by Robert Brady
Just another surprise for the Confluni on their new bad day.
With a ragged shout their second wave advanced, 5,000 strong, and took the teeth of our archers’ assault. They fell in droves and we picked up the speed of our advance. We engaged them less than 100 feet from their reserves, rendering their archers useless. Their swordsmen ripped ineffectively into our shields and then felt our swords and pikes. Like a wisp of smoke laced with red blood, they evaporated before our advance, leaving us less than 60% of their army to face with almost no losses of our own.
The next wave advanced through a hailstorm of arrows, most of them not making it to our front line. We stomped through them and advanced on what remained of their army.
At that point their confidence started to waver under the barrage of arrows and the impending doom of our advance. If I had had my heavy horse, I would have taken them from behind by now. Instead Shela finally decided that there would be no magic to counter and whipped a storm of fireballs into their midst. They scattered as their commanders swore at them and tried to whip them back into the fight, some with actual whips. My troops in advance engaged the clusters that remained, breaking into squads to chase down the scattered pockets of resistance.
I and my personal guard of fifty broke off from the main force in search of some of their commanders. At this point in the battle the captains would communicate back to me with runners, mostly kids who followed the army for food. Some of the captains were already emerging as being the ones who knew my mind and who could be relied upon for advice if they were closer, or whom I would tell to coordinate a force of other captains.
These would be my majors in the next evolution, J’her among them.
I homed in on ten men each with a single lock of hair, dressed in robes rather than armor, standing back from the rest. They realized that I had singled them out as I realized the same thing myself.
One raised his hand, energy dripping from it, and immediately fell flat on his back, thanks to Shela or one of her apprentices. The others knelt with their hands behind their heads. With their surrender most of the survivors of the battle on their side followed suit.
They’d been surprised by my Wolf Soldiers, now I found myself in control of thousands of prisoners. We took the men into custody, the leaders coming with me, the rest being stripped naked in the cold air of the early month of Earth. Some were bound with chain, some with rope, and some with their own clothes. I assigned six captains and their squads to take the prisoners, another five to put down the wounded on their side, and another five to collect our own wounded and see to their treatment. The rest went to guard duty, either into the outlying farms to check on peasants and look for deserters, or to man the wall in case their reserves were more extensive than we had seen.
We had gotten off lucky. I had guessed at a plot within a plot. I still had Ancenon to deal with – but he had probably realized by now that he had mortgaged his future in Trenbon for his position in the Free Legion. It would have gained him nothing to attack the ‘Wolf Soldiers’ even if he knew of my deception, but someone had been hard at work to remove me from the equation, and I needed to know whom.
There were prisons in my mansion in Thera, but not enough for thousands. My prisoners were now bound shivering in the center of the coliseum where the Wolf Soldiers billeted. They in turn had moved their residences back closer to its walls. Their leaders sat with me in my War Room, where they looked with interest at the table, the walls and the twenty Wolf Soldiers assigned to make sure they were cooperative. The Confluni here, as outside, were naked, more to intimidate them than because I feared hidden weapons.
It didn’t seem to inspire much fear.
“There are rules for treating prisoners of war,” one said to me. They had refused to give their names or any information.
“I know,” I said. “The Confluni are notorious for breaking them.”
He smirked, probably believing that I wouldn’t do what his nation had become notorious for.
“I need your names,” I said, “your cities, and to know who sent you.”
“We demand to see a representative of the Fovean High Council,” the same one said. He seemed an older man, by the wrinkles in his face, the grey in his one long lock of hair. The others clearly deferred to him.
“Let’s be clear,” I said. “I am Lupus the Conqueror, Duke of Thera and Heir to the Eldadorian throne. This is Shela, my woman, who is called the Bitch of Eldador.”
Shela shot me a look, but she knew my mind.
“You are my prisoners after you invaded my home,” I continued, looking him in the eye. “You aren’t going to be alive for much longer.”
I let that sink in. The other men looked sideways at each other, trying to keep their composure.
“How you die depends on what you can tell me, but rest assured, you will tell me what I want to know from you.”
Chapter Six
Aristocracy
We lost less than 100 men in the defense of Thera. It didn’t surprise me. In his conquest of Gaul, Julius Caesar attacked as many as 300,000 with 35,000 and routed his enemies. In his worst defeats, taken totally unawares, he lost less than 1,000. Training in warfare is everything.
In the United States, it took tens of thousands of dollars to train one of me. Reactor Operators who controlled the multi-hundred-mega-watt nuclear reactors and maintained the systems could cost over one hundred thousand dollars to train individually. They took two years to train and another six months in the fleet to qualify. Those men could step in and run the whole engine room if they had to.
The value in the training of a warrior is seen when you put him or her against someone who isn’t trained.
Here they handed out swords and shields, pointed warriors in the right direction (or close to it) and hoped for the best.
The Confluni had done that, and now here they sat, paying for it.
Five were still alive. One’s skin smoldered. I hadn’t taken out the leader, but removing him in order to see if that made the others bolder looked like my best bet.
“You will get nothing from us,” he warned me.
“Not from you,” I told him. “With that I agree. That makes you useless to me.”
Shela raised her hand to him. His long lock of hair fell onto the table before him with a good chunk of the skin from his scalp.
He gripped his head, looked into my eyes.
“This is forbidden,” he told me.
I held up my hand to stop Shela. “You would like an alternative?”
He lowered his hands to the table, brushed the lock from in front of him. Clearly he felt braver with other lives than with his own.
“I want my body sent back to Conflu,” he said, “and you will offer my men the option to join you before you execute them.”
“I think not,” Def said. Ann and Thebinaar hadn’t bothered to stay. Someone had to run the city. “How could we trust them?”
“How can you trust anyone who joins your number?” he asked. “Make them swear it, or kill them if they refuse. You have Confluni in your ranks. Our honor is no different than anyone else’s.”
“And what can you tell me?”
His compatriots stayed quiet, looking down. Other than to scream in pain, they hadn’t reacted to me at all. This one did the talking. It made me curious to see what they did when I’d removed him.
“I can tell you that you are the most hated man on Fovea right now,” he said. “And that my emperor, as well as the king of Trenbon, is terrified that you are going to take control of Eldador. They sent me here to disgrace you, and to get you to initiate a war with Conflu.”
“What?” I said. I hadn’t considered that at all. I had assumed they wanted Lee, the second part of the plan I had guessed at with the Bounty Hunter.
“It makes sense,” Def said. “You were attacked by Trenbon, and you attacked Outpost IX. You are attacked by Conflu; they assume that you will attack Conflu in return.”
“Only you would
be ready with everything you had,” I said. “You would catch me in a trap and crush me.”
He nodded. “I think you will still attack,” he said. “You are arrogant, so I think that you will try to take us on and beat us.”
I had to smile. That sounded like what I would do. It made more sense than sitting here and waiting for the next attack, anyway.
“Who is your inside man?” I asked him.
“My what?”
Def looked nervous. I had the Sword of War over my shoulder. I moved as nonchalantly as I could to put him on my left, so that when I drew I could stab without risking him pinning down my sword arm. If I didn’t get him, I could hold him until the Wolf Soldier guards could.
“Who do you have working for you, who is working for me?” I asked.
“Ah,” he said. “You think we have a spy.”
“If you didn’t,” I said, “how would you know which of your cities I would attack.”
He smirked to himself, looked at his men, then at me.
“You will ship my remains back to Conflu?” he said.
“If you tell me,” I said. “If you lie, she will know.”
“On your honor?” he asked me, looking into his eyes.
“On my honor,” I said.
“I know of one only, a Wolf Soldier called ‘Klem.’ But I am sure there are more.”
I looked at Shela, she looked at me. We recognized the former Earl of Thera’s name, and he had disappeared when I took his Earldom.
It wasn’t an uncommon name, but I had met all of the Wolf Soldiers, and I hadn’t let in that Klem. However, families here tended to keep reusing names, and I hadn’t met his family.
Shela nodded – he didn’t lie. I could find Klem.
I drew my sword, took a two-handed grip on the hilt, and lopped his head off. It bounced across the table onto the floor. His body slumped into the chair, then down under the table, pumping blood into a puddle around the chair.
His men looked nervous, my Wolf Soldiers didn’t flicker. It might as well not have happened.
“Who is next in command?” I asked them.
By the morning, they were all dead. I didn’t learn much, other than how much a mess like that pissed off the house staff.
I had the Dorkan Wizards looking for this Klem. I’d instructed them to be discreet. Once I found him, I might need to watch him and see what he did.
I met with the Confluni individually. They were pragmatic, if nothing else. Of just under 2,000 survivors, 1,600 were ready to join the team, and only 300 of them were lying about it. That added 700 bodies to Tren Bay and a healthy 1,300 to my Wolf Soldiers.
It took another day for fast riders to let me know that the army approached from the capitol. Two days after that, Rennin informed me that he planned to let the Free Legion go back to the Plains of Angador. In that time, I assembled the Wolf Soldier infantry, now over 6,000 strong in addition to what I’d left at the capitol, and promoted six captains to the rank of Major. Each captain had, plus or minus, a ‘millennium.’ A millennium included a thousand warriors under the Major, controlled by four captains, 20 lieutenants and 100 sergeants who fought as a member of their group of ten.
This took some rearranging of the command structure, but it would pay off. I could now, through six Wolf Soldiers, coordinate my army down to the last man. As we trained on the field, marching on the battleground where the birds still fed on the remains of Confluni soldiers, we could switch the positions of any two squads, any two millennia, or change their marching orders. The Confluni were easily adaptable to our marching style and adopted our structure quickly. Those I spoke with noted that their own people had nothing like this, and were nowhere near it.
A week later our militia returned to their burned homes and their buried and unburied dead. I had taken care of my own casualties and the populace had robbed the bodies of the Confluni on the first day. Most of the Confluni dead found their way into the bay, and some were buried for convenience or for their value in fertilizer. I broke down the heavy horse into a full millennium and a half, which would grow as we got more horses and more men. The Confluni were not equestrians and ninety percent of our horse, both mounts and riders, were Andaran. Two Spears, of course, had the full millennium.
He sat with Shela, Anne, Thebinaar and Def and I as we planned out our next move.
“Next week, I want to go to Uman City,” Ann said. I nodded.
“I got a look at Glennen, your King,” Two Spears said. “And he is a drunk and a fool. I smelled the urine on him as he thanked me for relieving the siege. One of the old men who tend him told me to tell you that he tried to order the army to attack the Free Legion soldiers, and was barely restrained.”
“How did they stop him?” Def asked. Glennen, drunk or sober, was King. If he wanted to attack, the army attacked.
“Your man, an Uman named, J’her, said they plied him with strong drink until he passed out,” Two Spears said. “Then when he awoke they plied him again.”
What an ending for so vital a man.
Two Spears looked me right in the eye. “If you plan to replace him, White Wolf, then you need to be there now. If I were my father, then the Long Manes would sack Eldador the Port tomorrow, and expect to succeed.”
I agreed. Ancenon probably could have had the city any time he wanted it. I wanted to go to the Plains of Angador and talk to the members of the Free Legion, but I had no time, and the next month belonged to War. They would be on their campaigns soon.
The time had come to bring the Free Legion to me.
I appointed Two Spears the Regent for Lee in Thera, giving him the ability to run the city in my absence. Five of my majors were left in the city under his command. Two more, the one in charge of the smaller millennium of horse and an infantry division, came with Shela and me to Eldador. This time we couldn’t spare the horses, and took ten days in quick march to get there. It rained almost every day and it made the journey miserable.
Before I left I dispatched riders to the Plains of Angador under the flag of Eldador, commanding the Free Legion to present themselves, by order of the Heir, to the palace in Eldador, or to vacate the plains of Angador forthwith. In case Ancenon decided to call my bluff, I left instruction with Rennin to mobilize. He wouldn’t take on the Free Legion – they would destroy him. He would instead establish an Eldadorian duchy on the plains of Angador when they left and people it.
I arrived in Eldador on the third day of War, to the news that the city of Outpost IX had begun full reconstruction, including new gates even more grand than the originals.
Glennen greeted us as we marched into the palace courtyard, unshaved and stinking of pee and vomit and stale booze. Just to be in his presence, even in the open air, had become an act of will, to which he seemed oblivious. He spent his days bleary-eyed, drunk and unable to focus.
His kids were in hell. I met with them and Shela as we set up in our rooms in the palace.
“He kissed me on the mouth,” Alekennen complained, and justifiably so. I had heard that there could be no trusting Glennen around any female now. His oldest daughter was 13 and a woman by the standards of Men. “And he keeps telling me the things I have to do with men. I can’t hear that from my father.”
“Nor I,” Tartan, his oldest son said. He was a copy of his mother, with the glowing features, slim bone structure and soft eyes. He stood tall like his father, a gentle giant, but one who had been slapped on the back too many times.
“If he isn’t calling me a coward for not dueling him, he is telling others I’m a hero and challenging them for me.”
I shook my head. “Guys, you have to know that it isn’t your father, it’s the drink that is doing these things.”
Terran, his youngest and a boy, who should be thinking of his father as a god at his age, said, “You mean he has a haint?”
“No, Terran,” Shela said. “No demon possesses him. He has the yellow sickness that those who drink sometimes have. He cannot help himself or wha
t he does.”
“Why doesn’t he just stop drinking?” Alekennen asked. “I mean, he has to know it’s ruining everything.”
“No,” I told her. “He doesn’t know. The drink ruins his thinking, and the drink tells him that his thinking is clear. You can reason with him, but it is pointless. If he doesn’t decide on his own to stop doing it, he won’t stop.”
“Will my daddy die?” Averee, his final daughter, asked me, looking up at me with Glennen’s eyes in Alekanna’s face.
I could lie, and easily, to one so young, but I think it is the greater cruelty. Better that they live in the real world, if they have questions like these.
“I have to tell you all, the odds are that the drink will kill him,” I said, watching their eyes tear. “I have seen this before, and it is sad, and they become terrible people when it happens. I will do everything I can to keep you from him, if that’s what you want. And if he does try to quit, we will do everything we can to help him.
“But you must be ready for the fact that, most likely, he is too far gone, and he will die.”
Averee burst into tears and ran into Shela’s arms. Terran took his lead from Tartan, who just stood straighter and nodded. Glennen pounded, “Be tough” into a kid who had very little toughness in him, and Tartan did his best to rise to it.
He probably realized better than anyone that he had not been named heir and, when his father passed, he lived at my mercy, Glennen having no family and Alekanna being of a house that had been wiped out in one of Eldador’s many internal skirmishes.
When the time came, I wanted to give him a city, but I wanted him to show me first that he could be a Duke, without being told he already had the job.
Alekennen seemed the most pragmatic of the four. She never lived a day thinking that she would rule Eldador. She’d been born a girl, and she knew what nobles used their daughters for.
