A half-blood – Outwaller and Morean – offered to try to track the old man and his party. Redmede was in the difficult position of getting to know his men as he faced each challenge – the fighting at Lissen Carrak had rallied all the different cells of the Jacks, and years of patient secrecy had aided their recruitment, but it didn’t help him now. He didn’t know the dark-skinned man or his abilities at all.
‘What’d you say your name was, comrade?’ he asked.
The young half-blood crouched. He wore a feather in his hair like an Outwaller, and carried an Eastern horn bow rather than a war bow. ‘Call me Cat,’ he said. He grinned. ‘You have any food, boss?’
‘No man is boss to any other here,’ Redmede said.
‘That’s crap,’ said Cat. ‘You the boss. These others – some wouldn’t live a day out here withouten you.’ He smiled. ‘Let me go find Cal. He fed me many times. Good man. Good friend. Good comrade.’
Redmede had the sudden feeling he was sending his new best scout to find his old one. ‘Tomorrow we go west on the trail,’ he said. ‘Know anything about this trail, comrade?’
The dark-skinned man looked up the trail for long enough that Redmede began to hope for an answer. But Cat grinned, suddenly. ‘Goes west, I reckon,’ he said. ‘Can I try for Cal?’
‘Go with my blessing.’ Redmede handed the boy some newly parched corn.
Cat raised the corn to his forehead. ‘Tara will protect me,’ he said. Tara was the Outwaller goddess.
Redmede couldn’t stop himself. ‘Superstition will never help us be free,’ he said.
Cat smiled. ‘Nope,’ he agreed. He ate the handful of corn in one great mouthful, picked up his bow and loped away into the gathering darkness.
The next night their camp was worse, they ate strips of badly dried venison and shivered by their fires. Redmede was sure they were being observed – he went out in person at dusk, and again at dawn, moving as silently as twenty years of outlawry had taught him to, but he didn’t see so much as a bent blade of grass nor did he hear a twig snap that wasn’t rightly accounted for by chipmunks and raccoons.
His men were leaner. He looked them over along the thin ribbon of trail – most of them had ruined their hose, and none of them had white cotes any more. The good wool was stained from lying flat, sleeping, crawling and living, and now their cotes had taken on the many hues of the forest. They were still too bright, but the starkness of white was being overlaid with a thousand imprints of nature, and the Wild was having the same effect on the men and the handful of women.
It was the women that caused him concern. He’d heard a couple screwing in the dark, and if he’d heard it he knew that two hundred other pairs of ears had listened with the same hunger. Men could share abstinence, but if one or two men were getting some . . .
He walked along the line until he reached the oldest of the female Jacks – Bess. She was as tall as he, and no kind of beauty at all in the world of men. Although here in the Wild her big-boned, heavy-breasted frame seemed as natural as a beaver dam and ten times as attractive.
Bill Redmede grimaced at himself. ‘Bess?’ he said. ‘Walk with me a few paces, eh?’
Bess got her blanket roll on her hip, passed the cord over her shoulder, and picked up her bow. ‘What’s on your mind?’ she asked bluntly.
‘Women. Fucking.’ He looked back at her. He hoped they were out of earshot of the Jacks.
She frowned. ‘You have a strange way of asking a girl, Jack.’
He stopped and leaned against a tree so enormous that the two of them would never have been able to pass their arms around the trunk.
A light rain began to fall, and he cursed. He ran back along the trail and ordered the long files of Jacks into motion behind him, and then he turned and ran back to her. ‘I don’t mean me,’ he said. ‘I need you to tell the girls-’
‘Fuck you, Bill Redmede,’ Bess said. ‘This ain’t the Royal Army. Those sisters have the same rights as any Jack – right to their arms, right to their bodies. Yes, comrade?’
Bill plodded along for a dozen paces. ‘Sister, there are ideals and then there are everyday-’ He paused, looking for a word. ‘Everyday things,’ he said weakly. ‘Every woman has the right to her own body. But plague take it, sister, we’re in a tight space-’
Bess was three paces ahead of him. She stopped, turned, and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘If we’re in a tight space then this is when we find out what we are. All the more reason the sisters should do what they want.’
Bill thought about that a moment. ‘Could end hard,’ he said.
‘Are you our lord? Our master? Our father?’ Bess challenged him. ‘It could end hard, and mayhap I’ll say a word to a sister if it looks like it will. But it ain’t your responsibility, is it, Bill Redmede?’
He looked at her, expected to find himself angry at her attitude to his authority, and instead was glad. Glad that someone else was a true believer. ‘Good of the many, sister,’ he said.
Bess nodded. ‘That, I can understand.’
That day the hunters got nothing and the grumbling in camp was continuous. A great many men were leaning towards blaming their leader. Redmede could feel it.
Morning came after a night of rain – a night where only the most hardened veterans slept. At least it made sex unlikely – but in the morning everyone looked thinner, more pinched, and as those men who had any rolled up their sodden cloaks and blankets, they bickered over the slightest thing.
A pair of serfs from the Albin – new men, young and comparatively strong and well fed – packed their goods silently and trotted away down the trail, headed east.
Nat Tyler came up. He’d had the runs for days and keeping up had been all he could do, but he was recovering. Redmede had never known a tougher man, and his heart rose to see his most trusted friend leaning on his great bow.
‘I could reach them from here,’ Tyler said.
‘You are feeling better, comrade. But skip it. We’ve never killed our own.’ He watched the two men moving furtively away.
‘So we have, when needs must.’ Tyler spat, but he dropped his ready arrow back into his quiver, and carefully tied the thong on his arrow bag against the wet. His eyes were on Bess as she walked, head high, shoulders square. ‘Fever broke in the night,’ he muttered. ‘And I heard a lot of shite talked.’
Redmede watched the rain. ‘It’ll get worse,’ he said.
That afternoon, in heavy rain, he sent out three teams of hunters, one of them composed of six unwilling men, younger serfs recently escaped, with Tyler to teach them. They were resentful of authority, cold, wet, and hungry – not the ideal circumstances under which to learn how to move in the woods.
‘There won’t be a fucking deer moving in this,’ Tyler complained.
‘Then kill them in their lies,’ Redmede quipped.
‘If this’n was my woods and I knew the lies I would,’ Tyler said. ‘Fuck me, even then I wouldn’t go out in rain like this.’
‘Kills the scent,’ Redmede said. ‘We need meat. Needs must when the devil drives.’
‘Make that up yerself, Bill?’ Tyler said. But he managed a damp smile. ‘I’m off then.’
They made camp too near dark, if lying in the rain under a dripping canopy of maple leaves could be accounted a camp. Everything was wet – the ground, the men, and all their clothes, all their blankets, all their cloaks.
It was dark to be gathering firewood but Redmede led the effort himself, and Bess backed him up, and before the sky overhead was black as black they had a heap of downed branches as high as a man’s head, and more and more of the exhausted men were rising from their first collapse to help. But Redmede could see that they were moving like the sick; their thin-lipped, jerky wood-gathering frightened him more than outright rebellion would have done.
Bess found a treasure – a hollow apple tree full of carefully stored dry birchbark. Redmede found his fire stele and got to work, but the wind and the rain didn’t help and neither did having an audience. The sky was black as a nobleman’s heart when he finally had his char glowing red with a lit spark.