Ser Milus laughed. ‘Most attractive people, Moreans. But Christ, who would send a girl that young with an army?’
Bad Tom was rereading the message, sounding out the words. Reading was not his strongest suit.
Ser Alison leaned over and read aloud.
Gallish Army within one day’s march. Cannot protect the Fur convoy. Request immediate assistance. Gallish Army five hundred men, with Outwaller allies. Assume siege train. Two hundred canoes, four large war galleys. Turkos – Osawa.
They had marched impossible distances in eight days – and found camp sites pre-scouted, and supply dumps of food in stone cairns. The company had lost two wagons, and crossed almost three hundred leagues of ground.
And now they had to cross the Meander for the third time, and there was no bridge.
‘Anyone seen the Duke?’ Sauce asked.
Ser Jehan shook his head. ‘Gone with Gelfred at last light yesterday.’
Tom looked at the icy ford, the ruins of the old bridge, and the good road just a few hundred yards away on the other side.
‘He ordered us to wait for him,’ Ser Jehan said.
Tom looked at Gerald Random. ‘Ser Gerald – I’m no big thinker, but mayhap this is your call to make and not mine.’
‘Everything depends on those furs,’ Random said. ‘The Duke would say the same.’
Tom raised both eyebrows. ‘Everything?’ he asked.
‘Your Captain’s been spending all the profits of the spring on the Moreans, and betting that against having a monopoly on the fall furs to sell me,’ he said. ‘I backed his play. We need those furs, Tom. It’s not just a fight.’
Bad Tom grinned in the way that made men uncomfortable – when all his teeth showed. ‘All the better,’ he said. ‘Get me Mag.’
Mag looked at the wide river. ‘A bridge?’ she said.
Bad Tom grinned at her.
‘I can’t,’ she said.
He looked away. ‘Is this about me and Sukey?’ he asked quietly.
‘No, sir, it ain’t, although if you want to have a quiet word about how I feel about the way you treat my daughter, I am, as John says, at your service.’ She met his mad glare with her own.
Sauce shifted uneasily. ‘Time’s wasting, gentles. Tom, if we push half the horses into the stream-’
He shook his head. ‘We’ll lose too many lads, Sauce.’
Ser Milus laughed bitterly. ‘Sauce, just think what it means when Tom hesitates to do something.’
Random scrunched up his face. It was cold, there was snow coming, and this was not a place to camp. ‘Who here has built a bridge before?’ he asked.
None of them had.
Random nodded. ‘I have. Mag, all we need is three piers. I could mark them for you with flags. If you can put – I don’t know, a pile of rock, a pillar? – fifteen feet wide, flat on top – on each spot then the lads can cut wood on the slopes over there and we have a bridge by nightfall.’
Mag measured it by eye. ‘I’ll try one, and we’ll see.’
They made a miserable camp half a league back from the river, and built enormous fires, and ate dried food and drank hot water. Men heated rocks in the fire and put them at their feet to sleep. Men slept three under each blanket, in long rows like salt mackerel packed in crates. The army’s women found themselves in high demand – for warmth.
Mag had two piers in place, but they required so much more effort than any casting she’d ever worked that she needed a night’s rest to work on a third.
The sun rose, somewhere beyond the snow clouds. Her first pier had half-collapsed into the water. She hadn’t built the web of the working clearly enough in her mind, and there were voids and soft spots in her rock.
Random sat by the riverbank with Bad Tom when she came out, rubbing her eyes and cursing the tight lacing of her second and third kirtles and the new pains in her hips which kept her from a good night’s sleep. And the collapse of her pier. She was looking at it when she put her foot on an icy rock and down she went.
She was undamaged by the fall, but she rubbed her hip ruefully as the two knights helped her up. ‘I’ve gone about this all wrong,’ she said. ‘The answer is ice.’
‘Ice?’ Random asked.
‘The water wants to be ice already,’ Mag said. ‘All I have to do is stitch it together. I tried using one of Harmodius’s workings – and I’m far from mastering it. But this is my old milk bucket in winter. In reverse.’
She raised her hands. In her right hand was the silver bodkin from her sewing kit, and she waved it, and the river flowed upwards, stilled and then froze into the form of three uneven piers supported a roadbed of solid ice. It was more organic than regular. But it was there. The two nearer piers were even supported by her earlier work with stone.
‘I’ll hold it until we’re across. I’m sorry, Gerald. I should have thought of it yesterday.’
Random grinned.
Bad Tom grinned. ‘Now we fight!’ he said happily.
An hour later, the army was rolling across the bridge. Mag paled a little as the last three heavy wagons crossed, but the ice didn’t crack.
‘There they are,’ Gelfred said. It was entirely unnecessary, as Demetrius’s men did not have white wool cotes or horse blankets to hide them. They did have multiple horses, and they were moving fast along the valley floor below, raising a haze of fine snow as they went.
They had a baggage train with them – sixteen wagons and pack animals.
The Duke watched for as long as it took the sun to climb another finger, and then he belly-crawled back over the ridge and ran to his horse. A dozen Vardariotes were there, and Count Zac, and Ser Michael.
‘He’s a hot-head, yes?’ the Duke asked.
White-clad horsemen swept over the low ridge that the road was climbing and loosed arrows from carefully warmed bows into the front of the Despot’s fast-moving column. Three men went down, and their blood was like red smoke on the white snow.
An hour later, it happened again. This time six arrows went home. The enemy were all in white, with horse blankets and wool gowns that covered their weapons and armour. They were almost silent, and very hard to spot in the sunlight.
Demetrius took a nip of fortified wine and shook his head. The bright sun made it hard to see anything among the bare trees on the ridges. If he slowed down, he had no chance of winning the race to the crossings of the Meander. If he ignored these pin-pricks, he was going to lose men.
‘Sabres,’ he said aloud. ‘Listen, Hetaeroi. When they come again let them come in close, and then charge. Everyone at them. Take me a prisoner.’
His own Thrakians nodded soberly. The Eastern mercenaries grinned.
An hour passed, as if the enemy had heard his plan, and he grew angry. When he halted to let his men eat, a single bolt from a crossbow – launched from high above – killed a pack horse. All the men took cover at once, but there were no more bolts.
As they mounted after their hasty meal, silent arrows fell like sleet from the increasingly cloudy sky, and there was no enemy on which he could vent his rage.
He gritted his teeth and led his men forward, putting a vanguard party almost five hundred paces ahead and another as far behind the wagons.
Count Zac shook his head. ‘This is taking too long,’ he said. ‘Let’s just fall on him.’
The Duke grinned. ‘I’m enjoying myself, Zac. This is art. There’s no hurry – the wagon trains will roll today, and the army is at the Meander. All we have to do is keep Demetrius off the ford.’
‘Is waste,’ Zac said. ‘Waste of arrows. We have good ground and better horses.’
The Duke frowned. ‘But why lose anyone? You know as well as I that almost every wound in this weather is a kill.’
Zac shrugged. ‘But it’s boring?’
The sun was starting its long slide to a bitterly cold darkness when the valley narrowed. Demetrius could feel the ambush coming, and he loosened the long, curved blade under his left thigh. His Easterners had kept their bows under their saddle blankets for a league.