Read The Protector's War for Free Online

northwestward across sandy heath with the cool smell of dew-wet heather crushed beneath a horse’s hooves…there wouldn’t be much more of that, if they made good their escape.
    He nodded and halted his horse with an imperceptible shift of balance and the slightest touch on the reins; that wasn’t an easy trick to learn, in the heavy war saddle and a full suit of plate. Compared to the way he’d learned to ride—in the slight English saddle, and then foxhunting—it had felt like being strapped into an upright coffin. But he’d picked up the knack rather thoroughly.
    Even an old dog can learn the odd new trick, he thought, shading his eyes with his hand and peering northeastward against the dawn, the visored sallet helm slung to his saddlebow.
    The farmer had probably taken up the land here because there was a tax-and-rent reduction for those willing to be first in such places, isolated and dangerous, and the ten-foot-high fence of angle iron and barbed wire that surrounded the houses was supporting evidence. This was the very northernmost edge of cultivation; in fact, there wasn’t another active farm for half a mile, and the old A5130 had been hacked back into barely passable state to reach the narrow lane that led to the homestead. North of here the road was simply a linear mound of thornbush twenty feet high.
    The largest building in the little cluster of habitation was a long, low-slung, whitewashed cottage with a thatched roof and small square-paned windows; several centuries old from the look of it and the size of the oaks and beeches in the garden—which included a lawn ornament in the shape of a four-foot black rooster half hidden in tall shaggy grass. Four other cottages stood nearby in a rough row along an old laneway, ranging from a tiny half-timbered affair to a modern two-story probably built in the 1960s. They’d all been reroofed with thatch—probably because if you grew long-stemmed wheat it was easier to use the straw than find fresh slate or tile. Besides which, it was officially encouraged.
    Early as it was, the farm’s folk seemed hard at work. He uncased his binoculars and looked; smoke rose in slow drifting columns from the tall brick chimneys that pierced the roofs, and he saw a woman in overalls and Wellingtons leading a horse towards a cluster of barns and a pond a hundred yards south. The space around the barns held a comfortable litter of tools—a two-furrow riding plow, a set of disk harrows and a tipping hay rake. Two more women hoed in an acre-sized stretch of vegetable garden, and an indeterminate teenager walking back towards the farmstead from the barns had a yoke over the shoulders and buckets of milk on either end. A brown-skinned girl child of eight or so in a shapeless wool frock fed chickens that clustered and gobbled about her feet with grain held in her apron. Another who might have been her sister save that she was pink and blond guarded a clutch of toddlers with the aid of a nondescript collie. Everyone was breeding enthusiastically these days, but from the numbers there must be at least three married couples here. The smell was of turned earth wet with the morning, smoke and manure and baking bread.
    He could hear the rising-falling moan of a wool spinning wheel from the small cottage, joined by the rhythmic thump…thump… of a loom. A post-Change metal wind pump whirled merrily to fill a tank set in an earthen mound. Forty or fifty acres of cultivation surrounded the steading, in fields edged by hedges new or newly trimmed back; sheep and cattle grazed on pastures whose origin as a golf course was barely visible. Stooked sheaves of wheat and barley stood in neat tripods and children with slings sent a flock of thieving black rooks up from them. Other fields held harvested flax in windrows, potatoes, turnips, beets and a young orchard that was just coming into bearing, with apples glowing red among the leaves.
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