comes out of the dust, and you hit or dodge and you don’t see him again. Usually I’m behind my lady d’Ath, of course, and the senior squires, well behind.”
They were out of the mountains again, well into the settled lands around Goldendale. Huon took off his helmet, relishing the breezethrough his sweat-damp hair, a feeling of lightness and release. A swale at the base of a low rise had been closed off by earth banks, and a spring kept it filled with water that lay mirror-still, reflecting the blue sky and puffy white clouds above. Willows surrounded it, and reeds grew in the edges; to the east was a long narrow strip of apple orchard along the irrigation furrow that kept it alive, with some of the fruit still glowing red among the faded green of the leaves.
Apart from that the land around the pool was a long sloping hayfield, the alfalfa recently cut and packed in big round mows all centered around a column made from the trunk of a tall lodgepole pine. Each haystack had a thatched roof on top of its circular height, and they looked as if they were huts taken in two giant hands and stretched like taffy. The smell was as sweet as candy, and it drifted over him like a benison, a reminder of a world where feeding your cattle and horses and sheep through the winter was about the most important thing there was.
Oh, devils and damnation, I’m not cut out to be a cleric!
“Let’s stop here for lunch,” Huon said. “We’ve got plenty of time. And nobody can say we haven’t been doing a day’s work today, man’s work!”
“Yeah,” Lioncel said, and smiled.
After all, we’re noblemen of the Portland Protective Association,
Huon thought.
War
is
our work. We’re the guardians of the land.
Sir Ogier had thoughtfully given each of them a remount from among the captured horses. They both rode light in the saddle, and switching off mounts every couple of miles, they could cover the distance down to the river in a few hours without overstraining the horses. Neither of them considered that sort of ride anything of a hardship.
“It’s a nice spot,” the heir of Forest Grove said.
Huon forced down a slightly queasy recollection of the sound when the arrow struck. The one he’d shot had been a bad man, not just an enemy; an assassin, an agent of the CUT who’d sold his soul to demons. On the other hand, you couldn’t help thinking how it must
feel
. Or that once the bad man had been a perfectly ordinary little kid. He hadn’t thought of that before.
You take the good with the bad. I don’t think I’m ever going to
like
killing men orhurting them. Fighting’s exciting, but I don’t like that part. I can do it when it’s necessary, I guess.
They watered the horses, rubbed them down and poured small mounds of cracked barley for them to lip up off the turf before they hobbled them and left them to graze beneath the willows. He enjoyed the homey, familiar task, the earthy, grassy smell of the horses and the way Dancer turned his neck and lipped at his rider’s hair.
The hobbles weren’t really necessary with their own mounts, he’d bought Dancer from a first-rate training farm when he was taken into the royal household and worked him since then, and Lioncel’s Hardhoof was just as good. The remounts were eastern and of quarterhorse blood, and most of all they didn’t know them and their
horses
didn’t know them. It was better to have them all hobbled while they sorted out who was boss-horse and got used to each other.
Then they opened their bags and sat under a willow to eat, leaning against their saddles and putting one of the small bucklers they wore on their sword-scabbards down to serve as a plate. Huon had managed to pick up a three-pound ration loaf of maslin bread, a mixture of whole-meal barley and wheat flour that was dense and coarse but fresh that morning, and a length of strong-tasting salty dried pork sausage full of garlic and sage. Lioncel contributed a block of cheese wrapped in dock
They were out of the mountains again, well into the settled lands around Goldendale. Huon took off his helmet, relishing the breezethrough his sweat-damp hair, a feeling of lightness and release. A swale at the base of a low rise had been closed off by earth banks, and a spring kept it filled with water that lay mirror-still, reflecting the blue sky and puffy white clouds above. Willows surrounded it, and reeds grew in the edges; to the east was a long narrow strip of apple orchard along the irrigation furrow that kept it alive, with some of the fruit still glowing red among the faded green of the leaves.
Apart from that the land around the pool was a long sloping hayfield, the alfalfa recently cut and packed in big round mows all centered around a column made from the trunk of a tall lodgepole pine. Each haystack had a thatched roof on top of its circular height, and they looked as if they were huts taken in two giant hands and stretched like taffy. The smell was as sweet as candy, and it drifted over him like a benison, a reminder of a world where feeding your cattle and horses and sheep through the winter was about the most important thing there was.
Oh, devils and damnation, I’m not cut out to be a cleric!
“Let’s stop here for lunch,” Huon said. “We’ve got plenty of time. And nobody can say we haven’t been doing a day’s work today, man’s work!”
“Yeah,” Lioncel said, and smiled.
After all, we’re noblemen of the Portland Protective Association,
Huon thought.
War
is
our work. We’re the guardians of the land.
Sir Ogier had thoughtfully given each of them a remount from among the captured horses. They both rode light in the saddle, and switching off mounts every couple of miles, they could cover the distance down to the river in a few hours without overstraining the horses. Neither of them considered that sort of ride anything of a hardship.
“It’s a nice spot,” the heir of Forest Grove said.
Huon forced down a slightly queasy recollection of the sound when the arrow struck. The one he’d shot had been a bad man, not just an enemy; an assassin, an agent of the CUT who’d sold his soul to demons. On the other hand, you couldn’t help thinking how it must
feel
. Or that once the bad man had been a perfectly ordinary little kid. He hadn’t thought of that before.
You take the good with the bad. I don’t think I’m ever going to
like
killing men orhurting them. Fighting’s exciting, but I don’t like that part. I can do it when it’s necessary, I guess.
They watered the horses, rubbed them down and poured small mounds of cracked barley for them to lip up off the turf before they hobbled them and left them to graze beneath the willows. He enjoyed the homey, familiar task, the earthy, grassy smell of the horses and the way Dancer turned his neck and lipped at his rider’s hair.
The hobbles weren’t really necessary with their own mounts, he’d bought Dancer from a first-rate training farm when he was taken into the royal household and worked him since then, and Lioncel’s Hardhoof was just as good. The remounts were eastern and of quarterhorse blood, and most of all they didn’t know them and their
horses
didn’t know them. It was better to have them all hobbled while they sorted out who was boss-horse and got used to each other.
Then they opened their bags and sat under a willow to eat, leaning against their saddles and putting one of the small bucklers they wore on their sword-scabbards down to serve as a plate. Huon had managed to pick up a three-pound ration loaf of maslin bread, a mixture of whole-meal barley and wheat flour that was dense and coarse but fresh that morning, and a length of strong-tasting salty dried pork sausage full of garlic and sage. Lioncel contributed a block of cheese wrapped in dock
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