Chapter 48: The Levy Comes Anyway

He had come up from the village with mail over a leather jerkin, none of it new and none of it his, and a plain kettle helm under his arm and a boar spear across the saddle in front of him.

"I heard the horn."

"You're the reeve."

"I told you at the King Fish I'd ride if the levies were called." Baldewin got his helm on. "The levies are not called and I'm riding, which by my reckoning puts me ahead of the arrangement rather than behind it."

Osric did not have time to argue with him and would not have won.

"Stay behind Alden. Do what he does."

"That is precisely what I was intending."

And then there was Theo.

He came up the castle track at a run with soot still on his forearms and Anna about ten paces behind him, and he had a hammer in his fist that Osric had not seen before: a long-hafted forge hammer with a squared face and a drawn-out peen, and the shaft turned smooth and dark.

"I'm coming."

"You're a smith."

"I'm a smith with a hammer and two hands and I've been in this village three days." Theo was breathing hard from the hill. "The man out there sent word to Harbren's yard four years ago asking after an apprentice for this village and Warin told me about it this morning, and I never knew, and I'll not sit in a shop."

Osric looked at him.

He had about nine reasons ready and every one of them was correct.

He's seventeen. He's never stood in a line. He's got no armour and no shield and no idea at all what he is riding toward. Argilac is already going and I have already got one son on a horse in this yard.

And he came up that hill at a run.

"Aldric," he said. "Find him a shirt of mail out of the store and a helm that's near enough. Not near enough for a parade. Near enough for today."

"Serjeant."

"And Theo." Osric leaned down. "You stay at my left hand and you do not leave it. Not for a friend. Not for your brother. Not if you see me go down. You'll do that or you'll get off that horse now."

Theo's jaw set.

"I'll do it."

The mail came out of the store and was too short in the body and too wide in the shoulder, and Aldric got it onto him and got a helm on him that sat badly, and nobody had time to do anything about either.

They were nearly away when the hooves came up the track.

Eleven horses, coming hard, and at the head of them a young man in good harness with his visor up and his colours on.

Sir Eckhard von Thurn brought his mount into the courtyard at a speed that scattered two grooms and hauled it round in front of Osric with a great deal more style than the moment required.

He had been at his own hall eleven miles off since the summer, cooling a head that had never once cooled, and somebody had ridden to him with the horn still going, and he had come.

"Serjeant."

"Sir Eckhard."

They looked at each other for about two seconds and there was nothing whatever in it that had improved since the spring.

"I have six of my own and I have picked up four off your road," Eckhard said. "Where is he?"

"Four miles past the alder fork."

"Khesari?"

"Between seventy and a hundred, if the boy's count is worth anything, and it might not be."

Eckhard's face did something that Osric had not expected and did not much know what to do with.

It was not fear and it was not calculation. It was eagerness, plain and undisguised and about twenty years old, and it sat on the young man like a lamp.

"Good," he said.

"My lord, this is not"

"Do not." Eckhard cut across him without any heat in it at all, which was new. "I know what you are about to say and I know why, and it is because of a stable yard in the spring and you may keep it. You and I will have that conversation again one day and I shall enjoy it and so will you.

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

"But I have hunted Khesari on my father's land since I was fifteen and I have never once been given eleven horses and a road and a reason, and I am not going to sit at a table while a captain of this barony is pinned in a ditch four miles past the alder fork."

Osric weighed it for about a second and a half.

He's twenty and he's a fool and he'll charge whatever he sees first.

And he has eleven mounted men, and every one of them is better horsed than mine, and I have nine.

"You'll ride under me," he said. "Not beside me. Under me. And when I tell you to hold, you hold, and if you cannot say yes to that then take your eleven home now and I'll not think worse of you for it."

Eckhard's jaw set.

For a moment the spring was very much in that courtyard.

"Yes," he said.

"Say it again."

"I will ride under you and I will hold when you tell me to hold." He said it through his teeth and he said it clearly. "Are we going, or are we discussing?"

"We're going."

Anna stood at the gate and did not say a word to anybody.

She had said her whole piece to her brother halfway up the track, out of everybody's hearing, and Theo's face when he came the rest of the way had been the face of a man who has been comprehensively told something. When they went out through the gate she was still standing there with her arms wrapped round herself, and she did not wave, and she did not call anything after them.

They went out at half past the third hour.

Twenty of them. Osric, Argilac, Theo, Alden, Doran, Voss, Baldewin, two of the younger men off the wall whose names Osric would remember for the rest of his life and did not entirely know that morning, and Sir Eckhard von Thurn with eleven horses at his back.

Twenty, going west on sound mounts, to a place four miles past the alder fork where the wood comes in on both sides of the road.

Osric put them into a canter as soon as the track allowed it and did not look back at the castle.

Behind him, on the wall, the horn went again, and went on going, calling in the near farms.

They rode the first six miles at a hard canter and the horses could not hold it, so Osric brought them down to a fast walk for a mile and then up again, and did that the whole way, and it was the longest afternoon of his life.

Nobody talked.

That was what he remembered about the ride. Twenty men went twenty-two miles and did not say fifty words between them, and Osric could not afterward remember a single one of them.

He rode at the front with his leg going from stiff to hot to numb and back to hot again, and by the eighth mile he had stopped noticing it as pain and had begun noticing it as a distance he could not entirely feel, which was worse. Somewhere around the twelfth mile the stitches began to give at the top of the wound and he felt the warmth come down the inside of the thigh and did not stop.

The country went past. Hedgerow and thin wall and heath, then the woodland thickening in on both sides as the road bent south-west toward the Alderwint country, and the light going with every mile, and the cold coming up out of the ground as the sun dropped.

At the ninth mile they passed a farmstead with the shutters closed and no smoke and a dog barking itself hoarse in an empty yard, and Doran looked at it and said one word.

"Gone."

Nobody answered him.

At the fourteenth mile they found the first of them.

He was face down in the ditch about forty yards short of a bend, and he had been dead about a day and a half, and he had died running.

The crows went up as the horses came round the bend. There were a great many of them.

Osric got down and turned him over and it was one of the two from the wall whose names he had known for nine years, and he had been shot through the back twice and had gone about eighty yards after that before he stopped.

"He got out of it," Alden said. "He must have got out and been ridden down."

"He got out of it going for Valmarch." Doran had already found the tracks and was crouched over them. "He was on foot and he was on the road and they came after him at a canter, one horse, and turned round again after."

"Then there's more."

"There'll be more."

Osric put him in the ditch out of the road and put his cloak over him and did not have time for anything else, and mounted, and did not look back at it.

They found four more in the next mile.

Two of them were Throderic's men, one of whom was Martin, who had let his blade go dull all summer and had chopped kindling with it and had blamed the scabbard. He was on his back in the road with his kettle helm eight feet away and his hands empty, and something had been at him.

The other two were Khesari.

Both of them had been dragged off the road and laid out side by side and had their arms crossed and their faces covered with their own cloaks, and one of them had a thin cord of braided hair laid across his chest that somebody had put there deliberately.

Osric sat looking at that for about four seconds.

They've had a day to see to their dead and they've done it, and they've left ours in the road for the crows.

Which means they were not in a hurry yesterday, and they are not in a hurry now.

That was the moment he stopped hoping for anything, and started planning.

They came off the road half a mile short of the four-mile stretch, on Doran's word, and went into the wood on the north side and walked the horses through it for the last part.

It was hard going and it cost them a quarter of an hour and it was worth every minute of it, because it meant that when they came to the edge of the trees they came to it quietly and could look before they were looked at.

The road ran below them along the bottom of a shallow trough, with wood on both sides and about sixty yards of open scrub between the tree lines. It was a bad road. It had been a bad road for two hundred years and everybody in the county knew it, and there was nothing whatever to be done about it because it went where the ground let it go.

To the north of the road, perhaps a hundred and fifty yards from where Osric lay on his belly in the leaf-mould, stood the old workings.

It was a spoil bank from some abandoned diggings, a long low hump of earth and shale about the height of a man and the length of a barn, curved round on itself at one end where somebody had cut into the slope a century ago and given up. In front of it, on the road side, the ground had been quarried out into a shallow bowl.

Somebody had built a wall along the top of the bank.

Not a wall. What men build when they have a day and a half, no tools, and are not going to be allowed to finish. There were two dead horses up on that bank, dragged there and left where they lay to fill a gap. There was the wreck of a cart that had been taken to pieces and the pieces rammed into the earth on end. There were rocks, a great many rocks, carried up out of the bowl one at a time by men who were being shot at while they did it.

And behind that wall there were men, and the banner was still up.

Osric found it first, before he found anything else, because his eye went to it the way an eye does.

The pole was leaning and shorter than it had been, and the cloth was in pieces and dark with something, and it hung and stirred and hung again in the last of the light, and the wyvern on it was still legible.

He got the count in about a minute.