“Everyone thinks farmers are stupid, and shepherds are the stupidest: lords and thieves alike. But tell me, what is ‘your war’—how will we fight, and when, and where?”
“And have I seen the gods themselves, and is the overworld paved with gold and walled in crystal? You want all the answers at once? In the dark?” Beside him, Felis made a sound between a snort and a sniff; Gird relented. “All right. What I heard is that the lords have raised their army, and plan to start by clearing from Kelaive’s domain east. We will take all the bartons from Hardshallows eastward, and move north—away from them, for now—and strike for the River Road.”
“Why?”
“Even if we won here, we’d still be caught between the south trade road, the River Road, and the trade road between Finyatha and Ierin. Their supplies would flow freely; ours would not. If we cut the River Road, we’ve cut Finyatha from Verella, in Tsaia—”
“Tsaia! You’re not thinking of fighting there—”
“Tsaia’s king is kinbound to this one. The gnomes say things are as bad there. Our bartons on the east reported interest in neighboring vills inside Tsaia.”
“But I don’t know where Tsaia is, except eastward.”
Gird grinned, in the darkness; Felis sounded as much affronted as frightened. That was good. “You will know, when we get there. Now: this is what we must do to win in Finaarenis alone. We must be able to feed ourselves, control the food supply—and that means the trade roads, as well as protection for the farmers, and certain towns—”
“You sound—different—” Felis sounded uncertain again.
“I am, in a way. It’s all very different than we thought. It’s more than raising three or four bartons at a time to attack a small force. Right now the lords have trained soldiers with good weapons; they have stores of supplies; they have control of towns and roads—and, if we’re honest, of much of the countryside. We should have more yeomen overall, but you know how it is—if we seem to be losing, some of those will go home and forget they ever heard of us. Our people have almost no experience, our weapons—Oh. That reminds me. Changes there, too.”
Felis rolled over; the straw rustled. “All right. I’m convinced. You’ve come back ready to lead us to glory, full of as many new ideas as when you came into my camp that first day. But unless the gods put their touch on you, you still need sleep, and so do I.”
Chapter Twenty-one
In less than a hand of days, Gird stood facing his first army: the bartons from Hardshallows, his own village, Fireoak, Whitetree, Harrow, Holn, and the original two Stone Circle groups. After his experience with the gnomes, their “straight” lines looked crooked, and their marching seemed as ragged as goats dancing along a path, but he said nothing of that for the moment. They were there, bold, timid, nervous, confident, in every possible mood he might have expected. With them had come the food he had told them to put by for this purpose; each had brought his or her sack of grain and beans, onions and redroots, even strips of dried meat.
What he had not expected so soon was the ragtag clutter of refugees that had come with them. His own village had come all in a lump, convinced that anyone left behind would die. After all, everyone knew where Gird had come from, and Kelaive had never been slow to make reprisals. Most of Hardshallows followed its yeomen, for the same reason, and Fireoak, in the same hearthing, feared the same trouble.
So besides the yeomen, Gird had all the others to worry about: small children, pregnant women, old men and women who could scarcely totter. They knew nothing of camp discipline. He had to double, then triple, the size of the jacks; smoke from the cookfires marked the sky with unmistakable evidence of their presence. When nothing happened for a few days, the oldest and youngest began to treat it as a holiday—spring, and no work to be done. Grandparents sat and chattered, children screeched, mothers festooned every bush with laundry.
Most of those who were young and strong wanted to join the bartons—better late than never—but Gird took only a third of them. The others he assigned to his traditional tally groups, with Pidi (now beginning to show his growth) to teach them the necessary foodgathering and camp skills. This group he knew could not keep up when the army began to move, but he had no safe place to send them; they would have to do as best they could.
As for the bartons, he had all of them change from varied farm tools to the long stick and the hauk for weapons. The farm tools went to the nonfighters, with a few hours of instruction. Once all his units had the long sticks, drilling them began to look more like drilling a real army. Gird imagined good, hard, steel points on the ends of those sticks, but what they had were sharpened wood: not good enough, but cheap and available. He imagined a lot more drill, but they had no more time than they did steel.
What he did have was willing spies. When the enemy army set out from Finyatha, runners passed the word from barton to barton. Gird knew within a few days, while the army was still days north of Hardshallows.
“Why don’t we move now?” asked Ivis and Felis. Gird tapped the map the gnomes had made him.
“We can’t be sure they aren’t getting information the same way we are.”
“But no one would tell the lords about us—not farmers—”
“Felis, think. They burned Berryhedge, didn’t they? Took the survivors, beat them—do you think there’s anything about the Berryhedge barton they don’t know? They burned three other villages we know of last winter, taking prisoners each time. Some yeomen got away; some didn’t. Some of those they caught will have told all they know—from pain, from fear, from hope of saving a child . . . whatever. Most of our people want to be free, but many of them are scared—and so they should be. Some of those scared ones will help the lords, simply out of fear.”
“But I still don’t see why—”
“Look again. If they know we’re moving north, they’ll most likely turn and come after us. They could catch us on the move, before we get to the River Road. I don’t know all that country; I need to see it, so that when we come to fight there, I can choose good ground.”
“The gnomes taught you that, too?”
“Yes.” He looked up, and saw a sulky expression in Felis’s eyes. Ivis was merely puzzled. “Felis, I’ll be glad to teach you all the gnomes taught me—to teach all of you—but right now I don’t have time. Now. When the army has passed the lower ford, there, they’ll be unlikely to turn back until Hardshallows. In spring, that stream runs deep and rough. That gives us time to get well north of them before they turn—and if we’re lucky they’ll go on to my old village, to get word from the steward there.”
Cob said “What about the lords’ magic—did you learn anything about that? Is it real, and what can they do?”
“It’s real.” Gird rumpled his hair with both hands. He could have done without that question. The next would be what could he do about the lords’ magic, and the answer was, nothing. “Some of them have lost it—that may be why they’ve changed for the worst. They’re afraid they’ll lose all their power without their magic to fight for them. But some have enough left—they can make light, call storms, compel men to obedience, change their faces—”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Lucky for us that most of them don’t have it any more; we’ll be fighting soldiers who have no more magic than we do.”
“Better weapons,” said Cob gloomily.
“Better for fighting unarmed peasants. Remember that most of ’em have been sitting around guarding some noble’s home; the ones that have experience got it with horse nomads—not with foot troops who use polearms. They belong to different lords; they’ll have a divided command; they aren’t used to drilling together. We are.”
The lords’ army did exactly what Gird had expected. They moved at a leisurely pace down the trade road from Finyatha toward Ierin, waited for a contingent of troops from Ierin, then swung southeastward, following the west bank of the Blue all the way to Hardshallows. His spies told him they burned that deserted village after fording the stream, then stopped to celebrate a victory. Supposedly, the enemy forces now numbered about 300 soldiers, and that many again of servants, guides, packers, and other noncombatants. This was by no means all the force the lords had at their disposal. Ivis’s duke was rumored to be on his way with his personal guard—a hundred strong, some of them fresh from the northern frontier.