With Selamis and his most experienced yeomen, Gird worked out a new, more uniform, organization. His cohorts were upwards of 120 hands—though the term “hand” began to fall out of use with the larger unit. Each cohort would have a marshal, and at least four yeoman-marshals. Where bartons had joined to form cohorts, their yeoman-marshals would serve, otherwise the most experienced yeomen could be chosen. Each cohort would divide into tally-groups for camp work, and each tally-group would be supervised by the yeoman-marshal for that section. When the army divided for some reason, Gird would appoint one of the marshals to command whatever group he himself was not with—which led to the title of “high marshal” for such a situation, and—over Gird’s initial protests—“Marshal General” for himself.
“They don’t have to call you that,” Selamis pointed out.
“Thank the gods! Why should they? A general is one of those fancy officers in gold-washed armor with a plume to his helmet; I’m not—”
“But you are, in one way. Commander of the whole army. It’s for the records, Gird, and if you send orders—”
“Flattery.” Gird eyed Selamis dubiously. The man had good ideas, but he had too many of them, too fast, and was too tactful by half in presenting them. Gird could not doubt his bravery—he had asked to start training while his hands were still sore—but he could not overcome the feeling that Selamis was just a little too smooth.
Somewhat to Gird’s surprise, the sier had caused no more trouble—no patrols had come in pursuit, and the guardpost near the bridge was left a pile of rubble. Gird’s eastern troop—half-cohort, he reminded himself—returned after several hands of days, full of their own stories of battle. They had “almost” held the sier’s cavalry; they had seen no sign of magicks.
Ivis made no comment on Gird’s mishaps, but did get him aside to discuss Selamis. “Are you making a yeoman-marshal out of him?”
Gird raised his eyebrows. “I hadn’t thought. Why?”
“He wasn’t in the barton in his village.”
Gird sighed. “We went over that. He was an outsider; he’d been given someone’s cottage—”
“I don’t entirely trust him.” Perversely, Ivis’s distrust made Gird feel obligated to defend Selamis.
“He’s not like us, I’ll admit, but he’s good enough.”
“He was telling Kef what you thought about the lords’ powers,” said Ivis. “As if you’d told him to. Did you?”
“Well—no. But I don’t see that it matters, unless he lied about it. What did he say?”
“Just what you’ve told me, mostly, and you thought the others should tell you if they’d heard anything more.”
“That makes sense. If I’d thought of it, I’d have done the same.”
“Yes, but—” Ivis shook his head. “I can’t explain it, but he’s—he’s not solid.”
“His wife and daughter died. We heard three days ago, from someone who saw it. He knows—that would unsettle anyone.” Gird did not say how Selamis had taken the news; he was not sure himself what that white-lipped silence meant, that was followed so soon by apparent calm. He looked off across the camp, where Selamis at that moment was chatting with someone while scrubbing a kettle. Harmless enough; what was it that unsettled Ivis? Gird remembered that Diamod had unsettled him, with the difference between farmer and craftsman, an indefinable shift in attitude.
By this time they had moved the main camp, shifting west away from Grahlin, and south along one of the arcuate band of hills. Only one of the gnomish maps had been recovered; Gird was trusting Selamis’s memory for the rest. The maps looked much the same to him, barring the use of a brush instead of a pen.
The larger camps, and richer resources of summer, allowed refinements he had missed before. One of their number claimed to have made his own brews before, and combined the seeds of early-ripening wild grasses with gods only knew what to produce a potent brew. The taste varied widely from batch to batch, but no one was asking for flavor. Gird found it relaxing to sip a mug in the evening after dark, when the weight of the day’s worries seemed to bow his shoulders and put an ache in every joint. It had been a long time—many years—since he could end most days in a pleasant if hazy mood. He had, he told himself, earned it.
It was on one such evening, after a day spent settling the petty disputes which so often infuriated him, that he found himself faced with six newcomers, all women, and all with a grievance. His head had ached since before dawn with the coming storm that drenched the camp in afternoon, and brought a foul stench from the jacks. No one else admitted to smelling it; he’d had to bellow at the marshals before they reassigned their tally groups to digging a new one. Even after the storm, it was hot and sticky, with hardly a breath of breeze and clouds of stinging flies; nothing would dry, and his boots were sodden. For supper they had only cold porridge left from the morning; the storm had caught them by surprise, and all the fires had gone out. So Gird had retired to his favorite stump with a pot of Selis’s brew, and let the stuff work the day’s irritations out of his consciousness.
He was not happy to be interrupted by the newcomers, and the woman who talked the most had a sharp, whining tone that set his teeth on edge. She had a complaint about the duke’s steward in their village, and a complaint about the barton’s yeoman-marshal, who did not welcome women. She wanted to tell him in detail about a legal dispute involving one woman’s husband’s mother and a promised parrion which had then been withheld, as proof of the unreasonable attitude of the steward. His eyes glazed after awhile. He was acutely aware of her disapproval, and that made him even less willing to be sympathetic. The other five women stood shifting from foot to foot as they listened, clumping behind Binis, the speaker, as if she were some sort of hero able to protect them. She didn’t look much like a hero, a tall scrawny dark-haired woman with a big nose and very large teeth, hands too large for her wrists . . .
He never did remember when the vague annoyance sharpened into active dislike, and the dislike into anger. Along the edge of his memory was the sight of Binis’s face, the expression changing from surprise to dismay to anger and contempt, the faces behind hers mirroring hers as if she were in fact the only real person there—his memory blurred, after that. The next thing he knew, Kef had waked him with the news that Binis was gone, and with her the five newest yeomen. That was the next morning, broad daylight, far later than he usually woke.
“She’s gone to tell the sier where we are,” warned Kef. “You really made her furious—”
“I said what I had to.” Gird rubbed his face, hoping the headache would go away, and wondering what, in fact, he had said. He hadn’t drunk that much, and the stupid woman shouldn’t have kept nagging at him.
“I know, but—” Kef peered at him. “You should be careful, Gird; that stuff Selis makes would take the hair off a horsehide.”
“I’m fine.” He wasn’t, but he would be with a can of cold water over his head and something to eat. If they had anything left. He clambered up, stifling a groan as stiffness caught him in every joint, and looked around.