How to Build a Lordship in One Bad Winter - The Price of Treason
Jethro Cleave stood beside him on the bluff, his arming doublet unbuttoned despite the freezing gale.
Victor stood on the highest point of the basalt bluff above Salt-Mooring, sixty feet above the boiling surf, his hands jammed deep into his pockets to keep the salt-wind from stiffening his knuckles. Below him, the sea was an endless, rolling expanse of dark slate-grey, streaked with white ribbons of froth where the tide fought the river-bar, the four great cogs of the Gouen Chamber already weighing their four-fluked anchors, their timber capstans groaning under the chants of thirty foreign deck-hands.
Beside him stood Jethro Cleave, his arming doublet unbuttoned at the throat despite the freezing gale, his unbandaged left hand resting on the hilt of his heavy broadsword.
“They’re leaving fast,” Jethro remarked, spitting a dark clump of wild dock-juice into the wind. “The fat one didn’t even wait for the midnight slack-water. Hauled his fat carcass up the ladder of that lead cog like the devil was reaching for his breeches.”
“The fat one has twelve hundred leagues of sea-patrol to worry about,” Victor replied, his eyes fixed on the lead ship’s square-rigging as the heavy canvas dropped from the yards with a series of wet, booming thuds. “If the Maritime League’s galleys catch those cogs thirty miles off the cape with four thousand crowns’ worth of military contraband missing from their cargo-rolls, Theobald will spend the rest of his life rowing on an imperial sweep-bench.”
“And us?” Jethro turned his scarred face toward his young master, his dark eyes squinting through the salt-haze. “What do we spend our lives doing, Victor? We just took two hundred royal crossbows and a hundred suits of border-bark armor from a foreign spy. In the Shire, they hang a man on a gibbet for having two yards of King’s wool in his tailor-shop.”
Victor reached into his haversack, pulled out a small, flat nodule of the Dun-Dour iron, and turned it over slowly between his thumb and forefinger.
“In the Shire, Jethro, men have walls,” Victor said. “They have stone churches that were mortared when my great-grandfather was a babe, and they have three thousand neighbors who will bring their billhooks to the ditch if a strange horseman rides across the rye. Here, we have twenty leagues of peat-bog, twelve thousand wild sheep, and four hundred infantrymen who don’t know whether they’re going to die of the lung-rot or an arrow through the neck before the winter ice breaks.”
Victor threw the iron nodule off the cliff. It fell sixty feet into the foam with a tiny, silent splash that was swallowed instantly by the roar of the surf.
“A man who’s drowning doesn’t ask who threw the rope, Jethro. He catches the hemp, pulls himself onto the rocks, and then he checks to see if the fellow on the bank has a club behind his back.”
“And does he?”
“Always,” Victor said coldly. “Theobald has a club three feet long. It’s called the High Realm of Leyne. But right now, his King needs this river-mouth more than I need his blessings. Stellan!”
The old sergeant appeared from the scrub-gully behind the bluff, his kettle-hat pulled low, his buff-coat spattered with wet mud from the drainage ditches. “Sir?”
“The fir chests in the fourth storeroom,” Victor said, turning back toward the land. “How many have been moved?”
“All twelve, my Lord,” Stellan reported, in a low, conspiratorial rasp. “We used six dray-wagons with the muffled axles. Moved ‘em while the fat merchant’s sailors were down at the landing hauling the salt-pork. We didn’t take them to the central redoubt.”
“Where are they?”
“In the old limestone cellar two miles west,” Stellan said, jerking a thumb toward the low hills of Red-Clay Ridge. “The one we found behind the brick-kiln. Four feet of stone overhead, three feet of dry gravel under the floor-timbers, and we walled the entry-arch up with green turf and brush-piles. A man could walk within three paces of the opening and think it was nothing more than an old badger-den.”
Victor nodded, his mind filing the coordinate away into the internal ledger. “Good. The bows stay in the grease until the first frost sets the river-ice. No drill with the steel prods. If one of my weavers is seen by an outrider carrying a sixteen-pound arbalest with a royal blued prod, the word will be in Northwind City before the week is out.”
He looked at Jethro.
“The armor is yours,” Victor told the hedge-knight.
Jethro’s fingers twitched against his scabbard. “The iron-bark?”
“One hundred suits,” Victor said. “You take your twenty veterans from the Lawoc retreat. You take fifty of the strongest lads from the second conscript-platoon, the ones who didn’t lose their nerve when the Green-Grass horse charged down the shingle. You fit the scales to their ribs yourself. If a strap is loose, you use an iron punch; if a shoulder-plate bites the neck, you trim the bark with a draw-knife. You drill them at dawn in the hidden gully behind the redoubt. No flags. No trumpets. I want eighty heavy infantry who can move in that bark without making more noise than a dry leaf falling on moss.”
“Shock troops,” Jethro murmured, his eyes glowing with an old, professional hunger that years of poverty hadn’t quite starved out. “Real shock foot. A line of men in that bark with six-foot halberds can walk straight through an arrow-storm, Victor. The bone-points from the steppe-bows will glance off those scales like peas off an iron kettle.”
“They’d better,” Victor said. “Because when John Iron-Bark comes down this valley, he won’t be bringing eighty half-starved nomads on spotted ponies. He’ll be bringing two regiments of mounted border-irregulars who know every trick in the northern book.”
A sharp, whistling hail came up from the beach below.
It was Michael, running up the shale-track on his short peasant legs, his leather jack unbuttoned, his hand holding an unsealed leather pouch that was dripping with fresh river-mud.
“My Lord Baron!” the young outrider gasped, his boots sliding four inches into the chalk-scree as he reached the crest. “From… from the south! An express-rider from Dour-Strand! He took three remounts through the Gap and nearly killed his third horse at the Little East crossing!”
Victor took the pouch, cut the hemp binding with his thumb-knife, and pulled out a single sheet of coarse, grey marsh-reed paper.
It was his father’s hand, but it was not the steady, impatient scrawl of the estate ledgers. The ink was smeared, the letters shaky, written with a dry quill that had scratched through the fiber in three places:
Victor,
The Duke has struck.
Three days after the Assumption, Morra issued the Great Proscription from the stone palace. He has declared all treaties signed by his late brother null and void. The eastern shires are designated as ‘contumacious provinces.’ He has revoked the baronial charter of House Green-Oak; old Thorn’s two boys were arrested at the third bridge and are currently in the ditch-prison at Lawoc, awaiting trial for treason.
The old Earl, your grandfather Black-Oak, is dead. A stroke of the apoplexy when the royal bailiffs entered his courtyard to inventory his plate. His estates are divided between two of the Margrave’s western captains.
Our turn is coming, boy. The tax-assessors have already reached Dun-Dour. They demand fourteen hundred gold crowns from the Gold-Tallow treasury as our ‘rebellion indemnity,’ plus the immediate surrender of our light cavalry troop to the new royal guard. I have two hundred pikes at the river-gates, but the neighbors are smelling the smoke. Baron Walker of Black-Pine has already pulled his caravans back from our borders; he won’t look me in the eye when we pass in the market.
The home estates are dying, Victor. If Morra moves his northern regiments across the Dour, I cannot hold Stone-Garth for thirty days without burning our own granaries. Build your ditches. Plant your pikes. If the sky falls in the south, I am putting your mother, the little ones, and every bushel of seed-grain we have left onto the spring barges and coming north to die on your beach.
Hold the mouth, Victor. Hold the mouth, or our name is just ash in the wind.
Victor folded the paper.
He folded it once. Twice. Four times, until it was a small, tight square of grey fiber no larger than a gold crown. He pulled his leather purse from his belt, dropped the paper inside next to the heavy iron signet of his house, and pulled the drawstrings tight.
The wind off the sea had stiffened into a steady, freezing roar that tore the breath from his nostrils.
Out on the water, the four great cogs of the Gouen Chamber had cleared the reefs, their dark square-sails filled with the northern gale, their black hulls leaning fifteen degrees into the chop as they raced southwest across the center of the God’s Tear, carrying his treason and his contract toward the King’s city.
Behind him, on the high prairie of Barrow-Fork, five hundred grey-coated infantrymen were swinging their shovels in the red mud, their ash-pikes planted in the turf like a forest of needles, their voices rising in the rhythmic, brutal chant of the ditch-drill:
Straw-foot. Skin-foot. One. Two.
Victor looked at Jethro, then at Stellan, his face as empty of fear or doubt as the limestone beneath his boots.
“Tell the cooks to double the meal-rations tonight,” Baron Victor Gold-Tallow said, his voice cutting through the gale like a dry razor. “Every man gets four ounces of salt-pork and a cup of small beer. Tomorrow morning, we start digging the second canal.”
He turned his back on the sea, walked down the basalt ridge into the cold, gathering dusk, and did not look back at the south again.