“But it feels different.” Ivis wiped his mouth with his tattered sleeve and grinned, teeth bright in the firelight. “You know what to do.”
Across the fire, Fori was basking in the praise of older men; Pidi was showing Herf the herbs he had brought back in his shirt. They were feeling at home here; Gird wondered if the young adjusted more easily. He was not sure what he felt. The blinding pain when he thought of Rahi was still there; when it hit, he found himself turning in the direction of Fireoak, willing himself across the woods and fields between to be with her. She might be dead by now, or still struggling in fever. He could not know.
He was beginning to know the men around him, and already knew that several of them would have been friends if they’d grown up in the same village. Cob reminded him of Amis, with his matter-of-fact friendliness. Ivis was more like Teris—responsibility made him truculent, but once freed of it, he was amiable and mild-tempered. Gird told himself that these were mostly farmers—men like those he’d known all his life—and in time would be as familiar as the men of his village, but for the moment he could not quite relax into kinship with them.
That night before he dropped off to sleep, he made an effort to speak individually with each of them, to fix their faces and names in his mind. Then he burrowed into a drift of leaves, with Pidi snuggled close to his side. It was still hard to sleep, in the open, knowing he had no cottage to return to, but he was tired, and the strain of the past few days overcame him.
The next morning brought complications. Instead of cool spring sunshine, the sky was cloudy, and a fine misty drizzle began to penetrate their clothes. The foul stench of their ill-dug jacks oozed across the clearing. Gird was sure they could smell it in the next village, wherever that was. He wrapped his leather raincloak around the sacks of grain and beans. The night guards arrived back at camp hungry, while Herf was struggling with the fire. Smoke lay close to the ground, making them all cough. After the previous night’s feast, plain soaked grain seemed even more dismal than usual. Gird’s joints ached; he wished fervently for a mug of hot sib. He heard low grumbles and mutters, and Triga’s voice raised in a self-pitying whine.
This would never do. Gird strode back into the center of the clearing as if the sun were shining and he knew exactly what to do. The men looked up at him, sour-faced.
“Triga, what did you find yesterday?” Triga, interrupted in mid-complaint, looked almost comical. Then he stood up.
“I found that swamp I told you about—” Someone groaned, and Triga whipped around to glare in that direction.
“Never mind,” said Gird. “Go on—and you others listen.”
“I walked all around it—that’s why I came back so late. There’s three little creeks goes into it, and two comes out. I don’t know what the middle’s like yet—there wasn’t time—”
“Good. That’s where we’ll go today.”
“All of us?” Herf asked. “It’s raining.”
“It’s raining here, too,” Gird pointed out. “You’ll get just as wet sitting here complaining about the rain, as walking along learning something useful. Maybe we’ll find a cave, and can sleep dry.”
They didn’t look as if they believed him, but one by one his fledgling army stood up. He grinned at them.
“But first,” he said. “We’re going to do something about that.” And he pointed toward the jacks. “It stinks enough to let anyone know a lot of men have been here, and it’s making us sick as well.”
“We don’t have no tools,” someone said. Kef, that was the name. Gird grinned again.
“I brought a shovel, remember? I’ll start the digging, but we’ll all be doing some—because there’s more to it than just shoveling.”
He had spotted a better site the day before. Now he took his shovel and tried it. Here a long-gone flood had spread across the clearing below the waterfall, and left a drift of lighter soil, almost sand. He started the trench he wanted, and gave the shovel to Kef. “That deep, and straight along there,” he said. They really needed a bucket, too, but they didn’t have one. He’d have to use the wooden bowls for the ashes. The men watched as he scooped ashes and bits of charred wood from the side of the firepit into one of their bowls. “You, too,” Gird said, pointing at the other bowls. “We’re going to need a lot of ashes.”
“But I though ashes only worked in a pit,” said Ivis.
“Best in a pit. But a trench is like a little pit. Ashes on top, then dirt, after you use it.”
“Every time?”
“Every time—or it won’t work. The guards kept a pot of ashes in the jacks; I started doing that at our cottage later, and ours smelled less than most.” He looked at them, noticing the squeamish faces. “The worst part,” he said carefully, “is going to be burying what’s already there.” He was pleased to note that no one asked if they had to.
It took longer than he’d hoped, with only the one shovel and small bowls to carry ashes, but at last they had the worst of the noisome mess buried, strewn with ashes, and a new bit of clean trench for that morning’s use. Gird covered it up himself when they were all done, and marked the end with a roughly cut stake poked in the ground.
“Now we clean up,” Gird said, “and then we go look for Triga’s swamp. He’s right—if we can find a safe way into it, that the foresters and guards don’t know, it could be a very handy place.”
Chapter Eleven
Triga led the way, with Gird behind him, and then the others. Gird had asked Ivis to be the rear guard, staying just in sight of the others. Within the first half-league, he was wondering how this group had survived undetected so long. They talked freely, tapped their sticks against trees and rocks as they passed, made no effort to walk quietly. Finally Gird halted them.
“We’re making more noise than a tavern full of drunks. If there’s a forester in the wood anywhere, he’s bound to hear us.”
Ivis turned a dull red. “Well—Gird—we don’t like to come on ’em in surprise, like—”
“The foresters? You mean they know—”
“It’s sort of—well—they’d have to know, wouldn’t they? Being as they have to know the whole wood. But what they don’t actually see they don’t have to take notice of. My brother’s one of them, you see, and—”
“And on the strength of one brother, you trust them all? What about the guard?”
“Oh, the duke’s guard is a very different matter—very different indeed. But they don’t venture into the wood except when the duke’s hunting. And then they’re guarding him, not poking about on their own.”
“And—duke? Your lord isn’t Kelaive?”
“Gods, no! I’ve heard about him, even before you came. Our duke’s Kelaive’s overlord, just as the king is his.”
“So the foresters of this wood know that a band of outlaws lives here, and expects you to make enough noise coming so they can avoid you. What if they change their minds? Surely your duke’s offered a reward”
“My brother wouldn’t take a reward for me,” Ivis said earnestly. “And if he captures the others, there I’d be, right in the middle.”
“What if he’s transferred, or killed, or one of the other foresters gets greedy?” Ivis said nothing in answer; from his expression, he had thought of this before and tried to forget it. Gird looked at all the others. “Listen to me: an army does not go about expecting its enemies to get out of the way. We can’t fight like that. Cannot. Perhaps Ivis’s brother has enough influence on the foresters of this wood, but we will not always be in this wood. We have to leave it someday, and you must know how to move quietly. And we must be alert—we must find the foresters before they find us, and never let them know we were near. Understand?” Heads nodded, some slowly. “Now—the first thing—no talking while we march. No banging on stones or tree limbs. Walk one behind the other, far enough that if one man stumbles, the others don’t fall too. Triga, you should be far enough ahead that I can just see, and you shouldn’t be able to hear us—you listen for anyone else. If you go too fast, I’ll click pebbles twice; if I click three times, stop. You give two double clicks if you hear foresters. Ivis, if you hear anything behind us, give two double clicks. The rest of you—if you hear two double clicks, stop where you are and do not make a noise. Clear?”