Milus scratched under his chin. ‘Archers? Hell, yes. Men-at-arms? Not a one. But I’ll tell you what there is down in my little kingdom – there’s two wagon loads of armour in barrels, and some nice swords, and a dozen heavy arbalests. All for sale at the fair, of course.’
‘Better than what we have?’ the captain asked.
‘White plate – the new hardened breastplates.’ Ser Milus licked his lips. ‘The swords are good, the spearheads better. The arbalests as heavy as anything we have.’
The Abbess smiled. ‘Those were for me, anyway.’
The captain nodded. ‘Take it all. Tell the owners we’ll give them chits for it and settle up at the end if we’re still alive. How heavy are these arbalests?’
‘Bolts a forearm in length and thick as a child’s wrist,’ Ser Milus said.
‘Put them on frames. Two for you and the rest up here for me.’ The captain looked at the Abbess. ‘I want to build an outwork.’
‘Anything you like,’ she said.
‘I want to put all your farmers and all the refugees to work and I want your help seeing that I get no insolence from them. I need them to work quickly and be quiet.’ The captain took out a scroll of parchment and unrolled it.
‘My squire is a gifted young man, and he drew this,’ he said. Michael flushed uncontrollably. ‘We want a deep V-shape of walls on both sides and ditches outside the walls; built three hundred paces from Bridge Castle, where the road from the Lower Town starts up the hill. It will allow us to send soldiers and supplies freely back and forth from the Lower Town to Bridge Castle. Put boards all along the bottom so men can walk quickly, without being seen, and put three bridges over it, so our sorties can move easily about the fields. See this cutaway? A nice hollow space under the boards. Good place for a little surprise.’ He grinned and most of the soldiers grinned back.
‘We’ll also put a wall along the Gate Road, running all the way to the top. We should have done it in the first place, anyway. Towers here and here, on earth bastions.’ He rubbed his beard. ‘First, we put in covered positions for these new frame crossbows – here and here – so that if they attack while we’re building, it’s all a trap and they lose a couple of their own for nothing. Last, we improve the path from the postern gate to the Lower Town.’
All the soldiers nodded.
Except Tom. Tom spat. ‘We don’t have the fucking men to hold all that wall,’ he said. ‘Much less in both directions.’
‘No we don’t. But building it will keep the peasants quiet and busy, and when our enemy attacks we’re going to make him pay for it, and then let him have it.’
Tom grinned. ‘Of course we are.’
The captain turned to the others. ‘I’m assuming that our enemy doesn’t have a lot of experience in fighting men,’ he said. ‘But even if he does, we won’t have lost much with these distractions.’
The Abbess looked pained. Her eyes had a hunted look, and she turned away. ‘He is a man. Or he was, once.’
The captain winced. ‘We face a man?’
The Abbess nodded. ‘I have felt the brush of his thought. He has some small reason to – to fear me.’
The captain looked at her, gazing as intently as a lover into her flecked brown and blue eyes, and she held his gaze as easily as he held hers.
‘It is none of your affair,’ she said primly.
‘You are not telling us things that would be of value to us,’ the captain said.
‘You, on the other hand, are the very soul of openness,’ she replied.
‘Get a room,’ Tom muttered under his breath.
The captain looked at Ser Milus. ‘We cut the patrols down to two a day, and we launch them at my whim. Our sole remaining interest is getting any more convoys in here safely, or in turning them away. Albinkirk is gone. Sauce – how far did you go today?’
She shrugged. ‘Eight leagues?’
The captain nodded. ‘Tomorrow – no, tomorrow we won’t send anything. Not a man. Tomorrow we dig. The day after, we send four patrols, in all directions except west. The day after that, I’ll take half the company west along the road, as fast as we can go. We’ll aim for twenty leagues, pick up merchants or convoys we can, and get a look at Albinkirk. Then back here, all with enough force to kill whatever opposes us.’
Tom nodded. ‘Aye, but against a hundred Outwallers, in an ambush, we’ll just be dead. And that’s without a couple of daemons and maybe a pair of wyverns and a hundred irks to eat our bodies afterwards. Eh?’
The captain wrinkled his lips. ‘If we surrender the initiative and hunker down here we’re all dead too,’ he said. ‘Unless the king comes with his army to relieve us.’
The Abbess agreed.
‘For all I know the Wall fortresses have already fallen,’ the captain said. His eyes narrowed, as if the subject had particular interest to him. ‘Whatever the case, we cannot count on any help from the outside, nor can we hope that this is an isolated incident. We have to behave as if we have an unending supply of men and materiel, and we have to try to keep the road east open. We need to lure our enemy into some battles of our choosing.’ He looked around at his officers. ‘Everyone understand?’ He looked at the Abbess. ‘We have to be ready to destroy the bridge.’
She nodded. ‘There’s a phantasm to do it. I have it. It is regularly maintained: when a certain key is turned in the gate lock, the bridge will fall into the river.’
The officers nodded their approval.
The captain stood. ‘Very well. Ser Milus, Ser Jehannes, you are in charge of my construction project. Tom, Sauce, you will lead the patrols. Bent, get the arbalest frames up, and placed in those four covered positions,’ he smiled, ‘where Michael marked them. Bent, take charge of running the rotations inside the fortress too. Don’t worry about who is a man-at-arms, who’s a valet, who’s an archer. Just get the numbers right.’
They all nodded.
‘You planning to take a nap?’ Bad Tom asked.
The captain smiled at the Abbess. ‘My lady and I are going to raise a nice fog,’ he said. ‘She is a very potent magus.’
He had the pleasure of watching her eyes widen in surprise.
Jehannes paused. ‘And you? Captain?’
‘I am a modestly talented magus.’ He nodded to his new constable. ‘Ah, Michael. Please don’t go anywhere.’
The other officers rattled out, Michael stood uncomfortably by the door, and after a moment it was just the three of them.
‘What do you have to say for yourself?’ the Abbess asked.
Michael writhed. ‘I love her,’ he said.
She smiled, to his shock.
‘That is the best answer you could have given, under the circumstances. Will you wed her?’ she asked.
The captain made a noise.
Michael stood straight. ‘Yes.’
‘What a dashing young fool you are, to be sure,’ said the Abbess. ‘Who’s son are you?’
Michael’s lips tightened, so the Abbess beckoned to him, and he came to her side. She leaned forward, touched his forehead, and there was a magnificent burst of colour and sparkling shards, as if a sunlit mirror had shattered.
‘Towbray’s son,’ she said, and laughed. ‘I knew your father. You have twice the looks and twice the grace he ever did. Is he still a weak man who changes sides with every twist of the wind?’
Michael stood his ground. ‘Yes, he is,’ he said.
The Abbess nodded. ‘Captain, I will take no action until our war is resolved. But what I say now, I say as a woman who has lived at court with the great. And as an astrologer. This boy could do much worse than Kaitlin Lanthorn.’
Michael looked at his captain, whom he feared more than ten abbesses. ‘I love her, my lord,’ he said.
The captain thought of the note in his gauntlet, and of what the Abbess had just said – he’d felt the power of her words, which had bordered on prophecy.
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘All the best romances bloom in the midst of a good siege. Michael, you are not so much forgiven as pardoned for this. Your pardon does not include further tumblings of said girl in my solar. Understood?’
The Abbess looked long and hard at the squire. ‘Will you marry her?’ she asked.