"Lady's grace be with them," said Gird. His scouts had not reported any nearby enemy troops eastward, but things changed fast. "Our front's crossed the Hoor, and made it over that first ridge."
"Be nice if they could get right up to that guardpost without being spotted." Adgar hawked and spat. "We could use more pikes."
Gird said nothing. The sier's men, he was sure, had their weapons with them, not hanging on an armory wall. They would have to earn any pikes they got from Grahlin. Something stung his sunburnt ear, and he swatted it. In another hand of days they'd either stop to find flybane or be eaten alive.
By midday, the end of the rear guard was across the Hoor; the noncombatants were supposed to be sitting quietly in the woods, while the front waited for the rearguard to close up. Gird moved up to lead the rearguard, and noticed that his ragtag followers were following orders, for once. Heat and exertion had given them the will to stretch out in the shade and wait. Even the children were silent as he led the rearguard past them. He wished he could rest; he had gulped swallow after swallow of cold Hoor water and his belly gurgled. The ridge beyond was steep; he stumped up it, using his stick, until he saw the blue rag tied to a low limb. He halted, and clicked the pebbles in his left hand.
More clicks answered. Cob stepped out of the thick undergrowth, and waved him on. "It's working," he said. "They left the guardpost as soon as they saw our patrol go across the road." It had been a small group—purposely small, to draw out the guard detachment without giving them any reason to call for help.
"Horses?"asked Gird. Cob nodded.
"But they're fast, the fastest we have, and the land's broken down there. Good cover." He did not add, as he might have days earlier, that if all went well those guards would soon have better to do than chase fugitives. He knew from experience now that all did not always go well.
He led Gird up to the front now, where his other forty pikes would lead the rest across the open ground between the hill and the guardpost. If Gird was right, few if any were left inside. If Gird was wrong, they were going to be full of arrows, but he would not think of that. Instead, he took a last look at the sun, hoped the "fugitives" had had enough start to lead the guards a good distance away. Then he nodded at Cob, and set off at a quick walk across the short grass.
It felt very open, out here under the sky, away from hedges and trees. In the shadow of a distant clump, cows stopped chewing to watch them walk by. Gird forced his eyes away from the cows and their calves and back to the guardpost. It was designed like a fort in miniature, but its walls were no higher than barton walls. Most of the time it functioned as a toll station, collecting a fee from travelers using Grahlin's bridge over the Hoor. It did boast a tower, all of three men high, from which a sentry could survey the bridge and the road into Grahlin. Or, as Gird thought, the road
away
.
So far no alarm had come from the guardpost. Gird squinted at its tower; he could see no one up there. But a thin column of smoke climbed into the sky from somewhere in the guardpost. He muttered a curse. At the least they had left a cook behind—a cook who might chance to look out a window idly. He looked along the road as they neared it. Nothing westward—so he should hope, having sent a small group to block the road well out of sight of the guardpost. Eastward, this late in the day, no traffic moved between Grahlin and the bridge, as he'd expected.
Now they were on the road itself. Gird sent units around both sides of the guardpost, which continued to look as innocuous as a cottage, including the smoking chimney. The little tollbooth on the road was empty. The guardpost's main entrance, a heavy wood gate, was closed, but the postern stood open. Gird had planned to break down the gate, which a drunken guard in a tavern had reported to one of Gird's fascinated agents was "only there to impress serfs; it wouldn't keep out a hungry ox, let alone a determined soldier." But given an open postern—it was either a trap or great good fortune.
Great good fortune turned in an instant when the cook—a tall woman with two buckets of garbage in her meaty hands—backed out the door into the men Gird was sending in. She let out a scream that would have shaken slates from a roof, and flailed about with the buckets. In the narrow space of the postern, they couldn't get at her without killing her, and no one wanted to do that. Then her screams roused the hand of guards left at the station, and Gird heard them blundering around inside as they tried to figure out what was going on.
"Quiet!"
Gird bellowed. To his surprise, the woman was instantly silent, her mouth hanging open. Her eyes bulged out in almost comical panic, and she dropped the buckets with a loud clatter. Gird took her by the shoulders, moved her aside, and said "Be still." She nodded, still with her mouth open. "Follow me," he said to Cob, and plunged through the door.
Already one of the guards had arrived at the narrow passage that led to the postern; Gird lunged with his stick, wishing he'd had sense enough to take a pike instead. His weight and speed forced the man back, but the wooden point would not go through the breastplate. He jabbed again and again; the man retreated, but slowly. Now he was out of the passage. Another guard came up beside him. Cob leaned on Gird, giving him more weight to use. That was fine, but he couldn't use the point on more than one at a time, and the passage was too narrow for two to stand abreast. He would have to push his way out, and take his chances until Cob and the others got through.
He took a deep breath, and bellowed a wordless cry as he lunged. The guard backed two steps; Gird hit his chest hard, and the man staggered and went to one knee.
Faster
, Gird told himself, shortening his grip and running out the end of the passage. Cob and the others were at his heels; he struck at the second man's face. Then Cob was beside him, then another. Cob had a pike, and the man who had fallen died on it. Gird saw a stairway up the outside of the tower, and a man halfway up. He had a horn, and was lifting it to his lips.
Gird threw his long stick, end over end. It spun in the air like a wheel; the man saw it coming, dropped his horn, and screamed. He ducked; the stick hit the stone above him and shattered. Gird had no time to watch this. One of the others had jumped at him as he threw. Gird threw himself to one side, and pulled his hauk from his belt. The sword knocked a chip from it, and the guard grinned triumphantly just as someone else's pike took him in the back. Gird grabbed the sword out of his hand, and looked around. Four guards lay dead or dying; the small courtyard was full of Gird's men, and the guard on the tower stairs was slumped against the wall.
"Sling," said one of Gird's men smugly. Fori was not the only one, now, who could hit something with a slung stone.
"We're not through," Gird reminded them. "Get this place secure, and get four—no, six—hands to the bridge." He went for the tower, and panted his way up the steps. The guard there was unconscious; Gird dumped him off the steps for someone else to kill, and continued to the top of the squatty tower.
From there he could see dust rising from the distant horsemen who were chasing his fast patrol. A score of them, at least, by the dust. Below, he heard the noise settle into the busy murmur of purposeful activity. He looked the other way. There were six hands—most of his remaining pikes—almost to the bridge. Almost a third of them were wearing blue shirts. Gird grinned. His yeomen had begun wearing them when they expected a good fight. Gird himself still had the one Ivis had brought to their first camp, but he was saving that for the day they really needed luck.
Today they needed only the time the fugitives were buying. Gird had all his yeomen in place well before sundown, when the pursuers might be expected to return. A carefully selected group of followers straggled across the fields, although they did not straggle nearly so well when they tried. They kept closing up into neat lines, until Gird yelled at them again. The returning horsemen, trotting briskly in formation toward their own guardhouse, could not help but notice the milling mass of people in the field; they turned aside to investigate. As soon as their backs were to the road and the guardhouse, Gird's signal sprung the trap, and up from roadside ditch and out from the enclosure came the yeomen with their long sticks and their new-won expertise in unhorsing cavalry. One, indeed, wheeled instantly and rode for the bridge to alarm the city beyond, but found himself cut off by the pikemen.
Gird hurried his people into position for the reaction that was sure to come. He wanted both ends of the bridge secure, breastworks on the rocky west bank of the river, a defined perimeter that included the guardpost and the bridge. Late that night, he was sitting over a table in the guardpost with Selamis, interpreting the records that they'd found.
"This is tolls," Selamis said. "Last year by this time they'd had—let me see—almost twice as much road traffic. Numbers and weight are both down. So his income will be down—"
"But he's rich; he'll have treasure in a storehouse—"
"He has to pay his troops, feed his troops, pay his suppliers. Where do you think his money comes from?"
"Fieldfees," said Gird, almost bitterly. Selamis shook his head. "Field-fee's the least of it. Road tax, bridge toll, market tax, building tax, death fees, marriage fees—not just on farmers, on everyone. Smiths won't make his weapons for nothing. He has to find them the raw metal, pay someone to bring it here." Selamis's hands were still tender, but he could turn the pages himself now. "Look at this. Cloth merchants' stonage last year—"
"Stonage?"
"Stones' weight—didn't your village use that?"
"But cloth is furls."
"Not in bulk. The rough measure of stonage is what team it takes to start the wagon on the level. If you've ever been in a big market town, in the square, you'll have seen the tracks, where they test it. The town's market judge has a hitch—can't use the traders' horses, they could be trained wrong. Double-double-hand-stone, a thousand stones, that is, if a pair starts it. If it takes another pair, it's counted as two, and so on. It's only rough; I was told once that a thousand-stone load will break down to more than that, unloaded, but it takes too long to do that. Most lords just raise the load-fee." Selamis liked to talk, and explained things clearly. Gird was fascinated at the variety of knowledge a lord's bastard had collected. When he asked, Selamis shrugged and seemed to answer frankly. "I was in his household until I was shoulder high to a grown man—they taught me reading, writing, figures, something of law and more of custom. Their custom."
"And then fostered you to farmers? Why?"
"I don't know." That was a door slammed in his face. "I suppose my father decided he had enough bastards around."
Gird thought of asking which lord had been his father, but thought better of it. The man was upset enough already. He yawned, honestly if tactfully, and suggested a few hours sleep before the inevitable attack from Grahlin. As it happened, the attack did not come at dawn, when Gird had expected it, and he got almost a full night's sleep before someone woke him up to ask his advice in an argument between two families whose children had started a fight.
Once he'd dealt with that (giving each child involved an unpleasant camp chore which took him far away from the others: the mothers might have thought of this, and let him sleep), he went out to look at the bridge by morning light.
Full daylight, and nothing moved on the road between the city and the bridge. Gird stalked along the lines, glowering into the distance. He could not attack the city; he knew nothing about attacking cities. They had to come out here, where he could fight them. So far the sier had been willing to do that, and Gird had assumed he would come to get his guardpost and his bridge back.
"I don't like this," said Felis, when the sun was a hand higher. Gird didn't like it either. He wondered what the sier was doing instead of sending his troops out. That brown man would not give up his power easily. Even as he thought this, a shout from the bridge brought his head around. He could see nothing but one of his own yeomen waving an arm; he waved his in reply and jogged on.
Under the bridge in the early morning, the Hoor had flowed steadily northward, toward the Honnorgat. Now, even as Gird watched, that flow diminished, the water's color changing from clear green to murky brown. Then it was gone, and the wet rocks and mud gleamed in the sun before they dried. Fish flopped frantically in the puddles, splashing the water out. Sinuous gleams flashed up the bank and into weeds: watersnakes.
"Esea's curse," someone said softly. Gird felt trapped with everyone looking to him for answers he did not have. He had never seen a river disappear like that, and neither had anyone else he'd known.
"Fish," said someone else, and he saw several of his yeomen slithering down the bank to grab for fish in the puddles.
"Get back!" he yelled. Whatever it was had power to spare; where a river disappeared it could return. His people stared at him, and turned to climb back out. He wondered how much water they'd drawn, how many buckets and skins and jugs they had for their need. Expecting the worst, he sent someone to check on the kitchen well at the guardhouse; it was empty, which did not surprise him.
What surprised him was that nothing happened. Around midday, a runner came in from the eastern contingent reporting that they had fought two stiff engagements, come off intact, but had to retreat up the River Road eastward. That meant they could not help if he needed them, but he had expected that. The fish trapped in their puddles died, and stank by mid afternoon. The nearest creeks to the west were barely trickling; beyond them, the flow seemed normal. Gird sent a small party north to the Honnorgat; they reported that the big river seemed completely normal. Although it was not particularly hot for the time of year, everyone felt thirsty—which was partly the knowledge that they had no source of water, Gird knew.
He sent those who could not fight away westward, with a score of yeomen, to make camp by the nearest good water source. He hoped it would stay good. He had a feeling that the sier had decided to move to a new battlefield, one on which Gird had no strengths at all.