By this time, Gird and his army were on the move. His original Stone Circle troops now numbered just over fifty; these he considered his best trained and hardiest. The bartons already risen contributed over a hundred, and the newest yeomen—the hardiest of the refugees—added another sixty or so. Then there were the refugees themselves, some of whom might be able to fight, at least a single blow: over two hundred of them.
Moving this motley group turned out to be harder than Gird had expected. Although he and his Stone Circle troops were used to traveling, many of the others had never been out of their villages until now. They did not understand maps, and the farther Gird led them from familiar country, the more unhappy and nervous they became. Some of the older people simply stopped, refusing to go on. For the first few days, it seemed that Gird was constantly being asked to persuade someone’s father or mother to keep going. “Not another step!” burned itself into his memory, along with “How many times have I told you—!” addressed to a wailing child.
It was not what he’d planned. It was not anything like what the gnomes had advised. But what could he do? They were his people; he had to take care of them. He led them by the safest ways he could find, avoiding villages where soldiers were quartered. He could not hide the movement of so many from everyone, but most of the peasants would not report them. What worried him were the few who might.
Gird paced back and forth nervously. It was much harder to hide a camp for three hundred than a camp for fifty; the jacks stank almost as far as the road when the wind blew right, and he could not convince his yeoman marshals that any guard sergeant would know what that smell meant. They would not make the trenches deep enough, and insist that the users cover it all. As for the cookfires—he looked back over his shoulder at the wisps of smoke rising into the forest canopy. At least they had trees here, and something to cook. He had to remember that, and the times when they’d had nothing. Farmers around here had been generous, though it was hard to persuade them to stay on their farms and grow food when their barton training gave them confidence. They wanted to fight, now, not plow and plant and reap. He himself would have changed places gladly, in peace, but they wouldn’t believe it. For a moment he felt a scythe in his hands, the lovely long swing back and forth, the bite of the blade into ripe wheat. But that was past, and now he had a camp to care for.
“Gird?” Raheli had come up to him, more quiet-footed than he would ever be. In the dimming evening light, the scar on her face stood out whiter than ever.
“What, lass?” His lass she would always be, the child he had held in the moments after birth, the laughing girl who had put flowers on the endstones and danced in the starlight with her lover . . . the girl he had not been able to protect. He could not get away from that.
“There’s trouble nearby; a runner came in.”
“How much trouble?”
“Farmer’s place burning, soldiers all around.”
“One of ours?”
“They say not. He came to a meeting awhile back, over to Whitford, and he’d been giving food to the local barton, but not drilling there. Tis said he’s a lord’s bastard, and got his cottage-right that way.”
Gird grunted. Peasant jealousy again. “Not his fault, if it’s true. Family?”
“Young wife, two children. Quiet man, they said. Hard worker, but kept to himself.”
Gird interpreted that his own way. If his village had resented his getting the cottage, they’d have made life hard on him; such a man might keep to his own hearth with good reason. Had the soldiers interpreted his solitude as rebellion? “What of him and the family?”
Raheli shook her head. “Don’t know yet. Soldiers took two off along the road, but it looked like a woman and girl.” Her voice shook; Gird’s would if he spoke, and he knew it.
“They killed him, then,” Gird said huskily. “Otherwise, they’d take him along.” To watch, to feel his own shame. The same shame and rage he felt still, when he thought of it. He turned away, blinking back the tears. “Well—we’ll have to keep a good watch; there’s naught more we can do.”
It was near dawn when a sentry found someone crawling through the wood on elbows and knees, sobbing. Instead of killing the intruder at once, he dragged him along to the main campsite. Gird, coming from the jacks to the cookfire in hopes of a quiet mug of sib, heard the commotion as the sentry reported to the night marshal.
“What’s this?” he asked, strolling over. The sentry’s catch was a lean, dark-haired man who stank of smoke and burnt wood. He stood hunched and shivering, his hands cradled to his chest.
“Says he’s a farmer, got burnt out,” said the sentry. “Says they beat ’im, burned his hands.”
“Come to the fire,” Gird said. The sentry and the night marshal both helped the man, who staggered as if he was near collapse. They got him seated by one of the firepits, where the flickering light of the morning cookfire showed a strongboned face smudged with ash and soot. A welt stood out along one side of his face; one eye was swollen, and his hands, when he held them out, were blistered on the palms, as if someone had forced them onto a hot kettle. His shirt was scorched up one arm, with the red line of a burn beneath.
“You need to drink,” Gird said. The morning cook had shifted to the other side of the firepit; he reached for the dipper in the sib kettle and paused. “Is your mouth burnt? Would cool water be better?”
“Water,” the man said faintly. Before Gird could get up, the cook had turned away, and came back quickly with a bucket of cold springwater. Gird held a dipperful to the man’s lips. He sucked it in noisily, swallowing so fast he nearly choked.
“Easy. There’s plenty.” Gird filled another dipper, and glanced at the cook. “Where’s Rahi? We’re going to need a good poultice for his burns.” The cook nodded, gave another stir to the porridge, and went off. When the man had finished the second dipper of water, he shook his head at the offer of another.
“Thanks . . .” he said. Tears made a clean track through the dirt on his face, glittering in the firelight. “I—I thought—”
“You’re safe,” Gird said. It was not strictly true, but he was safer here than where he had been. “What’s your name?”
“Selamis.” An unusual name for a peasant, Gird thought, but Rahi had said he might be a lord’s bastard. Some of them had unusual names. The man’s mouth worked a moment, then he said, “It’s—not a village name. I’m not from there.”
“It’s not a man’s name that matters,” said Gird. “Selamis is as good as any other. I’m Gird—that’s Jenis, and that’s Arvi.” He craned around to look. “And the cook’s Pirik. How did you get away?”
Selamis grimaced. “Tunnel—you—your men said, at Whitford that time, we should all have a way out, tunnel or hole in the wall, something like that. I had one in the woodshed, just under my barton wall. Not big. They threw me in there, after—after they were done—and said they’d take me off to the duke’s court come morning. So—I managed to move th’ wood, get the trap up—”
“With your hands burned like that? Brave man.” Gird flexed his own hands, imagining how it must have hurt to move anything.