by George Hatt
“We can bypass them,” said Aramand, the commander of Marek’s infantry complement. “There must be easier pickings farther on. Let them have their backwater.”
“Balls! Cowardice! To think you could brook such a notion—to be turned away by churls with sticks!” spat Tancred, a banneret who brought a formidable detachment of knights to the campaign.
Marek wiped sweat off his nose and cocked his head. He let the gleaming helms and pike heads in his vision blur as his eyes went out of focus. Then he nodded and looked at Tancred.
“I think you can take them,” he said. “Bring Lord Jarek’s battle along with your men. Ride until the ground gets soft, then dismount and advance on foot. It will be a slog, but you can push the enemies’ backs to the stream and kill them off them where they stand. They put themselves in a death trap. I want you to push them in and close it around their necks.”
“We are knights. We trample churls beneath our horses’ hooves!” Tancred said, then wheeled his horse toward his own men.
“Do as I say!” Marek yelled at the brash young nobleman. “Twenty-three hells! Aramand—ready your men. You may need to finish this.”
Marek watched helplessly and fumed as Tancred disobeyed his orders. The banneret and his 500 knights galloped through the marshy lowlands and splashed through the brook; he never bothered to summon Jarek’s men. Then the formation bogged down, broke ranks and struggled out of the water in near disarray. The pikemen advanced in orderly ranks on the struggling knights.
“He got his horses stuck in the mud. Oh, fuck him. Fuck that motherless son of a bitch,” Marek growled through his clenched teeth. “He’s pissing away our heavy horse! Aramand! March your infantry!”
Marek’s anger turned to grim resignation as he watched the pikemen massacre Tancred’s knights while his own infantry marched across the intervening field toward the battle.
The pikemen were well disciplined for a peasant levy, but they had not reformed their ranks when Aramand’s infantry met them on the killing field, and they fell back under the merciless press of Aramand’s fresh soldiers.
The battle was over in less than an hour, and Marek led the rest of his knights and the victorious infantry across the bridge. They spent the remainder of the day systematically destroying Bell Haven and exterminating its inhabitants (“…like rats,” he instructed them. “Don’t leave a single brick on top of another. We will make an example of them.”)
Once the slaughter was complete, Marek ordered camp to be set among the ruins of the village to take advantage of its defensible position.
“Lord Marek,” said a knight on guard outside the command tent that evening. The smell of smoke from the burned village hung thick in the air. “Lord Tancred has returned!”
“Come in, Tancred, come in! Aramand and I were just congratulating each other on our stunning victory and the instrumental part you played in it,” he said.
The muddy, blood-caked nobleman limped into the tent. “I am sorry, Lord Marek. I, I…”
“You fucked us, you little sot!” Marek roared and grabbed his armor.
The battered nobleman whined, “There were so many of them! The murderers slew us while we were stuck in the mud!”
“That is what you do! You kill your enemy when he trips on his own dick! You wasted 500 of our best men, you worm. I told you to dismount, but you charged through the morass. Your disobedience killed your men! Stop crying. Stop crying, Mahurin damn you!”
“Lord Marek!” Aramand said. Marek barely heard him over the roar of his own blood in his ears. He felt the blast of obscenities rumble out of his chest, but he lost track of what he said, and felt the dull shocks in his forearms as he pounded Tancred into what he assumed would be a bloody mess. At some point, they slipped and knocked over the field table. By this time Tancred had gone limp, and that somehow further stoked Marek’s already white-hot rage.
“Lord Marek,” Aramand said again when the anger subsided. “You’ve…”
“I know,” Marek croaked. He was already hoarse from screaming. “I know. Five hundred men, Aramand! He lost 500 men in our first battle. Against a fucking peasant levy.”
Marek stood, wobbly and weak from the exertion of savaging Tancred. He straightened and wagged a gory finger in Aramand’s face. “There will be no more insubordination on this campaign. I do not give a good god damn who it is. If I give an order, it will be obeyed. To the letter. On pain of death. Otherwise we will all die, because I promise you that Duke Grantham does not fuck up like we did today. This was an expensive lesson for you all.”
Marek stooped and pulled a broken table leg out of the red mass that used to be Tancred’s handsome face.
“I’ll need a new field table,” he said, and hurled the bloody shard of wood out the tent door. “Guard! Come in here. Drag this useless sack of meat behind a horse through the camp. The whole camp, damn it, including the lords’ and bannerets’ areas. They especially need to see this. I want the entire host to know what happens when a leader disobeys my orders, gets his men killed in the process, and is stupid enough to come back to me alive.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Barryn
As spring wore on and became an unseasonably hot summer, Barryn and his fellow recruits had continued to drill and sweat under the merciless sun. All of the recruits were now proficient with the spear, sword and shield, and crossbow—the standard weapons for infantrymen in the Black Swan Company. They also learned how to maintain and operate the light artillery pieces, the scorpion and the onager, that accompanied the infantry into battle.
The yelling from Sergeants Drake and Otaraz had gradually abated, and by late spring they no longer accompanied the recruits on their marches. Instead, they chose a recruit each week to be the detachment leader and let him execute their orders for the next day’s march. By this time, only the chosen recruit leader had direct contact with the sergeants, and that was only once each evening when they rode in with the supply wagon and the next day’s orders.
Barryn woke the recruits before the sun rose one morning and helped dismantle the camp. Ashara only knew how many miles away from Falgren Keep they were. Delton was the recruit leader for the week, and he had chosen Barryn to take final watch. This was roughly equal to naming him executive officer, since the man on final watch was responsible for waking is comrades on time.
They marched for two hours to a hilltop and found three men waiting for them, along with five wagons, a lighted torch in a stand, and two strange machines. One looked like a huge crossbow mounted on a pintle, and the other looked like a catapult from the illuminated books Barryn had read at the House of Portia, but much smaller.
“Artillery is the highest and noblest of the military arts,” intoned Sergeant Ryszard, the company’s Master Artillerist, when the 40 recruits fell in around the machine. “The infantry is the mainstay of any military formation, and cavalry is its handmaid, but the artillery! She is busy killing the enemy before either horse or foot reach the fight. Scorpion! Make ready!”
At the order, one of the men aimed the ballista at a bright yellow shield hanging from a wooden frame 50 yards away and began turning a windlass at the back of the machine. The action generated a small cacophony of ratcheting clicks and the creaking of torsion ropes as the windlass pulled the cord connecting the throwing arms rearward. The rope locked into place with another click.
“Load!”
The other crewman placed a two-foot long, finned javelin into a groove down the machine’s centerline and gently nestled it against the rope. He shouted “Clear!” when his hand was safely away from the ballista’s workings.
“Fire!”
The first crewman yanked the trigger cord, and the engine launched the wicked projectile with a violent thump.
“Fuck me running,” someone next to Barryn murmured. The javelin punched through the shield and buried itself in the grassy earth on the other side. Barryn wondered briefly if his homeland could survive an earnest attack from the Em
pire and its devastating engines.
The only thing keeping the Castle Dwellers from pushing us into the sea is their inability to unify, he thought.
Another voice came to him, unbidden: Think not of your homeland. Where I am, that is your home. And I am with you always.
Ashara…
Barryn’s reverie was interrupted when Sergeant Ryszard began his demonstration of the other machine, an onager. The sergeant explained that it worked on the same principle as the ballista, both deriving their torsion power from twisted bundles of rope and sinew, but the onager used a single arm that hurled a spherical shot in an arc against the target.
“This, recruits, is what we in the profession of arms call an indirect fire weapon,” the sergeant told his students with the patience of a school master. “It takes a certain degree of skill and, I would argue, finesse to land your shot where you intend it to go. However, this device rewards those who master its use. Onager! Make ready!”
The artillerymen cranked the machines’ windlass, pulling its single arm back into the firing position.
“Load clay!”
The loader gently placed a small clay sphere into the pouch attached to the end of the machine’s arm. Barryn noticed that he was careful to arrange the projectile so that a coin-sized circle of black in the clay shell was facing up. The loader pulled the torch from the stand and lit the black circle. “Clear!”
“Fire!”
The machine jumped, and the projectile arced a trail of fire and smoke across the sky and landed in a ball of fire 300 yards away. The recruits whooped and cheered at the spectacle.
“Now we’re finally having some fun!” Delton said to Barryn and slapped his back.
“Fun,” Barryn said. “Imagine what that can do to a man.”
“Not just a man, recruit,” Ryszard said. “Clay shot can fire villages and clear defenders off castle walls. If you set them up at the proper range, five onagers hurling clay are able to break up a cavalry charge. With these weapons, you’re only limited by your imagination and your marksmanship.”
The recruits spent the rest of the day learning the names of the engines’ parts and how to disassemble, maintain and reassemble them. Each machine, once disassembled, fit in its own wagon along with the specialized tools and spare parts to keep it operational in the field. Another wagon carried the engines’ ammunition.
Ryszard explained that each of the Black Swan Company’s 80-man infantry platoons were assigned a scorpion and an onager. The wagons were driven by the quartermasters, and one of the platoon’s eight-man squads maintained and operated the artillery pieces. The three most experienced men in the artillery squad crewed the savage machines, while the other five dug the emplacements for the pieces and fetched ammunition.
The recruits made camp that afternoon with the extra burden of two scorpions, two onagers and a wagon of ammunition. As recruit leader, Delton had to sign for the wagons, mules and their equipment. If we lose any of those monstrosities, the poor bastard will be paying for them for the rest of his life, Barryn thought as his friend signed the paperwork.
The master artillerist and his crewmen stayed at the recruits’ camp that night and would lead them in the next several days’ maneuvers. Barryn sited their tents in the center of the camp where Sergeants Drake and Otaraz used to be when they marched with the recruits, then marked off a section to park the wagons.
One of the artillerists inspected his tent and nodded his approval. “This is the part where it finally starts to feel like you’re in the Company,” he said. “The next few days will be the most fun you can have outside the brothel tent.”
Sergeant Drake’s words echoed in Barryn’s mind as he paced behind the short defensive berm of the camp in the clammy morning darkness: You’re almost mercenaries now, recruits, and not a moment too soon. We’re about to go to war and kill some sons ‘a bitches.
Artillery week was to be their last field exercise as recruits. As soon as they returned to Falgren Keep, Drake had told them, they were to be issued their weapons and armor and assigned to the infantry platoons. “And there’s a good chance you’ll be called back early. You can learn artillery in the field,” he had said.
Barryn had no trouble staying awake this early morning during last watch. The crushing reality was settling in that he would be marching to war among the Castle Dwellers. He was in turns nervous, excited and ashamed that he would be bearing arms with the sworn enemies of his people.
Former people, he reminded himself. No Castle Dweller ever tried to burn me at the stake.
Drake had very candidly explained the military situation to the recruits that evening during formation. Lord Marek of Relfast had crossed into Brynn at the head of an army of his retainers “and pig fucking free companies” and was wreaking havoc in the border reaches.
Innocent men, women and children were dying brutal deaths while Barryn paced around the now familiar camp and his comrades snored in their tents.
It’s war, recruits. Shit happens. But it doesn’t have to be like that. The Black Swan Company doesn’t fight like that, if we can help it, Drake’s disembodied voice repeated over and over in Barryn’s mind.
Why would Ashara want me to be party to this?
More troubling news—no word had come from the Heathen Realms about how the Templars fared against the Clans.
The news was troubling to Drake, but more so to Barryn for very different reasons.
“The barbarians aren’t hitting us in the arse yet, and Relfast is punching us in the face. We march, therefore, against Relfast. For now,” Drake had said in summary.
The barbarians aren’t hitting us in the arse yet…
Paardrac. Banton. Craenstardt. The names came to Barryn. He wondered how each of them were. If they were still alive, or slaughtered like the civilians in Brynn. Mamma. How is Mamma? Is she alive?
Barryn could not make himself pray for them. He looked up at the same moons, the same stars, in this camp as he ever had. The trees were the same, the summer morning air smelled the same. But he had never felt so far removed from the gods and ancestors.
I am your goddess, came the unbidden words again. Do not pray, for I will speak to you when you are ready to hear. I will guide your hand. I am Ashara.
“Ashara…why me?” he whispered.
No answer came.
“Fuck balls,” Barryn murmured. He was learning to swear like the sergeants. “Otaraz and Drake are right. I’m dumb enough to take a job and smart enough to actually do it.”
Ashara’s voice left him, as did her presence, which he didn’t fully notice until after it was gone. He became tired and horny and fantasized about Jasmine and Lady Sanguina to keep himself awake through the last hour of his watch.
CHAPTER FORTY
Grantham
A gentle evening breeze wafted through the open door of Grantham’s command tent and brought in the grassy smell of summer and of wood smoke and horse manure.
Nothing like it. The smell of campaign, Grantham thought as he looked out the door and watched the bustle of camp life go on, independent of his will or instruction.
“We are walking right into their trap,” Sheriff Cotrian told Grantham. He stood over a folding table covered with maps and dispatches.
“Yes,” the Duke said, turning toward the sheriff. “And they have blundered into ours.”
“Blessed expensive bait we left for them.”
The remark bordered on insubordination, but was nonetheless true. Lurid retellings of the massacre at Bell Haven were spreading throughout the border reaches, and the local militias were dying almost to a man rather than trust their homes to the mercies of the vicious Lord Marek.
And yet the burning continued. The garrison at Bell Haven had inflicted grievous casualties on the invaders from Relfast, but not enough to stop them. And the civilians of the hamlet suffered mightily under the enemy’s vengeance. Other villages were falling much easier, bereft of support from their nearby castles.
The knights and men-at-arms who could have helped were instead gathered with Duke Grantham at Oak Ridge, a strategic gateway to the heart of Brynn, along with the lords from the interior reaches of the dominion. Here they would make their final stand, Grantham decided, where their concentrated strength gave them a chance to crush the invaders in the open battle that the duke knew his opponent desired. There was no use in letting Marek bypass the individual lords while they holed up in their castles or defeat them piecemeal as they rode out to meet him. Grantham had rightly guessed that Marek would not slow his advance to engage in siege warfare.
“Perhaps the militias will bleed Marek out before he gets this far,” the sheriff said. “Then we could advance on him before he burns more of our country.”
“Were that you are right, Sheriff Cotrian,” the duke said. “Either way, they must do their best with what they have. We cannot afford to break pieces off of the anvil we are setting here at the Oak Ridge to aid the militias in the lowlands.”
“What news of our hammer?”
“I have the Black Swan Company marching wide of Marek’s left flank,” Grantham said, pointing on one of the maps littering the table. “They will hook in and attack the free companies spoiling the countryside, then harass Marek’s column until the devils meet us here.”
“And so we wait.”
“We wait,” Grantham said. “We can finish them off here, once and for all. The terrain favors us, and Marek will be so eager to attack a real enemy that perhaps he will fall into one or two of the traps we are setting for him.”
“Caltrops and pottes up here are not saving our people in the lowlands,” Cotrian said.
“But they will save Brynn,” Grantham said. “Do you question my strategy, Sheriff Cotrian?”
“Not at all, Duke Grantham,” he said. “On the contrary, I trust your judgement. I trust you so much that I feel I can unburden myself to you. My guts twist thinking of our suffering people.”
