Blood in the Water (2 page)

Tathrin looked quickly around for Reher. Gren wasn’t joking when he advocated clearing the road by killing everyone regardless. Arest wasn’t so ready with his swords but the Wyvern Hunters would still repulse any attack, determined to be safe instead of sorry. Hapless peasants would be slaughtered.

There. Reher was marching at the rear of Evord’s personal guard, the mounted swordsmen who made up the bulk of the captain-general’s retinue. That made sense. As a blacksmith, he kept all their horses shod. Would his other talents be called for today? Tathrin fervently hoped not.

Hurrying towards Reher, he felt his armour already weighing him down. Tathrin’s leather jerkin wasn’t as heavy as Gren’s chain mail, even with the steel plates sewn into its linen lining, but its insidious weight still sapped his strength.

Wearing a sheepskin jerkin over his chain-mail hauberk, Reher showed no sign of weariness. He never did and Tathrin didn’t think that was just because the man’s black beard hid so much of his face. Reher was enormous, taller than Tathrin, who seldom had to look up to anyone, and the smith’s arms were as well muscled as most men’s thighs. Tathrin’s own shoulders had broadened considerably after spending both halves of summer and the first half of autumn being drilled in swordplay by Gren. He still felt a weakling next to Reher. But their common Carluse blood gave them a bond he valued.

They weren’t so very far from Tathrin’s own home. Could he end up fighting boys he’d challenged to skip stones across a duck pond? Would he find men who’d clipped him around the ear for teasing a chained hound at the end of his sword?

“Reher!” Once he had the smith’s attention, he lowered his voice. “There’s movement ahead. Arest wants us with him in case it’s Woodsmen.”

Reher’s dark eyes glinted. Like Tathrin and most of the rest, he was dark-haired and deeply tanned after the long summer. “Let’s see.” He handed the rein leading the mule carrying his tools and supplies to another of the retinue’s non-combatants. Surprised, the man accepted it nevertheless. People didn’t argue with Reher.

They soon reached the head of the column. Captain-General Evord wasn’t a commander to hide away at the tail of his troops. The fields gave way to rough grass dotted with thickets, too far from any village to be safely farmed. Tathrin loosened his blade in its scabbard, tension twisting his gut. This wasn’t a high road with the ground cleared for a bowshot on each side to foil bandits. Evord was marching his army along a little-used route to reach their intended foe, all the better to go undetected.

How were locals to know this mercenary army wasn’t the usual villainous rabble? It was bad enough when militiamen collected the ducal dues but they were Carluse men at least, even if they’d taken the duke’s coin to wear his boar’s head badge. Tathrin’s father had once slapped him for spitting at a militiaman, and not just to save him from the sergeant’s vengeance. Most enlisted to feed their families or because they’d lost all home and livelihood, he’d explained later. Taking what they must to meet the levy, they usually tried to leave a household with enough to survive the hungry winter seasons.

Mercenaries had no kith or kin in Lescar. If they were sent to collect the levy, they descended like ravening curs. All the duke’s reeve demanded of a company’s captain was the money each household must pay. Whatever else the mercenaries took was theirs to keep. So farmers and craftsmen saw their houses ransacked for hoarded Caladhrian marks or Tormalin crowns.

The mercenaries readily handed over lead-debased Lescari silver for the ducal coffers. They were content to leave the copper pennies that the desperate cut into halves and quarters to make them do twice and four times their duty. The solid coin sent from beyond Lescar’s borders would slake the dogs’ lust for gambling, whores and drunkenness.

He remembered mercenaries coming to the Ring of Birches just once. Tathrin’s father had bought them off with strong liquors saved for just such a crisis. His mother and sisters hid away upstairs. In his farrier’s apron, Tathrin’s eldest brother by marriage had barred the way, a hammer in one hand, an iron bar in the other. None of the mercenaries had challenged him.

Such men were cowards at heart, that’s what his father had said. After these long seasons spent in their company, Tathrin would argue that point. If he ever got safe home and had the chance. He resolutely thrust such thoughts aside as they reached the front ranks of the column.

Men, and not a few women, were marching beneath a grey banner bearing a white gull. Their shields bore white wings with black tips, the paint old and chipped. A new design shone beneath them: a bright yellow quill. Tathrin was still trying to get the measure of such women, all warriors in their own right. Captain-General Evord had decreed no trail of whores and cooks would slow this army.

“There’s Gren.” Reher whistled a snatch of a flax-finch’s song.

It took Tathrin a moment to spot the short mercenary sliding through the tangled undergrowth. Hearing Reher’s whistle the second time, Gren glanced over his shoulder and beckoned them onwards.

Tathrin stooped, uncomfortably aware of his height. Reher showed no such concerns as they halted in the lee of a birch tree.

“What’s the game?”

“A double handful lurking a hundred paces beyond that twisted thorn.” Gren pointed. “Listen and you’ll hear their stones rattling in their breeches, they’re so scared.”

“Where’s Arest?” Tathrin couldn’t believe the mercenary captain could hide behind anything less than a full-grown oak. If he wasn’t as tall as Reher, he was even more massively built.

“He’s playing the swordwing.” Gren nodded to his offside. “Zeil and his mates are the corbies there.” He jerked his head a second time. “Awn’s the tufted owl and we’re the spotted thrushes.”

Fighting was just a game to these men. Like white raven, where men shifted little wooden trees and carved forest birds around the boards scored into his father’s taproom tables. The other player must evade all such traps set for the mythical white bird. Who was going to win today? Tathrin wondered. How much blood would be spilled instead of ale?

Reher nodded, frowning. “We need to know who they are.”

“Follow me.” Gren darted down a narrow path worn by deer or foresters.

They had reached the edge of Duke Garnot’s hunting preserve, where the price of a poached deer was a severed hand. Men living off the woods wouldn’t be eager to explain themselves to anyone, Tathrin reflected.

“Stay behind me and stay out of trouble,” Reher warned in a low tone.

They all spoke to him like that. Was it because he was still of an age when most youths were just ending their apprenticeships? Or because he wore a scholar’s silver ring, bearing the arms of the city of Vanam, far away in distant Ensaimin? Tathrin had soon learned mercenary swordsmen and craftsmen like Reher all assumed a university education eradicated most of a scholar’s common sense.

Well, Tathrin knew woods and fields better than any townsman. An autumn morning should be full of birdsong. These thickets were silent, tense. Tathrin fixed his eyes on Gren’s mailed back slipping through the bushes ahead. He strained his ears for some hint of anything bigger than a coney making its escape.

Ahead, a man dashed across open ground. Tathrin saw he wasn’t wearing the cream surcoat of Arest’s mercenaries, the black wyvern lashing its tail. He had no neckerchief of unbleached linen and bold yellow, the colours of Evord’s army. He wasn’t one of their own.

“Stand and identify yourself!” Reher bellowed.

In the thorn bushes, Gren halted, tense as a hunting hound.

The man stared horrified at Reher and Tathrin. Shouts erupted and someone screamed. Swords clashed in scuffles hidden by the trees. The man fled.

Gren stepped out and extended his arm, chest-high. The man couldn’t stop himself. He crashed to the ground, flat on his back, gasping like a stranded fish. Gren barely wavered, his iron-studed boots planted solidly in the leaf litter. Just for good measure, he drove a steel-capped toe into the man’s thigh. Tathrin winced. Even before Gren had rebelled to become a mercenary, his muscles had been hardened by boyhood among the mines of the peaks and lakes, on long trips hunting fox and beaver.

The blond man looked down with satisfaction. “Floored like a market-day whore.”

The man writhed on the ground, his wheezing pathetic as he struggled to catch his breath. He was a wretched specimen, left bandy-legged by a poverty-stricken childhood, chapped lips drawn back from rotted teeth. Tathrin wondered how long it was since he’d lost everything and taken to the forests.

“So what have we got here?” Reher planted a boot on the fallen man’s chest and scowled down. “Not Duke Garnot’s cully?”

He wasn’t wearing Carluse black and white. Tathrin bent to rip open his grimy jerkin and the sweat-stained shirt beneath, in case he wore some hidden boar’s head pendant. The duke’s men might go in disguise but they’d always keep something to prove their allegiance in case they were threatened by one of their own.

“We’re just woodsmen, you bastards,” gasped the man.

Gren chuckled. “Or do you mean
Woodsmen
?”

Tathrin had been barely breeched when he’d first heard the rumours. Tales of supplies meant for the duke’s mercenaries unaccountably seized on the road. An honest family who’d seen their livestock driven off found a flitch of bacon hidden in their woodpile, so the story went. A bag of coin had dropped down a widow’s chimney, enough to save her son from the militia’s clutches, her daughter from worse. All thanks to the Woodsmen, so the whispers said.

Now Tathrin knew the truth. He knew how much the unfortunate owed his father and his fellow guildsmen. They didn’t just drink white brandy and abuse the duke’s name when they met in the Ring of Birches’ cellar. They did all the good attributed to the Woodsmen and more besides. Who was better placed than an innkeeper to encourage the tavern stories that kept Duke Garnot’s men hunting for mythical Woodsmen, and to see a youthful packman or a fresh-faced cook’s maid unobtrusively joining a merchant’s wagons, heading for sanctuary among those who had long since fled Lescar for exile in cities like Vanam and Col?

But this sorry vagabond didn’t look like any of the guildsmen’s allies that Tathrin had seen slipping out of the inn’s back door in the dead of night.

“How many of you?” Reher took his boot off the man’s chest and hauled him up by his collar.

“I won’t say.” The man spat on Tathrin’s boots.

Gren clouted the back of his head. “Mind your manners. He’s here to help you.”

“Him and the rest of you pissing thieves,” the man retorted, unexpectedly bold.

One of Gren’s many daggers was already in his hand. He gestured towards the man’s crotch. “Do you want to keep your berries on their twig?”

“Don’t.” Tathrin saw their captive’s fingers twitch towards his own knife. “You’ve no hope of making a fight of this.”

The man subsided, seeing the Wyvern Hunters emerging from the thickets, sunlight glinting on their swords. They walked behind men wearing ragged and dirty clothes, some with bruised faces and shallow wounds to forearms and thighs. Most had their hands prudently clasped on top of their heads. To Tathrin’s acute relief, he recognised none of them.

“That’s them all flushed out.” Arest waved a massive hand, broad as a spade. “Salo, run and tell the captain-general’s adjutant.”

Reher surveyed them. “Any of you from Carluse Town?”

“I am, and I can hear it in your voice.” A man with a broken nose, too furious to be cowed, stepped forwards. “What are you doing with these dogs?”

“Do you know Master Ernout?” demanded Reher.

“Priest at the shrine of Saedrin?” The Carluse Town man was confused. “Of course.”

But Tathrin could see he didn’t know that the courageous old man was one of those priests conspiring with the master craftsmen to stop the abuse of honest men and women. Along with his niece, Failla. Tathrin allowed himself a moment to wonder how she was. When would he see her again? How long before peace allowed him to pursue their tentative understanding? If she hadn’t already forgotten him.

“If you swear, all of you, not to raise a hand against us as we pass, we’ll leave you unharmed.” The smith looked around the vagabonds, his dark eyes intent. “I swear it by Saedrin’s keys. If you doubt me, send to Master Ernout in Carluse Town and ask him if Reher’s word can be trusted.”

For an instant, Tathrin was horrified. Did Reher want to forewarn their enemy? Then he realised there was no way these men would give themselves up to Duke Garnot. Come to that, the chances were minimal of anyone here reaching Carluse Town before the duke knew exactly what threatened him.

“Will you take his word for it?” Arest enquired genially. “Or do we have to kill you?”

Now the ragged men’s eyes were irresistibly drawn to the main track. The first companies were marching past. Tathrin saw the vagrants blanch as the tramp of the approaching column shook the ground beneath their feet. Well, Tathrin wouldn’t have believed the army that Evord had assembled if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes.

The vagabonds muttered among themselves as they saw the battle standard fluttering above Evord’s retinue. Against the unbleached linen, the circle of hands stitched from cloth of gold shone like a sunburst. Each fist grasped a symbol of honest toil, of learning, of home and family. This army was bringing peace for all Lescari to enjoy such things, or so Tathrin fervently hoped.