He stiffened with unconscious pride: “But my lady was ready for them! We were waiting!”
Maybe because she used to be an assassin herself, Huon thought; he wasn’t sorry that she had been ready, though. That would have been a disaster for our cause, to lose the commanders in the County Palatine just as the invaders came west.
Lioncel went on: “I shot one of them with my crossbow then, in the apartments my lady was using, and I had to give him the mercy-stroke. And…I think since, during the fighting, but I’m not sure. But that’s not…so close, mostly. You shoot, or someone comes out of the dust, and you hit or dodge and you don’t see him again. Usually I’m behind my lady d’Ath, of course, and the senior squires, well behind.”
They were out of the mountains again, well into the settled lands around Goldendale. Huon took off his helmet, relishing the breeze through his sweat-damp hair, a feeling of lightness and release. A swale at the base of a low rise had been closed off by earth banks, and a spring kept it filled with water that lay mirror-still, reflecting the blue sky and puffy white clouds above. Willows surrounded it, and reeds grew in the edges; to the east was a long narrow strip of apple orchard along the irrigation furrow that kept it alive, with some of the fruit still glowing red among the faded green of the leaves.
Apart from that the land around the pool was a long sloping hayfield, the alfalfa recently cut and packed in big round mows all centered around a column made from the trunk of a tall lodgepole pine. Each haystack had a thatched roof on top of its circular height, and they looked as if they were huts taken in two giant hands and stretched like taffy. The smell was as sweet as candy, and it drifted over him like a benison, a reminder of a world where feeding your cattle and horses and sheep through the winter was about the most important thing there was.
Oh, devils and damnation, I’m not cut out to be a cleric!
“Let’s stop here for lunch,” Huon said. “We’ve got plenty of time. And nobody can say we haven’t been doing a day’s work today, man’s work!”
“Yeah,” Lioncel said, and smiled.
After all, we’re noblemen of the Portland Protective Association, Huon thought. War is our work. We’re the guardians of the land.
Sir Ogier had thoughtfully given each of them a remount from among the captured horses. They both rode light in the saddle, and switching off mounts every couple of miles, they could cover the distance down to the river in a few hours without overstraining the horses. Neither of them considered that sort of ride anything of a hardship.
“It’s a nice spot,” the heir of Forest Grove said.
Huon forced down a slightly queasy recollection of the sound when the arrow struck. The one he’d shot had been a bad man, not just an enemy; an assassin, an agent of the CUT who’d sold his soul to demons. On the other hand, you couldn’t help thinking how it must feel. Or that once the bad man had been a perfectly ordinary little kid. He hadn’t thought of that before.
You take the good with the bad. I don’t think I’m ever going to like killing men or hurting them. Fighting’s exciting, but I don’t like that part. I can do it when it’s necessary, I guess.
They watered the horses, rubbed them down and poured small mounds of cracked barley for them to lip up off the turf before they hobbled them and left them to graze beneath the willows. He enjoyed the homey, familiar task, the earthy, grassy smell of the horses and the way Dancer turned his neck and lipped at his rider’s hair.
The hobbles weren’t really necessary with their own mounts, he’d bought Dancer from a first-rate training farm when he was taken into the royal household and worked him since then, and Lioncel’s Hardhoof was just as good. The remounts were eastern and of quarterhorse blood, and most of all they didn’t know them and their horses didn’t know them. It was better to have them all hobbled while they sorted out who was boss-horse and got used to each other.
Then they opened their bags and sat under a willow to eat, leaning against their saddles and putting one of the small bucklers they wore on their sword-scabbards down to serve as a plate. Huon had managed to pick up a three-pound ration loaf of maslin bread, a mixture of whole-meal barley and wheat flour that was dense and coarse but fresh that morning, and a length of strong-tasting salty dried pork sausage full of garlic and sage. Lioncel contributed a block of cheese wrapped in dock leaves tied with twisted straw, some honey from the package his mother had sent, and a canteen of watered wine.
Huon sawed and slapped together a set of massive sandwiches, while Lioncel struggled with the top of the honey jar. Then they signed themselves, said grace and tore into the food with the thoughtless voracity of hardworking teenagers who’d gone six hours since the morning’s porridge and raisins.
“This is good cheese!” Huon said after a moment.
Most of the cheese you got with the army was just…cheese, issued in big blocks to groups. Even in the royal household, when they were in the field themselves; Mathilda was a stickler for not dragging too much in the way of personal comforts in the baggage train, and the Grand Constable was notorious for seeing that nobody exceeded what was allowed in the Table of Ranks. Huon didn’t mind; enduring hardship was a knightly duty, the cheese was usually not too moldy, and it made dry bread or the rocklike double-baked hardtack the troops called dog biscuit go down a lot better, especially if you could toast it over a campfire.
This was quite different, firm but not hard or rubbery either, with a rich lingering taste that was just a little sour-sharp, and bits of hot pepper had been worked into the curd and cured with it. He hadn’t had better, even as the last course at a banquet.
“My brother Diomede sent it up from Tillamook even though he’s absolutely green that I’m here and he’s stuck there,” Lioncel said. “He’s not a bad kid, and Anne’s a good mistress to serve.”
Huon nodded; Tillamook cheese was famous, and had been even before the Change. Nowadays it was traded all over the Association territories and even beyond.
“The wine’s from Montinore,” Lioncel went on. “Our home manor near Castle Ath.”
It was good too, though the water didn’t help, but he already knew better than to drink it straight with work to do and half a day ahead of him. The honey was really good; mostly clover but with fruit flavors, he thought.
“We live…lived in Castle Gervais full time,” Huon said; the castle and lands were under a Crown-appointed seneschal right now, while he was underage. “My mother liked it that way.”
Better not to think about that, he added to himself, and went on:
“I’m going to build a manor house south of town when I’m Baron. It’s a pain keeping the Castle Gervais quarters warm in winter. The wet moat means the concrete weeps during the Black Months; the amount of wood we go through is unbelievable. Why live like you’re under siege until you’re really under siege?”
Lioncel nodded. “My lady mother says she had to pretty well drag Baroness d’Ath out of the castle to the Montinore manor house after I was born…it was built a long time before the Change, it’s really cool, and it didn’t have to be worked over much. It was in the Crown demesne before we were…that is, before Lady d’Ath…was given the land in fief.”
“It’s weird, the way they forgot how to build something you could live in just before the Change,” Huon agreed. “A lot of them don’t even have fireplaces. Creepy! No wonder God sent a judgment on them! Gervais town doesn’t have much from before the Change. It all burned down. The new town’s modern, half-timbered stuff mostly, my parents oversaw that after the castle was built. Yseult can remember some of that, but I can’t.”