Pirojil pointed a finger toward the front of the column, tapped the finger against his own chest, jerked his thumb toward the rear of the column, and spurred his horse.
Lady Mondegreen’s eyes held steady on Kethol as he dropped back beside her, replacing Durine. ‘How soon do we arrive, Kethol?’ she asked.
If he remembered right, and he did, the outer wall of Mondegreen Town was just beyond the next bend, across a stream, and then over a ridge. ‘I believe we should be there within the hour, Lady.’ Why the Lady of Castle Mondegreen wouldn’t know the area around the keep better than a soldier who had only been through here once, during the war, he didn’t know. ‘We’ll have you safe in your own bed this night, and may it be a comfort to you.’
‘I’ve some comfort in my own bed, that’s true,’ she said. ‘Though my husband is a good man, a gentle man, but a very sick man, and has been, for the past few years.’
Oh, he didn’t say. And is that why you spend your time warming other men’s beds? ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he did say. It seemed like the appropriate response.
She pursed her lips momentarily. ‘Others suffer far worse than do I.’
‘Is the Baron much older than you?’
She frowned. ‘Yes, he is. And is there something wrong with that?’
‘Not at all.’ Kethol shook his head. ‘But it must be difficult –’
‘Yes, it’s difficult.’ She patted at her belly. ‘It’s difficult when you marry an older man, and are expected to produce an heir, and don’t.’ She started to say something more, then stopped herself.
‘There’s no need to watch your words around me, Lady,’ Kethol said. ‘I’m not loose of tongue, and I’ve got no stake in local matters.’
She didn’t look at him. ‘How fortunate for you,’ she said, through tight lips.
They rode in silence for a few minutes.
‘I seem to have something of a widespread reputation,’ she said at last.
‘Perhaps.’ Kethol shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t know. The only gossip I get to hear is usually about how one sergeant is a glory-hound, or another officer will never send his men out in front of him if he doesn’t have to – the private lives of our betters isn’t a topic for barracks conversation.’
Which wasn’t entirely true. It might not have been a topic for Kethol’s barracks conversation, but some of the Mut soldiers gossiped like fishwives, and Lady Mondegreen was often a subject of their chatter. If you believed the gossip – and Kethol never either believed all or none of it – she flitted from bed to bed with wild abandon, looking for the satisfaction that her ancient husband couldn’t have given her.
She looked at him, long and hard, as though trying to decide something.
A crow fluttered down and took a perch on an overhanging tree limb, and cawed down at them.
Well, as long as it didn’t shit on him, he didn’t mind.
Pirojil shook his head. Unless you knew how and where to look, the castle didn’t look like the weapon that it actually was.
Castle Mondegreen rose, huge and solid and dark on its hill, looming above the town below. On top of its six towers watchmen stood, probably bored out of their minds, but even more probably happy to be bored. It didn’t take much experience with battle to teach you that combat was far less romantic in real life than in all the tales, ballads and legends.
Of course, it wouldn’t take long before the sights and sounds and particularly the smells of war would fade in the memory, and it wouldn’t be long before young soldiers would be puffing their chests and strutting about, bragging of the great deeds they would do the next time the alarm horns sounded. Some of them would do very well. Some of them would die, and all of them would be changed, in ways many of them would not recognize until years later, if ever. A soldier’s life gave you plenty of time for introspection, but many just pissed that time away.
Pirojil himself had pissed away many an hour that could have been spent just thinking about things. On the other hand, he had not wasted all his hours, and he had long ago worked out that it was dangerous to keep weapons too near you. Necessary, yes, but dangerous – weapons changed people, and not just enchanted weapons.
Like the castle itself.
Originally, Castle Mondegreen had been built by some cousin of the conDoin family, as a way to establish a permanent foothold in Yabon. While invited in to help drive out the Brotherhood of the Dark Path and their allies, many of the Yabonese had not expected the Kingdom to stay in Yabon once the enemy had been dislodged. Like neighbouring Bosonia, Yabon had been a far-flung colony of the Empire of Great Kesh.
Unlike Bosonia, which had many Keshian colonists living there, Yabon had been an administrated district with a few Keshian nobles and many Yabonese tribal chieftains and lords. The Kingdom’s position was that once the Dark Brothers and their ilk were driven away, the natives were unable to protect themselves and therefore Yabon required a permanent Kingdom garrison. A rescue had turned into a conquest.
Some lords and chieftains had welcomed the Kingdom, and were rewarded with titles and lands. Other locals had, as locals did, resented their conquerors, and were primed for revolt in the early years. During that time, the remnants of the old regime would eye the new rulers, usually waiting and sometimes probing for weaknesses, ready to throw off the yoke of the newly-appointed Kingdom earl and his lickspittle barons.
And that was what the castle was for. Let the old regime raise an army in the countryside, let them gather together horses and men, bows and breastplates and swords, and let them rant and rave and fume as they would – so long as the new rulers controlled the castle.
Sometimes, the revolt could be put down by the Baron’s troops riding out and dispersing the rebels. More often, the trouble could be stopped at the much smaller wall around the town, protecting not just the nobility in the castle, but those loyal to the new regime who were, during the early years, the only ones permitted to live in the town, directly under the protection of the Baron.
But sometimes, the occupying troops would have to retreat into the castle, and wait to be relieved by the Earl’s troops. Stockpiled food and water were as much a part of the castle’s armoury as stockpiled arrows and bolts. As conquests go, Yabon’s was a relatively mild one, and by the third generation after the Kingdom annexed the former Keshian colony – which just happened to be Pirojil’s generation – Yabonese and Kingdom were interchangeable, except maybe for a bit of a funny accent in Yabon.
And so, the castle stood: a monument to persistence, just as the tumble down wall of the town was a monument to mutability, to how things never lasted.
Pirojil couldn’t tell how much of the town’s wall had been destroyed in the war – the Tsurani had broken through into Mondegreen Town on their way to the castle – and how much had been cannibalized before the Tsurani invasion by locals seeking building materials. After a generation or so of peace, the wall around the town was more of an inconvenience than a benefit, and it took a wise ruler to remember that walls were important.
The wall around the keep itself, though, was intact, although as battle-scarred as the rest of the landscape. Ashes were all that remained of the siege towers the Tsurani had built against the western wall, and while the southern wall still stood firm, it was scarred by a patched breach in the stonework, above where Tsurani sappers had failed in their attempt to undermine its integrity. The slump in the ground at the foundation told Pirojil all he needed to know about the failed attempt. Nasty way to die, he thought, with tons of rock and earth suddenly falling upon you, crushing you in the darkness like a bug. The trick was to make the tunnel as large as you safely could, with just enough timber to hold everything above you in place until you were ready to fire the supports, collapse the tunnel –