Forged in Fire (Destiny's Crucible Book 4)

by Olan Thorensen

  Even pushing the krykors as fast as he could, it took them an hour to reach the draw. The dogs controlled the krykors within the draw until he hacked and pulled several grisselthorn bushes into the narrow dead end’s opening. After surveying the hastily laid barrier and sternly instructing the dogs to “stay” and “guard,” he scurried as fast as he could the six miles home.

  His arrival and story ignited an explosion of activity. It took the chief several minutes to shout down the chaos and get the villagers organized. He ordered the people to pack on wagons and carts whatever they felt they had to save and to stand by for evacuation farther inland. He sent a rider to the district seat to alert their boyerman. Three more riders rode to East Head Point to confirm the shepherd’s story. The chief organized the remaining twenty-six fighting men of the village and led them toward East Head Point. Less than halfway there, a rider returned to back up the shepherd’s warning. A large force of men was landing and digging in. Another rider went to the boyerman with confirmation.

  The Mittack boyerman waited impatiently for the second rider before sending a message to the Mittack capital with news of a foreign invasion assumed to be Narthani. He relayed that he was mustering the district fighting men and that he would observe the invaders until help arrived.

  Caernford, Keelan Province

  It took a full day for the message to reach Hulwyn Mittack, hetman of the Mittack clan at Kilporth, the Mittack capital and site of the end of the semaphore line connecting Mittack to the rest of friendly Caedellium. Just over an hour later, the news reached Culich Keelan while he met with Vortig Luwis and Pedr Kennrick at Keelan Manor. The three men sat in a corner of the manor’s great room. Medicants had fitted Culich with a peg leg, and he got around with the help of a cane.

  Culich unfolded the semaphore message.

  TO: Hetman Keelan

  FROM: Hetman Mittack

  RECNI SDTSB HLN5X

  HENAL NTPMH LIAVC

  UDANA GHOAI UTGOL

  NSNNN EEINP EESKA

  DMDOD AANYS WFIEN

  “Mared!” he called out.

  Seconds later, his youngest daughter ran into the room. Her face bore a worried expression.

  “A coded message from Hetman Mittack. Get the code book in my study.”

  Mared’s face morphed into delight, and she whirled and vanished. The code book was the result of the MIU’s second White Paper. After a Caernford semaphore agent, Esyl Havant, had turned out to be a Narthani agent, all sensitive communiqués via semaphore were encoded. Yozef called the method he suggested a “columnar transposition,” where each day of a year had a different code word. The message was encoded by writing the code word at the top of columns for each letter. The message was then written left to right in the columns. The encoded message was read down the column in order of the letters’ positions in the alphabet. The reverse process decoded the message. Mared Keelan proved a diligent student, much like her oldest sister Maera, and she became her father’s code reader and writer.

  When Yozef explained the code system to Maera, she asked, “How hard is it to break?” In one of too many slips of attention, Yozef blurted out, “Only seconds on a laptop,” before he recovered. He made a second slip when he said it would take a hundred people days to go through all the possible Caedelli words “by hand.” He waited for Maera to ask how else would it be done, except by hand? She merely gave him a quizzical look he had become accustomed to and let the slips slide.

  Less than a minute after Mared left the room, she raced back, carrying a small book, a sheath of paper, a quill, and ink. Pre-drawn columns made coding/decoding easier. Culich gave her the semaphore message, and she sat at a table and scribbled. In two minutes, she handed a sheet to her father.

  H

  O

  R

  S

  E

  H

  U

  N

  D

  R

  E

  D

  S

  M

  E

  N

  A

  N

  D

  C

  A

  N

  N

  O

  N

  L

  A

  N

  D

  I

  N

  G

  E

  A

  S

  T

  H

  E

  A

  D

  P

  O

  I

  N

  T

  M

  A

  N

  Y

  S

  H

  I

  P

  S

  B

  L

  U

  E

  W

  H

  I

  T

  E

  F

  L

  A

  G

  S

  I

  N

  V

  O

  K

  E

  5

  C

  L

  A

  N

  X

  Culich took the sheet and grimaced. He wasn’t yet accustomed to the format. “Horse?” he said, glancing up at Mared. That’s the keyword of the day?”

  “Yes, Father,” she answered, smiling.

  “Hmmm. Hundr . . . eds me . . . n and cannon landi . . . ng east head . . . point many . . . ships . . . b . . . lue white fl . . . ags in . . . voke 5 . . . clan. Ah, there we go. Hundreds men and cannon landing east head point. Many ships. Blue white flags. Invoke 5 clan.” He looked at his advisers. “Hetman Mittack is invoking the alliance for help in whatever is happening.”

  “East Head Point?” questioned Vortig Luwis. “Why would the Narthani land men there?”

  “I agree,” added Pedr Kennrick. “With their navy, they could land north of Kilporth and cut the Mittack capital off before we could respond.”

  Culich shook his head, perplexed. “Even if they’re being cautious after the Moreland City battle and our raids, why East Head Point? I suppose it could be a diversion, but for what? Whatever they’re thinking, we have to respond. I’ll send messages on to Gwillamer and Hewell, asking them to mobilize five hundred men each for assistance, and we need to do the same with a thousand men. Adris is too far away to send men in time. Vortig, alert Mulron and Denes that we’ll send the Naffyd regiment. Naffyd is the closest city and regiment, and their unit is reported to be ready for action in an emergency. We’ll also send Denes with a battalion of dragoons and 6- and 12-pounder batteries from here in Caernford. I assume Hetman Mittack is mustering all of his clan’s fighting men.”

  Luwis appeared uneasy. “I agree there’s no choice, even if it weakens the alliance’s ability to respond elsewhere. It will take a full day to gather the men and supplies. By then, we should hear more from Mittack about what’s happening.”

  Clarification came the next day, right before Denes left for Mittack. The update evoked general surprise.

  Word of troops landing in Mittack reached Yozef an hour after Culich. The hetman had begun regular updates to Yozef and Maera after the battle in Moreland. Thus far, Yozef had resisted suggestions from Culich that he become a regular part of the hetman’s adviser group. Yozef felt it had been bad enough to relocate himself and the more critical facilities to Caernford, and he was loath to give up more time from everything else. Reluctantly, he knew he’d delayed only because Culich’s arguments were reasonable. Maera had agreed with her father, while she understood Yozef’s need to press ahead with the many projects.

  Yozef had already moved most of the foundry and cannon development group to Caernford. Abersford couldn’t support the necessary significant expansion. The distillery didn’t need him anymore, nor did soap, paper, and the sundry other enterprises, many of which had expanded into other towns and province
s.

  As promised, after Yozef had burned their original Caernford house, a large work crew finished their second Caernford home in a month. They were still moving in and furnishing. The house smelled of fresh planking and paint, and the design was different enough from the first house to minimize any remembrances of what had happened there.

  Although messengers regularly came to their new house, the contents of a just-delivered sheet surprised them, just as Yozef had settled down to work on his journals and Maera had donned a cloak to walk with Anarynd and Aeneas. Maera stood on the veranda as Yozef took the message from the boy who worked at Keelan Manor. He looked at the page.

  “It’s from your father and in code, so it’s sensitive information,” Yozef said, annoyed. “Why in code? Culich is at the manor today, only a few minutes away.”

  Maera laughed. “I bet it’s Mared. She in love with coding and decoding. I’ll bet Father wrote the message and told her to have Sonmon run it here. She probably thought it was sensitive enough to encode.”

  Yozef sighed. “We need to tell her it’s not always necessary.”

  Maera hurried out of the room. “I’ll get the code book.”

  When she returned, he gave her the message, and she quickly decoded, frowning as she finished.

  “What is it, Maera?”

  “Word has come that hundreds of soldiers have landed from ships at East Head Point in Mittack.”

  “Narthani?” asked a worried Yozef.

  “It’s not clear. The word from Mittack is that instead of red-and-yellow Narthani flags, they’re flying blue-and-white ones. Those are the flag colors of the Fuomi. Although the formal colors are blue and silver, common flags use blue and white.”

  Yozef’s face displayed a lack of knowledge.

  “Fuomi. Of Fuomon,” added Maera. “Long-time enemies of the Narthani. We haven’t had news from outside Caedellium for several years, but from what I know, I doubt they are any less hostile to each other than before.”

  “Hmmm . . . so if they’re Fuomi, what are they doing here?” Yozef mumbled.

  “This far from Fuomon, I don’t believe they can be seriously challenging the Narthani on the island,” reasoned Maera.

  “No, which means some other reason. Maybe just to find out what’s going on here.”

  “Or trying to see if they can establish a foothold on the island and maybe collaborate with one or more clans?” suggested Maera.

  “Helping against the Narthani is one thing, and staking a claim of their own is something else,” said Yozef.

  “From what I know, if we had to choose, the Fuomi would be far better for us than the Narthani.”

  “Maybe so,” said Yozef, “yet I can assume that neither Narthon nor Fuomon ruling Caedellium would be the clans’ preference. Either way, we need to know more about why they’re here.”

  Maera looked at the message again. “Father asks you to accompany the units to Mittack. I assume he’s planning to send a force of some size to Mittack, in case whoever they are have intentions we won’t care for.”

  Maera paused, rereading the message, nibbling her lip as she thought. “I’ll need to go with you if it really is Fuomi. Only a couple of other people on the entire island know enough of the Fuomi language to be useful, and none are as likely to understand nuances of the situation as well as myself.”

  Yozef agreed with the suggestion; the advantages were immediately obvious. She was right, as far as her assessment of herself. “Even though you read Fuomi, can you understand it spoken, since you’ve never practiced with other speakers?”

  “I should be able to understand the general trends of the speech, and the more I hear, the better I’ll get. The Fuomi will surely have people who speak Narthani, and my Narthani is quite good. I’ve been practicing with the Narthani prisoners and escapees. Which reminds me, Balwis offered to help me practice Narthani.”

  Yozef smiled. “And if you serve as an interpreter when we talk with the Fuomi, it won’t hurt to have someone who they don’t realize understands at least some of what they say among themselves.”

  “The thought had occurred to me,” said Maera, smiling back at her husband.

  “What about Aeneas? This is likely to take at least several sixdays.”

  “He’ll be fine. I’m not breast-feeding him anymore, so Braithe takes care of that. I’ll tell the staff that Anarynd will oversee the household while we’re away.”

  Yozef considered. Yes, Anarynd doted on Aeneas and was conscientious. It might be good if they showed their confidence in her and let her feel that she contributed. And yes, having Maera along would be good for the mission. And for me. I guess I’d miss her, if I had to be away for several sixdays.

  “All right. Discuss it with Anarynd, Gwyned, and Braithe. I’ll pass word on that we’ll be ready to leave with the others.”

  “You know, Yozef, it’s fortunate my monthly bleeding just finished. I hate traveling when that’s happening. I don’t get cramps anymore, but even with the kotex you introduced, it’s still a bother putting them in and disposing of them. Anarynd resisted using them until I showed her how. Yet even now she insists on burying them outside in the woods, as they did such things in Moreland.”

  Too much information, thought Yozef. Men knew these things happened but didn’t need elaborate descriptions.

  The next morning, a confirming message came from Mittack. The new arrivals were indeed Fuomi and indicated they wanted to meet with clan leaders. Culich suggested that the Mittack hetman wait until the Keelan men and representatives arrived before he talked further with the Fuomi. Culich still couldn’t ride, even by carriage, with his leg still healing from the amputation and becoming accustomed to the peg. Vortig Luwis would be the Keelan representative, with Denes commanding the force and Yozef as an adviser. Yozef saw no need to initially inform Culich that Maera would accompany him—they would argue later, if necessary.

  Chapter 7: First Meeting

  After two days’ travel, Yozef, Maera, Vortig Luwis, Denes, nine 6-pounder horse cannon, six 12-pounder cannon with limbers and caissons, supply wagons, and five hundred dragoons arrived at Kilporth, the Mittack capitol. The four of them rode most of the way in a carriage, although they also brought mounts: Mr. Ed for Yozef and a large gray gelding for Maera. At the last minute, Yozef also decided to bring three long 12-pounders. These had just passed tests after cooling and had barrels eighteen inches longer, which gave the gunpowder more time to burn before the shot exited the barrel, resulting in a longer range.

  However unenthused Culich felt about Maera’s involvement, he grudgingly acceded to the arguments. The Naffyd regiment waited for them, encamped two miles from the Mittack capital. They joined other Mittack men, and the combined forces left for East Head Point—accompanied by Aelard Mittack, only sixteen and the oldest son of the Mittack hetman.

  Aelard had been sent back to Kilporth to give the Keelanders an eyewitness account of the Fuomi, after accompanying his father to observe the intruders. He confirmed a rough count of a thousand Fuomi digging in a serious encampment at East Head Point—including trench works, bastions, and 30-pounder cannon probably taken from ships offshore. An interesting piece of information was that the Fuomi delegation included a woman, their translator.

  East Head Point, Mittack Province

  From Kilporth, the column pushed hard and reached East Head Point in one long day. They had brought extra horses to trade off pulling the artillery. Still, all the horses were well spent by the time they arrived. Denes’s thinking was that if fighting were necessary, it would not be a cavalry engagement, given the Fuomi’s lack of horses and the close and rugged terrain. From a hilltop, they saw the Fuomi dug in on a thousand-yard peninsula protruding from the coast. A rocky prominence at the far end blocked line of sight from the sea, so that Narthani patrols wouldn’t see the Fuomi camp. Low hills faced the Fuomi position, with a higher bluff to one side. There were no trees—the wind-swept point being inimical to vegetation, except for gra
ss and a few shrubs.

  While the rest of the column filed into an encampment area prepared by the Mittackians behind the hills and a mile from the Fuomi, the Keelan delegation proceeded by horse to another hilltop where Hulwyn Mittack waited. Formalities were brief. Everyone looked down on the Fuomi encampment.

  “Well,” said Denes, “if the Fuomi are here for trouble, there’s no way we’re going to attack them in their current position. With their numbers and the narrow front, our men would be slaughtered before they ever reached the trenches.”

  “I agree,” said Hulwyn. “They say they want to talk with clan leaders.”

  “Have you met with them yourself, Hulwyn?” asked Yozef.

  “No. Only one of my clansman and one of the few Preddi escapees living in Mittack. The latter’s Narthani was just barely good enough to understand that the Fuomi want to meet our leaders. That’s why I asked Culich if he had better translators.”

  “We brought along another Preddi escapee,” said Vortig Luwis, indicating a man standing behind the others. “Balwis Preddi and Maera both speak fluent Narthani, and Maera reads Fuomi and thinks she can understand at least some of the speech, though not enough to translate confidently.”

  “Good, good,” said Hulwyn, relieved. “No one we know or trust in Mittack knows enough Narthani for us to be confident of the translation. That’s one reason I didn’t meet with them. And, of course, we’re honored that you’re here, Maera,” he said with a smile to her. They had met many times over the years during various formal Tri-Clan Alliance meetings and more personal visits between hetmen families.