by P. J. Fox
“I, ah…they’re in stories.”
“Stories.”
“According to the bards, all armies have them. Because, you see, they’re a vital necessity in bringing down a wall and—”
Rudolph was lecturing him on tactics? Rudolph, whose knowledge of warfare seemed to come entirely from bards? Rudolph, whose notion of real clothes seemed to involve a surcoat with fewer bumblebees? He was out here, in the middle of nowhere, in the rain, the road was utterly impassable and instead of getting out there and digging it out like with the rest of the men he chose to stand here and preach at Hart?
“A battering ram is the size of a house and takes a hundred men or more to operate. It has to press directly against the wall in question for it to work, which means that it isn’t suitable for fortifications using a moat. Do you know whether House Salm has a moat?”
Rudolph blinked. No. Of course he didn’t.
“Then there’s the issue of fire. You see, a wooden platform even wider than your mother’s ass makes a delightful target for boiling oil and—”
“What about a siege tower?”
“Oh, that’s five stories tall. How do you plan on transporting that across two duchies?”
“They have wheels.” Rudolph sniffed. “I’ve seen pictures.”
“Yes, wheels.” Hart gestured. “For these fine fucking roads!”
“The mangonel—”
“Kills more friends than it does foes! Half the time those things fire backward.”
If even a quarter of the able-bodied fighting men in Morven were as stupid as Rudolph, no wonder so many were declaring for Maeve. In Rudolph’s mind, it was all so easy. Build a siege engine, or ten, bring it to the castle, sing a song.
There were weapons they could build on site. Like a bore. And they could tunnel beneath the walls, using the same shovels they were using now. But their real weapons were disease, and time. With the latter came the former. A siege meant slow starvation for those inside. Lack of access to fresh water, as wells ran dry. If there were even wells inside the castle. Rainwater could be collected, but rainwater relied on rain. Of which there might be plenty now…but who knew about later?
Dead bodies and dung could be thrown over the walls to speed along the process. And then there were arrows. Despite what Rudolph may have heard, in his beloved stories, most longbowmen didn’t fire from a quiver. Rather, they stuck their arrows into the ground in front of them. This allowed them to nock the arrows faster, yes. But it also served an equally, if not more important purpose: it made the arrows deadlier. The rich black earth and all that it contained stuck to the arrowheads, making infection all the more likely. Some archers even rubbed their own piss, or shit, on them, or spit on them as they pulled them from the ground.
An army like the one Rudolph envisioned would collapse under its own weight long before it reached its destination. Fighting men were like locusts: hard to command, impossible to keep fed. They turned every place they passed through, no matter how lush, into a desert. Stop for more than a few days in any one place and the only question was which would happen first: starving to death for lack of forage or being decimated by disease.
No amount of regulation could make a man smart. Hart could beat each one of them to within an inch of their lives and they’d still be lazy about digging latrines, and traveling more than a few paces for water. A camp, even a camp as small as the ones Hart used to pitch when he was scouring Enzie for bandits, became a cesspit almost as soon as it was pitched.
Arvid surveyed the scene before them. “We should call a halt.”
He was right, of course. Hart had come to the same conclusion, himself. It’d be full dark before they’d managed to dig themselves out of this quagmire. Best to give the men a chance to build fires, and rest, and dry their feet out before rot set in.
He stood off to the side, thinking, while his own tent was pitched and a fire built. A leader didn’t rub shoulders with his men. It lessened their respect for him. These men were terrified, most of them in an unknown place that childhood stories had convinced them was full of boggles and trolls. They needed him to be, not one of them, toiling in the mud, but above such things. Above such fears. Hart, serene, was a figure in which to have confidence. He wasn’t bothered; and neither should they be.
He reviewed, again, what he knew about where they were going.
The average small castle was really just the fortified home of a local lord. No different than where Lissa now lived, except with higher walls. He might have very few retainers, beyond his own family members. Or none at all. The next step beyond that was a household the size of his father’s. Which consisted of the lord, his castellan, his porter, and twenty or so guardsmen. A household with more to offer than thin wine and complaint would also have a dozen or so knights along with their squires. Bringing the total up to just under fifty hands. Adding in those grooms and other household hands who could take up arms if necessary, the total grew closer to seventy-five.
A large castle, meanwhile, might have ten times that.
And then there was the town.
Hart had some figures, but he’d learned not to trust figures. He’d learned a lot, in Molag. Which had been presented as a small conquest, too. And so while the best intelligence they had put House Salm’s hands at around two hundred and the surrounding town’s at little more, Hart planned as though he were approaching Caer Addanc.
The principal town of Chilperic, also called Chilperic, boasted a natural population of about twenty-five hundred souls. Only a fool, though, would think that meant a mere handful of fighting men. Not even allowing for the unnatural infusion of outside soldiers. Women fought, too. Everyone fought, when their home was at stake.
By contrast, Barghast had some twenty-five thousand souls. A large population center was the result of traffic: to and from the sea, along important trade routes. Anywhere two or more of these paths converged, one had a city. A village, on the other hand, was dependent on a specific anchor: like a castle. Chilperic served House Salm and, to a lesser extent, the surrounding countryside. Which gave Hart some hope, because while Owen Silverbeard, and indeed Maeve herself might have sent cronies to protect House Salm, it was very hard to hide a large army in the countryside. A sea of tents tended to stand out in an open field. And what would they eat?
“What are you thinking, brother?” Arvid.
“That, in general, there is one man hired to the town watch for every hundred or so citizens. And that the livestock population of a given town, on average, is double that of its human population. Meaning that Chilperic, in addition to whatever the traitors have provided, is likely to have twenty-five or so club wielding fools and five thousand or so sheep.”
He thanked Arvid, silently, for not making a joke about sheep.
“Pigs are better food animals,” was all he said. And they were. Pigs ate less individually, and were able to forage on their own. They required far less care than cows, or indeed sheep, which were largely dependent on their owners.
“But Chilperic’s principal export is wool.” Which meant that Hart, if he indeed held Chilperic, would be an extremely rich man.
Arvid said nothing, only stared out at the valley below.
“The leader of the Southrons is accusing the Hardland men’s sergeant of witchcraft.”
“Tell them that if they can’t stop fighting I’ll flog them both.”
“My men want time to worship their own gods.”
“They can wait until Thor’s Day, like everyone else.”
“I will tell them.”
“Brother, are you performing some sort of penance?”
Hart turned. “What?”
“The…feminine one.” There was no term for homosexual in Arvid’s native tongue. His people were not, as a group, terribly concerned about who slept with whom and indeed there was no true distinction between one preference or the other or concept of orientations. So long as a man married, and bore children, he was free to do as he would.<
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“He’s not my type.”
“Well, this I can see. If he were, then I would understand his presence.”
Blasted camp followers.
“He’s afraid of my sister.”
“Of Isla? Now if she weren’t your sister—”
“No. Of Rowena. His wife.”
Arvid laughed. “I’d like to tame that one. What a little minx. Nice teats, too.”
Hart gave him a flat look.
“What? I mean it as a compliment! You don’t want for men to think that you have ugly sisters, do you?”
“I don’t want men lusting after my sisters, either.”
“Every woman is someone’s sister.”
“Some women are only children.”
“You are impossible this evening.” Arvid squinted into the distance, apparently wondering if he saw something interesting and then, a moment later, deciding that he did not. “Regardless, then, you should be happy. As Rudolph clearly isn’t lusting after your sister.”
“Maybe he’s lusting after you.” Hart made a gesture, as though pulling at his own nonexistent beard. “It’s the hair. So luxuriant.” And so full of lice, no doubt.
“I don’t care for men.”
“Neither do I.”
Arvid grunted.
The rain had begun to lessen somewhat.
For now.
“I caught dinner,” Arvid said. “A deer.”
FIFTY-THREE
Rudolph poked dubiously at his meat.
Arvid’s catch had been a fortunate one. Men all over camp had done the same, Hart knew. Or tried to. Everyone shared the responsibility of supplementing their stores with whatever they could find along their route. They had to make those stores last—and who knew for how long. No army, of any size, could depend on being resupplied. Or on much forage once they arrived at their destination. Which was why Hart planned to take the castle fast.
“It’s raw in the center.”
Hart drank ale from his flagon. “So?”
“I like my meat well done.”
“Feel free to cook it next time.”
“I…I don’t know how.” Rudolph tried another hesitant bite of the venison, which wasn’t that bad, and grimaced. “Cooking is women’s work.”
Really? “Do we look like women to you?”
“Ah,” Rudolph replied. “But you can’t cook.”
Arvid roared with laughter. “He got you there, brother.”
The fire crackled merrily in the pit that Hart had dug. They’d found some mostly rotted logs and placed them around, giving them somewhere to sit that elevated them off the wet ground: Hart, Arvid, Rudolph, and a couple of tribesmen who seemed intent on playing knuckles. The sergeants were eating with their own men. After carving off his camp’s portion of the deer, Hart had divvied the rest up among them.
“Just eat it,” Hart told him.
“That which does not kill me,” Rudolph quoted, “makes me stronger.”
“That which does not kill me,” Arvid replied, ripping a strip of meat from one of the deer’s legs with his pointed teeth, “should run.”
“So where are we?” Rudolph asked.
Hart shrugged.
“What—you don’t know? Are there no maps?”
If Hart had wanted to be a teacher, then he most assuredly would have become one. He sighed. “Maps aren’t terribly useful as they’re mostly wrong.”
This was, apparently, news to Rudolph.
“He’s right,” one of the other men offered. “They’re mostly pretty pictures drawn by monks who’ve never left their abbeys. When they don’t know what’s between two places, they add something in. And when it comes to features like the coastline, they guess. You’re half as like to see monsters dancing along the beaches as no beaches at all, in a different map, and only cliffs. When in reality there’s no coastline there at all, because it’s a hundred leagues east.”
“Oh. My tutors never told me that.”
“Were they mapmakers?”
And then, because everyone was exhausted, it was time to turn in.
Only Hart stayed by the fire, turning so that his back was to it, staring out into the gathering dusk. First watch was always his watch. All through the valley, pinpoints of light twinkled. Other fires. Other men. Other fears. Overhead, no lights twinkled; the stars were shrouded in those ever present storm clouds, which seemed to have followed them from Barghast. The air was raw, too, promising more rain.
He wondered what Lissa was doing at that moment. Probably playing draughts with Tad. He could picture her so clearly, almost as if he could truly see her: her head bent over the board, lips curved into a small smile, laughing when someone said something funny. Master Hamel loved to bring home gossip, the juicier the better, and entertain his family with it while they sat about, enjoying their evening.
She was so beautiful. Bonel had been right, to describe her as looking almost like a child. But he didn’t think of her as one. Had never thought of her as one.
He didn’t envy her what was to come.
Could another man give her more? He knew the answer to that question. Knew, too, that Lissa was totally unaware of her own worth. Had Hart used that to his advantage? Preyed upon her weakness? He knew the answer to that question, too. And knew, finally, that none of it mattered. His need for her was near crippling.
She’d learn to adapt, as he would. The Gods had never promised happy endings, his God in particular. Only taught that a man could, and should, fight for what he desired while he made do with what he had. If Hart had remained the kind of man who could offer Lissa a homestead, then he never would have met her.
He’d wed this other woman, as was his duty. And, in truth, his desire: not for her but for what she represented. He wanted a title of his own, and lands. He’d bear children by her, and maybe even grow to care for her in some sense. And somehow make that up to Lissa.
Whose own life would be both greatly enhanced, and greatly diminished, by the match. She wouldn’t be the first mistress installed in a castle, not the first to suffer for her position. The gossip. The stares. The envy. To have a man’s love was a rare thing in these times, and even rarer still was love without expectation.
But unlike his own father, he had no intention of turning a blind eye to what were too often dismissed as women’s foibles. Solene would know his wrath, if she caused any disruptions. She’d learn her place, too. Just as Hart had. None of them were free.
He heard a footstep behind him.
Rudolph joined him on his makeshift bench.
“I thought I’d sit with you.”
Hart didn’t respond.
“Why…are we fighting this war?”
“Because Maeve is evil.”
“But…it all seems so stupid. Who cares who’s king, or queen? Why can’t we all just work together?”
Rudolph wasn’t talking treason. He was too stupid for that. Instead, he was asking the question of a child: why wasn’t the world a nicer place? Why was power such a corrosive influence, and yet so craved by so many? Didn’t they see what happened to men who had it? Why, why, why. Why, instead of one man hoarding it all, or one woman, couldn’t everyone share and have enough?
“People resist change,” Hart said finally, “even when it could work to their advantage. They prefer, instead, to keep those customs and practices which have grown familiar to them. Over lifetimes, until it’s no longer what’s right but simply what we do. The reasons, if there ever were real reasons, being lost with time. And replaced, in that same time, with superstitions.
“However unjust or unworkable those customs may be, they’re familiar; and the devil one knows is always more appealing than the devil one doesn’t.”
“But what if change is good?”
“It usually is. But to discover that, a man must first change.”
Rudolph considered this.
“Maeve, and the church, understand fear. And are using it to their advantage.”
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��But the church is good.”
“The church is a kingdom in its own right, with a kingdom’s concerns.”
“But the Gods….”
“The Gods, and the men who worship them, are two different things.”
“So you’re saying that the church…doesn’t speak for the Gods?”
“I’m saying that men speak for the interests of men. And when a leader of men, in turn, says that he speaks for the Gods, his followers are more apt to listen.”
“You’re jaded.”
“Wars aren’t fought over honor, but need.”
No man wanted war. War was expensive. And when the bill came due, it was for more than simply lives lost or gold wasted. It was for farms, entire villages burned. Fields churned under time and time again until the soil was spent and nothing would grow. It was for boys who grew up fighting, instead of learning a trade, so that there were no brewers or farriers or blacksmiths.
“How are you going to win?”
“Surprise.”
“Surprise isn’t chivalrous,” Rudolph informed him. “Rather, the leaders of each faction should exchange heralds. And then each should strive to select a battlefield that offers no advantage to his own side, leaving the outcome of the battle to the judgment of the Gods.”
And this was why chivalry was dead.
“I’m not a knight,” Hart reminded him. “I’m a professional soldier.”
“Chivalry is universal.”
“Tell that to the women whose husbands and sons aren’t coming home, because some fop with a banner judged their lives cheaper than his own self-regard.”
“I…I had never considered it like that.”
Hart grunted.
To men like Rudolph, war was all dashing across the open fields to bring justice in the Gods’ names. Justice and honor and all the other things the bards sang about, curse them. But in the real world war was a slog through trees, and a slow one. And these men, most of them, weren’t professional soldiers. They were just men trying to defend their homes, and their king. Many of them had already lost their homes, and had no recourse but to stay in the army. They didn’t have armor; they didn’t have horses.
