“But—” the redhaired man said. Gird spun around to him.
“You fight with a sword?”
“Not very well yet, but—”
“These sticks are longer than swords. You can’t fence against a sword, no, but you can poke with it—just as you’d poke cattle through a gap. D’you think soldiers are harder to move than cattle, if you hit them right?”
“Well—no. But I thought—”
“If you want to learn from me—what’s your name, anyway?”
“Felis.”
“Felis, if you want to learn from me, the first thing is to clean up this stinking camp!” He had not quite meant to be that rude, but a gust of wind brought the foulness thick into his lungs.
“But what’s that got to do with—”
“Yes or no.”
“Well, yes, but—”
Gird glared around at the men in the camp, most of whom were sitting up more alertly now, sensing a fight coming. Two were not; they lay against the rock face, with another crouched beside them.
“What’s wrong with them?” Gird asked, pointing.
Felis glanced that way, then shrugged. “Sim has some kind of fever, and Pirin has the flux—”
“And you ask why the stink matters! Didn’t you have jacks where you came from? Didn’t the grannies teach you about any of that?”
Felis flushed dark red. “We don’t have any tools, hardly, and it’s not so easy out here away from the towns—”
Gird snorted. He felt good, the righteous anger running in his veins like stout ale at harvest. “You thought soldiering was easy? You thought fighting a war was going to be easy?” His sergeant had said something like that more than once—he had the rhythm right, anyway. Felis glared at him, but said nothing. Gird went on. “You ask any of these men—Ivis, or Diamod—if we had more than this when I started. You ask them if someone can smell our camp from as far away.”
Some of the men were standing now, coming forward slowly. Gird could not tell if they came in support of their leader, or from curiosity. Felis looked around, seeking support.
“There’s no way—we don’t have good ground here, for digging jacks and such. It’s hard enough to find enough to eat, and—”
A taller man intervened. “So what would you do, stranger, if you had command here? Or is it all talk?”
Gird raised his brows ostentatiously. “Do you want us to show you? Or had you rather live like this?”
“Show us!” Felis spat. “Go ahead—let’s see what you can do.”
“Your people must help,” Gird said. Felis shrugged.
“I won’t make them. You can try.”
“You’re giving me command?” There was a moment’s absolute silence, on everyone’s indrawn breath. Felis paled; his jaw clenched. Then he spread his hands.
“For one day, for what you can do. I’ll be interested. Of course, we’ve nothing to share for supper.” Gird was sure that was a lie, but he smiled.
“We brought our own, and enough for return,” he said. Then he turned his back on Felis, taking that chance, and dismissed his own men “—to your tally groups.”
Raising his voice to reach all the men in the camp, he said, “You have two bad problems. The first is your jacks, which is making you sick with its filth. No need to ask where it isn’t—but you need a good deep trench far away from the creek.”
“The ground’s all rocky hereabout,” said the tall man. “We can’t dig it with our fingernails.”
“Fori.” Gird put out his hand, and Fori handed him the shovel blade. “Here’s a shovel, if you can put a handle to it. Anyone here can cut a pole, or—”
“I’ll cut a pole,” said the tall man. He turned on his heel and stalked off. Gird watched him for a moment, then went on.
“What do you have to carry things in?” he asked the group at large. After a moment’s silence, someone pointed to the kettle on the fire, and a large wooden bowl. Gird smiled at them. “That’s more than we had,” he said. “We had no kettle. But we don’t dirty a kettle with filth. Triga, I’ll want some baskets. Any of you men know how to make a basket?”
“A man make baskets?” asked one with a low whistle. Gird put out his hand to stop Triga (and Triga’s arm was there—predictable as always) and said “Don’t laugh; Triga’s a good enough soldier to know that supplies help win wars. Learn from him; we need baskets to haul that stinking waste into the hole you—” He nodded at the tall man who had cut his pole and was bringing it back, “—are going to dig for it.”
“I’m not moving any of that filth!” snarled someone across the firepit. Gird heard mutters of agreement, and the amused chuckles of his own men.
“Move the filth, or move yourselves,” Gird said. “It’s killing you—and you know it.”
“That’s not all,” came Ivis’s voice from behind him, “he’ll have you bathing, and if you get a cut, he makes you scrub it out with soaproot. Besides, nobody wants to eat in this stench. Just get rid of it.”
Gird grinned at his people, and walked over to the firepit. The kettle on it gave off a thin steam, but he could not tell what was in it. The overall stink was too strong. “What is it?” he asked the man tending the fire.
“Grain mush. It’s been grain mush for months, ’cept when someone snares a rabbit, or finds a berry patch.”
“No bread?”
The man squinted up at him. “You a housewife? I never learned to make bread. Besides, it takes things we don’t have.”
“You’ll get them.” Gird patted the man’s shoulder, and left him peering backwards, stirring ashes instead of the fire.
Now for the sick men. He knew he’d been lucky that none of his own troop had sickened yet. Although he’d tried to nurse his mother and Mali, he knew very little of the healing arts. Cleanliness, of course—everyone knew that the fever spirits thrived on foul smells and dirt. They grew fat and multiplied on what made healthy men ill. It was nearly impossible to be clean enough to keep them all away (his mother had insisted that even a speck of old milk left in the bucket could feed enough spirits to ruin the next batch) but the cleaner the better.
The stench worsened as he neared the sick men. One of them had red fever patches on his cheeks; his breath was labored, almost wheezing. His eyes were shut, and he didn’t pay any attention to Gird. The other, pale and sweating, had vomited; the man with him was wiping his face clean. Gird felt a tug at his sleeve, and turned. Pidi, almost as pale, had come up beside him.
“I picked some breakbone weed on the way—it might help for the fever. But I didn’t bring any flannelweed.”
“Boiling water,” said Gird. “See if they have another pot, and be sure you get the water well upstream.” Pidi went off, and Gird forced himself to squat down beside the sick men. The caretaker glared at him.
“Ya canna’ do aught for ’em. This’n’ll die by morning; feel his head.” Gird reached out to the fevered man, whose forehead felt like a hot stone—dry. “And this’n, bar he stops heaving, he’ll go in a day or two. He’s lost all he can, below, and I can’t get ’im to the jacks we got, let alone the jacks you say you’ll dig.”
“You know flannelweed?” Gird asked. The man shrugged.
“I’m no granny, with a parrion of herbs. What be you, man or woman?”
Gird took hold of his wrist and squeezed until the bones grated; the man paled. “Man enough, if strength makes men. But I’d be glad of a woman’s parrion of healing, if ’twould save lives. Have you sought a healer?”
“Aye. Felis brought one from the vill, a hand or more of days ago, when it was just Jamis here. But she was like you, all twinchy about the smell. Said we’d have to clean it up afore she could do aught. So’s Felis told her what he told you, and she huffed off, about holding her nose.”