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February 20 - February 23, 2024
“There are many laws. But the greatest of them is that the strongest is the strongest. And every creature, weak or strong, makes a good meal.” He laughed. “It’s no different at the king’s court. But here, it’s fair and honest, at least in that no one lies.
said. “Don’t disdain us. We do as other people do, we just don’t call it by pretty names.
We make war now to support Thorn, but also so that all the other killers and all the other predators will see our strength and leave us in peace. Will fear us. So we can go home and grow squash. It is not all war and knives in the dark.”
To the west, he found a user of much talent and little training. But he had no context for the discovery—a village witch, or a boglin shaman or one of the Wild’s living trees. He had no idea, and he dismissed the entity as far too weak to have displayed the power he had sensed.
When he was a small boy in a fishing village Harmodius, who’d had a different name then, had rowed out on the deep in a small boat with two friends to fish for sea trout and salmon with hand lines. Porpoises and small whales shared the sport, and sometimes they caught good fish only to have them snatched away by their aquatic rivals. But late in the day, while pulling in a heavy fish, Harmodius had seen a seal—an enormous seal as long as his boat—flash into a turn and reach for their magnificent fish… … just as a leviathan, as much larger than the seal as the seal was larger than the salmon,
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In all his life, Harmodius had never seen anything that moved him so deeply, or so impressed on him his own insignificance. It was more than fear. It was the discovery that some things are so great that they would not notice you even if they destroyed you.
At his own fire, the old Magus was heating ale in a copper shoe. “You seem content to help yourself,” Random said. Harmodius didn’t even raise an eyebrow. “I pay you the compliment of assuming that you are a generous man. And I made some for you.” Random laughed. He was camping with a legend, who was heating him ale on a chilly spring morning.
Harmodius ran it over the corpse—back and forth. Back and forth. “Ah!” he said. He said a verse of Archaic to the delight of all present, who had never imagined being allowed to watch a famous magus work. It was different in daylight. Men who had hidden away when he cast at night now stared like churls.
“Then I can safely say that the king can’t replace it for you. Good Christ, man, how can you take so much into the wilderness?” Harmodius laughed. Random shrugged. “We go to buy a year’s produce of grain from a thousand farms,” he said. “And beef from the hillmen—maybe fifteen hundred animals, ready to be fattened for market. And beer, small wine, skins from deer, beaver, rabbit, otter, bear and wolf—a year’s worth for every haberdasher and every furrier in Harndon. That’s the business of the Northern Fair, and that’s without their staple of wool.”
“I’ve never thought of the value of all these things,” he said. “Or if I have, I’ve forgotten.”
Hywel Writhe used to say, War is simple. That’s why men prefer it to real life.
Never make a plan more complicated than your ability to communicate it.
His sword took the nearest neatly, because killing fleeing infantryman was an essential part of knightly training,
“You are the cleverest boy,” Prudentia said. “Were you and Hywel lovers, Prude?” the boy asked. “None of your business,” she shot back.
It was odd—the captain had remarked it before. The commonly born men-at-arms—leaving aside Bad Tom, who was more like a force of nature than like a man, anyway—had prettier manners than the gently born. Atcourt had especially good manners.
The captain shook his head. On balance, it was difficult to be annoyed when you discover that men like you and desire your continued health.
They kissed. She laid her head on his arming cote and he opened his mouth. “Please don’t talk,” she said. “I don’t want to talk.” So he sat, perfectly happy, in the darkness.
“Your talent for stating the obvious must make you wildly popular,” the captain said savagely.
The captain leaned well out over the wall. “Loose!” he called. The trebuchet in the western tower creaked, and the whole tower moved by the width of a finger. “Hail shot. Watch this.”
“Don’t get fancy, youngster. Those ribs will kill you.” He leaned close. “So will kissing girls, if it costs you sleep.”
They swept over the irks and the broken men and a single larger creature, something nightmarish that gleamed a sickening green hue in the first light of the sun, but Bad Tom put his lance tip precisely in the thing’s ear-bole as it turned its talons on Grendel, and his lance tip—a spear point as long as a man’s forearm and as wide as a big man’s palm—ripped its brain pan from its lower jaw.
He came to her like a unicorn to a maiden—shyly at first, and finally eager to be caught.
The eagle was tired, grumpy and very pleased with himself, all at the same time.
Peter was learning to move through the woods. Home for him was grass savannah, dry brush and deep-cut rocky riverbeds, dry most of the year and impassable with fast brown water the rest. But here, with the soft ground, the sharp rock, the massive trees that stretched to the heavens, the odd marshes on hilltops and the endless streams and lakes, a different kind of stealth was required, a different speed, different muscles, different tools.
The words thrilled Peter, who thought he should be too mature to fall for such things. But war had a simplicity that could be a relief. Sometimes, it is good merely to hate.
Harmodius raised his arms, and a ripple rolled from his hands like a flaw in glass, spreading outwards in a semi-circle like the ripple made by throwing a pebble in a pond, except that trees blackened and grass vanished and boglins fell like wheat under a sharp scythe before it. Gawin, out beyond the edge of the bubble, charged his destrier straight at it. Random saw him put the animal into a jump, and they were up; down again in moments, having leaped the growing edge of the wave of destruction in a bound. And done it apparently unharmed. “Oh, well done,” Harmodius said. “That’s a proper
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Gelfred shook his head. He was still pale and his fear was obvious, but he was the kind of man who was afraid and kept on functioning. “No. Absolutely not. Tell him it can be done. If he’s quick.”
Because he was in command, and because he feared a trap, the captain was among the last men onto the field, leading half a dozen archers and two men-at-arms and Jacques with all the valets as a reserve. He came forward still full of doubt at his own decision, which seemed rash, and yet full of a sort of certainty—almost like religious faith—that he could feel the enemy’s failure.
The captain ran rock to rock across the stream, his sabatons flashing above the swollen water, charging his prey. It turned to finish Atcourt, caught sight of the captain’s rush, and hesitated a fraction of a heartbeat. Bad Tom watched his captain rush the monster and laughed. “I love him,” he shouted, and leaped after.
Then he turned back to his men, most of whom were helmed and mailed and ready to fight. The lone priest, his half-brother, lifted his cross in the air and all the men knelt, and Paul Mac Lachlan prayed for their souls. When they all said amen, the priest put the cross back into his mail cote and put an arrow on his bow.
Ser Thomas rode in with the female knight by his side, and the two barely fitted through the gate, but neither would give way to the other.
Thorn had not risen to power by ignoring the causes of defeat. He didn’t accept false pride. He acknowledged that he had been fooled, and beaten, and immediately altered his plans.
He remembered one of his students admonishing him that you could not convince men by killing them, and he smiled at the memory. The boy had been both right and wrong. Thorn had never been very interested in convincing anyone.
The man known as Jack, the leader of the Jacks, came from the west. His face was masked in ruddy leather, and he wore the same dirty off-white wool jupon and hose of his band. He wore no badge of rank, and carried no obvious symbol of it—no fancy sword, no magnificent bow. He was neither short nor tall, and a greying beard came out from under his mask to proclaim his age. With him were a dozen men with long yew bows, sheaves of arrows, long swords and bucklers.
Exrech was the chief paramount of the gwyllch that men called bogglins. His thorax gleamed white, and his arms and legs were a perfectly contrasting ebony black, as was his head. He was as tall as a man and power flickered around his mandibles, far more pronounced than a lower-caste gwyllch; his natural armour was better, and his chain mail, carefully crafted in the far East and taken in war, had been riveted carefully to his carapace to join the living armour. He carried a pair of man-made great swords in his two large hands and wore a horn at his waist.
Exrech’s jaws opened and closed with a firm click indicating waste of valuable warrior stock; not easily replaced; no clearly defined target. Strong disapproval.
If we cannot be rid of these useless mouths, we must make them useful.
The most powerful of my order to arise in twenty generations.”
“My old sword master used to say that a good swordsman likes not just to win, but to do it his own way,” he said. “Very true,” the Magus said. “Hubristical, but true.”
grinding barley for bread in hand mills. It was boring, exacting work that the nuns thought perfect for attractive young women.
Tom all but choked on laughter, but the Red Knight was good at this—he was a fine recruiter, while Tom had never been able to recruit anyone for anything unless he had a club in one hand and a whip in the other. We don’t take everyone. He allowed a laugh to escape his gut.
He shrugged. “I’ve discovered something. Something so very important that I’m afraid I’m not very interested in what men call morality right now.
Prudentia taught that we grow in strength by the ceaseless exertion of muscle, and that the exercise of power is no different.”
shrugged. “You can wallow or you can grow. I doubt you can do both.”
“You sound sympathetic,” Harmodius said. “If I’d been born in a crofter’s hut, I’d be a Jack.”
“Listen up, then. Evil is a choice. It is a choice. Doing the wicked thing is the easy way out, and it is habit forming. I’ve done it. Any criminal can use force. Any wicked person can steal. Some people don’t steal because they are afraid of being caught. Others don’t steal because it is wrong. Because stealing is the destruction of another person’s work. Rape is a violence against another person. Using violence to solve every quarrel—” The captain paused in his moralizing lecture, because, of course, as a company of mercenaries, they tended to use violence to solve every quarrel—he laughed
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The truth was that the truth was too horrible to share.
“More power in your hips than in your arms. Save your arms; they get tired the fastest.” He nodded to them. “It’s just work, friends. The smith practises his art every day—the pargeter daubs, the farmer ploughs, the shipman works his ship. Bad soldiers lie on their backs. Good soldiers do this. All day, every day.”
I’m sorry, goodwife, but war is my business. And war involves a lot of fire.
That’s not how I see it Harmodius shot back. From where I sit, it is the Wild who is losing.
