Chapter 7
“Obviously,” she was saying, “we’re tightly circumscribed by our terms of engagement, so there’s only so much that even I can do as regards actual positive action.
Properly speaking, I’m confined to offering materiel support and advice and encouragement.
Given the seriousness of the situation I’m prepared to bend the rules as much as I can, but breaking them—” She paused, preoccupied with her own thoughts.
“I’m prepared to break rules if I absolutely have to. ”
We were walking down the road. No need to skulk about any more; the Order would be long gone, nobody keeping tabs on me. “Good for you,” I said. “Now either suggest something or go away.”
“I have a plan,” she said. “Obviously I haven’t had an opportunity to clear it with divisional command, and I can’t call on any of our assets in this area, since they don’t know I’ve been assigned here.
The sad fact is, the sum total of my assets is you.
Nevertheless, I have the bare bones of a plan of action, for which I calculate a sixty-eight per cent chance of success. ”
“Sixty-eight,” I said. “Not sixty-seven or sixty-nine.”
She scowled at me. “In order for the plan to work,” she went on, “I shall need your complete cooperation. Is that understood?”
“Tell me what you’ve got in mind and I’ll think about it.”
It was possible, even likely, that she didn’t like me very much.
I tried not to let that eat into my soul.
“Very well. We know that Grimhild is at Pfeil. Logically, the Order will take Svangerd there, to begin the extraction process. Grimhild will want to oversee it personally, partly because that’s her command style, partly because she’s the most skilled operative in the entire North.
We can assume, therefore, that, barring accidents, Svangerd will still be alive by the time she reaches Pfeil. ”
“Which is seventy miles from here.”
“Fifty-nine miles. As you know, the road goes directly from Shave Cross to Pfeil, looping around the lake. If we march day and night and take a boat across the lake, we stand a reasonable chance of getting to Pfeil before they do.’
I thought for a moment. “Better still,” I said, “we stop off at Nieper and pick up some fast horses and a platoon of cavalry. That way, we can overtake them on the road.”
“Are you being funny?”
“No,” I said, and took the credentials out of my sleeve. “I’m a knight of the Wardrobe, I can have all the duke’s horses and all the duke’s men. Actually, why be a piker? Let’s make that a squadron of cavalry. Dragoons if they’ve got them.”
She gazed at the scrap of parchment, then handed it back. “All right,” she said, “we’ll do it your way. But this is still my operation.”
“Noted,” I said.
They didn’t have dragoons at Nieper, only a squadron of the seventh hussars.
Not to worry, I told the garrison commander, beggars can’t be choosers.
Throw in a couple dozen of those Flos de Glaia mounted auxiliaries and we’ll say no more about it.
Oh, and while I think of it, arrest that woman. She’s a witch.
He went pale. They’re superstitious in the valleys. “Are you sure?”
“Absolutely no doubt about it at all.”
“Oh, my God.”
I gave him a sympathetic nod. “What you need to do,” I said, “is grab her while she’s asleep, truss her up and gag her real good and put a bag over her head.
Then lock her up in the smallest cell you’ve got and I’ll deal with her when I get back.
On no account let her say a word to anybody and you should be fine.
You’ll have to take the gag out to feed her, of course, so I recommend stuffing bog cotton in your ears and singing psalms very loudly.
And for pity’s sake, no visitors. Anybody turning up asking to see her, arrest them. Got that?”
“Understood,” he muttered. “Look, can’t we just torch her now and be done with it?”
“Not without a proper trial,” I said primly. “I know, it’s a pain, but we’ve got to do the right thing, haven’t we?”
I had my choice of horses from the garrison commander’s personal stable.
I chose a solid-looking chestnut gelding, which the commander assured me was as meek as a lamb but also faster than the wind.
I know very little about horses, other than the pint-sized, vicious little ponies we had back home.
Good choice, the commander told me, after I’d signed the purchase warrant.
In charge of my squadron of hussars was a major by the name of Shenderic. He had an upper-class voice you could’ve cut gemstones with, ears like sails and the biggest Adam’s apple I’ve ever seen. “This mission,” he said, as we rode out of the castle gates.
“Piece of cake,” I told him. “A small group of Aelian monks have kidnapped a woman. We’re going to get her back.”
He frowned. He knew all about monks. Even so. “For that you need a whole squadron.”
“These monks are highly trained special forces, reporting directly to an archbishop,” I said. “Also, it’s imperative the woman isn’t harmed in any way. I’m not at liberty to tell you who she is, but—”
He nodded.
“So, we come at them with overwhelming force. I want the monks alive if at all possible. When they see your boys surrounding them with lances levelled, I can’t see them choosing to make a fight of it, can you?”
“Understood.”
The Flos de Glaia auxiliaries were strictly for scouting ahead, which they excel at, rather than actual combat, at which they also excel, but for which they’d be entirely unsuitable in this instance.
The Flos are the best horse archers in the known world, recruited from the wide open plains of northern Blemmya, though originally they came from the north-east frontier of Echmen.
They’re short, slight people with blue eyes and curly red hair, and anywhere north of the Middle Sea they’re liable to freeze to death unless they swaddle up in three or four layers of fur.
They look like children, mostly because they are children; traditionally, when a Flos male reaches adolescence he goes off into the wide world in search of adventure, glory and enough money to pay the substantial bride price Flos fathers demand for a half-decent wife.
If you encounter a twenty-year-old Flos, you can bet he’s no good; five years in the North and he still hasn’t made his big score.
The reason I didn’t want Flos horse soldiers anywhere near Svangerd was their habit of wiping out the enemy to the last man, woman, child, horse and dog.
There’s no Flos word for prisoner, surrender or civilian, and the word usually translated as mercy actually means either cowardice or a certain kind of mental illness.
The garrison commander had been partially truthful.
The horse he’d sold me was as meek as the wind and as fast as a lamb.
Six miles out of Nieper I swapped with the colour sergeant, and got a massive grey mare so broad that my legs were practically sticking out at right angles, but which was nevertheless a distinct improvement.
My overwhelming experience of the military is of violent men trying to kill me, so it’s hard for me to be objective.
Credit, however, where it’s due. When they’re on your side, trained professional soldiers are a good thing, and I can begin to see why kings spend most of our money on them.
You want something done? No problem. Something that involves butchering anybody who stands in your way?
Just another day at the office for our brave boys in chainmail.
True, I’d said that I wanted the monks alive if at all possible.
But it wasn’t. Surrounded by a ring of lance heads, the monks hit the deck, rolled under the hussars’ levelled spears and came up stabbing and slashing at the horses.
Your cavalry horse is a noble beast, as well or better trained than its rider, but it can only take so much.
For a moment it looked like the monks would get away with it; there were rearing, bucking horses everywhere, the hussars couldn’t use their lances so they had to ditch them and draw their swords, which took time and left them empty-handed, with monks pulling them down from their saddles and cutting their throats as though they’d spent the last ten years practising the manoeuvre for five hours every day.
Maybe they had, at that. But every conflict has phases – the vicissitudes of war, as Sindomer calls them – and as often as not, victory turns to defeat.
In this case, the monks were too successful.
They carved their way deep into the ring of hussars, which left them isolated, unable to support each other, and in due course they were engulfed and hacked to pieces.
Eight monks killed twelve soldiers and chewed up six more, but all to no purpose. C’est la vie, no pun intended.
“What we should have done,” the officer told me, as we picked our way through the carnage, “was dismount and come at them on foot. I’ll have to bear that in mind for next time.”
I stepped over a dead monk. His skull had been split, so he had two faces, and all the fingers of his left hand had been shorn off. Good old trial and error. I stopped, just short of the mule, which was grazing placidly. “Thanks,” I said to the officer. “I’ll take it from here.”
He gazed at me. “You sure?”
“Yes,” I said. “You’ve been a great help. Sorry about the men who were killed.”
He shrugged. “We won,” he said. “Now it’s up to me to spin it into a glorious victory. You might bear that in mind when you make your report.”