But it hardly mattered. The eastern provinces, with their impoverished yeomanry, had been the traditional recruiting ground for the Confederate army for at least two centuries. Every one of those “newbies” would have been training under the supervision of veteran male relatives since they were eight years old. And, in this hundred even more than most, they were going into combat surrounded by their experienced older brothers, fathers, cousins, uncles and neighbors. What was trotting down the pier below him was as capable and veteran a unit as Demansk had ever seen. To all intents and purposes, that was the hundred his old First Spear had come from.
His eyes scanned the pier and found the man he was looking for. Jessep Yunkers himself, still technically a civilian, was following the soldiers with a group of about forty men wrestling heavy handcarts up the steps leading to the pier’s entrance. Seeing those carts—and the man giving the orders to their handlers—Demansk’s scowl returned in force.
“Come on, Father.” Helga’s tone was just a razor’s edge short of a snap. Still most unsuitable, for a daughter addressing her august father. “You’ve got no more chance of keeping Trae behind than you do restraining a charging greatbeast with your bare hands. He is a son of Demansk, and since you’ve kept him out of the army he’s not going to pass up this chance of getting properly blooded. You know it as well as I do.”
Demansk tightened his jaws, but made no reply—for the simple reason that he couldn’t. However much his youngest son was given to thumbing his nose at tradition, in this at least he was forged on the ancient anvil. Trae, like any scion of Vanbert’s aristocracy worthy of the name, would earn his spear. And since, for his own purposes, Demansk had insisted on keeping him out of the army proper . . .
“Besides,” Helga added, “I’m certainly happy to have him along. Especially since he’s the only one who really knows how to use those gadgets.”
Gadgets. Most of the troopers had now filed aboard the ship, and the handcarts were halfway down the pier. Close enough that Demansk could see their contents clearly.
The lead carts were filled with heavy two-man arquebuses and their tripods. The trailing carts, with ammunition for the weapons. Trae had wanted to bring one of the bombards along also, but the experienced seaman Sharlz Thicelt had convinced the eager young nobleman that the thin planks and lightly-built hull of the ship wouldn’t be able to withstand the recoil.
The strange new weapons had been designed by Adrian Gellert and used by the King of the Isles against the Confederacy the year before. Some of the weapons in the cart below, Demansk imagined, had been captured during the fighting. But most of them—perhaps all of them—had been built by Trae’s artisans in his workshop, using Gellert’s design as the model. If no Vanbert natural philosopher would have ever dreamed of inventing the things in the first place, Vanbert’s metalworkers and apothecaries were perfectly capable of duplicating them once shown how they worked.
In fact, Trae claimed that his own arquebuses and firepowder were superior to the originals. Demansk didn’t doubt the claim. Trae had destroyed more than a few workbenches in his experiments to improve the weapons’ performance. Fortunately, he hadn’t killed anyone in the process. Not quite. But several of Trae’s workmen, as well as Trae himself, would carry scars and burn marks to their graves.
Demansk took a deep breath. Then, forced the smile back onto his face. “Ah, well. The gods’ will is whatever it will be.” He put his hand on his daughter’s shoulder and gave it a little squeeze. “Luck be with you, child. And my blessing.”
He gave the shoulder another squeeze, this one more in the way of an assessment than a reassurance.
“You might want to leave off on the exercise,” he said drily. “I’m not sure your Adrian fellow is going to be all that fond of a woman whose shoulders are wider and more muscular than his are.”
The jibe bounced off Helga like a pebble. She just chuckled and replied: “Oh, his shoulders are quite wide enough, even if he isn’t a legendary athlete like his brother. But then, I forget—you haven’t actually met him, have you?”