The north gate of Harth stood where the post road crested the town ditch, framed by two squat towers of dressed river gritstone and a timber palisade of sharpened pine logs.
The ditch was twelve feet deep and twenty feet across, dry during the summer months, but now, during Flood Month, holding two feet of muddy water fed by runoff from the chalk hills. For fifty yards on either side of the turnpike, the outer scarp of the ditch was choked with an overgrown jungle of wild willow, blackthorn brambles, and elder scrub that had grown untended since the last autumn frost.
Jon Hale swung the heavy billhook with a rhythmic, shoulder-straining stroke.
Chop. Crack. Sever.
The curved steel blade, honed to a razor edge on his cellar oilstone, bit through a three-inch willow trunk with a wet, splintering crunch. Jon seized the severed bough by its hairy bark, hauled it out of the muck, and tossed it onto the growing brush pile along the outer ditch lip.
A shower of cold river water sprayed from the leaves, wetting the front of his woolen work-smock. His breathing was deep and measured, steam pluming white from his nostrils into the chilly afternoon air.
Five paces to his left, Captain Dain, commander of the town watch, leaned against his heavy ash-hafted partisan, wiping sweat from his gray-streaked beard with the sleeve of his buff-leather coat.
Dain was a broad-shouldered soldier of fifty-five, a veteran of the border garrisons who walked with a slight limp from a saber cut across his left kneecap. A notched iron broadsword hung at his hip in a scabbard bound with copper wire, its grip worn smooth by thirty years of service.
“You chop brush like an army pioneer, Jon Hale,” Dain shouted over the thud of the town guardsmen’s axes working further down the scarp. “Most tavern keepers would rather pay four copper groats to hire a ditch-digger than get river mud in their boots on a sunny day.”
“A ditch-digger works by the hour, Dain,” Jon replied, not pausing in his labor. He swung the billhook again, lopping off a dense tangle of blackthorn that had encroached within ten paces of the road culvert. “A man who clears his own ditch works until the sightline is clean.”
Dain chuckled, a dry, coughing sound in his chest, and set his partisan against the timber guardrail. He reached into his coat and pulled out an iron whetstone, spitting on the stone before running it down the rusted edge of a spare billhook.
“Marris Gault’s carters dropped sixty cured oak balks right against my guardhouse wall before noon,” Dain said, nodding toward the two massive stacks of squared timber resting beside the gate apron. “Said you told her I needed road-repair timber before the spring mud washed the apron out. I signed the municipal voucher, but between you, me, and the town well, that timber isn’t going into the road bed. That’s barricade timber if I ever saw it.”
Jon lowered his billhook, resting the iron crook against his thigh as he looked up at the veteran watch captain.
“You have six men on the day watch, Dain,” Jon said in a level voice. “And eight on the night watch. If twenty mounted bandits came out of the northern scrub at a gallop, how many paces from the gate would they be before your sentries could cock a crossbow?”
Dain looked out over the sea of thick willow and blackthorn that bordered the highway.
His soldier’s eye, dulled by ten years of peacetime duty in a quiet river town, sharpened with professional calculation.
“Thirty paces,” Dain admitted, his hand instinctively dropping to his sword hilt. “Maybe forty, if the sentry was looking right down the road tongue. That thick elder patch at the bend hides anything taller than a donkey until it’s within shouting distance of the bridge culvert.”
“Thirty paces gives your archer five seconds,” Jon said. “Five seconds to reach the alarm horn, blow the warning, and drop the portcullis. If the riders have iron bards on their horses, they hit the timber leaves before the iron pins can seat.”
Dain stared at the thicket, his bushy gray brows drawing together.
In his second life, Jon had watched this very gate fall in seven minutes.
The Ash Host’s outriders had not charged down the center of the post road. They had dismounted two hundred yards out, creeping through this exact blackthorn thicket with axes and pole-saws, muffled by the rising morning fog. They had severed the counterweight chains of the drawbridge while Dain’s sentries were roasting sausages over the guardhouse brazier, leaving the town gate propped wide open when sixty heavy shock cavalry surged out of the chalk cut.
Dain had died on the flagstones before he could finish drawing his broadsword.
“Hal! Beric!” Dain barked suddenly, his voice taking on the sharp, brassy rasp of a frontline commander.
Two young watchmen in iron pot-helmets, who had been lazily hacking at willow twigs near the water culvert, snapped to attention.
“Drop those side-twigs,” Dain ordered, pointing his billhook toward the dense elder grove that choked the road bend eighty yards out. “Chop every willow and thorn-bush down to the turf. Clear it back thirty paces from the road margin all the way to the milestone. I want an open meadow between this ditch and the chalk ridge.”
“What do we do with the brush, Captain?” young Hal asked, leaning on his axe. “Burn it?”
“No,” Jon interjected, stepping up to the lip of the ditch. “Don’t burn it. Green willow smoke will hang over the gate and blind your own sentries. Drag the cut thorn into the dry ditch.”
Dain turned to Jon, his eyes narrowing. “Drag it into the ditch?”
“Stake it down,” Jon explained, pointing down into the muddy twelve-foot depression. “Drive four-foot ash pegs into the clay, wedge the thick willow boles against the inner scarp, and point the thorn-ends outward toward the highway. An abatis.”
Dain stood silent for three heartbeats, his gaze tracing the defensive geometry of the ditch.
An abatis of tangled blackthorn and sharpened willow stakes, anchored in deep mud, was an impassable obstacle to cavalry. A horse that attempted to jump or wade a thorn-choked ditch would thrash, belly-impaled on the hardened points, throwing its rider into the silt where crossbowmen on the parapet could pick them off at thirty yards.
“You were an engineer with the third border regiment, weren’t you, Jon?” Dain asked softly.
“I was a teamster with the baggage train,” Jon replied, his face showing no emotion. “A teamster spends ten years digging wagons out of ditches. He learns what stops a wheel and what stops a horse.”
Dain spat into the weeds, a grim smile spreading across his bearded mouth.
“An abatis it is,” the captain said. He turned back to his men with a roar: “You heard the innkeeper! Drag the thorn-branches into the ditch-bottom! Sharpen the tips with your axes, and lash the boles together with raw willow withes! If I find a single foot of this ditch that a sheep could walk across by sundown, you’ll stand four watches on the belfry platform without ale!”
The guardsmen sprang into motion with renewed vigor, the axes ringing against the wet wood with sharp, concussive cracks.
Jon returned to his work, his billhook swinging in steady, unyielding strokes.
With every bough he severed, the open killing field expanded. The dark, sheltering thickets that had hidden the ambushers in two dead lives tumbled into the mud, dragged away by the watchmen and woven into an impenetrable tangle of sharpened spikes along the ditch bottom.
By the time the church bell in the town tower tolled the third afternoon hour, the work was finished.
The post road now approached Harth across an open, naked expanse of short grass and river gravel. For two hundred paces from the gatehouse apron to the chalk milestone, there was not a bush tall enough to hide a hare, not a depression deep enough to conceal a crawling skirmisher.
The ditch was packed with four feet of interlocking blackthorn, their dried white spikes glinting in the pale sunlight like a carpet of barbed iron.
Dain stood beside Jon on the timber drawbridge, wiping the mud from his leather sleeves. He looked out over the cleared slope, his chest heaving with honest exhaustion.
“Clean,” Dain declared, his voice carrying the deep satisfaction of a soldier who knew his ground was secured. “A company of royal lancers couldn’t get within two bowshots of this gate now without showing their belt buckles to my watchmen.”
“That is what a gate should be,” Jon said, setting his billhook against the gritstone pier.
“Sir Cael will think we’ve turned the town into a border fort to honor his arrival,” Dain remarked with a rough laugh. “The council will give me a silver commendation for improving the town defenses.”
“Let them give you the commendation, Dain,” Jon said with a faint smile. “As long as the thorn-spikes stay in the ditch.”
“They’ll stay,” Dain promised, slapping his sword hilt. “They’ll stay until the willow rots to dust.”
Jon nodded, taking up his empty tool sack and turning back toward the town.
The sightlines were clear. The killing field was established. The gate was no longer a blind trap waiting to be sprung in the morning fog.
He walked down High Gate Lane toward the market quarter, the smell of bruised willow sap lingering on his hands like the scent of an impending harvest.
The town did not know it had built a fortress.
It only knew that the road looked wider, the sun was bright, and the hero was five miles away.