“Looks like we’ll have company the way I thought, my lord Tucannon,” he said aloud.

“You saw them?” the nobleman said eagerly.

“Saw one of them, and he saw the sheep. It was an enemy scout, all right; I caught the sun-blink off his binoculars. I sent my aide back to alert our own scouts and they should be reporting in . . . an hour to three.”

The baron nodded. Binoculars were an expensive specialty tool and among the most prized of salvage from the old world; the modern replacements just starting to appear were bulkier, not nearly as good, and almost as expensive. Field glasses ended up in the hands of those whose missions really demanded them, or those of extremely high status.

Ingolf went on: “And you can bet he’s part of the screen for a cavalry outfit. One gets you ten they take the bait.”

That brought a general rustle. About forty of the men sitting with their backs against the bank upstream of him munching on sausage and bread and cheese were equipped in articulated steel plate much like their lord; some of them de Grimmond’s household knights and men-at-arms, and the rest his vassal knights called up from their manors and their men-at-arms. They were the ones who fought as heavy cavalry; the twelve-foot lances they’d carry were stacked neatly in pyramids of ash wood and steel.

Very bad news if you can’t get out of the way, dodge around and pepper them with arrows, Ingolf thought. If you can . . . not so much.

He had a suit of plate complete too, the gift of Sandra Arminger, but he preferred lighter gear for work like this.

You have to use great big horses with that ironmongery, and even bigger ones if they’re wearing armor too. They’re fast in a charge, but not what you’d call nimble, and they get tired out quick.

Rather more men wore light armor of leather and mail like Ingolf’s; they also had tight horseman’s breeches, swords and powerful recurve bows of horn and sinew and wood. This far east the PPA bred its own cowboys and hence horse-archers. There were also foot spearmen with the same big kite-shaped shields as the knights and crossbowmen with small round bucklers and their specialist missile weapons; both carried swords as well and they wore what they called three-quarter armor here, which was like a man-at-arms’ but with some of the pieces left off. Spearmen and crossbowmen and men-at-arms were the three types of soldier that Association military tenure required landholders here to maintain and furnish at need.