His eyes still stung and watered; he could barely see across the meadow to the king's party. Had it been his hidden archers who killed those nobles, or someone else? The momentary lull caused by the onrushing fire had given way to renewed din of battle. His cohorts were inching forward again, by the half-step now, the wounded shifting back as they had practiced, the fallen trodden underfoot. He could do nothing about that, not yet.
The enemy spearmen had finally made it to the front of their lines; they proved as clumsy as Gird had hoped.
Even so, they made rents in the cohort they faced, and it could not advance. For hours, it seemed almost for days, the two armies were knotted in battle. Their lines staggered back and forth, gaining and losing an armlength, a footpace. The noise was beyond anything Gird had imagined, so loud that individual screams and blows merged into a hideous roar.
He concentrated his attention on the details of it, sending his own voice above the rest when necessary. The enemy's reserve archers, mounted, tried a sweep past his left wing. This was the maneuver he'd been looking for: would they support it? At least half the remaining enemy cavalry, and—yes—behind the screen of battle, a cohort or two of infantry. They thought the west hill empty, available; Gird smiled to himself. He might be only a stupid peasant, but he had learned a few things. That trap would spring itself, but he had to set the main one now.
Once before, the arrival of his camp-followers bearing almost useless "weapons" had convinced an enemy that he had vast reserves. The lords had been telling themselves that the peasants were all rebels at heart; they had only to count to know how many peasants were on their own lands, and fear the worst. Gird had taken the chance that the king and his advisors would follow the trails they had followed through the ridges, trails where horses and pack animals could go, where armies could march without fighting their way through prickly undergrowth. Gird marched that way where he could, and he knew they had trailed him back to this meadow. So they would think that what they saw, and what might be behind the little hills, was the worst of what they faced. That was, in fact, the truth, but would they believe the truth when a pretense fit their deepest fears?
He rode the gray horse a little up the slope, above the dust of the battle, to where he had a clear view across the meadow to that forested ridge behind the king. The king would have scouts atop it, for a certainty—if his people had not found them yet. But that would do him no good. Gird waved the pole with its long blue streamer twice. An arrow whirred past his head as the horse neatly sidestepped. Evidently some archers had decided he was worth hitting—well, he'd told his own to take out archers first, and anyone on horseback next.
Shrill yips from the western hill told him that the first part of his plan was working. His archers were falling back, coming around the slope into the hollow between the two hills—not a deep hollow, but one with its own peculiarities. The enemy archers should be making for the hilltop; he thought the cavalry would swing around, trying to take him in the rear, and so came the signal he had been waiting for.
It was amazing how many pits five thousand yeomen could dig in less than a day. Gird thought they could have dug a trench all across the meadow, but trenches could be jumped, and pits cleverly placed where horses must go between rocks of a rockfall—pits just too wide to jump easily—are a most effective cavalry trap. Thanks to the land and the Lady, he thought piously, for that fortuitously placed rockfall between the hill and the ridge behind it, where many horsemen could get into trouble out of sight of the rest of their army. His archers, having slipped around the hill to the rock-fall, were busy; the enemy archers above them, on the hilltop, found themselves unable to see what was going on. Those that tried to come down the south face of the hill to support the cavalry found the scour of the rockfall dangerous in more than one way. The others could—and did—let fly into the backs of the cohorts Gird had between the west and the central hill. He had anticipated this; those cohorts gave way, bending back around the hill; the archers found themselves having to shoot downhill into a confused mass of their own and Gird's troops.
One unwary captain in the king's forces saw that withdrawal as weakening, and urged his own cohorts on to flank those retreating. Gird smiled grimly. His left flank was now anchored by a wall of rock three men high—out of sight of that rash captain, up the little creek that looked so innocent. His troops stood on rock ledges, while their opponents were in the creek, or the mud on its other side. When they reached what they thought was his flank, they would find themselves standing on the far side of a pool of deep water, with no way out but the way they had come in. His archers would find them easy targets.
Meanwhile, the knot of bright-clad nobles across the field was moving again—perhaps it been only exhaustion that felled them. Gird squinted; he was sure he saw someone still on the ground. Out of the trees across from him came yet more cohorts of infantry, more squadrons of cavalry, and some—he squinted, shook his head, and looked again—some did not look human. Magicks, he told himself firmly. It's only magicks. Masks and costumes and fancy ways of frightening people into doing what you want. He wished he knew if the king's whole reserve was committed now.
Below him, the main forces contended as they had all morning, in a heaving, sweating, bloody, snarling mass. If it comes to plain fighting, he had told his marshals, if it comes to simple pounding each other, we win: we'll pound harder, and take more pounding. The king's army now outnumbered his in the center, but his center had not given back at all. They leaned into their pikes with every thrust, grunting with the effort.
Then the king's new reserves hit the back of his force, giving it that extra weight—man against man, those in front were forced forward by that pressure, onto the waiting pikes. They died, had to be shaken from the pikes, and others were already there, already being killed—and again, and again. Gird saw the shiver in his ranks, the realization that something new had entered. The marshals looked aside, trying to find Gird; he caught their eyes and waved with his free hand. Then he took the long pole and signaled his last reserve, across the meadow and up on the ridge behind the king's camp.
It seemed to take forever for that reserve to appear; he had told them to hide neither on the ridgetop nor near the bottom. In the meantime, his center sagged backward, and the enemy, heartened, drove forward with renewed energy. Gird had hardly time to see the first of his reserves clear the trees, yelling their heads off and sprinting downhill toward the enemy rear, before he was down in the thick of his own battle, supporting the center.
Fighting on horseback was completely different, he found. He had dropped the banner-pole, no longer needed—from here they would fight to the death, win or lose; he had no more decisions to make—and pulled his hauk from his belt. It was good for bashing heads, and bashing heads from above worked as well as when he was afoot. For one moment he thought of Amisi, and shoved the thought aside.
Later, when he heard it in songs, the battle of Greenfields (as the meadow became known) sounded much tidier than it had been in reality. The songs didn't mention the several times he was knocked off the horse, and remounted by some helpful soldier, or the blow to his knee that had him limping for a quarter year, or the near-rout when the enemy's last cohort of reserves turned out to be masked magelords with their power in hand. The songs certainly did not mention that long and miserable night after the battle, with the forest fire still burning its way south, or the cries of the wounded that never ceased. And somehow in the songs, that gray horse turned white. Gird was sure he had not aged that much in one day.
He remembered stumping through what had been the enemy's camp, swarming now with squads of his own yeomen gathering up supplies and weapons. The king's tent had gone up first, larger than many houses Gird had seen, with interior rooms walled in fluttering embroidered panels. He had had musicians with him (two had been killed, almost accidentally, when Gird's reserves tore through the camp; the others had been found crouched around their instruments), and a man who painted pictures on lengths of fabric. He had started a picture of the king, victorious, returning with Gird's head, but offered to change the faces for only ten gold pieces. Gird shook his head, and wondered what kind of king would take musicians and painters to battle.
The king was dead. He did not look much like Selamis, but fathers and sons did not have to look alike. He had been a tall man, dark haired as many magelords were, and in death his eyes had only the dull color of a fish found dead on the shore. Gird had found Sier Segrahlin's body, spiked with arrows from behind; he felt no guilt at that, but wished he could have talked to that brown man. They had almost understood each other, across a gulf no one else wanted to bridge. He still wondered, occasionally, if the sier had charmed him that night.
The songs listed the dead magelords, as if to remind the listener that these were all real. Gird did not even look at all of them; he had seen bodies enough. They had killed the wounded as quickly and painlessly as they could; they had killed all the magelords they captured; they dared not do less. At least there were no children with them.
He did not understand why he was still alive; his vision of the morning had been so clear, so certain. He felt curiously suspended, as he had after the Norwalk Sheepfolds, unable to rejoice in the same way as the others, though he felt a deep contentment. So many had died, and he had not, yet he had been sure he would—he had been almost
promised
he would. Nor had Rahi died, or Pidi; he found them both alive, marked but certainly not mortally wounded. But when he touched them he felt no more and no less than he felt for any of his yeomen: they were all his children, in some way he could not define.
He remembered coming back to his own encampment, holding the wounded and dying, speaking what comfort he could, until he fell asleep and woke to find that someone had covered him with a stolen piece of the king's tent. All that day and the next, as the crows and flies fought with them, he tried to bring order and restore health to that trampled and discolored ground. "Bury them all," he said, "Or burn them—even the magelords, yes: we had the gods' gift of victory, we owe them respect."
The songs began that first night, with the talk around the fires of those who could talk, and by the next night a few were trying to fit words to familiar tunes. The dead king's surviving musicians were glad to help. Gird was more than a little amused that the first version he heard of what became "Gird at Greenfields" was set to "The Thief's Lament"—the very song with which he had been taunted for cowardice.
Greenfields broke the king's power, and gave Gird control of the main grain-growing regions of Finaarenis. But it was not the end of the war. Those lords who had not joined the king's army, for whatever reason, were now sure destruction loomed. Some walled themselves in Finyatha; others fled toward Tsaia. Heirs of lords killed at Greenfields squabbled over inheritances now in jeopardy; rich merchants, who assumed a peasant government would have no desire or need for fine goods, appealed to the remaining lords for help.
Gird knew all this, and much of it he had anticipated, but his first problem was securing the year's limited harvest. Where there were no lords, there might be brigands. He split his army into sections, put each under a high marshal, and sent them to settle the countryside. He himself rode for the north, crossing the Honnorgat for the first time in his life on the gray horse, which seemed less like a broken-down carthorse every day. He could stay on at a trot now, although he preferred the swinging canter. Most of his marshals had caught a horse and learned to stay on it, as well. It made supervising a march or a movement much easier, and messages could pass far more quickly. Feeding the beasts was another worry, but men could not eat grass, and horses could. In summer, at least, they could afford a few horses.
Rumors of the king's defeat spread even faster than Gird had expected. In the north, he and his column found mostly deserted, looted manor houses, and celebrating peasants. Few of his recruits had come from the north—in fact he had trouble understanding their speech—but they seemed genuinely pleased with his success. He wondered if the quickly-established bartons in each village would ever amount to anything, and prayed that war would not test them.
Finyatha offered a different problem. Largest and richest city of the north, the seat of the Finaarenisian kings, it hung just out of his reach like a tempting plum. Most of its people were common folk, as everywhere, but at the moment it swarmed with magelord refugees. He had no knowledge of siegecraft; common sense told him that assaulting those walls with pikemen would do no good—a much smaller force on the walls could defend it. He thought of trying to divert the river, but remembering Segrahlin's tricks with water decided that some mage inside could simply call water into any well he wanted. In the end, he left it alone, and like an overripe plum, it fell on its own. One party of magelords tried to escape along the River Road to Tsaia; most of those fell to raiding parties, Gird's or brigands. The rest were too weak to keep control of the city. When the disruption inside reached the gates, and the fighting erupted into the fields outside, Gird's column—which had been waiting at a distance—marched in with little difficulty, to the apparent delight of all.
The gray horse brought Gird into those stone streets as if carrying a king; cheers racketed off the walls, and the flowers of summer fell on his shoulders, Alyanya's blessing. Then the horse pranced into the courtyard before a towering stone structure that seemed to spring, like trees, from the roots of the world itself, and reach skyward with every stretched finger. Between its arches, great windows had stood; they were shattered now, glittering fragments crunched beneath the horse's hoofs. A few pieces still clung to their frames, reflecting brightness against the cool darkness inside. The horse knelt; Gird stepped off and looked around. It was a hot day, blue-skied, and the courtyard had blue shadows under every ledge of gray stone. The very air shimmered; he blinked. Was it the air, or his eyes?