The older man gathered up the child, and together they walked slowly back towards civilisation, aware in their silence of the implications of the message they brought with them.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Call To Arms
The Road to Grimminhagen, in the Shadow of the Drakwald Forest, Middenland
The Autumn of Sweet Deceits, 2532
The journey that had taken three days going out took eight on its return, fear and urgency driving them mercilessly on through the pain.
Kaspar Bohme could not walk more than a few hundred yards without the fire flaring within his knee; the ligaments had swollen hideously, and the constant weight on it as well as the jarring impacts of step after step never gave the inflammation a chance to subside. The long silences were heavy between them but when they talked it was seldom of what they had seen or what it meant for their small part of the world. Kaspar listened as Metzger named the trees and the birds and countless other things for young Lammert. The child cried, desperately hungry, and they couldn’t feed it with meat killed on the move. Unlike them, a child could not hope to live long without food, and there was no way of knowing how long the babe had been abandoned before they had found him. On the eve of the first dawn, when the child’s cries were unbearable, Kaspar remembered a small farmstead that ought to have been near: one of the more distant outliers. They made the detour to beg milk for the boy and found a widow nursing her grief only too willing to share a cup of cow’s milk and a warm pallet for the men when she saw their wounds.
Although the night beside a warm hearth would have been a blessing it was time they could not afford to waste on comfort. Metzger worried for his friend; he needed the attention of a proper chirurgeon to be sure the infections had been cut out and no ill-humours remained to fester. “Do you have alcohol?” he asked the woman, Sara, wiping his hands on a rag as he came into the kitchen.
“It’s too early to be drinking,” the woman said. She was not unappealing, in a matronly sort of way. She had all the right curves and a softness of body that many men found attractive.
“It’s not for drinking, lass. I’m going to check Kaspar’s chest wounds and a bit of spirit is good for cleaning out any sickness that lingers.”
“You’d think I’d never dressed a cut in my life,” Sara said, ruffling his hair and disappearing into the cold cellar. She returned with a stoppered earthenware jar. “Let me.”
Metzger chuckled. “I could get to like you woman.”
“The novelty would wear off soon enough, I am sure,” she said, bustling out of the small room to tend to Kaspar.
He followed her a while later.
“Is he going to be up to moving on?” Metzger said.
“In a week or so, yes,” Sara said.
“We don’t have a week.”
“I know but that doesn’t change the answer to your question.”
“Will you stop talking about me as though I am not here,” Kaspar said, twisting his head away as Sara tried to pry his mouth open for another spoonful of broth. “I’ll be fine.”
“Typical stubborn man,” she said, shaking her head in disgust, “you will not be fine. You’ll be lucky if you make it a mile, and what good will that do you marooned out in the middle of nowhere, barely out of a fever, yes that sounds like a great idea to me.”
“Then put me on a damned cart, there isn’t time for laying abed. We must leave.”
“Come with us,” Metzger said, without thinking. The words just tumbled out of his mouth but even as he said them he realised he had been thinking about them for most of the day in one way or another. “Come back to Grimminhagen. We have a house, and men: a community. You wouldn’t be alone, and Lammert needs a woman’s influence if he isn’t to end up like me.”
“No,” she said, dismissing the notion as simply as that.
This time Reinhardt Metzger did not laugh or smile. His mouth tasted of ash and bile. “It isn’t safe here,” he told her, pressing the point.
“It’s just as safe as it was before you arrived,” she said.
“Just come with us, please.”
“And be your slattern? No, I don’t think so. Now you’d better be on your way if you are in such a hurry to leave. Take my cart and the old dray.”
Metzger reached out, hesitating to lay a hand on her shoulder. “Please, Sara, it isn’t safe.”
“So you say, but you don’t say why, so why should I believe you?”
“Tell her, Reinhardt,” Kaspar said.
“Tell me what? Stop talking in circles. If there is something I should know, spit it out.”
So he told her of the bones and the dead, of the shuffling ranks of the soulless, of the fallen stronghold and the war he knew was coming, of the sacrifice of the parents who had given their lives to hide their child, of the first fallen village swallowed by the tide of death marching relentlessly on, of the beast that had risen up out of the dirt, a puppet to a man’s dark magic, and he begged her again to come with them. “Because when they come your walls can’t protect you any more than your memories can. I am sorry, I cannot with good conscience leave you behind to die on your own.”
His words shook her, but she didn’t for a moment doubt him, this stranger who had turned up at her door with a child in need and a friend battling a low fever. She looked into his eyes, as though they were gateways into his soul that could prove or deny the credence of his claims, and asked, “Who are you that you can promise a stranger a place to live and safety?”
“I am Knight Protector in the service of the Graf; my family has served the Sternhauers for years. That is who I am, but I am also an old man who watches over the land of his forefathers in a time of ill omen. The dead walk the land.”
“We’d better pack a few things,” she said, giving him the only answer she could.
The four of them left long before dawn, the sounds of the earth still muted by the last vestiges of night.
Sara packed few creature comforts, a change of linens, a brooch from her man as a keepsake, the only treasure from a house full of her life, and food: bread and cheese wrapped in waxed cloth, a flask of sour wine, and some thick slices of ham.
She turned on the edge of her land to look back at the home she was giving up. Metzger did not hurry her silent farewell. He had left homes often enough, always wondering whether he would return. Sara left with the certainty that she would not. It was not just the walls and roof she was leaving, it was the life she had made for herself, the life she had shared with her dead husband, the one encumbered by so many ghosts already.
She closed her eyes, touched her fingers to her lips and blew a kiss to the life she would never have, and then turned her back on it.
“I am ready,” she said, and Metzger did not doubt her for a moment. She was a strong woman to be able to make such a sacrifice, to need nothing of her old life to survive and to still manage a smile for the child in her arms that wasn’t her own. He could only imagine the emotions conflicting within her, but he was savvy enough to know that Lammert was just another unborn ghost for the woman.
He nodded, and spurred the dray horse on. The cart lurched forward.
“He is a good man, Sara,” Bohme said. “I have followed him to the Gates of the Underworld and back on more than one occasion. If he had need I would step through them to bring him back to this stinking place. I love him as a brother and a father and all the friends I never had because he genuinely cares. That is a rare thing in a fighter. Usually they take their coin and join the cause but not Reinhardt. He follows his own moral compass and answers to his heart. He is a just man, and dare I say a pure man. I would die for him tomorrow if it meant he lived on to make a difference.”
“Do not be so quick to throw it away, soldier, this life is not such a bad place to be,” Sara said, and he knew she was thinking of her own husband but he did not want to ask her what happened. Some truths were best left to come out in their own time.
Metzger talked in his sleep. Like so m
any others with troubled dreams, he worked out his guilt and anxieties as he slumbered. What she heard then, in those feverish snatches of memory unconsciously shared, opened up a world of nightmares that no normal farmer’s wife ought ever to experience. She didn’t want to believe the snatches of horror rendered so hideously in his anguished cries, but night after night they grew more and more real to her.
As the days turned Kaspar grew stronger. His knee, though not healed, was able to take more of his weight and his ribs no longer pained him so fiercely.
Their road took them beneath the shadowy overhangs of rock and between the bosom of rolling hills, along the outskirts of various homesteads and isolated farms, each one lying in the path of the dead army. Sara woke Metzger in the middle of the night, shaking him out of the fever-sweats of another nightmare, to plead with him.
“We can’t just leave them,” she whispered. “We can’t just leave them in their beds, not when we know what is coming.”
He had been thinking the same thing.
They did what they could, amassing refugees in their desperate flight.
By the time they came in sight of the manse on the outskirts of Grimminhagen they were no longer four travellers. Two hundred more had joined their number, making it a caravan of the dispossessed. The mood was sombre. Metzger talked little, turning introspective. Sara nursed the babe, Lammert, singing lullabies in a voice far sweeter than her slight beauty would have suggested, adding another lie to the myth of looks. None of them carried more than a few of their most personal possessions, the rest left abandoned in their homes. More than double their number had refused to join Metzger on the journey back to Grimminhagen, saying they would stay and face whatever they had to, just as they always had, even when they saw the refugees that Metzger had gathered. They were stubborn people. It might have been different had the old priest, Scheller, joined them, but the Sigmarite was adamant they would fight for their homes not run from the shadows. Others followed his lead, refusing to budge as though a few stones were worth more than their lives.
He did not plead with them; it was enough for his conscience that he had given them the choice and if they refused to accept his protection he could not be held responsible. They would have to make their peace with the implications of their choice when the time came. He told them of the horrors approaching, what more could he reasonably do? Drag them out of their homes and force them to accept his protection? Have the Silberklinge round them up like prisoners? No, everything in this life was a choice, and they had made theirs.
Death would take them, and return them, and they would have a mindless eternity to own their mistake.
They walked and rode. By day it was hot and humid, intensely and unseasonably so, and by night cold and clammy, with thunder in the air and a storm never far off. The bread grew more and more unpalatable, becoming harder until it was unchewable, and the ham grew greasy, the cheese green with mould. What little food they had ran out the day before they arrived back at the manse. No one complained and the subservience disturbed Metzger more than the lack of food. That these people simply accepted empty bellies was wrong. He was already thinking of these few dispossessed as his burden, but he had offered them the choice, just as he had the others. They chose to follow him to Grimminhagen. They chose to throw their lot in with him. He shook his head, unable to lie to himself. They might have made the choice but he had asked them to, and he had promised them hope. That promise of hope made them his responsibility.
The sight of the old manor house didn’t lift his spirits, nor did the rooftops of the town a short way beyond it. Even knowing that he was at journey’s end and that Kaspar could seek proper care did little for his humour, but then he seldom felt joy with homecoming. A place had to feel like home otherwise returning to it could never hope to be a homecoming.
Crossing the threshold he could not help but wonder if he would have been able to give these walls up as easily as those people he had brought back with him. Despite the intimately familiar aromas of cooking and wood-wax, the fustiness of the threadbare rugs and so much else that was ingrained in his soul, he knew he could, as easily as the first day he had left to fight on a foreign field in another man’s war.
He wanted nothing more than to sink into a steaming tub and soak the road out of his skin but there were things that needed to be done, some matters pressing others less so, but no less demanding of him. The bath could wait.
First he called Fitch, Rosamund’s man, into his study, bidding him fetch a physician for Bohme, then he summoned Rosamund herself, bidding her take care of the refugees, find them quarters and work lest they feel like they were living off his charity.
She left him to pen letters, six of them in all, each identical down to the final full stop. The message was concise, outlining the danger they faced. There was no rhetoric or hyperbole in them, no embellishment of the horrors he had seen. His language was deliberately matter-of-fact: a huge force of undead was on the march, already deep into the territory he protected. With the few men at his disposal he could not hope to stand without aid.
He sealed each one with red wax, impressing the Metzger crest into the seal.
He summoned six of his retinue. He gave each a letter. “Today you are messengers, but make no mistake your errand is every bit as vital as your sword will be in the coming days. Take the six swiftest mounts in my stable, and ride the animals into the ground if you have to, these messages are that important and we have no time. Do you understand?” To a man, they nodded.
“Good. Holzbeck, Delberz, Untergard, Middenstag, Middenheim,” he pointed at each man one at a time, “and you to Arenberg. I cannot impress upon you enough the importance of your mission, gentlemen. This is no mere ride. Would that it were. I could tell you that the fate of the town rests upon your success and it would be no exaggeration,” Metzger said, sitting on the corner of his writing table. “Let us consider it on a level we all understand, shall we? Our mothers, our wives, our daughters, that is to say the lives of all of our loved ones, rest upon the swiftness of your ride. The dead are rising. You are to find the Stads Marshall, the Knight Commander, whoever is in charge of each city’s defences, and deliver the letter to him personally, not some lackey. Impress upon them what we face, but do not exaggerate or fall into fancy. The truth is frightening enough. They must believe their aid will save the day. If they are left thinking otherwise they will look to fortifying their own strongholds and prepare their own defences, leaving us to the mercy of the dead. They may well choose to send you on to the next link in the chain, if that is so, you are to ride like the wind. Word must spread or we fall. It is that simple. Without their support we cannot hope to stand.”
He looked down the line, from man to man, studying their faces, fixing them in his mind. These were the men their survival hinged upon. Grim determination was etched upon every face that looked back at him. These were good men. He could ask for no more than that. He stood once more. “Are you with me?”
“Aye,” they said as one.
“The marshals will no doubt ask you questions. Tell them this: word is being sent to every outlying farm, the citizens are being brought in to the shelter of Grimminhagen. Every able-bodied man will be given some instruction from the Silberklinge. We will not lie down. We will meet the dead with steel. Stand or fall, Grimminhagen will give good account of itself. Now go, and may the point of Sigmar’s boot spur your horses on.”
Finally, he had Briony brought to him. The young woman knocked timidly at the door. She entered the chamber, her hands defensively cradled around the bulge of her belly.
“How far along are you?” Metzger asked, looking up from the report he was penning.
“Sorry? I don’t…?”
“How many months until you deliver?”
“The midwife thinks it will be before the next moon, but as a first born it could take as much as another full moon after that.”
“I would ask a favour of you, Briony, but do not think your p
osition here is at risk if you say no. I swear that it is not, and I shall think no less of you if you say no.”
She looked at him then, a little frightened. He smiled, hoping to allay her fears, but a smile, no matter how kindly, was not so much when set against the turmoil that had already shattered her life. He knew there was gossip already, twenty refugees could not pass unnoticed, but the nature of that gossip needed to be watched lest it breed fear, the same fear he saw now in her eyes.
“It is a lot to ask,” he said. “Kaspar and I found a child hidden by his parents. They are dead and the child is alone to fend for himself despite being no more than a month old. His parents’ sacrifice has touched me. I cannot claim otherwise, even though I never met them and am fashioning their bravery in my mind. I would honour them by giving the best I can to the child. He cannot take solid food yet, and rather than simply pay a wet-nurse I would find the child a mother to care for him.”
“You want me to take in the child and raise him as my own?”
“Yes,” he said.
“And what of my own child if there is not enough milk for two? I live on your charity, my lord. I cannot very well say no, but the idea of taking another man’s child to my breast does not sit well with me.”
“My household will give you all you need, if you in turn offer the boy, Lammert, all he needs.”
“More charity?”
“No, Briony, it is not charity to care for another. It is human decency, and in a world like this, we need each other more and more.”
“I don’t know.”
“Please, at least think about it.”
There was a small brass bell on his writing table and he rang it. A moment later a thick velvet curtain was drawn back to reveal a second door into the study that led to his private chambers. Sara stood in the door, holding the child Lammert in her arms. She smiled as she offered the small bundle to the pregnant woman. “Meet Lammert,” Metzger said, trusting that when Briony saw the little tyke she would not be able to refuse him.
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