“Ketik—”
“Aye.” He had a rough voice, and stood canted a little sideways, as if missing the weight of his arm. The stump was ugly, a twisted purple lump of scar. He wore no shirt, only a sleeveless leather jerkin.
“If we found another campsite, what would we need for a forge?”
Ketik stared at him out of light-blue eyes. “A forge? Don’t you see this arm? I’m no smith now.”
“If we had what is needed, couldn’t you take an apprentice? Teach someone?”
Ketik snorted, a sound half-laughter, half-anger. “Could you teach someone to swing a scythe by telling them? Wouldn’t you have to show them? Do you think smithery is so simple?”
“Not simple at all,” said Gird quietly. “It is a great mystery, and our village had no smith at all. We shared one with Hardshallows. But we will need a smith—”
“And not all are weapons smiths,” Ketik said.
“I know. What I’m thinking of wouldn’t take a swordsmith. But we would have to have our own forge.”
“A good fireplace,” Ketik said rapidly. “Fuel—fireoak is best. Someone to make charcoal, because you’d need to be able to refine ores sometimes. Leather for the bellows, and not the rotting, stiff mess these idiots make in old tree stumps. Real leather, properly tanned. Tools, which means iron: ore or lump iron from some smelter. Both are illegal. An anvil. Someplace with water, too, and a way to disguise the smoke. Satisfied?”
“We will need to move anyway,” Gird said. “We might as well look for what we need.”
“What we need is the gods’ blessing and a fistful of miracles,” said Ketik. He sounded slightly less irritated now, as if challenging Gird had eased his mind.
“You’re right,” Gird said. “But though we need Alyanya’s blessing for a good harvest, we still have to plow and plant and weed and reap.”
Ketik laughed aloud. “Well—you may be the leader we need after all. I never heard of a one-armed smith teaching smithery, but then I never heard of a farmer teaching soldiering, either.”
Triga had come close while they were talking; now he said, “I said last autumn we should find a new campsite.”
Gird nodded, ignoring the rancorous tone. “Did you find someplace you thought would be good?”
“Me?” Triga looked surprised. “They wouldn’t listed to me.”
“If you already know a place—”
“I know another place than this, but it might not be what you want.”
“How far is it?”
“A half-day, maybe, or a little longer.” He pointed across the stream. “Sunrising. It’s swampy; the foresters never go there.”
Gird opened his mouth to say that the last thing they needed was a swamp, and closed it again. If Triga was trying to be helpful, why stop him, “I think we’ll need more than one place, but that sounds useful. If we’re pursued—”
“It’s like a moat, I thought,” said Triga.
“As long as we have a bridge over it—one they can’t see.”
“Gird—about the grain—do you want us to grind more today?” That was Herf, who had been tending the fire when Gird awoke. Triga looked sulky and opened his mouth; Gird shook his head. “Triga, tomorrow or the next day I’d like to see your swamp. Right now, though, the grain comes first.”
Triga said “I could go look for a path through the swamp.”
“Good idea.” Gird had never seen a swamp, and had no idea what one would look like. Were they flat? Sloped? Did they have high places that were dry? “If you find a dry place inside it,” he said slowly, “like the castle inside the moat—?”
“I’ll look.” Triga actually seemed cheerful—for him—as he waded across the stream and turned to wave back at them. Gird shook his head and turned to Herf.
“Now. How much grain do we have?”
When Herf showed him their meager food stores, and the way they were kept, Gird could hardly believe the band had not starved long ago. Sacks of grain and dry beans were sitting on damp stone under a rainroof made of small cedars with their tops tied together. Gird prodded the bottom of the sacks and felt the telltale firmness of grain rotted into a solid mass. Beans had begun to sprout through the coarse sacking. Herf had tried to store onions and redroots in a trench, but most of them were sprouting.
“I know,” he said in answer to Gird’s look. “Once they sprout, the redroots are poisonous. But I couldn’t dig them in any deeper here, without proper tools. The ground’s stony.”
“Well.” Gird squatted beside the trench, and brushed the leaf-mold off a healthy redroot sprout. “My da used to tell about his granda’s da—or somewhat back there—about the time before the lords came, when our folk grew things in the woods.”
“In the woods?”
“In fields, too, the grain—of course. But redroots and onions and such—some we don’t grow now—along the streams, and in the woods. We can’t eat these—maybe we should plant them now, and harvest in the fall.”
“We can still eat the onions—”
“Some of them, yes. But why not plant the others? Spread ’em around in the wood—no one’d recognize them as plantings, and they’d be where we knew—”
Herf frowned, thinking hard. “Then—we could grow the greenleaves, too, couldn’t we? Cabbages, sorli—”
“Maybe even sugarroot.” Gird poked at the leafmold. “This here’s good growing soil for some crops. Herbs, greenleaves—grow ’em along the creekbank, we could. You know how hard it is to haul water to the greenstuff in summer—we could plant it where it needs no help.”
“Aye, but breadgrain and beans—we can’t live on greenstuff and redroots alone.”
“Right enough for now—you get your grain from farmers, right?”
“Or steal it from traders—but that’s rare.”
“When we take it from farmers, they go hungry—so we can’t afford to let any rot—”
“It’s the best I could do!” Herf puffed up almost like a frog calling.
“I’m not saying it wasn’t. But if we find a new campsite, maybe we can do better. Besides—did you ever see the big jars the lords use?”
“Jars?”
“Aye. Brown, shiny on inside and outside. Like our honeypots but bigger. They’re almighty heavy and hard to move, but grain and even meal stay dry inside them.”
“And where would we get such? We don’t have a potter.”
Another miracle to wish for, thought Gird. They needed some pots—at least small ones. In his mind’s eye, his future campsite had sprouted another fireplace, although it wavered as he looked at it. He’d never seen a potter’s workshop. He knew they had a special name for the hearth in which they cooked their pots, but not what it looked like. But he could see as clearly as if he stood there the kitchen of the guard barracks at Kelaive’s manor, with the great jars of meal and beans, the huge cooking kettles, the shiny buckets, the longhandled forks and spoons, the rack of knives. If he was going to have an army, he would have to have a kitchen capable of feeding it—and storerooms—his head ached, and he shook it. What he had was a sack and a half of grain, some of it rotted, less than a sack of beans, a few sprouting onions, and redroots that might be edible in half a year. An open firepit, two or three wooden bowls, the men’s belt knives. He sighed, heavily, and heaved himself up.
“All right. We’ll grind some of that grain, and make hearthcakes tonight. But we’re going to need more grain, and I know the villages are short right now. Some of the men hunt, don’t they? How often do they bring anything back?”
“Not that often. There are only two bows, not very good ones, and the arrows—”
“Are as bad. I can guess that. Anyone who can use a sling, or set snares?”
Herf shook his head. Gird added those skills to the list in his head, and told himself not to sigh again. It would do no good. He wished he hadn’t sent Fori off; the lad had a talent for setting snares, and had once taken a squirrel with his sling. Come to think of it, slings cou
ld be weapons too.
“All right.” He raised his voice. “Come here a bit, all of you. There are some things need doing.” The men came closer, curious. “If we’re going to be an army,” he said, “we have to organize like soldiers. Food, tools, clothing—all that. We’re starting with what we have. The first thing is to get all the rotten grain and beans apart from what’s good, and protect the good from the wet. Then we’re going to plant the sprouted redroots, scattered along our trails, so that we’ll have them next fall. They’ll get bigger, you know, and double or triple for us. Who here has used a handmill?” That was usually women’s work, although many men helped grind the grain. Two hands raised. Gird nodded at them. “Herf will give you the grain—you saw how I did it yesterday. We’re making enough hearthcakes for everyone tonight. Unless the foresters show up, of course.
By midday, all the clothes washed the previous evening were dry. Gird pulled on his trousers happily; he did not feel himself with his bare legs hanging out. The two volunteer millers had produced almost a bowlful of meal, and Herf had used Gird’s clean shirt to hold the little good grain in one sack while he scraped out the spoiled and turned the sack inside out. The bottom end was beginning to rot. Without Gird having to suggest it, Herf decided to rip out the stitching there and sew the top end shut, so the weakest material would be at the opening. Since he seemed to know how to use a long thorn and a bit of twine to do it, Gird left him alone. Two other men had gone out in both directions along the creek, with the sprouted redroots, and were planting them. Gird reminded them that there was no good reason to plant them close to that campsite, since they would be moving somewhere else.
Fori appeared unexpectedly in midafternoon with a pair of squirrels he’d knocked down, showing off to Ivis with his sling. He had skinned and gutted them already, and had the skins stretched on circles of green wood. Gird grinned at him, delighted. But two squirrels would hardly feed twenty hungry men—they had no soup kettle.
Herf had the answer to that, showing Gird how hot rocks dropped in a wooden bowl could make the water hot enough to cook without burning holes in the bowl. By this time, he had all the good grain in one sack, and the dry beans separated from the damp, sprouting ones. Gird had wondered if they could also grow beans in the wood, but beans liked a lot of sun. Reluctantly, he had buried the smelly remnants of spoiled grain and beans. Now Gird sliced up onions, his eyes watering and burning, to go in with the squirrels and one dry, wrinkled, unsprouted redroot. Herf added the beans he’d put on to soak that morning.
The guards came back in the dusk to the smell of roasting hearthcakes and squirrel and bean stew. Gird had already found another, besides Diamod, who would be willing to stand night guard; these two had eaten, and when Ivis and Kelin returned with Pidi, the night guards went out. Gird had also drilled the others, in the afternoon, and insisted on their cleaning up. He was pleased to notice that Ivis and Kelin stopped to wash hands and face in the creek before approaching the fire.
They had only three bowls to eat from; these passed from one to another, along with the two spoons. But compared to the night before, it was a festive meal. Even Triga made no complaint. Ivis came to sit by Gird, and said, “I made the right choice.”
“It won’t always be like this,” Gird said, thinking of all the things he had to do. “We were lucky that Fori got those squirrels.”
“But it feels different.” Ivis wiped his mouth with his tattered sleeve and grinned, teeth bright in the firelight. “You know what to do.”
Across the fire, Fori was basking in the praise of older men; Pidi was showing Herf the herbs he had brought back in his shirt. They were feeling at home here; Gird wondered if the young adjusted more easily. He was not sure what he felt. The blinding pain when he thought of Rahi was still there; when it hit, he found himself turning in the direction of Fireoak, willing himself across the woods and fields between to be with her. She might be dead by now, or still struggling in fever. He could not know.
He was beginning to know the men around him, and already knew that several of them would have been friends if they’d grown up in the same village. Cob reminded him of Amis, with his matter-of-fact friendliness. Ivis was more like Teris—responsibility made him truculent, but once freed of it, he was amiable and mild-tempered. Gird told himself that these were mostly farmers—men like those he’d known all his life—and in time would be as familiar as the men of his village, but for the moment he could not quite relax into kinship with them.
That night before he dropped off to sleep, he made an effort to speak individually with each of them, to fix their faces and names in his mind. Then he burrowed into a drift of leaves, with Pidi snuggled close to his side. It was still hard to sleep, in the open, knowing he had no cottage to return to, but he was tired, and the strain of the past few days overcame him.
The next morning brought complications. Instead of cool spring sunshine, the sky was cloudy, and a fine misty drizzle began to penetrate their clothes. The foul stench of their ill-dug jacks oozed across the clearing. Gird was sure they could smell it in the next village, wherever that was. He wrapped his leather raincloak around the sacks of grain and beans. The night guards arrived back at camp hungry, while Herf was struggling with the fire. Smoke lay close to the ground, making them all cough. After the previous night’s feast, plain soaked grain seemed even more dismal than usual. Gird’s joints ached; he wished fervently for a mug of hot sib. He heard low grumbles and mutters, and Triga’s voice raised in a self-pitying whine.
This would never do. Gird strode back into the center of the clearing as if the sun were shining and he knew exactly what to do. The men looked up at him, sour-faced.
“Triga, what did you find yesterday?” Triga, interrupted in mid-complaint, looked almost comical. Then he stood up.
“I found that swamp I told you about—” Someone groaned, and Triga whipped around to glare in that direction.
“Never mind,” said Gird. “Go on—and you others listen.”
“I walked all around it—that’s why I came back so late. There’s three little creeks goes into it, and two comes out. I don’t know what the middle’s like yet—there wasn’t time—”
“Good. That’s where we’ll go today.”
“All of us?” Herf asked. “It’s raining.”
“It’s raining here, too,” Gird pointed out. “You’ll get just as wet sitting here complaining about the rain, as walking along learning something useful. Maybe we’ll find a cave, and can sleep dry.”
They didn’t look as if they believed him, but one by one his fledgling army stood up. He grinned at them.
“But first,” he said. “We’re going to do something about that.” And he pointed toward the jacks. “It stinks enough to let anyone know a lot of men have been here, and it’s making us sick as well.”
“We don’t have no tools,” someone said. Kef, that was the name. Gird grinned again.
“I brought a shovel, remember? I’ll start the digging, but we’ll all be doing some—because there’s more to it than just shoveling.”
He had spotted a better site the day before. Now he took his shovel and tried it. Here a long-gone flood had spread across the clearing below the waterfall, and left a drift of lighter soil, almost sand. He started the trench he wanted, and gave the shovel to Kef. “That deep, and straight along there,” he said. They really needed a bucket, too, but they didn’t have one. He’d have to use the wooden bowls for the ashes. The men watched as he scooped ashes and bits of charred wood from the side of the firepit into one of their bowls. “You, too,” Gird said, pointing at the other bowls. “We’re going to need a lot of ashes.”
“But I though ashes only worked in a pit,” said Ivis.
“Best in a pit. But a trench is like a little pit. Ashes on top, then dirt, after you use it.”
“Every time?”
“Every time—or it won’t work. The guards kept a pot of ashes in the jacks; I started doing that at our cottage later,
and ours smelled less than most.” He looked at them, noticing the squeamish faces. “The worst part,” he said carefully, “is going to be burying what’s already there.” He was pleased to note that no one asked if they had to.
It took longer than he’d hoped,with only the one shovel and small bowls to carry ashes, but at last they had the worst of the noisome mess buried, strewn with ashes, and a new bit of clean trench for that morning’s use. Gird covered it up himself when they were all done, and marked the end with a roughly cut stake poked in the ground.
“Now we clean up,” Gird said, “and then we go look for Triga’s swamp. He’s right—if we can find a safe way into it, that the foresters and guards don’t know, it could be a very handy place.”
Chapter Eleven
Triga led the way, with Gird behind him, and then the others. Gird had asked Ivis to be the rear guard, staying just in sight of the others. Within the first half-league, he was wondering how this group had survived undetected so long. They talked freely, tapped their sticks against trees and rocks as they passed, made no effort to walk quietly. Finally Gird halted them.
“We’re making more noise than a tavern full of drunks. If there’s a forester in the wood anywhere, he’s bound to hear us.”
Ivis turned a dull red. “Well—Gird—we don’t like to come on ’em in surprise, like—”
“The foresters? You mean they know—”
“It’s sort of—well—they’d have to know, wouldn’t they? Being as they have to know the whole wood. But what they don’t actually see they don’t have to take notice of. My brother’s one of them, you see, and—”
“And on the strength of one brother, you trust them all? What about the guard?”
“Oh, the duke’s guard is a very different matter—very different indeed. But they don’t venture into the wood except when the duke’s hunting. And then they’re guarding him, not poking about on their own.”
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