The Last Banner

Chapter 7: Bread and Vinegar

The horse had a white star between her eyes and an old split in her near hind hoof that Garrick had rasped smooth three summers ago. She smelled of the Harrowden stable—sour oat mash and wet fern—and she reached her muzzle down into the trench, snorting mud onto Leon’s shoulder.

The rider with the tongs didn't wait for Leon’s answer. He pulled an iron shoeing-hammer from a leather loop on the cantle and turned it over in his hand.

"Ten minutes, boy," he said again. His voice sounded like dry oats sliding down a chute. "The axle on the third powder wain snapped at the lynch-pin. If we don't clear the timber, the guns won't get across the ditch when the line falls back."

Leon looked at Bren Ostler.

Bren was still kneeling over the boar spear, his knuckles swollen purple from the cold grip. Mud had caked into his eyebrows, drying yellow in the wind that came off the marsh. He didn't look at the horse, and he didn't look at the gate. He was staring at the dead Vessian at his feet, watching a thin thread of black blood wind its way down the man's quilted sleeve into the gray peat water.

"Take the cornet," Leon said.

The rider's yellow teeth showed through his gray beard. "The cornet doesn't know an anvil from a sheep’s tail. Cassian wants the smith."

"Tam’s wounded," Leon said, pointing with his elbow toward the revetment.

Tam Cambres had slumped down into the hazel wickerwork, his hands pressed into his armpit where the Vessian pike had chewed through the boiled leather. A dark, thick stain was spreading down the side of his ribs, soaking into the sheepskin lining. His mouth hung open, his breath coming in short, wet whistles like a bird caught in a chimney.

"A gentleman with a hole in his coat is five pounds of bone for the ditch-graves," the rider spat. "Get up on the causeway, Varis. The portcullis doesn't wait on Harrowden manners."

Leon didn't move. He reached down, took the dead Vessian by the chin-strap, and cut the hemp cord with his father's skinning knife. The iron pot-helmet came free with a wet sucking sound. It was heavy—four pounds of beaten plate, greasy on the inside with old tallow and sheep-wool.

He shoved the helmet into Willem Fen's lap.

"Put it on," Leon said.

Willem’s fingers were too numb to grip the iron. "Leon... the horse... that’s your da’s mare."

"I know whose mare it is. Put the iron on your head." Leon grabbed the dead soldier's boots by the heels. They were good boots—waxed calfskin, double-pegged with boxwood, reaching mid-thigh to turn the marsh water. He sliced the leather laces with two quick, sawing motions and wrenched them off the cold feet.

He threw the right boot at Willem’s chest.

"Cut the heel off with your knife, like Elena showed you. Shove the foot in. Don't worry about the blood; it’ll wash out in the bog."

"Varis!" the rider barked from the mare's back. He raised the long pole with the tongs. "The chain is on the drum! They're dropping the timber!"

Leon rose from the muck. His knees gave a sharp, dry pop that made his teeth ache. He stepped up onto the lower turf terrace, wiped the greasy ditch-mud off his palms onto his wool breeches, and looked the rider in the eye.

"Three of us," Leon said.

The rider stared at him. "What?"

"Three of us go through that gate, or you can find another man who knows how to draw a lynch-pin without cold-cracking the iron." Leon tapped his father’s wrapped blade against his thigh. "Willem holds the tongs. Bren swings the eight-pound sledge. You want that wain moved before the Vessian foot hits the rampart, you need three pair of hands, not one boy with a pocket full of nails."

"The General—"

"The General isn't down here with the horse," Leon said, his voice dropping into that flat, hard rhythm he used when bargaining with the horse-traders at the Michaelmas fair. "He's up on the wall with sixty archers who don't have enough iron to shoot twice. You tell him the smith brought his strikers, or you tell him the wain stays in the mud."

The rider looked past Leon's shoulder.

Out on the plain, the screaming from the broken causeway had begun to thin out. Most of the men who had gone into the deep bog were under the peat now, their ash pikes floating on the scum like broken reeds. But behind them, the two remaining Vessian squares had halted. They were dressing their ranks, four hundred men dressing their lines by the drummer’s cane, their iron points rising and falling in unison like a field of barley before the sickle.

In three minutes, they would reach the ditch.

"Get them up," the rider said through his teeth. "If the lame one drops on the bridge, I’ll run him through myself."

Leon didn't thank him. He dropped back into the sludge, caught Willem by the leather collar of his vest, and hauled him upright. Willem hissed, his eyes rolling back until the lids fluttered, but he kept his good foot under him.

"Bren," Leon said.

Bren didn't move. He was still watching the blood on the dead man's sleeve.

Leon stepped over the corpse, grabbed Bren by the throat with his left hand—the fingers stiff and rough with the forge-charcoal—and shoved his head back against the dirt wall until the hazel wicker cracked.

"Look at me, Bren."

Bren’s yellow eyes flickered, the panic in them raw and greasy. "They're coming, Leon. The whole host. There's thousands of them—"

"The gate is forty paces," Leon said, his breath hot against the big boy’s nose. "You carry the boar spear in your right hand. You put your left arm under Willem’s ribs. You walk behind the mare, and you don't look at the grass. You look at the tail of that horse. If you stop, I’ll leave you for the ditch-pikes, and I’ll tell your father you died like a dog in a ditch."

Bren’s throat worked. He swallowed twice, a dry, clicking sound, then reached down and took Willem’s weight onto his broad shoulder.

"What about Tam?" Willem wheezed, his mouth gray with pain. "Leon... the cornet..."

Tam Cambres was leaning against the ditch wall, his eyes fixed on the gray sky. He had his hands clamped over his side, but the dark blood was bubbling out between his fingers now, thick and steady, running down the brass buckles of his fine armor into the sludge.

"Tam," Leon called out.

The boy’s head turned slowly. There was no officer left in him; his face was smooth and white as lard, like a child who had fallen out of an apple tree and couldn't find his breath.

"My sword," Tam whispered. His fingers fumbled in the mud, feeling for the greasy bootlace Leon had wound around the hilt. "Leon... don't let them take the silver. My mother... she had it made in the town..."

Corporal Karr came down the trench behind them, his four-foot billhook resting on his shoulder like a woodman’s axe. He didn't look at the horse, and he didn't look at the gate. He stopped beside Tam, reached down with his left hand, and hauled the boy upright by the scruff of his neck with the indifferent strength of an old butcher.

"Get moving, smith," Karr said without looking at Leon. "I’ll carry the gentleman. His father owes the crown forty crowns for his grace-money; the treasury won't pay the muster-penny if I bring him in cold."

He threw Tam across his good shoulder like a sack of oats, grunting once as the boy’s blood smeared across the faded buff of his coat, and began limping toward the causeway.

---

The gate-passage was twelve paces of gray granite flags, dark as an oven and smelling of wet wool, horse grease, and urine.

Above them, the oak timbers of the floorboards groaned under the boots of thirty archers running toward the murder-holes. A single lantern hung from an iron hook in the archway, its horn pane yellow with tobacco smoke and soot, casting a dull, oily light over the men who stood in the passage.

They were not soldiers. They were carters, sappers, and three boys from the northern fells who had been set to work boiling cauldrons of pine-pitch over charcoal braziers. The air was thick enough to chew—sour smoke, the bitter tang of burned fat, and the wet stench of sixty wounded men laid out along the inner wall.

A serjeant with an iron collar around his throat stood by the inner wicket, a short ash rod in his fist.

"Pikes to the ditch!" he screamed at every man who cleared the gate. "Turn about! Turn about and face the ditch!"

The rider on Garrick's mare didn't stop. He pushed the horse through the press, using the animal’s broad chest to clear a lane through the carters, until he reached a two-wheeled baggage wain wedged crosswise in the narrow exit between the inner palisade and the camp ditch.

The wagon was loaded with six iron-bound powder quarter-casks and fifty bundles of dried salt fish. Its right wheel had come off the spindle; the oak axle-tree had split from the lynch-pin hole back to the bolster, the white, splintered heart-wood jammed hard into the granite stones of the drain.

Four mules were tangled in the traces, kicking at each other’s hocks in the dark, their breath coming in great, rattling gasps.

"There it is," the rider said, dropping off the mare and pointing with his shoeing-hammer. "The fifth column is retreating through this gap in twenty minutes. If the guns can't get through, Cassian burns the wain and everything behind it."

Leon set Willem down against the wheel of a grain cart. He pulled the ash root from his pocket, touched it once against his lips out of habit, then shoved it back into the dry wool against his ribs.

"Bren," Leon said. "Hold the mule’s head. The gray one. Don't let her bite."

Bren caught the leather halter, his great shoulders dropping as he leaned his weight against the beast’s jaw. The mule rolled her eyes, but she stopped kicking.

Leon knelt in the greasy muck beneath the axle.

The break was bad. The oak had split along the grain, three feet of green timber sheared through where the smith had cut the mortise too deep for the iron strap. A cheap job. A contractor’s wagon, built to pass the king’s viewer in the capital and fall apart on the first stony road in the marches.

"It won't hold an iron band," Leon said, looking up through the gloom at the rider. "The wood's too soft. If we hammer an iron hoop over the split, it’ll crush the grain the first time the wheel hits the gutter."

A man stepped out of the shadow behind the powder wain.

He wasn't wearing an officer's purple now. He wore a plain, grease-stained leather jerkin with no sleeves, his gray hair plastered to his forehead with sweat, his right hand wrapped in a scrap of dirty linen that smelled of horse-liniment.

General Cassian.

He carried an iron pry-bar five feet long, balanced across his forearm like a balance-scale. His gray eyes were slow, cold, and steady as well-water over iron.

"I didn't ask what the wood would hold, boy," Cassian said. His voice didn't rise above the rattle of the archers' boots on the timbers above them. "I asked if the wheel will turn for twenty minutes."

Leon didn't look down. He reached into his belt, pulled his father's notched blade from its oiled cloth, and laid the bare iron across the splintered oak of the axle.

"The blade's thirty inches of good salt-iron," Leon said, his voice flat as the stone flags beneath them. "We lay the flat of it along the split. We take three turns of trace-chain around the timber and the blade together, and we drive two cold-chisels between the links to take up the slack."

Cassian looked at the sword. His eyes lingered on the notched guard, then on the greasy bootlace Garrick had wound around the tang twenty years ago.

"That's your father's steel," the General said.

"It's iron," Leon said. "It doesn't know who owns it."

Cassian looked at him for three breaths—long enough for an archer above them to loose three shafts through the murder-hole, the hemp bowstring snapping like a whip in the narrow stone.

"Drive the chisels," the General said.