How to Build a Lordship in One Bad Winter - The Saxon Share

Mist sat in the willow-bottoms along the stream like sheep-fleece, thick and greasy with the smell of rotted water-cress.

Victor rode the big roan mare through the ditch-lane toward High-Bank, the hooves squelching four inches deep into the grey, unctuous clay that passed for a highway in the eastern hundreds. Behind him came Stellan, chewing on a dried salt-prune, and four light-horsemen carrying long willow measuring-rods wrapped in waxed cord.

High-Bank was not a village of cottages; it was the barony’s iron-gut. Built along a gravel terrace where the stream dropped six feet over an old limestone weir, it held the great sunflower-presses, the grain-drying kilns, and the long, low timber shed of the repair-works, the Werk-Garth. The air here never smelled of bread or cider; it smelled of hot fat, iron scale, and green oak-smoke from the charcoal hearths.

As they cleared the ditch-bridge, Lind came running through the wet burdocks, holding the skirts of his wool tunic out of the mud like an old market-woman crossing a gutter.

“My Lord Victor!” the bailiff panted, his turnip-face glistening with perspiration despite the morning chill. “We’ve had the forge going since third-cock, just as your letter ordered! Master Hal is there, and old Gurd, but they’re swearing by the bones of Saint Jude that the wood will split if they bend it to that chalk-mark! They say you can’t put a curve like that into seasoned ash without a steam-box four times the size of our malt-kiln!”

“Tell them to stop using ash,” Victor said, swinging down from the roan before the horse had fully stopped. He tossed the reins to one of the outriders. “Ash splits along the grain when it takes a lateral heave. I told you two days ago: green elm for the moldboard, white hornbeam for the beam-shank. Elm doesn’t split; it twists. Where are the nodules?”

“In the wheel-trough, sir,” Lind stammered, trotting to keep up with Victor’s long strides. “Gurd tried to heat one in the charcoal bed. He pumped the bellows till his boy was spitting blood, but the damn thing barely turned dull red. He said it was devil-iron. He said it wasn’t made by Christian hands.”

“Gurd is seventy years old and can’t see past the end of his nose without his brass spectacles,” Victor spat, shoving open the split-oak door of the smithy.

The heat hit them like a wet pelt.

The forge was a long, dark cavern of river-cobbles and blackened rafters, lit only by the orange glow of two wide hearths where twin double-bellows, each six feet long, made of cured bull-hide, groaned under the arms of four sweating apprentices. The floor was thick with iron-scale, charcoal-grit, and the sharp, vinegar stench of the quenching-troughs.

At the central anvil stood Master Gurd, a man with shoulders like an iron-wood stump and a beard so full of grey soot that he looked as if he had been dug out of an ash-pit. He was holding a pair of long-nosed tongs, glaring down at a lump of dark, pitted metal that Victor recognized instantly: one of the two-pound nodules from the Dun-Dour lots.

Beside him, Master Hal, the head wright, was leaning on a broad adze, his apron covered in yellow shavings of cured elm.

“It’s stone, Lord Victor,” Gurd growled, not bothering to take off his leather cap. “I took an eighteen-pound sledge to it cold. It didn’t crack, it didn’t flatten, it just chipped my anvil-face and made a noise like an old church-bell. You can’t draw this out into a share. You might as well try to hammer an anchor out of a granite boulder.”

“You heated it too hot,” Victor said, walking over to the anvil. He didn’t look at the smith’s face; he picked up a pair of light tongs, lifted the nodule, and held it to the light. The surface was dark, scaled with a greasy, purplish film from the charcoal-smoke, but where the hammer had struck, the metal showed that bright, stainless gleam.

“A nodule like this isn’t pig-iron, Gurd,” Victor said, in that calm, instructional drone he had used when teaching junior draftsmen how to calculate shear-angles. “It has nickel in the grain. If you blast it with white heat, the crystalline lattice shifts and the metal locks up hard as diamond. You don’t burn it. You bring it to the color of an autumn plum, cherry-dull, no more, and you strike it with light, rapid taps. Fifty blows to the minute, not three heavy wallops.”

Gurd looked at him through his soot-crusted brows, his mouth working on an unlit pipe of dried dock-leaves. “A baron’s son telling an iron-master how to use a hammer. I was shoeing horses for your grandfather before your father had hair on his chin, boy.”

“And my grandfather spent thirty gold crowns every spring buying new shares from the northern merchants because your iron snapped every time it hit an oak-root,” Victor said, his eyes locking onto the old man’s without an inch of give. “Pump the bellows. Half-stroke. Don’t blast it.”

The smith hesitated, then spat into the slack-tub with a loud hiss. “Boy! Half-draw on the leather! Give the young master his plum-color!”

For twenty minutes, the only sound in the shed was the rhythmic, light tink-tink-tink of Gurd’s four-pound cross-peen hammer against the nodule. Victor stood over the anvil, his hand pointing with an iron rod: there, draw the nose forward; bevel the landside; don’t touch the wing till the socket is rolled.

Under the dull, cherry glow and the rapid, dancing blows, the metal did something that made Master Hal drop his adze.

It flowed.

It did not split along carbon-seams like common bloomery iron. It stretched like cold butter, spreading into a wide, triangular blade three-eighths of an inch thick, its surface smooth, dense, completely free of the pitted cinders that ruined provincial tools. When Gurd quenched it, not in the foul water of the slack-tub, but in a wooden trough of stale, dark sunflower-oil Victor had ordered brought up from the press, the steel did not scream or throw off clouds of white scale. It let out a low, bubbling sigh, the oil flashing once with a clear, yellow flame that smelled of toasted seeds.

Gurd pulled it out with the tongs.

The blade was thirteen inches long, shaped like an asymmetrical spear-point with a rolled socket at the heel. It was a dull, pewter-grey, cool enough to touch within two minutes, its edge so hard that when Gurd tried to test it with his best three-square bastard file, the teeth of the file skated across the metal with a dry, screeching slide that left only a white streak.

The old smith looked at the file, then at the share, his thick, soot-crusted fingers trembling slightly.

“That’s…” Gurd swallowed hard, his throat clicking. “That’s not farm-iron. That’s sword-metal. That’s better than the mail-plates the knights bring down from the capital.”

“That’s dirt-iron,” Victor corrected him, setting the cold blade into the mortise of the wooden frame Hal had laid out on two saw-horses. “Now bolt it. Use the iron pins from the third box, not wooden pegs. If this share twists in the furrow, I want the wood to break before the nose gives.”

By noon, the thing was standing in the yard behind the press-house.

It looked like an engine of war, not a farmer’s tool.

At the front rode a two-wheeled carriage, the vor-cart, its wheels three feet high, with wide ash-felloes designed to roll over the hummocks of the ditch-bottoms without sinking into the mud. Behind it, pinned to the axle by a heavy iron king-bolt, stretched an eleven-foot beam of cured white hornbeam, thick as a man’s thigh. Below the beam hung the coulter: a vertical, knife-like blade of ground leaf-spring steel that stood three inches ahead of the share. And behind the coulter curved the moldboard, a massive, twisted plank of green elm, carved into a parabolic scoop that looked like the flared bow of a sea-boat.

A crowd had gathered from the press-sheds: forty serfs in greasy smocks, three village headmen with their ash staves, and half the teamsters from the Dour-Strand road, all standing ten paces back, murmuring and shaking their heads.

“It’s too big,” one old man muttered, his rheumy eyes squinting at the beam. “You couldn’t drag that through the bottom-clover with six oxen. It’ll anchor itself in the marl like an oak-stump.”

“Bring up the roan and the grey gelding,” Victor commanded, ignoring the muttering.

Two horses were led out from the dray-stables, not the lean steppe-chargers the light troop rode, but two heavy, broad-chested work-beasts with feathered legs and necks like beer-butts. Instead of the ancient, rope-bound breast-bands that choked a horse every time it leaned into a load, Victor had Hal fit them with the new collars: two arched pieces of boiled hornbeam, padded with sheepskin and stuffed with dried rye-straw, resting squarely against the flat bone of their shoulders. The traces were not hemp rope; they were four-ply links of twist-forged iron that clinked against the whiffletree with a heavy, dangerous music.

Victor walked to the rear of the plough, his hands taking the double handles of the stilt.

“Lind,” Victor said. “Take the lead-line. Keep them at a walk. If they bolt, pull their heads toward the ditch.”

“My Lord,” Lind squeaked, his hands shaking on the hemp rope. “Shouldn’t one of the carters… I’m a bailiff, sir, I haven’t held a team since—”

“Take the line, Lind.”

The bailiff swallowed his spit, took the halter-reins, and clicked his tongue.

The two heavy horses leaned into the hornbeam collars. For two paces, the chains went taut, the iron links groaning as the plough-carriage lurched forward over the hard-baked turf.

Then the coulter hit the sod.

There was a sound like linen being ripped, a long, continuous, wet shhhh-clack as the vertical blade sliced through six inches of matted thistle-roots and clover-turf. Right behind it came the nodule-share. It did not bounce. It did not ride up out of the furrow like a common ard. Driven by the weight of the hornbeam frame and the downward suck of its parabolic nose, it sank nine inches into the black, greasy river-clay.

The moldboard took the slice.

A ribbon of black earth, fourteen inches wide and thick as a man’s calf, rose along the curved face of the green elm, lifted toward the sun, curled like a dried leaf, and rolled completely over, landing upside down with a soft, heavy thud that buried the green weeds beneath nine inches of turned, crumbling loam.

The horses didn’t even drop their heads. The collars sat flat against their shoulder-blades; their legs drove straight into the turf, their breath coming in steady, rhythmic snorts that threw no white foam.

Behind them, Victor walked in the furrow. He didn’t have to bear down on the handles; the wheels in front held the depth, and the share held the line. He simply guided the stilts with his fingertips, his boots sinking into the cool, damp, beautiful black earth that had never seen the sun since the ancient floods.

Across the field, forty yards down, Lind stopped the team.

The crowd from the press-shed had gone completely, utterly silent.

An old serf, the one who had complained about the weight, walked out into the furrow, knelt down in the dirt, and thrust his entire arm into the cut. His fingers went in to the elbow before they hit the hard-pan. He pulled his hand out, staring at the black marl under his fingernails, then looked back at the four-inch scratch his own wooden plough had made in the neighboring strip three days ago.

“It turned it,” the old man whispered, his jaw trembling. “It buried the thistle. The whole damn bed is upside down.”

Master Hal, the wright, was standing by the carriage-wheel, his thumb running over the elm moldboard. The wood was wet with soil-sap, but where the earth had rubbed against the timber, it was as slick as a greased skillet.

“One team,” Hal murmured, as if he were trying to remember an old hymn. “Two horses and one lad on the stilts. They could turn two acres between prime and nones. An eight-ox team with an old ard barely scratches half an acre, and they leave the roots in the ground.”

“It takes four times the iron,” Master Gurd pointed out, though his voice had lost all its sour bite. He was looking at the share-point; there wasn’t a scratch on the grey nodule-metal, not even where it had sliced through an ancient limestone boulder buried in the clay. “And the hornbeam beam… you can’t find fifty timbers that straight in the entire Shire. It’s a lord’s tool. A common tenant couldn’t pay for the axle-pins in seven years of harvest.”

Victor stepped out of the furrow, wiped his boots on the clover-tuft, and reached into his coat.

He pulled out a single, heavy gold piece, a standard royal crown from the central kingdom, bright, sharp-edged, bearing the three lions of Leyne. He held it up between his thumb and forefinger, letting the midday sun catch the yellow rim.

The eyes of every craftsman in the yard locked onto that coin like hawks onto a field-mouse.

“This is for the man who solves the weight,” Victor said. “I want the frame built of seasoned white birch with an iron tie-rod instead of a solid hornbeam beam. I want the wheels made with split-spokes instead of solid ash-discs to cut the carriage-drag by half. Whichever smith or wright brings me a plough that turns this depth, uses two-thirds of the timber, and can be built by two village carpenters in five days, gets this coin in his hand. The day the first furrow is turned, he gets another.”

Old Gurd’s mouth snapped shut with a click of iron teeth. Hal didn’t even say goodbye; he grabbed his adze from the dirt and walked at a dead sprint back toward the timber-shed, already shouting at his two apprentices to pull the dry birch-culls out of the seasoning loft.

Victor watched them scatter, a cold, satisfied hum vibrating behind his cheekbones.

Greed, he thought, letting the gold crown drop back into his leather purse. The only fuel that burns hotter than charcoal and doesn’t leave any ash.

He turned back to Lind, who was still holding the roan mare’s halter with both hands, his turnip-face pale with shock.

“Bailiff.”

“Y-yes, my Lord?”

“Take this team down to the third manor. Put Luke on the stilts; his knee is too ruined for a horse, but he can sit on the plough-beam and guide the horses with the reins. I want fifty acres of the lower bottom-land turned before the rain comes on Thursday. And Lind?”

“Sir?”

“If any man touches the nodule-share with a cold-chisel, hang him from the press-crane by his thumbs.”

Victor didn’t wait to see the plough start again. He mounted the roan mare, swung her head north toward the military camp on the rise, and kicked her into an easy, ground-eating trot.

The drill-field at Stone-Garth smelled of trampled clover, horse-piss, and the hot, sour sweat of eighty farm-boys who had spent four hours discovering that an ash-pike was three times heavier than a hay-fork.

Ronan stood on an overturned hay-wain at the center of the lines, his shirt stripped off, his hairy, barrel-like chest glistening like a greased ham in the noon glare. In his right hand he held a five-foot ash stave; every time a file wavered or a boy let his pike-point drop below the shoulder-line, the stave came down across the offender’s shoulder-blades with a crack that sounded like dry birch snapping under an axe.

“Keep ‘em up, you ditch-born bastards!” the giant roared, his face purple with rage, his spit flying over the front rank. “A northern horse doesn’t stop because you have a blister on your thumb! Plant the butt! Heel into the sod! Lock the left elbow! If the man beside you falls, you step into his muck before his blood stops bubbling! One! Two! Thrust!”

Eighty pikes—rough ash poles tipped with leaf-shaped iron heads Victor’s smiths had hammered out from scrap-bars—jabbed into the empty air with a ragged, uneven whoosh.

Half the rear rank tripped over their own boots. One boy dropped his pole, cursed, and reached down to grab it, only to catch Ronan’s stave across the back of his neck with a force that sent him sprawling face-first into a thistle-patch.

“Get up, you worm!” Ronan barked, not even looking down. “Jethro! Look at that third file! They’re bunching like sheep behind a hurdle! Spread ‘em out before I come down there and take the skin off their hams!”

Jethro of High-Meadow was walking behind the second rank, his scarred cheek twitching with cold, professional disgust. He was holding a short willow switch, tapping the boys’ heels to correct their stride.

“You’re stepping with your right foot, cabbage-head,” Jethro said, his switch cracking against a young serf’s shin. “The left foot goes first. Always the left. You step with the right, your buckler swings wide, and a light-horseman from the hills sticks an arrow into your armpit before you can say your grandmother’s name. Again. Step-hold. Step-hold.”

Victor reined in by the edge of the horse-picket, watching the ranks heave and stumble.

They were ragged. Half of them were wearing their fathers’ old wool smocks, belted with strips of willow-bark; some had boots made of untreated rawhide that were already curling at the toes from the damp grass, while others were barefoot, their heels caked in dry black clay. But they were young, none older than twenty-four, none younger than eighteen, and their backs were straight from four seasons of carrying sunflower-baskets.

When Victor rode up to the hay-wain, Ronan paused, wiping his streaming face with the crook of his elbow.

“They’re swine, Victor,” the giant said, leaning on his stave and breathing like a bellows. “Pure, unadulterated swamp-swine. Twenty of ‘em don’t know their left hand from their right. I had to tie a bunch of dried clover to their left boots and a clump of straw to the right just so they knew which way to turn when the horn blew.”

“The hay-foot, straw-foot method,” Victor murmured, a faint, cold smile touching his lips. “It worked for General Qi’s peasant-levies. It’ll work for ours.”

Ronan squinted at him. “Who the hell is Qi?”

“A general from the other side of the water,” Victor said, dismounting and walking toward the first file. “He had four thousand miners who couldn’t tell a pike from a hoe, and he broke a pirate army that had raided three provinces untouched.”

“Sounds like an idiot who got lucky,” Ronan grunted, climbing down from the wagon. “We’ve got eight hundred more of these coming in from the outlying manors by Sunday. The barracks at the keep are full. We have forty men sleeping under the grain-wagons, and Stellan says the salt-mutton won’t last three weeks if we feed them three times a day.”

“They don’t sleep at the keep,” Victor said. He turned toward Jethro, who had stopped his pacing and was watching him with that sharp, cynical squint. “Jethro.”

“My Lord?”

“The eighty men you brought from the marsh. How many have wives?”

“Twelve,” the hedge-knight said without hesitation. “Fourteen have mothers who aren’t dead yet. The rest are stray dogs from the tavern-cellars.”

“Take the twelve with wives,” Victor ordered. “Take twenty of the farm-lads whose fathers hold strips along the southern ditch-ridge. We’re laying out the first military settlement this afternoon. Four miles south, where the high gorse meets the fallow bottom.”

Ronan’s brow furrowed, his hairy chest heaving. “A settlement? Now? In the middle of the muster?”

“A soldier who doesn’t have a roof thinks about deserting every time it rains, Uncle,” Victor said, his ruler tapping the pommel of his sword. “We build the huts first. Timber logs, four men to a hut, sod roofs with a stone hearth in the middle. The wives move in on Monday. Each family gets a cow from the lord’s herd, on loan, and two acres of the new fallow land we’re turning with the heavy plough. The loan has no interest, but if the man fails to answer the morning inspection with clean iron and dry leather, his family loses the pasture-right for forty days.”

Jethro let out a low, whistling breath through his teeth.

“You aren’t just raising an army, Lord Victor,” the knight said, his scarred mouth pulling into that crooked, half-admiring smirk. “You’re building an iron collar around their necks, and you’re making their wives hold the chain.”

“A wife holds a chain tighter than any bailiff with a whip, Jethro,” Victor said, turning back toward his horse. “A bailiff goes to sleep at sundown. A woman with three children and an acre of beans stays awake all night making sure her man doesn’t do anything stupid enough to get their cow taken away.”

He swung up into the saddle, looking down at the eighty conscripts standing in the mud. Their faces were sweaty, their arms trembling under the weight of the ash-poles, but they were watching him. Not with the dull, bovine misery of field-serfs waiting for a beating, but with the sharp, nervous hunger of men who had just heard the price of their own blood.

“Drill them till sundown, Ronan,” Victor said quietly. “Then give every man a half-loaf of wheat-bread and a cup of small beer. Tomorrow they start cutting timber for their own chimneys.”

He touched his spurs to the roan, leaving the drill-field behind, the rhythmic thump-thump-thump of the ash-pikes following him down the lane like the first distant drum-beats of an oncoming storm.