“And then there was the last time I rode out of here to war for the king against those Crusaders still left on English soil, in the south. I was already Lord Commander of the Royal Horse by then, though the only titles I held were both Empire titles, Freiherr and Markgraf. That was when a part of my following was Sir Andrew, Laird Eliott’s wild pack of Scot rievers. Little did I then think or even suspect that there existed troops that could frighten those devils incarnate, much less that I would one day be the chosen war leader of those troops. Yet here I ride at the head of half the squadron of the Royal Tara Gallowglasses, the selfsame squadron that smashed, rolled up the vaunted Spanish heavy horse at the Battle of Bloody Rye.
“Every damned way I turn in this savage world, titles and allegiances and honors keep falling on me, binding me more and ever more tightly into a mold that I don’t feel fitted for, not really, deep down. I guess that, deep down, that old, peace-loving Bass Foster, who lived in a house by the side of the Potomac River with a splendid woman named Carol— Carol, dear Carol, ever loved, never really forgotten—and sometimes let her talk him into driving to D.C. to take part in protests against a war that seemed to be unwinnable, is still down there somewhere deep yelling and screaming his head off every time that this surface Bass Foster gets another title or whatnot for being an accomplished killer of men.
“What would’ve happened if Carol had lived, 1 wonder? Well, I never would’ve been projected here, for one thing. She would ‘ve had us two and the cats all packed up and on the road in the jeep headed for higher ground long before the floodcrest got within twenty miles of the house. Her obsessive need to work for the betterment of the suffering masses did not at any time include any slightest wish to risk her own life or health or comforts.”
In her own particular way, Carol had been easy to love, and he had dearly loved her for the too-brief time that God had given them together, but that was not to say that he had not recognized her faults. She had been a left liberal of the born-to-wealth, Bne-and-chablis crowd, and she had been every bit as hypocritical as any of them in her often-spouted and completely unworkable socialistic-Utopian schemes.
Carol would not have lasted for long in this world. Herself born to old money and all that went with a distinguished patronymic in Tidewater Virginia, she had nothing more than a scathing contempt for anyone bearing a title of nobility. Elective titles impressed her even less, unless the bearers were of a similar background and of views similar to her own fuzzy theories of egalitarianism, justice, and the need for social change.
Krystal was like Carol in some ways, which was probably a large part of the reason that she and Bass meshed so quickly upon that traumatic arrival in this world. But also because of those ways in which she was like Carol, plus a few ways in which she was most uniquely herself, he knew that he was losing her through his frequent and long-term absences in the king’s service.
“Maybe,” he thought, while the long legs of the hunter he was astride today ate up the ground and distance, “I should accede to her frequent demands that I pack her along with me wherever I have to go, whenever I’m ordered there. As she’s said often enough, a good many noble officers do just that, taking wives and mistresses—ammunition-wives, they’re called by the troopers and gun men—along on campaigns.
“What she just can’t seem to realize is that the field camp of an army in this world is in no way, shape, or form like any army camps she probably recalls from our world . . . that is, the world we came from. Any camp here, no matter how good the location chosen, no matter how good the weather, has inevitably become nothing less than a pesthole within less than two weeks’ time, breeding farms of dysentery, cholera, typhus, typhoid, tetanus, lung infections, poxes, internal parasites, noxious insects, and God alone knows what else. Only the very toughest men and women survive long in this world’s armies, not because of combat, but because of the conditions under which most of them live when they’re not in battle, that is, most of the time. And I can’t see exposing Krystal to it.
“Of course, it can be changed. I’ve already effected some of those changes in my own cavalry camps. I did it first with the galloglaiches and then I let them enforce compliance on the rest of the troopers, most of whom are rightly scared shitless of the galloglaiches, to start out.
“Every ranking personage who chances by remarks on how very clean and sweet-smelling my permanent cavalry camp is, and there’s damn good reason that it is, too. Two six-foot straddle trenches for each sixty troopers and harsh punishments of those caught relieving themselves elsewhere; pits adjacent to the horse lines for collection of shoveled-up horsebiscuits; and other pits to be filled with offal, wastewater, food scraps, and the like. On my strict orders, stray swine are chivvied out of camp whenever they wander in. I allow dogs and cats around because they tend to go after rats and mice and also because the men like to have them about, but each unit is under standing orders to keep its areas clean of canine and feline droppings, trash, and discarded clothing.
“And it’s working, dammit, it’s working for me and my command. Illness and common camp diseases are way down in the reports 1 receive. Few of the minor injuries that troopers suffer in the course of drill or in handling spirited horses wind up in lockjaw or worse, these days. And since I made them start boiling their water for a quarter hour before they ingested it, dysentery has become infrequent in camp.
“My next project, once I can get this Irish business, whatever it turns out to be, behind me, is to try to get my troopers and my officers, too, for that matter, into the habit of bathing a little more often. Then, maybe, into changing their linens and washing them, rather than wearing them until they rot off, and then just throwing the filthy rags away. But even just the bathing—if I can get it started—should cut down the incidences of boils and festered sores and skin rashes that the troopers all suffer now to greater and lesser degrees in their crotches and their armpits.
“Now, if the Welsh and English and Scots troopers who’ve been indoctrinated in my cavalry camp carry these newfangled ways back home with them, deaths and permanent crippling from disease can be significantly lowered throughout this kingdom and parts of Scotland, as well, and maybe then I’ll feel like I’ve done a bit more for the world in which my little son will grow up and live out his life than simply introduce some more effective ways of making war and killing.”
During the course of the three weeks of slow, ox-pace journey following the supposed madman’s revealing of his true, noble identity and his tragic ensorcellment, Abbot Fergus spent more and more of his time in converse with the English earl, riding beside the cart that bore the bear cage during the days and sitting near to it and its occupant in the night camps.
A younger son of very minor nobility—his elder brother was a knight as their father had been before him, holding a few, poor acres in feoff from the Earl of Ayr in return for service—Fergus had earned elevation to abbot by his administrative abilities, not by his family’s wealth or his own erudition, of which latter he owned painfully little. Therefore, being treated and bespoken as almost an equal by this wellborn, noble, obviously highly educated and widely traveled Sassenach lord was a singular and most exciting experience for the humble man.
Day after day, night after cold, firelit night, he sat as one enthralled to hear the tales of Earl Uilleam’s travels to and exploits in distant lands and seas and cities of fable. And the very fact that his lordship insisted that he remain confined within the locked cage lest a fit of the sorcery-induced madness suddenly come upon him, that during emergences to wash his body and clothes in nearby burns and tiny lochs he be close guarded by sharp-eyed monks and brawny gillies, reassured Abbot Fergus enough of the poor, unfortunate, put-upon and gravely suffering man’s good intentions that, upon request, he loaned his charge his razor and his precious bronze scissors that the earl might trim his beard and hair and filthy, cracked, and clawlike toe and fingernails. The man that emerged from beneath the gray-white hair looked indeed very noble to Abbot Fergus and even more so to the other monks, who began to treat their mad prisoner more like a captive nobleman and less like a dangerous wild beast.