But war has a way of thrusting the modest into sudden and unexpected immortality, picking this man over that, this location over that one, and sometimes for the most mundane of reasons. A host of grumbling stomachs and the silent decisions of one profane army cook would, through the impenetrable mysteries of the workings of Providence, forever mark a simple town called Varlotsville.
Packer Throme sat on the porch of the farmhouse, staring up at the stars, pondering. He felt the burden of his new responsibilities, but the weight seemed less impossible now that he’d done it for a day or two. It felt like good, hard work. So far, at least, the job consisted mainly of making decisions, yes to this plan, no to that one. Some came easy, others less so. But now as he stopped to consider, he had to ask himself how many lives rested on each yes, and each no? What sort of future would his decisions bring?
He could hear Panna inside the farmhouse talking to Father Mooring and the bright young general, Zander Jameson. They were finishing up the long-neglected organization of the chaplaincy. That was comforting on many levels. At Packer’s right sat Prince Ward, cradling his coffee once again, trying to keep his mind off a mug of ale that hovered somewhere just outside his reach, just inside the door of a nearby tavern, or just over that hill in the darkness where faint traces of laughter could be heard. He’d been fine during the day. But when night fell, the prince heard the call from everywhere.
On Packer’s left sat General Millian, resting with his head on the high back of a rocker, his eyes closed, a wispy plume of smoke rising from a pipe loosely cradled in his hand. Packer heard a snore and turned to his left. General Millian’s mouth dropped open as he drifted off. The young king gently removed the glowing bowl from the old soldier’s hand and set it on the table before him.
“He deserves a rest,” Ward said quietly.
“It’s a brilliant plan,” Packer said with a nod. Risky, he thought, but brilliant.
“He thinks quite highly of you, as well.”
Packer shot Ward a questioning glance.
“It’s true. He is well content to have leadership that understands no plan can succeed without divine intervention.”
“He said that?”
“ ‘That young man understands,’ ” Ward quoted, imitating the general, “ ‘that a horse can be made ready for a battle, but only God can win it.’ Or something like that.”
Packer laughed. “Victory comes from the Lord.”
“Yes, that was it! ‘Victory comes from the Lord,’ ” he repeated in General Millian’s deep voice.
The general snorted, then snored gently again.
“It’s from the Book of Proverbs,” Packer offered.
Ward nodded. “I assumed it was from something I haven’t read.”
Then Packer looked again at the general, now snoring peacefully, his head lightly bandaged. Packer marveled. Even in sleep the commander was ramrod straight, head up, shoulders back. Like he was born at attention. “I thought he’d believe me too young,” Packer said. Now he looked at Ward. “And I thought you might believe me too ignorant, or too inexperienced.”
“Well, you’re older than me. And as for experience, there are a handful of people I’d trust with my life, and none of them are princes or princesses, or even nobles. In fact, most of them are simple soldiers. Or sailors. Like you.”
Packer was thoughtful for a moment. Then he said, “You should know that I made a vow never to pick up a sword again.”
“You did all right yesterday without a sword in your hand.”
“I didn’t do anything,” Packer said firmly.
“Look, if it’s a theological discussion you’re after, I can tell you I won’t be drawn in willingly. It was a subject I slept through at the Academy.”
Packer took a deep breath. The Academy. Senslar Zendoda had had much to say about when and where to fight, but Packer had paid attention only to the how. He might as well have slept through it. “I had a teacher there who once asked me, What makes God laugh?”
Ward grinned back. “ ‘Men making plans,’ ” he quoted, doing an impression of the precise wording, the intense eyes of a character quite familiar to Packer. “I had the same swordmaster,” Ward confirmed. “I did manage to stay awake in Master Zendoda’s classes. Not that I wanted to. It was hard to sleep with so many sharp objects moving at such high speeds.”
Packer laughed, then looked up at the stars. “I’m going to take a walk,” he announced.
Ward gestured toward the spot where a big dragoon stood in the shadows near the picket fence, his back to them, pike in hand, his head swiveling with every motion, every sound. “Let that enormous fellow over there tag along, won’t you? You are the king, after all. And it’s still a job I don’t want.”
Packer looked at Stave Deroy’s back. “I’m not sure I could make him stay behind.”
Packer and Chunk walked side by side through the camp. All was quiet now. All personnel had been ordered to get as much rest as possible, and most were dutifully obeying. No lights burned, and the quarter moon was low in the sky, so the king and his guard were all but invisible as they picked their way toward the woods.
“Have you ever been in battle, Chunk?” Packer asked when they were far enough away from the camp that he was sure they would not be overheard.
“No, not a real one. Unless you count puttin’ a pike through that Mux fella’s neck.”
Packer nodded. “Actually, I would count that, yes.”
“Nah. He was facin’ the other way.”
Packer paused. “Well, taking him down was a great service, regardless.”
Chunk pondered that. “I didn’t know that then. I just knew he wasn’t one of us. And he had you by the hair.” Packer could feel the ire rise in his big companion.
“Thank you again.”
“That’s my job.”
They walked a few more steps. Then Packer said, “It’s a funny thing when a man’s job is killing other men. That was my job, too, on board the Trophy Chase.”
“You did it good, from what I hear.” He was proud of his king.
After a while, Packer asked, “Have you ever seen a miracle, Chunk?”
The big dragoon thought hard. It was his duty to answer honestly. “One time. One time when I was little I dropped a whole gold coin through a hole in my pocket, on the way to market. I thought I was in for the whippin’ of my life. So I prayed the whole way home, walkin’ back the way I come. And there it was, stuck in the mud. I just saw the edge gleam in the sunlight.” He paused, remembering. “I thought then, That’s a miracle.” He paused again. “I never did tell nobody about that before. Specially not a king.”
“God answers prayers, Chunk. That much I know for sure. He has to.”
“He has to?”
“It’s His nature. If we pray to Him. If we love Him, and if we ask like a child. He has to answer.”
After a pause, Chunk said, “That’s a lotta ‘ifs’ to try and remember.”
Packer laughed. “Maybe. But when you’re hurting and you don’t know where else to turn, and you ask God because you just want things to be right, it doesn’t really seem very complicated. Like a child crying out for his mother.”
After another long pause, Chunk said, “You’re real different from the other king.”
CHAPTER 3
Surrounded
Packer stood and brushed away the twigs and dirt that clung to his knees. He looked up again at the stars, and past them to their Creator. He knew now what he had to do. It was not the easy path, nor the safe path. But it was the right path.
As he walked back to where Chunk stood guard, he saw another figure in the dark. It was impossible to tell who it was, but he seemed formal and at attention, while Chunk seemed relaxed and at ease. This was not someone whom Chunk felt was dangerous.
“Beggin’ your pardon, Your Highness,” the big dragoon said, squaring up as Packer approached, “but this man here wants a word. Says he’s a friend of yours. I can send him away easy enoug
h.”
Packer could now see the height of the man, how stiffly he held himself. Gray hair, big hands. “Dog?”
“Aye, Packer. It’s me.” He sounded glum.
“What is it?” Packer worried that Dog had some grim news, perhaps from home.
“I came looking for you to tell you…” he trailed off. Then he hooked a thumb toward the big dragoon. “You suppose I could say it without the threat a’ death here?”
“Chunk, please let us talk a minute.”
“Yes, sir.” Chunk immediately crunched away through the woods, stopping just out of earshot.
“How is your…injury?”
“Fine.” Dog sniffed. He hadn’t come here to exchange pleasantries. “Look, it’s just this. I been talkin’ to that priest. Always a bad idea if a man don’t want to face himself. But lyin’ there with him stitching me, there wasn’t much way to run. Anyhow, I know I been hard on you all your life.” He went silent. Packer waited. “We fought a couple times,” Dog managed. “I won once, you won once. So I figure we’re square as far as that goes.”
“It’s in the past.”
“Yeah, but all of a sudden, now you’re king. I had some time to think, thanks to your robed friend, hoverin’ around…helping.” He said the word as if it were a fly to be swatted. “He seems to hold you in high regard.”
“Well, I don’t think he knows me all that well.”
“That’s what I told him. Anyways.” He cleared his throat. When he spoke again, it was in a resonant tone, overly paternal. “I know I didn’t treat your father well. All his Firefish talk, all that nonsense. And your priest school, you know, I thought that was just a load of slag, too. Then I thought you’d killed Duck and Ned, I turned you in. But that was an honest mistake.” He paused, waiting for an affirmation Packer didn’t offer. “So now you’re king of everything and all, and so I’m thinking I just need to tell you, you know, as regards all that…” he sighed deeply. “I want you to know that I don’t hold none of it against you no more.”
Packer nodded slowly, then said, “Thank you, Dog.” If that was all Dog could manage, Packer wasn’t going to get picky. Such a statement was in fact a long, long haul from where he’d been.
“You’re welcome. There’s one other thing.” Now Dog’s voice softened just a bit. “It’s that I hope you’re a real good king.” The old man paused as he felt a stab of bitterness rise, then fall, then dissipate. “And as long as you are, I’ll…I’ll do my duty by you. You and the queen.” Dog did not add, “especially the queen,” but he thought it. And Packer heard it.
“Thank you,” Packer said again. Then he added, “As long as you’re here, I could use some advice.”
Dog waited. “About what?”
“A lot of things. How much should we be asking the new recruits to do? How good are they? Do they have enough training? What about the irregulars? They fought on the Green, and we’re treating them as part of the army. Women, as well as men. Does that make sense?”
Dog scowled. “The new boys are every bit as good as those festerin’ fancy-suited stiffs that like to sit around and smoke and give us orders. They’re treating us better, now, now that we’ve seen ’em run. And if women can kill the Drammune, I say let ’em kill the Drammune. Lotsa men couldn’t do it. And I think most everyone feels the same way.”
“Well, that’s very helpful.”
“That? Anyone coulda told you that.”
“But they didn’t. Dog…May I call you Dog?”
“It’s my name, ain’t it?”
“Dog, would you agree to be an advisor to the Crown?”
Dog felt his pulse go up, and as it did the blood pounded through the wound in his chest. He ignored it, not wanting to seem too eager. “What would I have to do?”
“Speak your mind.”
“To who?”
“To me. Me and Panna.”
His eyes went wider. “That’s it?”
“That’s all.”
Dog rubbed his chin as he thought hard about this, looking for the loophole. “What does it pay?”
Packer pondered. “At least as much as soldiering, that I can promise.”
It seemed reasonable. Dog’s eyes narrowed. “I won’t bow down to you. Nothin’ like that.”
Packer shook his head. “I won’t ask you to.”
“Do I have to sit around with all your muckety-mucks who know everything about everything?”
“Well…yes. I’m asking you to become one of those muckety-mucks. I don’t want people around me who just tell me what I want to hear.”
Dog spoke quickly now, seeing reason in the boy, some promise that he might turn out all right if he just had people to steer him away from his natural boneheadedness. “I promise you, Packer Throme, I will never do that. I’ll never tell you what you want to hear. You can count on that.”
Dog said it with such confidence that Packer didn’t have the heart to point out that Dog had just contradicted himself. He put out a hand. Dog looked at it, then shook it. The big man’s paw seemed softer; his grip looser than Packer remembered.
Dog felt the hard, scarred hand and the firm grip, saw the iron in Packer’s calm blue eyes. Then he turned sharply and walked away.
The armies of Huk Tuth moved all night in the dark, carefully laying a trap. The Drammune generals had been adamant about troop placements. They did not want the Vast rabble to run again, and so rather than accept Tuth’s orders as written, a full assault from the north, the left flank, with all due speed, they argued with him. “We must bring our forces in from three sides: north, east, and west,” General Harkow insisted. “The tangled terrain to the south will become the anvil against which the hammer of Rahk will crush the Vast once and for all.”
Huk Tuth was the ranking officer and in absolute command. But though he thought speed more important than position, he was a naval man and inexperienced with ground warfare. Harkow’s plan won the day.
The first shots were fired by the Vast, at the eastern front. Drammune troops had crept in darkness to within twenty yards of the Vast trenches and redoubts. The first rays of dawn revealed that the floor of the little valley had become an army in the night, an army arrayed against the Vast, poised and ready. A single command was shouted, and the Vast opened fire.
It was a meager effort. Rain on a tin roof would have been only marginally less intimidating than the scattered gunfire the Drammune presence teased from the woods. The fits and coughs from behind felled trees and timbers piled as redoubts were unimpressive, and even those that found their targets also found Firefish-scale armor. Shots ricocheted away harmlessly.
The return fire, when it came, was merciless. The Drammune were five lines deep, five thousand foot soldiers on their bellies, each a marksman with plenty of ammunition, all ready to drive hard into the forest. These soldiers were backed by artillery. The cannon lining the farmland behind their ranks were mostly eight-pounders, with a few of the big guns, sixteen-pounders with eight-inch barrels, brought in to help open up the woods a bit.
A Drammune general on horseback watched from among the larger guns, waiting for the thunder of Vast cannon that would allow him to aim his own. The crack and plink died away, however, without so much a single bellow from a big gun. He uttered a single word—“Charnak!”—and the woods were shot through in an instant with thousands of rounds, a flashing of fire and thunder followed by billows of black smoke that blew from the field into the forest. Great trees toppled, felled by the cannonade. When the barrage ceased, not a single Vast weapon answered.
The general called the charge, and the horde went in uncontested.
The Drammune soldiers were soon cursing, however. They knew as quickly as their general that the Vast army had chosen not to hold this front. Climbing over redoubts and through trenches that lined the woods for miles, they knew this was no rout. The front had been abandoned. The real fighting would be on the flank, and to the rear. The Drammune pushed harder, hoping to catch the Vast from behind.
But this Drammune frontline assault was also a feint. This was not Harkow’s main point of attack. The great majority of his troops moved on the cue of gunfire from the east. They were already deep within the woods, having spent the better part of the night creeping into position, close enough to the Vast outposts to hear the troops laughing and talking among themselves.
Now the Drammune appeared in the dark shimmer of dawn beneath the canopy of the woods, emerging from behind trees, materializing from the mists that floated up from the winding creeks, arising from the underbrush like spirits from the grave.
If the Vast resistance had been weak on their eastern front, it was hardly noticeable on the north, their left flank. The attackers easily overran Vast outposts and stormed through the woods, hoping to meet up with their fellow attackers coming in from the east and west. They would together crush the Vast against their southern perimeter, where the terrain grew rough and rocky and impassable.
Tuth knew his enemy now, and distrusted reports that the southern woods were impenetrable. He feared the Vast would somehow disappear again. So he had planned to cut off all escape. He dressed his deadliest fighters in black, those trained to kill in silence hand-to-hand, and sent them to infiltrate the forest to the south, cutting off all hope of retreat into the underbrush. These were the Nochtram Eyn, handpicked by Fen Abbaka Mux, and named by him. They were “Death from the Darkness,” silhouettes with special skills, men and women, mortach demal and assassins who, it was said, could appear and disappear at will. Five hundred Nochtram Eyn had infiltrated the forest, discovered paths into the woods. With crossbows, daggers, and flying knives they eliminated entire platoons of the Vast, and blocked the paths with their bodies. Then they waited for the inevitable flow of fleeing Vast salamanders.
With five thousand Drammune coming in from the east, and ten thousand down from the north, General Harkow’s main forces now poured in from the west. Twenty-five-thousand soldiers came on from the least likely direction, a massive movement of Drammune military might, intent on crushing the Vast armies here once and for all. The mortar into the pestle. And so in a brilliantly planned attack, perfectly prepared in the dark of night, expertly executed at dawn, the Vast were surrounded.
The Trophy Chase Saga Page 89
