How to Build a Lordship in One Bad Winter - The Gathering Dust

Michael hit the ground before the gelding did, his mouth black with road-dust.

The gelding stood above him with its head between its knees, flanks heaving like a blacksmith’s bellows with a cracked leather belly, thick ropes of grey, bloody mucus stringing from both nostrils.

“Get… get water,” Michael croaked, his mouth black with road-dust, his tongue swollen so large he could barely work it past his front teeth. He clawed at the gravel with fingers that had worn straight through the fingertips of his buckskin mittens. “Not the ditch-slop. Well-water. Cold. The beast… the beast ran four hours without a blow.”

Victor was already down the timber steps of the west blockhouse before the second sentry could drop his spear-butt. He didn’t look at the horse; he caught Michael under the armpits, hauling the nineteen-year-old outrider upright with a single lift that set the boy’s leather buckles rattling.

“Talk,” Victor commanded.

“The north bank,” Michael wheezed, his eyes rolling back until the red-veined whites caught the pale noon sun. He reached into his coat with shaking fingers, pulled out a strip of birch-bark that had been charred along both edges, and shoved it against Victor’s chest. “They’re through the willow-gaps, my Lord. Not thirty riders. Not fifty. The prairie… the whole damn horizon looks like an overturned anthill.”

Stellan came trotting across the bailey, carrying a wooden canteen of small beer and a clean linen cloth. He shoved the spout into Michael’s mouth, clamped his leathery thumb over the boy’s chin to keep him from choking on the swill, and looked past Victor’s shoulder toward the northern skyline.

“How many banners?” the old sergeant asked, his voice a low, gravelly rasp he used when counting dead horses after a charge.

“No banners,” Michael gasped, coughing up a mouthful of beer and yellow phlegm. “Horse-tails. Black horse-tails tied to nine-foot ash-poles. And wolf-skulls. Three miles wide, Sergeant. They’re moving four deep, trailing strings of unbroken steppe-ponies behind every saddle. The dust… you can see the dust rising above the spruce-tops five leagues back.”

Victor walked to the brow of the timber rampart, jumped onto an empty meal-cask, and looked north across the swollen, brown torrent of the Huchen.

The False Thaw had finished its work. The great ice-sheets that had choked the river in February were gone, tumbled into the sea or melted into the brown mud that coated the river-benches. Across the water, the northern prairie stretched away toward the interior, an endless, rolling carpet of bleached yellow sedge and dwarf willow that was now beginning to show thin, greasy patches of pale green where the spring shoots were fighting through the permafrost.

And there, six miles to the north-northwest, the sky was dirty.

It wasn’t a rain-cloud. Rain in the northern riding came from the mountains in slate-grey curtains that smelled of wet slate and ozone; this was a thick, yellow-brown smudge that clung to the grass-tops like chimney-soot. Beneath the smudge, shimmering in the heat-haze that rose from the thawing clay, a dark, undulating line moved southward with the terrifying, slow momentum of an encroaching tide.

Ten thousand horsemen. The vanguard of the Bone-Wolf and Blood-Horn confederacies.

Behind Victor, the stone yard of Barrow-Fork went completely, unnaturally quiet.

The hammers had stopped in the saw-pits. The four teams of Fell-Cress draft-horses hauling teak-timbers up the gravel ramp stood motionless in their traces, their breath puffing in faint white wisps, while their drivers—conscripts from the eastern valley who had spent their childhoods hoeing beans—turned their hollow, dust-streaked faces toward the river with the blank, paralyzed dread of sheep watching a wolf clear the hurdle.

“They’re coming fast,” Ronan rumbled, lumbering up the rampart with his short cavalry axe balanced across his shoulder. The giant was chewing on a dried mutton-strip, but his small blue eyes were narrowed until they were almost invisible beneath his tangled ginger brows. “No baggage-carts. Just pack-ponies and parched grain. If they hit the gravel-bars at the lower bend, they’ll be on our ditch before the third watch.”

“They won’t hit our ditch today,” Victor said, his voice level, devoid of drama, carrying that cold, instructional cadence he used when balancing grain-ledgers in the counting-house. “Look at the towers.”

Three miles out, spaced across the northern river-terrace like the teeth of a broken saw, ten squat, square silhouettes stood against the yellow prairie.

They were not timber blockhouses. When Victor had ordered the perimeter fortified back in October, he had refused to use the light spruce logs that common border-knights favored. Master Hal’s masons had built them of double-coursed river-boulders, mortared with the grey, stone-hard hydraulic cement Victor had burned in the brick-kilns, reinforced at the corners with iron-tie rods forged from the nodule-alloy. Each tower was thirty feet high, ten paces square at the base, its walls two feet thick, pierced by narrow, vertical loops designed specifically for the steel prods of the Leyne crossbows.

Above the roof-platform of Tower Seven, five miles out along the Little West crossing, a thick pillar of greasy black smoke erupted into the pale spring sky.

One plume. Then, two miles to the east, Tower Six answered with another. Within four minutes, all ten forward towers were throwing dense, black columns of burned pitch-pine vapor into the wind, the signal for general engagement.

“Ten men in each,” Jocelyn murmured, walking up the catwalk with his arming sword sheathed at his hip. The young nobleman looked pale beneath his tan, his hand resting on the pommel of his blade with a nervous, white-knuckled twitch. “Victor… that’s a hundred of our best veterans out there. We’re leaving them in the mud? Ten men against ten thousand?”

“They have sixty sacks of parched peas in each cellar,” Victor said, not turning his head. “Three barrels of salted water. Two hundred bolts per prod. The doors are three-inch white hornbeam, sheathed in nodule-iron plates, bolted from the inside with three iron bars. A horse doesn’t climb a cement wall, Jocelyn. An arrow doesn’t pierce two feet of lime-mortared river-rock.”

“They’ll surround them,” Jocelyn insisted, his voice rising half an octave. “They’ll cut the wells!”

“The wells are inside the foundations, forty feet into the river-gravel,” Victor replied coldly. “Those towers aren’t built to be relieved, Jocelyn. They’re built to be an obstacle. A horse-army that moves without a supply-train cannot leave ten stone redoubts sitting on its flank and rear. If the Khan ignores them, the garrisons come out at night with recurve bows and hamstring his pack-ponies in the scrub. If he attacks them, he has to dismount his warriors and assault an iron-plated loophole with his bare hands.”

The first collision happened two hours past noon.

From the high watch-platform of Barrow-Fork, Victor watched through his brass spyglass as a dense swarm of four thousand light horsemen broke from the northern willow-scrub, fanning out like black hornets across the gravel flats. They rode low on their ponies’ withers, screaming their high, nasal clan-shrieks, their short bows working with that terrifying, rhythmic speed that had broken the Duke’s household guard at Lawoc.

They hit Tower Four first.

The nomads circled the square stone base at thirty yards, a swirling vortex of horsehair and wolf-pelts, raining thousands of light reed-shafts against the masonry. The arrows made a sound like a hailstorm hitting an iron kettle, *tink-tink-clatter*, shattering their bone points against the grey cement, skipping harmlessly off the sloped boulder-wash.

Then the tower spoke.

From the narrow, horizontal slits near the second-story floor-timbers, eight steel-prodded crossbows loosed in unison.

At thirty paces, the four-ounce square quarrels did not wound; they slaughtered. The heavy iron bolts punched through the bull-hide shields, through the laminated horn-cuirasses, through the ribcages of horses and men alike, pinning riders to their saddle-trees with concussive, bone-splintering thuds. A pony took a quarrel through the center of its chest, flipped headfirst in a spraying shower of mud, and catapulted its rider against the stone base of the tower with an iron rattle that Victor could almost hear across three miles of open air.

The horde tried to rush the timber door.

Thirty dismounted warriors, their long sheepskin coats trailing in the slush, dragged a twenty-foot spruce log toward the threshold, using it as a battering-ram.

They reached the door-recess.

From an overhanging machicolation carved into the concrete corbels above the lintel, a shower of boiling quicklime-water and hot sunflower-sludge dropped straight down onto their bare necks. The screaming was thin, shrill, cutting through the roar of the wind like a child’s whistle. Men dropped the log, clawing at their own faces as the caustic lye ate through their eyelids and nasal passages, rolling in the thistle-scrub until two bolts from the lower loopholes finished them.

For three days, the plains north of the Huchen became a slaughter-pen.

The Great Khan’s vanguard—accustomed to sweeping through nomadic grazing-lands where tribes fled or died in the open—found themselves pinned against a grid of ten stone stakes that refused to bleed. They could not cross the river. Whenever a detachment of five hundred horsemen attempted to ford the shallows between Tower Three and Tower Four, the crossbowmen on the high platforms cranked their windlasses, dropping heavy, armor-piercing shafts into the flanks of the swimming mounts until the brown current turned pink with horse-blood.

On the second night, Tower Nine went dark.

Victor stood on the ramparts of Barrow-Fork, watching the distant orange glow against the northern clouds. The nomads had dragged hundreds of bundles of dry gorse and dead willow-boughs to the base of the walls, packing the brush ten feet high against the loopholes, and ignited the pyre with seal-fat. The fire had burned for six hours, the heat so intense that the limestone boulders had cracked with loud, concussive pops.

Yet even as the timber roof-beams collapsed into the interior in a geyser of white sparks, the garrison did not surrender.

Corporal Hob, a three-year veteran from the Dour-Strand press-gangs, waited until fifty nomads had scaled the ruined corbels with rawhide grappling-hooks. Then he threw a burning pine-splinter into the two casks of pitch-pine turpentine and unslaked lime that Victor had walled into the cellar-vault.

The explosion did not sound like thunder. It sounded like an iron door being slammed shut by an angry giant.

A brilliant, white-orange flash illuminated the river-flats for five miles in every direction. The twenty-foot concrete tower disintegrated upward and outward, throwing three thousand tons of razor-sharp limestone shards through the ranks of the dismounted warriors like an enormous canister-charge. When the smoke cleared in the morning mist, there was no tower; there was only a twelve-foot crater filled with blackened stones and the mangled, shredded corpses of two hundred steppe-fighters.

By the morning of the fourth day, the last tower, Tower One, near the coastal marshes, fell silent.

The garrison had loosed fourteen hundred bolts, killed three hundred horses, and held two full clan-regiments in the mud for seventy-two hours. When the last bolt was spent, the surviving four men had smashed their crossbow-prods against the wall, overturned their water-casks, and died in the doorway with short arming-swords in their fists.

They had bought three days.

Seventy-two hours of life, paid for in seventy-two hours of blood and burned lime.

Victor stood on the catwalk of Barrow-Fork, his arms folded across his brigandine, watching the yellow dust-pall settle over the ruins of the outpost-line. His face was grey, hollowed by three nights without sleep, his fingers blackened to the knuckles with charcoal and the bitter ink of his deployment-orders.

Beside him, Jethro Cleave was leaning on his notched broadsword, his scarred jaw set so hard that the muscle stood out like a walnuts beneath his stubble.

“They’re through the screen, my Lord,” the hedge-knight said, his voice stripped of feeling. “Ten thousand lances. They’ve rounded up their dead, cut the meat off their fallen horses, and they’re forming on the northern gravel-flats. They’ll be at the river-mouth before the sun touches the yard-arm.”

Victor didn’t flinch. He reached down, caught his leather measuring-gauge from his belt, and tapped it once against the rough timber of the rail.

“They bought the time, Jethro,” Victor said.

He turned around, looking down into the sprawling, churning expanse of the home-bailey.

Ten thousand people were moving. Every woman who could swing an iron mattock, every boy over ten years old, every conscript who could hold a spade was standing in the three-mile arc of trenches that encircled the hill of Barrow-Fork.

The screen had fallen.

Now the wolves would see what kind of ditch the sheep had dug.