The Last Banner

Chapter 9: First Blood, Cold Iron

A burning palisade smells like dry pine needles and dead horses.

The pitch on the gate-towers went up with a soft, hollow (whuff) that took the breath right out of the lane. Black flakes the size of oak leaves drifted through the sleet, settling on the backs of the pack-mules and sticking to the mud like burned lard.

Leon didn't look at the smoke. He grabbed Willem Fen by the waistband of his breeches and hauled him up out of the straw.

"Bren," Leon said. "Take his left side."

Bren was still kneeling in the dirt, staring at his own thick forearms where Willem’s spit and grease had smeared into the hair. His eyes were wide and milky with panic. "The bridge is choked, Leon. I can hear the carters cutting the traces. If we go into that lane, we'll get trampled into the ruts."

"We aren't going to the lane," Leon said. He hooked Willem’s limp right arm around his own neck, grunting as the dead weight pulled against his collarbone. "We’re going to the horse-lines. The baggage train moves where the wheels can turn. An ox won't take a bog, but a mule will."

"The provost—"

"The provost is halfway to the river by now, saving his own skin and the pay-chest," Leon snapped. "Get on his other side or leave your spear. You can't carry sixteen stone of butcher's meat and five feet of ash at the same time."

Bren swallowed, dropped the boar spear into the wet straw, and caught Willem under the thigh. Together they lifted the boy off the dirt. Willem’s head lolled backward, his mouth slack, a thin gray crust of dried foam around his lips from the searing of the heel. He didn't weigh much—sixteen years of skimmed milk and turnip-bread didn't leave much bone on a tenant’s son—but in three inches of freezing muck, every pace felt like hauling an anvil uphill.

They stumbled out of the fodder shed into the alley behind the store-barns.

The camp was coming apart like an unraveled rope. Nobody was shouting commands. Men from the provisional battalions were running toward the north ditch, throwing away their wooden water-bottles, their iron pots, their spare shoes—anything that had weight and no edge. A boy from the low crags was sitting in an upturned wheelbarrow, holding his left hand in his lap; two fingers were missing, sliced clean off at the knuckles, and he was staring at the red stumps with the dull, polite curiosity of a man examining an unfamiliar tool at a market stall.

"Keep your head down," Leon muttered.

They skirted the rear of the second horse-lines where the picket-ropes had been cut. Six baggage mules, left behind because their backs were galled raw to the bone, stood huddled together in the sleet with their ears laid flat, shivering in the gray draft.

Past the picket-lines, the earthwork ended.

It didn't drop into a stone ditch here; this was the low tail of the Eastvale works, where the ditch became a shallow trench filled with standing bog-water and dead alder roots. Beyond it lay the Great Sike—two miles of peat marsh, gray moss, and stagnant pools that stretched north toward the lower crossings of the Redwater.

A company of thirty foot-soldiers was coming along the lip of the trench from the west.

They were not running. They walked in two tight ranks, their ash pikes carried at the trail, their boiled leather coats buttoned up tight to the chin. At their head walked Corporal Karr, his ash stick tucked under his arm, his notched billhook resting easy on his good right shoulder.

Behind Karr came four men carrying a wicker hurdle. On it lay Tam Cambres, covered to his chin with an old horse-blanket that had turned black where the boy’s blood was soaking through the wool.

Leon stopped, his heels sinking into the cold silt. "Corporal."

Karr halted. His men didn't break rank; they stood in the sleet with their pike-butts resting on their boots, their heads turned down against the wind. They were veterans from the salt marches—men who had seen five winters of border squabbling and knew that running from a rout only meant you died tired.

"The boy's done," Karr said, nodding at the hurdle.

Leon looked down. Tam’s face was the color of a skimmed turnip. His eyes were open, but they were fixed on the gray belly of the clouds, not blinking even when a wet flake of sleet landed on the dark pupil of his right eye. His hands were tucked outside the blanket, stiff as dried salt-cod, his fingers curled into the shape of a hilt that wasn't there.

"He died at the turnpike," Karr said without emotion. "I’m carrying him to the church-flags at Highwatch. His father has forty crowns in the strongbox; he’ll pay five to have the boy buried in consecrated lime instead of a ditch-grave with the levy."

"He was seventeen," Bren said, his voice cracking.

"He was an officer," Karr spat, turning his gray, sour face to look at Willem Fen hanging between them. "And that one’s ditch-meat. Cut the boy loose, Varis. You won't make two miles across the moss with a lame dog on your shoulders."

"He isn't ditch-meat," Leon said. "I burned the heel. The bad flesh is gone."

Karr made a small, wet whistling sound through his broken teeth. "You burned it? With what?"

"A tire-iron."

One of the pikemen in the front rank—an old man with a squint and a cheek scored by an old powder-burn—let out a dry chuckle. "Harrowden surgery. Kill the pig so the pork doesn't spoil."

"Shut your face, Durn," Karr barked. He took two steps closer to Leon, his ash stick tapping Willem’s dangling boot. The leather was charred black at the heel, crusted with gray salt where the sap from the wood had cooked into the hide. "It’ll hold two days if the marsh water doesn't get into the crust. After that, the black-leg starts and you’ll have to take the knee off with a wood-saw."

"Two days is enough to reach the high road," Leon said.

"There is no high road, boy," Karr said. He pointed his billhook toward the north. "The Vessian horse crossed the upper shallows two hours before dawn. They aren't chasing the rabble to the bridge; they’re riding down the causeway to cut the King’s wagons off at the narrows. Cassian knows it. That's why he burned the gate. He’s leaving the whole eastern draft here to keep their blades busy while he gets the guns across the Redwater."

A low, heavy rumble shook the ground beneath their feet—not thunder, but the dull, rhythmic thud of two thousand horses moving at the canter over the peat-sod.

It wasn't coming from the south. It was coming from the low ridge to the east, right across the neck of the marsh.

"Outriders," Durn whispered, his squint narrowing as he looked through the driving sleet. "The green cloaks. The Duke’s scout-riders."

Six horsemen appeared on the skyline, three hundred paces out. They were lean men on small, ugly steppe ponies, their lances carried upright in leather stirrup-boots, their shoulders hunched under greasy sheepskin mantles. They didn't shout. They didn't blow horns. They sat their horses on the crest of the peat-dyke, watching the mouth of the trench with the cold, patient attention of terriers at a rat-hole.

"Form square," Karr said. His voice was entirely flat, like a man ordering two yards of hemp from the draper.

"Corporal," Leon said. "The marsh. We can get into the reed-beds. A pony won't go into the black peat; it cuts the frogs."

"A pony won't," Karr said, not looking at him. "A man on foot with a six-foot lance will. They have sixty foot-archers behind that ridge, Varis. If we go into the open water, they’ll stand on the dyke and shoot us like teal in a pond." He turned his back on Leon and leveled his notched billhook toward the ridge. "Pikes down. First rank on the knee. Put the butts in the heel-marks."

The twelve men behind him moved without hurry. They dropped their right knees into the gray mud, bracketing their fifteen-foot ash shafts against the roots of the hazel revetment, their iron points slanting upward at the height of a pony's breast.

Leon looked at Bren. Bren’s face had gone slack again, his eyes rolling toward the burning gate-tower behind them.

"The shed," Leon whispered.

Bren didn't hear him. "Leon... the horsemen... they've got the bows out."

Leon didn't argue. He dropped Willem Fen onto the turf behind the pikemen’s kneeling rank, reached down, and took Willem’s iron pot-helmet from the mud where it had rolled. He jammed it down over the boy’s skull until the rusted rim touched his eyebrows, then grabbed Bren by the belt and shoved him down beside him.

"Stay flat," Leon said. "Don't look up until the iron hits the wood."

The arrows came without a horn.

They didn't come in a cloud like the songs said; they came in threes and fours, falling almost straight down out of the gray clouds with a low, tearing flutter like geese dropping into a stubble field.

Thunk. Thunk. Ssshh-clack.

One shaft drove four inches into the peat six inches from Leon’s nose, the split goose-quill vibrating with a sharp, dry hum. The head was not a broadhead; it was a narrow iron bodkin, four-sided and needle-sharp, forged to slip between the links of a mail coat or through the grain of an ash stave.

A pikeman two paces to Leon’s left let out a short, wet grunt.

The boy—he was no older than Willem, with two missing teeth and the yellow hair of the hill folk—didn't drop his pike. The arrow had gone through his left collarbone, the square iron tip sticking out two inches through the dirty buff of his coat behind the shoulder blade. He sat on his knee in the mud, his eyes wide, his mouth working silently, his right hand still locked around the seasoned ash of his shaft.

"Hold the butt, Callow," Karr barked from behind him, his cudgel resting across the boy's neck to keep him down. "Hold the butt or I’ll split your ears."

The boy grunted again, spat a mouthful of thin, pink froth into the ditch-moss, and leaned his weight forward onto the wood.

Then the ponies came off the ridge.

They didn't charge at the gallop. The ground was too treacherous—greasy peat over limestone flagstones—and the riders knew what happened to a mount that lost its footing in front of a hedge of ash. They came down the slope at a heavy trot, four abreast, their six-foot lances held short, aiming not for the men's chests, but for their faces.

The first pony hit the left-hand pike.

The green ash shaft groaned, bending double like a willow branch in an autumn gale, then snapped with a crack that sounded like a pistol-shot. The iron tip had driven deep into the pony’s shoulder, right where the muscle met the breastbone; the beast screamed—a high, human shriek that tore through the sleet—and threw itself sideways into the mud, pitching its rider over its ears into the revetment.

The man landed four feet from Leon.

He wasn't an eastern barbarian from the tales. He was an ordinary man with grease on his linen coat and a three-day beard gray with road-grit. He had an iron knife in his fist, eight inches of heavy, triangular blade, and he was scrambling to his feet with his mouth open, looking for the pikeman who had killed his beast.

He didn't see Leon.

Leon didn't reach for his father’s sword. The blade was still wedged under the broken powder wain two hundred paces behind them, holding three turns of trace-chain against the split axle.

His hand went to his hip.

His fingers closed around the shoeing-hammer he had kept in his belt-loop since the gate-passage—the old, square-faced hammer with the scarred head that Garrick had used to set cold shoes on the plough-teams.

He rose from the peat with the weight of his whole body behind the swing, the way he had struck the anvil ten thousand times in the dark smithy at Harrowden.

The hammer took the man just below the ear, where the iron rim of his cap met the wool cheek-guard.

It was not a clean sound. It was the sound of a heavy cleaver hitting an ox-rib on the slaughter-block—a dull, wet *crunch* of bone and gristle giving way all at once.

The man didn't cry out. He dropped straight down onto his stomach in the sludge, his fingers digging into the moss once, twice, before his forehead sank into the black ditch-water.

Leon stood in the freezing rain, his chest heaving, his right hand numb from the shock that had traveled up the ash handle into the meat of his thumb. Blood—dark, thick, smelling of beer and sour onions—was dripping from the corner of the iron hammer-face onto his knuckles, mixing with the cold ash Garrick had ground into his skin two days ago.

The world seemed to stop for the space of three breaths.

The sleet fell. The fire on the gate-tower hissed in the ditch. Willem lay in the straw with his eyes closed, his breathing thin and shallow like a sick sheep.

Bren looked up from the mud, his face white, staring at the dead man’s boots twitching in the water.

"Leon," Bren whispered. "You... you killed him."

Leon looked down at his own hand. The blood had already begun to cool, turning sticky in the wind that drew off the marsh. He didn't drop the hammer. He wiped the flat of it against the dead man’s sheepskin mantle, once, hard, until the steel was gray again, then shoved it back into the leather loop at his belt.

"He was trying to get up," Leon said. His voice was not his own; it was Garrick’s voice, the voice that spoke about cracked tires and rotten timber. "Willem's still breathing. Take his knees."

Down in the Great Sike, three leagues to the north, a great plume of gray smoke was rising against the white belly of the storm.

Not from a village.

The supply depot at the river-wharf was burning. Cassian hadn't waited for the rearguard. The barges were gone, the store-houses were in ashes, and between Eastvale and the safety of the western hills, ten miles of open peat lay empty under the gray sky, with six hundred enemy horsemen already riding the edges of the moss.