by Dragon Lance
Even in these northern climes, though, summer was ending. That was as much a reason for marching as any. There was no more time for napping in indolent heat and tramping to the nearby lake to fish and swim. Already, such pastimes had softened the soldiers, made them more like farm boys than conquerors.
Vinas led Courage along the straight, flat rows of wheat, letting the proud steed occasionally snap a few grains to crunch as they passed. Gaias limped along next to him without a mount. Despite a wounded hamstring, the man refused to ride a horse – unwilling to “condemn another noble beast to death.” Nor would he quit the front ranks to ride in a wagon. He wanted to remain beside his commander, providing counsel.
“I don’t like it,” muttered Vinas. He gestured about at the countryside of early autumn.
“What don’t you like about it?” Gaias asked, a twinkle beneath gray eyebrows. “Are the fields too lush? Is the sky too blue? Is the sun too bright?”
Vinas glanced upward at the cloudless sky, occupied by only a friendly summer sun and the flocks of Ergothian griffons, watching for enemies.
“All of that, and more,” Vinas said. “I feel like we’ve passed into some fairy realm. We are being lulled by a beautiful and lethal dream. Look at the men. Look at them!”
Gaias didn’t – he was too busy hobbling along – but Vinas did.
The soldiers did not march in columns or rows, but in an undisciplined mass. One of the colonels with a gifted voice had started leading his boys in marching songs. When those ran out, he had switched to tavern tunes, and the company careered across the road as if drunk. Others whistled. Half the men had stems of grass hanging from their teeth. Some even walked barefoot on the soft, cool grass.
Vinas snarled, “They aren’t ready to fight. Not one of them has got a killing heart left.”
“Well,” volunteered Titus unhelpfully, strolling along behind the warriors, “it’s your job to put hatred and fear in them. Go back and take one of the barefoot ones, one of the singers and one of the whistlers, and hang them. That’ll whip the others into line.”
Vinas shook his head. “Exactly. That’s what I’d have to do.”
Titus strode up beside them, taking one step for each of their two. “Why whip them in line? There’s not an army between here and the castle. Let them stroll awhile. We’ll have plenty of fear and hatred up the road a little.”
“Even if there was a less drastic way, I’m not sure I’d do anything right now,” Vinas said, “I just don’t have the heart for it anymore....”
“Or, maybe, you do have the heart, once again,” Titus observed.
As they neared the end of a tall field of wheat, Vinas noticed a farmer leaning on a fieldstone wall. The man smoked a pipe and squinted at them in the bright sun. He seemed to be interested in the army, amused even, but not the slightest bit afraid.
“Ho, there!” Vinas called, his hand ready beside his sword. “What news?”
The farmer’s face, the color and texture of supple leather, quirked for a moment. He thoughtfully spit and said, “Wheat’s done good this year.”
Vinas and Gaias traded incredulous glances. They had almost reached the man, whose gray-streaked black hair looked glossy like a horse’s tail. Vinas said, “Do you know who we are?”
The farmer tapped out the bowl of his pipe and used a chestnut-colored fingertip to tamp some more tobacco in place. “I suspect you’re that army everybody’s been saying is coming.”
With a hand signal, Vinas halted the army. The soldiers, singing or talking or chewing, were slow to respond. They bunched up as though all four thousand of them were listening in on the conversation.
“We’re from Ergoth,” Vinas explained. “We’ve come to take back the keep.”
The farmer spent a moment relighting his pipe, then said, “I figured you boys’d be coming. Too good to last.”
Seizing on this first hint of animosity, if not treason, Vinas said, “So, you would rather we’d stayed away?”
The farmer blinked as he pondered that statement. He let out two big bluish puffs of smoke, and said, “If you mean would I rather feed my family than starve them, yes, I suppose I would.”
Despite a warning look from Gaias, and despite the strong sense that in fact all four thousand men were listening, Vinas pressed, “And the other farmers hereabouts – they also would rather be ruled from Vingaard than from Daltigoth?”
“Look, Captain —”
“Commander,” Vinas corrected.
“— we don’t care who’s ruling us as long as we get a fair shake, as long as we aren’t getting robbed and cheated and sold and taxed and stomped every which way to Gileadai. I don’t know nothing about rulers and armies and all that. I know just about raising wheat and pigs and sons and daughters, and all I know is this season, ever since the ones in the castle said we’re free, all that raising has been going lots better.”
The response poised on Vinas’s tongue dissolved away into a bitter powder. He only stood there, mouth hanging open.
“Now, you’re the one who knows about rulers and armies, which is why you’re here, and why you’re going to take back that keep. That’s all fine. You’ve got to do what you know about. All I’m saying is I hope when it’s you on that throne or whatever they have in there, that my wheat’s not going to be burned away or stolen from me and my kids aren’t going to be out poaching on royal lands and shot to death just because they are tired of being hungry all the time. That’s all.”
Vinas was barely able to prevent himself from doing a double take in front of his men. That, in some small way, was a victory. So was closing his mouth with a little dignity. Without another word, he signaled his army to proceed with the march.
As the troops filed quietly by, more than one of the soldiers gave the farmer a polite nod. He, stolidly smoking his pipe, returned the gesture.
*
One Week Hence, 30 Hiddumont, 1199 Age of Light
One fine, cold autumn morning, the three armies of Ergoth marched onto the plains that surrounded Vingaard Keep.
There had been a few scuffles en route; not all the residents were as obliging as the first farmer. The attacks, though, had amounted to no more than sporadic ambushes by tiny militia groups. These “patriots” now adorned gibbets on the river roads leading to the keep.
The fortification was more than a single keep. It included a garrison of one thousand men; the oldest chapel to Mishakal in western Ansalon; the largest grain mill in the area; a stockyard, abattoir, and smokehouse (which locals claimed held one hundred and fifty sides of beef and two hundred head of living cattle); a winery; and the palace residence of Vingaard’s current ruler – Antonias Leprus, scion of a long and unremarkable senatorial family. Put simply, the place was well-defended, and even better stocked.
“King” Antonias had apparently decided against sending even a single one of his thousand warriors out to parley with Commander Solamnus and his sixteen thousand. It was just as well. Ergoth would accept nothing short of unconditional surrender, and Commander Solamnus felt in the mood for a good execution. Antonias seemed to sense all of this. Though not a military man, he knew enough to let his walls keep the enemy out, while his own men were safely sequestered within.
The futile annoyance of militia attacks ceased once the castle was in sight. From there on, the soldiers had marched in grim, silent menace down the main thoroughfares, past shuttered windows and barred and bolted doors. In keeping with the old saying, each man in Vingaard treated his home as a castle. As long as the keep stood, the houses – public and private – would need to be captured one by one.
There would be time for that. Vinas planned a siege, not a storming. Not yet. He would send word to Daltigoth that the rebels were surrounded, and ask whether to starve them out, assault the defenses, or both. Until he had verifiable word back from the emperor, he would only wait. As he had said to Gaias, he had the heart for nothing else. As Gaias did not say back, neither did his men.
In time, the armies entirely encircled the keep, save for the rivers, of course, which were lined with marksmen. It was then that Antonias chose to address Vinas from the wall.
“Greetings, Countryman!” shouted the rebel lord, as though in welcome. He had long, dark hair that fell in ringlets about his head and a chiseled mustache and beard, worn in the style of the distant Istarians. He was a freethinking dandy, a rebel in more ways than one. “What brings you to Vingaard?”
“High treason,” Vinas responded.
“Oh,” said Antonias, and he paused for a sip from the wineglass he held, “that.”
“Yes, that, Senator,” Vinas said evenly.
Antonias smiled. “I always liked the sound of that title – senator. It’s so republican. Still, lately the folk hereabouts have been calling me king.”
“That, too, will be corrected,” Vinas said ominously.
Antonias sniffed. “It’s going to be a siege, then, is it?”
“Until men are coming up from holes in your cellars and climbing ladders over your battlements and rushing through breaches caused by siege engines – yes, until then, you can consider this a siege.”
“Well, then,” Antonias said, resuming his former tone of cheer, “settle in. You’ll find this a gracious land, not nearly as frigid in winter as your Daltigoth. If you ask nicely and promise to pay the standard fares, you may even coax some of the better pubs and inns to open. I’m afraid all the ransomable persons are already in the castle, here, along with the very best drama and dance troupes in Ansalon. The town of Vingaard, however, has plenty of folk musicians who might entertain —”
“The keep of Vingaard has plenty of gall to act so unconcerned in the face of sixteen thousand troops, including a company of griffon riders and another of war wizards, as well as an elite division of escalade forces —”
“It is no act,” interrupted Antonias lightly. “We are unconcerned. We have enough provisions to keep us comfortable for five years. We have our own war wizards, whose spells will keep you and your eagle-lions well enough away for that same period of time. And sapping into granite is hard work, I assure you. You see, we have more than enough time to wait for you to decide that the conquest on which you are bent is ill-considered, at best, and perhaps even demonic.”
He paused for a response, but Vinas said nothing.
“Thank you for this parley,” said Antonias. “I must admit I have heard some amazing stories about the ruthless brutality of the great Vinas Solamnus, and so far, you have lived up to my expectations.”
With that, the so-called king turned and disappeared among the battlements, leaving Vinas standing and staring toward a darkening sky.
*
That night, Commander Solamnus did not host a lighthearted gathering of his advisors. His staffers did not assemble to discuss the imperial favors sure to be granted.
Despite the hubbub among the fighting men, the tent of Commander Solamnus was quiet. The only sound in it came from the scratch of a pen on vellum. The commander himself sat beside the map table and labored over a message to the emperor.
Vinas glanced away from the page and the twisted black lines that coiled across it. He seemed to stare straight through the slowly wafting canvas of the tent, eyes focused on some distant, unattainable object.
The camp chair creaked as he leaned heavily back into it. Lifting the letter up to his eyes, he read what he had written so far:
From Vinas Solamnus,
Commander of the Armies of Ergoth,
To His Majesty, Emann Quisling,
Emperor of Ergoth.
Greetings,
We have them. I write to you from our encampment surrounding Vingaard Keep. We have won this position with the loss of two thousand of our troops. The remaining sixteen thousand will be more than enough to hold this siege, even to win a storming escalade of the walls. Given the possibility of the latter, I will assign teams of engineers to build siege engines. I await your orders to attack.
That’s where he had stopped writing. He did not need orders to attack. Vinas had been granted full discretion with the army. If he had commanded it, his armies would have thrown themselves against the walls the moment they gained the Vingaard plains. Perhaps this very night then, he would have been writing a very different letter from the blood-drenched throne of the self-styled king. It would have been a costly offensive, but by sheer force of numbers he could have taken the keep.
Such a precipitous attack would have been very wasteful of men. It was a good enough excuse to delay. In fact, Commander Solamnus hoped not to attack now or ever.
A sudden memory took hold of him:
He sat in the velvet safety of his father’s lap, a gilded storybook lying open on his own knees. Father’s voice, deep and mystical, tolled like a carillon in his ears. He heard no words, only felt the deep resonances of the illuminated manuscript: gold, red, blue, and green figures climbing the trellis of sentences.
There, in a margin the exact width of his father’s thumb, was a whole forest. The forest held a noble huntsman in a rose-colored cape. He stood, his feet pinned by the thumb, his hands patiently and expertly fitting a final arrow into his bow.
The rest of the huntsman’s arrows were deep in a wild boar. The beast was cornered at last. He could barely stand to charge. The huntsman had chased him through a riot of pages already, a trail Vinas saw again with a mere riffle of his child’s hand.
The boy’s other hand clamped down over his father’s thumb. “Enough,” Vinas said.
This was where the story ended. Only once had his father read what followed, how the boar with his last breath revealed himself to be the Enchanter of Gherigoth, the sorcerer whose spells had guarded the wondrous city of old; how the huntsman stayed his last arrow for a moment before knowing pity for the dying sorcerer; how the last arrow met the last breath and the boar perished, taking enchanted Gherigoth down into the underworld.
Vinas clutched his father’s thumb. The tolling of words faded away to silence. The boy drew the page closed.
The child wondered again, as he had so many times before, how a great huntsman could slay the ancient sorcerer. “How can a man so quickly and accidentally become a villain?”
“The fact that you even wonder means you are not a villain,” came a voice. The sound was so gentle and familiar, so natural, it seemed a part of Vinas’s remembrance.
Suddenly, he noticed Luccia sitting across the table from him. Her freckled face was mud-smudged and young in the dim glow of his lantern, as it had looked when first they had tried to join this damnable army. “At least not yet, Commander.” Luccia tried out a smile, but the truth of these last words soured her expression.
“Would you like to come in, Colonel Luccia?” he chided.
“When does the victory celebration begin?” she asked uncomfortably.
He tossed the vellum aside. “As soon as we have won,” he replied. “Perhaps never.”
At that, she laughed, a genuine laugh. “You’re Vinas Solamnus. You can’t help winning this battle.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of. I will win, even if it costs me everything.”
Luccia breathed deeply. “I didn’t come here to talk about Vingaard —”
“Then, what?” he asked. “What else is there?”
She looked down, and seemed about to leave. After a visible exertion of will, she said, “There is one long siege you have never chosen to end, one fortress you have always held but never stormed.” She looked meaningfully at him. “And, I must say, you’ve starved me out. I’d like to discuss terms of surrender.”
He didn’t seem to hear. His sight was again upon that distant, unattainable goal.
Luccia shrugged, her confession bringing a flush to her face. Hoping to chase the embarrassment away, she bluffed, “I just thought seeing as we suddenly have so much time on our hands —”
“Luce, I’m sorry,” Vinas broke in distractedly. “I’m not going to be good company tonight. I guess I’d j
ust rather be alone right now.”
She nodded, pursed her lips, then nodded again.
“You can be alone as long as you want. Perhaps forever.”
And she was gone.
*
Four Months Hence, 12 Rannmont, 1200 Age of Light
The scene was nearly the same. Commander Solamnus was slouched in the same camp chair, before the same map table. In the depths of the snowy winter, he wore a wolf pelt bunched up around cold-reddened ears. Vinas’s breath ghosted out golden from his full brown beard.
That golden mist merged with Luccia’s breaths. She sat beside him now, for sake of warmth.
The letter Vinas perused this time was not his own, but came from the emperor:
From His Highness, Emann Quisling,
Emperor of Ergoth,
To Vinas Solamnus,
Commander of the Armies of Ergoth.
Greetings,
I am pleased with the progress of the siege. With two feet of snow and frost down to three feet, I’m sure the buggers have no idea you are so near to sapping beneath the moat. The war wizard spells should make quick work of the granite bedrock. The towers should do well crossing the frozen moat. Your planning has been perfect to the last detail.
Be sure to bring me the head of that traitorous “King Antonias.” Have one of the wizards preserve it. Perhaps, it could even be kept magically alive. I’ve planned to have it stuffed and mounted among my other hunting trophies, but how much more fun if it is alive and gagged for eternity, eyes darting hatefully at me whenever I enter the room!
As to provisions, you’ve had more than enough. Let the men buy their own food in the taverns. Which brings me to the latest pay caravan. I’ve sent full pay only to the engineers, sappers, and officers. They are the only ones working. If the rest haven’t enough money to buy food, let them wash dishes for it. They’ve got the time to.
On a related note, do not discourage the rank and file from getting children with these Vingaard wenches. A woman can rule a man if all that joins them is their mutual appetite. Once a child is made, though, it is the man that rules. Then the woman needs him. What better way to win the peasants back to the empire than by plowing their women with our seed?
