How to Build a Lordship in One Bad Winter - Salt on the Wind

Granite had replaced the willow-clay two days north of the great river bend, jutting out of the water like black snags waiting to stove in a flatboat’s bottom. Here, the River Dour lost its sluggish, yellow breadth, narrowing into a cold, muscle-straining torrent fed by the melt-water of the Frost-Wrath peaks. Every three miles, the sweep-crews had to ship their oars, jump into waist-deep glacial runoff that turned their shins blue within forty heartbeats, and haul the hemp tracking-cables along boulder-strewn towing paths while the pine spars creaked under the back-draft.

Victor stood in the sharp prow of the leading river-cutter, his hands jammed deep into the pockets of his salt-stained coat to keep his fingers from stiffening around his pencil. Ahead, rising three thousand cubits above the pine-covered foothills, the white tooth of the mountain range bit into an iron-grey sky. It looked indifferent. Men had died of gangrene, bled their guts out into the ditches of Lawoc, and signed away three hundred years of feudal charters in the counting-houses of Dun-Dour, but the glacier didn’t care. It simply sat there, sweating cold water into the rocks, waiting for the short northern summer to die.

Behind his cutter trailed the true weight of his inheritance: eleven deep-bellied transport barges, low in the water, their timber ribs groaning under two thousand sacks of cured flour, forty crates of nodule-iron, three thousand bundles of dry hazel-rods, and four hundred infantrymen whose boots were already beginning to come apart at the welts. Stellan had the rear guard with forty light horse, nursing three lame pack-mules along the gravel bars, while Powell sat under a canvas awning amidships, dipping an ink-stick into boiled vinegar to re-mark the baggage-rolls before the river-damp washed the names clean.

“Fell-Cress,” Ronan grunted, coming up beside Victor with an iron flagon of small beer in one fist and half a dried sheep-kidney in the other. The giant hadn’t shaved in a week; his red beard was crusted with salt and dried lard, his buff-coat unlaced over a linen shirt that smelled like an unwashed wool-press. “Smell that? No sunflowers up here, lad. Just goat-piss and wet granite. My old man hasn’t bought a new coat since the winter of the red ice, and if he finds out your father sent him three flagons of turnip-spirit instead of sea-brandy, he’ll have the grooms throw our baggage into the creek.”

“Your father took forty gold pieces out of our estate treasury two summers back to pay his wool-merchants,” Victor said, watching the shore. “He won’t throw anything into the creek. He needs our seed-loans worse than we need his horses.”

“Aye, but he won’t like you saying so to his face,” Ronan chuckled, biting the kidney in half with a sickening wet crunch. “Old Lowen is eighty. When a man’s survived sixty years on the border with half his ribs cracked and an ear-lobe missing from an elk-arrow, he figures the world owes him respect even if his drawers are full of holes.”

The wharf at Fell-Cress was barely more than three dry-laid stone jetties projecting into an eddy behind a gravel spit. There were no cranes, no stone storage-sheds, no customs-bailiffs in livery. A dozen mountain rowers in grease-blackened sheepskin vests sat on overturned willow-baskets, gutting river-pike with short bone knives, their greasy dogs growling at the foreign keel as Victor’s cutter swung against the hemlock fenders with a dull, hollow thump.

On the terrace above the slips, two men stood waiting.

The older one sat in a high, iron-wheeled bath-chair built of mountain-elm, two heavy wolf-pelts tucked over his shins. Lowen of House Fell-Cress looked like an ancient oak stump that someone had tried to split with a dull maul and then abandoned to the weather. His eyebrows were long, ragged clumps of grey moss that nearly hid small, blood-streaked blue eyes; his nose was twisted like an alder-root from three separate tavern fractures; and his right hand, resting on the carved arm of the chair, was swollen at the knuckles until the skin shone yellow-tight like lard-paper.

Beside him stood Soroush, Victor’s elder uncle, the heir to the viscounty, lean, dark-browed, his wool tunic patched with brown deer-hide at the elbows, holding the reins of an unmounted mountain pony whose coat was the color of dirty snow.

Victor climbed the slippery log-steps, his boots finding the notched wood with the casual balance of a boy who had spent half his boyhood chasing mountain sheep across these same terraces. He didn’t drop to his knees; he stopped three paces back, unbuckled his sword-belt to show the bare iron scabbard, and dipped his head.

“Grandfather,” Victor said.

Lowen didn’t move for four breaths. His throat made a dry, bubbling sound, an old man’s rattle that ended in a wet, tearing cough. He spat into the dry clover between his iron wheels, wiped his mouth with the greasy back of his thumb, and squinted up through his grey eyebrows.

“You’ve got your mother’s chin, boy,” the old Viscount wheezed, his voice carrying the harsh, gravelly scrape of mountain stone. “Sharp. Pointed. Like an iron cleaver. And your father’s belly, too, if that coat is anything to go by. What did Wulfram feed you on the boats? Duck-fat?”

“Salt-herring, sir,” Victor said. “And three-year-old rye that had more weevils than meal.”

“Hah!” Lowen let out a short, barked croak that sounded like a raven choking on a sheep-knuckle. He reached out, his swollen, misshapen fingers clamping onto Victor’s wrist with surprising, vicious strength. The grip hurt; the old man’s thumb-tendon was hard as iron wire. He pulled Victor down until the young man could smell the sour wool, the stale onion-soup, and the bitter pine-salve the old man used on his leg-ulcers. “You held the outriders together at Lawoc. Ronan sent a letter. Said you knocked Jocelyn Lapis-Briar off his mount to keep him from charging a wall of pikes.”

“He was going to get thirty boys killed for a banner, Grandfather.”

“Good,” Lowen hissed, letting the wrist drop with a grunt. “A knight who dies for a silk rag is an idiot. A lord who dies for one is a criminal. Soroush! Get the boy up to the hall. If we stand down here in the river-draft any longer, my shins will lock up so hard the smith will have to grease my hip-sockets with pork-drippings.”

The family seat of House Fell-Cress was not a palace; it was an overgrown border-peel. Built into the cliffside where the valley pinched into the high mountain gorge, its walls were three-fathom boulders mortared with river-lime, pierced only by narrow arrow-loops and three high stone chimneys that threw yellow pine-smoke into the spruce branches. Inside, the hall was dark, cold, and smelled of tallow-grease, boiled cabbage, and the wet hair of eight wolfhounds that lay sleeping by the ashes of the hearth.

There was no wine on the long pine table. There was only thin mountain beer, cold smoked trout with the heads still on, and a bowl of yellow turnip-mash that had gone greasy in the dish.

Soroush sat across from Victor, his thumbs hooked into a plain hemp belt, watching his nephew with the wary, guarded calculation of an elder son who had watched the family fortunes leak away through sixty small leaks.

“The tea-market is dead, Victor,” Soroush said, leaning forward as a serving-wench laid down a platter of grey salt-bread. His voice was quiet, lacking his father’s barking arrogance. “The Maritime League brought sixteen cog-loads of that black leaf from the southern islands into the estuary ports three weeks before the war broke. Bitter stuff. Tastes like steeped marsh-roots. But the burghers in the capital think it’s fashionable because the King’s daughters drink it with sugar. Nobody buys our dried snow-cress anymore. We have four barns full of last summer’s harvest sitting in the upper glen, rotting in the bins until the mice won’t even nest in it.”

“That’s why the treasury has twenty-two gold pieces in it,” old Lowen croaked from his bath-chair, his hand shaking slightly as he dipped a crust into his trout-oil. “Twenty-two! An independent viscounty with two thousand square leagues of rock, sixty miles of river-tolls, and I have fewer coins in my strongbox than an honest pig-gelder in Dour-Strand! Wulfram’s letter said you were heading for the salt-coast, boy. Said you were taking four thousand souls into the wilderness to build a town out of sea-drift.”

“I’m taking what the Duke gave us, sir,” Victor replied, chewing through the tough, woody crust of the bread. “Five hundred and ten square kilometers along the Huchen. Full allodial title.”

“Title!” Lowen spat a fish-bone onto the floor-flags, where a hound snapped it up with a wet gulp. “A piece of dead sheepskin signed by a frightened boy with a gold hoop on his head! The Huchen is three hundred miles of black peat and muskeg. The steppe-nomads cross the shallows every autumn like locusts, burning whatever they can’t eat and skinning the horses for saddle-leather. You can’t farm that dirt, Victor. The frost sits six feet deep in the loam until mid-June.”

“I don’t plan to farm the peat, Grandfather,” Victor said, setting his cup down. “I plan to hold the river-mouth. But I need iron horsemen to do it. Ronan’s lads are good with an axe, but they’re infantry. I need two hundred mountain light cavalry. Men who know how to shoot from the saddle on the run, mounted on the heavy steppe-crosses that can eat pine-needles and not drop dead of the belly-grip.”

Soroush let out a low, dry whistle through his front teeth. “Two hundred horse? Victor, that’s two-thirds of our mounted levy. Who guards the upper passes if the raiders come through the gap?”

“The raiders aren’t coming through the gap this winter, Uncle,” Victor said, with the flat, unyielding certainty that came from the cold machine in his skull. “Margrave Keld has forty thousand men sitting on the northern plateau. Every clan between here and the sunset is either marching under his banner or hiding in the high spruce waiting to see if he hangs the Duke. The border will be quiet for ten months. And you can’t feed two hundred horses through the winter anyway.”

Soroush’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t contradict him. The truth was an ugly, naked thing on the table: two hundred horses ate four thousand bushels of grain between November and the spring greening, and Fell-Cress didn’t have four thousand bushels of anything except wild nettles and sour turnip-tops.

“One gold crown per mount for twelve months,” Victor said, laying his terms out like iron nails on a pine plank. “Two hundred crowns cash, paid from my personal box tomorrow morning before the barges clear the slip. We provide their meal, their shoe-iron, their arrow-heads, and their winter coats. If a horse dies of the red lung or gets spiked in a fight, I pay the full replacement value, eight pieces of silver, within thirty days of the tally-return. If a rider takes an arrow through the throat, his widow gets twenty bushels of flour from our river-silos, delivered to this hall at my expense.”

Old Lowen stopped chewing. His watery blue eyes widened beneath their thatch of grey hair, staring at Victor as if the boy had sprouted three extra arms.

“Two hundred crowns,” the old man whispered. “And you take the feed-cost off my barns?”

“Every bushel,” Victor said. “They march under Soroush’s second boy. Douglas. Let the lad earn his spurs. But they take their tactical orders from me. No private raiding, no cattle-lifting across the boundary without my seal on the order.”

“Done,” Soroush said before his father could speak, his hand reaching across the trout-dish to slap Victor’s palm with a hard, wet crack. “By the Mother of the Hills, nephew, done. We would have had to slaughter half the remounts by All-Hallows just to keep the breeding mares from starving.”

Victor knew the price of the bargain even as Soroush’s palm met his. The two hundred crowns emptied his personal box to its last silver leaf, and the three horizontal flyers he had promised to bring down from High-Bank would cost him thirty crowns more in wheel-iron and hempen drive-cords before the spring run. He had just spent the last coin he could move without his father’s signet, and the seed-tubs for next season were still unfunded.

“There’s one more matter,” Victor said, not letting go of his uncle’s fingers.

“Aye?”

“The sheep on the northern crags,” Victor said. “The Fell-Goats. You shear them once a year, don’t you?”

Soroush frowned, his brow wrinkling in suspicion. “Aye. Coarse, greasy fleece. Full of burrs and sand. We sell it to the felt-makers in the lower valleys for three copper groats a stone. Barely covers the cost of the sheep-dip.”

“You shear the outer guard-hair,” Victor said, his mind pulling up the biological analysis the Cinder had compiled during their approach. Capra hircus laniger. The sub-arctic mountain variety. Underneath the rough, oil-heavy bristles that kept the winter rain off the animal’s spine lay three inches of down, white, finer than cobweb, eighteen microns in diameter, three times warmer than sheep’s wool by dry weight and possessing a crimp-density that rivaled the finest silk of the southern empires.

“Don’t shear them next spring,” Victor instructed. “Comb them. Have the women use horn-toothed wool-cards to pull the fine under-fur away from the skin before the summer shed begins. Pack the down in oiled linen sacks. Don’t wash it in river-water; keep the grease in the fiber. I’ll buy every pound your tenants can scrape off the crags for two silver groats a stone.”

“Two groats?” Soroush stared at him. “For the under-fuzz? Victor, that’s what the mountain-women use to stuff baby-cradles. It’s too short to spin on an ordinary wheel. The thread snaps every four inches.”

“It snaps if you use a high-spindle wheel,” Victor said, rising from the table. “I’m bringing down three horizontal flyers from the workshops at High-Bank on the spring run. They spin under light tension with a counter-weight. If we wash the grease out with sunflower-lye and weave it with a twill-set, a single mantle of that down will sell for five pieces of gold in the merchant-squares of Leyne.”

The gold was two years off and unproven. The women of the crags had never combed under-fur before; the first season’s down would spoil in a third of the batches if they washed the grease out too early, and a mantle that fetched five pieces in Leyne assumed a market that might not want goat-fuzz from the northern marches at all.

Old Lowen began to laugh, a high, wheezing, breathless cackle that set two of his hounds to barking in the corner.

“A merchant!” the old Viscount roared, slapping his wolf-pelts with both his swollen hands. “My daughter married an oil-merchant, and she’s bred an iron-clerk who wants to sell goat-fuzz to the central kings! By the Three Saints, Soroush, sign the boy’s papers before he figures out a way to sell the water in our ditch!”

Victor bowed, his scabbard tapping his heel. “The cavalry rides overland, Grandfather. Soroush leads them through the Red Ford to Northwind City. If I put two hundred mountain horses on my barges, we’ll be stuck on the sandbars until the ice takes the keels.”

“They’ll ride,” Soroush confirmed, already calculating the rations with a pencil-stub he had fished from his sleeve. “They can cover forty miles a day if they don’t have baggage-wagons behind them. We’ll meet you at the salt-quays before the third week of September.”

Victor walked out of the hall into the biting, clear dusk.

The mountain air was thin, smelling of pine-tar and the distant, dry snow of the glaciers. Below him, in the shadows of the river-gorge, the lanterns of his fleet were beginning to flare, eleven yellow sparks in the dark, frail as glow-worms against the black mass of the cliffs.

He touched the gold signet on his finger, feeling the heavy, cold scythes beneath his thumb. Two hundred light horse. The army was growing, one bargain at a time, bought with lard-cake and mountain debt. But every horse was another mouth, another iron shoe, another pair of eyes looking to him when the winter frost began to bite.

“Move,” he muttered to himself, descending the stone stairs toward the water. “Before the snow catches the tail.”

The fleet did not follow him overland. The eleven river-barges were deep-bellied cargo-keels, built for the slow, brown current of the Dour and too heavy to ride the open surf. They cast off from the Fell-Cress slips and ran south down the great river to its mouth, then turned north along the ducal coast under sail and sweeps, following the headlands around the Storm Sea until the mouth of the Huchen lay two days to the west. Victor himself took the light river-cutters and the mountain road, riding hard through the Red Ford to Brooke-Castell to meet the timber-traders, then on to the salt quays where the sea-barges would pick him up. Two routes, one timetable: the heavy freight by water, the lord by the faster road, both arriving at the Huchen before the third week of September.