Someone shoved him in the back and he stumbled forwards, following Brandt as he wove a path through the industrious soldiers until they came to a small rise on the outskirts of the encampment. They looked down across a much wider valley and a vast spreading plain below. Huge dust clouds churned up the horizon. The darkness was advancing, bringing on a premature night as the men of Stirland marched. Vorster’s breath caught in his throat as the sheer magnitude of the force registered. It must have been four thousand men… more.
“They wrote in the old days that it was sweet and fitting to die for one’s country,” Ackim Brandt said, looking at the men he would have to fight all too soon. They understood nothing, did they? There is nothing sweet or fitting in your dying. In war, good men die like dogs for no good reason. Come, let’s get you and your men home shall we?”
The exchange took place less than a quarter of a mile from Ignatz’s Folly. That was how the survivors had come to think of the arrowhead tip of Ramius Point ridge.
They were going home, or rather returning to the front line with Stirland to fight anew so that more of them could die on the right side of the river.
None of them had dared dream of any sort of homecoming during their days of captivity. To dream of home was just another torment. It weakened the soul. It ate away at their strength more completely than hunger or fear ever could. They had no need of fresh agonies. But now, together, walking towards the ridgeline of Ramius Point they could begin to hope. They were going home.
Vorster led the survivors. They held their heads up high, walking towards Martin’s army. They had not broken. They had not died. They were survivors. During their months within Brandt’s camp the ghosts of battle had taunted them. Cannon fire, the cries of the horses, the screams of the men and ringing steel had been keeping them from sleeping and driving them beyond the point of exhaustion.
Now they were free. Well, almost. They were out of the godforsaken stockade and were going home, sixty of them, bound hand and foot, shuffling along in a winding column. It was a long walk, but Vorster welcomed the clear sky over his head and the wind in his hair. He swore he would never complain about being stuck outside in the middle of nowhere again, knowing even as he made the vow that he would break it. He was a soldier. Complaining about the elements was his lot in life. The day he stopped complaining about the blasted snow or the blessed rain was the day he died. He looked at the rest of his men and smiled. He thought of them as his men now. They had made it.
Ackim Brant raised a hand, holding the line.
Across the field, Martin von Kristallbach walked forwards breaking the line of men, a trio of war hounds loping by his side. The man moved with the surety of a warrior not a woodsman. So changed was Martin by the conflict that Vorster would not have recognised him. He knew the look on his face. The man was haunted by daemons.
“But then who isn’t?” Vorster asked himself.
“Soldier?” Brandt queried.
“Just thinking aloud.”
Together they walked across the snow-covered field and met the man halfway. Vorster studied his liege as he approached. His hair and beard had grown almost wild. They lent him a terrifying aspect. He moved with the authority of someone used to being respected. With three war hounds running at his side, Vorster wasn’t surprised. The sight of the animals loping easily at his heels was enough to strike terror into the heart of even the stoutest soul. He was a born leader.
“Are you the Ottilia’s man?” Martin asked, looking Brandt up and down.
“Aye, I am. You?” Brandt held out his hand for the man to take.
“Martin von Kristallbach.”
Brandt started visibly at the mention of the name but didn’t withdraw his hand. Kristallbach smiled slowly as they shook. Kristallbach wasn’t a man to let his lackeys do the unpleasantries while he hid in the command tent.
“So you know me?” Martin asked. “Well, my new found friend, shall we be about our business? We have Schram here, and I see a few familiar faces. I thank you for looking after my people.”
One man in return for sixty marked this Schram as important, Vorster realised. But then Dietrich Jaeger was important to someone.
“I would that the situation was different,” Brandt said, surprising Vorster with his candour.
“No one ever claimed there was a good war, soldier, nor that there was a bad peace.”
“Indeed,” Ackim Brandt agreed. “We shall grant you twenty-four hours with which to make your passage out of our lands, after that, we must begin the dance all over again.”
“Twenty-four hours is generous,” Martin said. He reached down absent-mindedly scratching one of the dogs hunkering at his feet. “Though I suspect not enough for these men, no matter how fair your treatment of them has been. I cannot put them through the march.”
Brandt craned his neck to look at the ragtag bunch of men he had escorted to the exchange. Vorster followed suit. Martin was right; they were in no shape for an extended march. He understood why Martin had brought the full force of his army down onto this foreign field. He was prepared to fight for the sixty-something men.
Brandt mulled the dilemma over for a moment and then nodded, satisfied. “Seventy-two hours, then we come after you. That should give you long enough to cross the river.” Vorster understood the reference; Brandt was giving them a chance to go home. He had no quarrel with these men, any of them. He was merely a man living on this side of the river doing his ruler’s bidding, and for a few hours at least, there would be no conflict between them.
Martin held out his hand. “You’re a good man, Ackim Brandt. If the Ottilia ever tires of you I want you to know there is a place for you in Stirland.”
Brandt took Martin’s hand and shook it, once, firmly. “At the business end of someone’s sword, no doubt,” Brandt chuckled. He gestured to one of the guards who had accompanied him to loosen the prisoners chains, and it was over, as simply as that. The prisoners walked across the snow-covered field. They were greeted with huge grins, and hugs and slaps from comrades they thought they would never see again. The mood was buoyant. It was a good moment. For that little while at least they could forget about the fact that tomorrow or the next day or the next they would be fighting again and the day after that some of them would be lying face down in the mud, food for crows. There were precious few good days in war.
One man came back the other way. The difference in his demeanour was remarkable. He looked like a whelp that had been whipped one too many times. He was broken. His hair ran wild and his beard was scraggy and untamed. He shuffled, Vorster realised. He didn’t walk. His head was down, the fire in his eyes out. Jakob Schram hadn’t enjoyed his captivity. Brandt’s men seemed none too happy to see the young aristocrat returned to their ranks either. Schram was obviously their Dietrich Jaeger.
Speaking of Jaeger, Vorster saw the arrogant son of a bitch loitering behind Martin’s back, close enough to bask in the Elector Count’s aura and pretend familiarity. Vorster hawked and spat. The man made his skin crawl.
He waited until the last man had crossed over to the other side before he gripped forearms with the man who was his enemy, the man who had somehow become—if not his friend—someone he admired, liked even.
“Go with Sigmar, my friend,” Brandt said.
Vorster nodded. He inclined his head to Meinard and the others in silent farewell, and turned back to Ackim Brandt.
“You know if you ever do decide to take him up on that offer I am expecting you to put in a request for Vorster Schlagener to be seconded to your regiment. I’d walk to the ends of the earth for a leader like you, my friend.”
Brandt smiled. It was the most natural of gestures on his open face. “If I ever do find myself on the other side of the river I can’t think of a soldier I would rather have at my side. Now go before I change my mind and keep you here. I have a feeling we’re going to need a few more men like you if we want to whip that man of yours.”
Vorster chuckled. “Ah nei
ghbour, if only that were so.”
“Isn’t that always the way of things?” Ackim Brandt said, his gaze drifting towards Jakob Schram’s back.
Vorster tried to bite his tongue, he really did, but face to face with that dimwit Jaeger there was nothing he could do. His anger had been simmering from the moment he’d seen Jaeger skulking behind Martin’s shoulder. Half a minute in the man’s company and it got the better of him. One look at Jaeger’s smug expression was enough. The fop had the gall to expect thanks for saving them. His skull was so thick that the cost of his own actions hadn’t penetrated the bone. He wilfully refused to understand that his arrogant stupidity had condemned hundreds of good men to needless deaths. Instead he chose to stand before the survivors and play the role of benefactor, the caring father with arms wide open to welcome the prodigal sons home.
Vorster wanted to smack him in the face and wipe that damned stupid grin off his fat lips.
The words just spilled out of his mouth.
“You!” Vorster bellowed, grabbing a horrified Dietrich Jaeger by the lapels and hauling him up so the fool’s spluttering face was only inches from his own. “You sanctimonious son of a bitch! How dare you stand there like some bloody hero lording it over your minions! Do you have any idea what you did? Do you?” Spittle frothed at Vorster’s mouth. He threw the officer backwards. Jaeger staggered and stumbled trying to keep his feet. Vorster slammed an open palm into his chest and sent him sprawling to the dirt. He stood over the man. “Did you stay long enough to watch your own men die? Did you? No, of course you didn’t. You went back to your bloody pavilion for a nice goblet of mulled bloody wine, didn’t you? Sigmar’s balls, you disgust me, Jaeger. You’re less than human. You’re a fool and that wouldn’t be so bad if you weren’t so damned smug about your own stupidity. That man there,” he turned to thrust an accusing finger at Ackim Brandt’s retreating back, “is a hundred times the man you are. He cares more about his prisoners than you do about your own men!”
“How… how… you… How dare you?” Jaeger gabbled incoherently, enraged.
“I dare because I watched friends split open by axes. I dare because I lay amid their corpses as the birds plucked at their eyes! I dare because you were too bloody stupid to know your arse from your elbow and sent me to die! You sent us running across their guns. It was suicide and you were too goddamned dense to realise it!”
“I’ll have your head!” Jaeger thundered, pushing himself up onto his elbows, his face purple as though he were in the grip of an apoplectic fit. “How dare you, you ungrateful whoreson? I’ll have satisfaction for your insults’
“Are you truly that stupid?” Vorster shook his head. “Of course you are. Very well.” Vorster reached instinctively for the sword that on any other day would have been at his hip.
“Oh no, you oaf,” Jaeger said, on his knees. “You’ll do this right. You’ll face me man to man. I will have satisfaction or an apology.”
He teased off his dirt-smeared glove and threw it in Vorster Schlagener’s face.
Vorster stared at it in disbelief. The glove lay in the mud. He stepped on it, grinding it under his foot. “You outrank me, sir. You are petty aristocracy and I am a non-commissioned officer. There’s no good reason for a duel.”
“There’s every damned good reason you egotistical pup. You need a lesson in manners and I am just the man to teach you.”
“In which case I shall very much enjoy killing you.”
Vorster half-expected someone to get between them and call an end to the nonsense, but no one interceded. Vultures gathered around to watch though. The spectacle was compelling.
Oskar Zenzi held out a hand to Jaeger, helping him to rise. “I will stand as your second, Dietrich. Who will stand as this blowhard’s man?” Zenzi turned around. “Anyone?”
“I will.”
The crowds parted to reveal Ackim Brandt standing in the middle of them. The commotion had obviously drawn his curiosity. Vorster started visibly. He had thought the enemy soldier had returned to the safety of his own ranks, as any wise man would have. To see him, coming through the press of people to support him was a sign of friendship beyond anything he could have imagined. It showed, more than anything, that they were all men divided by an enemy of their own making where not so long ago they had stood side-by-side against a common threat. Still, in this new political climate it was unusual to say the least.
He wasn’t alone. Meinard and the other guards had remained with him, or returned.
The sight of Brandt reduced Jaeger to apoplectic rage. “How dare he? How dare this scum walk amongst us so brazenly? Will you stand for it, Zenzi?”
“Oh, yes,” Zenzi mumbled, obviously flustered by this peculiar turn of events. An honour duel between unequals, the lesser man’s second none other than an enemy commander—it was unheard of in polite society.
They weren’t in polite society, they were on a battlefield. Manners and civility were for the dead, he decided, extending an unusual courtesy to the man they had come to parlay with. It was a rare moment of peace in what had been a long hard campaign.
“We are all men of honour,” Zenzi decreed. “It is our opinion that honour is best satisfied between equals. As men of the Empire we are all equals.”
“Though some are less equal than others,” Jaeger blustered. No one was listening to him.
“Are you prepared to apologise to this man, friend Vorster?” Brandt asked, ignoring the raging Jaeger.
“No. I am quite prepared to kill him though,” Vorster said, without a hint of mirth in his voice.
“Then it seems our course is set. As the challenger your man has the right to choose weapons. Let us not draw this out any more than we need to. I suggest these.” Brandt drew a twin pair of beautifully hand tooled pistols.
Seeing them, Jaeger’s eyes lit up. “Oh yes, quite fitting. They will do just splendidly.”
He held out a hand eagerly.
“Make your choice.”
“This one, no, no, this one. Yes.” Jaeger took the second of the two even though there was no visible difference between them. Brandt smiled and handed the first pistol to Vorster.
“A single cap. Kill or be killed. If you fall, your charge will be seen as unfit and your opponent exonerated of all wrong doing. This we swear before an audience of equals.” Both men nodded. Very well.” He removed a small blackpowder pouch and emptied just enough propellant for a single shot from each weapon, and handed both men a lead ball. “You will follow my mark. Stand back to back.”
They did. Vorster felt strangely calm. He pressed the powder and shot into the pistol, and kept the barrel held upright, resting beneath his chin.
“I will count out ten paces. On ten you will each turn and loose a single shot. That shot shall signify the validity of this fight and settle all needs for honour. Is that understood?”
“It is,” Dietrich Jaeger said solemnly.
“Understood.” Vorster said.
“One last chance, gentleman, are you quite sure you want to go through with this?” Brandt asked.
“Of course I am,” Jaeger said. “I am completely in the right. I have nothing to fear from this ruffian.”
“Very well, and you, Vorster? Do you wish to withdraw from this contest? There would be no shame in saving a life.” The way Brandt said it left the crowd in no doubt as to what he believed the outcome would be.
“This isn’t for me. This is for every one of the men that Captain Jaeger condemned to death with his orders. This is for my friends and my brothers. I will not sully their memory. In one shot I shall avenge them all.”
“There is no satisfaction in vengeance,” Brandt said almost too quietly to be heard.
“Perhaps not,” Vorster conceded, “but there is retribution.”
“Oskar Zenzi, do you wish to officiate? These are your men, after all.”
“Ah, no, I think perhaps given the irregularity of it all it is best that I defer to you.”
“Very
well, then on my word! Gentlemen, begin! One!” He counted out the steps. “Two!” Eight seconds and he could be dead. The thought, rather surprisingly, didn’t disturb Vorster. Indeed he was curiously detached. His hands were steady. He took another step. The world came alive around him even as it slowed to a treacly crawl. Scents heightened, suddenly overpowering: grass and mud and sweat, piss and fear were all there in his nose, alive. The colours of the grass, the sky and the clouds intensified. The grass became greener, more verdant, the sky cerulean and the clouds purer. He was alive, experiencing these things for the first time despite the fact that he had lived with them all of his life. The sudden fear of their loss ought by rights to have undermined him. It didn’t. It invigorated him. This was his world, the living world, the world his men had been denied because of Jaeger. “Three! Four! Five!” Brandt cried out, marking time. Vorster walked resolutely on, keeping perfect time with Brandt’s count.
“Six!”
Vorster breathed deeply and held it.
He saw the implacable face of Martin, a silent spectator on the fringe of the crowd. Vorster chose to believe he saw something else in the Elector Count’s cold eye—a belief that justice was being served.
“Seven!”
He let the breath leak slowly out between his lips.
“Eight!”
He closed his eyes, focusing on the rhythm of his heart and the slight breeze on his face. He could picture the entire scene, down to the faces in the crowd: the men of Talabecland, Ackim Brandt facing the Stirlanders, the flustered supporters of Jaeger and unseen by all but a few, the unflappable count.
“Nine!”
The dub-dub-dub against his chest accelerated rapidly. His breathing grew erratic. Still his hand was steady, the tip of the pistol’s barrel unmoving against the underside of his chin.
[Von Carstein 03] - Retribution Page 16
