How to Build a Lordship in One Bad Winter - Ink and Rust

Riders from Cambreach did not carry silver trumpets or white silk pennons. They carried three-foot clubs loaded with lead, wore wool cloaks stained with sheep-grease to turn the rain, and smelled of the sour cider they had bought off roadside peddlers to keep from drinking ditch-water.

Paul pulled his lathered mount to a halt before the outer timber gate of Stone-Garth just as the noon-bell was clanging from the keep’s roof. Behind him came the family’s four-wheeled travel-wagon, its ash-felloes caked with five inches of grey river-marl, two spare horses tied to the tail-board with dirty hemp ropes.

Victor walked out from the repair-shed, an iron measuring-gauge in his left hand and a piece of dry chalk in his right. He stopped ten paces from the carriage as the leather curtain was dragged back with an impatient, furious rattle of brass rings.

A girl jumped down onto the cobbles before the groom could drop the folding stool.

Irene was sixteen, three years younger than Victor, and she had inherited none of their father’s thick, dark, eastern heaviness. She was all Fell-Cress: tall, long-limbed, with hair the color of pale winter wheat falling in a wild, unpinned mass over a travel-cloak of dark blue wool that had two grease-stains near the hem. Her face was pale from six days on the post-road, but her blue eyes, the cold, sharp, unblinking blue of their mother’s people, were snapping with pure, concentrated fury.

“Victor!” she shouted across the yard, ignoring the two sentries who stiffened to attention. “You dragged me out of the lecture-hall during the second term of rhetoric! Paul had four men with clubs standing outside my dormitory door before I could pack my second trunk! The Master of the College thought I was being arrested for the river-tax!”

“The Master of the College is currently packing his own silver in an oat-cask, Irene,” Victor said, not moving. “Did you see the southern road?”

The anger drained from her face like water poured through a sieve. She stopped three feet from him, her travel-cloak swinging open to reveal a soiled linen dress and boots that were white with lime-dust.

“It was full of carts,” she whispered, her voice dropping all its theatrical schoolgirl pique, becoming small and dry. “Thousands of them, Victor. People from the episcopal estates. They were dragging their bedding on hurdles. Two companies of hired foot from the central shires were marching south through the Gap with their pikes reversed, selling their horses to the tavern-keepers for forty copper groats a head. They said Duke Jorah’s head was on an iron spike above Lawoc’s south gate.”

“It’s not on a spike,” Victor said, flicking a streak of chalk from his sleeve. “Morra needs the corpse whole so the bishops can sign the succession-roll without having to say their prayers over an empty coffin. Go inside. Mother has soup on the hearth, and Henrik has spent three days hiding behind the dairy door waiting to throw green apples at your hair.”

She looked at him for three seconds, her fingers catching the front of his rough leather coat. “Are we going to fight, Victor?”

“We’re going to farm, Irene,” he said, turning her by the shoulder toward the keep’s entry-stair. “And if someone tries to burn the wheat, we’re going to kill them. Go wash your ears. You look like a charcoal-burner’s girl.”

She hit him on the arm—a sharp, stinging slap that had no real force behind it—and marched toward the tower, her boots clattering loudly on the stones, her pale hair catching the midday sun like spun wire.

Victor watched her clear the door, then turned his face toward the military enclosure behind the horse-barns.

The camp was an ugly mess.

Five hundred and twenty men were bivouacked in the lower meadow between the stone keep and the ditch-line. Two hundred were freemen, apprentices, carters’ sons, younger brothers of freehold farmers who had answered the old Baron’s initial call in May. They had pitched their little grease-cloth ridge-tents on the high gravel knoll, their ash-spears planted upright in neat rows, their linen tunics clean enough to show the green-and-white stripes of their home parishes.

The other three hundred and twenty were Victor’s new serf-levy.

They had no tents. They were camped forty yards away in the lower thistle-bottoms, huddled under timber-frames covered in fresh cut gorse and rye-straw, their smudge-fires throwing off a thick, greasy, stinging smoke that smelled of dried cattle-dung and green alder-bark. They sat in the mud with their knees drawn to their chins, clutching their five-foot ash bills like beggars guarding a crust of bread.

Between the two camps ran a dry ditch six feet wide.

Nobody had dug it as a trench; it was an old drainage culvert, but the men had treated it like an international border. On the freemen’s side, three young fellows in red wool caps were leaning on an unhitched wagon, throwing dried sheep-knuckles across the gap, laughing loudly whenever a knuckle bounced off a serf’s straw shelter.

“Hey! Clod-hopper!” one of the freemen shouted, a boy with a crooked nose who worked his uncle’s tanyard in High-Garth. “Did you wash the pig-grease off your fingers before you touched that ash-pole? You drop that iron in the dirt, the Baron will make your sister lick it clean!”

The serfs didn’t throw anything back. They just watched, their dark, sunken eyes unblinking, their fingers tightening on their ash-hafts until their knuckles turned white. It was that old, patient, murderous silence that Victor had seen in the eyes of horses that had been beaten too often with a heavy trace-chain.

Victor walked down the lane between the horse-lines, his boots making no sound on the trampled clover.

“Where is the commissary?” he asked Stellan, who was sitting on an overturned salt-box near the ditch, stitching a split seam in his horse-girth with an awl and greased twine.

The old sergeant spat a yellow string of dock-juice into the weeds. “Blinken’s in the tent behind the granary, sir. Counting his cabbage-stems.”

“Did the shirts arrive from the weavers’ row in Dour-Strand?”

“They arrived, aye.” Stellan didn’t look up from his needle. “Four hundred coats of coarse grey wool, dyed with walnut-hulls like you ordered. They’re sitting in the dry shed under two locks.”

“Why haven’t they been issued?”

“Blinken says the rolls aren’t certified by the civil registrar yet. Says he can’t issue household cloth to bonded cottars without a signed voucher from old Boon, or the estate books won’t balance at Michaelmas.”

Victor didn’t swear. He simply turned on his heel and walked toward the large canvas pavilion pitched against the masonry of the third granary.

The flap was tied back to let in the breeze, but inside it smelled of dried beef, smoked ham, and the sweet, cloying perfume of the lavender water Quartermaster Blinken used on his handkerchiefs. Blinken was fifty-two, a cousin of the civil registrar, with a stomach that bulged comfortably against a doublet of dark green wool trimmed with squirrel-fur. He was sitting behind a folding table covered in clean sheepskin rolls, a small bowl of stewed plums at his elbow, using an ivory-handled knife to scrape an error off a parchment ledger.

“Master Blinken,” Victor said, stepping over the threshold.

Blinken looked up, his round, smooth face arranging itself into that smooth, deferential smirk that house-officers use on young lords who haven’t yet learned how to read a tax-audit.

“Ah, Lord Victor! A glorious day, sir, a glorious day. I have the muster-returns for the lower estates nearly complete. The costs are high, sir—very high, with the price of salt-mutton rising in Dun-Dour—but I have managed to trim three silver shillings from the carters’ allowances by—”

“Where are the uniforms, Blinken?”

The clerk’s pen hovered over the sheepskin. “The… the grey wool doublets, my Lord?”

“The uniforms,” Victor repeated. “Four hundred coats. Dyed grey. With the sunflower patch sewn to the left breast. Why are they in the storage shed while half my men are sitting in the thistle-patch wearing their fathers’ rotting hemp smocks?”

Blinken smiled, a small, patronizing twitch of his fat lips. “My Lord, you must understand the procedure. These men are unfree cottars. They have no legal status on the manor’s equipment inventory. If I issue four hundred coats of fine wool, worth at least two silver groats each, to bonded serfs who might die of the flux before the autumn drill, the loss falls upon my office. I need Steward Boon to countersign the issue-roll, and Boon is currently in Dun-Dour with the Baron—”

Victor reached across the folding table.

He didn’t draw steel. His right hand caught the squirrel-fur collar of Blinken’s fine green doublet, his fingers twisting into the wool until the seam popped with a dry snick. With a single, explosive jerk of his shoulders, he hauled the sixteen-stone clerk clear over the walnut desk.

Ink-wells flew. The bowl of stewed plums crashed against the floorboards, scattering dark purple juice across the muster-rolls. Blinken shrieked, his arms flailing, his fat thighs knocking the trestles flat as Victor dragged him through the tent-door into the bright, yellow sunlight of the yard.

“Victor! My Lord! Murder! Treason!”

Victor dragged him forty yards through the clover, his heels digging two pale furrows in the turf.

The yard went silent. The freemen on the wagon stopped throwing their sheep-knuckles; the serfs in the thistle-bottoms rose to their feet like a forest of grey ash-poles. Ronan came out from the horse-barn, a half-cleaned bridle in his hand, a great, feral grin splitting his beard.

Victor stopped beside the great wooden swill-tub near the kitchen drain, a four-foot oak vat where the scullery-boys dumped the sour dish-water, grease-skimmings, and rotten cabbage-leaves for the estate hogs. It was half-full of grey, scummy water that smelled of dead leeks and hog-bile.

Victor hoisted the clerk by the waistband of his breeches and the nape of his neck, held him suspended over the grease-crust for two heartbeats, and dropped him in.

The splash was magnificent.

A geyser of rancid, grey-green slop erupted five feet into the air, soaking Victor’s boots and spattering the front of Stellan’s leather jack. Blinken surfaced with a bubbling shriek, spitting sour turnip-skins, his squirrel-fur collar dripping black grease, his small hands clutching the slimy rim of the vat.

“Every man,” Victor said, and the sentries on the gate-tower stopped breathing. “Every single man who holds an ash-pole in this camp wears the same grey coat before the sun touches the western ridge. If I see one serf in a hemp smock at evening inspection, Blinken, I won’t put you in the swill-tub. I’ll put you in the bottom of the water-dungeon under the keep, and I’ll let Jethro’s infantry bring you your meals once every three days.”

The clerk choked on a piece of cabbage-stalk, his head bobbing, his eyes round as silver groats. “Y-yes, my Lord! Immediately! Stellan, the keys… the keys are on the hook behind the flour-bin!”

“Get him out of the slop,” Victor told two house-guards who were trying not to laugh. “And check the meal-weights in the mess-tents. If the soldiers’ porridge has been cut with sawdust to balance his accounts, hang him from the hay-crane by his ankles.”

He didn’t look back at the tub. He walked straight across the drainage ditch into the thistle-bottoms, his boots wet with hog-grease, stopping before the front rank of the serf-levy.

Jack-o’-the-Ditch was standing at the head of the file, his ash bill resting against his shoulder, his scarred mouth twitching.

“My Lord,” the serf said, his voice husky.

“Where’s your bowl?” Victor asked.

The lad blinked. “Sir?”

“Your wooden mess-bowl. Bring it.”

Victor walked over to the field-cauldron where two cooks were ladling out the midday meal, a grey, steaming mush of cracked barley, water, and dried peas. He picked up an unwashed wooden trencher from the stack, held it out to the cook, and took a full ladle of the porridge.

Then he sat down in the dry clover, right in the thistle-patch, five feet from the serfs’ ditch.

He took an iron spoon from his belt, scooped up a mouthful of the grey mush, and chewed. It was thin, burned at the bottom of the pot, and had almost no salt, but the barley was whole and there were no weevils in the grain.

“Jethro,” Victor said, chewing slowly.

“Aye, sir?”

“Sit down. Eat your porridge. You have forty furlongs of line-drill before the dusk-bell, and if your boys drop their points because their bellies are empty, I’ll have Ronan use his ash-stave on your backside instead of theirs.”

Jack-o’-the-Ditch looked at the young lord sitting in the burdocks with horse-grease on his trousers, then at the freemen across the ditch, who were staring with their mouths open, their sheep-knuckles forgotten in their hands.

The serf didn’t say thank you. He simply sat down in the dirt three feet from Victor, plunged his wooden spoon into his bowl, and began to shovel the hot, saltless mush into his mouth as if it were a feast of roast capon. Within two minutes, thirty more men had dropped onto their haunches in the thistle-patch, their spoons clattering against the wood, their eyes fixed on Victor with a fierce, terrifying intensity that made the freemen on the wagon slowly, quietly climb down and walk back toward their own tents.

By two hours past noon, the yard had changed.

Every man in the camp wore the same coarse, dark-grey wool coat, dyed with walnut-hulls, with the silver sunflower stamped on a square of boiled leather over the left breast. You couldn’t tell the tanner’s nephew from the ditcher’s third son unless you looked at their fingernails, and after twenty minutes of line-drill in the hot dust, everyone’s fingernails were black with the same dirt.

Victor stood on the mounting-block by the gate, his measuring-gauge tucked into his belt.

The drill was still hideous.

“Straw-foot! Skin-foot!” Ronan’s roar shook the apple-trees at the edge of the lane.

Victor had ordered every man to strip the leather shoe from his right foot, leaving it bare, while the left foot kept its raw-hide boot with a clump of dried rye-straw tied to the ankle.

“Straw-foot! Skin-foot! Step together, you ditch-born swine! When I say straw, the boot comes down! When I say skin, the bare toes hit the gravel! If I see one man drop his boot on skin, I’ll have Jethro take the hide off his ribs! One! Two! Straw! Skin!”

Five hundred men moved across the meadow in three ragged lines, their pikes at forty-five degrees.

Thump-slap. Thump-slap. Thump-slap.

The line wavered, bulged in the center where the ditch-boys were moving too fast, then straightened as Jethro’s willow-switch cracked against a sergeant’s shoulder. They weren’t soldiers yet; they were still clumsy, their breaths coming in ragged gasps, but they weren’t two camps anymore. They were five hundred grey coats stepping on the same rye-straw, turning their heads to the same horn, breathing the same hot, greasy dust.

A horse clattered through the north gatehouse, its hooves sliding on the dry cobbles.

It was Paul, his cloak spattered with dried mud, holding an unsealed leather dispatch-tube stamped with Baron Wulfram’s sunflower seal.

Victor stepped down from the mounting-block, took the tube, and cracked the wax with his thumb.

The parchment inside was thin, yellowed marsh-reed paper, written in his father’s heavy, impatient hand.

The Council has signed, Wulfram wrote. Morra takes the coronet on the Feast of the Assumption. He has confirmed the northern border-treaty. Margrave Keld receives the territorial rights to all unmapped lands north of the Huchen River, with full authority to settle provincial lords on the frontier. Baron Thorn of Green-Oak was buried three days ago outside Lawoc; his heirs have already petitioned the new Duke for relief from their war-fines. The wolves are dividing the sheep, Victor. Be ready.

Victor folded the parchment once, slid it into his pocket next to the cold iron keys of the inner treasury, and looked back at the meadow.

The five hundred men were wheeling toward the west, their pikes leveling into the yellow sunlight, their five hundred boots coming down together with a single, massive, earth-shaking thud.

“Straw,” five hundred voices roared into the summer wind. “Skin.”

Victor reached down, picked up his willow gauge, and walked back into the dust.