Chapter 6 – A Poisoned Sweet #3
“Your buckets are there,” she told the next man who came down from the wall, pointing to the three buckets she had placed in the shadow of a nearby lilac bush.
“Ah, thank you, lady,” he said, and inwardly she breathed a sigh of relief. It might have been a small thing, but she had worried he might scold her for changing something, or that there might have been a reason she had overlooked for the original placement of the buckets.
The diggers seemed to go through water faster, so she took away one of the masons’ buckets and moved it down by the trench, then hurried to fill the buckets for the blacksmiths.
She liked problems of this sort. Someone on the wall dropped his trowel as she was passing, so she dared to approach the scaffolding, stretching on tiptoe to hand it back to him.
“Sorry, m’lady, thank you very much,” he said, tugging his forelock. He had an eyepatch over his right eye, a lanky man as brown as a bean and just as stringy.
“It’s no trouble,” she said, as awkwardly as he, but then he gave her a crooked smile and she smiled back, and hurried away to gather her empty buckets with a lighter heart. That was one man who hadn’t had to get off the wall.
Putting the filled buckets back in their new configuration, Ophele went to stand under her oak tree again, her large, watchful eyes open, taking everything in.
* * *
“There’s about a hundred of them, Your Grace,” said Remin’s scout.
Eude was still winded from his fast ride back to Tresingale, a short and slightly built man who was born to lurk.
In Remin’s absence, Jinmin had dispatched scouts and trackers to locate the bandits, and reports had been coming in for the last week.
They were not all bad, but they weren’t good, either.
The number was less than originally supposed, but a hundred men was a formidable force.
On the north side of town, Remin had resurrected his old commander’s tent and set up a worktable, just as it had been through all the long years of the war.
He even had his maps rolled up in their usual corner, stored in oilskin cases and neatly labeled.
“They made winter camp in the Veralde Forest.” The scout pointed to the place on the map. “I saw a lot of old Vallethi army insignia.”
“That’s a lot of men to be living off the land,” remarked Bram, who had come in from the Gellege Bridge early that morning.
All of Remin’s knights had some degree of tactical genius, or they would never have become knights at all, but Bram of Lisle was uniquely attentive to practicalities.
A hundred men would clear a forest of game inside a month.
“They cleaned up the camp some, sir, but we found this.” Eude held up the remains of a rough burlap bag, burned in the middle but whole enough to get an idea of size. “There were many more like it. Near their cooking pit.”
“A grain sack,” said Remin, his jaw tightening.
Men living as fugitives in a forest should not have sacks of grain.
Men living as fugitives in a forest should not have access to trade.
Men living in a forest over a long, bitter winter should have been eating each other’s frozen carcasses by the new year.
Which meant someone was supplying them.
“The nearest villages are Ferrede and Meinhem,” said Bram, tapping each with a fingertip. “Ferrede is three or four days away, if I remember right. Meinhem, nearer a week.”
The scandalmongers of the Empire claimed that Remin had put every man, woman, and child living in the valley to the sword, to make sure no one loyal to Valleth remained. He had not. But if he had, he would not currently be having this problem.
“I’ll leave that to you, Bram,” he said after a moment. “Go watch the villages, see who goes in and out. Stop any wagons you see on the road. Take eight men.”
Bram nodded. He always reminded Remin of a rather moth-eaten ferret, with button-black eyes, a narrow, pockmarked face, and long black hair, peppered with gray.
“Where are they now, Eude?”
“About ten days out, Your Grace. Marching south-southeast on foot. Mostly spears and clubs, but I saw some swords and about two dozen bows.”
The tent was silent as they let him think.
Remin knew every ripple and fold of the valley; he had been riding it for seven years and had an excellent memory.
He wasn’t worried about dispatching a mob of deserters, though the fact that they were men of military experience shouldn’t be taken lightly.
The greater concern was that every man he sent away from Tresingale was leaving some necessary work unfinished.
If the walls were delayed, then they would be increasing night watches for Andelin devils; if the spring planting was delayed, then they might be hungry, come winter.
And more than anything, he resented having to take his war horses from their plows.
“I’ll lead a force out tomorrow afternoon,” he said finally.
“We’re not going to sit and wait for them to come to us.
They’re in rough, rocky hills, with a lot of choke points.
We’ll intercept them when they’re moving in column and hit them with our archers, then send in some horsemen to mop up. How many can we spare, Auber?”
“Dozen horses at most, unless you don’t mind stopping some major projects. Most of them are doing draft work.”
“Tounot, pull some archers out of their work details today, and give them some practice time.” Remin scowled ferociously.
“Edemir, report to me later about how we can minimize the impact on planting and wall building, but I’m willing to give up a few acres of planting before we lose a foot of wall. ”
These were familiar problems, too much to do and not enough resources, and not even gold could buy a solution to everything.
Between grudging rewards from the Emperor and tribute from Valleth, Remin had more money than he knew what to do with.
The thing he was lacking was time. Finding and securing the experts and supplies he needed didn’t happen overnight, much less transporting them to the valley.
By late summer, Tresingale would be bursting with men and materiel, but they would have to survive that long, first.
He would take Juste, Huber, and Jinmin along. Sir Jinmin of Oskerre was a stolid man of nearly forty who went about his work on a battlefield the same way he went with his belt knife at dinner. A knight on horse was worth twenty bandits. A Jinmin of Oskerre was worth forty.
After he dispatched more scouts under Eude’s command, Remin reviewed the rest of his plans with his knights, to make sure nothing was overlooked.
The only remaining trouble was what he would do with the people supplying the bandits.
It might not be the whole village; it could be only two or three people who had taken it upon themselves to commit treason.
The loyalties of the Andelin commonfolk were complicated.
After a century of war, they might regard themselves as citizens of either Valleth or the Empire.
But he had offered them amnesty. He had offered to escort anyone who considered themselves citizens of Valleth to the border, and even gave them a few silvers to help them on their way. Someone had refused that offer and then stabbed him in the back.
Remin Grimjaw had no mercy for traitors.
For now, he handed the problem over to the back of his mind and went to have a look at the spring planting.
It gladdened his heart to see the furrows of rich, dark earth stretching away on the north side of town, acres of fresh-turned soil that would soon sprout, green and living.
There were small dots in the distance, men and horses plowing and seeding, singing out their commands to the beasts under Auber’s experienced eye.
“Looks good, doesn’t it?” Auber asked, trotted his bay over to stand by Remin’s warhorse.
They only had a few horses to spare for riding, but the quantity of acreage would have made it impossible for Auber to manage on his own feet.
“We’ve got about sixty acres plowed and forty planted, so far.
Based on Edemir’s figures, that ought to see us through the winter comfortably.
I agree with the men, though, we ought to plant the carrots and such inside the wall.
Birds are already stealing seed and next it will be deer in the carrots. ”
The wooden palisade on the north side of town was a stopgap measure. Both men glanced at it automatically, a ten-foot wall of heavy logs planted upright, spiked on the top and currently three miles long. It would keep deer out, but stranglers would go up and over it as easy as a ladder.
Deer. Ghouls. Stranglers. Demon wolves, regular wolves, human wolves, traitorous villagers and the coming winter and no doubt a host of other hazards that Remin hadn’t even conceived. It was overwhelming, if one started a list.
“You want a turn with the plow, Rem?” Auber glanced at him sidelong, and Remin decided he would.
“Let’s see if you beat me this time,” he said, kicking his horse into a gallop toward the nearest plowman and grinning as Auber swore and raced after him.
Of course, Auber was a farmer’s son and had taken his first toddling steps behind a plow, so the contest wasn’t exactly fair. But it was nearly time for the noon meal and the men welcomed any excuse to stop, much less the treat of another contest between the Duke of Andelin and Sir Auber Conbour.
“First to five?” Auber handed his horse to one of the men nearby. “And the row doesn’t count if it looks like a drunkard plowed it.”
“That only happened one time,” Remin protested, but he didn’t mind the good-natured mockery.
Manual labor sounded like just what he needed.
A few minutes later, Remin and Auber were standing at the end of their respective rows, plows and reins in hand, waiting as the spectators excitedly counted them down.