Chapter 31 — Six Weeks

Chapter 31: Chapter 31 — Six Weeks

Chapter 31 — Six Weeks

Christopher missed the practice block because he was watching Aldwin sharpen a knife.

Godfrey hit him across the shoulder.

"Raise it again."

Christopher raised the wooden sword. "I saw it."

"You saw it after I struck you."

Aldwin sat beneath the gatehouse awning with a blade across his knees, Perrin beside him repairing a bowstring; both had been ready since before sunrise. Christopher had asked to go with them the previous evening, and Godfrey had spent most of breakfast explaining why a baron should not follow every deer into the woods.

"I am not going alone," Christopher had said.

"That’s the one sensible part of the proposal."

Godfrey struck again, and Christopher caught the blow badly but stayed on his feet.

"You want to learn the land," Godfrey said. "Then listen to Aldwin. Walter will command if anything armed comes out of those trees. You won’t overrule either of them because a track looks interesting."

"I understand."

"Say it while looking at me."

Christopher met his eyes. "I will follow Aldwin in the woods and Walter if we meet a threat."

Godfrey lowered his practice sword. "Better."

The hunting party left after breakfast — Aldwin, Perrin, Walter, Christopher, Adam Fletcher and Thomas Reed — while Ivo remained with Godfrey at Dragonwatch. The apprentices carried bows and short blades, Walter a sword and a spear; Christopher had Edmund’s sword, though Aldwin took one look at it and handed him a shorter hunting knife as well.

"What for?" Christopher asked.

"Cutting meat. Cutting rope. Anything you should not do with that sword."

They crossed the nearest planted fields without entering them; the barley shoots were still small, but enough had come up to show where the rows began. Once, Christopher would have walked straight across the ground; now he followed the narrow path Cedric had marked between strips.

Beyond the fields, spring grass covered the old ditch, and water moved through it again now that Robert Miller’s crew had opened the blocked channel. The banks were soft; Thomas stepped into mud up to his ankle, and Aldwin made him pull free without grabbing the reeds.

"They come away," Aldwin said. "Then you fall farther."

Thomas wiped his boot on the grass. "I know that now."

They reached the western trees while the sun was still low, and Aldwin stopped the party beside a patch of broken earth.

"Boar," Perrin said.

Christopher crouched. Hoofprints and mud turned over around a root, but he would not have known what made them.

"The ones from our enclosure?" he asked.

"Perhaps two ordinary boars," Aldwin said. "Not the beasts you killed in the yard. The ground would look worse."

The three captured adults and their five young remained behind stone walls near the stable, so these tracks belonged to wild animals. Christopher remembered the Tier One warthogs — their meat had been worth bringing inside — but fighting another pair for a few meals would be a poor way to lose an apprentice.

"We leave them," he said.

"They left before us."

Aldwin moved on.

Christopher had expected hunting to mean searching for animals; instead, most of the morning involved stopping because Aldwin had already found what he needed: deer droppings near young leaves, a rabbit run beneath brambles, prints where several animals had crossed a shallow stream.

Adam could read more of the ground than Christopher could, and Perrin could tell how recently a branch had broken just by touching its exposed wood. Walter said little, watching beyond the party whenever Aldwin knelt.

Christopher tried to remember every sign, but after an hour the prints began to blur together.

He nearly stepped on a snare.

Perrin caught his sleeve.

A thin loop of cord lay beneath dead grass between two roots, and Christopher pulled his foot back.

"One of yours?" Walter asked.

"No." Perrin lifted the loop with a twig. "Mine are east of here."

The cord was new, the stake cut from green wood, and the disturbed earth around it had not settled.

Aldwin examined the knot. "Someone set it within the last few days."

"Could it be one of our settlers?" Christopher asked.

"They know to tell me where they set traps," Aldwin said. "Otherwise my party walks into them."

He freed the stake and wound the cord around it.

Walter looked through the trees. "Do we follow the man who placed it?"

"We finish the hunt," Christopher said.

Aldwin put the cord in his pouch. "Good. He may come back to check it, or he may have set ten more. We don’t know."

They continued along the stream, Aldwin leading them farther from the road but never so far that Christopher lost the direction of Dragonwatch’s towers; the ruined watch stood on high ground above the valley, its topmost stonework appearing between branches whenever the trees thinned.

Near midday, Perrin signaled for everyone to stop.

Three deer grazed beyond a fallen trunk, one standing apart from the others, and Christopher could see a pale patch beneath its throat and the slow movement of its jaws as it chewed.

Aldwin pointed to Adam, then to a gap between two trees, and Adam crept forward with his bow while Thomas waited farther back with another arrow ready. Perrin moved left to keep the deer from bolting toward the thick brush.

Christopher started to follow Adam.

Aldwin held up one hand.

He stayed.

Adam reached the gap and drew. The deer raised its head as wind passed from behind Adam toward the open ground, and Christopher watched the animal’s ears turn.

He thought it had heard Thomas shift his feet.

"Thomas, hold still," Christopher whispered.

The deer sprang.

Adam released; his arrow struck the fallen trunk. Perrin loosed an instant later, but the animals were already through the brush, three pale backs vanishing into the trees.

No one moved for a while.

"I did hold still," Thomas said.

"I know." Christopher turned to Aldwin. "Did I frighten them?"

"You helped. The wind carried us first."

Adam lowered his bow. "I should have shot sooner."

"You had a narrow place," Aldwin said. "If you had shot sooner, you might have hit the trunk sooner."

Perrin retrieved Adam’s arrow and handed it back without comment.

Christopher waited for the group to move, but Aldwin instead took them around the fallen tree to show where the deer had crossed. The prints were clean in the soft earth, and one animal had kept its weight mostly on three feet.

"An old hurt," Aldwin said. "I have seen that one before."

"Can we follow it?" Christopher asked.

"We could spend the rest of the day doing that. It isn’t wounded from this morning."

Christopher glanced at Adam’s arrow — the shaft had no blood.

"Then we find another."

"After we eat," Aldwin said.

They ate cold bread beneath a stand of birch. Christopher sat with his back against a tree, rubbing the sore spot on his shoulder where Godfrey’s morning strike had left a bruise. The walking had made him notice several more.

Walter passed him water. "Not the day you imagined?"

"I thought we would be back by noon."

"With a deer on each horse?"

"At least one."

"We have no horses."

Christopher looked up, but Walter’s face remained perfectly straight.

Adam laughed first, and Christopher took another drink and let him.

They found a small doe later that afternoon. Perrin spotted it beside a clearing where young grass had grown through last year’s fallen leaves, placed Adam behind one tree and Thomas behind another, then waited until the animal turned broadside.

This time Christopher said nothing.

Adam’s arrow struck behind the shoulder; the doe jumped, ran twenty paces and fell. Aldwin went ahead to make certain it was dead before the others approached.

Christopher helped carry it to firmer ground, where Aldwin opened the belly with quick, careful cuts and checked the organs, finding nothing that made him reject the meat.

"Do you always do that?" Christopher asked.

"Unless you enjoy discovering sickness after supper."

Christopher held the legs while the others tied the carcass to two poles, and they took turns carrying it between them. Walter could have carried the animal alone, but Aldwin insisted the apprentices do most of the work, since Walter needed his hands free if they met trouble.

On the way back, Perrin stopped beside an oak with a low branch.

The ground beneath it had been swept clear, a shallow pit holding cold ash with a few small bones beside it. Someone had eaten here recently. A strip of hide hung over the branch, scraped clean on one side.

Aldwin touched the hide. "Rabbit."

"One of our people?" Adam asked.

"No one told me about this place."

Christopher looked around; the site was close enough to the stream to drink but sheltered from the path they had taken that morning. Whoever used it knew how to keep smoke low.

"The snare?" he asked.

"Likely," Aldwin said. "Not certain."

Walter searched the ground around the oak and found a bootprint in a patch of damp soil — too small for his own foot, too worn to reveal anything else.

"We should wait for him," Christopher said.

"With a deer to carry and daylight going?" Walter asked.

Christopher reconsidered. "No. We mark the place and come back."

"With Aldwin," Walter said.

"Of course."

Christopher examined the scraped hide once more. Someone had been taking game from the woods around Dragonwatch recently.

He could expect them to stop once they were told.

Perrin cut the hide down and left the ash undisturbed while Aldwin noted the path by two forked trees and a stone shaped like a broken tooth. Christopher tried to hold the landmarks in memory, though he still would not have found the camp alone.

They reached Dragonwatch before dusk.

Martha came out of the kitchen when she saw the deer, Bennet following with his board and Bertram bringing a clean hook from the smoking shed. Aldwin gave them the meat after checking it again in better light.

Godfrey met Christopher near the gate.

"You brought something home."

"Adam shot it."

"And you?"

"I carried it. I also scared three others."

Godfrey glanced at Aldwin.

"That’s fair," Aldwin said.

Christopher told him about the snare and the camp. Godfrey listened without interrupting.

"Poaching?" he asked.

"At least unauthorized hunting," Christopher said. "We don’t know who set the trap."

"What do you want done?"

"Aldwin and Walter go back with two apprentices. Find the person if they can. Do not leave traps where our people might step into them."

"And if they catch him?"

Across the yard, the deer was already being hung in the kitchen. Food mattered here, but so did knowing who moved through the woods close to his walls.

"Bring him to Dragonwatch," he said. "Disarm him first."

Godfrey nodded.

Christopher turned toward his temporary house, boots wet, shoulders aching, hands still smelling of deer despite washing them at the gate trough. He had spent almost a full day in the woods and still could not have led the others home by the path they had taken.

That bothered him more than missing the first shot.

Tomorrow he would train before breakfast again, then ask Aldwin where to begin learning the ground without slowing every hunt.

The gate stuck when Christopher tried to close it.

He put his shoulder against the timber; it moved a hand’s width, then stopped again.

"Do not force it," Owen called from the wall.

Christopher stepped away while two workers lifted the heavy leaf just enough for Owen to pull a stone from beneath the bottom edge, and the gate swung shut with a hard wooden knock.

"There," Owen said. "The wheel ruts are pushing gravel into the track. We clear it every morning until I can set a proper sill."

"It worked yesterday."

"It worked this morning too. You only had to ask it nicely."

The second leaf closed without trouble, and a bar dropped into brackets on both sides. Six weeks earlier, wagons and chained beams had blocked the opening after dark; now men could shut the gate in moments. It still had no iron facing, and the ground beneath it would need work, but it was a gate.

Beyond the wall, the three higher fields had turned green, the barley standing unevenly, thick in some places and thin where stones had been pulled out late. The turnips were only leaves for now; none of it could be eaten yet.

Christopher climbed the gatehouse stairs with Owen, and from above he could see smoke rising from repaired homes outside the inner yards; families had moved out of the crowded barracks one by one. Empty roofs still lay farther down the old street, but children ran between the occupied houses, and washing hung from a line near the kitchen.

Dragonwatch looked less like a camp.

Its western wall still had a breach wide enough for a wagon; Owen’s crew had narrowed the opening with the two quarry blocks and other stone salvaged nearby, though a determined group could still climb across the rubble. A wooden fighting platform on the north side remained roped off because its supports had rotted, and Christopher could see a bright patch of new mortar beside black stone that had endured longer than anyone remembered.

"Which one today?" he asked.

Owen followed his gaze. "The stair beside the west breach. If a watchman breaks his neck reaching the top, the wall does us little good."

Christopher studied the open stretch. "I thought you were putting the men on the breach itself."

"I was, until Cedric borrowed four of them. Ask him why he still has them. I have asked twice."

Christopher went to the fields after breakfast.

Cedric Palmer was walking beside the first barley strip with Wilfred Ross, each carrying a stalk, though Christopher could see no difference between the two.

"You took Owen’s workers," he said.

"I borrowed four men with spades," Cedric said. "Owen calls everyone who can lift a stone his worker."

"Owen calls everyone with a back his workers."

Wilfred held out the stalks — one had longer roots and a smaller top. "The north strip is growing better than the one near the road. It keeps the night damp but drains by noon."

"Will it yield more?" Christopher asked.

"We will know when we cut it," Cedric said.

The comparison strips Wilfred had proposed weeks earlier had sprouted, and Christopher had hoped the difference would settle their argument; instead, each man found something in the growing barley that supported his own method.

"What do you need the four men for?"

Cedric pointed to a ditch along the lower side of the turnip plot. Grass had begun to clog its mouth. "Clear that before the next rain. Then Owen can have them."

"How long will you keep them?"

"They will be back at the wall this afternoon."

"Tell Owen that yourself. At present, he thinks I took them from him."

Cedric looked over at Owen on the wall. "He knows where they are."

"He wants to know when they are coming back. Go and tell him before the two of you drag me between the field and the wall again."

Christopher walked back along the edge of the fields, where a serf family worked near Wilfred’s free tenants, sharing a water barrel and little else. When one of Wilfred’s men mentioned visiting Dunmar after harvest, the nearest serf bent lower over his hoe and said nothing.

At the kitchen yard, Bertram Hollowreed turned strips of venison on a rack beside his smoking shed while two boys carried fish from the river in a basket that leaked water onto their legs. Martha took one look at the catch and sent them to wash the mud off before entering her kitchen.

The stores were holding. Bennet had stopped counting the days until empty shelves and started counting how much grain remained until the first harvest — a better calculation, though not a comfortable one. Deer, fish, rabbits and wild greens stretched their food, but none of it could replace a failed field.

Aldwin crossed the yard with Perrin, both carrying bows.

"Anything?" Christopher asked.

"Two rabbits," Aldwin said. "Perrin saw deer across the stream, but we left them."

"What about the snares near the oak?"

"Gone," Aldwin said. "We took down three more that were set too near our paths. No one was there when we returned, and nobody came to demand them."

Walter had gone with them as ordered, but they had found no one to bring before Christopher; the little rabbit camp was empty. Aldwin checked that stretch during ordinary hunting rounds now, without taking a knight away from the walls each time.

"If someone sets more, report it before you touch the camp."

Aldwin nodded. "Walter gave the same order."

Aldwin kept walking, with no interest in discussing an absent trapper for the rest of the morning.

The children’s alarm drill began after the midday meal.

Twenty-four older children and teenagers gathered in the broad yard near the east barracks, four of them serving as runners, Meg among them.

Walter stood at the gatehouse steps with a wooden clapper, Bennet waiting beside the barracks door, and Joan watching from the shade with Elsie, who had been told twice that she was too young to run with the older children.

Walter struck the clapper.

The children moved — most toward the marked shelter room, two older boys carrying practice water buckets to the kitchen, the four runners splitting along different paths. Meg took the outside lane by the wall, reached the west stair and returned to Bennet before the others had finished their route.

"You took the short way," one boy said.

"You took the muddy way," Meg replied.

"The short way is meant for the east runner."

"Walter said reach the stair and come back."

Walter nodded. "She did. Next time I will tell you which path is blocked."

He sent the group through another drill. This time he announced that the east gate was unusable and the kitchen yard was full of smoke. The older children changed routes; several younger ones hesitated until Bennet pointed them toward the other shelter door.

After the clapper fell silent, Walter dismissed all but Meg.

Meg’s eyes went to Christopher, then to her mother.

Joan folded her arms. "What has she done?"

"Nothing wrong," Walter said. "She asked to train."

"She already runs half the day during those alarm drills."

"That’s why I asked her to speak to you first," Walter said. "I won’t add work without your knowledge."

Meg’s face went red. "I did."

"You said Walter might show you how to stand," Joan replied. "You didn’t say he had agreed."

"I had not," Walter said. "I wanted you here."

Christopher stayed beside the wall; he had watched Meg run for weeks and seen her repeat the routes after the other children went home. Joan had seen it too.

"What sort of training?" Joan asked.

"Balance, footwork and learning to fall without putting out a hand," Walter said. "She can stop if she dislikes it. I will stop her if she is too tired."

Joan looked at her daughter. "Do you want that?"

"I want to try."

"Then do not come home unable to carry a wash basket."

Meg grinned. Walter led her into the cleared part of the yard.

He drew two short lines in the dirt. "Stand here. Feet apart."

Meg planted them wide.

"Not so wide."

She moved them together until they almost touched.

"Not like that either."

Christopher remembered hearing the same words from Godfrey on his first morning, and he left before Walter could notice him smiling.

Godfrey was waiting near the west wall.

"You’re late," he said.

"The alarm drill ran long."

"Did Bennet finish the morning report?"

Christopher showed him the board Bennet had given him: stores, repair crews, the injured quarry worker’s progress, and a note about a wheel that needed replacing. The man’s broken leg had begun to heal straight under Mabel’s care, though he still used a stick to move about, and his household had been receiving food while he could not work.

Godfrey read it. "Owen has four fewer men."

"Cedric returns them this afternoon. I sent him to tell Owen himself."

Godfrey handed back the board. "The gate closes. The fields are planted. The people have roofs. Do not let those things persuade you the wall is finished."

"I can see the breach from my window."

"Good. Keep looking at it."

Six weeks of work had changed Dragonwatch; six more would change it again, if the weather held and no one forced them to spend the season fighting.

The change had brought new arguments with it: Cedric marked plots for the northern families, Wilfred moved two stakes, and Cedric put them back before breakfast. Christopher finally walked the boundaries with both men while Bennet recorded the agreed lines. One household needed easier access to the well; the neighboring plot shifted to make room.

The disagreement cost most of a morning, and Christopher ordered Cedric and Wilfred to bring the next boundary dispute to the same table instead of sending separate complaints through Bennet.

Bennet added the final marks to his copy and kept it in the strongbox with the household records. Cedric drove fresh stakes deep enough that children could not pull them free. Wilfred walked the line once more, grumbled about the distance to the well and accepted it.

Christopher put the board under his arm and followed Godfrey toward the training yard. Behind them, Walter told Meg to place her feet again; she complained that she had, so Walter made her look down.

The sound of her laughter carried across the stone.