more than knowing that fifteen years later he could still frighten people, ones who’d been children when he died. I think I’ll take a nap before we go up to the keep, dear.”
“Ah-” Ingolf said, as she nodded politely and left.
Mary spoke: “Lord Maugis, she’s perfectly right. I say it, and my husband and I are good friends of Princess… High Queen Mathilda. And here’s the others.”
Ingolf breathed a well-concealed sigh of relief; at least he thought it was, until he caught Mary’s sideways glance and smile.
“Captain Jaeger,” Maugis said.
Mark was with the other Richlander, but looking a bit shaken, almost certainly from memories of the fight surfacing. That happened after the insulating rage and fear burned out of your blood. It was worse when it happened at night when you were half asleep.
And the captured Boise commander. “And Captain Woburn… Rancher Woburn, I believe, too; your father is a Sheriff as well, isn’t he?” Maugis went on. “Please join me and my family for luncheon. As a Montivalan I say, let us put aside the war for a little; as a soldier, I say, welcome, comrade.”
Woburn looked as if he’d been having those night-thoughts too. It was worst of all when you’d lost, and were lying alone blaming yourself for it.
Jaeger filled half his plate with the potato salad and took a tankard of the beer; evidently Richland’s foodways bit deep. The Boisean ate as well, but kept silent; he was limping and had a couple of bandages and his left arm was in a sling, and no doubt he was hurting for his men. Ingolf sympathized, but he had business to do. Fortunately it was all stuff the Boisean already knew, or which he wouldn’t at all mind the enemy knowing if by some unlikely chance he got loose.
“I’m promoting you to Major, Jaeger.”
That got a blink and a smile, but not a big one; which said that Jaeger’s priorities were good.
Kohler thought he was sound, and Kohler was a good judge of men.
“Pick your own replacement for your command and run the name by me. What’s the state of the regiment?”
Since I’m now going to have to be more hands-on. Dammit, Kohler, I needed you! I’ve got half a dozen jobs to juggle! I only took the Colonel’s post because you needed someone whose father was a Sheriff as a figurehead!
He’d led them to victory more than once, led from the front, and his latest plan had let them give the enemy a lot more of a world of hurt than they received. That had probably kept the men reasonably happy with him, even though he was busier than he liked with other things half the time. It wasn’t that he couldn’t run a light cavalry regiment; he’d done it before, and pretty well. Time, time…
Jaeger flicked his eyes aside at Woburn while he chewed hastily; Ingolf nodded very slightly. Let him know how light we got off; can’t hurt, might help.
“Three more of the wounded died overnight, Colonel,” Jaeger said when he’d swallowed.
He had medium-brown hair and was whippet-thin despite the way he was shoveling in the potato salad and mutton-ham and something very like kielbasa, and tomatoes and onions dressed with oil and vinegar and crusty rolls and butter, and eyeing the pastries. He’d eaten that way every time Ingolf saw him have an opportunity, but he wasn’t surprised at the man’s looks. From what older people said now and then, fatties had been common before the Change even among farmworkers, though that was difficult to imagine. You certainly weren’t going to get that way doing what a horse-soldier did these days.
“Richter and Smith died of internal bleeding, the doctor tried, but too much was sliced up. They had to stop transfusing them, there were men who might recover who needed it and only so many donors.”
Ingolf sighed. There were places that could store refrigerated blood for a while, but they were few and far between. Triage was an ugly fact of a fighting-man’s life, but it was a fact. You weren’t doing anyone a favor if you let a man who had some chance to live die just to keep someone who didn’t have a chance going another half hour. There were times when the only favor you could do a comrade was a quick knife-thrust; at least they’d been spared that.
“The third?” he said.
Can’t recall anyone else who looked that bad and it’s too early for infection to show up.
“Sir, Olson got hit on the head hard enough to dent his helmet in, but he was doing fine and then… he just started breathing funny and died, real quiet.”
Ingolf nodded. Head wounds were tricky that way; there was no way to see inside a head, of course, and nothing much the doctors could have done if you could see inside. They could pick fragments out of a depressed fracture or trepan for pressure on the brain if you were lucky, but that was about it. He’d been knocked out once and had had blinding headaches at intervals for six months afterwards; sometimes men never did entirely recover from a clout to the skull; and sometimes they just died, like Olson.
Three more dead made ten too many, but fewer than he’d expected. Ten dead altogether and thirty non- walking-wounded of whom only half a dozen would be crippled for life was a light butcher’s bill for an engagement that size, but then winning always made for a lighter payment. The Boiseans had taken five times that. Still, you died just as dead either way.
“The rest seem to be doing well. The doctors here are excellent, that’s what our Doc Jennings says. One of them went to the same school his own teacher did. And uh, Lord Rigobert left some of his medics too, and more medical supplies, so we’ve got enough morphine for the bad cases. He pulled out at dawn, couldn’t have slept more than a couple of hours, that’s one busy man. The Tithe Barn thing we’ve got all the wounded in is as comfortable as you could expect, sir, it was just used for a grain store, pretty clean.”
“I’ll drop in on them again today,” Ingolf said. And it won’t be quite as bad this time. “The rest?”
“Camp’s pitched in the reaped fields about a half mile out of town. Still putting up the tents.”
Which wasn’t urgent; in weather like this it was probably more comfortable to just roll in your blankets than sleep in a stuffy tent. Most men preferred them if they had a choice, though. Probably because they gave an illusion of permanence, of home, in the enforced nomadism of a soldier’s life. They were a shell you could take with you.
“There’s a good well of clean water we can drink straight, plenty of it and a wind-pump, and the distance might, ah…”
“Make it harder for bored troopers to come into town and get drunk and cause too many problems,” Ingolf said.
The younger Richlander nodded. “Yessir. And maybe we should provide working parties to our hosts, sweat some of the devilment out of them once they get over the fight and start feeling bored and randy again. Uff da, this officer’s job, it’s like being a nanny, isn’t it, sometimes! I figure that’s why Three Bears put the Sioux even farther out.”
Says the graybeard of twenty-four, Ingolf thought.
“That, and they don’t like being crowded; and he’s scouting out to the north right now. Supplies?”
“Plenty, sir, we don’t have to touch the reserves. Lots of firewood ready cut. Lord Maugis here gave us a bunch of the sheep.”
Maugis shrugged and spread his hands. “Sheep and battles go ill together, and the meat won’t keep in this heat. That was my demesne herd, too.”
The Richlander nodded. “And all the vegetables and fresh bread and fruit we can use, which is making the men happy, and some pretty good beer, I’m having that carefully rationed. We paid, of course.”
“Of course,” Ingolf said gravely.
He and Mary glanced at each other. They had permission to draw on the Crown accounts through Sandra Arminger, but Rudi was still fairly heavy with gold-the friendly new government of Iowa had given them a substantial going-away present to mark the alliance. As it turned out, gold was relatively more valuable here in Montival. Ingolf knew why. There were more ruins in the east, particularly more big ones, and the big ones were where most of the precious metals could be found. You had to have a grasp on the economics of the trade to succeed as a salvager. The difference in purchasing power was about two-to-one for gold, a little less for silver.
But it’s going to run out someday not too far away. Wars are really expensive, and then Rudi’s going to be dependent on his mom-in-law for an allowance. Which will make everyone else unhappy or even get them thinking
