And perhaps the worst blow of all was the Sossag’s defection. Their chiefs had deserted him, and gone east to fight their own battle. Had they been present with his force, none of this would ever have happened.
Thorn wheeled his starlings and doves in the sky, and looked down from their eyes, and knew that he had been misled by the powers in the old fortress. The assault of the birds of prey had pushed his little helpers away. And he had been blind. For one scant hour.
But in his hand was a precious jewel. His friend had, at last, sent him word. Detailed word.
Despite the defeat, he now had the true measure of his enemy, and his enemy was not as strong as Thorn had feared. He didn’t like the taste of their power, but he didn’t need to fear their soldiers. They were too few.
Thorn had not risen to power by ignoring the causes of defeat. He didn’t accept false pride. He acknowledged that he had been fooled, and beaten, and immediately altered his plans.
First, the Sossag had won a victory that would serve his ends – and they were badly hurt and their leaders looked fools. This was the time to force them back to their allegiance to him. He needed them, and their ruthless human cleverness – so very different, and so much more cunning than the irks and bogglins.
He needed to consult with his allies among the Qwethnethog daemons, and he needed to convince them, with a show of force, that he was still the master of these woods. Lest they slip away too.
He savoured the irony. He was attacking the Rock for them, and yet they threatened to defect.
He sighed, because all these petty inter-plays of emotion and interest resembled the very politics that had driven him away from other men, when he was a man. The Wild had been his escape and now proved the same.
It was foolish that he needed a victory to convince the unwilling when he could take the lives of most of his allies merely by reaching into the essence of their Wildness and pulling-
He remembered one of his students admonishing him that you could not convince men by killing them, and he smiled at the memory. The boy had been both right and wrong. Thorn had never been very interested in convincing anyone.
But reminiscence would solve nothing. He withdrew his attention from the doves and the lynx and the fox, the hares were all dead, taken by dogs, and he moved his thinly distributed consciousness back to the body he had made for it.
A dozen irks stood guard over him, and he acknowledged them. ‘Summon my captains,’ he said in the harsh croak he now had as a voice, and they flinched and obeyed.
West of Albinkirk – Gaston
The army that now trailed north on the last stretch to Albinkirk, was many times larger than the elite force that had left Harndon a week before. And much, much slower.
Gaston sat his horse in the midst of a road blockage bigger than some towns in his home province and shook his head. He was watching four men who sat hunched under a bridge, eating a side of bacon.
‘It’s like the rout of a beaten army,’ he said in low Archaic. ‘Except that it is still headed towards the enemy.’
The king was virtually unapproachable, now, as the entire knight-service of the country had reported in, and all of his great lords surrounded him. No longer could Jean de Vrailly pretend to threaten the king with his three hundred knights – his convoy was no longer the largest. The Count of the Borders, Gareth Montroy, came in with five hundred knights, hard men in lighter armour than the Galles but just as tall, and five hundred archers as well. The Lord of Bain’s banner led another two hundred knights, with the popinjay Edward Despansay, Lord Bain, at their head. They were the great lords, with uniformed retinues of professional warriors who trained together, but there also were hundreds of individual knights from the counties under the King’s Lieutenant’s banner, and almost a hundred of the king’s own Royal Knights, his elite bodyguard that also canvassed the countryside as justices and monster hunters under the king’s trusted bastard brother, Ser Richard Fitzroy. There were another hundred knights of the military orders, priests and brothers and lay brothers of Saint George and Saint Maurice and Saint Thomas whose discipline was as good or better than any company Gaston had ever seen, riding silently in their black-robed armour under the Prior of Pynwrithe and his marshal.
All together the king had more than two thousand knights and as many again men-at-arms, plus three thousand infantry who varied in quality from the superb – the green clad Royal Huntsmen rode ahead of the column and covered its flanks, dashing silently through the increasingly dense brush on specially trained horses, although they fought on foot as archers – to the ridiculous: county levies with spears and no armour who served for twenty days or until their side of bacon was eaten.
The men at his feet were eating as quickly as they could.
His beautiful cousin was riding at the head of his convoy. He wore his full harness – all the Galles did – and rode a war horse. But the last few days, the Alban knights had begun to do the same – not all at once, but in fits and starts. And in the evenings, they had begun to practise with their lances and with their swords, with their horses formed in great long lines.
And de Vrailly went from group to group, praising some and challenging others. He praised the diligent and ignored the lazy, and men began to speak of him.
Knightly men. Not this sort.
Gaston watched the men under the bridge, and they watched him, chewing and swallowing as quickly as they could manage, forcing the cooked bacon down their gullets.
He gave his horse some rein and she picked her way down the grassy bank to the stream. The men under the bridge began to pick up their belongings, but he raised a hand to forestall them.
‘We haven’t done nothing,’ a sandy-haired yokel with a short beard said, raising two greasy hands.
Gaston shook his head. ‘Answer me the one thing,’ he said carefully. Speaking Alban always left him feeling muddled.
The sandy-haired one shrugged. Gaston noted that he hadn’t said one word of polite greeting – neither saluted, nor bowed.
Albans. A nation of fools and outlaws.
‘Why are you so anxious to eat your cooked ham and scurry home?’ he asked. He walked his mare forward another few steps so that they could hear him better. He looked down at them.
All four of them looked at him as if he, not they, was the fool.
‘Cause my wife needs me home?’ said one.
‘Cause it’s going to be haying in another ten day, if the sun keeps on,’ said the second man. He had a fine linen shirt and a silver ring on his finger. By Galle standards, Alban farmers were rich, fat and very ill-mannered.
‘Cause my duty says I can go home when this here bacon is et,’ said the third, a long-haired old man. His hair was mostly white and Gaston could see the outline of a crusading badge on his tunic, carefully removed.
‘You have fought before, eh?’ he asked.
The older man nodded, his face still. ‘Right enough, boyo,’ he said. Here under the bridge, their voices echoed.
‘Where?’ Gaston asked.
‘In the East,’ the old man said, and took another bite of bacon. ‘And before that, under Ser Gilles de Laines, against the Paynim. With Lord Bain, too. And under the old king, at Chevin. Ever heard of it?’
Gaston smiled. ‘You are pleased to make game of me,’ he said pleasantly.
‘Nah,’ said the old archer. ‘You foreigners don’t really know much about war, and you haven’t ever seen a big fight like Chevin. If you had, you wouldn’t be asking us these tom-fool questions. We’re eating our bacon so we can get home and not fight. Because it’s going to be horrible, and I, for one, know just fucking how it’s going to be. And my son-in-law and his two friends here will all come with me.’