Strength of Swords (First Cohort Book 2)

by M. R. Anthony

  We left my office and spent the better part of three hours talking to those of the First Cohort who were still alive. Somehow they all had an idea of what was happening, even though I hadn’t opened my mouth to speak about it and I was sure none of my lieutenants had either. A good soldier always has his eyes and ears open for rumours – it’s what keeps him alive.

  By the time I’d chosen my companions and we’d gathered together our scant travelling supplies and provisions, it was gone noon. I’d found to my dismay that there were several more of the First Cohort still missing, beyond what I’d read on Lieutenant Craddock’s list. My men weren’t deserters – if they hadn’t returned to duty, I could only fear the worst for them. There was no opportunity to worry about it – that was Craddock’s job now.

  When I set out, accompanied by the twenty I’d chosen, it was with a greater determination than I’d had even when the recent fighting had been at its most intense.

  3

  The road from Gold to Blades was a long one. I called it a road, but from memory I knew that not all of the route would be paved and besides, it would be for the best if we kept ourselves away from well-travelled roads, with their prying eyes and mouths eager to tell tales.

  We left Gold without fanfare. We saw a few soldiers and some dazed-looking citizens as we wended our way through the fire-blackened streets towards the outskirts. None of the people dared to meet our eyes, as if they thought we were a threat to them. I didn’t think their behaviour strange, since I’d witnessed for myself what had happened to the town’s inhabitants and their homes.

  “I feel for them, Jon,” I said to Ploster as he walked beside me at the head of our short column.

  He knew the significance of what I said. We’d long since forgotten what it felt like to care for anyone apart from ourselves. It made the senseless killing easier and I think that most of us had managed to convince ourselves that caring was a weakness.

  “We all do, Captain,” he replied. “Look behind you at the men.”

  I spared a glance over my shoulder. The men were looking around them, taking in the fullness of the destruction. I knew that most of them had been fighting in these streets only a couple of days earlier, but I’d brought other men who’d formed part of our lady’s escort to the cities of Septic, Bunsen and Demox. These of the Cohort had only heard the tales or seen the devastation at night when they’d been out on patrol. Here, in the full light of day, the clarity of sight enhanced the other senses, making the burned wood smell sharper and the creaking of ruined structures sound more poignant.

  All of us were men hardened by a thousand different battles. In the hundreds of years we’d fought alongside each other, we’d always remained aloof when confronted by the results of war – particularly when we’d been the main players in the combat. As we left the town of Gold, I could see the light of recognition in many eyes. It was a recognition that this was not a good thing – that there were undesirable consequences for those who were left behind and that these people might never recover from what had happened to them.

  “It’s a good thing to see the realisation,” I said. “I speak as if it’s something that I have always known myself, but in truth the understanding is new to me as well.”

  “Not new, Captain,” he corrected me. “Newly rediscovered would be a more accurate term for it.”

  “Even dead men can feel empathy,” I said with a humourless laugh. “For some reason, I am happy that it is the case.”

  “The next stage is to search within yourself and find out if you hate that which you were,” he told me with his usual unerring accuracy for these things. Ploster was an intelligent man.

  “Have you managed to answer these questions yourself?” I asked. “How have we managed to fool ourselves for so long? We are neither of us stupid, nor are we easily swayed into acting in a manner that we do not agree with.”

  “I can’t hate myself,” said Ploster. “The man who does is a fool beyond measure. I might hate some of the things I have done, or I may wonder at why I have felt so little interest in the results of the conflicts I have taken part in, but I cannot be angry at myself for any of it. The argument may sound like a childish one, but I am me. I have no choice but to come to terms with myself.”

  “I think I am in agreement with you, Jon, as I often find to be the case.”

  “We are very alike in how we see the world and how we see ourselves within it, Tyrus,” he said.

  We were unable to pursue the conversation further at the time. We always marched fast and our speed had quickly taken us through the outskirts of Gold and onto a rough, cobbled road that wended south. I felt no love for the town, but it was jarring to leave it so suddenly. After all, it had been the scene of some of the most intense fighting that any of us had ever taken part in. As the last of the fire-damaged dwellings was left behind, I realised that I was leaving without knowing exactly how many of my men were still alive. For some reason, it felt like a failing of sorts.

  One positive from the recent conflict was that I felt as if I had gained a great amount of experience in the dirty arts of urban warfare. I had no desire to put my new skills into practise any time soon and it was just my luck that we were heading to Blades, where there was every chance we’d see some more fighting along the same lines. I’d always preferred the cleaner battles, where I could feel in control of events. I had to admit that I was a man who liked to be in control. Some men like chaos and the unexpected. I didn’t fear these things, but I did my best to mitigate their influence.

  “How long till we get there, Captain?” shouted Beamer, ten yards behind me and Ploster.

  “It might take us a month,” I called back. “Are your feet hurting you already? We’ve hardly covered a mile yet.”

  A few of the men laughed at Beamer’s expense, but he was not dissuaded from a reply. “I can walk for a month easy, Captain. I asked mostly out of concern for young Waxer over here. I can hear his left shoe creak every time he takes a stride and the sound of it is beginning to piss me off.”

  “Young Waxer?” laughed Nods. “He’s over seven thousand years old, I reckon. I’ve eaten prunes that were less withered than that old bastard’s face.”

  “You’ve not been eating prunes again have you, Nods?” asked another. “It’s just that I’m walking behind you. Should I drop back another thirty paces?”

  There was more good-natured banter and some jostling as they walked. The sound of it pleased me, since it indicated that they weren’t going to dwell on the sights or the memories of what had happened in Gold. Since we’d found the Saviour what seemed like years ago, but was nothing like so long, we’d changed. The Saviour brought hope to all and we of the First Cohort were no exception. The difference was that we didn’t hope for a life free from oppression – we hoped for forgiveness, without knowing exactly who or what we wanted this forgiveness from. We’d fight tooth and nail for it, until the last of us had been killed, crushed, buried and forgotten. I could only hope that by the time the last of us perished, there’d be someone left who would care enough for us that they would bury our bodies and allow us to rest in peace.

  We stayed on the road for the time being. The cobbles were rough but sturdy, since this road had always seen a lot of foot traffic. Warmont’s armies came to and from his remote outpost of Gold regularly. There was a thick coating of mud over the stone, evidence that many men had passed this way recently.

  “How long can we follow the road?” asked Ploster. We didn’t really want to find ourselves overtaking hundreds of the Duke’s men. I doubted they’d greet us with open arms and chance favoured Leerfar being somewhere amongst them. I didn’t want to risk our expedition before we’d even reached Blades.

  “We’ll be moving much faster than they are,” I said with confidence. “I’d say that we could reach their rear-guard on the fourth day.” We marched fast and we only stopped when it became too dark to travel in safety. We could have probably covered much of the journey at a run, bu
t I didn’t want to risk depleting our energy. Our bodies were hardy and possessed an almost unlimited stamina, but I had always been left with a concern that this energy needed to come from somewhere. Just because I didn’t know the source, it didn’t mean that I should always push us to the limit. It was something we could keep in reserve and we could test our extremes when it was important enough for us to do so.

  “What about their stragglers?” asked Ploster. “Do you think Leerfar will allow them to drift away as they march, or will she have them in a tight formation?”

  “Leerfar has a poor grasp of the tactical, but she’s no fool when it comes to discipline,” I said. “The problem for her is that her men left in disarray. She is fast enough to catch them up, assuming she has chosen to do so, but I think she’ll have problems marshalling them into a unit.”

  “In other words, we’ll need to keep an eye out.”

  “Indeed. I am sure that her officers have managed to draw most of the fleeing men together, but not before those with a mind to do so had drifted away.”

  “There aren’t any major towns between here and Blades for them to go to. Except for Furnace, and that’s almost next door to Blades.”

  “There are no towns, but there will be people. Farms and villages that no one has heard the name of. There’ll be places for soldiers to hide. But for the moment, we’ll stay on the road.”

  We maintained a good pace for the remainder of the day. The lands around Gold were hilly, though nothing close to mountainous. Whoever had built the road had tried to wend it along the valley floors, in order that it be as level as possible. In many cases this hadn’t been possible, and the road went over many of the hills in our way. These hills were hardly more than a few hundred feet in height, but from the tops of some, you could see for many miles around.

  “More hills,” grunted Ploster. “But we’re too far from the sea to see the coast.”

  “Hundreds of miles of hills lie before us,” I said. “I think that all of our boots will be creaking by the time we reach Blades.”

  Neither of us mentioned that we’d not travelled so far that we were unable to see the pall of smoke to the north-west, which gave away the location of the town we’d just left. We were glad to look at the unspoiled countryside for a change. I don’t think there was an aesthete amongst us, but not even the hardest of hearts can truly say that they don’t feel something when they look at the rough beauty of an untamed landscape.

  The Duke’s lands were mostly poor, at least in comparison to some of the others in the Empire. I’d been to places where there was mile after mile of flat, beautifully-cultivated farmland, covered in row upon row of golden wheat or barley. Sometimes it felt as though you could walk for a week and not see anything other than these vast farmlands. Here, so far to the west, the ground was not so fertile, the sun did not shine so brightly and the land was not so flat. That is not to say that farming was a rarity in the Dukedom, since there were farms almost everywhere that you travelled, but the crops were scraggy and stunted. Many of the hillsides were too steep for easy ploughing and these areas were given over to grazing. A man had once told me that you can feed ten times as many people with an acre of wheat as you can with an acre of cattle. Perhaps that was why the population of Warmont’s lands grew so slowly. That and the constant battles which killed huge numbers of his rebellious people.

  We stopped for the night a good distance to one side of the road, even though it took us almost half an hour to reach a place I felt comfortable with us stopping. We pitched our ancient, rough tents and set a watch. When the entire Cohort travelled, I permitted myself the luxury of a larger tent. Not because I had ideas that I was superior to my men, but I did occasionally need to host guests or visitors in order to discuss tactics and strategies, none of which would have been possible in the single-man tent I had with me for this trip.

  We clustered around a single campfire and talked. There’d been no other buildings visible when we’d stopped, so I felt safe enough with this small light to illuminate our faces as we picked at the dried meat and biscuits in our packs.

  “Did this stuff ever taste like anything other than shit? Even when we were a bit more alive?” asked Maims. He was one of Corporal Grief’s assistants. I couldn’t allow Grief to come with us, but I thought we might have some use for a man who knew how to use a needle. In spite of his inappropriate name, Maims was possessed with a surprising finesse when it came to damaged flesh and smashed bones.

  “I’m surprised any of us are alive, with you butchering us every time we take a sword thrust in the leg,” said Scrinch, without any fear that he’d receive less-than-perfect attention next time he took an injury.

  “I’ll sew your lips shut when you’re asleep if you’re not careful,” warned Maims with humour. “And your hand to your cock.”

  “I’m glad mine’s not withered and fallen off,” said Grids. “I’ve still got hopes of marrying a nice young lady somewhere.”

  “What’re you going to tell her when she rests her head on your chest and can’t hear a heartbeat?” asked Beamer. It was a common joke amongst the men that they intended to get married. Sometimes you’ve got to joke about the things you might want, but which you know will never happen.

  “I’ll just tell her she’s gone deaf, that’s all,” replied Grids.

  “She’d have to be deaf to put up with your complaining.”

  “And blind to put up with his looks.”

  “Maybe you should set your sights on a nice old lady, instead of a nice young lady, eh?”

  “Piss off. I’m having me that young wife. You see if I don’t.”

  “Grow yourself a lovely beard like Corporal Ploster over there. You’ll be batting them away like flies when you’ve got such a fine covering over your chin.”

  I saw Ploster shake his head in mock disgust as he found himself pulled into the discussion. Caught off guard, all he could utter was an earthy retort, which immediately told everyone that he was unable to defend himself through wit, and resulted in him suffering a barrage of friendly abuse. I did enjoy the campfire banter in modest doses. Even though I sometimes saw myself as an old curmudgeon, there was still a young man buried in there somewhere, deep down.

  Soon, the carefree façade faded away and one of the men who had not taken part in the fight for Gold asked for some details.

  “Was it as bad as I hear?” asked Chunter.

  “All that and more,” said Beamer. He was occasionally prone to melodrama, but his expression told of his seriousness. “It made Xoj-Fal the Wyrm look like a fight against two hundred training ground dummies.”

  “Yeah,” said Bolt. “It was as dirty a fight as I can remember. I thought for a time that it would be the end for us all. The bastards just never seemed to stop coming, no matter how many of them we killed. Isn’t that right, Captain?”

  “That’s the way it was, Bolt. They didn’t enjoy it any more than we did, though. Lots of new lads amongst them,” I replied.

  “I never did enjoy killing the new lads,” said Hacker. He’d missed the fighting as well. “Come to think of it, I’m not sure I ever enjoyed killing the old hands either.” He looked up, startled at the realisation and scared that he might be the target of derision for his confession. No one mocked what he’d said.

  “Think yourself lucky you went off to Septic with our lady, then,” said Waxer. “There were old hands and new hands on every street corner in Gold. I reckon the Captain must have killed fifty of them himself.”

  I didn’t know how many I’d killed. I never kept count – I’d never wanted to. It might have been fifty, it might have been more or fewer. Even if I’d killed a hundred, it wouldn’t have changed the fact that we’d lost.

  “You know something?” I asked the men before me. “Just when I thought my squad was going to get cut down, I felt as if time itself were standing still for me. I looked into the eyes of a man who wanted to kill me and I saw that he didn’t want to die. He wanted to go home t
o his wife and children and I felt no hatred for him. There’re only two men I want to kill now, though I’ll stick my sword into anyone else who gets in my way.”

  “The Duke and the Emperor,” said Eyeball. “You set your sights high, don’t you, Captain?”

  “Until those two are dead, this will never end,” I told them. “And we can prepare for another two hundred years of killing. I don’t think any of us want that anymore.”

  A few of the men shook their heads in agreement. I think we’d all drank our fill of death.

  “So what happened to him, Captain?” asked Nods. “That man you looked at when you thought you were going to die.”

  “I killed him,” I replied with sadness.

  “Anyone got any Grask?” asked someone suddenly. “I could do with a drink.”

  “I’d like to say we’ve brought some with us, but we haven’t,” said Ploster. “We’ll drink our toast when we reach Blades.”

  “Not in a tavern though, eh?” asked Bolt. “We’ll stand out like a sore thumb.”

  “Not all of us,” I said with a smile. All of the men had tattoos of some sort on their body, many of them covering their faces too. It made us easy to spot on the battlefield, which was something I encouraged, but it also made us easier to identify in the places we visited. That wasn’t always a useful thing. For this trip, I’d made sure to pick several men whose tattoos didn’t stretch above their necks. We might need them if we had to venture out in the daytime without raising too many questions.

  The conversation went on for a time. None of us really needed to sleep anymore, except out of habit. Even though I didn’t specifically benefit from sleep, I did find the opportunity to close my eyes and pursue my own thoughts to be a relaxing one. Eventually, I rose and went to my tent, whilst the other men drifted away to their own. I’d rolled out a thick blanket over the dry, lumpy grass and lay back gratefully on it. I dare say that to a city man, this would have been the most uncomfortable bed he’d ever have slept upon, but to me it was no hardship to lie on it and pass a few hours in comparative solitude.