A Wizard in War

4

Gar placed a finger on the map. “Is this the river ford we passed on our journey here?”

“You came from Sir Hildebrandt’s manor in the north? Yes, it is.” The king seemed surprised that Gar had found the intersection of road and river so easily.

“You’ll have it heavily defended,” Gar predicted, “and if I can see that, so can the earl. He won’t even try a crossing, though he’ll mass enough soldiers there to make you think he will. No, he’ll send his troops across the river at least a quarter mile away.”

The king stared at the map in surprise, then frowned and demanded, “How?”

“In boats,” Gar said.

“With horses? It would take far too long!”

Gar nodded. “Even so. He will send only a dozen knights by boat; the rest will be foot soldiers, but they’ll be his most experienced, his best. They’ll make enough trouble for ten times their number, and draw your troops away from the ford. Then his men will cross—but they won’t be the main body of his troops, just enough to keep your army busy, and while they’re distracting you, the rest of his soldiers will cross the river here and here”—he stabbed the map with the forefinger of each hand, wide apart—“these two fords. How distant are they from the main road to your castle? Four miles?”

“A bit more.” The king stared intently at Gar.

“Close enough to arrive before the diversion is over, then. And Insol will cross at both fords, so that he can bring his troops marching around like the pincers of a crab’s claw, with your troops between them as they shut.”

“You have guessed even as I have.” The king watched Gar narrowly. “I will have troops hidden in the forest nearby, of course, to fall upon them as they come out of the water. What else will I do?”

“Why, carry the fight to Insol, of course!” Gar said, surprised. “Your army will be ready before his, will it not?”

“It will indeed, especially since the knights near those estates will gather there rather than here.” The king turned to Sir Hildebrandt. “You will command the force that guards the center ford, though, Sir Hildebrandt. Keep half your force here; send the others back to Northford.”

“As Your Majesty wishes.” Sir Hildebrandt bowed his head, keeping a straight face.

The king turned back to Gar. “So my army shall attack from north and south at the same time, fording the river and charging out upon Insol’s hidden forces. What shall they do then?”

“Catch them sleeping, since your men will cross under cover of night. I would guess that you would send your best soldiers across first, dressed in black and moving as silently as possible, to take out Insol’s sentries, so that you can catch his camps by surprise. When they’ve slain or captured all his soldiers and knights, your forces will wait for dawn, then ride posthaste to attack his castle. With luck, you may catch him before his drawbridge goes up.”

“Exactly as I had planned!” The king clapped his hands in delight. “This is a most insightful recruit you have brought me, Sir Hildebrandt! Can he fight as well as he plans?”

“Oh, he most surely can,” the knight said ruefully. “But can you lay schemes beyond a battle?” the king asked.

“Strategy, Your Majesty means? Yes, I have some knack for it, if I am given full knowledge—but I know little about your country or your barons, and less about your goals. Do you go only to chastise one earl?”

“That’s as must be,” the king said grimly. “If Insol’s defeat is enough to make the rest obey and send the full tax that they owe, and soldiers for my personal army, well and good—but if not, I shall have to chastise each of them, one by one.”

“To what purpose?” Gar pressed. “For gold and strength of arms? Or to curb their harsh treatment of their serfs, and make them instruments of your own justice, not merely their own whims?”

“Gold, of course, and the strength to compel them to do as I command! Why should I care how they mete out their justice, or how they herd their serfs? Such cattle are good only for tilling the land and gathering wood, nothing more.”

Coll clamped iron control over his whole body to keep it from shaking with rage.

“But those ‘cattle’ are human,” Gar said softly, “and make foot soldiers for your army, and mothers to raise more soldiers.”

“They must be tended with care, of course, as any cattle must! Do you think I know nothing of husbandry?”

“Of course not, Your Majesty,” Gar soothed, “but to guess at your strategy, I must know how many serfs you wish to keep alive when your war is ended.”

“As many as possible, of course! What good is a field with no one to plow it?”

“Then you wish to make the barons stop fighting one another, and wasting serfs in the process?” Gar pressed. “Wasting! What manner of talk is that?” The king made a chopping gesture. “What care I how many cattle they slay in their wrangling? Let them fight each other every day of the year, weakening one another so that they may fall easy prey to my armies, when I wish to compel them to obey!”

“Then the constant warfare that assails this land is your strategy,” Gar inferred.

The king stared in surprise, then slowly grinned. “Most insightful indeed.” He turned to Sir Hildebrandt. “The man is a marvel, Sir Hildebrandt, and more than fit to command! See to it that he leads the charge across the northern ford, and that Sir Dirk is beside him!”

“Of course, leading the charge will almost guarantee that you’re killed in the battle,” Dirk pointed out, “especially if your soldiers aren’t any better fighters than that.” He pointed at two squadrons of footmen who were practicing halberd play with wooden weapons—and missing one another as often as they struck.

“Of course,” Gar agreed. “The last thing a king wants is a really capable knight leading a body of well-disciplined, hard-fighting soldiers. This king may be a brute, but he’s no fool.”

Coll stared at him, scandalized, feeling cold runnels of fear all through himself. Then he glanced frantically to left and right, to see if anyone was close enough to hear—but Gar and Dirk had chosen the right location for a private talk; they were ostensibly surveying the castle and the soldiers, so they were out in the middle of the courtyard, where no one could hear them—except Coll, of course, but he shared their opinion of the king. He had hoped to find a wise and compassionate young monarch, filled with ideals and burning to stop the slaughter of serfs in the lords’ petty wars. Instead, he had found a man who was perfectly willing to encourage those battles, and wanted only more gold and more power. Coll’s rage smoldered in him like a banked fire.

“He’s intelligent,” Dirk pointed out.

“Oh, yes, intelligent,” Gar agreed. “If he weren’t, he wouldn’t be half so dangerous. Intelligent and shrewd.” Dirk nodded. “The kind of man who thinks you can trick your way around morality.”

“No, he doesn’t even think about right or wrong. After all, he knows he’s the king.”

“So anybody who opposes him is wrong?” Dirk asked. “Only in his own eyes.”

“I see,” Dirk said softly. “He is his own morality.”

“Which is another way of saying that he’s a selfish, egocentric brute,” Gar said dryly.

Coll wasn’t sure what all the words meant, but he was sure he agreed with them. Like Dirk and Gar, he had found his king to be very disenchanting.

Dirk noticed. “You don’t look any too happy about him either, Coll.”

The serf shrugged. “You, at least, can leave this land, if you don’t like its king, sir.”

“Dirk,” the knight corrected.

“Dirk.” Coll tried to smile. “You can leave. I have to live with this king.”

“Yes.” Dirk’s eyes narrowed; his voice dropped. “But he doesn’t.”

Coll stared, trying to understand what the knight meant. When he realized it, it struck him like lightning, and he staggered. The idea that people could rid themselves of a bad king was shocking, worse than shocking.

“Steady.” It was Gar’s hand that held him up. “After all, you’re an outlaw.”

Coll stared at him, uncomprehending. Then he understood what Gar meant, and he felt a rush of strength swelling within him as a wolfish grin tugged at his lips. He was dead already, if the law caught him—how much more dead could he be for fighting against the king?

“He’s young, though,” Gar reminded Coll. “We might still make something of this king of yours.”

Coll stared, even more flabbergasted. How could you remake a king?

“Is he a pretty good example of the men who rule you,” Dirk asked, “or are the lords any different?”

The question took Coll aback. “I only know of Earl Insol.”

“But you must have heard something of the others.” Coll shrugged. “From the rumors we hear in our village, they’re all the same—not the songs the minstrels sing in the common, but the words they speak in low voices when the door is barred and the night keeps folk home in bed. All of the lords want wealth—who doesn’t—and all of them want power, or they wouldn’t be lords.”

“That makes sense, as far as it goes,” Dirk admitted. “The question is, do they want anything but wealth and power?”

“Of course,” Gar said, with a hard smile. “They want the things that wealth can buy and power can compel—rich food, fine wines, young women for their beds…”

Anger flared in Coll. “Yes, they’re like that, all of them! Oh, my grandfather told me that Earl Insol was noble enough when he was young, that many of them are—but a year or two of power changes all that. Before his father died, the earl was angered by our sufferings; he brought us food when he could, and made his soldiers treat us more gently, so my grandfather said. They thought it was because he was in love with one of the serf girls, but dared not touch her, for she was very pretty, and his father might want her for his own—and sure enough, the old earl took her, and the young lord was too much ashamed to take her afterward. He still came to help the serfs with food and medicine when he could, but something had died within him.”

“What happened when they buried his father and he became earl in his own right?” Dirk asked.

Coll shrugged. “He stopped the scourgings and demanded fewer days of labor on his own lands—for a year or two. Then Count Sipar, his neighbor to the north, marched against him, and he had to haul men from the plow and jam them into boiled-leather armor.”

“He won, though?”

“He didn’t lose,” Coll sighed. “He still holds Insol. He held the border, yes, but he didn’t march into Sipar’s lands. At home, he began to become hard as his father, and little by little the scourgings came back, and the days of labor went up again, until we were no better off than before.”

“And his son?” Dirk asked.

“Which one?” Coll said bitterly. “He has a dozen, among our serfs—but never by the woman he loved in his youth, they say.”

“He hasn’t married, then?”

“Only two years ago, and long we had to labor to provide his feast! His wife’s with child at last, so mayhap there will be a son soon.”

“And his lady?” Gar asked. “Has she come among you to cure your ills, or asked her lord to lighten your burdens?”

“Lighten them! She’s calling for another day’s labor every fortnight, to build the new tower she fancies!” Coll shook his head slowly. “Yes, some of them are noble enough when they’re young, sir knights—but power changes that. In all of them. I’ve never heard of a one who used it to help his serfs—not one.”

Dirk gave Gar a lugubrious look. “It is worse than home!”

They had only two weeks to weld the king’s forces into a single army. His Majesty employed Gar and Dirk as couriers, riding from one knight to another to take them the king’s orders and bring back information. It took Gar only one day to figure out that the king expected him to coordinate the bands, inducing them to work together somehow. He left it to Dirk to soothe ruffled feathers and convey orders without being too insulting, while Gar devoted himself to calming and flattering the king while he provided him with advice on tactics under the guise of guesswork. Coll rode first with the one, then the other, amazed at the number of details they gave him to work out, and even more amazed to discover that he could do every job they gave him.

In spite of it all, he still managed to squeeze in a couple of hours of drill with the king’s spearmen every day, and quickly discovered that he and his friends had worked out more ways to use the weapon than the professionals had been taught. He undertook the task of teaching them, without letting them know. “Foul? I’m sorry. I never thought it would be a foul blow to strike at the belly with a spear butt. We do that at home in Mélange, all the time. How did I do it? Well, you stab with the blade, but as you draw the spear back, you swing the butt down, like this…”

Gar watched them drill and was pleasantly surprised. “Well done, Coll, well done indeed! It seems we chose better than we knew when we recruited him, Dirk!”

“Oh, well, I always had an eye for talent,” Dirk drawled, with a gleam in his eye—and a manner so droll that Coll shouted with laughter. It felt good to laugh again, even once.

Then they were marching, and the time for laughing was done.

The king himself led the crossing of the ford on the main road. He led a charge with a dozen knights behind him in the grey light before dawn, out of the water and into the earl’s camp. Insol’s army was just waking, just beginning to stumble out of their tents to throw kindling on their banked fires and blow them to life. The king’s army swept in among them, clubbing unarmed men aside with contempt. Knights came running from their pavilions with swords already drawn and only mail coats for protection, shouting and haranguing their men into some semblance of order and bullying their soldiers into catching up spears. But the king’s troops parried their thrusts, then stabbed in return, and men died. Death screams filled the air, and some of them came from king’s men, for the earl’s soldiers came awake quickly with the surge of fear. But they were too few and too late; the king’s knights swung from horseback and struck the swords out of the hands of the earl’s knights, though here and there an earl’s man thrust upward and slipped his blade between gorget and helm; there and here, a king’s man struck, not caring where, and a knight lost an arm or fell with blood pulsing from his throat. But most of the earl’s troops fled, and in less than an hour, the king’s soldiers were rounding up prisoners.

“An excellent action, Majesty,” Gar told the king. Coll, overhearing, thought that Gar should have known if anyone did—after all, the plan had really been his.

“Thank you, Sir Gar.” The king fairly beamed—pleased; he had won his first battle. “I trust Sir Hildebrandt and Sir Hrothgar have fared as well as we.”

“I’m sure they have, Majesty,” Gar told him. Coll wondered how the big man could be so certain of it. Nonetheless, the couriers came riding at the gallop to tell of victory, and that before they were more than a mile farther down the road, with the prisoners already on their way to the king’s dungeon. The king was beside himself with glee. “A triumph! A wonderful triumph!”

“It is indeed,” Gar agreed, “but when we chase Earl Insol on his home estates, I trust Your Majesty will be more careful of your person—and more thrifty with your men.”

The glee vanished on the instant. “What do you mean?”

“We must find some high place,” Gar counseled, “so that you may look down on the battle, and direct it. I know it will be hard for you to give up leading the charge yourself, but our chances of winning the battle are greater if our tactician can see the enemy’s movements and counter them during the battle, rather than setting everything in motion and hoping he was right.”

The king had started nodding before Gar was more than halfway done. “Yes. A most excellent idea, Sir Gar. You will stay by me, though, to guard me.”

Coll fancied he caught an undertone of relief in the king’s words—and he thought Gar’s sigh was entirely false as he said, “I must do as Your Majesty wishes, of course.” After all, Coll reflected, Gar hadn’t said who the tactician was.

So it was that, when they met Earl Insol’s army, the king was no longer at their fore. Instead, he sat atop a hill with his bodyguards, Gar at his right hand, and directed the battle. There was a fair amount of grumbling about it, covering outright fear: How sure of victory could the king be, if he was so anxious to be far from his own army? But Dirk rode from knight to knight, explaining in very loud tones how the king’s being away from the battle improved their chances of winning, and each knight nodded as though he had reasons of his own for agreeing. The troopers, seeing how thoroughly their masters were of one mind, began to relax and gain heart.

The earl, marching his main army to join the advance guard he had sent to the ford, had met and rallied the routed soldiers, gathering them in. Spies in the enemy camp sent word to the king that the nobleman was shocked and angry to find the king had already attacked and had captured half his advance guard to boot. “Not necessarily a good thing,” Dirk explained to Coll. “He knows he has a real fight on his hands now, and is out for revenge besides.”

Soldiers who overheard him exclaimed with delight, but Coll felt a cold pool of apprehension growing in his belly. It would be a harder fight than the last, much harder.

It was. The earl borrowed the king’s technique from the reports of the battle at the ford, and charged at first light. The king’s men were ready and waiting for him, though, and gave ground at the center of the line, fighting desperately as they retreated—desperately, because the earl’s knights fought with the energy of anger, driving their footmen all the harder, and because the earl himself laid about him with furious strokes of his sword, calling for the coward king to come out and fight. The troopers could only try to parry his blade and retreat before him and his huge armored horse, because only another nobleman was allowed to battle him. Any knight who had been so rash as to try it and win would have been hanged for his pains.

Coll watched it all happen, for he crouched in the bracken high on the hillside with the rest of the reserves, hearing the king rage at Gar, “He insults me, he impugns my honor! Don’t tell me again about the soldiers he has hidden in the ranks near him who are to disembowel my horse and bear me down…”

“The earl will be quite willing to hang them after the battle, as honor dictates,” Gar reminded him.

“Then let them die—but let it be in battle, from the spears of my soldier guards! Live or die, I must fight him, or none will ever follow me again!”

“Look!” Gar pointed. “The earl has driven our center in so far that our flanks are behind his now! Yes, Majesty, by all means, charge in to fight him, for we have him surrounded now!”

The king drew his sword and charged down with a shout. His men echoed it and pelted down the hill after him, Coll in their midst.

They struck the earl’s army like a hammer through thatch. The knights commanding the flanks saw them coming, and timed their own counterattack so that suddenly the earl found his army hard-pressed from every side. Even the men who had been giving ground before him were standing firm now, even beginning to press in! And worst of all, here came that idiot boy in his shining armor, plowing through the press of peasants and roaring Insol’s name! There was no help for it, chivalry dictated that the earl turn aside from trying to push back the serfs in front of him, to meet the stripling in combat. “Dag! Vorgan!” he called to the two nearest knights. “Press this rabble back! I must see to the scullery boy!” He turned, couching his lance, and saw a lane open up as if by magic, foot soldiers pressing back to reveal the young king at the far end, lance leveled. Insol shouted and charged.

So did the king.

They met with a fearful crash. Insol felt his lance torn from his arm and reeled in his saddle, his stomach suddenly roiling as the sky and army swerved and soared about him. Motion stopped; dimly, he was aware of serfs turning his horse about, and pulled himself upright in the saddle in time to see the young king turning to face him, throwing aside a broken lance and drawing a sword.

Anger came to Insol’s aid. He drew his own sword and spurred his horse, shouting an angry insult. The king’s horse lumbered into motion, and king and nobleman met to trade blows.

But while the king was keeping Earl Insol busy, Gar was shouting orders to the other knights, who drove their men in, cutting Insol’s army into wedges—wedges that fought back with the desperation of cornered men who expect no mercy, and the battle disintegrated into half a dozen skirmishes. The knots of men broke apart, and Insol’s men ran for ground that gave them a better chance. The king’s men raised a gloating shout, and charged after them—but the earl’s serfs knew the terrain and stopped to fight again atop a ridge, so that the king’s soldiers had to charge uphill at them. They met spears, and many died.

Coll didn’t wait to get caught up in trying to catch a fleeing foe. As soon as he could, he broke off from the battle and ran for home. He was dreadfully aware that the fighting was far too close to his village, and that fleeing soldiers might very well run for the cover of its cottages.