When he crouched down with his cowl up, even if he didn’t spread his cloak over himself and the dark canvas bag wrapped in a sheet almost as white as the fresh snow - he would look like a small drift that had accumulated over a rock, or a tree stump, or a fencepost.
Perhaps it was spending time with Grodan or looking at the brilliant reflection of the sun upon the snow, but he was coming to the judgment that those grey cloaks the Rangers preferred did make a sort of sense in this countryside. Most winter days were not blindingly white as it was today, but overcast, grey, cloudy, or snowing, and the landscape rarely stood in this stark relief of absolute white and black shadows under the trees. The neutral grey would be good camouflage in all manner of circumstances. For a moment he wondered if he might find such a cloak, then decided carrying a third cloak around was just too much to bear; besides, explaining to Durine and Pirojil why he’d taken to this new fashion might entail more talking than he had patience for.
After he had found himself beyond the first stand of windbreak trees, which had now acquired a mammoth windbreak snowdrift with a few green strands of pine needles sticking through on the leeward side, he had spread out his cloak on the snow and lain down upon it to rest for a few minutes - moving through thigh-high snow was hard and sweaty work - and when he finally stopped panting, he had strapped the brezeneden to his overboots, and started to walk.
He now understood the origin of the brezeneden’s name: ‘clumsy feet’.
It made sense.
Sure enough, after the first few dozen steps - during which he had carefully watched his feet - he had become cocky, and picked up his pace. Immediately after which, he had stepped his left brezeneden down on top of his right, and when he had lifted his right foot, his boot had worked loose from the leather bindings and he had plunged face first into the snow. Even after he had got back to his feet and perched himself on the brezeneden again - a struggle in itself - it had taken several long, cold minutes to remove his thick gloves, retie his right boot to the brezeneden, and slip his hands back into the blessed warmth of his gloves and move on.
It went better, after that - until the next time that he had stepped on his own, suddenly-broadened, feet and while this time the lacings had held, he had still fallen down in the snow. But after a while he thought he had the knack of it, although he suspected that there were some subtleties to using these things that Grodan knew, and wished the Ranger had shared with him.
He wondered, for a moment, whether to attribute those omissions to malice or to stupidity, and decided that Rangers weren’t stupid! The Ranger didn’t strike him as particularly malicious, either. It must have been the inability to explain it all in one quick talk. Or, it could merely have been the Ranger’s odd sense of playfulness. He’d known men who found a great deal stranger things than this amusing.
Still, after a while, his feet started to learn how to avoid each other, and he was able to move at a preposterously fast pace, under the circumstances. The marks that his brezeneden made would probably be erased by the first decent wind, but even in the absence of a stiff wind, the branch that he was dragging behind him would obscure them from all but somebody with the observations skills of a Nataiese Ranger.
At a bend, he came upon the carcass of a horse, blood from the long sword wound in its neck having stained the snow a dark red.
The impressions in the snow made it clear what had happened; the horse had slipped on a patch of ice hidden beneath the snow, exposed by everyone riding the trail-breaker’s path. The rider had been thrown into a nearby snow bank which had half-buried him.
Kethol shuddered. In his mind he could hear the sound of the cannon bone breaking, and nodded in approval at the footsteps that showed that the rider had braved the animal’s undoubtedly desperately flailing hooves to cut its throat, quickly ending the doomed creature’s pain. Retrieving the saddle had taken the work of at least a dozen men, judging from the footprints - the stirrups had probably got themselves caught beneath the horse, and several men had been required to lift enough of its bulk to slide it out. They hadn’t been disturbed during all this either.
The smoke puffing into the lazy air far in the distance suggested that the nearest farmhouse was probably more than a mile away, and the likelihood of any peasant having heard this relatively minor commotion was even smaller than one having been fool enough to venture out to see what had happened.
Which was fine with Kethol.
He drew his knife and set his gear aside and knelt in the packed-down snow next to the dead animal. It was small for a horse, which meant that it easily weighed six or more times what the largest buck deer that Kethol had ever taken had, and probably half again the size of that huge buck elk that had fed the company for a solid week up in Thunderhell.
A full field dressing would require more than one man’s strength: he could break the breastbone, with enough effort; but it would take two or more men working together to spread the ribcage.
Still, the horse hadn’t yet quite frozen. Even though he was panting and sweating with exertion when he had finished, he was quickly able to cut through the hide and flesh to expose the left rear hipbone. He wished he had thought to bring a small camp hatchet to break the bone free of the socket, but it was the matter of only a few minutes until he was staggering through the waist-deep snow, dragging the leg across the snow behind him towards a stand of birches that had managed to remain mostly unburied in the storm.
The storm had washed itself out around the stand of trees, leaving a small eastern hollow with barely a foot of snow in it, where he quickly cleared a spot to the icy ground. One of the long-fallen trees provided branches that snapped off in his hands and, with the aid of his dulled knife, chunks of wood, out of which he quickly built a fire.
Starting the fire took only a few moments - he didn’t have to use the sheet of birch bark folded over in his rucksack, since the nearby birches provided plenty of that material, and he peeled a large strip off a wide bole, and with a few strokes from his flint-and-steel kit quickly built up a smouldering blaze. Then he ran back to the carcass to retrieve the rest of his gear, as well as leave more footprints.
He hacked off a hunk of horsemeat from the leg he had salvaged, and roasted it on the point of his knife over the fire, nibbling at it from time to time, rather than waiting for it to cook all the way through, out of impatience, rather than the pressure of time. Even if the patrol was unable to make a full circuit around the city, the breeze would blow the smoke away and even if they had to double back - as he expected they would - he would hear them coming long before they saw the clumsily-butchered carcass, and make his escape with the bulk of the windbreak between him and any observation.
It wasn’t bad, although Kethol had never really cared for horse-meat. A man who much cared what he ate should probably have picked a better profession than mercenary soldier, but he was surprised to find that he had worked up a serious appetite. He ate quickly at least a couple of pounds of the meat. The rest he threw in the fire.
He dumped more wood on the fire, then went back to the carcass and hacked off as much meat as he could at speed and buried the pieces in the snow at the far end of the hollow. Then he pissed on the snow nearby in several places.
He opened the canvas bag and took the pieces of Tsurani armour that he had stolen from the storeroom in the keep’s basement - early on in the war, the Muts had apparently been as interested as everybody else in collecting and examining this curious armour - and scattered them about the clearing.
The Tsurani sword, removed from its black sheath, snapped satisfyingly when he set the point on the ground and bore down on the flat of the blade with his foot, and he tossed the body of the sword aside, scooping up the few inches of the point and tucking it into his pouch.
He peered out from the hollow, and listened.
Nothing. Nothing but a slight wind, and the far-off chittering of some bird, a feathery braggart that apparently wanted to let the whole world know that it, too
, had survived the storm.
Dragging the branch behind him, he set off on his brezeneden, pausing only for a moment to drop the sword point next to the horse’s corpse, then quickly making his way across the ridge, back towards the city. It would probably be a good idea to wait outside the city until dark. The cover of night would serve him well when he staggered back in.
He would have to bury the brezeneden in the snow outside the city, though. Pity. But now that he knew the trick, he would be able to make another set if the need for them ever arose, as he devoutly hoped it never would.
You do what you can, the long-dead Kami had said.
When you don’t know quite what to do, you do what you can do.
Not a bad philosophy.
Kethol didn’t know how to prevent a fight from starting, much less how to end one without leaving everybody on the other side dead or dying - at least, everybody who hadn’t fled. And the Swordmaster’s ordering him to do it hadn’t magically conferred upon him that ability.
Like Pirojil and Durine, he could have settled for going out into the city and looking and trying, but it didn’t take any more than two eyes to see that there were problems, and that things were only going to get worse while a dozen feuding factions were trapped in the city. What to do about that was beyond Kethol.
It wasn’t beyond precedent for Kingdom nobility to yank subordinate incompetent nobles from their estates. Or even less than incompetent, no matter how lofty their station; as Guy du Bas-Tyra had apparently been able to do to Prince Erland in Krondor, using Prince Erland’s supposed failing health as an excuse, if not a reason.
If the Earl had been here, the obvious solution would be for the Earl to explain to the feuding barons that he viewed the present situation as a test of their own leadership abilities, and that he would remove any who flunked that test. And the question of who the next Earl of LaMut was going to be could also be touched on.
But if the Swordmaster took that approach he could easily touch off the very situation he was trying to prevent. As he kept truthfully pointing out, he was not the Earl, after all, and nobles often would listen to one thing and agree when the point was being made by their betters, yet bristle when told it by an inferior, even if it was the same damn thing.
The winners would write the history, as usual, and the history would say that the losers had started the fight, and had been put down by a combination of loyal baronial troops and a few regulars, and anybody who could swear otherwise would be rotting in the ground somewhere, unable to make their dead voices heard.
Blame the war, as usual; if it wasn’t for the war, the bulk of the LaMutian regulars wouldn’t have been off fighting Tsurani: they would be here in LaMut, and barons at a council in LaMut would only have had their own personal guard, so any hostility between the various elements would have been a minor problem, rather than a serious threat. At worst a duel would have been called out, most likely it would have come down to nothing more than a couple of lackeys getting into a scuffle in the stabling yard.
Now it could be a full scale riot, or worse, city fighting between armed men with years of battle experience and less sense than the gods gave a salamander. At the moment it looked as if even a scuffle between lackeys might trigger a battle between the barons.
Kethol didn’t know how to handle that.
But Kethol did know how to make a few things.
He knew how to make his way across the land without drawing attention to himself. He knew how to field-dress an animal – or quickly hack off a leg in the absence of time to do a proper job – and he knew how to let the other players in a game distract themselves while he kept his eye on the main chance.
It would look for all the world as though some Tsurani scout had been hiding in that clump of trees, and had observed the LaMutian patrol passing by, leaving behind the dead horse. The Tsurani had been unable to resist supplementing whatever meager rations he had with some fresh horsemeat, then made his escape, avoiding leaving footprints by hiding his tracks among those of the patrol’s horses. Who knows: the man might even be a trail-breaker for a raiding party. The Tsurani were clever when it came to war, and might be clever enough to attack when the Kingdom least expected, in the dead of winter.
It might not work, but the thought of some Tsurani lurking about might well give the baronial troops something else to think about besides killing one another.
One could always hope.
TEN
Rumours
Steven Argent didn’t like it.
He forced himself to sit back in his chair in the Aerie ignoring the glass of wine on the side table at his elbow, the better to glare at the fragment of blue ceramic in his hand - if only to avoid glaring at Tom Garnett, who sat across from him, petting Fantus, and waiting for the Swordmaster’s response to his report.
Why everybody else - even that freebooter, Kethol - seemed to be taking to the firedrake was a recurring, if relatively minor, irritation. Steven Argent was still frustrated at his ongoing inability to keep Fantus out of the Aerie, and momentarily, from time to time, used that minor frustration as a welcome distraction from more important and far more frustrating matters.
Like this bit of sharp blue ceramic that he held in his hand, the other armour piled next to his chair, and Tom Garnett’s report about how and where it had been found.
Steven Argent had not been surprised that snowdrifts from the storm had made it impossible for Garnett’s patrol to make even a complete circuit of the city, even on the closest roads. That was expected, but the effort had had to be made, if only to confirm how thoroughly they were all snowed in. His only surprise was that the patrol had cost only two horses - one slipping on ice, and another gone lame on the return leg of the patrol - he had anticipated losing as many as four. And any surprise irritated him. There was a rule about soldiering and warfare that he had learned long ago: all surprises are bad. Another rule: all rules were broken, upon occasion.
But he could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times that he had had anything resembling a good surprise during the years of this war with the Tsurani, and the more than a dozen years soldiering before them. Surprises were always things like the relief column being a day late and of half the strength that you were counting on, rather than arriving a day early or at twice the strength. Or the enemy over the next ridge was an army instead of a company, never a patrol instead of a company.
It was widely known that ever since the war had started the Tsurani, come winter, retreated behind their lines to await the coming of spring and the resumption of the war, and from what Steven Argent thought he knew about the number and quality of soldiers that they had fielded, their fear or religious avoidance of combat during winter was one of the few reasons that they hadn’t swept across Midkemia from north to the Great Northern Mountains, south to the Bitter Sea. All reports indicated that the Tsurani homeworld harboured armies many times greater than what they were throwing at the Kingdom. A report to the Earl from Prince Arutha at Crydee on what they had been told by a Tsurani captive indicated that this war was merely an aspect of some massive political struggle on the Tsurani homeworld.
Argent found politics even more irritating than surprises.
He had never heard of the Tsurani deliberately leaving scouts behind Kingdom lines during their winter retreat, or about stranded Tsurani turning scout, rather than turning tail for their own lines. If that had happened now, that would be a surprise. And not a good one. And if it happened because of Tsurani politics, it would be a doubly irritating surprise.
‘So?’ he asked. ‘What do you think? Just another straggler?’
‘No.’ Tom Garnett shook his head. ‘Unlikely. Not that it’s impossible - but living off the land well enough to survive in winter isn’t something that I’d expect a lot of the Tsurani to be good at, and those few, desperate ones who jumped us last week were in the worst state I’ve ever seen any of them in.
‘This one was in good enough shape, apparentl
y, even after having survived outside in the storm - he picked himself a very good spot for that, and from how suddenly and hard that blizzard hit, that he survived at all tells me that he’s both good and lucky. He had probably been hiding out in that very stand of trees, watching the comings and goings of the city, ’Watching and waiting from a stand of trees, then quickly taking advantage of the situation to provide himself not only with a quick meal, but as much meat as he could carry - that speaks more of skill than desperation. And he was smart enough not to return to that spot.‘
The Swordmaster half-seriously believed that the test of a man’s intelligence was how much that man agreed with the views of one Steven Argent, and he had always considered Tom Garnett to be particularly intelligent, although no doubt he had certain disagreements with him, but kept them to himself. Loyalty and sycophancy were two entirely different things, in Argent’s estimation.
‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘It’s bad enough to think of Tsurani scouts helping to prepare the way for their spring offensive, but if that means the Tsurani have changed their ways of avoiding combat over the winter, that’s a very bad sign.’
Tom Garnett nodded. ‘Wouldn’t be the first time they’ve learned a new trick.’
‘There are a few they seem reluctant to learn, though,’ said Argent.
‘Cavalry.’ Tom Garnett nodded, agreeing. ‘By all reports, they seem to have some odd sense of honour about not riding, for which I’m grateful. They’ve certainly captured enough of our horses to have taken it up, should they be so inclined. And I can’t imagine too many things a Tsurani isn’t brave enough to try.’
Argent nodded in agreement. No man who had faced the Tsurani would gainsay their bravery.
‘But they do seem to have learned a few things from us. Still, even concluding that they’ve adopted winter scouting ahead of the spring re-engagement is a lot to read from this one incident, and it wouldn’t necessarily mean that —’
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