But beyond, there were rows of empty tents awaiting Sauce’s army; the company camp with a skeleton crew of veterans living well and sleeping too much; the camp prepared for the Nordikaans, with fifty new recruits who had swaggered in from the north and who had already proven that they could at least drink with heroic prowess; a camp for the casa and another for the guilds of Harndon and their regiment; then more shelters for the Venikans and the Beronese, and then, beyond, in all directions, miles of white linen tape delineating blocks of tents as yet not erected, and lines of fires as yet unstoked, for more soldiers. More and more, lines of white tape that extended as far as the eye could make out their tracery against the black earth.

“Bad Tom tomorrow?” Michael asked.

“Or day after. Every day he stays in the west, we save a day of shipping oats and straw. It will be close, even as it is. And we’re leaving this place to starve unless Sauce brings them supplies . . .” Gabriel shrugged. “Never mind. She’s done everything we asked and more; her chevauchee has netted another four hundred wagons and she’s filled them with grain.”

“And it is still close,” Michael said.

“Oh yes,” Gabriel answered.

Blanche emerged onto the narrow parapet walk, and behind her was Kaitlin and Syr George Comnena, now Caesar.

Michael watched the horizon. “And Sauce?” he asked.

Comnena settled into a merlon. He produced a flimsy. “Bird,” he said. “Sauce is climbing the San Colombo. She says . . .” Comnena smiled. “A lot of things about oxen. She says five days.”

Gabriel nodded.

“Perfect,” he said.

Michael turned, so that the setting sun seemed to cast fire across his face. “We’re on schedule. By God, Gabriel, I thought it was impossible. And if the astrologers are right, we only have six days. And we are still on schedule.”

“New motto,” Gabriel said. “We make the impossible seem merely really, really difficult.”

Blanche laughed. “I’ll have it put on the household banner.”

“Food?” Gabriel asked her.

She produced a tablet. It was not, in fact, wax; the plain ebony wood held a smooth substance, like fired clay with a glaze, except that the glaze was hermetical. Mortirmir had made the tablets. There were six sets so far; all of them could communicate with each other, and they had an inexhaustible supply of invisible pages.

She flipped through those pages with one finger. “We’re preparing to use fifty tons of food a day,” she said.

“Fifty tons?” Kaitlin asked.

“With four hundred wagons, we can only carry four days’ rations for the army,” Blanche said quietly.

“Carry where?” asked Kaitlin.

Michael was still shaking his head. “Four hundred wagons . . .” he said. “And all pulled by horses and oxen who eat—”

Gabriel shrugged. “Don’t worry,” he said. “If we fuck up the numbers, we can eat the draught animals. Thanks, my dear.”