Soldiers' Redemption (First Cohort Book 1)

by M. R. Anthony

  The men quickly realised that they weren’t going to spend the day marching, or at least not all of it. The First Cohort was ready first, standing in perfect formation, with arms and armour tweaked and adjusted until their owners were satisfied that a sword wouldn’t foul when drawn, a boot snag upon a leg guard, or any one of a hundred other small worries that each soldier has when battle looms.

  The Treads infantry took a little longer to prepare and I watched as they hastily buckled on sword belts, clipped their leather breastplates into place and assisted other men to do the same.

  I spoke to our lady. “Today they might have to fight for you. I suggest that you walk amongst them, so that they know that they are part of a greater whole.”

  She looked chastised by my words. I hadn’t meant them to be harsh, but the time had passed for her to hide away. She was the banner now and a banner must always be seen. “You are correct, Captain Charing. Will you walk with me?”

  It caused an additional delay, but walk we did. I provided an arm for support, though she did not need one. Where she passed, the men would pause and look at her. When she smiled, I could see the fears dissipate and in every pair of eyes, the determination that I had last seen behind the walls of Treads burned brighter than it had before.

  “Do you see the effect you have?” I asked. “It is good that you ride upon your horse for all to see, but on the day of a battle, it is sometimes better to come closer to your men, so that they can feel gladness, even when they risk their lives.

  “I hope that today there will be no loss of life, Captain Charing, but I note your point and thank you.”

  Once we had gathered into our formations, with the First Cohort to the centre and the Treads infantry to our left, we set off, leaving our camp behind. Surprise was to be our key weapon on this day and I had my lieutenants push us to a fast march.

  The first slivers of daylight were already beginning to glimmer on the horizon as we came across the first of their scouts. The presence of sentries suggested to me that whoever led them retained at least a semblance of control. I let their scouts run away unmolested and we followed their path, knowing that it would lead us directly where we wanted to be. As Sprinter had told me, they had chosen their camp well in order to avoid the possibility that they might be surprised. I guessed it to be little more than a precaution – in reality I’m sure they had doubted the possibility that they would encounter a superior force in the vicinity.

  We marched over the brow of a hill and a quarter of a mile away I could see them, camped on flat land next to a stream, with good visibility all around them. Two of the scouts re-joined their camp just as we came into sight. It didn’t take long before the signs of an uproar become apparent to us and I could picture half-dressed men scrambling for their armour and their swords, as others dozed nearby, hoping against hope that it was a false alarm so that they could get back to sleep.

  We were not a false alarm, and reached them before they were even close to prepared. As I had instructed in advance, we circled half of the camp, so as not to leave our lines too thin, and then we halted, fifty yards from the first of their tents.

  “Who is in charge?” bellowed Lieutenant Sinnar, given the privilege on the basis that he had the loudest voice.

  There was no sign that anyone was going to volunteer themselves as in charge, so Sinnar bellowed out again. “Tell me who is in charge or we will come looking for him!”

  We didn’t have to wait long. A tall woman emerged from the scrum of the camp and made her way half way across the intervening space between the two armies. She was fully clothed in banded leather armour. She bore no shield, but had a long sword tucked into her waist. Her gait and the way she had arranged her armour and sword suggested to my trained eye that she was more than just a career officer. I got the feeling that she’d seen action, and a lot of it.

  “I am Lieutenant Faye,” she said. Her eyes fixed not on Lieutenant Sinnar, but on me, and then our lady. “What is it you want from us?” she asked. As she spoke, I saw several dark lines blur through the early morning light towards my men. There were clanking noises as the arrows were deflected harmlessly by our shields. I gave thanks that my men always expected the worst and I held up my hand to ensure that our lines stayed back.

  “If I find out who fired those fucking arrows I’m going to rip their balls off!” shouted Lieutenant Faye into her camp. She turned her attention to me once more. “You could have killed most of us by now, but you have chosen not to. Can I assume that you wish to talk?”

  I smiled at her perspicacity. “It is our lady who wishes to speak to you,” I said.

  Eighteen

  I don’t know why I thought it might have been difficult. Lieutenant Faye was in no haste to have her men slaughtered. We outnumbered them and had the element of surprise. Additionally, the First Cohort’s reputation as ruthless killers preceded us. Our reputation gained us many things, but trust was not amongst them. It was fortunate that our lady had something about her that immediately gained the trust of those who were open to the notion of the freedom she represented.

  As the men of the enemy camp saw her, the frantic sounds of activity died away and they all stared at the young woman on her white horse. I saw for the first time how our lady’s aura was much more effective against men, with Lieutenant Faye looking hardly impressed or affected by it. It was a good job that she was eminently practical and we sat down to speak at a table positioned in the middle of the two armies. I didn’t spend time wondering where they’d got a table from. We carried a couple with us and though they were hated for their bulk, there were times when a simple table was an indispensable tool of war.

  My powers of diplomacy were slight and my negotiation tools crude. I had little time for fancy words or beating about the bush.

  “Why have you split from Warmont’s men?” I asked. “Or are you still a part of his army?”

  Lieutenant Faye was cut from the same cloth as me. She hawked and spat onto the grass next to her. “We are going home,” she said. “We have killed our brothers and our sisters for too long. If we did not desert now, we would carry our shame back to our homes and bear it for an eternity.”

  Her words startled me, echoing my own feelings which had led the First Cohort to cast our lot in with the Saviour. Maybe there was some sort of undercurrent, sweeping these lands and bringing with it a thirst for something new.

  “How did you feel killing the men from Treads?” I asked, surprising her in turn.

  “I kept us back,” she admitted. “We got through the gates, but we saw little of the fighting. Others were swept along by Bonecruncher’s madness, but we were not amongst them. Warmont’s Fifth burned and we escaped through the gates. Captain Garg commanded what remained, but he is weak. When we left, he shouted and cursed, but he did nothing to stop us.”

  “And these homes you go to? Do you look for peace or will you fight for what you want? She is the Saviour,” I said, nodding towards our lady where she sat next to me.

  “I care naught for Saviours,” said Lieutenant Faye. “These men with me will talk of little else. I am a soldier and I will fight for the family I have left at home in Bunsen.”

  Her words about the Saviour made sense to me. It was men who killed men and everyone who directed them to kill was a man. Here we were, an army of men, ready to destroy anyone who stood against us. The Saviour needed to be a woman to bring change, and her radiance was something felt by men alone.

  “Will you fight for us?” I asked softly. “We have need of people who will not stand and watch as the Duke takes men from his towns and sends them against men of his other towns. Our lady brings hope for the brave.”

  Lieutenant Faye looked at me long and hard. Her eyes were grey, but no less piercing than those of our lady. I wondered what she saw behind my own eyes and what she made of my face, so covered in its scars and the intricate weaving of my tattoos. Whatever she saw, it was apparently enough.

  “It would be a shame
for us to go to our towns and have the Duke’s men conscript us once more,” she said. “My men follow me willingly and they will join with you. I do not think they will be loyal to the captain of the First Cohort though.”

  “They will not need to be. They will be loyal to our lady and they will follow your command and you will follow my command. Is that enough?”

  Lieutenant Faye didn’t need long to think at all. “That will be enough,” she said.

  Thus ended our negotiations. With all of these things, there is usually a period of time that follows, where orders are passed on and glowering stares between the two sides are gradually replaced by a vague suspicion.

  Our lady walked slowly around their camp, with me and Lieutenant Faye at her side. Footsore trailed in her wake, dutifully carrying her banner. The camp had been in disarray only a few minutes before, but now everything was packed away and the men were dressed and ready to go. I had not been wrong when I thought that they still had some discipline and now that I’d met Lieutenant Faye I was not in the least bit surprised.

  What did continue to surprise me was the ease with which our lady gained the loyalty of the men – now her men. They stared at her in awe, most of them stammering to reply if she spoke to them or asked a question. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised – most soldiers, most people even, prefer to follow and to have the difficult decisions made for them. I do not say this dismissively or with cynicism, it is the truth and I do not judge people for it. Many is the young man who hears a few rousing words and signs up for the army, putting his life in the hands of officers, some of whom are entirely unequipped to make the best of this enormous power they are given. Such is life – it is often offered freely when we are too young to know what it is that we have done.

  After the ritual of our lady’s walk was done, I ordered Lieutenant Faye to prepare for a march.

  “We’re going to Gold,” I told her.

  “That is where Captain Garg was taking the Duke’s army,” she said.

  “Indeed. We’re going to see if we can do something about that.”

  “We won’t catch them in time. Captain Garg was worried about something. He wouldn’t let us rest and said we had to reach Gold as quickly as possible. If we marched to Septic or Bunsen, we could build up our numbers through reinforcements”

  I shook my head. “I’ve already been told that we’ll be too late to intercept the men heading to Gold. Nevertheless, I want them out of the town before more of the Duke’s men arrive. If we can take Gold and hold it, there’s nowhere between here and Furnace that Warmont can base his men.”

  “There’s Rival further down the coast,” she said. “Though that is a long way distant as well.”

  “Even if we doubled our numbers from these coastal towns, it’s nothing compared to the men Warmont can turn out of Blades or Scar. If he can get them into Gold, we will never take the town from him.”

  “I understand, Captain Charing. Let us march for Gold at once.”

  Gold was a long way distant. I spoke to Lieutenant Craddock and he guessed we were still twelve days away. Lieutenant Faye’s men were reasonably fit and healthy, their weapons and armour of an acceptable quality. They mingled easily with the soldiers from Treads – our lady had been correct when she said that morale would increase when the people from these towns realised that there were other places which stood alongside them. The First Cohort remained mostly alone, however. It is not that my men were unwilling to mix, it is just that when you have seen ten thousand battles over hundreds of years, there is little left to say to other soldiers. The newly-promoted Corporal Knacker gave it a go, spreading his filthy humour amongst the others, as if it was his sole mission in life.

  Lieutenant Sinnar continued with his bullying, never giving the Treads men a chance to rest when there was marching to be done or the opportunity to practice their weapons or formations. I could see that he was no longer hated and that his men had started to look up to him. He’d appointed his own corporals and did his best to mould them in his own image, as brutish as that was. Captain Foster became one of these corporals – he complained bitterly, but I think that he was relieved to have the responsibility taken from him.

  All of this continued as we marched. I saw little of Ploster or our lady. I believed that our sorcerer was doing his best to impart his secrets to the much more powerful Saviour, in the hope that she might quickly learn to harness her own powers more effectively.

  I found myself drawn to Lieutenant Faye. Not through any physical attraction, but I had missed the company of a woman. A strange thing to say for a man who had been alone for so long, but we still sought each other out in the evenings and spent the hours discussing our different lives and how our paths had taken us to where we were now. I did not reveal much about the darker side of my past, and kept to the happier memories of my life before the First Cohort, though those days seemed almost lost in the past and the man I had been was unrecognisable to me now.

  I found out that Lieutenant Faye had been drafted into the army against her will. Some of Warmont’s justiciars had swept through Bunsen fifteen years or so ago, taking young men of a certain age until they had filled their quota. I was curious as to why Lieutenant Faye had been conscripted amongst all of the other young men and she’d shrugged at the question and told me that she was bigger and stronger than most of the boys her age. Now, she told me there were few of her men who even considered her to be a woman. I didn’t know if that was to be thought of as a compliment or the worst kind of insult. She’d laughed when I asked, the sound merry, and she’d said that she took it as both.

  The journey to Gold was therefore a surprisingly enlightening one. I spent the day lost in my thoughts, or talking to the men, and the evenings were taken up in conversation with a woman who wasn’t afraid to be challenging and who had no hatred of me for being the captain of the First Cohort. When I’d first asked her what she thought about us, she’d started to laugh at first, but then gave the question some serious consideration.

  “Why should I hate you? You’ve been as badly used by the Emperor and Warmont as anyone else. Worse than anyone else – you’ve lost everything from your past. Your friends and families are gone, turned to dust. All you have is what you are, with nothing to look forward to and not even death to greet you at the end of your duties.”

  I couldn’t deny the words she said and when she realised how they had affected me, she changed the subject adroitly, distracting me with a tale of her own misspent youth. I could tell I was being distracted, but was grateful for it nonetheless.

  There was little else to keep me occupied and we made rapid progress. I kept the men from Treads and Lieutenant Faye’s men in their own units, but renamed them Treads Regiment and Bunsen Regiment respectively, keeping the First Cohort separate. I realised that these were not the most original and inspiring of names, but the men seemed happy with them.

  There was also the matter of supplies to keep hungry men marching. We of the First Cohort needed little in the way of food – I had no idea what kept our bodies moving and our sword arms strong, but the men of the two regiments appeared to have an insatiable appetite for their meals. It had been a long time since I’d looked after so many men, and the logistics of it started to become a burden. Fortunately, our cook, Chartus, showed himself to have the mind of a quartermaster – a talent I had not known he possessed. In spite of Craddock’s memory that there were no villages in this region, we did come across several after we received directions from Lieutenant Faye. After all, these lands were more hers than they were ours.

  In these villages, we were greeted with a certain amount of suspicion, though not quite hostility. When you’re outnumbered five to one by heavily armed soldiers, you do not usually throw bricks at them from your upper windows. Though negotiations in these places were generally tense affairs, or at least tense for the villagers involved, Chartus did manage to keep us provisioned for the road, using the healthy quantity of coin that the First
Cohort had accumulated over the years. We did receive pay for our work, but we had little to spend it on and much of it was kept in a stout chest for the times we might need to bribe our way through hostile territory. In my head, I had once allocated this money to assist in our flight from the Emperor’s lands, were that time ever to come to us. Now, there seemed little other use for it than to be spent in our cause.

  On the positive side, soldiers with a cause rarely ask for a wage. This was good news, because our sturdy little chest would not have paid the salary of nearly three-and-a-half thousand men for very long. There would be a time in the future when it would become an issue, but I didn’t worry about it for the moment. The men we had with us would stay to fight as long as there was food in their bellies.

  After twelve days, we reached Gold, or at least we came as close to the town as I wished us to get. I had us camp in some high, rocky hills about seven miles outside the town’s boundaries. I was not pleased to be so far away, but sometimes you have to make do with what you have available. If it came to it, the distance was little more than an early morning’s march. I spoke to our lady, to see what she hoped to achieve and how.

  “This is as close as we can get without being seen by every passing merchant and having our presence betrayed. Even so, it will not be long until word reaches them. The countryside we traversed was open, and it is certain that we passed people on the way who will have watched us pass while they remained hidden. We can only hope that their news doesn’t reach the wrong ears before we have a chance to enact our own plans.”