"I don’t see what you’ll be needing a sabre for, love,” Galin said in a whisper as Cooper left. “We’ll be in the wall and the only horses we need are for carting spare spears and kit up the road to the Pass. No riding about heroics this time. Maybe you misunderstand the geography of the place, see, but it ain’t fit for horse and if we end up in country that is, something’s gone to complete shite.” Galin looked at Luthene calmly and squeezed her hand. He knew what the reeve was asking in a way that she did not and it broke his heart to have to explain it to her. He let his hand drop and squatted down in the dust of the road and started scratching shapes in it with the tip of his long knife. “Have a look, love,” he said as he drew, marking Dunholm with an X and scratching the land from there to the border with the detail of a man who had once lived rough in those same hills as he avoided the hangman’s noose.
“The X there, that’s us. The northern clans marshal here, at Carrick, where I was born by the way, and then they march about a week to Dumholm. Crannog’s Pass is a two days march to the west of here, in a valley between the Twins, the tallest mountains on the border. There are other ways around but none that I’d want an army through, so that’s the spot. And beyond, between it and Dunholmn?” He gestured with his hand to the rolling hills filled with the first sprouts of spring. “Fine land, good farms, and a terrible place for a handful of men to fight a horde. So we fight them at the pass and make sure to hold them so they ain’t in the interior without the northern clans ready to meet them. So we will be making that pass a fortress and fighting them there. There’s no withdrawing until the clans muster.” Galin shrugged. “Ain’t much else we can do.” He stood up and scuffed out the map with the toe of his boot and hugged Luthene. The men had understood what he meant when he mentioned the pass and were ready but Luthene was not of the North so it was not as readily clear. He just hoped they would both live to regret signing the reeve’s orders.
The reaction among the assembled leaders of the war bands was about what Galin would have expected. He had not left the North covered in glory but a fugitive from dubious justice at the hands of an enraged lord after Galin stabbed his nephew in a drunken brawl in Carrick and some of the men remembered, especially the guardsmen of Alfric. It seems that time had not tempered the lord’s dislike and Galin’s memory was still blackened by that evening’s events. “Drunk son of a bitch came at me, acting the big man,” Galin muttered out of anyone’s hearing but Luthene’s, “and I’m the bloody criminal. Fuck ‘em.” But Luthene proved her worth again as a diplomat and Galin leaned back, arms folded across his chest, while she spoke. Her telling of the fight in Arnholt’s fortress was close enough to the mark and it seemed to be doing the trick, with even Alfric’s men looking at him with more respect than contempt. When she finished, he let his arms drop and walked among the leaders, clapping them on their shoulders as he passed each one.
“Look men, we’re buggered. The orcs are, from what I’ve been told, less than a week’s march out. I ain’t expecting you all to like me but I’m the best worst option we’ve got. And ask the men I brought, they know me. I am no tyrant. You command your men, same as before, and we have war councils every night at my fire. It won’t be pure democracy but I will listen to what you have to say and am willing to be wrong. Other than that, I think Luthene’s about covered it. We’re clearing out the reeve’s stores now, getting every scrap of steel we can out toward the pass. If any of you have carts and beasts to draw them along the route of march, send runners and have them ready. We will be settling in there and need every bit of help we can muster. The northern clans have heard the summons and should be at Carrick within a day. Orcs aren’t at the pass yet, so we have time to get there and make it a bloody tough nut to crack. Now if you need arms, we will share out of the reeve’s stores once we’re at Crannog’s. No sense in marching through peaceful country in mail, eh?” Some of the men, the older smallholding farmers who led their bands of neighbors, laughed and even Alfric’s men smiled. “Now get your lads formed out of the west gate in an hour. And, oh, before you head off, if any of your men’s been head to head with the greenskins in living memory, send ‘em over my way. Got to know up enough to stick a spear in ‘em.”
Cooper had done an excellent job organizing the ransacking of the armory and by the time Galin caught up with him, there was a veritable sea of wagons and carts loaded with arms, supplies, rations, and about anything else that a traveling army might think to need. It was not how the company would usually travel, preferring to move quickly and live off the land, but with what amounted to a siege ahead of them, the men had prepared well. “Coops, well done as always. The rest are about a half mile down the road, so let’s get a move on and catch ‘em. We’re marching straight on til we’re at the Black Ford, no matter when that is, and we march at dawn the next day, so let’s shift it!” The waggoneers cracked their whips and horses and oxen lurched forward and like an animal shaking itself awake, the column company started forward to rendezvous with the levies and household guards along the Pass Road and toward the Black Ford. The mood of the company changed, even with the danger they faced. The men marched without complaining and after the first mile, songs began to pop up among the men as they marched, lifting their spirits in the face of what was to come.
The column made it to the ford an hour after sunset and the levy men collapsed nearly where they stood from the pace of the march. Even some of the household troops were complaining of blistered feet, much to the amusement of the company men. Cooking fires sprang up and the men came together to cook their rations. Galin, bereft of Cooper’s woman’s cooking and unwilling to suffer through his own, circulated between the fires, sharing out drinks from his wineskin with the men, learning their names and where they had lived. When he returned to his own fire, he saw that Cooper had outdone himself, procuring a good cut of beef in Dunholm that he had cooked on the same discarded breastplate they had used during the retreat from the company’s massacre. “Ain’t got enough oil like Maria’d use, but plenty of fresh butter, so you’ll be happy enough,” he said and slid a chop onto Galin’s outstretched wooden plate. “And this man here, he said his officer’d sent him. Used to be a prisoner of the greenskins, so he was, and figures he might have something to add to your understanding.”
Galin turned to the other man seated next to Luthene and inclined his head. “Thank you for coming over. I hope Cooper’s been passable company. Now, please, tell me about these buggers. When I was growing up they’d gone quiet so it was more legend than fact, you know?”
The man, clearly on the wrong side of forty with streaks of grey in his beard and hair and a mouth only dotted with teeth, nodded to Galin and set aside his plate. “Name’s Cathal and I come from two days walk past the pass, wee vill there. Them orcs grabbed me when I was a wain, before your time, laddie, when they was still a’raidin weekly over the border. They et some of us right off, the bastards, like we was heads o’ beef. Me, I’d apprenticed with a smith, see, so they kept me alive to help ‘em make proper Highland steel, not that shite they use ‘emselves. So I lived among ‘em til one day I caved in the head of one of the smiths with me and got the hell out. Run into a shepherd after a day and got meself back here. So, you’ll be wantin’ to know about their fighting, aye?” Galin nodded and passed the man a cup of wine which he drank appreciatively.
“So, they’ve got tribes same as we’ve got clans, only you can tell jus’ by lookin’ at ‘em what tribe they is, see, ‘cause it’s more or less about size. The bigger buggers, they’re the top class, taller’n big men and strong as an ox and they rule the place from the upper reaches. Further down into the caverns you is, the more stunted the green buggers are, down to the size of a wee woman, some of ‘em. The ones down below don’t like the ones on the top, o’course but they ain’t strong enough to do a thing about it. When they fight, it’s the wee’uns they use first, tire us out with them and then the bigger, armored buggers come out of nowhere like a hammer and break whatever they’re looking at. The smaller ones, they ain’t given good blades or armor, no better than the worst of our levy, and the big ones, especially the full warrior tribes, thems the ones that are armed like a knight out of Adeluna, with mail and plate and what have you.
“Now the army, they stack up by tribe and fight in groups based on that. So you’ll have one of them elders leadin’ them and they’s a family, cousins and such, all together. Even the wee ones, it makes ‘em tough to break because they won’t leave their kin behind. Even for savages, they’ve got that much honor to ‘em. So they’ll come on in waves, the warriors of a few tribes at a time, trying to tire our arms, then melt back. Wave and wave they come but they don’t get stuck in proper unless it’s the chief clans. Them lads’ll stay fighting for the sheer love of it, battle mad bastards. But they love to surround their enemies, see?” He took a smoldering branch from the fire and drew up four blocks in a shallow T. “It’s like a bull, see? Them outside ones, that’s the horns, then the head, and the back’s the loins. So the head’ll come on with the horns and pin a body down and then the loins, the heavy ones, they come storming in once they’re good and fucked. Love their swords though, no use for a proper spear. Keep ‘em at arm’s length and put a foot of good Highland spearhead in their guts as easy as pissin’. And them archers they got, their bows ain’t much stronger’n what you’d use as a wee lad, no more’n fourteen summers. Good for hunting and ambushing folk but against a proper shield and good mail… we’ll look like hedgehogs when they’re through but we’ll be standin’ and that’s what matters. And if’n we capture a few, I know enough of the tongue to get some proper answers out of ‘em, so I’ll make myself handy, aye?”
Galin nodded while he spoke, fixing in his memory everything Cathal was saying, not knowing what would be useful when they made it to the Pass. “Thank you Cathal, thank you,” he said, chewing his lip distractedly. He tossed the man a fresh skin of strong wine and was surprised by the speed at which the old man snatched it out of the air.
“Old, boyo, not dead,” he said with a laugh and took his leave, returning to his own fire with his prize.
Galin turned to Cooper and Luthene again, his food half-forgotten in his lap. “Well, that’s good news, I think. Buggers like to swarm and we’re fighting in a pass as narrow as a gnat’s arsehole. Gives us proper chance to fight ‘em like proper soldiers, even make some preparations and all that…” He trailed off, chewing his lip again. “Before I ramble though, the both of you, what’s the morale like? You were moving among the troops all day, so aside from being hungry, tired, and footsore, what in the nine hells have we got to work with to defend the pass? Do they seem like the sort that’ll stand or am I more worried about them buggering off the first time the greenskins hammer on their drums and come running? And be blunt, aye? I’d rather know now than when the wall’s a bloody shambles,” he said, laughing with dark, wry amusement.
