The track wound downward, passing close by that little round flat-topped hfll where, amid the heather, Foster had rested the remnants of his battered squadron, while straining to see through the fog-blanketed vale the course of the battle. Today, the sun shone brightly on a party of local men and boys assiduously cutting the peat whereon warhorses had
trampled, whereon men had marched and charged and died, last year. The little stream that had run thick and clotting-red with those men’s lifeblood now sparkled and gurgled between its banks with the clear water of the melted snows.
Farther on, on that plain where had been King Arthur’s camp and the long beleaguered wagon fort, bones lay even more thickly than upon the hills. For a moment that was blessedly brief, Foster could hear again the drone and wail of the bagpipes, the demented shrieks of the charging Highlanders, the roar of the swivel-guns, boomings of muskets and pistols, death cries of men, the nerve-wracking screaming of a wounded horse somewhere nearby in the flameshot hell of fog and wreaths of lung searing powder smoke.
That night, in their camp many miles south of that terrain of peat and death, Nugai ushered Dan Smith into Foster’s pavilion. Before the Lord Commander of the King’s Horse, the burly blacksmith laid an outsize sheathed broadsword.
“M’lud, ain o’ tf Hexham peat-cutters come acrost this un-ner t’ bones o’ a horse, in tf bog. Dan Smith thought he’d seen it afore, so he git t’ man a piecet of siller he’d won a-gam-in’, for’t Ain’t many as could use a ol’ bastid-sword for a broadsword. Be h Cap’n Webster’s, m’lud?”
Foster drew the thick, broad, antique blade from its rotting scabbard. Smith had evidently spent some time and effort in cleaning the weapon, for the steel gleamed free of any speck of rust and gave off a smell of tallow.
He nodded. “Yes, Dan, I feel certain that this is Buddy’s blade. He had thought the Scots had gotten it, while he lay with his broken leg pinned under his dead horse. I’m sure hell be very pleased to have it back, for all that he’s no longer a soldier.”
But Dan Smith flatly refused the offer of a coin to replace the one he had paid a peat-cutter for the big sword. “Och, nae, m’lud. Twere foun’ money, coom by t’ dice. An’t’ noble Cap’n Webster be a frind o’ old.”
Foster nodded again. “Very well, Dan, if that’s as you want it But when we get to York, you’ll give it to him.”
With his troops encamped on the old royal campgrounds outside York—principally due to the presence of the Scottish contingent, for they could expect no less hostility here than they had suffered under at Whyffler Hall—Foster, his bodyguard and a few selected officers rode into the city and sought out Pete Fairley’s manufactory.
Pete, clad in the same rough clothing as his horde of artisans and laborers, said, “Damn! Carey’s gonna be mad as a wet hen he missed you. He’s on the road down to Lunnun with a dozen new light nine-pounders and four rifled eighteens we worked up this past winter—an’ they’ll throw further an’ straighter an’ harder ‘n anything thesehere folks is ever seen, too. Time you gets over t.o Manchester, then down to Lunnun, your own self, he’ll probably be here or on the way back, so he won’t get to see you, a-tall. Sheeit!”
In the long, wide, high-ceilinged building which once had been the riding hall of the archepiscopal residence complex, Foster stood amazed at the end of row upon row of heavy work tables, before which a hundred or more artisans were fitting Pete’s version of the snaphaunce lock to horsepistols. The place was a hubbub of chatter in broad, north-country dialects, the clattering of tools and, from afar down at the other end of the room, the huffs of leather bellows and the clanging ring of hammer on anvil.
Feeling a pull upon his sleeve, Foster turned to confront Dan Smith. “M’lud, d’ye think Master Fairley would lemme make use o’ his smithy? An’ it be well-fitted, a minit or twa an’ Dan Smith could have Cap’n Webster’s big sword good as new.”