“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.”