The Red Knight

‘I want to put all your farmers and all the refugees to work and I want your help seeing that I get no insolence from them. I need them to work quickly and be quiet.’ The captain took out a scroll of parchment and unrolled it.

‘My squire is a gifted young man, and he drew this,’ he said. Michael flushed uncontrollably. ‘We want a deep V-shape of walls on both sides and ditches outside the walls; built three hundred paces from Bridge Castle, where the road from the Lower Town starts up the hill. It will allow us to send soldiers and supplies freely back and forth from the Lower Town to Bridge Castle. Put boards all along the bottom so men can walk quickly, without being seen, and put three bridges over it, so our sorties can move easily about the fields. See this cutaway? A nice hollow space under the boards. Good place for a little surprise.’ He grinned and most of the soldiers grinned back.

‘We’ll also put a wall along the Gate Road, running all the way to the top. We should have done it in the first place, anyway. Towers here and here, on earth bastions.’ He rubbed his beard. ‘First, we put in covered positions for these new frame crossbows – here and here – so that if they attack while we’re building, it’s all a trap and they lose a couple of their own for nothing. Last, we improve the path from the postern gate to the Lower Town.’

All the soldiers nodded.

Except Tom. Tom spat. ‘We don’t have the fucking men to hold all that wall,’ he said. ‘Much less in both directions.’

‘No we don’t. But building it will keep the peasants quiet and busy, and when our enemy attacks we’re going to make him pay for it, and then let him have it.’

Tom grinned. ‘Of course we are.’

The captain turned to the others. ‘I’m assuming that our enemy doesn’t have a lot of experience in fighting men,’ he said. ‘But even if he does, we won’t have lost much with these distractions.’

The Abbess looked pained. Her eyes had a hunted look, and she turned away. ‘He is a man. Or he was, once.’

The captain winced. ‘We face a man?’

The Abbess nodded. ‘I have felt the brush of his thought. He has some small reason to – to fear me.’

The captain looked at her, gazing as intently as a lover into her flecked brown and blue eyes, and she held his gaze as easily as he held hers.

‘It is none of your affair,’ she said primly.

‘You are not telling us things that would be of value to us,’ the captain said.

‘You, on the other hand, are the very soul of openness,’ she replied.

‘Get a room,’ Tom muttered under his breath.

The captain looked at Ser Milus. ‘We cut the patrols down to two a day, and we launch them at my whim. Our sole remaining interest is getting any more convoys in here safely, or in turning them away. Albinkirk is gone. Sauce – how far did you go today?’

She shrugged. ‘Eight leagues?’

The captain nodded. ‘Tomorrow – no, tomorrow we won’t send anything. Not a man. Tomorrow we dig. The day after, we send four patrols, in all directions except west. The day after that, I’ll take half the company west along the road, as fast as we can go. We’ll aim for twenty leagues, pick up merchants or convoys we can, and get a look at Albinkirk. Then back here, all with enough force to kill whatever opposes us.’

Tom nodded. ‘Aye, but against a hundred Outwallers, in an ambush, we’ll just be dead. And that’s without a couple of daemons and maybe a pair of wyverns and a hundred irks to eat our bodies afterwards. Eh?’

The captain wrinkled his lips. ‘If we surrender the initiative and hunker down here we’re all dead too,’ he said. ‘Unless the king comes with his army to relieve us.’

The Abbess agreed.

‘For all I know the Wall fortresses have already fallen,’ the captain said. His eyes narrowed, as if the subject had particular interest to him. ‘Whatever the case, we cannot count on any help from the outside, nor can we hope that this is an isolated incident. We have to behave as if we have an unending supply of men and materiel, and we have to try to keep the road east open. We need to lure our enemy into some battles of our choosing.’ He looked around at his officers. ‘Everyone understand?’ He looked at the Abbess. ‘We have to be ready to destroy the bridge.’

She nodded. ‘There’s a phantasm to do it. I have it. It is regularly maintained: when a certain key is turned in the gate lock, the bridge will fall into the river.’

The officers nodded their approval.

The captain stood. ‘Very well. Ser Milus, Ser Jehannes, you are in charge of my construction project. Tom, Sauce, you will lead the patrols. Bent, get the arbalest frames up, and placed in those four covered positions,’ he smiled, ‘where Michael marked them. Bent, take charge of running the rotations inside the fortress too. Don’t worry about who is a man-at-arms, who’s a valet, who’s an archer. Just get the numbers right.’

They all nodded.

‘You planning to take a nap?’ Bad Tom asked.

The captain smiled at the Abbess. ‘My lady and I are going to raise a nice fog,’ he said. ‘She is a very potent magus.’