Making the straw dummy was quick work, in the hot days of tall grass and long afternoons. Cob suggested weighting the body with rocks; Triga had the even better suggestion of seating a real person on the log, and pulling him off slowly—to see how a person felt— and then making the dummy feel the same. That turned into several days of experiment, with one after another trying to keep his seat on the log with friends pushing and pulling from one or both sides. Gird took a turn, wondering if it felt anything like riding a real horse, or if it could be a way to learn. It was easy to wrap his long legs around the log and hang on, but hard to keep his balance when someone yanked his arm. After his second fall, he watched Ivis on the log.
“We don’t need the straw dummy,” he said, “As long as we pad the ends of our sticks, and remember that this one is a friend. Whoever’s up can tell us which moves are hardest to counter.”
The rider—Ivis, then others—was equipped with a reed “sword” and laid about vigorously to simulate resistance. Slowly at first, then with increasing confidence and speed, they all learned where to strike a rider to throw him off balance. The game became so popular that Gird had to remind them that there were other ways—and enemies—to fight, or they would have spent all their time knocking one another off logs.
Rahi, in the meantime, had merged almost invisibly into the troop. Gird was acutely aware of her presence for the first few days; then he went off to the other camp, and when he returned it was as if she had always been there—but as a soldier, not his daughter. She did not avoid him, exactly, but she did not spend her free time with Pidi, or with Gird, and even seemed to steer clear of Fori. She had her place in drill, and made no more than the usual beginner’s mistakes. As he would have expected, she learned fast. Gird waited for something to go wrong, but nothing did.
It was now nearing harvest. After harvest the fieldfee collectors would be out; Gird wanted to introduce his barton idea to at least a few villages before then. For that he needed seasoned older men, men the farmers might trust as similar to themselves. They had to be proficient in the drill (although he didn’t expect them to teach the farmers much in the short time until harvest—but they had to impress them.) And—perhaps most important—they had to be reliably close-mouthed. He himself would go, of course. Ivis had developed into a trusted lieutenant, as had Cob. Diamod was known in five or six villages as a Stone Circle
organizer. Felis, who might have been another possibility, had broken his wrist on his last “ride” as a target, and would not be fit until after harvest.
After long discussions, Gird chose four villages to test his idea: Fireoak, Harrow (where Felis’s group had supporters), Whitetree, where Ivis’s brother lived, and Hardshallows. Cob and a man from Felis’s group went to Harrow, Ivis to his brother, Gird to Fireoak, and Diamod to Hardshallows. They were to spend no more than two nights in the village, and talk to no more than five men.
Chapter Fourteen
Coming into Fireoak on a late summer day, as an active rebel organizer, was very different from leaving it as a fugitive who had only the ghost of an idea for rebellion. The two of them joined a stream of workers coming in from the fields: harvest markers, who went into the fields before harvest to make sure the boundary stones didn’t roll an armspan one way or the other—herders prodding slow-moving cows toward home and milking time. Gird flared his nostrils, enjoying the scent of cow. He had never understood those who thought cows stank. Pigs stank; dogs stank; even people—but cows had a rich, joyful scent, as befitted animals who lived on fresh grass and herbs. Their droppings had never disgusted him. Someone—he could not right then remember who—had told him once that a man should keep only those animals whose smells were pleasant to him.
The Fireoak farmers and herdsmen knew perfectly well the two were outlanders, but they knew Diamod and had heard of Gird. They sauntered down the lane, dusty and brown as the farmers with them, and no one spoke to them. Slow, traditional talk rolled by: harvest chances, taxes, a remedy for stiff ankles followed by a joke about the cause, comments on cows and weather and the uncommon number of rabbits that summer—a joke directed at Gird, which he well understood and knew better than to answer.
“Pop up and down everywhere, they do,” someone said a second time, to see if he would rise to the bait. “Got so common, we might think they’s people.”
Then the village, with its familiar cottages, the wattle fences between smallgardens, the walls of bartons rising behind. It was at once strange and the same: so like his own village, and yet not his village—and his village was not his village. Gird sniffed: bread, cheese, the vegetables they had not yet planted for the camps, ale somewhere—his mouth watered. Children wandered about, too thin but not yet starving, noticing the strangers but warned away from saying anything by quick gestures from their elders.
He would have passed Mali’s brother’s cottage, if Diamod had not jabbed him in the ribs. It looked different by daylight, from the front. He remembered Rahi’s harsh feverish breathing in the barton out back, the gray light of dawn when he’d eased out the gate into the field beyond. Now he saw a low fence enclosing a ragged smallgarden, the beaten path to the front door. And in the door, a thin girl, yellowhaired, who held one crooked arm as if it pained her. Her face whitened, and she ducked inside. Gird turned to see Diamod wink before he walked on.
Gird came to the door, stepped out of his boots, and said “Girnis?”
Mali’s brother’s wife, a face he barely remembered from that one night, said “You’re Gird? Gods above, what do you mean— come in, don’t stand there!” Gird picked up his boots and ducked beneath the low lintel. It was dark inside, and would have been cool if not for the fire on the hearth. By that flickering light, Gird could see Girnis standing flat against the wall between a loom and a wheel.
“Is—is Rahi—?”
“She’s alive, and well, and stubborn as ever.” Gird looked at the wife, whose lips were folded together. What had he walked into? He had not asked Rahi all that had happened here, but perhaps he should have.
“I thought—” the woman began, then closed her mouth, and twisted her hands, and finally said again “I thought you were leaving Girnis with us. To be ours.”
“I did,” said Gird, surprised. “I said so; I was grateful.”
She looked at him hard, then her mouth relaxed a little. “You didn’t come to take her?”
“Of course not! Why would you think—”
“Raheli left. When she didn’t come back, we thought she was with you, or dead—we didn’t hear of anyone being killed. And then we thought, if you wanted her, you might want Girnis, but she’s—”
“She’s not Rahi.” She was the child of Mali’s illness, the twin that lived, but never as vigorous as a singleton. “I wouldn’t take her. Girnis, let me see you.”
Girnis came to him, shyly but now unalarmed. Her arm had healed a little crooked—not so bad, when she held it out. But she stood with it up, as if it were still in its bindings, and it was thinner than the other.
“Does it still hurt you?” he asked. She nodded.
“Mother Fera—” she glanced toward the woman, “—says I should move it more, but the joint hurts, Da, when I try.”
“Let me feel.” Gird took her arm, conscious of its thinness, and the faint tremor—nervousness? pain?—that met his touch. He bent and straightened it slowly, stopping when he met resistance and heard her indrawn breath. He could feel nothing wrong but stiffness, but he was not a healer. “I’m sure your aunt has tried heat,” he said, “and herb poultices. I think myself it would be good to move it more. Sometimes things hurt when they’re healing. A few times a day, anyway—I think you could do that.” She nodded, solemnly. She was quiet; she had always been quiet, the quietest of his children, but not slow. Just quiet, in a house full of noisy ones.
The woman had moved nearer; she looked less alarmed. “We’ve had an offer for her,” she said. “She has a mixed parrion, she says?”
Gird
nodded. “Yes. She has Mali’s parrion of herbcraft, and Issa’s—my brother’s wife’s—parrion of embroidery. Issa was a weaver, as well, but died before Girnis learned enough.”
“I am a weaver,” the woman said. “I can teach her, if her arm strengthens. But—will you let us arrange the marriage?”
“Of course. I told you—if you in your kindness will have her, she is your daughter, and yours is the right to speak for or against.”
He heard boots in the barton, and stiffened, but the woman called through the house: “Gird’s here. It’s all right.”
After that awkwardness, he was surprised to find that Mali’s brother was enthusiastic about the possibility of training within the village.
“Of course, the bartons,” he said. “You’re right, Gird, and I don’t know why we hadn’t thought of it before. Had no one to teach us, I suppose. I know—let me think—I know two hands of men who would join here, at once. What about weapons?”
“Drill first, then weapons,” said Gird. He and Barin were sitting on the cool stones of the barton, drinking ale to celebrate. He could feel a delicate haze leaching the tiredness from his bones.
“What about women?” asked Barin.
“Mmm?”
“You’ve got Rahi now. I’m Mali’s brother, after all; I remember what she was like and how relieved the family was when you offered for her. Will you take women like that in?”
Gird shrugged. “I would myself, but I can’t force another group to do it. What about you?”
“I don’t like the thought of seeing my wife—but after all, she could be cut down for no reason, as Rahi was. Most of them won’t want to anyway, but for a few—why not?”
The following night, five other men visited Barin’s, presumably to finish an open barrel of ale before the beginning of harvest, when it was bad luck to have one. They talked village gossip until the stars were thick and white, then Gird spoke his piece. Less open than Barin, they still agreed it was a good idea. The longer they talked it over, the more they liked it—except that only two of them thought women should be allowed to join.
“They talk too much,” said one of the men. “Let them find out, and it’d be all over the village by dawn.”
Barin laughed. “And who was it let out the secret of Kinvit’s lover, last winter?”
The others burst into laughs; the man who had complained of women talking too much said “But it wasn’t my fault!” Gird chuckled. It was always the same; the loosest mouths complained that others gossiped. Their tales were always true, and if the wrong story got out, it was never their fault. Finally the man came around, laughing at himself. “All right,” he said. “I got drunk; I opened my mouth, and out fell Kinvit and Lia, doing what Kinvit and Lia had been doing since harvest. No nosy old granny could have done worse.” But he was still opposed to having women training in the village. Gird did not push him, letting Barin do most of the talking. They would all know, by now, about Raheli; they would all assume that Gird had a special reason for allowing women to fight. And that was perfectly true.
In the end, the men voted to organize a barton meeting, and gradually recruit new members. Gird promised to send someone— “It may not be me,” he pointed out—to train them. “Consider him a sergeant,” he said at first, but even in starlight he could see the dislike they had for that name, associated as it was with the lords’ tyranny. “What would you call him, then?”
They talked back and forth, suggesting and arguing, until one of them said “We’re like a bunch of cattle milling in a pen, waiting for the herdsmarshal to set us on our way.”
“Marshal!” said Barin, smacking his leg with his fist. “That’s good—and it’s not a word we would fear to have overheard. Marshal. And the rest of us are—”
“Yeomen,” said Gird. “That covers all of us, farmers and craftsmen alike. Any but lords. And no one will ever know, from talk of it, what it is.”
“I do like that,” Barin said. “The yeomen and the marshal meet in the barton tonight. As long as we need only those two ranks—”
“But we’ve got another!” It had come to Gird in another of those flashes of insight. “Marshal—that’s one of us traveling, coming to train you. But even in the village, you’ll need a leader—that’s the yeoman-marshal. And then yeoman for everyone else.”
“And someday—” Barin said. He didn’t have to finish. They all drained the last of their ale, and stamped their feet in agreement. Gird could see it—the flow of men out to the Stone Circle
, to learn. The flow back in, to train those in the bartons… and back out, to the fight they all knew must come, and then back, to take up their peaceful lives. As natural as breathing, or the cycle of seasons. He knew from experience that ale could make things seem simpler than they were in morning’s light, but this was going to work.
Work began in earnest when he returned to the camp and conferred with the others who had gone out. All the villages had shown an interest—not surprising, since they had talked to men already known to be Stone Circle
sympathizers. Two of the others had noticed that the villagers shied from the usual military rank terms of sergeant and captain, but they had not come up with alternatives. They nodded when Gird told them about marshal, yeoman-marshal, and yeoman.
“That’ll do,” said Ivis. “They won’t mind that—it’s nothing like the guards. Best of all, we can talk about it in front of anyone— even a guard sergeant—and he won’t know what it is.” Gird nodded.
“They thought of that, too.”
“Will we all be marshals?” asked Cob. “I mean, when we’re drilling here, that’s going be to confusing.”
“None of us are marshals yet,” Gird said. “And some of us may be better than others at teaching. Besides, we still don’t know enough.” In his mind, the wheel of the year turned, grinding the moments away. How long before the first snowfall? Before full winter? Four bartons to train, this winter—maybe more. “After harvest,” he said, “we need to bring one man from each village here, to drill with us, and see how the larger units work. When the taxes are paid, no one takes much notice if someone travels to visit relatives. In the meantime, our own harvest: I hear the field-fees are up again, and we cannot starve our allies.”
For the next few hands of days, they drilled only briefly, spending most of their time gathering food and preparing it for storage. No casual nutting and berrying, this time, but a planned harvest of the woods and fields, that must be done before the lords came to hunt, in the days after the fieldfees were paid. Gird had planned food storage sites both in and away from the camps, so that if one were found and destroyed, others would be safe. They could not hunt, and risk foresters preparing for the lords’ visits seeing their smoke or smelling the blood, but they could gather fruit, tubers, berries, and stow them away. Into storage pits lined with rock went redroots and onions: their own harvest had been abundant. Other roots and tubers, bulbs and nuts, were stored with them, along with apples and plums and dried berries, bundles of herbs, strips of necessary barks. Their own baskets stored grain as well, harvested from the edges of common pastures, along streambanks, and in Triga’s bog. Gird moved from place to place, checking the growing stores, and trying to foresee what hazards they must survive.
After harvest, the lords would come to hunt the large wood; Gird moved everyone to the tangle of hills where Felis’s group had lived, and the only game worth hunting was wild boar. If they stayed out of the pickoak scrub, living uncomfortably in the lower brush, they should avoid the occasional hunting party with a taste for pig. The men grumbled, but only slightly. Gird found work for them even in the chest-high thickets of brush.
“We might need to come this way and hide, and it would be good to have paths they can’t see from the opposite hill.” So his troop crawled and twisted through the thick growth, hacking out paths wider than the rabbit-trails they found. Rahi sniffed the hacked ends of the scrub, and said she thought some of these were medicinal, stunted by so
il or dryness. She began making a collection of twigs, bark, roots, and brewed a variety of pungent bitter concoctions which she insisted he taste. They all made his tongue rough up in furrows; they tasted as if they ought to do something good. One made him sweat profusely.
At last Ivis’s forester friends sent word that their duke and his friends had returned to the city; the forest was theirs for the winter. By this time the autumn rains were beginning, turning their trails to cold gray mud. Gird wished he had a stone cottage, with a great roaring hearth; his knees ached constantly. Instead, he had the three main campsites he’d found for winter, two backed into the south face of a hill, and one deep in a grove of cedars and pines. His favorite had a clean-running creek, small but adequate to their needs, and the surrounding trees had all dropped their leaves, letting in the low winter sunlight. The other south-facing camp had a larger stream, but he was somewhat worried about floods, come spring. Even in the slower autumn rains, they had to cross the stream on fallen logs. The men called that one Big Creek, and the other Sunbright; the most secluded campsite they called Cedars.
No one grumbled when he insisted they go right on working, rather than huddle in the first shelter they could contrive. He did not know if they were learning to think ahead, or if they simply accepted his orders. But wet and cold as it was now, winter could only be worse. The shelters he had planned went up quickly: wattle frames for side and roof, thatched with whatever they could find, mostly wild grass. Gird realized, as they wrestled with the grass between rains, that he should have had them out scything it earlier. Next year, he thought. And by then he would need another scythe or two. And some sickles. They smeared mud on the insides of the walls. Triga suggested another plan: poles braced against a tree, lashed together, and then wattle woven to make a circular peaked shelter. After building a couple like this, he admitted that it took more work, and gave less interior room, but the two they had made a welcome change, like extra rooms, during that winter.
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