The Tattered Banner

by Duncan M. Hamilton

  ‘There’s a girl. She works at the Sail and Sword. Her name is Alessandra. Can you go to her, and explain what has happened. Perhaps it would be best if you didn’t reveal all the details of why I’ve had to go. Just let her know that it couldn’t be helped and that I’ll be back as soon as I can,’ Soren said. He thought about adding to tell her that he loved her, he certainly felt as though he did, but for some reason he found he could not admit it in front of Amero.

  ‘The Sail and Sword. Alessandra. Consider it done,’ Amero replied. They had reached the centre of the courtyard where they parted, Amero headed out the gate to where his carriage was waiting, while Soren went back to his room to pack his things.

  C h a p t e r 3 3

  THE WILDS OF THE EAST

  The lights and smells of the city seemed like nothing more than a dream by the time he arrived at Fort Laed. It had taken a full week to reach, and it was the farthest outpost properly garrisoned by the Duchy. After they had passed out of the river lands, the scenery had become uninteresting and repetitive. Flat plains stretched as far as the eye could see. On a particularly clear day Soren thought at times he could just make out the peaks of the mountains far away to the north, but for the most part, there was rarely even a tree to break the monotony of the seemingly endless miles of grassland.

  The fort was beyond what was considered to be the borders, or marches, of the Duchy. In the distant past a busy trade road to the east had passed through the region, but merchants from the far eastern empires were rare at best since the old Saludorian Empire had fallen.

  The fort itself was far from being an impressive affair. The last building he had seen made entirely from stone had been Eastmarch Castle, but that was several days to the west and still well within the borders of the Duchy. Although there was a stone hall in one corner of the rectangular area enclosed by the wooden palisade, it was roughly constructed and if anything, less imposing than the other wooden buildings in the compound.

  The arrival of the carriage in the compound caused something of a stir. It was clear that contact with the city was not that frequent. After disembarking, Soren asked a soldier who was collecting the mail package from the carriage where the commanding officer was. The man struggled with the bulging canvas parcel as he gestured to what was little more than a shed on the left hand side of the muddy square in the centre of the fort. It was certainly a far cry from the Academy.

  He stumbled his way through the churned mud, his legs stiff from the cramped inactivity of sitting in carriages for so long. He knocked at the door and was instructed to enter by a curt and gravelly voice.

  ‘I am Banneret Soren, recently of the Academy. Master Dornish provided me with these letters of introduction.’ He took a parcel of papers from his doublet and handed them to the commanding officer who stood opposite him on the other side of a desk. His face was weathered and had gone several days unshaven. The combination made him look several years older than Soren suspected he actually was. He wore a dark blue doublet trimmed with the mustard colour of the Duke’s Legion of the Eastern Marches that was so faded the different colours were barely discernable. He took the papers suspiciously and broke the blue wax seal. He read through them for a moment before speaking.

  ‘I am Banneret Weston dal Vecho, Colonel, the Duke’s Legion of the Eastern March, commander of Fort Laed,’ said the officer formally. ‘Dornish says you aren’t completely green and that you are to remain here under my command until he sends word for you to return to the Academy. He hopes this will be in time for the start of the next academic year.’ He raised an eyebrow as he read and Soren could tell that he was wondering what it was that had precipitated Soren’s unexpected arrival. ‘I hope for your sake that is the case and you are better than the other spoiled brats that occasionally come out here seeking experience. They don’t tend to last long. Speak to the quartermaster in the next building to the right. He will give you your necessaries and see you squared away.’

  ‘Thank you, Colonel,’ said Soren. As Soren turned to leave, dal Vecho spoke again.

  ‘We’re very shorthanded here, and the barbarians are acting up more than usual. As an Academy graduate you’re going to be leading men sooner than you might have thought, so prepare yourself for that.’

  Soren nodded, saluted and left.

  The quartermaster was gruff and unfriendly, but efficient all the same. Soren had not known what to expect. The marches were often somewhere young graduates of the Academy who were from less influential families would go to get some experience in the hope of getting promotion to postings closer to home. Otherwise it was not somewhere an ambitious swordsman would be inclined to spend a great deal of time.

  He was given two uniforms, a plain but functional sword and a variety of other items that would serve him during his stay in the east. After signing for the items and being told he would be expected to return them all as soon as his service was finished, the quartermaster’s assistant took him to the officers’ barracks.

  Each officer was afforded the luxury of his own room in a long single story bunkhouse, which the quartermaster’s assistant informed him was mainly due to the shortage of officers, and, he added with a smirk, the frequency with which they were killed. The assistant left Soren to stow away his things, but he was not left to his own devices for long.

  He had barely finished organising his things, much in the same fashion as he had in the Academy, when a trooper knocked at his door with orders for Soren to attend on the Colonel at once. He left what he was doing and followed the trooper, hoping to make a good impression with promptness if nothing else. The trooper led him back across the muddy yard and back to Colonel dal Vecho’s office. When they arrived, he opened the door and gestured for Soren to enter. It seemed that they did not stand on ceremony in the marches. Nonetheless, Soren saluted when he entered.

  ‘Ah, Banneret Soren, I know you haven’t had much time to settle in, but a report has just come in of a raid on a farmstead a few hours away. I’m sending out a patrol that will be commanded by Lieutenant Dalvi. I want you get a feel for the job and the lie of the land. The next time you go out, it will likely be you in command, so learn as much as you can. I have given you a field commission of Cornet. The legion is a light cavalry regiment, so I hope you are comfortable in the saddle! If you’ve got questions, ask Lieutenant Dalvi, he knows what he’s about,’ said dal Vecho.

  Despite his trepidation, Soren found himself to be enjoying the patrol. While he loved the Academy and the life that he had there, the patrol had a quality to it that was missing from there. This was real. The sense of exhilaration that it gave him went some way to easing the concern he had at the very real possibility that he would never be able to go back to the city, or the Academy, at all.

  The patrol consisted of twenty men and two officers, Lieutenant Dalvi and himself. Dalvi was considerably older than Soren but had a face that made it difficult to determine exactly how old he was. It was tanned and lined, but he could have been beyond middle age or just weather beaten. He didn’t say much, nothing more than the occasional command to the sergeants who rode directly behind them. His head scanned constantly from left to right, his steely grey eyes squinting into the bright, early summer’s day as he searched for anything out of place. It was unusual for an officer not to have been to the Academy, but it was clear that when dal Vecho had not referred to the Lieutenant as Banneret, it had not been an oversight. Unusual, but, as Soren was quickly learning, the rules on the marches were very different to those in Ostenheim.

  Soren still knew virtually nothing about the patrol beyond what the Colonel had already told him. A little after midday they stopped at a small farmstead. It was two small wooden buildings and a corral, a tiny dot on what seemed like an endless plain. The officers and sergeants dismounted and approached one of the buildings and were greeted by the man who exited it.

  ‘Lieutenant Dalvi!’ he said happily. He gestured to a table and chairs by the door that had been laid out with rough
wooden cups. ‘Am I happy to see you,’ he added, as they sat. ‘Caroline! They’re here!’ he yelled as an after thought.

  A moment later a stout woman that perhaps had once been pretty, but now showed the wear of a frontier lifestyle, came out of the building. She carried a heavy pitcher and after heaving it up to the table began filling the cups with lemon water. Soren stared idly at the corral that contained half a dozen horses.

  ‘Magnificent, aren’t they!’ the man said, following Soren’s gaze.

  ‘Thomas, this is Banneret Cornet Soren, just joined us from the west, as punishment for a variety of misdeeds, no doubt!’ Lieutenant Dalvi said.

  Soren cast him a half glance. ‘They are magnificent indeed,’ he said, returning his attention to the horses. ‘They remind me of Ruripathian destriers.’

  ‘You’ve a good eye. There’s a fair amount of Ruripathian in them, but these are my own breed. Just as strong, just as brave, but these fellows are faster and will run all day. When I have a good stock I’ll start selling them to the Duke. He’ll have a cavalry to beat anything the Ruripathians can send against him!’

  ‘Well, hopefully the days of war with Ruripathia are far behind us,’ Soren replied

  ‘Ha!’ said Thomas. ‘That day will never come.’

  ‘Thomas is a veteran of the last war,’ Dalvi said, between mouthfuls of lemon water.

  ‘Aye. I saw how the Ruripathian cavalry operate first hand. Well, I used my veteran’s pension to buy some captured horses, and came out here to put them to stud. It’s the perfect place. You can run them for hours on end in every direction. Perfect but for the barbarians that is.’ He cast a glance over his shoulder. ‘I suppose that’s why you’re here.’

  ‘A prospector said he saw smoke on the horizon and reported it to us at the fort,’ Dalvi replied.

  ‘The smoke had faded out by noon yesterday. It’s the Androv stead I reckon. There’s nothing else out there,’ Thomas added glumly. ‘I was going to ride out and check, but the lads are still young and Caroline won’t let me go more than an hour or two from the stead on my own.’ He said it with shame in his voice, but everyone knew that it would have made no difference to what they would no doubt find.

  ‘Thank you for the drinks, Thomas,’ said Lieutenant Dalvi. ‘It’s my plan to overnight there and stop by here on our way back tomorrow, but my advice to you now would be to pack up your family as quickly as you can and head to Fort Laed until we are sure the area is safe again. There are too few of us on this patrol to chase them down and offer you protection also.’

  ‘Aye, you’re right. I need to go to the fort for some supplies anyway. Good luck to you!’ said Thomas.

  The patrol mounted quickly and before long the farmstead was fading into the distance.

  C h a p t e r 3 4

  THE DISTANT OUTPOST

  ‘I grew up on the marches,’ Dalvi said abruptly, an hour or so after they had left the farmstead. ‘It was nicer back then, before the barbarian tribes moved down from the hills in the north. First they started raiding in the summer, now they seem to be attacking whenever they want. As the frontier stretches ever farther to the east, we just can’t keep them from raiding settlements. The Duke won’t send us more men, beyond volunteers. And who would volunteer for danger and hardship out here when there is a nice comfortable life in the city, with parades and balls and fancy uniforms? Who indeed?’ He cast a glance at Soren with a smile on his face. ‘What did you do anyway?’ Dalvi asked. ‘Sleep with the wrong noble’s daughter?’

  Soren did not like Dalvi’s assumption that he was a privileged and indolent idler. ‘I killed the wrong man,’ Soren replied, with as much chill in his voice as he could muster. He did not want anyone here thinking he was a spoiled rich boy. His statement had the effect of killing the conversation for the remainder of the journey.

  There was little left at the Androv stead bar a scorched patch on the ground and some charred wood. The sergeants barked commands and the troopers fanned out searching the surrounds as Dalvi and Soren surveyed the remains.

  ‘What would these people have had that is worth doing this over?’ Soren asked.

  ‘The prospectors to the north would have silver and gems, but these people? Very little,’ said Dalvi. ‘Androv was a cattleman. They must have taken his stock, no more than a few dozen or so. Barely worth the effort. They haven’t caused this type of destruction before. Androv wasn’t the type to fight back, so I doubt if he provoked them. He wouldn’t have put his family at risk.’

  One of the sergeants called out so they walked over to him.

  ‘Two sets of remains, sir,’ the sergeant said.

  ‘Thank you, sergeant. Have them buried, but keep searching. Androv had three children so there should be five in total. I want to give them a proper burial.’

  The sergeant left to go about his duties.

  ‘Surely the cattle must have been spread out over a large area. Couldn’t they have just driven them off without interfering here?’ Soren asked.

  ‘Perhaps, but they didn’t. I doubt if we’ll catch any of them either,’ Dalvi replied. ‘They just bleed off into the plains as though they were never here after a raid. Nonetheless, it calls for a change of plan. Androv had daughters. If we don’t find any more bodies, perhaps we’ll still find them alive. I’m going to send a rider back to Fort Laed with a message to send more troops. We need to go out in force and give these barbarians a bloody nose, dissuade them from doing this kind of thing again for a while. In the meantime the rest of us will go south. There is a small trading post and the shell of an outpost a few hours away that we haven’t been able to man. We’ll base ourselves there for a day or two and see if we can pick up any scent of the barbarian trail. We can go after them when the reinforcements arrive.’

  The outpost had been built the previous year, in answer to the settlers who were ever pushing the frontier further to the east. It was too small to be called a fort, being nothing more than a log palisade reaching about ten feet in height, enclosing an area large enough to contain a modest horse corral and three small wooden buildings. The plan had been to occupy it for a few weeks a year, and to serve as a stopping off point for passing patrols. There was one building outside the walls, a ramshackle affair that looked as though its original shape had received more than one ill-planned extension. One day this would probably be a major fort, like Laed, and a thriving frontier town, but for now it was still only a remote statement of the Duchy’s expansionist plans.

  The killing of the Androvs and their still missing daughters had put a dark mood over the patrol. They had the men set about making the outpost ready for occupation, while Soren and Lieutenant Dalvi went to speak to the occupant of the small shack beside the outpost.

  As they bowed their heads to get through the too-small doorway, Soren thought of the great merchant palaces in Ostenheim and how far removed this was from it.

  ‘Hello there?’ called Dalvi.

  A man in a grubby ensemble of what was once city finery appeared from behind a cabinet of oddities.

  ‘Hello, gentlemen, how might I be of assistance?’ he asked. ‘Ah, legion men!’ he added after taking in their uniforms.

  ‘I am Lieutenant Dalvi. I haven’t met you before.’

  ‘No, I’m Morris. I just bought this concession. A pleasure to meet you,’ said the trader.

  Soren had seen his kind slumped against walls in the city with a bottle. Traders who had made and lost fortunes but had run to the end of their nerves and fallen on hard times.

  ‘A farmstead a few hours to the north was destroyed and its herd was driven off. Have you seen anything, or heard anything from passing traders?’ Dalvi asked.

  ‘Nothing as yet, but it might explain why no one has passed this way for several days,’ Morris said.

  Dalvi appraised him for a moment, his brow furrowing when it became clear to him that he would not learn anything from this man.

  ‘Do many people pass this way?’ Dalvi asked, giving it
one final try.

  ‘A few, the number has been growing. One day in the not so distant future I expect this post to be a regular final stop for merchants heading to the east, and the first port of call in the Duchy for those heading in the other direction!’ said Morris cheerfully.

  Soren thought that Morris was deluding himself. Regular trade with the east was unlikely to be passing through here in either of their lifetimes.

  ‘We will be occupying the outpost for a few days until we have a clearer picture of any threat in the area. I expect you will inform me immediately if you become aware of anything at all,’ said Dalvi.

  ‘Of course, Lieutenant,’ said Morris. He smiled obsequiously and bowed as they made their way out.

  They left the building and walked back to the fort and to the hut that Lieutenant Dalvi had designated as the officers’ quarters. Dalvi shuffled in and sat down wearily hoisting his feet up onto the table. He lit a thin twist of tobacco and inhaled deeply, billowing smoke out of his nostrils as he stared into nothing.

  ‘Well, he was a pretty revolting creature. I wouldn’t be surprised if he is as eager to be of assistance to the barbarians as he is to us. I know that type. They come out here when they’ve lost everything else and drink themselves to death inside a year. From the smell of him, Mr Morris might not even last that long!

  ‘I want to take some heads before these bastards get back into the hills,’ said Dalvi. ‘I want you to take two men and patrol east. Five or six hours should be enough. Take Sergeant Smit, he’ll see you right. I’ll go south. We’ll leave at first light tomorrow, but be sure to be back before nightfall. I’ll leave the rest of the men here to get the outpost in order. I want to find their trail before it goes cold and be ready to go when the reinforcements get here. Then we will hunt them down. Now, get some rest.’

  There was venom in his voice whenever he referred to the barbarians, and Soren was a little surprised that he was pursuing it with such determination. At this point the barbarians were probably long gone with their bounty, and perhaps the unlucky Androv girls, who Soren doubted would ever be seen again.