S. Stirling - The Given Sacrifice

Oak and the Baron of Tucannon waited for them. The Mackenzie nodded casually, and the nobleman gave a Protectorate military salute, fist to chest in a clash of steel gauntlet on articulated breastplate.

“Take a look at their faces, your Majesties,” he said grimly.

The pleasure of doing a difficult job well seemed to have fled, and neither was a man to be easily upset by the miserable aftermath of battle.

“Aye, Ard Rí ,” Oak said. “This is just a sample, mind, but it’s the same with most in the red armor. Save for some officers. It wasn’t until we went over the field looking for the wounded that we noticed the pattern.”

Rudi did too. At first glance along the row of battered, bloodied bodies he thought some were women. Which was vanishingly unlikely, since the CUT regarded females as a lesser creation and had strict rules restricting them to domestic tasks. Far more so than even Associates, and unlike them with no provision for exceptions for those too stubbornly bloody-minded to accept or work around customs they found grated on them. Then he realized. .

“Young, First Armsman Oak, my lord Maugis,” he said. “Very young indeed-too young to raise a beard, every one.”

“Yah,” Ingolf said. “They take them young from their parents, six or so, but I’ve never heard of them putting the cadets in the line before they’re full grown. That’s eating the seed corn with a vengeance, wasting all that training.”

“Tuili,” Rudi said flatly. “Bastards. They’re desperate, but even so.”

There were battlefield chores youngsters did; junior squires among Associates, eòghann in the Clan, military apprentices among Bearkillers. Some of those tasks involved danger, because there was no absolute safety in an environment full of flying metal and human beings in the mildly insane state of savage focus required for naked extreme violence at arm’s length. Tasks like pulling back the wounded, bringing up arrows or a fresh lance, carrying messages. Riding in the ranks to meet a charge of knights was not among the things that youths just learning their trade were fit for.

“There wasn’t anything we could do,” Maugis de Grimond said. “It’s unchivalrous, but there wasn’t anything we could do but cut them down.”

He seemed to be trying to convince himself, which spoke well for him. Rudi knew plenty, and not necessarily wicked men, who’d simply shrug and move on.

“Not if they were serious, no, there wasn’t anything you could do but strike,” Rudi said. “My lord, I slew my first man in battle when I was barely ten. It would have been fair enough if he’d killed me instead. Since I’d a blade and I intended to see his blood.”

That had been when a Protectorate deep-penetration squad led by one Tiphaine Rutherton kidnapped him and rescued Mathilda, who the Clan had in turn captured in an earlier raid, all part of the build up to the War of the Eye. Or the Protector’s War, as they called it in the north-realm. That was the feat that had won the future Grand Constable knighthood and the barony of Ath, though it wouldn’t be very tactful to mention the details right now.

The knight nodded, his eyes still haunted. “We. . we just thought it was one or two exceptions, some squire getting a rush of spirits, a boy pushing into a man’s work, that happens. They were out to kill, and for squires that junior they were very well trained. And they wouldn’t give up. Then just now we rode back over the battlefield and saw how many. .”

Mathilda put a hand on his shoulder. “Duty is hard, my lord,” she said. “And facing mere danger is not the hardest part of war, sometimes.”

The baron nodded, his face relaxing a little.

Rudi gestured agreement. “After years each in the House of the Prophet, I’m not surprised they wouldn’t give up. And a lad of fourteen can kill you dead as dead, if he’s determined enough and you don’t fight back with all your force. Weight of arm isn’t the only thing that matters.”

He turned back to Ingolf. “There was something else?”

“Yah, you betcha,” he said, the sing-song guttural of his native speech a bit stronger than usual in his voice. “The Dúnedain overran one of these farm things.”

“Temple-farms, I think they call them.”

“Yah.” Ingolf glanced at Maugis; they were good friends, if not particularly close ones. “You ought to come too, Maugis, if you can. I think you might feel better about this”-he indicated the enemy dead-“if you did.”

“What is it?” Mathilda asked.

“Better just to show you, and I wish I didn’t have to know it myself, Matti,” he said.

They cantered in his wake, a squad of Ingolf’s Richlanders added to the party leading the way. The path turned off the old highway and onto a narrower road, dirt but well maintained and covered in rolled gravel. Ingolf was closemouthed.

“I’d have planted trees on the roadsides,” Mathilda said, to fill the silence-something unusual for her.

“The Cutters don’t do anything just for nice,” Rudi said.

The headquarters of the temple-farm was a set of plain log buildings surrounded by an earth berm twelve feet tall, the wooden plank gate sagging open. Within were barns and grain-stores and the usual workshops essential to cropping and grazing, though there was far less machinery than in most places; the corrals outside were empty, which was logical-nobody left livestock to be swept up by an enemy. Storehouses trailed sacks of grain and potatoes, evidence of a hasty attempt to move the just-completed harvest as well, and a rather crude wagon lay with a broken wooden axle and crates and boxes spilling out of it. The traces lay before it, sliced and loose where someone had cut the team out of its rig rather than bothering to unharness.

Rudi’s lips tightened in a snarl. A pile of scrap wood and straw had been piled against one long low-set building that looked like a cross between a bunkhouse and a fort and set alight, with parts of it still smoldering and reeking. From the look of the shattered door someone inside had broken open the barred portal and then pushed through the flames.

“The Cutters killed the male slaves and pushed the rest inside that building, it’s only got one door, and then lit the fire,” Ingolf said, confirming his guess. “They busted out-which took some presence of mind.”

“Not something the Cutters would expect of women,” Mathilda said, a little white around the lips.

“Yah, well, stupid evil shits, fortunately. The Dúnedain came along about then, and signaled for us. Though damned if I know what they expected us to do that they couldn’t, just at a loss, I guess.”

There were other signs of haste as well. An X of stout timbers held the body of a man; his throat had been cut recently enough that the blood pooled at his feet wasn’t completely dry, but from the look of his body he’d been on the cross for some time. Several other bodies lay about, all men with lash-marks, sprawled naked where they’d been shot or cut down. They had arrow-stubs in their bodies, or just the wounds, and slash-marks from shetes.

So much is bad, but I’ve seen as bad or worse, in war, Rudi thought.

That wasn’t what made his escort swear until their officers’ barked commands for silence, or make signs against ill luck, or cross themselves if they were Catholics. Nor even the fact that all the dead men-slaves had been gelded, and had their right eyes burned out.

One whole man in a rag loincloth crouched beside a cage of poles lashed together with twists of iron-hard rawhide, a short but muscular fellow with bewildered eyes roaming about and his face slack. Two Dúnedain with spear and shield were in front of him, protecting him from a crowd of women. Most of them were naked too, and many were pregnant, had burns on their legs and hands, or both. A round dozen were trying to get towards the man, some of them with billets of firewood or rocks in hand. Others wandered about, or sat and wept, or stared vacantly, several score in all. One dangled from an improvised noose that ran out of a window, and he didn’t think that the Cutters had done it. A team of medics, Rangers and from Ingolf’s volunteers, was tending to the burns and other injuries of some of the women.