The Last Banner

Chapter 5: Meat for the Ditch

The gate did not shut all at once. An oak timber eight inches thick took six men on the windlass to turn, and the chain had a kink in it from salt-rust. It screeched twice—metal on dry iron—then bound fast with three feet of daylight still showing between the leaves.

A man inside shouted to cut the ropes. Another told him to shut his mouth and haul.

"Keep moving," Corporal Karr said. He didn't turn back to look at the dust rising off the stubble fields, and he didn't run. He caught Tam Cambres's cob by the cheek-strap and hauled it sideways off the causeway, dragging the animal down into the dry ditch-bottom where the hazel bundles were stacked.

Willem Fen slid off behind the saddle, hitting the gray marl on his knees. He didn't make a sound. His face was gray as dishwater, his teeth clamped shut over his lip until the skin showed white.

"Up," Leon said, catching him under the armpits.

"The foot’s gone, Leon," Willem whispered. His breath smelled bad—the sour, rotting smell of a sheep with foot-rot. "I can’t put the flat of it down."

"Then don't put the flat down. Sit on the turf." Leon dropped him against the revetment wall where the cut earth had been shored up with split hazel. "Bren, stay with him."

Bren didn't answer. He was standing on the ditch-lip with his boar spear held in both hands, his mouth open, watching the road south.

The dust wasn't a cloud now. It had broken into shapes.

They were small from three furlongs off—lean beasts, longer in the leg than valley horses, moving with that steady, low-headed trot that cavalry use when they have five leagues of killing behind them and another five ahead. They didn't have trumpets blowing. They didn't carry pennons. They wore dark boiled leather over gray wool, and their lances were tipped with short, leaf-shaped heads that didn't catch the light.

"They're not charging," Bren said, his voice coming thin and high, like a boy calling pigs at dusk. "Why aren't they charging?"

"Because they don't have to," Leon said.

A serjeant with three missing fingers came down the ditch at a trot, carrying an armful of ash stakes. He threw five of them at Leon's boots. They weren't spears; they were fence-rails, five feet long, hacked off rough at one end with a hand-axe and charred black in a brush fire to harden the green wood.

"Drive them," the serjeant barked. He had spit dried in the corners of his mouth and a smear of yellow axle-grease across his forehead. "Angle them forty degrees toward the slope. Two paces apart. If you haven't got a mallet, use a stone."

Leon took one. The wood was green willow, heavy and wet, the bark still slick with sap. "A horse will push through this. It isn't seasoned oak."

The serjeant stopped, his yellowed eyes fixing on Leon’s chest. He looked at the bundle under Leon’s arm, wrapped in Garrick’s greasy bootlace, then spat into the hazel roots.

"It isn't meant to stop a horse, smith," he said. "It’s meant to make them slow down enough for the bowmen on the high wall to get two shafts into their girths before they reach the breastwork. Now drive it, or I’ll use your head for the mallet."

He moved on, dropping stakes every three paces into the arms of boys who stood like fence posts in the mud.

Leon didn't look for a stone. He stepped up onto the lower terrace of the ditch, where the earth was packed hard by the spades of the sappers, set the charred point against the clay, and brought his right boot down on the flat butt. The willow sank six inches into the muck. He drove it twice more with his heel, then braced his knee against the shaft to test the purchase. It gave two inches to the left.

"Bad wood," he muttered.

"Everything's bad," Tam Cambres said. He had dismounted, holding his cob's reins with one shaking hand while his other tried to cinch the leather straps on his brigandine. The buckles were thin brass, and his thumb was trembling so hard he couldn't find the tongue-hole. "My father paid forty crowns for this harness in the capital. The plate-maker said it would turn an eastern bolt at sixty paces."

"The plate-maker wasn't standing in a ditch," Leon said. He reached over, took the strap from Tam’s fingers, pulled it two notches tighter than the boy had it, and drove the brass tongue through the hole. "Keep the chin-piece down. If an arrow hits the gorget, it slides up into your throat if you don't tuck your head."

Tam swallowed. His throat clicked. "Have you seen them before?"

"No."

"My cousin was at Causine. He had three fingers taken off by a bill-hook. He said they don't take ransom for anyone under a banneret."

"Then don't tell them your father has forty crowns," Leon said.

A dry rattle came from the high rampart thirty paces above their heads—not a drum, but the sound of eighty men drawing ash bows out of their wool sleeves at once.

The archers were old men, mostly. Veterans from the northern marches with bald scalps and long, stringy arms that looked like dried salt-cod. They didn't have quivers; they had driven twenty arrows each into the soft turf between their boots, points down, so they could draw and notch without looking.

"Hold the line," someone shouted from the timber redoubt. The voice was thin with distance, swallowed by the wind that had begun to draw down out of the crags.

The first horse came off the causeway two hundred yards out.

It didn't jump the ditch. It stopped on the hard gravel of the road-shoulder, its rider leaning forward in the stirrups with his lance tucked under his right forearm. He was forty yards ahead of the rest, a scout on a clay-bank gelding that had lost its near-fore shoe.

The man looked at the ditch. He looked at the three thousand boys standing in the gray wool and the hazel hurdles. He looked at the half-shut gate and the two mules still tangled in the traces of the salt-wain.

Then he turned in the saddle, took an iron horn from his hip, and blew two short notes.

Not the long, mournful blast of the Aurel levy. Two hard, flat barks, like a dog warning cattle off a lane.

From the trees behind him, fifty more horsemen came out onto the open grass. They didn't form a line. They moved in clumps of six and eight, trotting through the dead thistles with their short bows held across their pommels, their stirrups short, riding high on the horses' withers the way the men of the dry eastern steppes ride.

"Archers!" the voice from the redoubt cried. "Mark three hundred!"

The bowmen on the rampart didn't loose.

A tall man in an officer's surcoat—dark purple wool, grayed with dust at the skirts—walked along the top of the timber palisade, his hands tucked behind his belt. He had no helmet on. His hair was cropped gray, and his face was long and flat, like an axe-head that had been ground down too many times on an oilstone.

"General Cassian," Corporal Karr muttered from the hazel ditch. His ash stick was gone; he had picked up a four-foot billhook with an iron cleat wired to the socket.

"Why aren't they shooting?" Bren whispered, his boots shifting in the mud. "They're right there. I could hit that gray one with a sling-stone."

"They're three hundred paces out," Leon said. "An ash bow drops sixty yards short at that mark. If they shoot now, the arrows stick in the dirt and the Vessians pick them up to shoot back."

Bren looked at him, his face twisting. "How do you know that?"

"My father made the tips for the town guard at Harrowden," Leon said. "He told me the weight of an arrow-head tells the bow how far it can carry. You don't waste iron on air."

The horsemen knew the mark. They halted two hundred and fifty paces out, just beyond the reach of the high bows, their horses tearing at the dead grass with their teeth. Three of them got down, loosened their girths, and began rubbing their mounts' legs with handfuls of dry bracken.

They were waiting.

"What are they waiting for?" Tam asked. He was leaning against his cob's shoulder, his knees knocked together under the leather plates.

"The foot," Leon said.

A mile back along the road, beneath the rolling gray cloud of the burning farms, the drum started.

It wasn't one drum. It was three, beating together with a heavy, broken rhythm that vibrated through the soles of Leon’s boots. It didn't sound like music; it sounded like someone driving sheep-hurdles into wet clay with a timber beetle.

*Thump. Thump. Thump-thump.*

Behind the drums came the pikes.

They didn't come in files. They came in three great squares, four hundred men to a block, their sixteen-foot ash shafts held straight up so the iron tips looked like a dead thorn-hedge moving over the grass. They were not boys from the villages. They wore long coats of quilted linen stained brown with walnut juice, iron pot-helmets with no crests, and broad-bladed short-swords slung across their kidneys.

"Those are the border companies," Karr said, his voice dropping into that flat, dead tone he used when he was talking about horses with the rot. "The Duke's men from the Salt Marches. They’ve been on the King's rations for ten years."

The three squares halted at the five-hundred-pace stone.

A single rider rode out from between the columns. He was small, his armor blackened with soot until it looked like cold stove-iron, mounted on a mule that had an iron plate strapped between its ears. He stopped thirty paces in front of the pikes, turned his mount toward the Eastvale ditch, and held up a bundle of three willow twigs tied with a red rag.

"A parley?" Tam whispered, some of the color coming back into his cheeks. "They want terms. My father said even the Vessians observe the custom of the march."

"That's not a parley," Corporal Karr said. He spat into the hazel roots again, but this time his tongue was dry and nothing came out. "That’s the count."

"What count?"

"He's showing the General three sticks. One for the ditch. One for the gate. One for the camp behind it." Karr raised his billhook, resting the iron hook against his shoulder. "He’s telling Cassian he has three hours of sun left, and he intends to sleep in the turf huts before the dew falls."

The man on the mule dropped the twigs into the grass, turned his beast, and rode back into the thorn-hedge of the pikes.

On the rampart above them, General Cassian didn't reach for his sword. He didn't shout an order. He walked three paces back toward the timber redoubt, stopped by the corner-post, and looked down into the ditch where the Harrowden boys were huddled.

His eyes were gray, flat, and slow. They passed over Tam's fine armor without stopping. They took in Bren’s boar spear, Willem’s wrapped foot, and then they rested on Leon’s hands—the cracked skin, the black forge-ash still ground into the knuckles, the old border sword bound to his ribs with cow-leather.

"You," Cassian said. His voice was not loud, but it had that quality of a bell struck under water; it reached the bottom of the ditch without rising.

Leon looked up. "Sir."

"Can you hold that fence-rail when the first rank hits it?"

Leon looked at the charred willow stake, still wobbling where his heel had driven it into the peat. "No, sir. The wood’s green. It’ll snap at the notch."

Cassian looked at him for two breaths. A small, cold twitch moved the corner of his thin mouth—not a smile, but the look of an appraiser who had found the crack he was looking for in a cheap pot.

"Then break your sword over their shins when they come through," the General said.

He turned his back and walked into the redoubt.

The drums on the plain struck three fast beats, and the thorn-hedge of sixteen-foot ash tilted forward until the iron tips pointed straight at the ditch.