How to Build a Lordship in One Bad Winter - An Iron Scythe

Victor hauled the gelding up the spine of the scree-bank, both spurs biting hard into flanks already lathered with white, salt-foul grease. Gravel sprayed from beneath the iron-shod hooves. Behind him, forty horses fought the loose slope, their lungs rattling like dry hides dragged over gravel. Stellan swore at a stumbling remount, his cavalry axe swinging loose from his wrist-loop, while Jocelyn hung over his pommel, gagging on the dust that hung thick as ditch-silt in the midday swelter.

They reached the crest where the limestone broke through the scrub like broken teeth.

Below them, five miles of open river-terrace lay flattened under the blinding, merciless sun. The River Dour curved around it like an oily brown intestine, wide and sluggish, its muddy banks choked with duckweed and the sunken hulls of burned supply-barges. But Victor was not looking at the water.

He was looking at the butcher’s block.

Duke Jorah’s central array, the pride of the central shires, three ducal regiments of royal guardsmen backed by forty field battalions of provincial foot, was no longer an army. It was a dying beast pinned in the mud, thrashing without a head. Through the yellow glare of the dust-pall, Victor watched two dense wedges of black-armored horsemen carve into the flank of the grand pavilion.

They moved with none of the fluttering silk and horn-blaring pomp of eastern chivalry. There were no heralds crying lineage, no pennants dancing on twelve-foot lances. There was only an iron wedge, blunt-nosed and terrible, moving at the full, bone-shattering trot of beasts that knew no exhaustion. Two thousand horsemen, every rider strapped into layered cuirasses of boiled iron-bark that gleamed with the greasy black sheen of wet pitch. Beneath them surged the northern steppe-chargers, short-backed, thick-throated brute beasts with heads like wooden mallets, their muzzles dripping bloody foam where their riders had dosed them with cinnabar-tare. The weed had done its work; the horses felt neither arrow-wounds nor the jagged bites of broken pikes. They slammed into the ducal line like an iron drawbridge dropped into a crowd of market-women.

“Gods in the mud,” Jocelyn whispered, his knuckles bleaching white on his braided leather reins. “That’s… that’s the Duke’s own household shield-wall. That’s the White Maple guard.”

The shield-wall did not break backward. It broke apart like rotten timber under a splitting wedge.

Victor stood high in his stirrups, ignoring the burning thrum that spiked through his temples. The Cinder behind his eyes pulsed once, cold as well-water drawn through winter frost, casting a faint, pale grid across the slaughter below. His brain drank the data without mercy: Closing speed: twenty-two feet per second. Line depth: six ranks of ash-pikes. Point of failure: left pivot. Time from impact to total array collapse: nine minutes, forty seconds.

It had not even taken ten minutes.

The northern knights did not bother to draw swords when their lances snapped on breastbones. They swung four-foot billhooks, iron-cleavers, and spiked lead flails with both hands, the reins knotted to their high saddle-bows, letting their mounts trample the screaming men into the marsh-marl. Behind them came thousands of tribal light horsemen, wild auxiliaries from the scrub-steppes, dressed in wolves’ ears and unwashed horsehair, screaming like gulls as they rode along the fringes, leaning from their short stirrups to slit the hamstrings of fleeing carters and crossbowmen.

Then the great silk banner went down.

It had stood forty feet above the grand pavilion, embroidered with the three silver maples of the ruling house, dyed with sea-purple and fringed in bullion. Victor saw a rider on a slate-grey mare gallop directly into the circle of halberdiers guarding the staff. An axe rose, glinting once in the sun. The staff snapped with a crack that Victor could almost hear across two miles of empty air.

The silk crumpled into the horse-dung.

“He’s dead,” Victor said. The words came out dry, tastes like sand. “Jorah is dead, or he’s an iron collar around Keld’s saddle-girth.”

“We have to go down,” Jocelyn shouted suddenly, his voice cracking like a green twig. He wheeled his horse, eyes bloodshot, spit flying from his lips. His hand fell to his hilt. “My brother is in the Second Brigade down there! My cousins! Victor, we’re forty horse, we can hit their trailing flank while they’re dismounted to loot—”

“Shut your fool mouth,” Victor snapped.

“I won’t leave them! My father—”

Victor didn’t draw steel. He simply threw his left fist across the gap between their mounts. His armored knuckle caught Jocelyn square on the jaw, right below the ear. The boy’s head snapped back; his stirrup slipped, and he tumbled sideways into the loose shale with an iron rattle that made the horses dance.

“Stellan,” Victor said without looking down.

“Aye, sir.”

“Throw him over his pommel if he tries to stand. If he touches his hilt again, break his wrist.”

Stellan had already dismounted, boots sliding four inches into the chalk-rubble. He planted a broad knee into Jocelyn’s breastplate, pinning the squirming nobleman to the rocks with the casual weight of a farmer holding down an unruly calf. “Stay down, Master Jocelyn. The lad is saving your pelt. Look at the gully-mouth.”

A quarter-mile below their limestone outcrop, a knot of thirty steppe-riders had detached from the carnage. They rode low on their ponies’ necks, shaggy caps pulled low over eyes like grease-spots, carrying short, sinew-backed bows resting unstrung across their thighs. They had seen the dust of Victor’s small column on the crest. They were already spreading out in a loose crescent, fanning through the gorse like sheep-dogs sent to gather stray ewes.

“They smell blood,” Victor muttered. His heart was slamming against his ribs, but his fingers remained steady as he buckled his scabbard-strap tighter against his thigh. “They aren’t going to charge up a scree-slope. They’ll shadow us until their heavy cousins finish butchering the pavilion, then herd us into the river-reed marshes.”

“Northwest?” Stellan asked, hauling Jocelyn to his feet by the leather collar of his brigandine. The young noble was weeping now, half from the blow to his ear, half from the sickening smoke rising from the plain below, but he didn’t reach for his sword again.

“Northwest,” Victor confirmed. “Along the dry creek-bed. If we ride the ridges, their ponies will run us down within the hour. In the rocks, their mounts lose their stride. Move! Double-file, loose reins, keep the remounts in the center!”

They turned their backs on the dying army.

It was an ugly ride. The limestone ravines that cut through the foothills of the western boundary were choked with briars and loose flint. Every few hundred yards, a horse would slip, steel shoe screeching on bald stone, sending heart-stopping rattles through the narrow gulch. Victor rode at the front, his teeth clenched against the cold fire creeping through his optic nerves. The Cinder was running hot, drawing down whatever salt and grease his body had stored, mapping the slope of the terrain, measuring the moisture of the creek-stones to find the firmest footing.

Behind them, the high, wolfish whoops of the steppe-riders echoed off the canyon walls.

The arrows came ten minutes later.

They weren’t the heavy, sky-darkening volleys of city militias. These were light reed-shafts tipped with triangular sheet-iron, loosed from four-foot recurve bows at full gallop. They hissed through the dogwood thickets like hornet-swarms. One shaft struck the cantle of Victor’s saddle, biting three inches into the ash-wood; another skipped off Stellan’s greasy kettle-hat with a sharp tink, leaving a bright, clean gouge in the grey iron.

A remount in the rear—a little brown mare Victor’s father had bought off an eastern carter—let out a screaming wheeze as an iron barb took her behind the rib. She crashed into the brush, thrashing and kicking her pack-girths to splinters.

“Leave her!” Victor roared over his shoulder, not slowing his gelding’s stride. “Cut the lead-rope! Don’t look back, you idiots, ride!”

A young recruit—a tenant-boy named Bran whose father leased six acres of sunflower-bottoms—fumbled with his knife, his horse lurching sideways on the river-stones. A second arrow took the boy cleanly through the throat. He didn’t scream; he made a thick, bubbling rattle, dropped his reins, and fell backward over the croup into the dry weeds. His gelding bolted into the brush, wild-eyed, trailing its reins.

“Keep moving!” Victor shouted, his voice hoarse, raw from chalk-dust. “To the stakes! Two miles to the Third Corps lines!”

They burst out of the gully onto the rolling plateau north of the battlefield. The sun was leaning toward the western ridges now, painting the trampled clover in bruised, purple shades. Two miles ahead, dark against the pale sky, rose the spiked palisade of the Eastern Reserve. Three regiments of pike-militia and two thousand provincial light horse sat behind an earthen ditch, their banners limp in the dead air. They had not moved an inch to help their prince. They were huddled behind their sharpen stakes like sheep listening to wolves outside the fold.

The steppe-riders broke from the tree-line forty rods behind, forty shaggy horsemen screeching their high, nasal hunter’s chant. Seeing the bristling perimeter of the eastern camp ahead, they did not press the charge. The leader—a man in a grease-stiffened sheepskin coat with iron rings sewn to the shoulders—pulled his pony up on a grassy knoll, stood in his short stirrups, and spat toward the ditch. He raised his bow, shook it once in a circle above his head, and turned his beast back toward the smoke of Lawoc.

Victor reined his gelding in fifty paces from the ditch. The animal was shuddering beneath his thighs, its head hanging so low its muzzle almost brushed the thistle-tops, thick ribbons of grey mucus trailing from its nostrils.

Three outriders with red-and-white pennons on their ash-spears rode out from the ditch-gate, their horses fresh, their armor free of dust.

“Halt there!” the foremost called out, his voice thin and nervous. “State your banner! The lines are closed by order of Viscount Bitter-Bamboo!”

“Sixth Troop, Third Light Outriders,” Stellan yelled back, coughing up a mouthful of grey phlegm that landed with a wet plop in the dust. “This is Victor, heir to House Gold-Tallow. Lower your damned spears before I get down and use them to scrape my horse’s hooves.”

The sentry peered through the dust, recognized the sunflower device painted on Victor’s scuffed leather buckler, and turned to wave a rag toward the redoubt. “Open the barrier! It’s the Baron’s boy! Let ‘em through the ditch!”

Victor didn’t speak. He swung his right leg over the saddle, but as his boots hit the grass, his knees buckled. A sudden, vicious wave of nausea struck him, the metabolic cost of the Cinder’s calculations draining the sugar from his blood like water through a broken bucket. He caught his horse’s stirrup-leather with both hands, leaning his forehead against the animal’s hot, sweaty shoulder until the grey spots cleared from his eyes.

“Victor?” Jocelyn was beside him, his face bruised where Victor had struck him, his lips trembling. “Are you hit?”

“I’m whole,” Victor muttered, wiping his nose with the back of his gauntlet. A thin smear of dark crimson came away on the buckskin. A nosebleed. It was getting worse every time he ran the predictive models. “Get your horse walked out. Don’t let her drink yet or she’ll colic. Stellan, count the men.”

“Thirty-one, sir,” the old sergeant said without looking round. His voice was completely flat. “Lost five mounts, two men dead in the ditch, one missing back by the willow-scrub. We’re thirty-one.”

Thirty-one out of forty-two.

Victor looked up at the great earthen ramparts of the Third Corps camp. Thousands of men were lining the trenches, staring silently south toward the pillars of oily black smoke rising from Duke Jorah’s headquarters. The air was dead, hot, and smelled of coming rot.

“Come on,” Victor said, pulling his horse’s head up by the bridle. “My father will be at the council pavilion. And he’s going to be very, very busy.”