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Chapter 25: Militia

The hundred men assembled on the grass field west of town looked exactly the way Roland had expected them to look and nothing like what he had hoped.

Thin clothes. Bad shoes. The particular posture of people who had spent their adult lives doing heavy physical work, which was not the same posture as people who had spent their lives being physically strong. Hollow cheeks, muddy boots, hands that were thick-knuckled but not trained. The city wall rose behind them in the near distance; beyond that, the forest.

“These are the men who met your requirements,” Carter said, with the neutral tone of an officer delivering a report he personally finds optimistic. “Male. Clean record. Eighteen to forty. No physical deficiencies. I checked each of them myself.”

“I see.” Roland kept his voice even. The world’s productivity was low — this was true everywhere in the kingdom, not just Border Town. Enough to eat was already the primary objective for most lives. That these men had survived this long was its own evidence of capability. He reminded himself of this.

Carter leaned close: “Your Highness, with respect — I don’t think this is workable. None of them can balance a sword, and most of them will run the moment the demons breach sight line. If you need bodies on the wall, hire professional mercenaries from Willow Town. These people are more useful behind it.”

“No.”

“The mercenaries would be—”

“More reliable in the short term and entirely useless for everything I intend to build after this winter.” Roland looked at the line of men standing in the damp grass. “A force drawn from your own people fights differently from one you’ve rented. Every army that’s lasted longer than a generation understood this. We’re training these men.”

Carter shrugged. “Your call, Your Highness. Do I begin with swords tomorrow?”

“You begin with running. Long distance, measured pace. And before you say anything — I know you’ve never trained like that. Find the hunter who helped with the first wall survey. You and he will observe today first.”

His name was Brian, and three days ago he had heard the fourth prince’s speech in the square and decided something.

He had lost his brother two winters ago in the Longsong Stronghold slums — not to demon beasts but to cold and starvation, the slow death that came when you had nothing left to sell and no one willing to loan you anything. A month of black bread and frozen wind. His brother had gotten sick. Had not woken up.

Border Town in winter was cold, but it was a house made of brick. It was a landlord who, according to the bulletin boards, was proposing to pay his people to stay. When the ships from Willow Town came in and the wheat was carried up to the castle in batches, Brian had looked at the docks for a long time and then gone to register for the militia.

The temptation was the salary: ten silver royals a month, comparable to a skilled tradesman. He was twenty-two. Sheryl was waiting on his proposal until he had saved enough. The math was suddenly better.

The first thing the prince did after they assembled on the grass field was put them in a line and tell them to stand at attention — hands flat to the thighs, back straight, eyes forward.

It was harder than it looked. In fifteen minutes Brian’s lower back was complaining. In thirty his legs had gone to a low-grade tremor. The ground was still wet from the rain and the damp was working its way through the seams of his shoes. He thought: I carry gravel for a living. Why is this so difficult?

The prince stood to the side and watched them with his arms crossed.

A quarter-hour before the hour was up, someone in the line folded — knees giving way, catching himself with his hands on the ground, then rising and stepping out of the line. The prince said nothing. The man stood apart, looking at the ground.

“Rest,” the prince said when the time was done.

Brian sat down in the grass. His back was completely soaked through. Around him most of the others were the same — sweat despite the cold, muscles in low protest, the particular fatigue of sustained tension rather than exertion. He had not thought standing could do this to a person.

“I don’t understand why we’re doing this,” said the man next to him, a stonemason’s apprentice named Luk. “Why stand still? Shouldn’t soldiers learn to fight?”

“I don’t know,” Brian said.

After the rest, the prince stood in front of them again. “Round two. Same position. If every man in this line holds until the end, everyone gets a second egg for lunch.” He paused. “If anyone breaks, the group loses it.”

The reaction moved through the line visibly, as though the concept of a second egg had its own small gravity. The men who had been slumping straightened fractionally. Several people swallowed.

Brian thought: this is manipulation. He is moving us around with food like you move a donkey with a carrot.

He thought: if everyone holds, there will be two eggs.

He thought: I have not eaten an egg in six weeks.

The man to his left set his jaw. The man to his right found his back. Around the whole line, something locked in — not camaraderie exactly, not yet, but the beginning of a calculation that included other people’s failure as a cost to oneself. The line held.

Devil’s temptation, Brian thought, and held.

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