How to Build a Lordship in One Bad Winter - The Pig in the Cabin
Theobald Sward sat on a low cargo-crate near the fire when Victor entered, his knees spread wide to accommodate a stomach like a soft wool-bale.
Victor pushed the heavy oak door shut behind him with the heel of his boot, his right hand resting flat against the pommel of his broadsword. The room was small—ten feet square, built of thick, rough-sawn larch logs that still leaked yellow resin—intended as a secure store for the customs-ledgers and the tax-scales. On the single pine table sat an unlit candle, an open bottle of dark, sour wine that smelled of vinegar, and a small iron brazier filled with glowing birch-coals that did almost nothing to cut the bone-chilling draft coming through the floorboards.
Theobald Sward sat on a low cargo-crate near the fire, his knees spread wide to accommodate a stomach that looked like an immense, soft wool-bale draped in plum-colored velvet. He had taken off his fur travel-gloves, revealing small, pink, ring-encrusted hands that he was holding two inches above the coals, his fat fingers rubbing together with a dry, whispering sound like dry husks.
“A drafty kingdom you’ve built here, Victor,” the merchant wheezed, his tenor voice smooth as warm suet despite the cold. He didn’t look up as the door clicked into its latch. “A very drafty kingdom. My shins have been numb since we cleared the southern cape, and that old pirate Jonas refused to let my servants light a charcoal pan in the cabin. Said the smoke would spoil his spare sails. An uncivilized beast, that sailor. Totally uncivilized.”
“Jonas knows that five hundred tons of flour and a runaway spark make a very fast way to drown in thirty fathoms of water, Theobald,” Victor said, walking to the table. He did not sit. He stood with his hip braced against the wood, his eyes fixed on the director’s greasy forehead. “You brought four sea-runners into my roads without an invoice. That’s smuggling in any harbor in Vaelar.”
“There is no Vaelar, my dear boy,” Theobald sighed, turning one hand over to warm the palms. “Haven’t you read your father’s letters? Duke Morra sits in the stone hall at the capital with twenty northern mercenaries standing behind his chair, signing whatever parchment Margrave Keld slides under his elbow. The southern barons haven’t paid a copper of customs-toll since the Feast of Saint Jude, and the Maritime League has three squadrons of heavy war-galleys cruising off the estuary mouths, waiting for the first sign of frost to close the shipping. The realm is a carcass, Victor. We are simply deciding who gets the tallow and who gets the hide.”
“I didn’t ask for a sermon on statecraft,” Victor said, his tone dangerous and flat. “I asked what is in the holds of those four cogs.”
Theobald smiled, a small, slow stretching of pink flesh that made his little raisin-eyes disappear into his cheeks. He reached into his coat, pulled out an iron pry-bar barely ten inches long, and tossed it onto the table between them.
“Go and look,” the fat man said. “The fourth storeroom. The one behind the salt-beef bins. My personal retainers moved twelve crates ashore while you were playing engineer with that ridiculous larch derrick.”
Victor stared at the pry-bar for two seconds. He picked it up, turned on his heel, and walked out into the cold, drafty aisle of the main warehouse.
The fourth storeroom was dark, smelling of damp lime and green wood. Two of Theobald’s grey-coated guards stood outside the padlocked door, armed with short hunting-swords and heavy horn-bows. They looked at Victor, looked at the iron signet ring on his finger, and stepped aside without a word, one of them drawing an iron key from his belt to throw the bolt.
Inside sat twelve long, narrow chests made of mountain fir, bound with cold-rolled iron straps and sealed with yellow pitch.
Victor didn’t hesitate. He wedged the tip of the pry-bar beneath the lid of the nearest box, threw his weight against the lever, and sheared the iron nails with a sharp, sharp screech of complaining metal.
The lid came away.
Inside, packed in dry oat-chaff and greased sheepskin, lay twenty steel prods.
They were not the crude, wooden-stocked hunting bows the provincial bailiffs carried. These were heavy, double-winched siege-crossbows out of the royal arsenals of Leyne, the Arbalests of the High Realm. The prods were forged from laminated steel plates three-eighths of an inch thick, cold-blued to prevent rust, fitted with bronze nuts and double-lever hair-triggers that could hold five hundred pounds of draw-weight without creeping.
Victor lifted one from the chaff.
It was heavy, nearly sixteen pounds of dense iron and seasoned walnut, cold as a glacier to the touch. Beneath the prod lay two hundred iron bolts, six inches long, tipped with solid, four-sided bodkin heads designed for one purpose: to punch through a knight’s steel breastplate at eighty paces as if it were parchment.
He opened the second crate. More bows.
He opened the third.
There, resting in grooved cedar racks, were twenty suits of armor.
They were not plate. They were sleeveless, long-skirted coats of overlapping scales, cut from the dark, oily inner bark of the Iron-Bark Mast, boiled in tallow and pinned with non-corroding bronze rivets. It was the legendary armor of the Margrave’s personal guard, the Iron Knights. A single cuirass weighed barely twelve pounds, flexible as a leather jerkin, yet tough enough to turn a broadsword strike or an iron hunting-arrow without splitting.
Victor counted the crates.
Twelve chests.
Two hundred heavy crossbows. Two thousand steel bodkin bolts. One hundred suits of Iron-Bark armor. And in the smaller boxes at the rear, four hundred curved southern horse-sabers with shark-skin grips, their blades coated in amber cosmoline.
Victor’s breath came in a slow, ragged whistle through his nose.
A common baron with this much contraband in his cellar would have been dragged to the block in the capital within three days, his estates declared forfeit, his name erased from the church-books. A single suit of Iron-Bark armor was worth forty pieces of gold on the black market; two hundred royal crossbows could arm a private regiment that could take a walled town.
He dropped the lid. The wood slammed shut with a hollow, booming bang that echoed through the empty warehouse.
Victor walked back to the inner office.
He entered, stepped past the charcoal brazier, drew his broadsword in a single, silent sweep, and laid the naked, notched steel flat across the pine table, two inches from Theobald’s fat fingers.
Then he reached out with his left hand, threw the heavy oak drop-bolt across the door-jamb, and leaned his weight against the wood.
“Explain,” Victor said.
Theobald didn’t flinch from the blade. He picked up his porcelain cup, took a slow, noisy sip of the lukewarm mint-water, and set it down precisely in the center of an oil-ring on the pine boards.
“You have a very dramatic way of greeting your business partners, Victor,” the fat man murmured. “Most young lords would have fallen on their knees and kissed the hem of my coat for fifty of those bows.”
“I’m not a young lord, Theobald,” Victor said, and the leather wrapping creaked under his grip. “I’m an independent baron holding five hundred square kilometers of border-land under a ducal charter. Those bows came out of the royal arsenal at High-Cross. The armor came out of Margrave Keld’s private armory at High-Fork. Selling either to a provincial noble without a direct warrant from the crown is high treason. Receiving them is a death-sentence. Are you trying to get my neck under an axe, you fat pig?”
“There is no axe, Victor,” Theobald said, his tenor voice dropping all its mock-politeness, becoming cold, flat, and chillingly authoritative. “And there is no treason. The High Realm of Leyne does not commit treason; we conduct policy.”
The merchant reached into his plum-colored sleeve, pulled out a small silver medallion hung from a braid of black horsehair, and laid it beside Victor’s blade.
The silver was old, dark around the edges, stamped with the image of a nightingale sitting upon an open compass.
The Nightingales, Victor thought, his mind pulling up the diplomatic intelligence files he had studied in the capital’s academies. The King of Leyne’s private foreign intelligence service. Not merchants. Spies. Political saboteurs who worked ten years ahead of the royal armies.
“You’re an officer of the crown,” Victor said, not moving the sword an inch.
“I am the senior director of the third bureau for the eastern maritime territories,” Theobald replied, leaning his round head back against the fir logs. “Gouen Chamber is a very convenient purse, Victor, but it is still a purse. The hand that pulls the strings sits in the palace at High-Cross.”
Theobald leaned forward, his small eyes fixing on Victor with an intensity that had nothing to do with buying timber or selling sunflower-grease.
“You wondered how my four cogs made the passage from the southern estuary in nine days, didn’t you?”
Victor’s eyelids narrowed slightly. “The coastal drift takes seventeen days. Even Jonas couldn’t shave more than four days off the run without riding the outer banks.”
“We didn’t ride the outer banks,” Theobald whispered, drumming a slow, rhythmic tattoo on the pine boards. “We sailed straight across the center of the God’s Tear.”
Victor’s heart skipped a single, hard beat.
The God’s Tear. The monstrous inland sea that divided the High Realm of Leyne from the Grand Duchy of Vaelar, six million square kilometers of cold, grey, treacherous water, notorious for blind currents, sudden summer gales, and underwater reefs that had swallowed hundreds of ships since the ancient separation. For three hundred years, trade between the two realms had crawled along the muddy coastal margins, taking three weeks of hazardous rowing to move a cargo of salt-pork between the east and the west.
“You found the channel,” Victor said, the realization hitting him like an iron blow to the chest.
“The royal navy charted it two summers ago,” Theobald confirmed, a thin, triumphant smile touching his lips. “A deep-water trench, eighty fathoms through the center, completely free of basalt reefs. A fast cog out of High-Cross can drop her moorings on Tuesday morning and hit your salt-piers at Salt-Mooring on Friday noon. Three days, Victor. Three days instead of three weeks.”
The fat man leaned closer, the smell of his almond-scented lavender water cutting through the tallow-smoke.
“The world is about to change, boy. When a sea becomes a highway, the old borders rot. The High Realm has thirty regular legions sitting on the western plains, but we don’t have timber. We don’t have the great larch masts from the northern spruce-forests, and we don’t have an open port on the eastern ocean. Vaelar has both. Vaelar has forty thousand square miles of unmapped timber, iron-rich marl, and an open coast that leads straight to the trade-routes of the Southern Empires.”
“So the King wants to invade,” Victor said coldly.
“The King does not want to march thirty legions through the mountain swamps to fight fifty thousand horse-barbarians,” Theobald snapped. “That is what fools do. That is what Duke Jorah did, and now his carcass is rotting in a ditch outside Lawoc. We want a bridge-head, Victor. An independent, well-fortified, allodial bridge-head that can hold its own gates, build its own ships, and feed its own infantry without asking for a single grain-chit from the council in the capital.”
Theobald reached out, tapped the cold steel of Victor’s broadsword with his ringed fingernail, and looked up into the young baron’s dark eyes.
“We want you, Victor.”
Victor did not move. In his brain, the Cinder sat silent, cold, watching the geopolitical vectors realign like iron filings around a lodestone.
Leyne’s grand strategy: not conquest, but satellite fragmentation. Break Vaelar into three manageable pieces. Let the northern Margrave take the western plains; let the southern wine-lords exhaust themselves fighting the Maritime League; and anchor an independent military province on the northern coast under the direct, secret patronage of the central crown.
“And the price?” Victor asked.
“You hold the mouth of the Huchen,” Theobald said, in a business-like murmur. “You build your timber-mills. You build your ship-slips. You clear the nomad clans from the southern banks and turn the prairie into wheat-land. When the King’s transports come across the God’s Tear, your piers are open to our keels, your warehouses hold our flour, and your pikes keep John Iron-Bark’s cavalry from sticking their noses into our freight-sheds.”
Theobald pointed with his thumb toward the outer storeroom where the twelve fir chests lay.
“The two hundred crossbows are a gift,” Theobald said. “The hundred suits of bark-armor are a gift. Alden Iron-Bark knows they are here; he personally signed the release-chits at High-Fork because he needs you to keep his brother John from taking the northern sea-gate. You are the anvil, Victor. Alden is the hammer. And the High Realm is the iron-master who owns the forge.”
Victor slowly, deliberately slid his broadsword back into its scabbard, the iron throat-plate clicking shut with a dry, final snap.
He did not smile. He did not thank the King of Leyne, and he did not drop to one knee.
“I want five thousand gold crowns in loan-credit,” Victor said, his voice hard as limestone. “Twenty years. Zero interest. Drawn against the Gouen Chamber’s branch at Northwind City.”
Theobald’s fat jaw dropped an inch. “Five thousand? Victor, you are a boy with four hundred pikes and an unroofed blockhouse—”
“I am a baron who has two hundred heavy crossbows in his storeroom and forty thousand tons of teak coming down the river,” Victor corrected him, leaning over the table until his eyes were six inches from the merchant’s nose. “I want three thousand unfree laborers shipped across the inland sea before the spring ice breaks. One thousand gifted to clear my ditch-lines; two thousand paid for at standard market-rates out of the loan-credit. And I want four more cogs assigned to my fleet for six months of every season, free of charter-hire.”
Theobald looked at him, his small raisin-eyes glittering with a mixture of terror, outrage, and profound, professional admiration.
“You are an extortionist, Victor,” the fat man whispered. “A thieving, ditch-born provincial extortionist.”
“I’m an ally, Theobald,” Victor said, reaching out to unlock the heavy door-bolt. “And in three years, I’ll be the only man between here and the sunset who can keep your King’s ships from being burned on this beach. Draw the contract. In duplicate. On mountain vellum.”
He threw the door open, letting the freezing salt-wind of the Storm Sea rush into the dark, smoky room, blowing the candle-flame flat against the grease-plate.
Outside, through the torch-smoke and the spray, the great larch derrick was swinging its third load of flour over the pierhead, its iron pawls clicking in the dark like the teeth of an oncoming century.