by Garon Whited
“And if they don’t believe in me, how does that help me?”
“What if you made a noise under an adult’s bed, then weren’t there to be seen? If they can’t see you, then they know something is there, but they won’t know what it is. How terrifying would it be, for example, if you were to whisper their name, and then they couldn’t see you?”
“Huh.” It thought about it for a minute. “That could work, but how do I manifest under an adult’s bed? They don’t believe in me, remember? Besides, how would I know a name?”
“I’m not just a monster, Fred. I’m also a wizard. I bet we can work out a way for you to find your way under a grownup’s bed. And, since there are people in the world who deserve to spend a sleepless night wondering what’s crawling around under there that they can’t see, I bet I can get you names, too.”
“Huh. Okay, let’s say I go for this. What’s in it for you?”
“If I get you a name, you go visit them until I tell you to stop.”
“That’s it?”
“Plus, you don’t terrify children. Ever.”
“I dunno.”
“Please? It’ll save me from having to kill you, which I really don’t want to do.”
“…I could get used to the idea.”
We sat down and hammered out a deal. Well, I sat down; it sort of crouched on the lower arms.
I had no idea whether or not I could trust Fred to keep his end of the bargain. How trustworthy is a monster when you aren’t looking at it? Then again, I like to think I’m trustworthy, so I really had to give him at least the benefit of the doubt. We reached an agreement and I introduced him to the concept of shaking hands; I then had to point out that I didn’t have to shake all of them. I wasn’t against it, in principle, but there was no way I was shaking the slime-oozing tentacle.
With our deal sealed, I cast several spells for him—little things, really, but they would help him make his presence felt. Then we generated some suitable banging, thumping, screaming, and a final, gurgling death-cry. Fred was actually quite good at that; he’s heard a lot of terrified screams, and he’s got a whole chorus of mouths to use. Fred went off to find a bed somewhere else, leaving me amid the dust bunnies.
That was interesting. He left, and I was under the bed. I didn’t even have to lie down; I was just oriented properly to fit in the “real” space. Was that a courtesy on his part, or did it have something to do with two masses occupying the same space? Come to that, did the extradimensional space travel with him as a field he generated, or did he move it into contact with this universe? It did seem to act like a pocket universe with him as the sole occupant.
I crawled out from under the bed.
Ha. For a minute there, I was a monster under the bed. Maybe that’s why the kids stared at me with wide eyes.
“No problem,” I told them, standing and dusting myself off. The two youngest believed me instantly. The eldest looked dubious.
“Go ahead,” I told him. “Look under. You’ll be fine. I took care of it.”
He was even more dubious, but the other two laid down over the edge and bent to look; they confirmed the lack of ugly. He looked, then, and seemed amazed.
“Now, which one of you was hoping I’d come and help?” I asked. They all admitted it.
“You’re the protector of children,” the eldest said. He even sang me a bit of song about how children call on me and I rescue them. The other two nodded furiously. “I didn’t know it would work.”
Well, they weren’t wrong. And I considered Linnaeus lucky that he was already dead.
“You shouldn’t have another monster under the bed,” I told them. “Now it knows better than to do anything in my kingdom. Now, you three get right to sleep. Okay?”
They agreed and immediately flumphed into the blankets. That’s the technical term for plopping into bed and throwing the blankets over your head, you know.
I stepped out the window and rapidly disappeared into the night, terribly embarrassed. True, I just did a nice thing for a bunch of children, but I expected to have something more along the lines of a demonic monster or something. Not a quasi-imaginary beast.
That’s when I realized my psychicness—another technical term—was getting stronger. I could listen for people thinking at me—okay, okay, praying, if that’s what you want to call it—and actually hear them. I had mixed feelings about having such a sixth (or seventh, or eighth…) sense. It might be good for getting a feel for public opinion, granted, but it also meant that I was going to have urges to go out and randomly help people.
I spent a little time in Tort’s lab, just sitting and listening, trying to get a feel for what I was hearing through my ears and what I was hearing… well, any other way. The ears were easy; I could wrap myself in a silence spell better than any earplugs. Whatever else I heard was not, therefore, sound. And, yes, I heard a lot of things, kind of like those background thoughts at night while you’re trying to get to sleep.
A lot of what they wanted was pretty nebulous. Good harvests, good health, long life, happiness, prosperity, all that stuff. I was working on all that stuff already—
Whoa. Hold it.
When I woke up, I pretty much started doing everything I could to make life better around here. Is that why I immediately wanted to help Torvil, Kammen, and Seldar become knights—because that’s what I felt I was supposed to do? Did I start building and enhancing a kingdom because people were sending out psychic waves to encourage it? Did that play on my natural impulses and encourage me to move very quickly into making this little piece of the world a better place? Has it been going on for nearly a century, telling me that I need to make things better?
Once they knew I was really here, did the psychic encouragement increase, since they knew their prayers might get answered?
I sat quietly in Tort’s lab and rubbed my temples. It wasn’t that the people were controlling my mind, or even doing anything invasive. They were just… wanting. And I was hearing it. At worst, I was being my usual, helpful self without the pesky requirement of people actually asking me to help. If I could look at it that way, it wasn’t so bad.
I do need to pay more attention, though. I can’t let public opinion run me. I’m also going to have to listen more and see what I can learn about my kingdom. That might do some good, provided I take the time to look into what they ask for and especially why they want it.
As for kingdom-things that needed work, there was also the whole financial thing. The mountain produced gold and silver, which are good mediums of exchange, as well as copper, tin, and iron, which are good for production. This was very handy, since I planned to take over paying the military from Amber; I didn’t want any questions about who they worked for. Of course, feeding them isn’t the problem, really; making sure they’re armored, armed, and mounted is. We have the metal and can get the horses, but diverting those resources into that particular use eats up cash.
I was sitting down to dinner, thinking about money and chilling a cup of water with magic. As ice started to form, I had a brilliant idea. I dashed out to bother a jeweler after hours and I bought some diamond chips. These I brought home and gave to Tort, then finished dinner.
That evening, she provided me with her mental library of spells and I provided some innovation and knowledge of carbon crystallization. Between us, we put a diamond chip in a heap of powdered charcoal and left it to slowly absorb carbon, crystallizing it around the diamond seed-crystal.
It’s coming along nicely. It’s surprisingly simple when you know how a diamond is put together. It’s just a regular pattern that repeats over and over. I’m still proud of it.
This, of course, means I have to worry about having the same problem Spain had with importing silver from the New World: Inflation. Fortunately, that wasn’t an immediate problem, but one I needed to bear in mind for later.
On the other hand, I hoped I wasn’t causing immediate problems for Tort and for Thomen.
After dinner, Bron
ze took me to the mountain to for some quality time talking with the stone. Afterward, when we came back, we were outside Tort’s place as I was putting Bronze in her stable. There’s not a lot of care or maintenance on her; make sure she’s got a good supply of combustibles and some metallic snacks, that’s about it. I paused because I heard raised voices from inside the house. Well, I have exceptionally sharp hearing; I usually ignore conversations going on inside nearby buildings, but this was like shouting in my face.
“And he’s the King! I know!” Thomen said. It wasn’t a shout, but it was a forceful statement. Tort’s reply was less forceful, but still intense.
“Then you can understand!”
“No, I can’t! I’ve never understood! Fourteen years, Tort! Fourteen years, and you still wear a braid! If it’s not the longest braid in history, it’s only because you cut your hair!” Then, slightly more calmly, “I’ve never asked for more than you could give, you know that—”
“And I have been pleased to give you what I could,” she interrupted, “and to take what you would give. But now that is over, as you should know.”
“I don’t know it!” he said, sounding exasperated. “What is it about him? You were only a little girl when you knew him. How can you love him? How can he mean that much to you? Is it because he’s the King?”
“His station is irrelevant.”
“Then it’s his teeth? He’s older than you, while I’m too young? He won’t grow old? Or he can make you live forever? Or is it just that he’s your angel and that’s all it is?”
“He is my angel,” Tort replied, “but that, too, is irrelevant.”
“Then what?” Thomen demanded. “Now that he’s here, what’s changed? Why is it that he shows up and everything has to be different between us?”
“Nothing has changed between us. You mean as much to me as you ever did.”
There was a long pause.
“I see,” Thomen said. “Finally, I see.”
“Thomen, no, that is not…”
“No, don’t say it. Don’t say anything. You’ve said enough. More than enough.”
“If it matters, I do care for you, very much.”
“No, I don’t think it matters, because I don’t think you do.” A door slammed. I stayed in the stable with Bronze until the outer door slammed and the boots stomped away up the street.
Then I thought that maybe I should go back to the mountain for the rest of the evening. That way, Tort could finish crying. But, most important, I could pretend that I’d never heard a word.
Yeah, that sounded like a good idea. Bronze and I went back to the mountain. I spent the rest of the night looking over a pile of sand and making it do things.
Sand castles!
Well, sand castles and sand combatants. I used the sand as a physical medium for making play-soldiers and terrain. It moved where I wanted it to and shaped itself to my wishes. Think of it as magical doodling while thinking about things.
The things I was thinking about were not the things on my mind. Instead, I thought about the cadet knights and how they would work on a battlefield. The sand helped with that by giving me something to use as a toy battlefield.
One thing I didn’t have to worry too much about was the cavalry aspect of being a knight. We had horses, but they were the lighter, faster horses usually found in the plains, not the brutes needed for big men in steel plate wielding twenty-foot poles.
Oddly enough, cavalry, in the traditional knightly sense of lowered lances and shining full plate armor, was pretty much unused in Rethven and completely unknown in the Sea of Grass east of the Eastrange. Their ideas of combat riders were a bit different.
Most of the grassmen, or the people of the plains, were horse archers. That’s how they hunt, and they’re very good at it. They never need to close with their targets and go hand-to-hand. Even when they attacked and harassed invaders from Rethven, it was always a case of putting arrows into people and then vanishing.
On the other side of the Eastrange (or, The Teeth of the World’s Edge), in Rethven, cavalry was much less common. Horses are expensive targets, and by the time you spend the money to breed something big enough to carry all that armor, train it, and actually buy armor for both man and beast you’ve spent a small fortune. Plus, it needed all that armor; it was easy to hit. Worst of all, any hedge-wizard could do horrible things to your horse, armor or not, and that made things very expensive very quickly.
Second, all that armor meant they were slow. Compared to a running infantryman, a fully-armored knight and horse was a two-ton juggernaut that would run him down if he was lucky, or put a lance through him and let him die later if he wasn’t. The problem for the knight, however, was surviving to get to the infantry so they would run. It took forever to charge across open ground, especially while attracting every arrow, quarrel, sling stone, and thrown rock in range. Even if the knight did make it—and groups of them certainly could—the infantry tended to scatter left and right instead of running directly away. This presented a problem, since two tons of horse, rider, and armor don’t turn worth a damn at speed.
Actual infantry in melee tended to use long-hafted weapons and adopt pack tactics; the people behind and to the sides did the attacking—usually at the lightly-armored legs of the horse—while the people in front packed themselves together and presented a bristling porcupine of spears. Shortly after that, the guy in the really heavy armor, now on foot, tended to get mobbed.
At least, that was the case with disciplined troops; militia and peasant levies, on the other hand, were ideal targets for this kind of cavalry. They didn’t have the discipline to stand there and face the juggernaut, so they ran and got cut down from horseback. That was the bread-and-butter of armored cavalry—shattering superior numbers of low-quality troops.
The last of the major problems for heavy cavalry was that they tended to bog down in anything but flat, solid terrain. Going downhill wasn’t so bad; going uphill just made things worse. Rocky terrain was awful for the horses, and anyone who prepared the ground against cavalry simply dug holes about knee-deep. And as for rainy weather… anyone who thinks horses in armor can go through mud better than a four-wheel drive should consider Agincourt before getting too cocky.
The net result was that after all the time, effort, and money invested in training, armoring, breeding, and so on, the “traditional” knight was somewhat limited in application—rather like a tank, in some respects. This led to them being somewhat rare, and thus made hard to train them together to fight as units; they tended to go off and be heroes on their own. Dead heroes. They just weren’t worth the expense when a nobleman could spend the same amount and get fifty or a hundred times as many regular infantry. You just don’t build a high-cost unit like that and send it out to get slaughtered. Like most specialized units, it desperately needs to be supported by other types of units—infantry, archers, siege engineers, the works.
As for me, personally, I’m kind of an exception, as my survivability is much higher. That’s Bronze’s fault.
So, while heavily-armored knights on horseback had certain definite advantages in specific circumstances, Rethven never really relied much on them. They were a specialized unit, mostly used when the terrain was flat, mobility was important, and brute striking power was required. Crag Keep was a good example; charging across that bridge to attack or counterattack—just to help clear the bridge—was typical. Opening the gates to let Rethven infantry face viksagi infantry wasn’t a good idea.
Rethven’s usual “cavalry” was something more like “mounted infantry.” They were men in light to medium armor who rode up to battle, dismounted, and formed into standard infantry units. This let them cross open ground quickly, or reach an unexpected position, or exploit a sudden vulnerability much more quickly than a standard infantry unit. It was also a lot cheaper in terms of horse breeding and training.
I think heavily-armored knights might be more useful than the standard Rethven school of military though
t may believe. Mobility like that is a major asset on a battlefield—not so much in urban fighting, maybe, but definitely on more open ground. The armor is still the problem, partly in the expense but mostly in the weight. If there’s a way to get the weight down without sacrificing protection, maybe a horse wouldn’t need to be specially bred for size to carry it all. A unit of such knights could exploit breaches in the enemy line and wreak havoc. Or just flank the enemy unexpectedly quickly. Or… well, there are lots of possibilities.
The key to mobility is the lightness of their gear. Steel isn’t ideal for that. Titanium, maybe? Or aluminum? If we could make the armor light enough, I would have to worry about the cavalry aspects of knights.
So, while my soon-to-be knights are trained to ride and fight from horseback whenever possible and practical, they are really best at getting into a pitched melee on foot and hammering the other guys. They regard horses as expendable accessories to battle: Ride up and either create a breach until your supporting infantry can arrive, or exploit a breach to move past the enemy to a vital target—an enemy commander, for example. In doing so, kill everything you can until your horse goes down, then start killing things while on foot. Since they don’t have to charge into battle under their own steam, they can wear heavier armor, et cetera, et cetera.
Fair enough, for now. Kelvin is making them as deadly as possible from a martial skills standpoint. Tort is helping them learn to be specialist wizards—battle wizards, if you like. Seldar and I are making them physically impressive. We’ve come a long way, and there’s room for improvement, especially as battle-wizards.
It’s amazing how much magic they do know, though. Show them how to punch a man across a room and they’ll punch anything they can. Punch them from across the room and they start getting good at blocking them. True, this is still new to them, but they’ve been practicing. They stand a good chance of deflecting anything they see coming. I’m quite pleased.
Wednesday, May 5th
When I came back to Mochara, Tort was all smiles and sunshine, glad to see me. She was dressed very nicely; the outfit hugged her hips and her long braid was wrapped around her head, held in place with a jeweled, silver chain. She would not have been out of place in an old Robin Hood movie, apart from the staff.