Ieduin frowned. “This is all of them?”
Ewan nodded. “All the farmsteaders. Their sons will work the farms in their absence, but they’ll come when the harvest is done. Sooner if Rowan puts out the call.”
Ieduin sighed and turned to face Ewan. “How many fighters do you have? Total. Including anyone of fighting capability fifteen and older?”
Ewan shrugged. “Roughly three times this. Too many to fit in here.”
“How am I supposed to train people who aren’t here?” Ieduin asked.
Silence answered. Rowan and Ewan exchanged a glance.
“The way it’s done,” Ewan started, “is that you train these men. They go back to their farms and train their boys. Come spring, they’ll all be ready.”
“We don’t have until spring,” Ieduin ground out, frustrated. “I told you I needed all your available fighters.”
“Aye, and ya have them. Right there. This is how it’s done here, lad. How it’s always been done. Ye can’t just march in here and change eight hundred years of Greymark tradition.”
“I need to run joint training exercises so your fighters can learn to work as a unit with mine.” Ieduin didn’t even try to keep the irritation from creeping into his tone. “If two thirds of your people don’t even show up, I can’t do that. There’s more to fighting a war than swinging a sword.”
“Nobody ever won a bloody war by marching in formation,” Ewan shot back.
Rowan put a hand on Ieduin’s chest. It was the only thing that kept him from stepping up to Ewan in a challenge. He leveled a warning look at Ewan, who looked like he was about to do the same. “We will send out a call for the rest of them to report as soon as the harvest is complete. That will be another two weeks at least. Commander Ieduin, I know that will cut into the training time you thought you would have, but surely you recognize the importance of a harvest when our stores are already painfully short.”
“I do.” Ieduin adjusted his vest and stepped back. “In the meantime, that means my Crows will have to fill more roles than I planned. When the other two thirds of your force arrive, don’t bust my balls when I work them twice as hard.”
Ewan’s answer was a derisive snort. Ieduin let it go, but only because Rowan gave him a look that said he should.
He turned back to the farmers standing in the courtyard below and placed his palms on the wooden railing. “We’re going to put them in lines.” He whistled and gestured to the group of Crows he’d picked out.
The Crows nodded and left to carry out their orders.
“All right, listen up!” Ieduin shouted above the din of chattering voices.
Nobody paid him any mind.
“You’ve got to project, lad,” Ewan said. “Like this.” He stepped forward. Putting two fingers to his lips, he let out a shrill whistle and bellowed, “Shut yer gobs already!”
The crowd slowly fell silent, all eyes turning up toward where they stood on the wall.
Ieduin cleared his throat. “Fall in for inspection! I want two sections, ten across, fifteen deep.”
The men shifted slowly into position, more chatter breaking out.
“I didn’t give you permission to talk!” Ieduin shouted firmly, and the crowd froze, falling silent. “Get in line or go home. I don’t issue orders twice.”
Next to him, Rowan arched an eyebrow and smirked. Ieduin ignored him, waiting impatiently for the Greymark farmers to fall in line. He’d made a mistake, assuming this would be easy. Not only did Ewan seem to want to oppose him at every turn, but these men were no soldiers, even on a good day.
The Crows walked down the jagged lines of men, adjusting anyone who wasn’t standing in the right place by pulling them.
After a few minutes of impatient waiting, Ieduin climbed back down the steps to pace in front of the lines. He tried to memorize something about the men in front of each line. Getting to know all three hundred of them would be impossible, but it wasn’t impossible to know twenty.
Once all the Crows gave him the signal that they were all in line, Ieduin folded his hands behind his back and paced again.
“My name is Commander Cock, and every morning from dawn until we break for lunch, you’re mine,” Ieduin said and stopped in front of one of them. “I’m your god. You do not question any orders I give you. You do it. If I say the sky is purple and sheep are horses, guess what? That’s the damn truth until I change my mind. Now, everybody who isn’t in the front of the line, look at the man in the very front. Congratulations, all you men in front have just been promoted to the rank of corporal. Each one of you here in the front line is responsible for the lives and wellbeing of the fourteen men directly behind you. You will report to your captains, who I will assign momentarily. They report directly to my Crows, who then report to me. That is your chain of command.”
Some of them bristled and shifted in their lines, but there were no outright objections, so Ieduin moved on.
“Corporals, if your men succeed at the tasks I assign, you succeed. If you fail, they fail. That means if I tell you you’re going to run five miles, and one of you only makes it four, you’ve all failed the assignment. Failed assignments will be repeated until they are completed successfully. You are no longer fifteen individuals, but a single unit, and you will be treated as such. You will eat as a unit, sleep as a unit, shit as a unit.”