How to Build a Lordship in One Bad Winter - The Net at the Water’s Edge

Victor slid down from Grape’s saddle and the gravel turned to black paste under three hundred pairs of hobnailed boots before the dust from the slope had even settled. Down in the river-wash, where the Huchen curved back on itself in an oily, grey-brown arc, the water was choking on wreckage. Two nomad steppe-ponies, their bellies swollen and legs stiff as tent-pegs, were pinned against the willow-hurdles of the landing-weir, while a third thrash-kicked in four feet of sucking silt, its eye torn out by a bodkin arrow.

Victor slid down from Grape’s saddle, his right knee giving a sharp, hot pop as his heel hit the shale. His arms were numb to the elbows. That final three-minute chop through the rear of the Green-Grass column had felt less like fencing and more like swinging a twelve-pound maul into a pile of wet cedar-billets. The iron-gall grease on his broadsword was black, flecked with coarse horsehair and grease from sheepskin coats. He didn’t sheath it. He leaned his weight against the pommel, breathing through his teeth, waiting for the red needles behind his retinas to stop their jagged dancing.

“Close the files!” Stellan’s bellow tore through the damp river-mist fifty rods down the shore.

The old sergeant had his pikes planted four ranks deep across the narrow gravel spit between the water and the black basalt face of the bluff. They looked like an iron hedgehog dragged out of a ditch. Two hundred and fifty men in walnut-dyed wool, their eight-foot ash poles leveled waist-high, their iron heads locked so tight that when a panicked nomad horse slammed into the second rank, the points took the beast in the throat, chest, and shoulder all at once. The animal didn’t even drop; it hung there, impaled on three ash-shafts, its hind hooves clawing air, spraying dark, frothing lung-blood over the face of a twenty-year-old weaver’s son who was screaming a prayer to Saint Jude without letting go of his grip.

“Hold the butt!” Stellan roared, his short cavalry axe swinging down with a hollow, sickening crunch into the skull of an archer who had tried to slide under the pikes on his belly. “Don’t look at the blood, you cabbage-heads! Step! Step! Drive ‘em into the current!”

From the grounded barges thirty paces out in the shallows, Jonas Salt-Foot’s crossbowmen were working their levers with the slow, terrifying rhythm of a flour-mill.

Thwack-clank. Thwack-clank.

The heavy square bolts didn’t arch through the air like nomad arrows; they flew flat and low, fifty paces across the flat water, smashing through boiled leather coats and split-reed shields with a sound like dry planks being kicked in by an iron boot. A rider in a greasy fox-skin cap tried to wheel his spotted pony toward the deep channel, shouting some guttural clan-call, but a bolt took him through the kidney, lifting him two inches out of his high wooden saddle before he pitched face-down into the foam. His horse bolted, its empty stirrups slapping against its lathered flanks, only to founder in the four-foot silt-bed where three more shafts pinned it through the withers.

The final netting of the broken horde took seven minutes more; the whole engagement had run a quarter-hour from first lance to last surrender.

A light cavalry force that loses its momentum in a cul-de-sac does not retreat; it becomes meat. The rear ranks of the Green-Grass horde, crushed between Jocelyn’s descending lances on the ridge and Stellan’s bristling ash-hedge on the beach, simply dissolved into the mud.

Some threw their bows into the river and threw themselves flat on their bellies in the gravel, their hands crossed behind their ears, pressing their faces into the cold shingle with the instinctive submission of dogs that have seen the whip too often. Others—the young ones whose blood was still hot with slaughter—tried to climb the basalt scree on their hands and knees, their soft hide boots slipping on the wet stones until Jocelyn’s retainers rode them down from above, stabbing downward with shortened broadswords like men spearing eels in a ditch.

“Hold!” Victor shouted. He had to shout twice; the first sound was barely a dry croak through throat-linings coated in powdered lime. “Stellan! Cease the bolts! Knock the bows down!”

Jocelyn came trotting through the shallow water, his grey charger throwing sprays of pink-stained foam across the rocks. The boy’s visor was up, his forehead covered in black powder-grease and sweat, his teeth bared in a wild, manic grin that made him look ten years older than he was. His right vambrace was smeared with brain-matter from the cuff to the elbow.

“We broke ‘em, Victor!” Jocelyn laughed, his voice cracking on the high notes like a drunkard’s. “By the Mother of the Waters, we broke the whole horde! I took three of their lances on my buckler, felt like someone throwing pine-knots, and then we rode right over their rear-guards! They folded up like wet linen!”

“You lost two men,” Victor said, his eyes on the shale behind Jocelyn’s horse.

The young noble’s grin faltered, his mouth staying slightly open. “What?”

“Two of your father’s retainers,” Victor said, pointing with his blade toward a heap of grey rocks sixty rods up the slope. “Old Mark and the boy with the crooked tooth. They charged ahead of the line to catch a horse-pennon, got their beasts tangled in a wild rose-brake, and three nomads on foot took them off their saddles with skinning hooks. Go and get their bodies before the dogs get into the meat.”

Jocelyn looked back, the hot flush of victory draining from his cheeks, leaving him looking sickly yellow under the midday glare. He looked down at his blood-stained glove, closed his mouth, turned his mount with a sharp jerk of the bit, and trotted away without another word.

“Jethro,” Victor called out.

Jethro of High-Meadow was sitting on a dead pony twenty paces away, using an oily rag to wipe the notched edge of his broadsword. He looked tired, his scarred cheek twitching with a rhythmic, nervous pulse, but his eyes were clear, completely detached from the shouting.

“My Lord?”

“Count the prisoners. Strip the iron, take every bowstring, and bundle their thumbs behind their backs with dry hemp. If a man has an arrow through the lung or a broken back, don’t waste salt-water on him; use a dagger and roll him into the deep current. I want the sound ones in files of ten on the high shingle.”

“Aye, sir,” Jethro grunted, sliding his broad blade back into its twine-bound scabbard with a dull clop. “And the horses?”

“Every beast with four good legs is an outrider mount,” Victor said. “If a pony has a split hoof or a strained loin, bleed it into the cooking-tubs. My pikes have spent three days on moldy biscuit; they’re going to eat horse-liver tonight until their bellies ache.”

A sudden, sharp spasm hit Victor behind the left ear, a cold, metallic jolt that felt like an iron chisel being driven into his mastoid bone. He stumbled half a pace, his shoulder striking Grape’s saddle-flap. The gelding gave a low, snorting rumble, nudging Victor’s arm with its wet muzzle, smelling the blood on his wool coat.

Engagement terminated, Cinder 01 chimed, the voice cold, remote, entirely uninterested in the butchery along the bank. Tactical efficiency index: eighty-eight percent. Enemy casualties: two hundred and seventy-six killed, one hundred and thirty-seven captured. Friendly losses: six regular cavalry dead, eight severely disabled, twenty-one light wounded. Warning: Host heart-rate exceeds threshold; core glycogen reserve critically depleted. Recommend immediate rest and ingestion of simple carbohydrates.

“Shut up,” Victor whispered through his teeth, pressing the heel of his hand against his forehead until stars danced in his vision. “Just… close the screen.”

He pulled his canteen from the saddle-ring, took three swallows of the stale vinegar-water, and spat the rinse into the stones. It tasted of iron and horse-silt, but it cleared the numbness from his upper lip.

Across the gravel flats, the shouting had changed its tune.

The weavers and carters’ sons of the Third Levy, boys who had spent their whole lives bowing to village bailiffs and jumping into the ditch whenever a nobleman rode down the road, were looking at the dead nomads sprawled across the shingle. They looked at their own ash-pikes, stained with dark grease three feet up the wood, and then they looked at Victor, who was standing alone by his horse with blood on his breastplate and his face white as chalk.

Jack-o’-the-Ditch raised his billhook into the sun, the iron head glinting like an axe.

“Lord Victor!” the serf roared, his voice cracking on the syllable, rough as gravel. “Victor! Victory! Victory!”

The cry caught like fire in dry thistles. Four hundred voices took it up, banging their ash-shafts against their wooden bucklers until the black cliffs above the river echoed with the drumming roar: “Victory! Victor! The Sunflower! Victor!”

Victor stood motionless, his fingers digging into Grape’s mane.

It was an ancient, dangerous sound. He had read about it in the historical chronicles of the old world, the sudden, terrifying transition when a herd of frightened peasants realizes that they have iron in their hands and that the men on horses bleed just like sheep. It was how empires started, and it was how barons got their castles burned over their heads when the bread ran short.

“Fools,” Victor muttered under his breath, though his hand rose in a single, short gesture of acknowledgment that made the shouting redouble.

Stellan came up the gravel, dragging two prisoners by their hair.

One was an older warrior with two iron plates sewn into his leather collar, his left ear torn in half, his breath coming in whistling gasps through a crushed nose; the other was barely twenty, his face round and flat, wearing an iron-ring necklace that marked him as a sub-leader of ten. Stellan dumped them onto the shale at Victor’s feet like two sacks of wet parsnips.

“This one speaks the border-slang, Master Victor,” Stellan said, kicking the older man in the ribs with his iron-shod toe. “He was trying to drown his horse-pennon in the reeds when we dragged him out.”

Ronan came slouching over, his four-foot cleaver resting across his shoulders, his beard dripping with small beer he had liberated from one of the barge-kettles. He stopped above the prisoners, leaned down, and barked three harsh, spitting syllables in the northern tongue.

The older nomad looked up, his dark eyes filled with that dull, fatalistic hatred that mountain tribesmen save for their conquerors. He spat on Victor’s boot, a thin, bloody glob of phlegm.

Ronan’s boot moved. It was a short, brutal kick that caught the man in the cheekbone, snapping the bone with a sharp tock and rolling him five feet into the thistles.

“Speak when the lord looks at you, dog,” Ronan rumbled, a deep, chest-shaking register in his voice. He turned to the younger one, who was trembling violently, his eyes darting toward the dead clan-chief whose horned helmet was still lying forty yards back in the dust. Ronan pointed his dagger at the lad’s throat.

A rapid, frightened exchange of guttural consonants followed. The boy’s voice was high, frantic, his hands gesturing wildly toward the north, toward the smoking horizon beyond the oxbow.

Ronan listened for two minutes, his red eyebrows knitting together until his eyes disappeared into his skull. He lowered the knife, looked at Victor, and spat into the shale.

“It’s just as Jethro said,” the giant reported, his tone losing all its tavern-humor, becoming hard and professional. “The Green-Grass horde didn’t come down here to raid the shires. They had an internal split three weeks back. This boy’s chief, the bastard you spitted on your lance, took four hundred lances and chased the Wind-Horn sept across the river to finish the blood-feud before the winter ice sets in.”

“And their home camp?” Victor asked.

“Six leagues upstream,” Ronan said, pointing with his blade toward the northwest. “In the gorse-hollows near the upper shallows. They left barely two hundred fighting men behind, half of ‘em old veterans with bad lungs and the other half boys who haven’t grown their first hair. But they have twelve hundred of the Wind-Horn captives penned in the willow-brakes. Women. Children. Three thousand head of breeding sheep and nearly four thousand horses.”

Ronan wiped his bloody cleaver against his buffalo-vest, his small blue eyes gleaming with greed.

“We mount up now, Victor,” the giant urged, leaning closer, his breath hot with ale and onions. “We take Jocelyn’s sixty lances, thirty of my mountain lads, and fifty of Jethro’s veterans. We ride through the night along the river-terrace. We hit their camp at first light while they’re still boiling their morning tea. We kill the two hundred guards, take the horses, take the sheep, and we have four thousand head of meat before the snow flies!”

Victor looked at the forty wounded men sitting on the rocks. He looked at Jocelyn, who was vomiting into a thistle-patch fifty paces away, and at his four hundred infantrymen whose boots were wet and whose bellies were empty.

“No,” Victor said.

Ronan’s jaw dropped, his face turning the color of raw beef. “No? Victor, are you blind? Four thousand horses! That’s three times what your father has in the entire home barony!”

“And who drives four thousand wild steppe-horses across six leagues of tundra without six hundred mounted men who know how to use a lariat?” Victor asked, cutting through the giant’s rage like cold steel. “If we hit that camp tonight, the guards will scatter the herds into the scrub before our lances clear the ditch. We’ll be chasing two-year-old mares through the bogs until midwinter while my pikes starve on the beach.”

Victor reached down, picked up his leather measuring-gauge from the saddle-bag, and pointed it toward the bluff.

“We take the old redoubt tomorrow,” Victor said. “We clear the ruins of Barrow-Fork. We build the palisade, secure the well, and get our four hundred infantry behind deep ditches where no nomad horse can touch them. We wait for Soroush’s two hundred mountain cavalry to arrive from the Red Ford. When they hit the shingle, we have three hundred and fifty light horse and four hundred pikes. Then, and only then, we cross the river and take the Green-Grass camp whole.”

Ronan stared at him for five seconds, his fists clenching and unclenching, before he let out a long, disgusted snort that blew dust off the rocks.

“You’re a cold bastard, Victor,” Ronan growled, though he shoved his cleaver back into its leather loop. “A cold bastard.”

“I’m an alive bastard, Uncle,” Victor said, swinging up onto his gelding. “Get the fires lit. Butcher the dead ponies. Tomorrow we start digging.”