Kings of the North

by Elizabeth Moon

  Burek and Devlin both looked puzzled, but Jenits’s face lit. Arcolin gave him a quick nod. “I don’t expect we’ll run into a trailing force—though we might—but we should see evidence of their tree rigging. If we can get to the main trail across the ridge before they realize what we’re doing, we should be able to see how they get up and down, and estimate how far ahead they set up ambushes and the kinds of locations they pick. And then—”

  “We can put our own archers up there,” Burek said. “And ambush them.”

  “They’ll need practice shooting down at that angle,” Arcolin said, remembering what Cracolnya had always said about his cohort’s practice on rising and falling ground. “But yes. The thing is, we know nothing about rigging ropes in trees, not even what size rope.”

  In the long summer afternoon, the cohort moved as Arcolin directed, encountering no brigands they could detect. Just as they crossed the main trail, Burek spotted a coil of rope tucked into the crotch of a tree. They looked up. At intervals along a nearly horizontal limb, loops of rope circled the limb, stained dark, unnoticeable to a casual glance. One end of the coil ran up the tree trunk, looking like a vine stem, to the base of a limb higher than the one that held the loops of rope.

  “They climb the rope, pull it up, thread it through those loops … they must tie it off at the far end,” Burek said.

  “Now we know they have trees ready to rig along the main trail,” Arcolin said. “So they can move their ambush site. We need to know how many, what kind of trees they use, how many sailors they have to climb them.”

  “Our siege-assault specialists could climb it,” Devlin said, looking up.

  “Later,” Arcolin said. “For now, we don’t want them to know we noticed this. We’ll go on over the ridge and look there.”

  He wondered how many brigands were actually good at climbing trees and standing on ropes to shoot crossbows. The ones they’d just killed all wore conventional shoes or boots. He remembered the sailors aloft being barefoot, remembered asking someone about that. Boots were too slippery when they got wet, he’d been told. Bare feet callused by hard use and salt water clung to the ropes and spars.

  They reached the crest of the ridge, and Arcolin looked back at the slope they were leaving, the furrow in the trees that showed where the main trail ran. He could not see the trail itself, but someone aloft in one of those trees could signal to a watcher here without being seen from below. A troop, no matter how quietly it moved, still made enough noise to cover the sound of a crossbow’s string … and a bolt fitted with a ribbon could be seen from here.

  On the far side of the ridge, they moved cautiously through woods as the light slowly waned into twilight. Scouts reported a clearing ahead with rigged trees covering the opening.

  “Looks like a camp—maybe for twenty, by the size of the jacks.”

  “How recently were they there?”

  “Hard to say, sir. Not yesterday, but within the last hand of days, most like. Fire-pit has bones in it, but there’s a pile of offal still downslope. It’s been dragged about by vermin but not consumed yet. They’re planning to come back this way sometime; we found a barrel of meal hidden in a brush pile.”

  “We’ll camp here tonight,” Arcolin said. “They’re sure to notice us, but we can’t move far enough before dark to be out of their range, either. So they’ll attack, but our people will be up the trees, not theirs.”

  “All night?” Burek asked, looking up at the trees.

  “Better than theirs sneaking in and having the height on us,” Arcolin said. “Short watches, since there’s no way for anyone to rest up there.”

  That, it turned out, was an error. The first climbers sent into the trees found fishing-net hammocks tied into the crotches of each rigged tree, water jugs with lines tied to their handles.

  “They could stay up in the trees for days,” Burek said. “That explains how our scouts missed them.”

  “That and not imagining such a thing,” Arcolin said. “Siniava’s people never did anything like this, so none of us even considered it. And yet—I saw those ships, the last year of Siniava’s War. And I knew Alured had been a pirate.”

  “Risky,” Burek said. “But we hurt them today.”

  “We’ve hurt them before,” Arcolin said. “Ordinary brigand bands would have retreated by now. There’s something keeping them in this area, and they’re being reinforced.”

  The best climbers in the cohort went up the trees and tested out the rigging. Nothing happened through the early and midnight hours of darkness, and Arcolin finally woke Burek and lay down at the foot of one of the rigged trees. So far none of his climbers had fallen.

  He woke to a blow in his back, the scrape of a blade on his mail. He rolled away, yelling, grabbing for his dagger. More yells from his sentries … someone landed on him again, this time with a heavy cloth that missed his head but caught his arms for an instant. He stabbed through the cloth, felt the dagger go home into flesh, yanked and stabbed again—and then his people were there, the weight on him gone, and his assailant lay dead on the ground.

  In the torchlight Arcolin saw a small, wiry man in short trousers and a sleeveless jerkin, barefoot—his soles horny as goats’ hooves—his hair in a stiff braid. He had elaborate tattoos on both arms—sea monsters, Arcolin thought—he remembered the sailors of the south being heavily tattooed. On a thong around his neck was a medallion with a design Arcolin did not recognize. The blade he’d attacked Arcolin with, broad and curved, was much like those they had captured before.

  “Was there only one?” Arcolin asked. “And how did he get past the sentries?”

  “Sneaks,” Devlin said, nose wrinkled. “They’re good at that, if nothing else.”

  “Didn’t see or hear another one,” Jenits said. “Maybe because he’s barefoot?”

  “Could be,” Arcolin said. “He’s a sailor … but why would he come here alone and then attack openly? Why me, and not a sentry? Killing a sentry would open the way for others to attack. He could have avoided us easily enough.”

  “Something here he wants,” Burek said. “And perhaps he didn’t realize you were there. If he wanted to climb the tree and stumbled into you, he’d have to attack.”

  “Maybe,” Arcolin said. “Come morning we’ll see what we find.”

  The rest of the night passed quietly. In the morning, they found another barrel of meal and an empty cask that smelled of the wine it had once held.

  “That barrel’s heavy,” Devlin remarked, when they’d pulled the lid off. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

  “Grain,” Tam said.

  “Poke it with a sword,” Devlin said. “Let’s just see.”

  Far down in the barrel Tam’s sword met resistance. “We could just eat the grain,” he said with a sly grin.

  “Pack it up,” Arcolin said, shaking his head.

  In minutes, men were shifting the grain to the extra sacks. They found a heavy leather-wrapped bundle at the bottom of the barrel: a small anvil and a hammer.

  “They have a farrier with them,” Burek said. “We know they have horses, and most of the horses are shod. But this anvil looks small to fashion horseshoes. And there’s no sign of a forge—none at all.”

  “They could have the forge somewhere else and keep the anvil here—though I wonder why,” Arcolin said. He looked closely at the anvil; something about it tickled his memory. The street of the smiths in Cortes Vonja—the different sounds of the hammers, the anvils ringing to the blows in different smiths’ halls, different sizes of anvils … “What would this anvil be good for?” he asked Burek. Devlin answered.

  “Captain, I’ve seen an anvil like that in a medaller’s—where they make badges and medals and things. This hole here—that would hold the anvil die—”

  “Dies!” Arcolin said. “Of course! He came back for the dies.”

  “Sir?”

  “Coins, Dev—they’re striking coins. Changing the marks, at least, and maybe the composition, making c
ounterfeits. That’s what was worth one man sneaking back in the night, and if he came to the foot of that tree, it’s because he wanted to climb it. They sent a sailor—the dies are hidden up the tree somewhere.”

  Those who’d spent the night in trees climbed back up and poked into every hollow, every tangle of limbs. “Found something,” Forli said. “Limb broke off and they hollowed out a space.” He lowered the leather sack on a line; inside were two pieces of steel. “And here’s something else,” he added. “Sack of money, looks like.” He tossed that down.

  Burek fitted the tang of the lower die into the hole on the anvil, and Arcolin set the hammer die atop it. “That much fits,” he said. He looked in the sack of coins and found a mix of coins: some Guild League with different marks, some from the far south with the marks of Immerdzan and Aliuna, a few from the duchy of Fall. In the bottom of the sack was another, of thinner leather, holding pewter disks, a dozen or so plain and several bearing confusing blurred marks.

  “Practice,” Devlin said. “The shop I saw, a ’prentice was learning to hammer straight, and the master used disks like this for him to learn on.”

  Arcolin upended the hammer die and looked at the surface that would shape a coin. He could not read the design—surely it was intended for a Vonja coin, but …

  “Let me try,” Burek said. “We can use one of the practice disks. Someone get me a hammer.” One of the soldiers rummaged in the tool bag they always carried and found one. Burek fitted the disk between the two dies and struck the top one a solid blow. The disk looked lopsided—it had not been exactly centered—but now Arcolin could read the mark: the Guild League symbol on one side and Vonja’s own mark, PCV, on the other.

  “In silver, it would be a niti,” Arcolin said. “I wonder if this is the only coin they make.” He pulled a niti from his belt-pouch to compare.

  “Those nas and natas we found in the merchant’s wagon were some of them counterfeit.”

  “And where did they get the dies?” Arcolin said, thinking out loud. “These are hard steel, not something an artisan can carve out.”

  “Mints have dies. Maybe they’re stolen?”

  A breeze rustled the leaves overhead, and Arcolin looked up: clouds moving in again. “Later. Pack everything up; we’ll go back to our home site.”

  “Take the dies and anvil?”

  “Of course. We need proof for the Vonja Council. Scouts, be alert for rigged trees. I think they’re still north of us, but we don’t want more losses, in case they sent for reinforcements.”

  By dusk, the cohort was back off the ridge and within a glass’s march of their former campsite, where they’d left the wagons and two tensquads.

  “I don’t think we’ll see any attacks for a few days,” Arcolin said. “They’ll be resupplied, no doubt, but that will take time. We must be hurting them. We’ll send word back to the city. These dies could be stolen from their mint, or made elsewhere. I want to take them in myself, in case they do have a traitor who might intercept them. Perhaps if we get word about Stammel.” It had been so long, he did not expect good news.

  Burek nodded. “I wouldn’t trust them either—not after what they tried before.”

  Arcolin gave the dies to their own smith, who looked them over carefully.

  “This little anvil’s definitely a coiner’s,” he said. “At the mints they’d use a water-powered hammer to strike multiples at once; this would be a merchant’s set. Seen them up north, to strike Finthan coins with Tsaia’s mark.”

  “I thought both passed easily in the northern realms,” Burek said. “Doesn’t the north have a sort of Guild League?”

  “No,” Arcolin said. “Finthan and Tsaian coins are commonly accepted at mint value—at least in Vérella and Fin Panir—but everything else must be changed—at a cost—and some are regulated.”

  Burek looked puzzled. “But doesn’t that impede trade? I mean, if the money changers take their snip, and the realms—”

  “Yes, but not so much that most people mind it. We use letters of credit, as you saw. And the periodic bankers’ caravans—heavily guarded—often carry gold bullion and lump silver, so it can be fresh-minted in Tsaia. There’s no tax on letters of credit and much less on unminted metals.”

  “What about the others, like Pargun and Lyonya and so on?”

  “Pargun doesn’t trade in Tsaia.”

  “But they trade on the coast,” Burek said, scowling. “I’ve seen Pargunese coins—not many, to be sure, but some.”

  “I suppose …” Arcolin had not ever considered where the Pargunese traded. Down here? They must go by sea, down the river. “I suppose they trade in Bannerlíth, on the northern coast, north of the Eastbight—perhaps they themselves have come to the southern coast.”

  “Even Andressat uses Guild League standards for coinage. It would be simpler if everyone did.”

  “True,” Arcolin said. “But the money changers would hate it. They’d lose half their trade.”

  “I suppose,” Burek said. He had picked up the dead sailor’s medallion and now turned it over and over, examining the designs on both sides. “I wonder what this means.”

  “I never saw it before,” Arcolin said. “It’s not the device Alured picked when he claimed the duchy of Immer. He went with one from the Cortes Immer ruins.” He poked through the pile of coins, setting them in stacks according to size, metal, design. “Some of these wouldn’t fit the dies at all. If you stamped this one width of the die—” He held up a small silver. “—it would be obviously thinner than standard. There must be more dies.”

  “Unless they want them to be noticed,” Burek said.

  “Not this obvious, I don’t think. If the idea is to show that the city mints are adulterating their coins, they’d want them to look nearly the same.”

  That evening, Arcolin wrote out a report for the Council, and Burek added notations to the map they were making. Next day, by daylight, he set Burek to making a fair copy of the map to send back to the city with his report. In midafternoon, a farm boy came to the camp to report that his father had seen “fancy men” moving along the woods’ edge.

  “Fancy?” Devlin asked. He was questioning the boy; Arcolin listened from inside the tent where he worked.

  “Hats w’ feathers,” the boy said. “And they leader has shiny things—around he neck and he arms.”

  “How far away was your father, that he could see all that?”

  “Oh, he hid in a log,” the boy said, scratching one bare leg with the dirty toes of the other. “He’s lookin’ for berries, this time summer, an’ he heard ’em, and into a log he went, same’s I would, on account it’s t’other village’s berry patch.”

  “And?”

  “And they come right by ’im, walkin’ proud, he says, but some limpin’ and blood on they clothes. And pickin’ every berry they saw.”

  “How many?”

  The boy stared at his hands, scowling, moving his fingers up and down, and finally said, “Two hands maybe.”

  “They’ll be no trouble to us for a while,” Burek said. “But to the farmers …”

  “It’s late to move today; we’ll move tomorrow,” Arcolin said. “I’m not going to risk our people on the trail at night. The woods are more open up that way—we should be able to pick up a trail.”

  Cortes Vonja

  Once a tenday the grange drilled outside the city, in the water meadows. As soon as the Marshal allowed, Stammel went along, his hand on Suli’s shoulder. He wore his own uniform again, though it was loose, and a banda over it. The Marshal insisted on a straw hat over his helmet; he was sure it looked ridiculous, but the Marshal wanted to protect his eyes.

  “I’m blind,” Stammel said. “Why worry about them?”

  “Because an infection in them could kill you,” the Marshal said. “And if there is any chance your sight might come back, staring into the sun you can’t see will finish it.”

  So now he followed Suli and the others, stumbling only a little now and
then. She was good at noticing what might trip him and murmuring warnings. “Rut here. Big root ahead, high step.”

  This was drill as he knew it, but with slightly different commands. The yeomen knew them and started off at a strong walk; Stammel, next to Suli, felt out of place this close. At least he hadn’t tired on the walk out of the city, and when the Marshal called a rest, he wasn’t out of breath like some of those he heard huffing and puffing.

  “Unarmed next,” the Marshal said. “Pair up. Stammel, you’re with Groj.”

  Stammel grinned. He’d won the argument, then; he hadn’t been sure until this moment. Unarmed fighting, once in grip of the other, wasn’t about sight but about feel … and he was sure his feel would come back. Groj might throw him, but he would be fighting again. Suli guided him some twenty paces.

  “I’m Groj,” a voice said in front of him. “I’m one of the smiths. Marshal says I’m not to kill you.”

  “I’d prefer not,” Stammel said.

  “I’m a head taller,” Groj said. “He said I should tell you that.”

  “I could tell from your voice,” Stammel said. He could feel his body’s adjustments, the same as always. For a taller man, this shift. Around him he heard other pairs moving into position.

  “But I won’t let you win,” Groj said. “I told ’m I wouldn’t, and he said that was all right.”

  “I won’t let you win, either,” Stammel said. Just as he wondered whether pairs signaled each other some way or the Marshal started it, he heard the command.

  All the pent-up emotion of the past tendays exploded as he charged. He heard the rasp of Groj’s boots on the grass as the man tried to swing aside, but he was faster, and his arms, reaching wide, caught the man’s belt. Pivot, yank—Groj’s big hand touched his shoulder, but he already had the leverage, and Groj went down. He rolled up quickly, caught Stammel’s arm, and then they were in grip, hands and elbows and knees, struggling for mastery.