How to Build a Lordship in One Bad Winter - The Charge of the Black Masts

Jethro Cleave stood by the pommel of his roan charger behind the timber revetment, his thumb testing the wire-bound grip of his five-foot spear.

Jethro Cleave stood by the pommel of his roan charger behind the timber revetment of the second ditch, his thumb testing the wire-bound grip of his five-foot broadsword. The steel was cold, cold enough to draw sweat from his palm through his pigskin gauntlet, but his eyes were fixed on the black fog fifty paces ahead where the fire-dragon was beginning to drown.

The nomads had stopped running from the flames.

They were not soft central-valley militias that broke when their boots got hot; they were the Iron-Horns and the Bone-Wolves, men whose grandfathers had burned out whole shires during the barbarian clearances eighty years ago. Across the northern lip of the ditch, two thousand dismounted warriors were working with the frantic, rhythmic fury of ants rebuilding a crushed hill.

They were dragging the earth forward.

They had stripped the willow-hurdles from their own baggage-pens, packing them with wet river-silt, dead ponies, and the bloating corpses of their own vanguard, throwing five-hundred-pound fascines into the burning tar with heavy, splashing thuds. Where the pitch-fire was hottest, fifty steppe-fighters would charge into the flame carrying a six-inch spruce log, drop it into the boiling sludge, and die in their boots while twenty more men threw shovels of wet river-clay over their burning shoulders.

They were building three bridges of meat and mud across the fire.

“They’re bridging the center,” Jethro said, his voice quiet and flat that always made his sergeants look at their own cinch-straps.

Beside him, fifty horsemen sat their mounts in absolute, terrifying silence.

They were not the light provincial scouts Victor had led out of the eastern hundreds. They were the Fifty, the Iron Knights of Barrow-Fork. Every man was strapped into a full cuirass of boiled iron-bark, harvested from the northern border-groves and shaped over charcoal-hearths into overlapping plates that gleamed with the dull, greasy black sheen of wet coal. Over the bark plates hung surcoats of coarse, walnut-dyed wool bearing the Gold-Tallow sunflower, their legs encased in greaves of cold-hammered nodule-steel that had been quenched in sunflower-fat to turn the rust.

Under their saddles surged the heavy mountain crosses from Fell-Cress, seventeen-hand brute beasts with chests like beer-butts and hocks thick enough to anchor a dray-wagon. The horses wore no iron plate; they carried chamfrons of hardened iron-bark strapped across their foreheads, their chests protected by double layers of boiled bull-hide that weighed barely twenty pounds.

They were light. They were fast. And their beasts had been fed on parched barley and beer-mash for four months while the infantry had tightened their belts.

Ronan came slouching down the reverse slope, his great black stallion throwing up clods of red marl with every stride. The giant had discarded his scabbard; he carried his four-foot cavalry cleaver across his shoulder like a woodman carrying an axe, his unlaced hauberk rustling against the buffalo-hide vest that smelled of old blood and tobacco.

“The second ditch is weeping, Jethro,” Ronan rumbled, reining his stallion in until the animal’s foam-flecked muzzle nearly brushed the knight’s shoulder. “That scarred bastard with the red horsehair standard has three hundred dismounted axemen through the smoke on the left pivot. They’ve laid eight hurdles across the caltrops and they’re hacking through Stellan’s willow-stakes with two-handed bills.”

“I see them,” Jethro said.

“Victor says no,” Ronan grunted, spitting a string of sinew into the ditch. “The boy wants us to wait until the third ditch fills with the second wave. He says the geometry is better if we let their center extend another forty paces.”

Jethro turned his scarred face toward the giant, his dark, deep-set eyes cold as ditch-ice under his conical iron sallet. “Tell the boy that forty paces in this mud means Stellan gets his gizzard split by an ash-pole. If the stakes go, the pikes have no flank. I’m not losing my fifty lads because an eighteen-year-old clerk wants his arithmetic neat.”

The hedge-knight swung his right leg over the cantle and settled into his wooden saddle-tree with a dry, leathery creak. His boots found the heavy iron stirrups, the rowels clicking against the flank-leathers.

He did not draw his broadsword. He took his lance from the bucket, not the fragile, hollow spruce pole of the tournament-tilts, but twelve feet of solid, cured white hornbeam, thick as a man’s forearm, tipped with an eight-inch four-sided bodkin head of nodule-steel that had been cold-hammered until the metal showed that greasy, pewter-white shine.

“Fifty lances,” Jethro commanded, his voice barely rising above the dull rumble of the fire. “Form wedge. Half-distance. Ronan, take the left shoulder. If my point breaks, you take the standard.”

“I’ll take his standard and his liver,” Ronan grinned, his teeth showing white through the red brush of his beard. He shifted his cleaver to his right hand, his left fist gathering the four-ply leather reins of his black stallion with a casual, terrifying ease.

The fifty Iron Knights drew their hornbeam shafts from the boot-buckets.

There were no trumpets. There were no heralds crying lineage.

There was only the dry, metallic snick-clack of fifty lances dropping from the carry to the level, their ash butts seating into the heavy leather arrestor-cups bolted to their saddle-bows.

A hundred yards ahead, the center breach erupted into sight.

Through the roiling, yellow smoke-wall of the burning pitch-ditch, fifty dismounted steppe-warriors burst onto the gravel bench. They were the Wolf Guards, the personal retinue of the Great Khan’s third son, hulking, broad-shouldered men dressed in triple-layered coats of cured horsehide sewn with bronze rings, swinging four-foot curved cleavers with both hands. Behind them came two hundred more, dragging bundles of brush and dead ponies to widen the road through the fire.

They saw the fifty black-armored horsemen sitting motionless in the mud and raised their blades with a harsh, barking shout: “Khor-tash! Khor-tash! Ride the sheep!”

Jethro Cleave touched his rowels to the roan’s ribs.

“Forward,” the knight said.

The fifty horses did not explode into a gallop. In that heavy, thawing marl, a gallop was suicide; an animal would blow its wind in eighty paces or throw a shoe in the gravel. They started at a slow, measured, bone-crushing trot, sixteen miles per hour, knees brushing, stirrups locked rim-to-rim, two hundred iron-shod hooves striking the clay in a single, thunderous cadence: thump-thump-thump-thump.

The ground began to shake.

It was not the loose, skipping vibration of light steppe-ponies; it was the rhythmic, concussive hydraulic shock of forty tons of horseflesh and iron-bark moving in an unbroken, wedge-shaped mass.

At forty paces, Jethro leaned his chest against his horse’s neck, the hornbeam lance tucked tight beneath his right armpit, his eyes narrowing to the narrow cross-slit of his visor.

The lead Wolf Guard, a man six feet tall with an iron torc around his neck and a notched two-handed cleaver raised above his shoulder, braced his boots in the red mud, his teeth bared in an animal snarl as he prepared to leap beneath the horse’s breast-collar and hamstring the mount.

He never swung.

Jethro’s eight-inch nodule point took the warrior squarely in the center of his chest.

The impact was not a puncture; it was a physical erasure.

The four-sided bodkin head punched through the bronze rings, through the three layers of cured horsehide, through the sternum, through the spine, and burst out of the man’s back in a spray of bone-chips and lung-marrow. The momentum of seventeen hands of mountain charger did not check for an instant; the fifteen-stone warrior was carried backward off his boots, skewered on the hornbeam shaft like a sparrow on a roasting-spit, his body slammed into the two men behind him with a concussive crunch that pulverized three ribcages in the same heartbeat.

The hornbeam shaft did not snap. It was cured mountain wood, reinforced with an iron tie-rod through its core; it held the load until Jethro twisted his wrist, dumping the three mangled corpses into the mud as the wedge ploughed through the gap.

To his left, Ronan was an engine of butcher-work.

The giant did not use a lance; he leaned from his saddle, his black stallion trampling men into the ditch-clay while his four-foot cleaver rose and fell with the rhythmic, mechanical efficiency of a water-powered trip-hammer. A steppe-fighter tried to thrust an ash-bill into the stallion’s chest, but the point skated off the curved iron-bark chamfron, throwing sparks into the mud. Ronan’s return strike took the man through the left collarbone, splitting the ribcage to the fourth vertebra with a sound like a wet hide being ripped down the seam.

The fifty Iron Knights hit the breach like an iron drawbridge dropped into a sheep-pen.

The dismounted Wolf Guards were crushed beneath the horses’ knees before their cleavers could find a tendon. The lightweight iron-bark armor proved its terrible genius; when a nomad’s heavy curved blade struck a knight’s cuirass, the laminated bark did not dent or split like soft iron plate. It absorbed the shock with a dull, wooden thump, the greasy whale-tallow coating deflecting the edge, leaving the rider uninjured and the horse fresh.

“Through them!” Jethro roared through his visor, his voice muffled by the steel slits. “Don’t halt! Carry the ditch!”

The fifty horses did not turn to skirmish. They drove straight across the mud-bridges, their hooves trampling the burning fascines and the dead men into the boiling tar, bursting through the smoke-wall onto the open gravel-flats beyond.

Before them lay the northern flank.

Two thousand light horsemen of the Blood-Horn clan were sitting their mounts in an open crescent, watching the smoke, waiting for their shock-troops to widen the road. They were unarmored, their bows resting unstrung across their thighs, their formations loose, completely unprepared for fifty tons of black-armored fury to emerge from the very fire that was supposed to protect their crossing.

Jethro drew his five-foot broadsword with his right hand, the steel clearing the leather with a dry, singing shriek that rose above the crackle of the pitch.

“Charge,” the knight whispered.

The fifty chargers leaped from the trot into a dead gallop.

The distance was eighty paces.

The collision was not a fight; it was a harvest.

The light steppe-ponies—exhausted from three weeks on willow-bark, their lungs burning from the sulfur smoke—could not stand against the shock of the mountain chargers. Jethro’s roan slammed its chest into the flank of a nomad sergeant’s mount, knocking the smaller beast sideways into the gravel with a sickening roll that snapped the pony’s spine and crushed the rider’s thighs beneath forty stone of dead weight. Jethro leaned down, his broadsword whistling through the yellow sunlight, and took the head off a second rider before the man could clear his recurve bow from its otter-skin case.

The fifty Iron Knights rode through the crescent like an iron ploughshare through wet turf.

They did not wheel. They did not circle. They kept their knees locked, their files dress-straight, their heavy broadswords rising and falling in unison, cutting a thirty-yard furrow of mangled flesh, severed limbs, and dying mounts straight through the center of the Blood-Horn array.

A young warrior with three braids tried to drive an iron bodkin through Jethro’s thigh, but the point caught on the cold-hammered nodule-steel greave, skidding harmlessly across the pewter-colored metal with a dry shriek that left only a white scratch. Jethro’s counter-stroke took the boy across the throat, the heavy edge shearing through neck-tendons and leather gorget until the blade grated against the shoulder-bone.

“They’re breaking!” someone yelled. Ronan, his red beard plastered to his cheeks with black arterial blood, his black charger trampling an unhorsed standard-bearer into the gravel. “The wolves are running!”

The remaining fifteen hundred nomad horsemen didn’t wait to test the steel of the second rank.

They wrenched their ponies’ heads around, kicking their flanks with their heels, and scrambled wildly back toward the deep channel of the Huchen, abandoning their wounded, their baggage-mules, and the three bridges of meat they had spent six hours building across the ditch.

“Hold your reins!” Jethro roared, his horse spinning as he hauled back on the curb until the bit foamed pink with spit. “Halt the troop! Do not follow into the river!”

The fifty knights pulled up fifty rods from the water’s edge.

Their horses were heaving, their nostrils red and flared, but their hocks were sound, their armor unbroken, and their lines straight. Behind them, two miles of mud and burning pitch were choked with four hundred dead men and sixty screaming horses that were dying in the red clay.

Jethro pulled his visor up, his scarred cheek twitching with that slow, sarcastic half-grimace.

The air smelled of salt-wind, burned sunflower-fat, and the clean, iron stench of blood that had not yet gone cold.

He looked back toward the high ramparts of Barrow-Fork.

On the south bastion, five hundred rods away, Victor Gold-Tallow was still standing by the central ballista, his hand resting flat on the timber frame, his dark coat motionless against the grey stone of the wall.

He had not moved an inch.

Jethro wiped his broadsword on his horse’s mane, slid the notched steel back into its twine-bound scabbard, and turned his roan back toward the smoking ditch.

“Form line of four,” Jethro told his sergeants, his voice dry as sand. “Walk the mounts out. We have thirty more miles of river to watch before the sun goes down.”