Chapter 66: The Raids Are Changing

The second raid came on the fourteenth day, and the third came four nights after it, and neither of them was at Orswood.

The second was at a farmstead on the Vale road, six miles out, where they took a pig and a sack of meal and a woollen cloak off a hook and were gone before the household got a light struck. Nobody was hurt. The farmer's wife heard them in the yard and lay in the dark and did not move and did not wake her husband, and told Osric so herself when he asked, and said it flatly and without any shame in it at all, and Osric told her she had done exactly right.

The third was worse.

It was at a croft under the north shoulder with three people in it, and this time there were nine or ten of them and they came in daylight, at about the second hour of the afternoon, and they did not go into the byre.

They went into the house.

They put the crofter and his son against the wall with a spear on each of them and they went through that house in about a quarter of an hour, and they took the meal and the salt and the beans and the seed corn out of the loft, and they took the pot off the fire with what was in it.

And when the woman got in front of the door of the small room where the two young children were, one of them looked at her for a moment and then went round her and looked in and came out again and said something to the others.

And they left the children's food.

Osric heard that part twice and could not do anything with it either time.

"He looked in," said the crofter, standing in the outer yard with his hands round a cup he had not drunk from. "He looked in and he came out and he said something, and then the one with the spear went and put back the little crock with the barley meal in it. Put it back on the shelf. Where it had been."

"Did any of them speak so you could understand it?"

"Not a word of it, Captain. But that one, the one who looked in." The crofter's face did something. "He said it like a man giving an order and the others did it, and he did not look at me while he said it. He looked at the floor."

"And then?"

"And then they went. East and up. Nine of them and every one carrying, and one of them had my seed corn on his back in a sack, and I have been three years getting that seed clean."

Osric got the rest of it and gave the man a bed for the night and sent him back in the morning with two weeks of meal out of the castle store, which Rothgar wrote down without comment and which Osric knew perfectly well he could not do more than about four times.

Then he went up to the wall and stood in the wind for a while.

Six or seven. Then five or six. Then nine or ten.

And they are still on foot and they are still going east and up, and now they arecoming in daylight, which means they have worked out that nobody rides thatcountry in the afternoon in January.

And one of them put a child's food back on a shelf.

I could have done a great deal with a man who did not do that. I do not knowwhat to do with a man who does.

The council sat on the sixteenth day.

It was a smaller room than the hall and it had a stove in it and it was the only warm room in that castle at that hour, and there were nine people in it: the Baron, Waldric, Rothgar, Lambert, Othwin with his wax tablet, Corwin, Eckhard, Aldric, and Osric.

Osric stood, as he always stood, and gave it.

Three raids in sixteen days. Six on foot, then five or six, then nine or ten. No horses anywhere in any of it. Every trail going east and up. A steading two miles over the stone line standing empty since before the first snow.

Then the count.

"Off the store, since the first raid: two weeks of meal to the north croft. The Orswood man lost three beasts and I have not replaced them and cannot. I have four families out of the far crofts asking to come inside the palisade before the next fall, and one of them has already come without asking."

"Let them come," said Heinric.

"They'll want feeding, my lord," said Rothgar.

"I know what they will want."

"I am not arguing against it. I am saying it aloud so that it is said aloud and Othwin writes it down, because in six weeks somebody in this room will have forgotten that we chose it and will want to know how the figure moved." Rothgar did not look up from his ledger. "Let them come. And I want it in the book that I said let them come, and that I also said what it costs."

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"Write it," said Heinric.

Eckhard shifted in his chair.

He had not said anything yet and he had been going to say something since he came in, and Osric had known it from the door.

"May I ask the captain a question."

"Ask it," said Heinric.

"Three raids in sixteen days." Eckhard turned toward Osric and was entirely courteous, which was the part that had begun to grate. "And in sixteen days we have sent out one patrol, which walked eleven miles and came back with a description of some snow."

"That's near enough true."

"I am not trying to be unfair, Captain. I want to be clear about that." Eckhard spread his hands slightly. "I know what the roads are. I know what the horses can do and cannot do. But there is a village out there being robbed by men on foot, and this garrison has a hundred and six on the roll, and we have answered three raids with one walk."

"And what would you do?"

"Put men in the villages." Eckhard said it at once, which meant he had it ready. "Not patrols. Patrols are useless in this. Eight men at Orswood, eight on the Vale road, eight at the north crofts, sleeping in the barns, and the next time nine Brennocs walk into a yard in daylight they walk into eight of ours instead."

There was a small silence.

It was, Osric thought, not a stupid plan. It was the plan a good young knight makes, and about a third of the men in that room had just decided it was a good one, and Osric could feel it happening.

"How do you feed them?" he said.

"They eat what the village eats."

"The village has not got it." Osric turned to Rothgar. "Twenty-four men in three villages for eight weeks. What's that?"

Rothgar did not even look at the ledger.

"Off the castle store, if we feed them properly, about forty quarters. Off the villages, if we make the villages do it, rather less to me and a great deal more to them, and I would expect two of the three to be eating seed corn by the middle of February."

"And they'd still be robbed," said Osric, "because there are eleven crofts out that way and I can put men in three of them, and every Brennoc in that country will know by the second week which three."

"Then they go where the men are not," said Eckhard, "and we have at least made three places safe."

"And made eight places worth robbing." Osric said it evenly. "That is not a criticism of the plan, Sir Eckhard. It is the plan and it is the best plan anybody has put in this room. It only does not work, and I have been trying to make it work for eleven days."

Eckhard's jaw moved.

"Then what is the captain's plan?"

And there it was, and it had been coming since the door.

Osric did not answer it immediately.

He looked at the map and at the nine faces round that room and understood, quite clearly, that he was about to say something out loud that he had been holding privately for a week, and that he had been holding it because he did not like it and had been hoping something better would arrive.

Nothing better had arrived.

"We stop trying to catch them out there," he said. "We cannot. Nine men on foot in that country in this weather cannot be caught by anybody, and every day I spend trying is a day of horses and fodder and frostbite for nothing.

"So we do not defend the crofts. We defend the grain."

Waldric's head came up.

"Every granary in this barony," Osric said. "Every store that is worth walking eleven miles for. Orswood, the Vale, the north crofts, the mill, and this castle. Men in them at night, and the fuel to keep a fire, and a horn, and the crofters

told to their faces that if it comes to it they are to give up the byre and the meal in the house and not stand in the door."

"You would tell a man to let himself be robbed," said Eckhard.

"I would tell a man not to die over a pig."

"And the seed corn?"

"The seed corn we hold." Osric put his hand flat on the map. "That's the line. They may have the cattle and they may have the meal and they may have the boots off a man's feet, and I will not spend one soldier stopping them. The seed we hold, and if they come for the seed we kill them for it, and the reason is that a barony that loses its cattle is poor in the spring and a barony that loses its seed is finished for a generation."

Nobody said anything for a moment.

"That is a great deal of ground given up," said Waldric.

"It is all the ground given up except the ground that matters," said Osric. "I know what it will look like in the village. I know exactly what it will look like, and I have thought about that for a week, and I have not got a better one."

Heinric had been sitting with his chin on his fist through all of it.

"Corwin," he said. "You have been quiet."

Corwin had been quiet. He had been sitting at the end of the table with his hands folded and had not spoken once in the entire session, and had been listening in a way that Osric had been aware of the whole time without being able to say how.

"I have been quiet because I have been here eight days," he said, "and a man who has been in a barony eight days should be extremely careful what he says third."

"Say it anyway."

"Very well." He sat forward. "The captain is right and Sir Eckhard is right, and they are right about different questions, which is why they are arguing.

"Sir Eckhard is answering the question, how do we stop people being robbed. And the answer to that is men in the villages, and it is the correct answer, and it fails only because you have not got the food to do it.

"The captain is answering the question, how does this barony come out of March able to plant. And that is a colder question and a better one, and his

answer is the only one I have heard in this room that survives contact with February."

Eckhard's colour came up slightly.

"So you would give up the crofts."

"I would give up the crofts, and I would hate it, and I would say so out loud to the crofters myself rather than let a serjeant do it." Corwin looked at him without any edge at all. "And I would want it said in this room that Sir Eckhard's plan is the one we would be doing if we were richer, because a year from now, when somebody is writing this down, that ought to be in it."

Eckhard sat back.

He did not look mollified. He looked, Osric thought, like somebody who has been handed a gift in public and cannot work out whether he has been paid or bought.

"Then that is what we do," said Heinric.