Chapter 28: One Month to Raise an Army

The council said no more for a time. Outside, the bells of the village chapel began to toll the hour, and the crows along the battlements went up into the wind and settled again.

Lambert caught Osric before he reached the passage.

"She has been told," he said. "I did it myself an hour ago, because it was going to be a servant otherwise and I judged that worse."

"How did she take it?"

"Badly, and not in the manner you would expect." Lambert glanced back at the chamber and lowered his voice. "She asked me three questions. What sum he had offered. Whether the letter had come by a single rider or by a party. And whether the hand was his own."

"And?"

"I told her the sum, because I saw no cause not to, and she made a small sound and said it was more than the whole household costs him in a year." He folded his hands. "I told her one rider. She said that meant he did not want it discussed, which is what your captain has been saying for four hours, and she arrived at it in about a second and a half without having seen the letter."

"And the hand?"

"There she stopped and looked at the wall for some while, and then said that if it was his own he had written it three or four times before he sent it, because he never sends a fair copy of anything he has not fought with." Lambert's mouth moved slightly. "I did not tell her that Throderic had said the same. I found I did not want to."

Osric let that sit.

"Did she ask about coming back?"

"No." Lambert said it flatly. "That is the part I came to find you about. She did not ask what happens to her, or whether she is to be sent, or what the Baron intends. Not one word about herself at any point. She asked me three questions about her father and then she thanked me and sat down and picked her pen up."

"That's not calm."

"No. It is not calm and I did not take it for calm." The chaplain looked back down the passage. "It is a person doing sums because the alternative is feeling something, and I have seen it in a great many people at gravesides, and it is generally about a fortnight before it comes apart."

"She'll not come apart in front of anybody."

"I know she will not," said Lambert. "That is rather what worries me."

Osric came out into the passage afterward and stood a moment in the cold with his helm still under his arm.

Throderic came out behind him and stopped alongside and did not say anything for a while, and the two of them listened to the chapel bell finish.

"You didn't have to do that," Osric said. "In the hall the other morning. The order you never gave me."

"No."

"Waldric knew."

"Of course he knew. He has been doing this since before either of us could lift a spear." Throderic looked out along the passage. "He let it go because he would rather have you than have you cornered, and because Rothgar was about to say something about coin and he wanted the room moving. Waldric spends nothing he does not have to."

They walked out toward the yard.

"Osric."

"Aye."

"Don't do it again."

"No."

"I mean it and I'll say it once. I have covered you in that hall and I would do it again tomorrow, and the day I have to do it and I have not been told first is the day it stops working." Throderic did not look round. "Bring it to me. However bad. However late. I would rather be woken."

"Aye, Captain."

"Good." He clapped Osric once on the good shoulder. "Now. Come and look at a map with me, because I have been staring at it since Tuesday and I have got a number I do not like and I want a second man to tell me I have counted wrong."

"Have you counted wrong?"

"No," said Throderic. "But I would like to be told so."

The captain's chamber was cold and small and had one lamp and a low fire, and the campaign map of the barony and the wider county lay weighted flat on the trestle with a stack of scouts' reports beside it.

Throderic leaned over it with both hands on the wood.

"Sit down. This is the part you'll like even less than the smoke."

Osric sat.

"Start with what's out there," he said.

"What's out there went home." Throderic tapped a point east of Valmarch, over the river. "Your patrols have had eleven days and found nothing but hoofprints going the right way. The tower's cold. The ground round it is churned by a hundred horses and every one of those tracks runs east."

"Gone."

"Gone. No push on Valmarch. No second wave. They bloodied you at that tower and then they turned for home."

Osric looked at the map for a while.

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"A hundred of them cross that river for the first time in living memory," he said. "Spend four days on it. Lose fifteen or twenty men on a ruin with seven people in it. And then go home empty and content."

"Aye."

"That's not a raid, Throderic. Raids take what they can carry and run. This one came for something. Got it or lost it, and left."

"Or came to see whether the door was still locked." The captain pulled a stool round. "And found the hinges rusted through."

"Either way they come again. Men who find a door open don't forget the road to it."

"Then we had best know what we can put behind that door when they do."

Throderic laid a flat hand over Valmarch on the map.

"Village and castle together, at a hard muster. Sixty men."

"Sixty."

"Farmers with billhooks, half of them. But sixty bodies for a wall." He tapped the castle itself. "The retinue. Men who soldier for their bread and nothing else. Fifty."

"Forty-six."

Throderic looked up.

"Erryk won't stand before the spring and Gerfried says likely not after. Voss is on a broken ankle and a shoulder that won't span until the turn of the year. Alden can swing that axe once at a man and not twice, and he'll tell you otherwise, and he'll be lying." Osric said it flatly. "And there's three names off the roll that haven't been replaced. Call it forty-six and be honest about it."

The captain sat back and rubbed his jaw and did not argue.

"A hundred and six, then."

"A hundred and six. Against a warband that put eighty in the grass east of that tower and never once felt the loss of them."

"There are the two who owe the Baron their spears." Throderic slid two fingers out to a pair of smaller marks. "Branlind, north. Alderwint, west, out on the Osterwald road. Between them another hundred, if their lords answer the summons and don't drag their heels doing it."

"Branlind will answer." Osric said it without hesitation. "Old Marek buried a brother to the Khesari nine years back. He'll come for the hating of them alone and bring his own bread." He put a knuckle on the western mark. "Alderwint I'd not wager a wet boot on. That lord counts his spears the way the Baron counts his coin and likes to keep them both at home."

Throderic looked weary before the words were out of him.

"Say he comes anyway. Say they both do, and on time, which is two things I have never once watched happen together in forty years."

"Two hundred and six."

"Two hundred and six spears. To hold a barony with a wall that isn't finished." He let it stand. "Against a people who number their horsemen in the thousands across the water."

"They'll not send thousands."

"No. They will send another hundred, or two, and they will send it at one place at one hour of their choosing, and I will have three quarters of what I own strung out along forty miles of creek road watching the wrong ground." Throderic tapped the map twice. "That is the shape of it and it does not improve however long I look at it."

Osric was quiet a moment.

"Then we don't hold it in a field."

"No."

"We hold what stone we've got and make them pay for every yard of the rest." He turned his hand over. "It's what the tower taught them. They don't like walls. Seven of us cost them fifteen men in a ruin with a hole in one side of it, and they went away and thought about it, and that is worth more than any two hundred spears standing in a wet meadow."

"And if they bring enough to swallow the walls as well?"

"Then we send for help." Osric said it flatly. "Which is the part I've been not saying since you sat me down."

The captain moved his hand across the map to two larger holdings.

"Hochbergen here. Osterwald here. The nearest baronies that could put men on the road inside a week. Both richer than us. Neither fond of us."

"Osterwald's lord still holds that Valmarch cheated his father over the mill-rights. Before either of us went grey."

"His father held it. He inherited the grudge along with the land, the way they do."

"So he'll come slow, and want paying, and want it in writing." Osric's mouth thinned. "And Hochbergen?"

"Hochbergen will come quick, take a third of whatever we save, and call it neighbourly." Throderic almost smiled. "That is the better of the two."

Osric dragged a hand down his face.

"God, but it's a poor county to be attacked in."

"It is a poor county to do anything in but die of old age, and even that they will find a way to tax you for."

Osric's eyes went west, to the largest mark on the whole sheet.

"And Auenstadt."

"What of it."

"There's nothing like it for forty leagues. Walls, a garrison of its own, coin to hire ten more." He tapped it. "And the Khesari came out of the east with an Auenstadt woman on their heels. That city has a reason to care."

"Auenstadt cares for Auenstadt." Throderic said it as men say what they have said too often. "It is run by a council of merchants who mind their ledgers first and the marches never. The city is held in the Count's name, and the Count is Lord Mayor by right and its guarantor before the King."

"And the Count is where the Count always is."

"In the royal capital. Warming a bench near a mad king's empty chair. He has not smelled his own county in three years." The captain gathered the reports together and squared the stack. "The council rules while he's away. And a council musters for a border baron on the same day the sea catches fire."

Osric sat looking at the map.

A warband that comes and goes as it pleases. A hundred spears that answer and a hundred that only might. Two neighbours who'd sell us the rope. And a great city with its lord three years gone and its purse sewn shut.

We're alone out here. We always were. It only took a hundred horsemen over a river to make me say it plain.

"There's a piece of it you've not put on the table," he said.

"There are four. Which?"

"Winter."

Throderic sat back.

"Aye," he said. "Winter."

"The ground goes hard in six weeks. After that the levies can't be raised, because every man of them is at his own hearth eating what he set by, and you'll not get them out of it for anything short of smoke on the horizon." Osric put a finger on Branlind. "So whatever we're going to have, we have it by the first frost or we have it in the spring."

"And whoever put those men over the river knows that as well as we do."

"Better. They live by it. Their whole year is a calendar of when a horse can eat off the ground and when it can't."

Throderic looked at the map for some while.

"Then we have six weeks," he said. "That is the number I had and did not like, and I wanted a second man to count it and tell me I was wrong."

"You're not wrong."

"No." He let out a breath. "Right. Then let me tell you what I mean to do about it, and you may pick at it while I say it, because it will not survive contact with any of them and I would rather it fell apart in here.

"I go out myself. Not a rider with a letter. Me, with the Baron's seal in my coat, to Branlind first because Marek will say yes in ten minutes and I want one yes in my pocket before I walk into the next room. Then Alderwint, and I sit at that man's table as long as it takes, and it will take three days and four dinners and I shall want to hang myself by the second.

"That is the levies. After that, if the Baron gives me leave, Osterwald and Hochbergen."

"That's a month."

"It is a month if all of it goes well and it will not go well."

"And who holds the yard while you're gone?"

"You do."