by RW Krpoun
Things weren’t going so well throughout the rest of the city, however: the arson teams were still burning two or three targets a night, while the disturbances were growing steadily in size and scope. So far the garrison patrols were able to keep them under control with liberal applications of riot-staves and flogging, but things were not getting any better. The corpse-barges were reporting more than seventy-five people dead each day of disease, not counting those dying of the usual causes, a number everyone knew would continue to rise with each passing day. The city was a sealed pot sitting on a bed of coals and the only question was how long it would take to explode.
She sat on the battlements until the night had settled into full darkness, enjoying the fresh breeze coming off the sea and the bright star-points overhead. Behind her the city was a sullen mass of dim lights, far fewer than would be usual before the siege as there was a growing shortage of candles, and lantern-oil was restricted for boiling water to make it safe. She eyed the dim lights that moved around the trenches and earthworks of the Hand forces and scowled; Kroh had told her that they were done digging, except for the final assault trenches that they would dig to the wall itself when a breach was made. The artillery they had on hand was in position and hammering away day and night, but the Waybrother had assured her that nine of ten of the pieces were throwing stones too light to do any serious damage to the wall; until the heavy train arrived the city was safe.
Of course, the heavy gear would arrive within a month or so, and deep down Duna was glad: let the Hand knock a breach in the walls and try to carry the place; she would welcome a good fight against Hand troops rather than shooting down hungry men who were starting fires in order to feed their families. She knew the arson teams had to be stopped, but it did not make killing them any easier.
Killing was hardly something new to Duna, nor was hard living any stranger: raised an orphan whose skin set her even further apart, she had been captured from the ruins of her foster-parents’ border-farm five years earlier by raiding Orcs and handed over to a Minion of the Dark One along with a score of other children. The captives were taken into the depths below an abandoned Dwarven hold and sacrificed one by one upon a Void altar.
They had lived in a cage whose roof had served the altar as a floor, watching their friends dragged kicking and pleading upwards, heard their tortured screams, and then seen the corpses fed to the Direbreed guards. There had been eight children left when a detachment of the Phantom Badgers exploded out of the walls and slew the Minion and his followers in a long and hard fight, losing several Badgers in the process. She and Picken served in the Company’s ranks while the other six worked in support positions back at the hold.
The Badgers were her family, and the Company was her home; fighting was her trade, and killing followers of the Void was her chief ambition in life, that and being promoted to Corporal. Dying was nothing important; there were, as life had thoroughly taught her, worse things.
Picken crawled up onto the wall next to her. “Pretty night.”
She gave him a sideways hug; he was the youngest of the orphans, while she was the oldest. “Yep. Tired of reading?”
“Always. Still, you have to do it.” The boy shrugged. “Someday I’ll be a wizard.”
“Good thing, you’ll never be tall enough to be a warrior,” Duna teased him.
The boy grunted. “I’ll be glad when they lift the siege.”
“You and me both; I hate being cooped in, even in a whole city.”
“Too true.” Neither mentioned the days in the cage; once in a while over the years the eight had gathered in some open place out of doors and discussed it in halted, hushed tones, but it was not something that came up often. “But it’ll come down to fighting in the streets before it’s over, I bet.”
“You know something?”
He shrugged. “I hear them talking, the Captain and Axel. It’s all the timing, you see, Laffery will want to move just so. If he’s even a little bit off a bunch of us will catch it in the neck.”
“We always do,” Duna looked up at the stars. “Fight here or in the field, I’m ready. Bring it on, get it over with.”
“Axel gave me his crossbow, you know, the hand one like Elonia’s.”
“Really? That’s something, it’s master craftsmanship.”
“Yep. He doesn't want to trifle with it now that he’s familiar with that staff, so I’ll be able to snipe during the battles.” A voice echoed up to them from below. “Oh, bugger, he checked on me.” The apprentice rolled off the wall onto the archer’s walk. “Learning to be a wizard also involves polishing boots and ironing tunics,” he advised his friend, grinning. Waving, he trotted towards the stairs, shouting a reply.
After an hour she started feeling hungry and made her way back to the tower to find Jothan; rations were shorter than normal, but the Company was eating better than most of the garrison, and a good deal better than the refugees; starvation was not claiming anyone in the city yet, but that day wasn’t far off.
They had sworn the ex-slave in as the Company’s first interpreter at the morning formation, but Jothan still had to stay out of sight, and busied himself with cooking their meals and tending the food stores, a chore Henri, the new Quartermaster, was glad to sluff off onto the ex-slave. They did the cooking in a stove they had set up under an awning in the lee of the tower to keep from heating the structure, fencing off the area with tarps strung between posts; civilians weren’t allowed within thirty feet of the walls, but it didn’t stop crowds of hungry children from gathering at mealtime. Durek had ordered the canvas strung so that his Badgers could get a meal without each bite carrying a pound of guilt.
As Duna came out of the tower she heard the familiar whisper of an axe in flight and the solid tunk of the blade biting soft wood. In their fenced-off dining area she found the ex-sailor throwing axes at a half-dozen two-inch-thick sections of pine trunk nailed to saw horses, the target dimly illuminated by a couple lamps improvised from bacon grease and cotton wicks.
“You’re good,” she observed when the interpreter had thrown his last axe.
“And you’re quiet,” he grinned, mopping sweat off his brow with a grimy bandanna. “You got to throw regular, keep the wrist limber.”
“I’m surprised that you’ve picked it back up so quickly after all these years.” Duna walked down to the targets with him as the wiry man pulled his blades out of the wood.
“I didn’t have to pick it back up ‘cause I never lost it,” Jothan ran a thumb over an axe’s edge. “The Hobs were interested in axe-throwing; they knew I could throw from the boarding action that took my ship so I put on demonstrations for them real regular, and was given time to practice, too. Of course, one wrong move while I had an axe in my hand and I would have looked like a hedgehog.”
“Why were they interested in axe-throwing?”
“That I don’t know for certain, they’re strange bastards one and all; as near as I could figure, they are as uncertain about Humans as we are about them. They let me practice with sword and shield, too, so I could spar with their younger warriors, but that was just to familiarize the new bucks with how we fight. I guess it never occurred to them that I would learn about them from it, or they figured I wouldn’t ever get away.”
“Were any of them skilled with the throwing axe?”
“Oh, they would try ‘em after I demonstrated it, but their hands are wrong, that second thumb, it won’t work. They stick with their own weapons exclusively-five years and I never saw a Hob with anything but their native gear. They were curious, is the way I see it.”
“Serjeant Maidenwalk was teaching me to throw an axe, but that stopped when she was wounded.”
Jothan cocked an eyebrow at her. “You're an archer, skill pay and all; why would you want to mess around with throwing axes?”
Duna outlined her fight in the worker barracks. “If I could throw an axe, I could have had one in hand, ready for ranged or melee combat; as it was, I could have gotten killed
.”
The ex-slave gave that some thought. “I see your point. I learned the axe ‘cause bows aren’t much good at sea, the damp causes the strings to stretch and they lose effectiveness. But you didn’t come looking for an axe-teacher, girl, did you? It’s a cook you wanted, I bet.”
Duna grinned. “I could use both.”
“And I’m the man for the job. We’ve plenty of bacon and cheese, and some rolls that are getting on, I can make you a good greasy bacon-cheese sandwich, and then show you the finer points of axe-killing, if you like.”
“That would be great, the food first, though.”
“As you wish.” While he busied himself slicing the bacon by the light of a single candle she sat cross-legged on one of the tables and watched him, a small-boned plain-featured man much weathered by the elements whose black hair was thinning on the crown. He moved with sudden, swift gestures, the deftness of this long-fingered hands entertaining to watch, his dark eyes flashing as often as his ready grin as he heated a pan and set the bacon to frying, rattling on about Company gossip.
“It must be bad, escaping the Hobrec only to end up cooped up in our quarters,” Duna observed as Jothan poked and prodded the sizzling bacon. “And that’s going to be too big a sandwich for me.”
“I’m having one myself, beggin’ your pardon,” he grinned, winking at her. “Toasted or not? No, that’s not true at all, lass, not a bit: your Captain offered to get me out of Sagenhoft on the next ship, if I wanted, so I had a choice, and a choice is freedom, so long as it’s not a choice between do or die. I’ll never willingly set foot on another deck so long as I live, leaving me with some fightin’ skills and a bunch of languages spoken by those who nobody talks to. Your Company’s offer was the only one I had before me, and it’s as good or better than any I can expect, so here I am. I spent many years on smaller ships than the Company area, so its not the space that’s important.” He leered. “Size don’t matter, you know.” He grinned wryly when he saw the gibe go over her head.
“So what will the Company Interpreter do when there’s no interpreting to be done?”
“Any dirty chore that’s to hand, I suppose, although that’s nothing new, at least for now. I’ve noticed that most of the Badgers are ale-and-whores types, good lads in a fight but used to letting others do the thinking. I figure a chap with his wits about him could make a place for himself in this outfit.”
“Durek’s always looking for people who can think,” Duna nodded, watching him slice the stale rolls and press them into the skillet. “I wonder why they call them sandwiches?”
“ ‘Cause of some nobleman in Opatia,” Jothan checked the surface of a bun and returned it to the skillet. “A real fanatic for careau, he was, liked it so much he came up with a way to eat with one hand while playing with the other. He named the thing after his favorite tile, the Sand Witch, which we call the Night Hag here in Alhenland. Sand Witch, sandwich.”
“Huh.” Duna was impressed. “Did you spend much time in Sufland, free, I mean?”
“Yep, made more’n half the major ports before I was taken, and plenty of reaver bases after that. Even saw your people a couple times in the forties.”
“My people? You mean the Ruwen?”
“Sure, I made many a run into Tartika, that’s the Ruwen Freeholds’ only deep-water port, trading finished goods for timber. Big lumber-dealers, your folk.”
“What was it like? Can you speak their language?”
Jothan spat a string of gibberish at her, then shrugged. “That’s about the extent of my Yarinal: ‘one mug of buro, please’. ‘How much’, and the numbers from one to ten is the rest.”
“What’s buro?”
“A drink they make from rice, molasses, and sweet potato, tastes terrible and packs a punch. They drink puk, too, sort of a wine they make from tree sap. And thin beer, I don’t recall what they called it. Didn’t your mother tell you about the place?”
“I was a foundling, less than a year old,” Duna shrugged, elaborately unconcerned. “Why did you say my mother?”
“Because usually its Ruwen women you find outside their lands,” Jothan sliced cheese and heated the slices by holding them on a fork over the coals before assembling the sandwiches. “Now, I’m no expert of the Ruwen culture, but it was pretty obvious that they don’t hold with women speaking their minds, if you know what I mean. Here.”
“Thanks. How do you mean, specifically?”
“Well, I stuck close to the waterfront, being a stranger in a place where that’s made very plain by the color of my skin, but I did take a couple walks through the town and we talked a bunch with the Ruwen traders who sold lumber, they spoke Pradian with real funny accents, sort of sing-song, anyway, I got a bit of a feel for the place. Women are, I don’t know, they’re sort of held back, or to the side, sort of.”
“I don’t understand.”
The interpreter chewed while he thought. “Well, one thing is that they walk behind the men.”
“Behind the men?” Duna frowned.
“Yeah, you see a man walking someplace, his sons’ll be alongside, but his wife and daughters are a couple steps behind him.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, because they’re women. Women can’t own property or carry weapons, or wear trousers, that’s a fact. We had a second mate was a woman, big tough girl out of...blast, what port was she out of? Some half-frozen Imperial armpit, I disremember which. She was a rough sort, homely as a week-dead rat, but knew her trade, I’ll give her that. Bagged a Hob with a spear when they took our ship, and fed the fishes, too. The Ruwen traders were pretty shocked to see a woman wearing trousers and a blade, let me tell you, although they liked her yellow hair and blue eyes. And you should have seen ‘em stare when she gave orders, it was like she was a talking dog. They told me about the property and such, after seeing her.”
“So a woman couldn’t spend her money, then, if she can’t own property?”
“I wouldn’t think she’d have money, ‘cept what she was given to run the household,” Jothan shrugged, wiping grease off his upper lip with a bit of stale lettuce, which he then ate. “What I got was that they belong to their husband, like a coat or a horse.”
“That’s stupid,” Duna shook her head. “Are you sure about this?”
“Not precisely, as in the details, but twice we had women stow-away on our ship, and I’ve heard of several other ships where it happened, mostly because they were forced into a marriage or some such. They had heard things were different elsewhere, and figured they could do better in other lands. Some did, I guess.”
“Huh.” The dark Badger ate her sandwich and thought about this for a while. “What the place like, other than that?”
“Hot and full of tall dark people,” Jothan answered promptly. “The coast’s like this side of the Ascendi, all sheer cliffs and bad rock, only one decent port. The Ruwen aren’t sailors worth spit, although I guess given their coast they can’t be blamed for not havin’ much enthusiasm to learn. They had fishing boats, too shallow-draft for my liking, but...anyway, the Freeholds is all one big tree farm, they grow teak, mahogany, ebony, and other hard woods for sale. Other’n that they’re mostly farmers and herdsmen. They like to fight, too, I’m told. Not many outsiders go further in than Tartika. Oh, they’re great wood carvers, the Ruwen, I forgot. Do incredible things with a block of wood and about twenty-six different knives, ivory or bone too, but generally wood. I made a bit of coin buyin’ things cheap off street vendors and sellin’ ‘em in northern ports.”
“I would like to go there, someday,” Duna said wistfully. “To see a country where I’m not different.”
“You’d still be different, although not so much, what with wearin’ a blade and trousers and not looking down when a stranger passes,” Jothan shrugged. “Although I can understand you wanting to see where your people came from. Hard to say if you don’t have some northerner in you, though, ‘cause some that live on the coast are the same shade as you, w
hile those further inland seemed a lot darker, although I might not have that right. I do know the Ruwen can look at each other and tell where they’re from, or maybe it’s the accents and such, but they kind of all looked a bit alike to me, at least on the first few visits.” He finished his sandwich. “Ready to try the axes?”
“Yup.” Duna stood and brushed off her tunic. “I bet I see a chance to use them before we get clear of the city.”
“Seems a safe bet,” Jothan nodded.
The twentieth was another dog-day, hot, cloudless, and still, a fine day to sit on the bank of a stream and bobber-fish with a jug of ale cooling in the water, but a bad day to be patrolling the streets of a walled city under siege. Rolf eyed the surging crowds that filled the street and shrugged his shield a little higher on his arm. Moonblade was back in the Company’s tower, being far too long for use in such crowded confines, and too lethal in any case, replaced with a shield (one of those captured in Dorog, less the Hand insignia), and a riot-staff.
Things were getting worse in the city every day: potable water was running short, disease was spreading faster, the disturbances had finally crossed the nebulous line between ‘street-fight’ and ‘riot’, and the corpse-barges were reporting over a hundred dead from sickness each day. The big Corporal was tired, hungry, and heartily fed up with the siege. With very little water for washing the grossly over-full city stank, and the hostile glares and muttered curses he heard every day as he patrolled the city wore on the gentle Badger’s spirits. Although Bridget, like Janna before her, gave each of her platoon a day off in rotation, Rolf had exempted himself from the roster, feeling that it was a Corporal’s place to be with the platoon. Kroh had done likewise, which meant precious little relaxation for either, although the Dwarf seemed immune to the pressures of the siege, choosing to revel in the street-fighting instead.
The Badger platoon, one of forty-odd such patrols moving through the city, was assigned to Kiln Crossing, a smallish market-square at the intersection of Plate Street and Crofter’s Row; the market-square, which was half-filled with refugee shanties, was a food and water distribution point and experience proved that such places were where outbreaks of violence were common. The Badgers stood in battle-formation near the wagons and water-carts which were issuing the daily rations, the precious cargos guarded by a detail drawn from First Cohort, the distribution overseen by municipal clerks drafted from every branch of the Ducal government.
