Chapter 58: They Burned the Grain First

They burned the granaries first and the people after, and they did it slowly, because there was no reason at all to hurry.

The village sat in a fold of the hills two days east of the mountains with a stream running through it and forty-one roofs, and it had been there a long while. There were stones along the stream bank set as boundary marks by people whose language nobody now spoke. The Brennocs who lived in it had put their winter grain into three long low stores behind the headman's house, dug down into the earth and roofed with turf, which is the correct way to store grain in that country and had been the correct way for four hundred years.

Kashir sat his horse on the high ground above it and watched his men go through it, and did not go down.

He was fifty-one and enormous with it, and had been enormous for so long that he had stopped moving like a big man and had begun moving like a piece of the landscape. He sat that horse the way a boulder sits in a river. His shoulders had gone thick and sloped and his neck had gone with them, so that from behind there was very little to tell where the one ended, and his hands on the pommel were the size and colour of two dressed hams.

The face was worse. It was broad and flat and had been broken more than once and set by somebody with no interest in the result: the nose driven sideways at the bridge, the left cheekbone sitting a little higher than the right. A scar came down through the eyebrow and picked up again below the eye, which meant something had gone through in a straight line and the eye had survived it, and the eye had not gone white. It was as brown and as ordinary as the other.

He kept his head shaved to the skin above the ears with a single black plait behind, and the beard grey through the middle in one broad stripe. There were three iron rings in the outer edge of the right ear. He had taken them off a man a long while ago and had put them in one at a time over about nine years and had never explained it to anybody, and nobody had asked twice.

He wore a coat of good Acuseian wool over lamellar that had been made for a smaller man twenty years before and had been let out twice, and the plates of it had been repaired in about eleven places with whatever came to hand, so that the coat itself was a record of every year he had failed to die.

There was a bow at his knee he had not drawn in six years and a sabre at his hip he had used the day before yesterday.

Below him the first store was already going.

They had opened the turf roof with mattocks and thrown burning brush down into it, and the grain was catching the way stored grain catches, slow and sullen and then all at once, with a great deal of white smoke that went up straight in the cold air and could be seen, Kashir estimated, from about nine miles.

That was the point of doing it at midday.

The rest of it was going on in the lanes.

They had come in before the light and had the ends of the village stopped before anybody was properly awake, and after that it was house to house, and the houses in that country are low and have one door and no window worth the name, so that going into one is something a man has to want badly.

They wanted to do it. There was a winter's food behind those doors and every man out there knew it.

Two of them came out of the third house with a woman between them and a chest that had taken the pair of them to lift, and dropped the chest in the lane and broke it open with an axe, and the woman got a hand into one of their faces and was knocked down for it and did not get up quickly.

Further along, a roof went.

They were pulling the thatch off some of them to see what was in the lofts, because the lofts are where the seed goes and where the smoked meat hangs, and a house without its thatch in January is a house nobody will live in again this year and everybody involved knew that as well.

And at the far end, past the headman's place, four Brennocs had got themselves into the mouth of a byre and were fighting.

Kashir watched that part with more attention than the rest.

They had a spear and two axes and a hedging bill between them and they had picked the ground well, because the byre door was narrow and had a stone lintel and only two men could come at it. They held it a good while. One of them went down early and got up again with his arm hanging and put himself back in the door with the other three.

It took eleven of Kashir's to shift them and cost him one dead in the doorway and another who would be no use for a month.

They shifted them in the end. They shifted them by taking the roof off from behind, which took twenty minutes and was the correct answer, and after that it was finished quickly.

"They fight," said the man beside him.

"They fight. They will fight worse next month and better the month after." Kashir did not take his eyes off the byre. "A hungry man is a poor soldier for about three weeks and then he is a very dangerous one, and after that he is nothing at all. It is a matter of catching them in the right week."

The man beside him spoke Khesari well. Not perfectly. He had learned it from somebody who spoke it badly, and it came out with the vowels wrong and about four words in every hundred that no steppe man had used since Kashir's grandfather was a boy, and Kashir had stopped finding it funny about a month ago.

"How many of these have you done?"

"This is the ninth."

"And the others were the same?"

"The others were the same. Two of them were larger. One of them fought properly, which I did not expect, and cost me four men and a good horse."

"Which one fought?"

"Ardh Tolwen." Kashir said it without any particular feeling. "The smallest. Nine miles north of here in a valley with one road into it. Sixty roofs and a wall of stone and thorn round all of it that somebody's grandfather built, and they got behind it before we were up the road and they held it from the middle of the morning until the light went.

This content has been misappropriated from NovelPhoenix; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"They had four bows in that place and they used them properly, and they had a man in charge who did not shout. And when we came over the wall at dusk they went back through the houses one at a time and made us pay for every one of them, and when it was finished there were eleven of them still standing in the headman's yard and they would not put anything down.

"So I killed them in the yard." He shifted his weight. "And then I burned the grain, and then I burned Ardh Tolwen, which I had not intended to do when I rode up that road."

Sir Eldric Bregard was quiet a moment.

"Why?"

"Because a man does what he intended for eight villages and something else for the ninth, and the eight are a season and the ninth is a story." Kashir turned his head. "There are people in these hills who have never seen me and never will.

They will hear about Ardh Tolwen this winter and they will hear it from somebody who was not there, and it will be worse each time, and by the spring there will not be a wall in this country that anybody troubles to get behind.

"That is worth more than the grain. That took an afternoon and it will do the work of six more."

Eldric absorbed that.

"Your Baron will want to know why the ninth cost him four men and a good horse," Kashir said. "Tell him about Ardh Tolwen. He will understand it or he will not, and I have stopped caring greatly which."

He was a lean grey man of fifty-odd in dark riding gear with no device on it anywhere, and he had been at Kashir's elbow for eleven days and had asked perhaps thirty questions and had answered none. He had been put on a horse at four years old and had never since had to think about it. He had a longsword at his hip that he had not drawn once in Kashir's presence, and Kashir had spent a good deal of the eleven days wondering about that sword and had concluded that it was probably a very good one and had left the matter there.

Down in the village somebody had begun screaming.

Neither man looked at it.

"They will go west," Eldric said.

Kashir did not trouble to agree with it.

"You are certain."

"You have asked me that four times."

"I have asked four times because the Baron will ask me four times when I go back, and I would rather have the same answer four times than a different one." Eldric did not look away. "So. You are certain."

Kashir let a moment go by, out of a preference for not being managed.

Then he pointed with his chin, down and east, at the country beyond the smoke.

"There is nothing that way for eleven days," he said. "Steppe, and my people on it, and they know what happens to Brennocs who come out onto grass in winter. There is nothing north but rock. There is nothing south but more of this, and I have done six of the six that were worth doing.

"That way there are two hundred miles of poor country, and then a river, and on the far side of the river there are farms with roofs on them and byres with cattle

in them, and every one of those farms belongs to men who took Caer Dunnoch off them two summers ago and put a prince's name on it."

"So they will go west."

"They will go west because a man with children goes where there is food, and because they have hated that country for eight hundred years, and because it is easier to steal from somebody you already hate." Kashir turned back to the burning. "It is not difficult work. Any fool would go west. That is why I said yes to it."

Eldric nodded slowly.

"And they will not come in a body."

"No. That is the part your Baron is paying for." Kashir almost smiled and it did not improve his face. "A body can be met. A body can be beaten in an afternoon and then it is over and everybody goes home and tells the story. This will not be a body. This will be four men here and nine men there and a boy with a billhook, all winter, in forty places, and not one of them will know about the others.

"They will not be an army. They will be weather."

The second store went up while he was speaking.

It went with a sound like a great door closing and threw a column of smoke that leaned east on the wind, and out at the edge of the village the riders had got the people into the stream meadow and were doing what was done.

The men who had held the byre were laid out in the lane where they had fallen and the snow round them had gone.

"You are not watching," Kashir observed.

Eldric said nothing to that at all.

"Most men watch. The ones who are new to it watch because they cannot help themselves and the ones who are old to it watch because they are checking." Kashir put both hands on the pommel. "You do neither. You have stood beside me for eleven days and looked at nine of these and you have looked at none of them."

"I have looked at all of them," said Eldric. "I have not looked at any of them with my face."

Kashir considered that.

"You are a strange people."

"We are."

They sat a while.

"He will want a day," Kashir said eventually. "When I go over the water. He will send a man and the man will say a day and I will be expected to be on that ground on that day. That is the arrangement and I have kept it twice and I will keep it again."

"You will."

"And I will want to know why, this time."

"You will not be told."

"I did not say I would be told." Kashir looked at him. "I said I would want to know. A man may want what he does not get. It costs him nothing and it keeps him from becoming a dog."

For the first time in eleven days, something moved in Eldric Bregard's face.

It was not much. It was the thin beginning of what in a warmer man would have been a smile, and it was gone almost at once.

"That is the most sensible sentence anybody has said to me since I crossed the mountains," he said.

"You should come more often."

"I should not."

Below them the third store took, and the village was going now, all of it, and the smoke had joined into a single column that stood up out of the fold of the hills and went a long way into a clear white sky.

Kashir watched it climb.

"Nine miles," he said. "They will see that in Dun Ercha and in the two valleys under it, and they will send men, and the men will get here tomorrow and find this, and by the day after there will not be a Brennoc between here and the pass who does not know that the grain is gone."

"And then?"

"And then they will do their counting." Kashir gathered his reins. "Every people does the same counting in a bad year and it always comes out the same way. How much have we. How long will it last. Where is there more.

"They will get to the third question about the middle of the month, and it will already be too late to go anywhere but west, and they will not go because they are brave. They will go because there is a mouth in their house that is open."

He turned the horse.

"Tell your Baron the grain is done. Tell him it will start inside three weeks and it will not stop before the thaw, and tell him from me that he is getting it cheap."

Eldric turned his own horse and fell in.

"He knows what he is getting."

"Does he." Kashir did not look round. "Then he is the first man I have ever worked for who did."

They rode east off the high ground with the smoke going up behind them, and below in the fold of the hills the last of the noise finished, and the fires burned on into the afternoon and were still burning when it got dark.