I shook my head. “Welded. Better still, rivetted and welded.”
He was frowning. “There aren’t any lions in these parts,” he said.
“Is that right?”
I had reason to believe there’d be a dragon in the caves below Staert, and I was right. They don’t exactly conceal their presence.
One of the many things that everybody knows about dragons, and that isn’t actually true, is that they breathe fire. Of course they don’t, but fires start wherever they’ve been living for any length of time. My friend the lion-catcher in Outremer explained why, or at least he told me what he’d been told. They’re desert creatures, he told me. They’re what causes deserts.
Which sounds like drivel, until you read old books and look at old maps. From which you learn that once upon a time, hundreds or thousands of years ago, the endless rolling sand dunes of Outremer were forests and pastures and meadows, quilted with rivers, studded with busy towns and walled cities. Just occasionally you come across them, the corner of a worked stone poking up through the sand, like a bone through the skin. But then, so my friend told me, the dragons came, and something they were or something they did dried up all the water, killed all the trees and the grass. And where you get dead trees and dry grass, you get fires, and before long there’s nothing alive at all, which is a pretty good working definition of a desert. Either they poison the water, like the iron ore, or their piss kills the grass, like a sick dog’s; anyway, you can tell straight away where a dragon lives, because everything around it is dead.
When I was a boy, there was a big stand of ash trees at Staert. My grandfather had them planted the day my father was born, which I always thought was a nice thing to do, and if ever I had a son, I’d do the same. All gone. At least, the stub ends of the trunks were still there, charred black, sticking up like the grave markers of a hastily buried army. The ground was black and crunched when you walked on it, all the way from the top of the ridge to the point where the earth becomes rock.
I didn’t need to go that far, so I didn’t. I stood on top of the Calf, the smaller of the two tall knolls on the other side of the valley cut by the little river that races down from the mountains to join the Blood River at Watersmeet. I don’t know that that little river ever had a name, not a proper one. We always called it Calf Water. Anyway, its bed was dry and split with deep cracks, and the withies on what had been its banks were starting to droop. The fire hadn’t managed to jump the riverbed, but all the heather on the flanks of the Calf was brown and brittle, and you know what dry heather’s like. Breathe on it when you’ve been eating garlic and you’ll have a fire you could weld steel in.
No heather in Outremer, naturally. But around the oases they grow marvelous crops of wheat; shorter in the stem than our northern varieties, but with ears as long as your thumb. The enemy used to wait until the corn was just ripening, and then they’d swoop down, drive off the farmers, harvest the corn, and cart it back over what we laughingly called the border. Same every year, and the farmers only stayed there because we wouldn’t let them leave.
I’d been there two and a half years. I was still alive because I’d been seconded away from my lord the duke’s contingent to serve with one of the emperor’s regiments—the locals, in other words, the people who actually lived there and knew what they were doing. They knew about such things as keeping your wounds and water clean, not letting your latrines drain into a river when your allies were camped a mile downstream, that sort of stuff, and they knew about fighting the enemy, which they’d been doing for six hundred years.
The year before, my lord the duke had been given responsibility for that sector, and he’d tried to forestall the annual invasion by fighting a pitched battle on the border. He lost, needless to say, and seventy knights and five hundred and twelve foot soldiers died, and the enemy went about their business in the usual way. The next year, the rotation meant our lot, the emperor’s men, got that sector, and of course, they knew what to do.
Which was nothing. We sat on our horses and watched as the enemy column swaggered (no other word for it) across the little brown river that marked the frontier. We’d already evacuated the locals, so the country was empty for as far as an eagle could fly in a day. We sat and watched them ride down the old military road the emperors had built four centuries ago, and we did nothing.
We did nothing while they set about their weary job of chevauchee—that’s the military word for turning someone else’s home into a desert. You trash the houses, cut down the orchards, burn the crops, kill every domesticated animal, and then you move on to the next village. It’s hard manual labor, which was why the enemy used prisoners of war—our people—to do the actual work, while they sat in their saddles and made sure they did a proper job. They sat, and we sat, and the chain gangs sweated to death in the blazing sun, destroying the livelihoods of their own flesh and blood. Then, when there wasn’t anything left, they moved on to the next village, and the next, until they’d finished their allotted sweep and it was time to go home.
The enemy weren’t stupid. They sent the harvested grain on ahead in wagons, but they kept back large areas of uncut grain so the army would have something to eat on its way home. The biggest patch was a flat plain, maybe two thousand acres, all rich, fertile land, with the road running straight down the middle.
One of the men in our company was local born and bred. He knew the terrain, and he knew the prevailing winds. So, one night when the enemy were camped in the middle of this enormous cornfield, we crept out and started our fires at carefully chosen points, knowing that the wind was in the right direction and would blow strongly for the next thirty-six hours. Then we split into two, each party blocking one end of the road.
It worked like a charm, though the fighting at the roadblocks was murderous. But we knew we didn’t have to prevail, just hold them up long enough for the fire to reach them—and it did, roaring in like waves breaking on a beach, until the smoke was so thick that fighting was irrelevant, and we broke up and got out of there as fast as we possibly could. Of the twenty thousand heathens who marched in, about nine hundred got out. The technical term for that is victory, though of course they were back next year, and the year after that.
We also burned to death about twelve thousand of those prisoners of war, but that couldn’t be helped. As my lord the duke said later, when claiming the whole thing had been his idea; once captured, those men were assets of the enemy and needed to be dealt with; and besides, better dead than in the hands of the infidel. Actually, he may have been right about that last bit. They had a pretty rough time of it, so I gather. I guess it comes down to a choice: Which would you rather die of—fire, torture, or starvation?
Also, said my lord the duke, it’s a well-known fact that burning the crop actually increases the fertility of the soil, so once this ridiculous war was over and the heathen had been crushed, future generations would bless us. I won’t comment on that, if you don’t mind.
Garcio the blacksmith has always done good work. He charged me an angel seventeen for it; extortionate, but it wasn’t my money. The change out of the second angel just about paid for the hire of the stonemason’s big cart, his big crane, and a dozen of his biggest men. Have you noticed that when you’re engaged in something truly difficult and dangerous, everybody rips you off?