noncombatants in the castle. Everyone else in the hills, and then raid out of them with the barony’s fighting men when the enemy occupy the lowlands… which they will.”
“Yup, they will,” Ingolf said; he wasn’t going to lie to this man. “Hopefully, not for all that long, but for a while, yeah.”
“Tell me, Lord Vogeler, how many men would you need to comb these mountains against me and my neighbors if we took refuge there? How long would it take?”
Ingolf’s professional reflexes kicked in. He looked up at the peaks to the east-one of them still had a little snow on it and must be around seven thousand feet-and ran what he knew of the terrain through his mind.
“At least five thousand men and a lot of equipment, if you gave me a year,” he said. “Not counting the ones you’d need to besiege the castles around here, or at least solidly invest them. Maybe two years to do a thorough job. Ten, twenty thousand and even more gear if you wanted it done quick and dirty. You’d need good troops you could trust to get out there in small units and get stuck in whenever they could, not just go through the motions when someone higher up was looking. And some engineers to build roads and fortified posts, plus labor. And it’d cost you, money and blood both. That’s natural ambush country, looks like.”
Maugis nodded quietly. They walked on through the town, the baron nodding response to bows and curtsies and salutes; nobody was going to interrupt him, of course. Grimmond-on-the-Wold had something like eight hundred folk in peacetime and many more now. That was big for a village, but not a place that had wholly made up its mind to be a town either, and certainly not even the smallest city.
“I could raid from those hills and tie down that many troops or more,” Maugis said. “I could make trying to move supplies through this country… anywhere between here and the Snake River… a nightmare of endless harassment. Ambush convoys, kill foraging parties, cut off patrols, burn outposts.”
He turned and gestured to the town and the lands beyond. “I know that this doesn’t look like much to a traveled man,” he said.
“Actually it looks pretty good,” Ingolf said sincerely. “Mary and I were just now saying that we envied you. Well, would envy you if it were peacetime.”
Maugis smiled; it was an oddly charming expression, and made his rather ugly face handsome for a moment.
“Thank you,” he said. “This is my… my world, if you know what I mean. My own particular world.”
Ingolf dredged his memory for a word he’d heard; his family were mostly Deutsch if you went back far enough, along with a slew of other things including a lot of Norski. They had preserved a few bits and pieces of that heritage, and not just recipes for bratwurst.
“Heimat,” he said. “An old word. Your heimat is… your little country, the first homeland of the heart. The place where your roots are.”
Maugis nodded quickly. “Exactly. I’ve enjoyed my times at Court in Todenangst and Portland, the university in Forest Grove, visits to Walla Walla, tournaments and meetings of the Peers, theatre and concerts, but this place is my home. All of it, and the people are my people.”
Most of the folk of Grimmond-on-the-Wold were peasants, who tilled the little garden tofts around their three-room-and-a-loft cottages that gave off the tree-shaded streets. They had their strips in the big open fields of wheat and barley, canola and sunflowers and clover westward, their stock in the common flocks and herds. From that they paid a share to the lord, and worked two or three days a week on his demesne land; that included a long south-facing slope of goblet-trained vineyards green and bushy with summer and the orchards around the irrigation furrow beneath. Some of the little houses were neatly kept, with flowers planted around their doorways. Others had patches flaking from their whitewash and chickens walking in the door.
None of them looked truly miserable; the people in them certainly weren’t underfed, or very ragged, or too smelly. The toft gardens all had abundant vegetables and a few fruit trees; there were chicken coops and the odd pigsty or shed for a milch cow down at their far fence. There were Refugees in Richland who lived worse. The upper part of the town held larger houses as well, from the reeve’s and the bailiff’s up to those of the household knights.
“Heimat,” Maugis repeated, rolling the word around his mouth to taste it. “I like that. It… fits.”
Since this was a baron’s seat, it also had two or three of the things the ordinary manorial village had one of, bakeries and blacksmith’s shops and some full-time weavers. The blacksmiths had the usual piles of bundled scrap metal around their doors, and they were working too hard to notice their overlord walking by; metal hissed viciously with a vinegary smell and a spearhead was quenched, with a grinding chorus of metal shoved against spinning honing wheels beneath. Most of the other craftsfolk looked about as busy.
“War wears things out,” Maugis said, nodding at them. “Things and people.”
“God knows it’s worn holes in me,” Ingolf said ruefully, touching the dent where his nose had been broken.
Down at the end of the single street were a set of huge barns, long work sheds, a tall windmill and a tangle of corrals. Those were swarmingly busy too.
“I could turn these mountains into a running sore when the enemy come… as they will. Or I could put up a single fight on the plains for honor’s sake, and then just defend the heights, giving a bloody nose to anyone who pokes it in and hoping to deal as best I can with whoever has the victory in the end.”
“You could do that, my lord,” Ingolf said carefully, as he might to a horse he wasn’t sure might bolt. “But you’d be making it that much less likely we win the war.”
“Yes,” Maugis said calmly. “And I have obligations to the Count, whose vassal I am. He’s a good man who does his best, and even his father-who was a jumped-up thug with a veneer of courtesy, as my father said-gave us good lordship, mostly, which is as much as a vassal can rightly demand. The question is, can the Count protect me and mine in return for my service if I throw everything into the scales for him? I’m not a household knight who can fight with no thought but to die at his lord’s side. There are more than four thousand people living in this Barony, Lord Vogeler, commons, clerics and gentles alike. They’re my vassals; they look to me for protection in return for their service and obedience, and I have sworn to provide it. For that oath I must account before the very Throne of God.”
He crossed himself. “Most of the time being a baron is a fine thing, the wealth and power and glory of it. There comes a time to pay for everything, though, if a man’s to be a man indeed and not just a wolf that walks on two legs with his sword for fangs. And only the lesser debts can be paid in cash. These decisions are mine to make here, and that is my burden.”
“There’s more involved than the Count Palatine,” Ingolf said. “Or Walla Walla and the County of the Eastermark in general.”
“Yes; there’s his overlord the Lady Regent, and the new Kingdom. Lady Sandra I know a little, and she is very able, she’s led the Association well. But she’s colder than the dark side of the Moon. A ruler must make sacrifices, and balance this loss against that, sometimes ruthlessly; I know that from watching and listening to my father work, and my own experience. But she would sacrifice my barony and its folk without even a moment’s hesitation if it served her aims, as if it were an entry in a ledger or a cutting bar in a hay-reaper. I cannot give fealty to a machine or a mere form of written laws. It must be to a person, someone who respects my honor, who loves it, even if he sends me to death and condemns my lands to the fire for a greater duty’s sake.”
“She’s not the big boss anymore, Lord Maugis.”
He stopped and looked at Ingolf Vogeler. “I don’t know Rudi Mackenzie,” he said. “Or Artos the High King. But I do know you, a little, Lord Vogeler. We’ve fought together side by side, and I’ve seen you at work with your own troops. And I flatter myself that though I’m young yet, I’m a fair judge of men. So tell me about Artos. Tell me if he’s a King worth risking all this”-he moved his arm about-“for. Is he a man who loves his vassals’ honor as much as his own? Is he worthy of true fealty, that I can ask my followers to lay down their lives and risk their homes for him?”
Ingolf stood rooted to the spot. Hell, how do I answer that? he thought desperately. OK, I know Rudi pretty damned good. We were together through two really stressful years and a lot of… wait a minute.
“Lord Maugis,” he said. “I could tell you what I think of Rudi.. . the High King… but that would just be words. My opinion at most. Let me tell you what I’ve seen him do, these last two years and more, since I rode into Sutterdown with the Prophet’s men on my tracks. Words are cheap, but a man is what he does.”
When Ingolf finished, he found his throat unexpectedly dry. And the sun was much lower, low enough to make him blink in surprise. They were sitting on a stone horse-trough with a spigot above it. He turned it on, and
