Kings of the North - Elizabeth Moon [55]
“I suppose …” Arcolin had not ever considered where the Pargunese traded. Down here? They must go by sea, down the river. “I suppose they trade in Bannerlíth, on the northern coast, north of the Eastbight—perhaps they themselves have come to the southern coast.”
“Even Andressat uses Guild League standards for coinage. It would be simpler if everyone did.”
“True,” Arcolin said. “But the money changers would hate it. They’d lose half their trade.”
“I suppose,” Burek said. He had picked up the dead sailor’s medallion and now turned it over and over, examining the designs on both sides. “I wonder what this means.”
“I never saw it before,” Arcolin said. “It’s not the device Alured picked when he claimed the duchy of Immer. He went with one from the Cortes Immer ruins.” He poked through the pile of coins, setting them in stacks according to size, metal, design. “Some of these wouldn’t fit the dies at all. If you stamped this one width of the die—” He held up a small silver. “—it would be obviously thinner than standard. There must be more dies.”
“Unless they want them to be noticed,” Burek said.
“Not this obvious, I don’t think. If the idea is to show that the city mints are adulterating their coins, they’d want them to look nearly the same.”
That evening, Arcolin wrote out a report for the Council, and Burek added notations to the map they were making. Next day, by daylight, he set Burek to making a fair copy of the map to send back to the city with his report. In midafternoon, a farm boy came to the camp to report that his father had seen “fancy men” moving along the woods’ edge.
“Fancy?” Devlin asked. He was questioning the boy; Arcolin listened from inside the tent where he worked.
“Hats w’ feathers,” the boy said. “And they leader has shiny things—around he neck and he arms.”
“How far away was your father, that he could see all that?”
“Oh, he hid in a log,” the boy said, scratching one bare leg with the dirty toes of the other. “He’s lookin’ for berries, this time summer, an’ he heard ’em, and into a log he went, same’s I would, on account it’s t’other village’s berry patch.”
“And?”
“And they come right by ’im, walkin’ proud, he says, but some limpin’ and blood on they clothes. And pickin’ every berry they saw.”
“How many?”
The boy stared at his hands, scowling, moving his fingers up and down, and finally said, “Two hands maybe.”
“They’ll be no trouble to us for a while,” Burek said. “But to the farmers …”
“It’s late to move today; we’ll move tomorrow,” Arcolin said. “I’m not going to risk our people on the trail at night. The woods are more open up that way—we should be able to pick up a trail.”
Cortes Vonja
Once a tenday the grange drilled outside the city, in the water meadows. As soon as the Marshal allowed, Stammel went along, his hand on Suli’s shoulder. He wore his own uniform again, though it was loose, and a banda over it. The Marshal insisted on a straw hat over his helmet; he was sure it looked ridiculous, but the Marshal wanted to protect his eyes.
“I’m blind,” Stammel said. “Why worry about them?”
“Because an infection in them could kill you,” the Marshal said. “And if there is any chance your sight might come back, staring into the sun you can’t see will finish it.”
So now he followed Suli and the others, stumbling only a little now and then. She was good at noticing what might trip him and murmuring warnings. “Rut here. Big root ahead, high step.”
This was drill as he knew it, but with slightly different commands. The yeomen knew them and started off at a strong walk; Stammel, next to Suli, felt out of place this close. At least he hadn’t tired on the walk out of the city, and when the Marshal called a rest, he wasn’t out of breath like some of those he heard huffing and puffing.
“Unarmed next,” the Marshal said. “Pair up. Stammel, you’re with Groj.”
Stammel grinned. He’d won the argument, then; he hadn’t been sure until this moment. Unarmed fighting, once in grip of the other, wasn’t about sight but about feel … and he was sure his feel