He remembered the gnomes suddenly, their stern faces and inflexible rules. Their warmaster would have had something to say about “relaxation,” and not what he would like to hear.
“What did I say to Binis?” he asked Kef.
“You don’t remember?”
“If I remembered, I wouldn’t need to ask you, now would I? Tell me.”
Kef looked down, scuffed his toes in the leafmold, and then stared past Gird’s shoulder. “You said—you said you didn’t care what the steward had done, that the yeoman-marshal had a right to run his barton any way he pleased, and if he didn’t want a gaggle of whining women treating war like a village brawl over oven-rights that was fine with you, and if she didn’t have a better reason than that for joining up, she’d never last a day of camp discipline—that you had enough half-witted, lovesick wenches hanging around already, bothering your soldiers with nonsensical notions—that for all you cared she could take her ugly face to the duke and see what good it did her—”
“I said that?”
Kef nodded. “More than that—and livelier than that, if you take my meaning. You brought up every god I heard of, and a few I haven’t, and threatened to unbreech her in front of the whole camp and tan her backside.”
“Oh gods.” His heart sank. He had never suspected himself of that kind of thing. He thought Binis was ugly, and just the sort of woman he disliked, but that was no excuse for what he’d said.
“That’s when Rahi tried to get you to be quiet—”
“Rahi—!”
“And you told her to shut her damnfool mouth or you’d show her you were still her father—?”
“Mmph.” Humor pricked his misery. “I daresay she didn’t take that well.”
“No—she said ale was no one’s father, and stormed off—that’s when Binis left. And the others.”
Gird scrubbed his head with both hands. Worse than he’d thought. Worse then he’d ever imagined—how could he have done such a thing? He could see, with the clear vision of the morning after, just how that would affect all the women. He had had no problems with them before; they had done all he asked of any soldier, and now—he shivered. “Where’s Rahi?”
Kef was staring at the ground again. “Gone. She went off with Sim. I—I think she’ll be back.”
At least his son had been far away, off scouting with a small group in the west. Maybe he could get this straightened out before Pidi came back. He had the feeling it was going to take a long time, and a good bit of unpleasantness.
“Well. Thank you for telling me.” That surprised Kef; he had expected anger, Gird could see. “I needed to know what had set everyone off. Now I do, and I’m not surprised.”
“You’re not?”
Gird shook his head. “No—why would I be? I didn’t know what I was saying, Kef—you don’t have to believe that, but I didn’t. That’s not an excuse; I’ve told you all that, and it has to apply to me, too. I was wrong to get drunk, wrong to say all that to Binis—”
Kef scuffed the ground again. “That yeoman-marshal, he did say as how she’s hard to live with—always picking quarrels, complaining—that’s why he didn’t welcome her—”
“That’s as may be.” Gird took a deep breath, and it out in a long sigh. His head still hurt, but he could see, between the waves of pain, what he should have done, and would have to do now. “I was still wrong, and I can’t afford to be wrong like that. Red Selis first, and then I’ll find the other marshals: we need to have a conference.”
Red Selis, who had taken over Felis’s unit after the guardhouse defeat, was so relieved to find Gird sober, cooperative, and reasonable that he looked almost foolish. Gird did his best to project calm confidence. They discussed the transport of water to an alternate campsite, if one were found, and the possible storage of some equipment near the spring in case they came back to this site later. When all this was settled, Gird looked Red Seli straight in the face.
“I played the fool last night, and you have cause to mistrust me—what about it?”
Red Selis’ face turned redder than his hair. “Well, I—I was going to say, sir—since you mentioned it first—it’s not that we don’t trust you—”
Gird resisted the temptation to shake him. “Of course you don’t, right now: what I’m asking is, do you want to quit? Go home?”
“Quit!” Startled, Red Selis stared slack-jawed a moment, then shook his head. “No, ’course not. Just for one bit of temper? It’s just that—I dunno, exactly, but—”
“If I’d done that in the midst of battle, it could’ve killed us all,” Gird said harshly. “If someone else had, I’d be ready to break his neck for him—might even try. It’s worse for me—I’m supposed to be showing you how. Tell you what, I never knew it to take me like that before—not that I recall. It won’t do: you know it, and I know it. That’s well and good: no more of it for me. But to mend last night’s bad work—I have to know if you’ll trust me on this, long enough to see that I mean it.”
“Well—yes.” Red Selis looked thoughtful. “I never—I mean I thought you’d be angry, like, that we’d seen you—”
“I am angry, but with myself. It’s not your fault.”
“ ’Twas my cousin made the brew—” muttered Red Selis. Gird had forgotten that.
“It’s not his fault either. You’ve heard me say it to others: the rule’s the same for all. I was flat stupid, that’s what it is, and it won’t happen again.” As he said that, he wondered—how was he going to tell when he’d had too much? Surely it wouldn’t mean giving up ale altogether? He could see sidelong looks from those of Red Selis’s cohort who were close enough to hear. At least they were there, and not on their way home.
By nightfall, Gird had visited each of his marshals. Sim had not found a really good campsite; the army was dispersed among several temporary sites, and, to Gird’s eye, had lost perhaps one in seven. He didn’t do a formal count, and no one told him. Gird had not seen Rahi all day; he had not wanted to ask Sim about her. He had asked the marshals to gather everyone briefly, and in the dusky forest light of early evening he faced his army in a clearing not big enough for them all. He could feel hostility, fear, and even more dangerous, detachment—too many of them had decided they didn’t care what he did.
“How many of you,” he began, “saw what happened last night?” Arms waved, and a general growl of assent. “And how many of you saw it coming? How many noticed I was drunk before that?” Fewer arms, and a subdued mutter. Finally one clear voice from behind a screen of trees.
“I seen it days ago, the way you started goin’ to the ale-pot every night. Said to my brother, you just watch, and he’ll go the way of our uncle Berro, see if he don’t, and you did.” That brought a scatter of chuckles, but some nodding heads.
“Well,” Gird said, “you were right. I just hope your uncle Berro never made such a fool of himself, and never said so much he wished he hadn’t said.”
“I always heard as how drunks say what they really mean,” said someone else, challenging. A woman’s voice. Gird had expected that.
“My Da said, the first time he found me drunk, that a drunk’s mind was two years behind him, at least.” He paused, looked around, and felt a flicker of interest from them. “If you’d asked me, back when I had a home and a wife and children, if I thought women could make soldiers, I’d have said no. I’d never seen one, and neither had any of the rest of you. When Rahi came, my own daughter, I doubted her at first. But she had nowhere to go, and I knew my own blood was in her.”
“And you told her—”
“Aye. Drunk, which I shouldn’t have been, I told her a bunch of nonsense. Maybe I do think that, down in the old part of me, in my past. But here and now, I mean what I’ve said afore about women. You know what that is, and how I’ve made the rules here. And kept them, until now. I let my own daughter—and you that have daughters know what that costs—choose to put her body in front of pikes and swords. I meant all I said, and my pledge is still that what laws we make afterwards will be fair to women as to men.”