The Fell Sword (10 page)

Mostly, he lay freezing in his cloak and thought of Thorn. He’d given up his blanket to Nat Tyler, who had a fever and the runs and was worse off. They’d carried Tyler for days until he declared he could walk – but he walked in silence, and when they made camp he’d lie down and sleep. Redmede missed his council.

The worst of it was that more than a month had passed since the defeat, and he didn’t really have a goal. He had heard that the Wild had a mighty lord, far to the west; an old and powerful irk who had a fortress and a set of villages where some Outwallers lived free. It was a rumour he’d gleaned when he recruited some serfs in the Brogat; he wondered now if it was just a cloud cuckoo land, a promise as false as the heaven preached by priests. A month’s travel, scrounging food and killing any animal big enough to make a meal—

The immediate problem was food. It might have amused him, that his very success in saving Jacks from the wreck of defeat now meant that there were too many of them to hunt deer in the woods. His people had consumed the last of their supplies when they left their canoes at the last navigable stretch of the Cohocton, and began walking west. They followed a narrow ribbon of trail beaten into the earth by generations of Outwallers and Wild creatures – it was like a deer trail, but twelve inches wide and formed of hard beaten earth that didn’t show a footprint or even the mark of a dew claw or a hoof.

And there was no game for hundreds of yards to either side of the trail. The only sign in the woods was boglin sign. Thousands of them – perhaps more – had survived Thorn’s defeat, and when the sorcerer abandoned his forces he’d released thousands of the small but deadly creatures from his will. They, too, were on the trail, headed west. Headed home.

That was a frightening thought.

But this trail led somewhere. That much Redmede knew.

The woods themselves seemed more threatening then he remembered. The silence was oppressive – even the number of insects seemed reduced by the magnitude of the Wild’s rout. It was a silent summer. And Bill Redmede had never travelled this far west.

A day’s travel west of the Ings of the Cohocton, they found an irk village burned flat. Casual inspection showed that the inhabitants had probably done the work themselves – there were no corpses, and nothing had been left. Just the remnants of twenty-four cabins in a great circle, all burned, and the stockade around it, closely woven with raspberry canes and other prickers, black, but still thorny.

One of his men had cried to see it. ‘They’re ahead of us!’ he said. ‘Sweet Jesus, Jack, the knights are—’

Redmede wanted to smack him. But instead, he leaned on his bow and shook his head. ‘Use your noggin, young Peter. How would they get here? Eh? Irks did this themselves.’ He ordered men to prod the cabin foundations for grain pits, and they found ten – all empty. But they were desperate enough to pick the kernels of dried corn out of the earthen pits, one at a time, and then young Fitzwilliam found a buried pot – a great earthenware container that held twenty pounds of grain. Another hour of digging found another.

Forty pounds of corn among two hundred men was a mere handful per man, but Bill sent three of his best, all veteran foresters, north across the stream, and they returned while the corn was being roasted on fires. They had a pair of deer.

The next morning, as if a miracle, a troop of turkeys walked boldly across the cleared fields to the south – twenty fat birds, bold as brass. In the process of killing them, the Jacks realised that the corn in the fields was ripe. The fields furthest from the woods’ edge had already been picked clean – clearly the irks had harvested what they could before they burned their village – but the corn under the forest eaves was fresh, full-kernelled, and mature. Albans grew grains – oats, barley, and wheat – irks and Outwallers grew the native corn, and while the taste was unfamiliar and curiously sweet Bill knew salvation when he saw it. Twenty turkeys and four hundred ears of corn provided a second feast, and with time to think and food in his belly he decided they should rest another day and sent more hunters north and south to look for deer.

The men he sent north didn’t return. He waited three days for them, and mourned the loss of his best scout, an old man everyone called Grey Cal. Cal was too good to get lost and too old to take foolish chances. But the Wild was the Wild.

A half-blood – Outwaller and Morean – offered to try to track the old man and his party. Redmede was in the difficult position of getting to know his men as he faced each challenge – the fighting at Lissen Carrak had rallied all the different cells of the Jacks, and years of patient secrecy had aided their recruitment, but it didn’t help him now. He didn’t know the dark-skinned man or his abilities at all.

‘What’d you say your name was, comrade?’ he asked.

The young half-blood crouched. He wore a feather in his hair like an Outwaller, and carried an Eastern horn bow rather than a war bow. ‘Call me Cat,’ he said. He grinned. ‘You have any food, boss?’

‘No man is boss to any other here,’ Redmede said.

‘That’s crap,’ said Cat. ‘You the boss. These others – some wouldn’t live a day out here withouten you.’ He smiled. ‘Let me go find Cal. He fed me many times. Good man. Good friend. Good
comrade.
’

Redmede had the sudden feeling he was sending his new best scout to find his old one. ‘Tomorrow we go west on the trail,’ he said. ‘Know anything about this trail, comrade?’

The dark-skinned man looked up the trail for long enough that Redmede began to hope for an answer. But Cat grinned, suddenly. ‘Goes west, I reckon,’ he said. ‘Can I try for Cal?’

‘Go with my blessing.’ Redmede handed the boy some newly parched corn.

Cat raised the corn to his forehead. ‘Tara will protect me,’ he said. Tara was the Outwaller goddess.

Redmede couldn’t stop himself. ‘Superstition will never help us be free,’ he said.

Cat smiled. ‘Nope,’ he agreed. He ate the handful of corn in one great mouthful, picked up his bow and loped away into the gathering darkness.

The next night their camp was worse, they ate strips of badly dried venison and shivered by their fires. Redmede was sure they were being observed – he went out in person at dusk, and again at dawn, moving as silently as twenty years of outlawry had taught him to, but he didn’t see so much as a bent blade of grass nor did he hear a twig snap that wasn’t rightly accounted for by chipmunks and raccoons.

His men were leaner. He looked them over along the thin ribbon of trail – most of them had ruined their hose, and none of them had white cotes any more. The good wool was stained from lying flat, sleeping, crawling and living, and now their cotes had taken on the many hues of the forest. They were still too bright, but the starkness of white was being overlaid with a thousand imprints of nature, and the Wild was having the same effect on the men and the handful of women.

It was the women that caused him concern. He’d heard a couple screwing in the dark, and if he’d heard it he knew that two hundred other pairs of ears had listened with the same hunger. Men could share abstinence, but if one or two men were getting some . . .

He walked along the line until he reached the oldest of the female Jacks – Bess. She was as tall as he, and no kind of beauty at all in the world of men. Although here in the Wild her big-boned, heavy-breasted frame seemed as natural as a beaver dam and ten times as attractive.

Bill Redmede grimaced at himself. ‘Bess?’ he said. ‘Walk with me a few paces, eh?’

Bess got her blanket roll on her hip, passed the cord over her shoulder, and picked up her bow. ‘What’s on your mind?’ she asked bluntly.

‘Women. Fucking.’ He looked back at her. He hoped they were out of earshot of the Jacks.

She frowned. ‘You have a strange way of asking a girl, Jack.’

He stopped and leaned against a tree so enormous that the two of them would never have been able to pass their arms around the trunk.

A light rain began to fall, and he cursed. He ran back along the trail and ordered the long files of Jacks into motion behind him, and then he turned and ran back to her. ‘I don’t mean me,’ he said. ‘I need you to tell the girls—’

‘Fuck you, Bill Redmede,’ Bess said. ‘This ain’t the Royal Army. Those sisters have the same rights as any Jack – right to their arms, right to their bodies. Yes,
comrade
?’

Bill plodded along for a dozen paces. ‘Sister, there are ideals and then there are everyday—’ He paused, looking for a word. ‘Everyday things,’ he said weakly. ‘Every woman has the right to her own body. But plague take it, sister, we’re in a tight space—’

Bess was three paces ahead of him. She stopped, turned, and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘If we’re in a tight space then this is when we find out what we are. All the more reason the sisters should do what they want.’

Bill thought about that a moment. ‘Could end hard,’ he said.

‘Are you our lord? Our master? Our father?’ Bess challenged him. ‘It could end hard, and mayhap I’ll say a word to a sister if it looks like it will. But it ain’t your responsibility, is it, Bill Redmede?’

He looked at her, expected to find himself angry at her attitude to his authority, and instead was glad. Glad that someone else was a true believer. ‘Good of the many, sister,’ he said.

Bess nodded. ‘That, I can understand.’

That day the hunters got nothing and the grumbling in camp was continuous. A great many men were leaning towards blaming their leader. Redmede could feel it.

Morning came after a night of rain – a night where only the most hardened veterans slept. At least it made sex unlikely – but in the morning everyone looked thinner, more pinched, and as those men who had any rolled up their sodden cloaks and blankets, they bickered over the slightest thing.

A pair of serfs from the Albin – new men, young and comparatively strong and well fed – packed their goods silently and trotted away down the trail, headed east.

Nat Tyler came up. He’d had the runs for days and keeping up had been all he could do, but he was recovering. Redmede had never known a tougher man, and his heart rose to see his most trusted friend leaning on his great bow.

‘I could reach them from here,’ Tyler said.

‘You are feeling better, comrade. But skip it. We’ve never killed our own.’ He watched the two men moving furtively away.

‘So we have, when needs must.’ Tyler spat, but he dropped his ready arrow back into his quiver, and carefully tied the thong on his arrow bag against the wet. His eyes were on Bess as she walked, head high, shoulders square. ‘Fever broke in the night,’ he muttered. ‘And I heard a lot of shite talked.’

Redmede watched the rain. ‘It’ll get worse,’ he said.

That afternoon, in heavy rain, he sent out three teams of hunters, one of them composed of six unwilling men, younger serfs recently escaped, with Tyler to teach them. They were resentful of authority, cold, wet, and hungry – not the ideal circumstances under which to learn how to move in the woods.

‘There won’t be a fucking deer moving in this,’ Tyler complained.

‘Then kill them in their lies,’ Redmede quipped.

‘If this’n was
my
woods and I knew the lies I would,’ Tyler said. ‘Fuck me, even then I wouldn’t go out in rain like this.’

‘Kills the scent,’ Redmede said. ‘We need meat. Needs must when the devil drives.’

‘Make that up yerself, Bill?’ Tyler said. But he managed a damp smile. ‘I’m off then.’

They made camp too near dark, if lying in the rain under a dripping canopy of maple leaves could be accounted a camp. Everything was wet – the ground, the men, and all their clothes, all their blankets, all their cloaks.

It was dark to be gathering firewood but Redmede led the effort himself, and Bess backed him up, and before the sky overhead was black as black they had a heap of downed branches as high as a man’s head, and more and more of the exhausted men were rising from their first collapse to help. But Redmede could see that they were moving like the sick; their thin-lipped, jerky wood-gathering frightened him more than outright rebellion would have done.

Bess found a treasure – a hollow apple tree full of carefully stored dry birchbark. Redmede found his fire stele and got to work, but the wind and the rain didn’t help and neither did having an audience. The sky was black as a nobleman’s heart when he finally had his char glowing red with a lit spark.

Even then three tries failed to get the char to light his tow, which was apparently damp despite being carried in a well-made tin, right against his skin. He cursed.

Bess shrugged. ‘Stop your whining,’ she said. ‘I know a trick.’ She rubbed some birch bark between her hands, crumpling it finer and finer as three other women held their cotes over her head to keep the rain off – and the birch dust caught the spark from the char cloth, flared to light, and lit a twist of birch bark that glared like a magic spell in the darkness. All the men and women in the dark, wet camp, cheered spontaneously – not just a gasp, but a shout. In a minute, the pile of dry birch bark caught and in ten minutes, the whole vast pile of wood was roaring, flames leaping twenty feet in the air, so high that the rain was diverted over their heads.

With fire a palpable reality, the Jacks found the spirit to get more wood, even though it had to be scrounged by feel in total darkness – armloads of sodden, half-rotten wood appeared, but by then the fire was so hot that it had ceased to discriminate. It was so hot it could dry a man’s shirt in a few beats of his heart, even as that heat threatened to boil his blood. The sick and the most weary were encouraged to lie down, feet to the fire, in a ring close around it where the air was breathable, and they were as close to comfortable as a man could manage in the Wild.

Nat Tyler came in near to midnight. The fire was still burning like a beacon, and men were working in shifts to feed it, crashing a hundred feet or more into the surrounding darkness.

‘It’s like you’ve hung out a sign,’ Tyler said. He crouched down by Redmede, and he was obviously exhausted.

‘Get anything?’ Redmede asked.

‘Doe and two fawns,’ Tyler said with half a grin. ‘Wasn’t pretty, but we got ’em. Funny – when we took the deer we could see your fire plain as the fingers on my hand, but when we came down the hill, we lost you – even lost the stream for a time.’ He shook his head. ‘Plague take it, lost in the dark is like hell come to earth, comrade.’