credit. That was a very dramatic end to the assault, wasn’t it?” He leaned into a merlon to peer down at the shambles in front of the gate. “No, don’t look,” he said, straightening up. “The plunderers are at work already.”
“The Wends took a bad beating!”
He leaned back against a crenel and folded his arms, regarding her quizzically. “Yes and no. They lost at least ten times as many men as we did.”
“That’s good, isn’t it?”
“Ye-e-e-s.” He dragged the word out. He might have been mocking her, but his smile seemed genuine enough. “But if they had more than ten times as many men to start with-twenty times, forty times as many? Most people would say that Wartislaw can afford to lose ten times as many men as Anton can.”
“But you don’t?”
“Not necessarily. Armies are funny things… The Cardician men are fighting for their families, their homes. They’ll go on to the last drop of blood, and their sons and wives and daughters beside them. The Wends are fighting for money, mostly. A couple of bad maulings like this one and they’re apt to start recalling things they forgot to do before they left home. Their best leaders will have died or been wounded. I’ve seen armies lose faith and just melt away, even mercenary armies.”
“But they won’t make the same mistake again, will they?”
He shrugged. “If they knew how little ammunition we have left… You’re not planning to go out there and minister to injured Wends, are you?”
The thought had not even occurred to her. “Is that normal?”
“I’ve never heard of it. If their flag of truce gets here before the scavengers deal with them, they can rescue their own. They’d better hurry, though.”
His manner to her was somehow fatherly but not patronizing, confiding but not gossipy. He was certainly not talking down to her; in fact he was almost speaking in riddles, encouraging her to question more deeply. “Have you ever seen ladders fail like that?”
His eyes twinkled. “No. Oh, I’ve seen ladders break, but never with such dramatic results. But then, I’ve never seen an assault attempted against a wall so high in such a narrow space. Rash, it was; asking for trouble. They knew that road was a killing ground; they knew the castle’s history.”
“The ladders’ collapse was unusual, though?”
He shrugged. “I think so, but I won’t go around talking about it.”
He was talking with her about it. Why? If it had been Wulf’s magic that broke the first ladder, how many men’s deaths must he now have on his conscience? But how many defenders’ lives had he saved by preventing a sack?
If it had been Wulf’s doing.
“We’re all very stubborn, us Magnuses,” Baron Magnus remarked, turning his head to stare across the valley at the snowy mass of Mount Naproti. “Notoriously so. I expect Vlad and I were holy terrors when we were children. Don’t remember. Marek never was. Marek was always owlish, bookish; didn’t give a spit about weapons or training or even horses, much.”
Madlenka hadn’t seen Marek around all morning. She wondered where he was. A man in holy orders couldn’t fight, but he should have been helping in the infirmary.
“Anton was,” his brother said thoughtfully. “A holy terror, I mean. Drove the castle staff crazy. And Father. Even Vlad and me.”
So the abrupt change of subject was a lead-in to a litany of Anton’s virtues and pending sainthood, was it? She thought she already knew quite as much about her husband as she ever needed to.
“We were all,” the baron said. “Or almost all, glad when he discovered puberty. At least that channeled his villainy along predictable lines. But Wulf…” Ottokar sighed.
It was not to be a lecture about Anton. She waited.
“Until he was about seven, Wulf was a bull; a small bull, but deadly. When he charged, you couldn’t stop him. You just had to get out of his way, although sometimes you could distract him by waving a red flag, or a honey cake, in his case.” Otto turned to peer up innocently at the bulk of the Hogback, rising almost vertically to the clouds above them.
“And after he reached seven? A little young for puberty, surely?”
“I’m not at all sure he’s reached puberty even yet.”
“I am.”
“Well, he’s growing up fast,” the baron told the sky. “After he reached seven, he was more like a bull dog than a bull. Once he got his teeth into something, there was never any way to get them out again.” Otto sighed and then smiled at her. “No way at all.”
So what was he hinting? Was this a warning or encouragement? th=t='0em'›
“We must all be very grateful to him for what he did today,” she said. “If he did it, I mean.”
“If he did it,” the baron agreed.
“And he cured Anton’s injuries on Tuesday.”
This time it was the baron who remained silent.
Was he hinting that Anton ought to step aside and let Wulf marry Madlenka, or was she just reading too much into an offer of friendship and perhaps support? Something, almost certainly this morning’s victory, had changed Otto’s attitude since last night, when he had plainly disapproved of Wulf’s intrusion into the Anton- Madlenka match.
“Gratitude becomes a man,” Madlenka said. “But it’s too late, isn’t it?” A handfasting was as binding as a marriage. “Would even gratitude help now?”
“I don’t know,” Otto said sadly. “I just don’t know.”
CHAPTER 8
Satisfied that there were no more casualties in need of transportation, Madlenka headed home along the wall walk, smiling to all the happy people she passed, listening to the laughter echoing up from the streets.
She was effectively alone! Since her handfasting three days ago, Anton had made sure that never happened-except for one precious moment last night, when she had exchanged a few words with Wulf. But otherwise she had always been escorted by her maids or Giedre or Noemi or Ivana or Mother or some combination. And now, just by chance, there was nobody watching over her. Except possibly Wulf? When she came to Fishermen’s Bartizan, the temptation was much too strong to resist. She turned aside and ran up the steps.
Because the curtain wall that enclosed both town and castle stood atop high cliffs, it could not be assaulted, and so had few watchtowers. Fishermen’s was about midway between the north gate and the keep, roughly at the northeast corner, and was so named because the drop below it was very nearly sheer. In theory you could lower a fishing line to the Ruzena River, although in practice the resident wind would never let it reach the water. When Petr and she had been young, they had tried dangling bait, in the hope of catching eagles. All they had accomplished was to get themselves thoroughly soiled with bird droppings and forbidden to go in there again-an edict they would conveniently forget in a month or so.
As always, the bartizan was deserted, just a small stone cage suspended from the lip of the wall. A drifting of snow hid the filth on the floor and the swallows had fled their nests in search of winter quarters. There was nowhere to sit, but she stood for a few minutes relishing her solitude. To the north she could see the mouth of the gorge. The Wends were building their gun emplacement there. The last ragtag survivors of the assault force were still slinking homeward, tails between legs.
If they did not quickly return under a flag of truce to collect their dead and wounded, there would not be any wounded. Already the Gallant scavengers were out on the road, stripping armor and weapons, slitting throats and purses. Undoubtedly some Wends must have ridden the ladders over the cliff, down to the riverbank. There was a small patch of forest there, an inaccessible corner between the base of the cliffs and the river. Ancient stories told of other assailants ending down there and long-ago bishops consecrating it as a Christian graveyard.
