"That was good beer we found," the one named Frank said, buttoning up his leather trousers. "Damn good. Better than any to home. I liked them little spicy sausages too, and the sweet cake with the nuts, but the beer was fine, with a real bite to it and a good head. Hope the monks got more for us to take."
"You want to take it, go up and knock that hard head of yours on them walls," the leader said, and there was a soft chorus of chuckles. "Anyway, saddle up. We got to patrol twice as much ground while the Portland pussies are away."
"Excuse me, while the noble knights and their vassals are off there chasin' noises in the dark," Frank said as he vaulted easily back into the saddle of his quarter horse, landing with a wet smack of leather on leather. "Christ, what a bunch of play-acting put-ons."
"They're payin' the bills. Mebbe we should dismount and scout some more. There's a farmhouse over to there, about a quarter mile. It'd get us out of the wet, at least."
Nigel's hand made a slight, almost infinitesimal movement towards the sword slung over his back. That farmhouse was directly in back of them; if the patrol leapt the fence, or came to tear it down "They ain't payin' me enough to get off my horse all the time," Frank said. "Considering we checked that house yesterday and there's no beer there. If I'm going to be cold and wet, I'd rather do it moving."
The mercenaries laughed again; then their horses rocked into motion in unison. The party waited silently until the patrol's hooves had faded into the rain; Nigel held out a hand and made them wait a moment more while he pressed his ear to the ground again. The muffled thump continued, fading steadily; they hadn't stopped to come dashing back.
"Go!" he said softly.
They crossed the road in pairs; he mentally blessed the overconfidence that had made the Protector leave only a bit over two thousand men here-enough to invest the town and the splendid fort, to be sure, but not nearly enough to encircle it, or keep small groups from infiltrating under cover of darkness. If they'd spread all their men in a thin ring around it out of supporting range of each other, they'd have been horribly vulnerable to counterattack and sally if the garrison was in any strength. Instead they'd sensibly kept most together in a single body big enough to defend.
Although in their commander's shoes I'd he screaming for another two or three thousand men, enough to put a fortified camp at each point of the compass and drive a ditch and trench all the way around. Interesting. There haven't been many sieges since the Change; nobody's quite sure of how to go about it, or how different it will be from the books.
A pruned vineyard covered the slight upward slope on the other side, the vines catching at their legs like twisted fingers in the dark. Then they went through a field, half plowed and half still in crimson clover; the disk-plow itself stood forlorn in the center of the field, abandoned when the word of war came, marking the spot where the sucking, gluey mud gave way to wet pasture. Nigel blessed the rain even as he cursed the squelching sounds their boots made and the way the ground clung to them; still, it was getting as dark as a wardrobe, and the hissing, drumming sound made a blanket of white noise around them. They were safe unless they blundered directly into another patrol; he could see less of the hill and fortress than he'd been able to half a mile back. It was fortunate the monk knew his way, because this was exactly the sort of situation that could get even experts thoroughly lost.
Ground lifted under their feet; they met a stone retaining wall about waist-high, and then scrambled up the steep slope. Whatever it was that grew there was tough, only giving a little under their boots with a ripping sound and a sharp green smell, but it was slick with rain and liquid mud from the soil below, and they had to bend double and pull themselves up with their hands as well. It was a relief to stop when they ran into the stone and concrete of the wall, to rest against the rough surface and let their hearts slow; the bad part of that was that it made him feel how the rain sucked heat out of his body. Even with the rain and the dead blackness of an overcast night, he still felt conspicuous in his black outfit against the whitewashed wall; a little light leaked out from the arrow-slits in the towers above, enough to make out his hand in front of his face.
Of course, my eyesight isn't of the best. Thank God for hard contacts, what?
John Hordle muttered something about hoping the monks could haul them up, but the expected knotted rope or Jacob's Ladder didn't appear. Instead their guide drew his dagger and pounded sharply on the wall in some sort of signal, with a dull clunk sound that made him think the pommel was made of lead. And there was something a little wrong about it even so:
"Be ready," the Mount Angel warrior said as he stepped aside.
A chunk of wall about four feet tall and three wide slid up soundlessly, with a smoothness that argued for counterweighted levers. The five of them went through into the gaping maw behind, Hordle swearing mildly at the way it cramped his huge form; as they passed the door, Nigel saw that it was stone and concrete covering a plate of steel. When the last of them passed, it sank back into place with a sough of displaced air, arguing for a nearly hermetic seal; more steel sounded on steel as bars went home with a chunk sound. Then a lantern was unshuttered. It was dim enough, but almost painfully bright to eyes so long in the darkness, showing a short arched tunnel leading to a tubelike spiral staircase rising upward. Two men in mail shirts with shortswords on their belts stood by a spoked wheel set into the side of the tunnel; they nodded in friendly fashion.
The round, unremarkable face of the third figure, carrying the lantern, was framed in a visored sallet helm much like the one Nigel Loring ordinarily wore himself, but he could have sworn:
"I am Sister Antonia."
Well, well. It is a woman. I wouldn't have expected it of Catholics, and rather old-fashioned ones, from what I've heard.
"Do you wish to see the abbot at once? You must have all had a very hard day."
"Thank you, Sister," Nigel said politely, smoothing his mustache with one finger.
The young woman's smile was charming and showed dimples; she wore a dark robe over what looked like three-quarter armor: breast-and-back, vambraces, tassets, mail sleeves.
"But if he's available-" the Englishman went on.
"Certainly, Sir Nigel. And to answer your question, I'm a Sister of the Queen of Angels Monastery, which has always been closely associated with Mount Angel. Please follow me, sirs, ladies."
Nigel shrugged, slightly embarrassed-assuming something that looked odd was odd had become a habit since the Change-and did so. Sister Antonia picked up a poleax in her other hand and trotted tirelessly upward despite the weight of her gear, which the Englishman knew from long personal experience would be considerable. Motion made the lantern sway, casting huge moving shadows in the tall stairwell, and the echoes of their rubber-soled shoes and the nun's hobnails provided a background of squeak and clatter. The effort of his own seven-story climb was welcome, warming him a little in his sodden clothes and squelching shoes. The concrete walls themselves were dry and smooth, and the soil around them probably well drained; this was obviously recent work, not more than a few years old. He wondered how the hilltop community managed for water.
Cisterns, I suppose, he thought. And possibly deep wells with wind pumps, boreholes would do if they had to go down four hundred feet or better from the hilltop. They certainly have some good engineers.
After an interminable time they came out into large dim cellars used as storerooms, stretching off into the distance. They were piled with sacks of grain and dried peas and beans, barrels of beer and wine and salt pork and beef, plastic trash containers recycled to hold sharp-smelling sauerkraut, flitches of bacon and hams hanging from racks, and great banks of metal office shelving supporting glass Mason jars of preserved fruits and vegetables and meats. Then they went up a much shorter flight of metal stairs and through an iron grillwork door and into a ready room-cum-armory, with poleaxes and crossbows racked around the walls. A sparse four armed men and two women sat at a table that could have seated twenty; Nigel smiled to himself at the sight of their stifled yawns. Military boredom seemed to be a universal characteristic, although most soldiers he knew wouldn't have a breviary open to pass the time. The guards nodded silently, gravely polite.