Coming into Fireoak on a late summer day, as an active rebel organizer, was very different from leaving it as a fugitive who had only the ghost of an idea for rebellion. The two of them joined a stream of workers coming in from the fields: harvest markers, who went into the fields before harvest to make sure the boundary stones didn't roll an armspan one way or the other—herders prodding slow-moving cows toward home and milking time. Gird flared his nostrils, enjoying the scent of cow. He had never understood those who thought cows stank. Pigs stank; dogs stank; even people—but cows had a rich, joyful scent, as befitted animals who lived on fresh grass and herbs. Their droppings had never disgusted him. Someone—he could not right then remember who—had told him once that a man should keep only those animals whose smells were pleasant to him.
The Fireoak farmers and herdsmen knew perfectly well the two were outlanders, but they knew Diamod and had heard of Gird.
They sauntered down the lane, dusty and brown as the farmers with them, and no one spoke to them. Slow, traditional talk rolled by: harvest chances, taxes, a remedy for stiff ankles followed by a joke about the cause, comments on cows and weather and the uncommon number of rabbits that summer—a joke directed at Gird, which he well understood and knew better than to answer.
"Pop up and down everywhere, they do," someone said a second time, to see if he would rise to the bait. "Got so common, we might think they's people."
Then the village, with its familiar cottages, the wattle fences between smallgardens, the walls of bartons rising behind. It was at once strange and the same: so like his own village, and yet not his village—and his village was not his village. Gird sniffed: bread, cheese, the vegetables they had not yet planted for the camps, ale somewhere—his mouth watered. Children wandered about, too thin but not yet starving, noticing the strangers but warned away from saying anything by quick gestures from their elders.
He would have passed Mali's brother's cottage, if Diamod had not jabbed him in the ribs. It looked different by daylight, from the front. He remembered Rahi's harsh feverish breathing in the barton out back, the gray light of dawn when he'd eased out the gate into the field beyond. Now he saw a low fence enclosing a ragged smallgarden, the beaten path to the front door. And in the door, a thin girl, yellowhaired, who held one crooked arm as if it pained her. Her face whitened, and she ducked inside. Gird turned to see Diamod wink before he walked on.
Gird came to the door, stepped out of his boots, and said "Girnis?"
Mali's brother's wife, a face he barely remembered from that one night, said "You're Gird? Gods above, what do you mean—come in, don't stand there!" Gird picked up his boots and ducked beneath the low lintel. It was dark inside, and would have been cool if not for the fire on the hearth. By that flickering light, Gird could see Girnis standing flat against the wall between a loom and a wheel.
"Is—is Rahi—?"
"She's alive, and well, and stubborn as ever." Gird looked at the wife, whose lips were folded together. What had he walked into? He had not asked Rahi all that had happened here, but perhaps he should have.
"I thought—" the woman began, then closed her mouth, and twisted her hands, and finally said again "I thought you were leaving Girnis with us. To be ours."
"I did," said Gird, surprised. "I said so; I was grateful."
She looked at him hard, then her mouth relaxed a little. "You didn't come to take her?"
"Of course not! Why would you think—"
"Raheli left. When she didn't come back, we thought she was with you, or dead—we didn't hear of anyone being killed. And then we thought, if you wanted her, you might want Girnis, but she's—"
"She's not Rahi." She was the child of Mali's illness, the twin that lived, but never as vigorous as a singleton. "I wouldn't take her. Girnis, let me see you."
Girnis came to him, shyly but now unalarmed. Her arm had healed a little crooked—not so bad, when she held it out. But she stood with it up, as if it were still in its bindings, and it was thinner than the other.
"Does it still hurt you?" he asked. She nodded.
"Mother Fera—" she glanced toward the woman, "—says I should move it more, but the joint hurts, Da, when I try."
"Let me feel." Gird took her arm, conscious of its thinness, and the faint tremor—nervousness? pain?—that met his touch. He bent and straightened it slowly, stopping when he met resistance and heard her indrawn breath. He could feel nothing wrong but stiffness, but he was not a healer. "I'm sure your aunt has tried heat," he said, "and herb poultices. I think myself it would be good to move it more. Sometimes things hurt when they're healing. A few times a day, anyway—I think you could do that." She nodded, solemnly. She was quiet; she had always been quiet, the quietest of his children, but not slow. Just quiet, in a house full of noisy ones.
The woman had moved nearer; she looked less alarmed. "We've had an offer for her," she said. "She has a mixed parrion, she says?"
Gird nodded. "Yes. She has Mali's parrion of herbcraft, and Issa's—my brother's wife's—parrion of embroidery. Issa was a weaver, as well, but died before Girnis learned enough."
"I am a weaver," the woman said. "I can teach her, if her arm strengthens. But—will you let us arrange the marriage?"
"Of course. I told you—if you in your kindness will have her, she is your daughter, and yours is the right to speak for or against."
He heard boots in the barton, and stiffened, but the woman called through the house: "Gird's here. It's all right."
After that awkwardness, he was surprised to find that Mali's brother was enthusiastic about the possibility of training within the village.
"Of course, the bartons," he said. "You're right, Gird, and I don't know why we hadn't thought of it before. Had no one to teach us, I suppose. I know—let me think—I know two hands of men who would join here, at once. What about weapons?"
"Drill first, then weapons," said Gird. He and Barin were sitting on the cool stones of the barton, drinking ale to celebrate. He could feel a delicate haze leaching the tiredness from his bones.
"What about women?" asked Barin.
"Mmm?"
"You've got Rahi now. I'm Mali's brother, after all; I remember what she was like and how relieved the family was when you offered for her. Will you take women like that in?"
Gird shrugged. "I would myself, but I can't force another group to do it. What about you?"
"I don't like the thought of seeing my wife—but after all, she could be cut down for no reason, as Rahi was. Most of them won't want to anyway, but for a few—why not?"
The following night, five other men visited Barin's, presumably to finish an open barrel of ale before the beginning of harvest, when it was bad luck to have one. They talked village gossip until the stars were thick and white, then Gird spoke his piece. Less open than Barin, they still agreed it was a good idea. The longer they talked it over, the more they liked it—except that only two of them thought women should be allowed to join.
"They talk too much," said one of the men. "Let them find out, and it'd be all over the village by dawn."
Barin laughed. "And who was it let out the secret of Kinvit's lover, last winter?"
The others burst into laughs; the man who had complained of women talking too much said "But it wasn't my fault!" Gird chuckled. It was always the same; the loosest mouths complained that others gossiped. Their tales were always true, and if the wrong story got out, it was never their fault. Finally the man came around, laughing at himself. "All right," he said. "I got drunk; I opened my mouth, and out fell Kinvit and Lia, doing what Kinvit and Lia had been doing since harvest. No nosy old granny could have done worse." But he was still opposed to having women training in the village. Gird did not push him, letting Barin do most of the talking. They would all know, by now, about Raheli; they would all assume that Gird had a special reason for allowing women to fight. And that was perfectly true.
In the end, the men voted to organize a barton meeting, and gradually recruit new members. Gird promised to send someone—"It may not be me," he pointed out—to train them. "Consider him a sergeant," he said at first, but even in starlight he could see the dislike they had for that name, associated as it was with the lords' tyranny. "What would you call him, then?"
They talked back and forth, suggesting and arguing, until one of them said "We're like a bunch of cattle milling in a pen, waiting for the herdsmarshal to set us on our way."
"Marshal!" said Barin, smacking his leg with his fist. "That's good—and it's not a word we would fear to have overheard. Marshal. And the rest of us are—"
"Yeomen," said Gird. "That covers all of us, farmers and craftsmen alike. Any but lords. And no one will ever know, from talk of it, what it is."
"I do like that," Barin said. "The yeomen and the marshal meet in the barton tonight. As long as we need only those two ranks—"
"But we've got another!" It had come to Gird in another of those flashes of insight. "Marshal—that's one of us traveling, coming to train you. But even in the village, you'll need a leader—that's the yeoman-marshal. And then yeoman for everyone else."
"And someday—" Barin said. He didn't have to finish. They all drained the last of their ale, and stamped their feet in agreement. Gird could see it—the flow of men out to the Stone Circle, to learn. The flow back in, to train those in the bartons . . . and back out, to the fight they all knew must come, and then back, to take up their peaceful lives. As natural as breathing, or the cycle of seasons. He knew from experience that ale could make things seem simpler than they were in morning's light, but this was going to work.
Work began in earnest when he returned to the camp and conferred with the others who had gone out. All the villages had shown an interest—not surprising, since they had talked to men already known to be Stone Circle sympathizers. Two of the others had noticed that the villagers shied from the usual military rank terms of sergeant and captain, but they had not come up with alternatives. They nodded when Gird told them about marshal, yeoman-marshal, and yeoman.
"That'll do," said Ivis. "They won't mind that—it's nothing like the guards. Best of all, we can talk about it in front of anyone—even a guard sergeant—and he won't know what it is." Gird nodded.
"They thought of that, too."
"Will we all be marshals?" asked Cob. "I mean, when we're drilling here, that's going be too confusing."
"None of us are marshals yet," Gird said. "And some of us may be better than others at teaching. Besides, we still don't know enough." In his mind, the wheel of the year turned, grinding the moments away. How long before the first snowfall? Before full winter? Four bartons to train, this winter—maybe more. "After harvest," he said, "we need to bring one man from each village here, to drill with us, and see how the larger units work. When the taxes are paid, no one takes much notice if someone travels to visit relatives. In the meantime, our own harvest: I hear the fieldfees are up again, and we cannot starve our allies."
For the next few hands of days, they drilled only briefly, spending most of their time gathering food and preparing it for storage. No casual nutting and berrying, this time, but a planned harvest of the woods and fields, that must be done before the lords came to hunt, in the days after the fieldfees were paid. Gird had planned food storage sites both in and away from the camps, so that if one were found and destroyed, others would be safe. They could not hunt, and risk foresters preparing for the lords' visits seeing their smoke or smelling the blood, but they could gather fruit, tubers, berries, and stow them away. Into storage pits lined with rock went redroots and onions: their own harvest had been abundant. Other roots and tubers, bulbs and nuts, were stored with them, along with apples and plums and dried berries, bundles of herbs, strips of necessary barks. Their own baskets stored grain as well, harvested from the edges of common pastures, along streambanks, and in Triga's bog. Gird moved from place to place, checking the growing stores, and trying to foresee what hazards they must survive.
After harvest, the lords would come to hunt the large wood; Gird moved everyone to the tangle of hills where Felis's group had lived, and the only game worth hunting was wild boar. If they stayed out of the pickoak scrub, living uncomfortably in the lower brush, they should avoid the occasional hunting party with a taste for pig. The men grumbled, but only slightly. Gird found work for them even in the chest-high thickets of brush.
"We might need to come this way and hide, and it would be good to have paths they can't see from the opposite hill." So his troop crawled and twisted through the thick growth, hacking out paths wider than the rabbit-trails they found. Rahi sniffed the hacked ends of the scrub, and said she thought some of these were medicinal, stunted by soil or dryness. She began making a collection of twigs, bark, roots, and brewed a variety of pungent bitter concoctions which she insisted he taste. They all made his tongue rough up in furrows; they tasted as if they ought to do something good. One made him sweat profusely.
At last Ivis's forester friends sent word that their duke and his friends had returned to the city; the forest was theirs for the winter. By this time the autumn rains were beginning, turning their trails to cold gray mud. Gird wished he had a stone cottage, with a great roaring hearth; his knees ached constantly. Instead, he had the three main campsites he'd found for winter, two backed into the south face of a hill, and one deep in a grove of cedars and pines. His favorite had a clean-running creek, small but adequate to their needs, and the surrounding trees had all dropped their leaves, letting in the low winter sunlight. The other south-facing camp had a larger stream, but he was somewhat worried about floods, come spring. Even in the slower autumn rains, they had to cross the stream on fallen logs. The men called that one Big Creek, and the other Sunbright; the most secluded campsite they called Cedars.
No one grumbled when he insisted they go right on working, rather than huddle in the first shelter they could contrive. He did not know if they were learning to think ahead, or if they simply accepted his orders. But wet and cold as it was now, winter could only be worse. The shelters he had planned went up quickly: wattle frames for side and roof, thatched with whatever they could find, mostly wild grass. Gird realized, as they wrestled with the grass between rains, that he should have had them out scything it earlier. Next year, he thought. And by then he would need another scythe or two. And some sickles. They smeared mud on the insides of the walls. Triga suggested another plan: poles braced against a tree, lashed together, and then wattle woven to make a circular peaked shelter. After building a couple like this, he admitted that it took more work, and gave less interior room, but the two they had made a welcome change, like extra rooms, during that winter.
The newly designated yeomen marshals arrived for their training while this was still going on; Gird had to stop for a couple of days to give them intensive training. But they were almost as impressed with the troop's camp organization as with the drill. This, in turn, helped convince the last doubters among his soldiers that such organization was important. If it could impress strangers, then it was not just a matter of comfort.
The yeomen marshals stayed a hand of days; on the last day, Gird discussed with them the way they'd organize and train during the winter.
"By spring," he said, "I'd like to have your yeomen ready to drill with another barton. Someday we'll have to have bartons able to come together quickly."
"What about recruiting new bartons?" asked the yeoman-marshal from Hardshallows. "I know you wouldn't want to risk it in your old village—the steward, I hear, is still furious about you, and the men who left after you—but we're less than a day's walk from Hawkridge to the west, and not much more from Millburh, down our own stream."
Gird had hoped no one would suggest that yet; he had wanted to be sure the barton idea would work before starting more. But he could not actually stop them—these were not his men yet—all he could do was make them sneaky, if they'd already decided. In the pause, while he tried to think how to answer, Barin from Fireoak spoke up.
"I think we should wait until we have at least two—maybe three—hands of yeomen, all drilling well. How else could we show them what we mean? And if—I don't mean to be illwishing, but if this doesn't work—if we find that our neighbors do tell the lords' men, then better only a few bartons die, than many."
Gird nodded, glad he hadn't had to say it himself. "Barin's right, I think. If your barton grows and prospers, and you're sure it's safe, then I will not tell you not to tell the next village. But we're like a man starting a journey with a heavy load: it's better to take a few slow steps, and be sure it's balanced and will hold, than to set off at a run and have the whole thing fall apart." His hands mimed the falling load, and they all laughed. "One village at a time. I think myself it would be better if only one in each barton knew the name of the yeoman marshal in other bartons."
"But if he dies?"
"Each of you tell one of your yeomen—not someone you usually work in the field with—how to contact us, here. And let us know the name of that person. Later, everyone will know everyone, but for now, as Barin said, if someone tells, it's better that only a few die."
When the yeoman marshals had left, Gird and his troop used the hand of days between the last of the autumn rains and the first of the snows to transport and stow the food and supplies the villages had given them, cut and haul wood for their fires, and add such refinements to their shelters as time and ingenuity allowed. When that first bank of blue cloud rolled across, cutting off the slanting autumn sun, and dropping the temperature, Gird felt that they were as well prepared for winter as possible.
This did not mean he had thought of everything. His own well, in the foreyard of his cottage, froze only in the bitterest winters, and only after midwinter. The clear-running creek that was one of the reasons for choosing Sunbright froze solid before Midwinter, and they must either melt snow and ice for water, or carry it (a cold, heavy load that sometimes froze before they got it home) from a spring some distance away. He had thought to dig the jacks trenches ahead, before the ground froze, but had not realized that the "loose" dirt from them would freeze, and have to be chopped into chunks to fill the trench.
Problems had the advantage of helping Gird keep everyone busy. In the villages, winter boredom led to quarrels and occasional fights. Here, such dissension could be fatal. So his four tally groups had assigned chores, and whenever the weather allowed, Gird chivvied everyone out for a march or drill practice. He divided the groups slightly differently. One brought food from storage, and another cooked it, while the camp chores group had to maintain the fire, the jacks, and the supply of water. The tool groups were set to repairing tools broken or chipped, and to making useful items for the camps. One of the things the villages had sent (at Gird's request) was yarn; Rahi taught several of the men to knit, using smooth-polished twigs as needles. Knitting was an unusual parrion; she had had it from Mali's brother's wife, in the time she lived there, and liked it much better than weaving.
Midwinter was a different kind of problem. Gird had always known when Midwinter was coming because the village headman said so. Here, he realized, everyone thought of him as headman, and he should know when to celebrate Midwinter. He looked up, at a heavy gray sky. The days were still getting shorter, so it wasn't Midwinter yet. He felt that it would come in a hand or two of days, but he did not know when it would be, or how to find out. But missing the Midwinter celebration was unthinkable.
He asked the others. Most thought it would be "soon" but no one had an exact date. Would it matter? At that thought, a colder chill ran down his neck. Of course it mattered; Midwinter and Midsummer were the ends of the axle on which the year turned. He had to know. He had to find out. Now that the men knew he did not know, they were looking at him nervously.
"How did you find out last year?" he finally thought of asking Ivis.
Ivis flushed. "Last year—well—we all went into one village or another, near Midwinter, and celebrated there." And before Gird could decide to do the same, he said, "I don't think we can, this year—we're too many."
"True, but we can ask." Ivis' village was too far away, across the wood, but one of them could make it to Fireoak and back. To Gird's surprise, Fori asked to go.
"I can stay with Barin, and ask about Girnis. And the barton."
Gird nodded. "Good—but be sure you're back before Midwinter."
Fori set off the next morning with a sack of food and everyone's prayers. Gird watched all the faces staring after him, and said, "Since you're all so glad to be outside, get your sticks." A general groan, but not so dismal as he'd expected.
Stick drill had progressed a little farther. Felis, once his arm healed, was able to demonstrate what he had learned of swordsmanship. Gird suspected it wasn't much, but he himself had never gotten that far. One thing he did know was the length of swords Kelaive's guards had used. He asked the others; the duke, Ivis said, carried a longer sword, but no longer than from waist to ground. He had seen him standing with its tip resting on the ground. So, Gird thought, a sword could have a blade that long, or shorter. He asked his one-armed smith, who mentioned curved blades and broad-bladed swords, but agreed on length. That meant that a longer stick could fend off a sword—not fence with it, to lose chips as the sword chopped—but if the stick could hold the swordsman back, the sword could not harm the person with the stick.
It seemed reasonable, but they had to test it. Slowly, Gird insisted. Carefully. No more broken bones, if possible. Felis took those of his original group who had learned the most about swords, and these faced Gird, Cob, and a few others Gird thought he could trust to stay calm.
The sticks were nowhere near spear length, but about the length a man would choose as a walking staff, or for guiding cattle. So far they were not all the same length, although a broad hand would cover the difference. Gird had watched them in use over the past season, noticing carefully what went wrong most often, when the sticks clashed in ranks, which grips did not hold. Now, with Felis well again, they would see. He felt a little silly, standing there with a real stick facing an imaginary sword, but what else could they do?
Felis waggled his wooden "sword" and swiped at Gird. Gird lowered his stick, and pointed it at Felis, who sliced at it. Before the "sword" struck, Gird jabbed the stick at Felis's face. Felis jerked back, and his sword stroke went wild.
"Wait," said Felis. "Try that again, slower." It would not be slow in battle, but they were only learning. Gird nodded, let Felis begin his sideways swipe with the sword, and then jabbed again. Again Felis jerked his head back, and this time, while he was still off balance, Gird jabbed again, and got him in the chest, gently. Felis grunted, then straightened. "I can't—I think I'm just not good enough—but if you keep poking that at my eyes—I have to back up."
"Let Cob and Arvan try it," said Gird, stepping back, Arvan advanced with his "sword" and very little enthusiasm, to meet Cob. Here Cob was the shorter by a head, yet with the length of his stick he could force Arvan off balance.
"It's too easy," said Felis, scratching his thick red beard. "These sticks we're using for swords don't have the weight of a real weapon. If someone got a blow in, it would jar your stick aside—"
"But could they?" Arvan was frowning. "Cob, just hold it still—let me try." He swung hard at the stick, and managed to bat it aside, but it swung back on rebound, and Cob needed little force to control it.
"But suppose there were more than one swordsman," Felis said. "If you have more than one coming in, you can't just poke one. The other one will poke you."
"That's what the formation is for," Gird said. "If it works." This time he and Cob lined up facing Felis and Arvan. When they lowered their sticks, and jabbed, the two "swordsmen" found themselves giving ground, flailing uselessly with their shorter weapons.
"Just remember," Felis said, "that even an accidental blow with a sword is going to take chips off that stick. It won't last forever. Can you do real damage with it?"
"I don't know." Gird tapped him in the chest again. "If I did that much harder, you might fall down; I might even break your breastbone, or a rib."
"You'll have to swing it to knock someone flat, most times." Triga, watching, entered the discussion. "And if you swing it, that gives time for a fast swordsman to slip in and kill you."
"And if you swing it," Felis pointed out, "it can foul on someone else's stick who's fighting another opponent."
"Mmmph. I thought we could try this—hold still, now, I won't really hit you hard." Gird jabbed at Felis's face, then tapped his chest, and then slid his hands down to swing the stick like a flail. But Arvan chose that moment to dart in and put his "sword" to Gird's neck.
"Like that," Felis said, grinning at Arvan and Gird both. Gird glowered at Cob.
"And where were you, partner?"
Cob looked rueful. "Standing watching you, when I should have been watching Arvan. We have more to learn, yeomen."
"We could whittle a point on these sticks, and fire-harden it," said Triga.
"It's still not going to go through any kind of armor. Even if it did, it would catch there, and I'd be standing there with a dead soldier on the end of my weapon, looking foolish." Gird scratched his beard vigorously, as if that could clear his head. "I thought if we hit them in the chest hard enough—or in the belly—that would knock them down, maybe even out."
"Hit them in the face—that makes 'em back up, and they'll worry about losing an eye—"
"True, but—" Gird thought about that. "We need a way to kill them, or we'd be standing all day poking poles at them. I did think of some farm tools—the shovel, the mattock, the scythe—but they all have to be swung. And you're saying, aren't you, that anything we swing will be clumsier than a sword?"
Felis half-closed his eyes, and began swiping the air. Gird stared, then realized he was imagining himself swinging various farm implements. Gird tried to guess which, from Felis's movements, but except for the sickle (a short swing, with a snap to the wrist) he could not be sure which was which. Felis opened his eyes, made a few passes with his "sword," and grinned. "I think there's a chance with a mattock—and even a scythe, though the grips would have to be moved around. But it wouldn't be easy."
Gird heaved a dramatic sigh. "None of this is easy. If it was easy, someone would've done it long ago."
Rahi spoke, for the first time in a drill session. "What if two or three worked together? One with the stick, to force the swordsman's attention, and one or two with weapons more likely to kill, but slower."
"That's fine, if we outnumber the enemy," said Felis. "But in battle—"
"Wait," said Gird. "That might work—and we had better outnumber them, Felis, facing steel with wood. Let's try it."
Felis shrugged, but stepped forward again. This time Rahi stood beside Gird with one of the sickles. She was on his left, but then looked at her sickle and quickly changed sides as Gird lunged at Felis. Felis backed, his attention necessarily on the stick in his face. When Rahi came forward, he tried to swing at her, but the pole caught him in the angle of neck and shoulder. Arvan swung at Rahi, but missed as Cob's pole got him in the chest, and then poked again at his face. Rahi could easily dodge Felis's wild strokes, and she swung, stopping just as the sickle tip hooked into his side. Then, slow for the exercise, but smoothly, she swung back, pivoting, to come forward again and take Arvan in the belly. They all stopped and stood up.
"It works in slow motion," said Felis doubtfully. "And I don't know how we'll practice it fast, not without killing each other."
"We still need someone with a stick for every swordsman." Gird scratched again, and stared at the stick. "And some behind with the other weapons, the killing weapons. Not that the sticks can't kill. But there's something I'm not seeing. Anyone else?"
"Well—you ever see that old-style stickfighting, on fair days?" asked Cob.
"No—the only fair-day I ever went to had one wrestler not as good as you, and a man who could throw knives."
"They started it like a dance," Cob said. "One man tapping a drum, and them tapping the sticks together. It was pretty, like watching horses in a field, tappity-tap. Then they started going faster, and faster, and about then I realized it was a kind of fighting. I'd have learned more, only I was there to make a few crabs wrestling, and my friends had bet on me. I asked one of them later, and he said it was old, something our great-great-grand-das would have known about."
"Do you remember any of it?"
"Only the first bits, the slow part. But it'd be good practice, anyway. Get us used to the feel of something hitting the sticks."
It took longer than Gird would have expected before he could match Cob's pattern; his knuckles felt as if he'd hit them with hammers. And that was with both of them being careful. Triga, who'd been to the same fair, and thought he remembered the stickfighting very well, tried to start fast and ended up sucking his split knuckles ruefully. At least he wasn't angry—but there had been no frogs to eat for days. Arvan picked up the movements quickly, as did Felis, but Padug, who had been Felis's other star pupil at swordsmanship, was slower than Gird. By the time Fori came back, to announce that Midwinter Feast should be celebrated in eight days, most of them were still fumbling their way through this new drill.
Midwinter itself was the coldest and darkest Gird had ever known. No one was sick—Alyanya's grace—but that meant no excuse for any fire whatever. And the rituals of Midwinter had always involved the whole family: each member had his or her assigned role. He had asked the men, and located an eldest son, youngest son, the oldest and youngest overall. Rahi had to take all the women's roles; Gird hoped the gods would understand and accept their intent, and not demand the precision only a whole family could provide.
At dusk on the first night, all their fires were quenched, and the hearths brushed clean. Water, fire, ritual earth (though they had no garden or ploughland), each handled with due reverence—the icy air breathed with respect and affection both. Rahi, not surprisingly, remembered all the women's verses: she had been, once, the youngest daughter, then the eldest, and with Mali's death and her marriage, Alyanya's representative in Gird's home. Together, finally, hands cupped around symbolic light, they sang the Darksong. That was in the middle of the night, when Torre's Necklace stood high overhead. From then until dawn, they huddled together, telling old tales of their childhoods, their fathers' tales as far back as any could remember. Their breath steamed silver in the starlight, each speaker like a tiny chimney. Then—best of omens—a clear dawn to Midwinter Day, and Rahi set the circle pattern of twigs for the new fire. In a great circle, hand to hand, they watched her light it, on the lucky third spark.
They had their feast, as well, for Gird had hidden a comb of honey, and dripped it liberally over hearthcakes and grain mush. Besides that, they had deer, hunted safely long after the lords had gone back to their city. They feasted in comfort, around the roaring fires, and spent the second long night singing more songs than Gird had ever heard. All it lacked was ale; he missed the warmth in his throat and belly, though not the aching head when he woke.
The rest of that winter was hard, but not as hard as he'd feared. When the snowmelt began, with the myriad tinkling music of dripping icicles, they were all still healthy. No one had lost fingers or toes to the cold; no one had had lung fever.
Twice he'd been able to send men to the four original bartons, to check on their training. All had a full three hands or more in training; Hardshallows had five. And they were still recruiting, though cautiously. Fireoak had discovered a man who thought Kelaive would pay him for rebel names. He had changed his mind, Barin reported, when they explained it to him personally. Fori's report of that explanation was fuller than Barin's; the barton had expressed their opinion of him with force—the man would limp for awhile. Gird winced, but accepted it. Better one man beaten than many killed—or even one. He felt slightly better when he found, still later, that the one who had hit the man in the head with a pot was his wife, now an accepted barton member.
Hardshallows reported that it had indeed started a daughter barton, down in Millburh. Growing slowly, but Millburh had a resident guard post, almost a fort. They had to be careful. As the weather lifted, the barton in Ashy, Felis's old village, sent word that it, too, had contacted another village: Three Springs, which had passed the word to two other vills in the same hearthing. As soon as the spring plowing was over, those bartons would be sending elected yeomen marshals to train with the main force.
It was all moving faster than Gird had expected. He still could not quite believe that he'd been away from his own home almost a year—and was alive, leading a growing number of disaffected peasants in what was clearly going to be an army. And yet they'd had no clashes with the lords, no trouble with any of the guard forces. It would be easy to be careless, moving through the green and fragrant woods of spring, with flowers starring the pastures beyond, with the birds carolling overhead.
We don't have an army yet, he reminded himself firmly.