by Robert Adams
"Oh, I used to lose track of time, forget the exact date, even, when I was in med school, but even then there were always television and newspapers and . . . Oh, God, newspapers, books . . . the only two books in this whole place, I think, are owned by those two strong-arm nuns, and they're both in Church Latin and nothing but a mishmash of damn superstitious, Christian religious shit, anyway, and they're so hard to read—not printed, written in weird letters . . . ."
"Letter? Written? Oh, God, I think . . . it looks exactly like pen, ball-point pen . . . ballpoint pen, home . . . ."
On the next sheet of legal pad, the letter continued.
* * * *
Eventually, the track on which I had been proceeding forked—one fork going due west and the other roughly southwest, I thought at the time. However, that night when I saw the positions of the stars, I knew that I was headed almost due south. This track, I soon discovered, had seen few if any other travelers in years and was much overgrown, but then I was just as pleased, since I had been losing time on each occasion I had had to conceal myself from such persons along the way.
After two days more, I fetched up at a ruined hamlet beside a broad, swift river. There was no recent trace of man in the place, I quickly discovered, the crumbling, wattle-and-daub habitations by then giving lair only to small vermin, all the area long since stripped clean of anything of use or value. However, I found some tiny garden patches which had survived, reseeding themselves without the aid of man, over the years, and from these I was able to gather enough greens and root vegetables to truly fill my shrunken belly for the first time in years, that night. I established myself in the least dilapidated of the still-standing shanties, one in which the field-stone hearth still would draw properly and which even retained part of a roof of moldy, overgrown thatch.
After so long a time of unceasing privation, suffering, and damp, aching cold, that tiny hovel seemed nirvana to me. I ever was accurate with cast stones, and this talent served me well, depleting the ranks of hares, squirrels, and the larger wood rats. I slew a viper with my sword and dined on his tender white flesh, and on another day I chased an otter away from a fish he had brought out onto the riverbank and gorged on fat, rich salmon that night, before I rolled myself into my warm tartan and slept full-bellied and free and contented on my bed of springy conifer tips bathed in the dry warmth radiated by the coals of my fire.
But that blissful idyll could not long last, of course. The available plant foods were limited in quantity and the small beasts either departed the area or became so wary that my stones more frequently missed them than not. It at length became obvious that were I not to starve, I must find habitations of men, wherein I might trade for food or, if I was driven to such, take it by force. I might have followed the bank of the river, but I instead elected to cross it, thus to still be bound southward.
But there was no bridge, of course, not even a ford, and the water was deep and wide and the current swift. Although the rotted, atilt piles of a dock of some sort still stood in the shallows, there was no trace of any boat, so I built a makeshift raft on which to carry my sword and baldric, targe, wallet, brogues, and bonnet, hampered in this effort by lack of any sort of real rope or thongs with which to secure the odd bits of warped lumber and green saplings which were my only available materials. Finally, I stripped bark from some of the larger trees and twisted it into a very inferior sort of twine, hoping that it would suffice.
Alas, it did not. The raft came apart in midstream, and although I was able to grab my wallet and bonnet, all else not fastened to my swimming body was lost to me. The current in the main channel was much fiercer than I had guessed, and so I finally fetched up so far downstream that it took me more than two days to work my way through the trackless waste back up to the spot just opposite my original point of entry. There were piles in the shallows there, too, and a good-sized rowboat was drawn up half out of the river, but it was so rotted that the wood crumbled at the touch.
A tiny ruined and deserted hamlet was clustered up the bank from this landing, too, just as on the opposite bank, and I stayed in it until I had exhausted the food resources, then set out along a weedy, overgrown track that meandered southeast—barefoot, with only a dirk, a small knife, a brass razor, a torn shirt, a faded tartan with its belt, wallet, and bonnet to my name, plus a stout staff which had recently been a sapling. Better for me, alas, had I been mother-naked.
The brutal people who inhabit that portion of the Kingdom of Scotland, I discovered to my pain and sorrow, despise and abominate all those of the Highlands and Islands; my attire was that of just those areas, of course, the sept of the tartan identifying the wearer as come of one of the most hated ilks, Mac Ghillie Eoin, a sept of the Mac Leans of the Western Isles, such as had raided and ravaged parts of the Lowlands from time immemorial.
I knew myself to be in the Lowlands, of course, but I had no knowledge at all of my precise location, and it was not until much later that I even realized that the river I had swum had been the River Clyde. A few days farther along the winding track, which had clearly seen little if any use in years, I came into yet another deserted hamlet, this one a bit larger than had been those back beside the river. Here the houses were mostly not so ruined and the small gardens had volunteered more vegetables, thus attracting more small game beasts, and so I was able to stop there for some weeks.
Just the same as the previous two in which I had halted, this one seemed to be utterly devoid of artifacts, those not missing altogether having rotted into uselessness. However, on one occasion, while I was rooting among the sagging thatch of a roof in search of still-dry material to use for freshening my bed, what should come tumbling out but a tiny basket of wicker containing a rotted bag of rawhide and, inside it, a dozen or so copper coins and three small, well-clipped ones of silver. Oh, would that I never had found that cursed money, Ms. Foster.
* * * *
With the Italian-Northern European Faction solidly mounted in the saddle, the reins firmly in hand, with the Spanish-Moorish Faction broken, shattered of any real power, all of their armed forces either become dust or having fled as fugitives the peninsula of Italy and the island of Sicily, Holy Roman Emperor Egon and his victorious hosts began to slowly, gradually withdraw from the ravaged, war-torn, but now unthreatened papal and allied states, bound for the Alpine passes which the melting snows had once more opened for passage.
Despite the fact that a large minority of the Imperial Army had consisted of mercenaries hired from all over Europe, and had marched and fought the length and width of the Italian peninsula—besieging, overawing, defeating field forces, subduing principalities of many and varying sizes, and, at last, pursuing, hunting, harrying, hounding the scattered remnants of the might of the Spanish-Moorish Faction and their allies and mercenaries into the sea or unto death—Emperor Egon and his noble officers had seen to it that it had been for the time and the place a relatively clean, minimally destructive war.
Himself a young, vital man, though a veteran of many a hard-fought battle and long, grueling campaign as an officer of mercenary horse under the command of his justly famous uncle, Reichsherzog Wolfgang, who was widely renowned as a great captain in the classic mold, the Emperor had laid down firm law to his mercenaries and vassals at the very outset, whilst still his huge, conglomerate army was camped in the southerly foothills of the Alps, in the lands of his client state, Savoy.
"Gentlemen, captains, we are come south to right wrongs, not to wreak more woe upon those not our enemies. We, personally, would much liefer be biding back at our Eagle Palace with our Empress and children than riding long, dusty, weary miles every day, then laying our sore, tired body down in the discomfort and reeking, fetid noisomeness of a military camp every night. But are we to not see our papacy pass irrevocably under the evil control of men whose concepts are not those of true religion but of grasping for more and more temporal power to the detriment of emperor, kings, archdukes, dukes, marquises, counts, barons, and even sim
ple freiherren, we suppose, then a firm stroke must be made and we are the only available power to strike that blow."
"Nonetheless, you all and all your men, down to the very lowliest muleteer, must understand: We are not come with this host of ours to Italy as conquerors or would-be conquerors of all the lands, cities, castles, and peoples. No, we are come rather to purge out the elements inimical to the well-being of our Church, her properties and cities and loyal allies. For years already now, they have been ravaged and looted and intimidated and abused by the armed might of those who are their foes and ours and we will not see our own force add to their woes by commission of similar outrages. Let that be abundantly clear to all who march under our banner."
"Casual looting, murder, and rape along the line-of-march will not be tolerated under any circumstances, for our baggage trains are long and complete and contain all the necessities, including plenty of strong rope for hanging transgressors against our stated wishes. If any come up with a new horse, fat pigs or fowls, fancy clothing or jewelry, he had better have a bill of sale or witnesses—a goodly number of them and all unimpeachable, too—or, noble, gentle, or common, he may well find himself dancing a jig upon the tightrope. Nor will it be advisable for any to make to gull us, for we have been long a soldier and in command of soldiers in foreign lands, we know well and of old every hoary trick and stratagem, and any who might think he has chanced upon a new one with which to hoodwink us might recall before so doing that although death is invariably quick, the approach to it can be made exceeding long and hideously unpleasant; we are certain that our Kalmyk bodyguards could show some rare skill in prolonging an execution if given their head in the matter."
"With regard to intakings, now: Every walled place, public or private, will be invited to yield, to contribute at least a token force to our numbers and cause as indication of goodwill. Those who do so are thenceforth our friends and there will be no depredations of any of their possessions or vassals. Those who do not . . . well, that is a horse of an entirely different color. Defiers will be invested then and there; our siege train is large, complete, and well supplied, and we have hired on some of the most accomplished sappers in all of Europe, so we doubt us that any city, any castle, will long stand against our might. All treating of any nature, however, must always be done prior to investment. Once any place has been invested, even if it then freely surrenders, it will be considered to have been taken by storm and will suffer accordingly."
"But ordained sacks must still be done according to our standards. There is to be no arson, and fires started by accident or prior bombardment must be immediately extinguished. Unless defended by armed might, residences are not to be slighted or unduly damaged to no account. Churches, church properties, churchmen and -women are inviolable under any conditions and the right of sanctuary will be assiduously honored on pain of death. Otherwise,"—he showed his strong, white teeth in a wolfish grin—"it can be a normal sack, with all which that implies. As all of you know, or should know, to be especially cruel, brutal, in the first few such things on a campaign projected to be a long one will, if some of the sacked are allowed to escape into the countryside, either terrify the foe still to be met or harden him to meet us in the field rather than exposing his family to such. This will benefit us, for we are certain that there presently exists no armed force in all of Italy which could stand against our might and emerge the victor."
"There is one thing to be point out, however. You all are most certainly aware that at least three big-name slave buyers are come already to follow our arms into Italy, and more are certain to gather. There will be absolutely no kidnappings of peasants for sale to them by anyone. However, there is no such protection afforded the common, non-ransomable inhabitants of places which chance to fall by storm, so you would be well advised to caution your fighters that the throat they cut for sport in a sack might, if left whole, have added a bit of weight to their purses, even if poor as a church mouse; and before they merrily bash in the heads of the brats of the women they are enjoying, they might check to see how much the slave dealers are paying for them . . . the women, too, for that matter."
The young Emperor's assessment of the qualities of the forces opposing him had been accurate; his well-organized, well-balanced army had never been defeated in any major battle. Also, after some notable, well-publicized intakings of walled places held by the Spanish-Moorish Faction or their supporters, no other cities or towns and precious few castle-fortresses had defied him; many had, indeed, sent delegations spurring hard to meet his vanguard as far as possible from environs of their walls to offer him conditional surrender and so escape siege, bombardment, slaughter, rape, pillage, torture, and slavery.
The efforts of King Giovanni IX of Naples, who had assembled a small but tough army and pushed up from the south to take the much beleaguered Spanish-Moorish Faction's reduced host in the rear, had been sincerely appreciated by Egon, but not at all necessary. The three significant meetings of real armies in the field had all taken place at or near rivers and were remembered by the names of those waterways—Tiber, Ofanto, Agri. All three were great, crashing battles in the grand tradition, and in them, Emperor Egon showed all the world that despite his relatively young age, he had learned well from his uncle and other military mentors.
The only encounter which might have been a close contest ceased to be such when the strong vanguard of the Neapolitan Army smote the Spanish-Moorish Army and its mercenaries in the rear, burned their wagon-laager, looted their camp, captured their baggage and siege train, then drove on to strike the rear of the already hotly engaged battle line itself. What might have been a decided defeat for the Spanish-Moorish Faction was thus transformed into an utter rout of their largest, best-equipped army and opened the way for Egon to Rome. The pursuit of the vanquished was long, vicious, merciless, and unremitting. Nonetheless, enough escaped to form with their more southerly-ranging counterparts a second army.
This one was brought to open battle one stifling August day near to the banks of the Ofanto River. Egon cleverly tricked them into leaving a well-drawn and well-placed line of battle to attack an apparently confused and ill-placed enemy, then butchered them in detail. The murderous crossfire of cunningly concealed light cannon decimated the attack while still it was far from the now-firm lines, his arquebusiers—employing the new, multi-shot weapons developed in England during the calamitous attempts to subdue that land by the late and unlamented Pope Abdul—poured fourteen volleys of thumb-thick leaden balls into the attackers, and then, when they had retired behind the ranks of pikemen, ranks parted all along the battle line to reveal the grinning mouths of larger field guns, all loaded to almost the muzzle-bands with grape and langrage and carcasses filled with arquebus and caliver balls.
King Giovanni, by choice in command of the horse for this battle, had been nibbling at the flanks and rear of the attackers with his light horse, his heavy horse being in the midst of their own running battle against their opposite numbers of the foe. Hard on the heels of the incredibly sanguineous impact of the heavy-gun volley, he sent his reserve horse hard against the right flank of the shaken line of attackers, even as the Imperial foot countercharged with pike, sword, axe, and pole weapons their battered and bemused enemy. Most of the survivors of this engagement were those who had been so wise or so cowardly as to flee prior to the worst of the carnage.
The battle on the Agri had been little more than the valiant but vain attempt of a scratch force of the Spanish-Moorish Faction to hold back the advance of the Imperial Army and its now-legion force of new allies long enough for the bulk of the remaining faction to escape across the strait to Messina, through a gantlet of Genoan, Imperial, and other Italian Faction warships and galleys. These men fought hard, fought well, from carefully prepared and skillfully selected positions, and for the first time in an open battle of this campaign, the young Emperor had the blood banner uncased and borne the length of the lines, where all could see it and understand its grim message: no q
uarter, kill them all to the last man, succor no wounded, take no prisoners. No single man of any rank had lived of that defensive force when at last their vastly superior enemies had passed over the deathly-silent earthworks and moved on toward Calabria (which Moorish-held duchy King Giovanni long had coveted, restrained from taking it only by the awesome power of Rome).
However, due to a number of factors, mistakes and miscalculations on the parts of many, a significant enough number of the forces and leading men of the Spanish-Moorish Faction found their way out of Italy and into Sicily that the Archbishop of Palermo—Cardinal d'Este, one of the foremost of the Italian Faction—had the recently elevated Pope Sicola prevail upon the Emperor, the Savior of Rome and of all Italy, to land a significant force in Sicily and cleanse it, too, of the Spanish-Moorish foulnesses.
At that time, Egon and his army had already been on the march to or in Italy for more than two years, and he was anxious to return to his own lands and family soon, thereby curtailing the hideous expense of keeping his forces together, fed, fit, and fighting, for there had been—by his own commands—little enough loot or income from slave sales to help ease his financial burden. But neither did he like the idea of a possible regrouping of his foes on an island which would, due to location and length of coastlines, be absurdly easy to re-man, resupply, and rearm from either Afriqa or any of the Spanish kingdoms or caliphates; to do so might well see him having to do it all over again in the near future.
