They’d point the column towards its next goal, and then canter away into the darkness, looking for Gelfred, who ran the chain from the back of his horse, a league in front of the Captain, with a small sphere of red mage light perched on the point of his peaked bassinet. Only the men on whom he’d cast his phantasm of sight could see the light. It made him relatively easy to find – by his own scouts, anyway – and allowed him to direct them at speed. Once they rejoined him, he sent each scout to his next guide post. He consulted the chart spread over his high pommel, and he used his not inconsiderable ars magicka to manage all the information brought to him by forty men, pinning their reports into non-dimensional pigeon holes in his memory palace image of the terrain.
Hermeticism and good scouting and a long summer spent in harness kept the company moving through the dark at the speed of a walking horse, across strange roads and through alien country. Because these factors made it look easy, the young sprigs of nobility who made up the new men-at-arms in the company thought that it was easy.
And so the company came down out of the mountains, through the olive groves, and to the banks of the Meander at the speed of a walking horse. Which is to say that they arrived like a thunderbolt.
The company rode up to the top of the ford in a column of fours, with the men-at-arms on their warhorses mounted in the outer files, and the carts, women, archers and pages in two files in the middle. This formation had been practised for two weeks without much explanation.
The Red Knight rode past Ranald Lachlan and a pair of his drovers, who were busy belaying a heavy rope. Lachlan waved. The Red Knight saluted with a smile that was just visible in the strong moonlight. The rain clouds were blowing off.
‘Gelfred?’ he asked. ‘This is a ford?’
Gelfred shrugged. ‘If we were all twice the height of Tom, here, this would be a ford,’ he said. ‘In dry years, they use this. Otherwise, it’s unguarded.’ He met his Captain’s eye in the moonlit dark. ‘Best I could do,’ he said.
We can do it, Harmodius said inside the Red Knight’s head. Almost five feet deep at the deepest point, just past mid-stream.
The Red Knight nodded to his invisible companion. ‘Very well. It’s going to be deep in the middle. My source says five feet.’
‘Sweet Jesus!’ Michael cursed. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered, mostly to Gelfred, the only non-swearing man in the company.
‘The wagons will be wet through,’ Gelfred pointed out.
The Red Knight had an apple, and was eating it while watching the river.
‘And it will take time. If we get beat, we won’t get back across in daylight with our baggage,’ he added.
Bad Tom spat. ‘We won’t get beat.’
A dozen men made the horned sign of aversion. Wilful Murder spat and touched the wood of his buckler. Even Ser Jehan looked unhappy.
‘It would certainly be useful to know if the Vardariotes have accepted our offer and left their barracks,’ the Captain said aloud.
Ser Alcaeus winced, but he had no report to offer.
White moonlight fell on glittering armour and well-disciplined horses, who stood calmly; red leather saddles were brown-grey against the dusty grey of the ground and the dark green of the olive trees on either hand. A farmhouse, shuttered tight and dark, lay silent to the right of the road – really no more than a gravel gully between the walls – that led to the abandoned ford. And the moonlight shone down on the river, reflected in ten thousand shards that made a bright white road all the way to the far shore. The effect was so powerful that a simple man might think that the water was shallow.
No one on earth has that much power, boy. Not to walk across the water.
The Captain smiled. He stripped off his gauntlets and rooted in the draw-string pouch sewn to the front of his belt-purse – the one he wore even in armour. He came up with two bone dice.
‘Dice?’ asked Michael.
‘He’s a loon,’ Tom said.
Sauce shook her head.
The Captain stood in his stirrups, rattled the dice in his hand for a moment, and threw them as hard as he could out into the current of the river. If they made a splash, no one heard it.
‘Go,’ said the Captain.
Gelfred nodded and took the scouts across in a mass. Every man – and woman – watched them trot into the ford, up to their fetlocks and then their hocks, and then the horses were swimming – the men soaked – and then the horses were walking again. Rob’s page, Tom Hall, came adrift from his horse in mid-stream, but he kept his head and his horse’s mane, and despite being the smallest he got over and mounted again.
Gelfred flashed the red on his helmet three times, and the Red Knight nodded to his staff.
‘They’re across,’ he said. Among the men-at-arms, only he, Tom, Jehan and Milus could see the red light on Gelfred’s helm. It occurred to the Captain, then and there, that they should all have mage lights – in different colours – for night operations.
I’ll bet the ancients used mage lights.
Harmodius grunted, in an aethereal way. I never bothered with those books – but there are many on war. From the Archaic Empire, and even earlier.
You interest me, old man. The Red Knight looked around. But I need peace for a few hours.
It’s awfully dull in here. But very well. I’m sure you’ll call me when you need me to destroy something, the old man said with some bitterness.
In the strong moonlight he could see all his scouts fanning out across the river.
‘You asleep?’ asked Bad Tom. ‘You look half wode. And yer lips are moving.’
The Red Knight straightened, feeling the weight of command like a belt of lead on his hips. ‘I must be wode. I ride with Mad Tom.’ He looked around at his staff – larger since the spring, with more knights under his direct command. They were his reserve – itself an Archaic concept. Everyone was ready.
‘Let’s do it,’ he said.
Bad Tom laughed, and put spurs to his stallion, who put his steel-horned head down and plodded into the water on the upstream side. As he walked forward into the sluggish, sparkling water, he angled to the left, out and away from the main column.
Fifty men-at-arms mounted on their warhorses walked into the current behind him, in a long single file.
Sauce led fifty more men-at-arms off to the right, downstream.
‘What was that about?’ Cully asked Bent.
Bent shrugged. ‘Cap’n does strange things. You know that.’
Ser Michael leaned in between the two archers. ‘You gentlemen are missing the benefits of a classical education. When he threw the dice, he meant, “the die is cast”. As in, there won’t be any going back.’ He looked at the two senior archers, who stared back at him. Finally, he snorted, turned his horse, and joined Bad Tom’s file in crossing upstream.
‘Could have just said,’ muttered Cully.
‘Arrogant pup,’ agreed Bent.
The crossing took the company less than half an hour, and then they were moving at a cart’s pace along the track on the far side.
There was no crisis, but small emergencies slowed their march. Lis’s cart lost a wheel and had to be repaired. That meant sending up the column for the two wheelwrights that the company retained, and they had to go back down the column with their cart and enlist twenty archers to raise the cart bed. The actual repair was the work of two minutes and a portable anvil, but all together it took longer than crossing the river had.
Twice, the whole column had to halt because Gelfred was unsure of their way in the maze of unmarked roads that criss-crossed the fields of the Morean heartland. The field walls were all at least six feet tall and in many cases twelve feet tall – or rather, aeons of use had sunk the roads six feet into the stony soil, meaning that even a mounted man on a big horse couldn’t see over the walls on either side. The roads themselves were just big enough for a full-sized wagon or three horsemen abreast – sometimes narrower if an old tree grew out into the road bringing the attendant wall with it. Sometimes the old walls had tumbled down into the road and needed to be cleared, and the Captain moved the company’s pioneers – in effect, his peasant labourers – to the head of the column to clear the road as he went.