Kuranski was the Scarlets’ last remaining casualty. The other wounded men who had escaped from the battle had either recovered from their injuries or already died on the march southwards.
With Kuranski, it had been different. The half-Kislevite swordsmen had sustained a deep wound in his thigh from a boar tusk during the protracted struggle with the boar riders. He had managed to limp away from the battle otherwise intact but in the weeks since, the wound had become infected. Kuranski’s condition had worsened to the degree that he could no longer walk. For the last week, his comrades had been forced to carry him everywhere on a makeshift stretcher.
“The wound has started to develop pus,” Gerhardt said. “I’m sure it’s treatable, but since we don’t have a surgeon with us, there isn’t much we can do. We just have to try and keep him comfortable, and hope for the best.”
“It’s not the only choice we have,” a voice interrupted their conversation.
It was Krug. He had survived the battle along with the toady Febel. The two men walked over now, drawn by the discussion of Kuranski’s condition.
Dieter had always heard that war was unfair. He supposed it was an example of that unfairness that Krug and Febel still lived, while better men like Captain Harkner had been lost.
“There is another choice,” Krug said. “A more practical one.”
“We have discussed this already, Krug,” Gerhardt’s eyes narrowed. “I have talked to Sergeant Bohlen about it and he agrees. Kuranski is one of us. He will be given every chance to recover.”
“You ask me, you’re making a mistake,” Krug continued. “You said yourself, Kuranski has a fever. He’s only going one place from now on, and that’s downhill. Besides which, it is slowing us down having to carry him everywhere. At the very least, we should put the matter to a vote. With that in mind, why don’t we ask the young blood what he thinks?”
Krug turned toward Dieter, his eyes glittering with malice. Ever since Dieter had stood up to him at the old woman’s hut, he seemed to delight in trying to needle him.
“You’re a country boy, Lanz—aren’t you? You must know all about these things. What happens when a farmer has a lame horse or dog? He doesn’t carry it around with him everywhere, does he? Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting we just bash Kuranski’s brains out like we would with a dog. We can be more humane. I’m sure we can scare up some strong drink from among the men in camp. Then, we get Kuranski good and sodden, and one of us does the job when he’s insensible. Maybe the farm boy here could do the dirty work, if he’s got the stones for it.”
“Shut up, Krug,” Gerhardt said, tightly. In the course of the argument, Rieger had come to join Hoist and Gerhardt in standing beside Dieter, backing him up. “I’ve warned you before. Now, I’m going to make myself very clear. There will be no more loose talk about Kuranski. He is a comrade, a fellow soldier, and he will be treated in the same way as we would hope to be treated if we were in the same position. Do you understand me?”
“I understand you.” For a second, Krug held Gerhardt’s gaze as though he was willing to push the dispute further. “I think the decision is foolish, but I suppose I will have to let it pass. For now.”
Averting his eyes, Krug walked away. Febel scurried behind him.
“Someone should teach him a lesson,” Dieter said, after a moment had passed. “I’ve half a mind to call him out. Challenge him to duel—”
“Shut up, boy,” Gerhardt said quietly.
He rounded on Dieter.
“You are young and full of vinegar, so I make exceptions. But if I hear you say anything on the subject of challenging Krug to a duel again, I will clip you around the ear and give you a boot up the arse. What do you think is more important—a few harsh words between comrades, or the survival of the regiment?”
“I…” Dieter’s tongue seemed frozen in his mouth. His words were stymied. Facing the full force of Gerhardt’s anger, a man he looked up to, he felt the colour drain from his face.
“In case you haven’t noticed, we’re in a bad situation,” Gerhardt continued. “We’ve lost a lot of good men. Our commander is missing and most of our sergeants are dead. Just like the rest of our army, the Scarlets are in tatters. We are like hunted animals, alone and on the run, our every step dogged by the enemy. What’s worse, the entire province is at risk. We were supposed to defeat the orcs and protect our people. Right now, we couldn’t protect a privy pit from a company of pigs. And what do you want to do, at this, our worst hour? You want to pick a fight with a fellow soldier. You want to fight a duel in which one or both of you could get killed, at a time when your province needs every fighting man it can get. Well? Are you ashamed of yourself and your big mouth, Dieter Lanz? You should be!”
With that, Gerhardt stalked off, leaving Dieter white-faced and open-mouthed in embarrassment.
“I wouldn’t take it too personally,” Rieger said, after a decent interval had passed. “With most of the sergeants dead, Gerhardt has been forced into a position of command alongside Sergeant Bohlen. With things the way they are, the two of them are struggling to hold the regiment together. We’ve lost over half our men. That means there’s a lot of pressure on Gerhardt’s shoulders.”
“I didn’t mean to make it worse,” Dieter said. He shook his head, still taken aback by Gerhardt’s outburst. “I was just sounding off.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Rieger commiserated. “Don’t brood on the matter too long. Least said, quickest mended, as some sage once put it. Anyway, we’d better get to work.”
He indicated the bodies of the dead wolves they had brought into camp. Already, the smell of woodsmoke in the air had intensified. Glancing at the centre of the camp, Dieter noticed men had started building up the fire, adding more wood to increase the temperature ready for roasting meat.
“These wolves won’t get to butchering themselves,” Rieger said. “And I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m so hungry I could eat them pelts, teeth and tails in all.”
Later, when the cooking was done and the Scarlets had feasted on roasted wolf meat, Dieter considered their position. With his belly full, the situation seemed less bleak than it had earlier, but he realised it was an illusion born of his temporary contentment.
The wolf meat was the first real meal the men had shared in a week.
It was not so much the fact that they were camping in the wilderness which had led to their lack of food. Summer had given way to the autumn in the time since the army of Hochland had suffered defeat in battle. In the deep woods it was a period of comparative plenty. If a man knew where to look, there was a surfeit of easily gained provender in the form of wild mushrooms, edible berries and other fruit, not to mention small game like rabbits and birds.
What was more, having been raised in the country, Dieter knew exactly where to find this bounty. Like every other child in his village, he had spent the majority of his autumns helping to gather from among the available foodstuffs in order to increase his family’s stores in preparation for winter.
In the last few weeks, such hard-won knowledge had proven invaluable. Most of the rest of the Scarlets had been born and raised in an urban setting, either in the slums of Hergig or in the latticework of towns and villages that surrounded the capital. They were the sons of soldiers and whores, of innkeepers, of craftsmen, of scribes, even of minor landowners.
With the exception of Dieter, none of them knew how to best lay snares for rabbits, or knew how to tell the edible dwarf’s cap mushroom from the almost identical, and deadly, brown shade. One made a good meal when cooked in the hot ashes of a fire, the other meant a lingering painful death of the kind Dieter would not have wished on his most hated enemy, not even Krug.
In the last few weeks, Dieter’s knowledge had allowed him to prove his value to his comrades on numerous occasions. Even with such knowledge, however, it had been hard to find enough food to keep body and soul together. The greenskins were on their trail constantly, meaning t
here was little time for gathering food. Most of the time, the Scarlets had been forced to concentrate on keeping ahead of the enemy’s scouts, rather than being able to spend the hours needed to find food for themselves. It was not that there was a lack of food. Simply, the Scarlets lacked the time to find it.
Even the feast they had just shared was a fleeting resource. If they had been able to salt the meat, pickle it in brine or smoke it, there was enough left that it might have lasted them for the best part of a week. As it was, they had no salt or brine, and they could not afford the days needed to build a smokehouse and put it to work. They could take the remains of their feast with them, but it would probably only last a day or two before it began to spoil. Then, they would be back exactly where they had been before they had killed the wolves. Hungry.
In the aftermath of the army’s defeat by the orcs, Dieter had come to realise precisely how dependent a human army was on the assorted supply train that trailed in its wake. Unlike the greenskins, a human army could not afford to forage for their food. Without a small subsidiary army of cooks and victuallers to provide for them, along with the requisite provisions, any force of human soldiers existed forever on the brink of starvation.
Dieter remembered the victualler Otto, and how certain the man had been of his importance to the army. Time had proven Otto’s words were correct. Having lost the cooks and victuallers, along with all their cookware and provisions, had proved to be more of a blow to the Scarlets’ hopes of survival even than the number of fighting men the regiment had lost.
However Dieter looked at it, the future seemed dark and uncertain.
CHAPTER EIGHT
FIELDS OF GOLD
The next day, as the sun rose high in the midday sky, the Scarlets came face to face with temptation.
It did not take the same shape as any of the temptations they were usually prey to; the pitfalls endangering their souls that the priests were always swift to warn them against. It did not take the form of strong drink, the various games of chance, or of a beautiful woman of uncertain virtue. It was a temptation of a more subtle character.
It took the form of a gently swaying field of wheat.
“There has to be enough there to feed the regiment for a month,” Hoist said, as they sheltered among the trees of the forest at the edge of the field, watching with hungry eyes as the wheat swayed gently in the breeze. “I never thought I’d be so excited to see some farmer’s field. Look how golden it is. It has to be ripe. We could use it to make bread.”
“We’d have to grind it first,” Rieger said from the side of him. He turned to look to Dieter, who was standing beside them. “Well, what about it, Dieter? Helmut Schau was a miller. Do you think you could grind us the flour to make some bread?”
“It would take too long.” Dieter shook his head. “Besides, we’d need to thresh the wheat first, and make a grindstone. And we’d need an oven if we were going to make bread properly. But we’d only need some water to make porridge from the wheat. It’s better if you let the wheat grains get wet first, so they will sprout overnight. Then, you mix them with water and boil it to make porridge the next day. The taste is a bit dull without salt, but Hoist is right. There’s enough in that field to feed the entire regiment for weeks. We wouldn’t have to go hungry again. Each man could carry his own supply of grain with him.”
The three of them, alongside another half-dozen men, had been on scouting duty. Sent on ahead of the rest of the regiment, they had encountered the wheat field first. Hoist had sent a runner back to notify Sergeant Bohlen of their find. Now, turning to look deeper into the forest, Dieter saw Bohlen and Gerhardt hurrying towards them.
“I don’t like it,” Gerhardt said, staring into the field. “It could be a trap.”
Several minutes had passed since his and Sergeant Bohlen’s arrival. In that time, Hoist had given them his report on the situation, leading to a discussion among the men present as to the best way forward.
In the meantime, the rest of the regiment had taken up a position a little way back from the edge of the field. Wary that there might be greenskins in the area, Sergeant Bohlen had ordered the rest of his men to wait in silence.
“Still, we can’t just bypass the field,” Hoist argued. “Think of all that food. Even without any scythes, Dieter thinks it wouldn’t take more than a couple of hours to harvest the grain. And we’d be set up for weeks. No more going hungry.”
“Better hungry than dead,” Gerhardt said. “By now, every village and farmstead in the region will have heard that the greenskins are coming. The people will have fled south. There’s no way a farmer would leave his crops behind like this. Either he’d harvest them and take the food with him before he left, or he’d burn them so the enemy couldn’t have them. He wouldn’t leave it ripening in the field like that.”
“Perhaps he didn’t have time,” Dieter said. “For all we know, the orcs may have already been through this area. Perhaps the farmer was forced to flee at short notice and he didn’t have time to set light to his fields.”
“Then, the greenskins would have done it for him,” Gerhardt said. “Whether it was orcs or goblins, any greenskins that came through here would have destroyed anything they couldn’t take with them. I don’t know whether they eat wheat, but if they don’t, they wouldn’t have left it behind for us to find it. After they’d finished stealing everything they wanted, they’d set fire to the rest. It’s the way they do things. What do you say, sergeant?”
All eyes turned to Sergeant Bohlen. The sergeant had been uncharacteristically quiet throughout the discussion. Looking at him, Dieter saw an unsettling degree of uncertainty in the sergeant’s eyes. It was there for only a moment before Bohlen covered himself by turning to gaze thoughtfully at the wheat field. He stared intently at the swaying crops as though considering the matter at length.
Abruptly Dieter realised the sergeant was unsure of his ground. Usually, this kind of decision-making was the task of the company commander. As a sergeant, it was Bohlen’s job to make sure that his commanding officer’s orders were enacted; he was not normally responsible for the fate of an entire regiment. In the command void left in the wake of the army’s defeat by the orcs, Bohlen had been forced into an unfamiliar position. Dieter could only hope he came to grips with his new responsibilities as quickly as possible.
“Gerhardt is right,” Bohlen said, at last. “The situation is suspicious. We’ll send scouts to check the edge of the forest all around the field to make sure there are no greenskins lying in wait. We’ll only enter the field itself if it turns out the surroundings are clear. Any questions?”
“It is a good plan, sergeant.” Rieger had been silent, but he suddenly spoke and pointed towards the field. “But I don’t think we’ll have to send out scouts to see if there are any greenskins around. Someone else has decided to do it the easy way—by offering themselves as bait.”
Following the direction of Rieger’s gesture, Dieter saw a party of men had emerged from the forest and entered the field. There were about forty or fifty of them. At first, seeing the ragged state of their clothing, he mistook them for a group of flagellants. Looking more closely, he realised they were soldiers, their uniforms much the worse for wear after weeks on the road. Although they wore the red and green livery of Hochland, he did not recognise their regiment. He could see them well enough, however, to spot the long barrels of their weapons. They were handgunners. Apparently, they had been as captivated at the presence of the wheat field, and its promise of an extended food supply, as the Scarlets.
Hurrying deeper into the field, the handgunners began to forage among the crops. Running their hands along the stalks of wheat, they started to pull away grain in great handfuls, depositing the golden treasure in the dozens of ammunition pouches that each man carried dangling from a bandolier across his chest.
“Fools,” Gerhardt said. “They obviously haven’t scouted the area—otherwise, they’d have found us here. Don’t they realise they could be wa
ndering right into an ambush?”
Even as Gerhardt spoke, a movement among the tall stalks of wheat indicated he was not wrong in his fears. A few hundred paces away from the handgunners, the wheat started moving violently, swaying in a direction at odds with the breeze. Too late, one of the handgunners noticed the movement. He called out to his fellows, even as a thin piercing note rose high on the wind.
It was some kind of signal. All around the handgunners, the wheat started moving. Catching a glimpse of green skin and furred bodies among the sea of wheat, Dieter realised the ambushers were goblin wolf riders.
The handgunners had started running, but the trap was already closing. Swift shapes furrowed towards them through the wheat like sharks in a golden sea.
“We have to help them!” Bohlen shouted.
Confronted by a situation of imminent danger, he was back to the sergeant of old. His voice rang out in clear commanding tones, bringing the rest of the regiment running to his call.
“Forward!” Drawing his sword, Bohlen stepped out into the field with Dieter and the others at his side. “Forward the 3rd! Forward the Scarlets!”
It was the first time Dieter had heard those words in many weeks. They thrilled him. For a moment, it was as though all the fears and anxieties of the last few weeks had fallen away. He was a soldier again. He was a Scarlet, not a member of a broken regiment, nor a coward running for his life.
Then, as he joined the others in charging across the wheat field, he remembered where he was. His regiment’s numbers were depleted. The last weeks had taken their toll. They were exhausted men. Worse, they were facing an unknown number of the enemy. For all they knew, there might be thousands of goblins hiding in the wheat field.
Somehow, it did not matter. From the instant he had heard the call to arms, he was a Scarlet once more. Though he might well face death, he would do his duty.
“Forward the 3rd!” he took up the cry with the other men of the regiment as they charged across the wheat field’s golden expanse. “Forward for Hochland! Forward the Scarlets!”
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