had one of her herbal brews that puckered his mouth after the ale.
He woke next in the cool colorless light of dawn, his head pillowed on Rahi's lap; he looked up to see her slumped gracelessly against the wall, snoring. His head throbbed; he could not tell if it was the ale or the lump. He tried to reach up to scratch his itching hair, but chose the wrong arm; his wince woke her, and she smiled at him with a look that turned his heart. He could not stand for her to be here, for her to be leaning over him as he had so often leaned over her.
"You put me to sleep," he said quietly, holding her gaze. "You told them to give me ale, and then you had that brew—"
Rahi grinned. "You needed the rest, and you'd have stayed up all night, arguing and keeping everyone awake. Besides, we wanted to clean your wounds again. That hurts."
"Not so badly now," he said, moving arm and leg gingerly.
"You told us, clean makes fast healing. And we have two healers, now. From Overbridge."
"We still need to move, leave here before someone comes." Some large army they could not handle, a commander smarter than the one that had let Gird pit his entire force against three separate smaller ones.
But that day was spent reorganizing after the battles. Gird fretted less as he realized it was not entirely faked for his benefit, and less still when one of the healers had time to draw the pain from his head and lay it on the soldiers' hearth. Where, she insisted cheerfully, it really belonged. He thought to ask about Selamis, who had been traveling with the noncombatants, since he could not hold a weapon.
"He looks bad," said Ivis. "Sad, miserable—I suppose part of it's the pain. But his wife and daughter—he can't help thinking about them." Ivis's losses were far in his past, a young wife dead of fever, children never born alive. Gird thought he knew the anguish Selamis was feeling now (where was Girnis, his other daughter? She had married a lad from Fireoak, but neither of them had come to the wood when Fireoak village broke up. He had not asked Barin about her, not wanting to know.) He looked around but did not see him. Ivis interpreted the look correctly, and said "He's explaining the accounts to Triga."
Gird felt as if someone had poked him with a pin. "Accounts? He can read?"
"So he says." Ivis could not, and was glad of it. "Says he can calculate, too. And write."
"I'll keep him busy," Gird said. "We need someone who can keep track of what we have."
Meanwhile, his army had gathered all the clothing and equipment the soldiers had had—those with no shoes or boots tried on the soldiers' until they found some that fit or were comfortably large and could be stuffed with rags or tags of fleece. The soldiers' clothes, washed in the stream and dried on bushes, became shirts and tunics for those with no clothes, and patch material for those whose clothes needed patching. In the soldiers' kitchen were the huge cookpots he remembered, and longhandled utensils. The heavy storage jars would be impossible to carry along (and now, he thought, I know why their army needs wagons), but the food stored in the pantry would fit into sacks. They had fifty-nine swords now (some had broken during the fights), four bows gathered after the battle and another forty found in the armory. Gird spared a moment's thanks that the soldiers had chosen to go after them with swords instead of carrying those bows along. Best of all, the armory had racks of pikes, eighty of them.
Gird limped over to the racks and touched one gleaming tip. He lifted it from the rack and felt the balance. Not
that
different from the sticks—the gnomes were right about that, too. And if they carried them for a few days, the new weapons would feel normal.
"That should go through a little easier," Felis said behind him. Gird noted that Felis did not specify
what
it would go through easily. He knew that some of them were still shaken by their own violence, by the knowledge that they, too, were men who could kill.
"We have the gods to thank for this," Gird said. He turned and looked at those who had followed him into the armory. They all nodded; eyes down. "We earned the victory this time. But it will not come so easily again." They did not like hearing that, but it was the truth, and he could not lie to them. He had won at Norwalk Sheepfolds in spite of his own mistakes, because the enemy had not expected anything. He had won here, as easily as he had, because of the enemy's mistakes. Some day he would face a commander who made no mistakes, and then—He shook his head. Time enough for that later. Now they must thank the gods who had been with them, who had helped them.
His people had no rituals for celebrating victory in war, because they had not fought a war—at least not in living memory. Gird conferred with the oldest men and women he could find; none of them knew the right ritual. In the end, Gird combined the thanksgiving ceremonies for Alyanya's permission to open the ground—which should hallow their use of the steel they carried—with the harvest prayers for those who had died in the past year. Sweating with both nervousness and pain, he limped from the soldiers' barracks to the bridge over the stream, and threw in a ritual handful of grain, of flowers (gathered that day by village children), of mint leaves. The oldest granny laid a fire in the center of the village square; he led everyone in a slow dance around it. The fire burned bright, upright and clean: did that mean the gods were satisfied? He did not know. He felt both sadness and contentment, grief worn out with time, as the harvest lament always left him. The fire spurted up, suddenly, burning blue as the summer sky; Gird felt a wash of heat across him, as if he'd been dipped in it—but he was not burned, and the fire had fallen back to its wooden roots in an instant. All the hair stood up on his neck.
They said something,
he told himself.
And I'd better figure out what it was. . . .
It had looked simpler on the model in the gnomes hall. Gird wiped sweat off his forehead and scowled at the stragglers moving along the trail past him. Go north like this, they'd said, and capture this stronghold, they'd said, and then send part of your force over here to capture this other stronghold which controls . . . it had made perfect sense. There, with gnome soldiers. He could almost understand the gnomish disapproval of undisciplined humans.
He had not planned the capture of the Overbridge guardpost, and it had fallen into his lap, eighty good pikes and all. He had neither planned nor expected the other results of that victory: the bartons that had suddenly decided to leave home and join his army, the lords who decided to punish him by burning farmsteads where no one yet had even thought of joining him, the utter confusion and chaos which had erupted in a few hands of days all over the central part of the kingdom. He
had
planned a march north to the River Road, to isolate (if not capture) Grahlin, the city in which the Sier of Sorgrahl ruled, and he was instead spending days he could not afford in skirmishes with the sier's very capable mounted patrols. Remembering that brown man and his courage, he was not surprised to find that the sier made none of the mistakes other commanders had made.
He would have been glad to avoid Grahlin, but it was important for several reasons. It controlled access to the Honnorgat along one of its major tributaries, the Hoor. It sat athwart the River Road, which here bowed away from the Honnorgat to avoid seasonal flooding at the confluence with the Hoor. And the sier's large garrison would be as much trouble behind him as it was in front or on either flank.
It would have been easier—much easier—without all his unexpected allies, especially the noncombatant followers. They had no place to go; he understood that. But he wished fervently that they would find another no-place besides his army. They could not move quickly, and would not move silently. Even now, when his face should have warned them away, some of the children were calling out to him. The adults shushed them, only after the fact.
At the moment, he was trying to work his way to the west of Grahlin. They had tried it before, but this time Gird hoped that the sier would be busy with eight hands of men who had gone east, with forty of his precious pikes. They were supposed to convince the sier that they were leading the whole army that way, but if these stragglers didn't move faster (and more quietly) a stupider man than the sier would realize what was happening. Even as he thought that, the last of the noncombatants trudged by, and his rear guard grinned at him. He knew only about half of them. The rest were new, from the incoming bartons.
Gird fingered the tally sticks tucked into his shirt. Eight hands of pikes was less than a quarter of his army now; he found it hard to keep the rapidly changing numbers in mind. New people came in daily, supplies flowed in and out like water in a basket dipped in and out of a river. The gnomes had insisted that no one could manage a war without knowing his own and the enemy resources, but he could not do that if they kept changing. At least he would soon have someone who could
really
write and cast accounts. Selamis had been able to read everything Gird showed him, including the maps, and he said he could write. When his hands healed, they'd know.
The rear guard had passed; its marshal nodded at Gird, who fell in beside him. This was—Adgar, he remembered. Once of Felis's troop, then his own—the kind of man he liked as marshal, a solid farmer.
"I got the word by runner," Adgar said. "The sier's men took the bait, and are chasing our eight hands eastward."