by Dragon Lance
Even my greatest loss – sixty-four of my eighty-three supply wagons – will be seen as a necessary chastening of the young Ergothian commander. It will be told how Vinas Solamnus addressed his division, saying he had not accepted the loss of the wagons and had decided it was their duty to take back from the land of Vingaard tenfold what that land had stolen from them.
That’s what the histories will say. They will speak of the glorious victory at the Crossing.
These small losses have given me the tool by which to turn my division into a gods-justified pillaging machine. We will despoil Vingaard and bring it to its knees before the castle walls are even in sight.
But what of that which has been lost? What of nobility and purpose? What of honest valor and innocence?
I impaled a man today and held him aloft on the end of my sword. I enjoyed watching him die.
How silly of me to think I would need to exaggerate the brutality of this force and its commander. If Vingaard learns only a quarter of our true depravity, they will surrender immediately.
I have lost everything in this victory. Even Gaias lies in a half-drowned stupor among the other wounded. Had Luccia not recognized his tunic, floating among the jam of logs, he would have been lost entirely. Titus does not know if the colonel will ever awaken.
Now, all that remains for me is the empty hope that I can end this brutal business as quickly as possible. I pray the slaughter will be atrocious enough that it will not be allowed to continue, one way or another.
My soul aches to lie in the grave, or if not that, to defeat these people so that then, under the auspices of victory and civil government, we can save them.
And save ourselves.
X
One Month Hence, 9 Hiddumont, 1199 Age of Light
They moved like a locust plague across the land. The fruits of summer were tom from tender branches. Bean pods were snatched up by handfuls. Cabbage heads were crunched raw or stowed in sacks or merely kicked loose to provide a moment’s diversion along the road. Corralled pigs were shot with Ergoth’s finest arrows, gutted and cleaned on the spot, and hung to swing beneath bending poles.
Vinas let the soldiers provision themselves – “glean” as the senators in Daltigoth would call it – but he didn’t let them turn into a mob. He kept them marching twenty abreast, letting them reap the adjacent farm fields without breaking ranks. The longer, more difficult tasks such as slaughtering livestock or securing “tributes” of bread and jerkied meats from farmers, were assigned to select teams. Vinas also made certain that the village women gathered were willing and well paid for their services. No one was personally harmed – Vinas saw to that.
As to their livelihoods, well... the army was a lethal monster, and monsters must be fed, must be mollified until it is time again to fight.
In fact, his army had never stopped fighting. Each mile of this nowhere place gave them a new fight. After a three-week encampment while those who would heal did, the army had set out. They had marched more for lack of supplies than for any pressing need to advance. The advance had come slowly and with cost.
Not five miles north of the Crossing, which now saw little daylight owing to the clouds of carrion creatures that filled the sky, a platoon of scouts had run afoul of a hobgoblin nation. The scouts were in stew pots before Ergoth’s main army had reached the camp. Vinas had razed it to the ground. Some of the men now carried purses made of bugbear ears.
There had also been skirmishes at each town. Pitchfork militias would capture an outrider and ask questions and demand answers until the ground started shaking with twelve thousand feet. Those tongues that once wagged in rebellion now greeted the Ergothians gladly. The gifts of food and wine were readily accepted, along with the wagons the gifts had come in, and the horses that drew the wagons.
Occasionally, too, scouts would encounter the works of true rebels. Trees had been felled across the road. Slogans and threats had been scratched into the sides of barns. Traps had been hidden in potholes. For each handful the scouts caught and hanged along the way, there were many more making havoc ahead.
So went the petty battles of the advance. Sixteen soldiers lost their lives, as well as one horse maimed by a trap. The attrition was acceptable, given the decimated hobgoblin nation and the crowded gibbets that dotted the land.
Such were not really battles. The time for true fighting was coming again.
“Gather up,” Vinas said quietly as he directed Courage back onto the dirt track that served as a road.
Gaias, beside him, did not relay the message. His voice was still raspy from his near drowning. Another colonel nearby called out, “Gather up!”
The columns sharpened, moving out of the fields and onto the road. The whole snaking procession – two hundred rows of infantry with outriders to either side and scouts sweeping the land in a broad crescent – stretched for a mile.
Vinas looked ahead. The sloping farmlands gave way suddenly to gray thrusts of eroded stone. Ahead lay a canyon, where the second great battle would be fought.
“Gaias,” Commander Solamnus said softly.
“Yes, Commander,” Gaias rasped.
“I will ride ahead to that ridge. Bring the men to me there. Bring them to the bowl of land beneath the ridge. I want to speak to them.”
He did not wait for acknowledgment of his orders, knowing it would come, but would likely be too strangled to be understood. Instead, Vinas slapped the reins once against Courage’s neck and charged away like a comet of dust.
*
Afternoon had graduated to evening before the whole division of Daltigoth could be gathered in the bowl to hear Vinas. He would need to speak quickly, forcefully, and then get them up from that death trap to the high, defensible ground.
The men looked savage in their strictly ordered ranks on the desolate bowl of land. They looked like a newly needled tattoo in a concavity of dying flesh. The sun westered behind the army, already beginning its veil-dance of setting. Gossamer garments and ribbons of fuchsia and lavender spun slowly about its swollen heat. Behind Vinas, a curtain of indigo rose to fill the sky. Not a star showed in it.
Vinas drew a deep breath. He stepped to the edge of the precipice. Behind him, Gaias tensed. There came the subtle stirrings of magic as a war wizard cast the spell for vocal augmentation.
Ergoth, I speak to you. You – soldiers and cavalrymen, griffon-riders and scouts, war wizards and colonels – you are Ergoth. We are Ergoth. We are the best and bravest. We are the fighting arm of our nation. Before us is the task of defending, of avenging, the mind and heart of Ergoth. If we fail in this terrific task, whether we fail in might or nerve, our Ergoth will fail. If, though, we triumph, Ergoth will triumph.
The nation lies not in Daltigoth, not in the heartlands or the plains beside the Turbidus Sea. Ergoth stands before me.
A cheer went up, signaled by Chancellor Titus, who directed the six-thousand-throated cry like a trumpet marshal signaling heralds. As quickly as it had started, the cheer died. For some time, its ghost echoed down the canyon.
And Ergoth faces its greatest threat yet. It lies there, ahead of us.
He gestured to the dark rift. The Vingaard River had carved it through stone over the millennia. Vinas considered how old that desolate place was, how the basin where his division stood was, some centuries ago, the bottom of an inland sea.
The scouts who went in on foot have not returned. The griffon scouts that flew above the rift say it is miles and miles long, that no other way leads through these badlands, and that the vermin of Vingaard could hide like goblins in a thousand thousand bolt holes.
And they do hide. It is not law or civilization that they champion. It is chaos and squalid tribalism. They disdain the blind eyes and fair hands of Justice, preferring despotism and the tyranny of tiny men.
There is no more heavy infantry, light infantry. There is no more infantry and cavalry. There is no more horse and griffon. There is only Ergoth. No more shall we fight as separate we
apons in separate hands, but now as a single weapons master.
Ergoth will march through this death trap, we, all together. The scouts will march atop the plateaus, watching for enemies. If danger approaches, they will shoot a flaming arrow straight into the air to warn us all.
The griffon-riders and war wizards will patrol the rims, within sight of the scouts and the army below. Should attack come from the plateau or from the caves, the griffon-mounted wizards will rain fire and lightning down upon the heads of our enemy.
The cavalry will surround the infantry, marching at the head and tail and flanks of the division. Where possible, they will ride up the foothills of the canyon and cleanse the caves there of man or beast.
The infantry will march in the center of the company, shields ready and swords sheathed.
And when they bring us this fight, which surely they shall, we will fight like Ergothians, and they will die like dogs.
Titus did not need to direct the ovation that answered that proclamation, and if any rebels were encamped within the deceptive folds of that canyon, they no doubt heard the stirring words.
*
That night, Vinas summoned his advisors to the command tent. By turns, they arrived out of the watchful darkness of sleeping soldiers and bivouacs. Each advisor arrived sober-faced and sleepy, wondering what new gravity awaited them. Each was met at the tent flap by a giddy young man whom, only after blinking a couple of times, they recognized as their commander.
“Come in, come in,” Vinas said to each newcomer.
Instead of the road-stale armor, Ergothian tunic and tabard, he now wore a clean white tunic and homespun breeches. These were the greatest of extravagances on the road, especially given that most of the spare clothes had been swept away with the wagons.
“What are you doing, crusted in dirt and wearing your armor?” he asked, incredulous. “I’ve called you here to celebrate!”
“Celebrate what?” they each had responded.
“Celebrate the end of all things,” he replied, his voice loud and joyous. “When, tomorrow, we march through that cleft, we will either be slain – each last one of us – or we will emerge from the other side, victorious. Either way, all the old things will be gone!”
After listening to Vinas’s litany, Gaias blinked uncomprehendingly at his commander and said, “You, Sir, are drunk.”
Titus asked jovially, “You’ve been hiding brandy from the priesthood again, haven’t you? Where is it?”
Vinas gave his greeting to the perpetually befuddled war wizard Duece, and the man responded, “What sort of nonsense is this for the middle of the night?”
The scout Destrias merely shrugged and said, “I couldn’t sleep, anyway.”
Even Barnabas and Anistas, the young man from Hellas’s ill-fated troop and the healer who had set him aright, were invited. “We thought we heard a party,” they said in unison.
And, finally Vinas greeted Luccia, who only looked in stunned puzzlement at him.
“Here,” he said to her, “let me help you with that armor.”
His hands, large yet always dexterous, worked free a shoulder guard, revealing a line of brown grit across the freckled shoulder beneath. He studied the line, then drew a finger across it, leaving a bare streak of skin.
“Luce! No wonder I didn’t recognize you,” he said, gazing into her eyes, “you looked so tan.” Laughter came from the other revelers, who were readily sampling the commander’s private stock of libations.
Luccia ignored them. She returned Vinas’s searching look, though her eyes were not lit with the same merriment. “I’ve had trouble recognizing you, too, of late.”
Vinas nodded once and smiled thinly.
He broke contact and drifted back among the others. His figure was as lithe and graceful as it had been eighteen years before, in the alley behind his father’s estate. With his tousled hair, twinkling eyes, and insistent smile, this older Vinas was looking much like the younger one.
“Join us, Colonel,” he said to Luccia. “We were just trying to decide whether to invite the rebels in for a drink.”
She lifted the shoulder guard and began to fasten it back in place. “I’m glad to be just ahead of them on the guest list,” she said.
Vinas gestured her toward a seat that, right then, did look clean and comfortable. Precious little looked that way anymore.
As she passed him and took the proffered camp chair, Vinas said, “We are trying to decide whether it would be faster and less expensive to lure Vingaard back with festivals, or smash it with arms.”
Titus, who looked a bit unpriestly with his red nose and wet smile, lifted a partially drained glass. “I lean toward the festivals,” the gigantic priest said. “To pay eighteen thousand men, or the widows and families of eighteen thousand men, is no small expense. Wouldn’t the money be better spent on a great celebration? And we are not just paying these men, but clothing them and feeding them and provisioning them. Take that money and use it to make Ergoth the loveliest empire in Ansalon, not the cruelest, and Vingaard and everyone else will be climbing over each other to join.” The word “loveliest” was said a little too lushly, and it brought a laugh from the other guests. “So, if you agree with me – if you smile like me instead of frowning like our more warmongering companions – come sit here and help me argue.”
Luccia regarded the grand man of the church. Titus looked now more like a tame bear than ever before. “Your argument is at least pleasant,” she observed, not moving from her seat.
Barnabas, the sniper youth rescued from Hellas’s band, said, “Don’t be fooled by his simpleton smirk. The fact is that Ergoth feeds and clothes and pays and provisions these men whether or not they fight. The money is not sitting there for this world festival of his. The emperor would have to dismiss us all and dissolve his armies to hold such a feast.”
“Not all his armies,” objected Titus loudly, then added under his breath, “not those of us who can cook.”
More laughter. It was a musical sound on that savage plateau.
Even laconic Gaias was getting into the spirit; the spirits reciprocated. “A festival would reward treachery.”
The others turned to him.
Vinas, reflective behind a chalice, said, “How do you mean?”
Gaias swallowed. “Vingaard has rebelled. If you throw a feast for anyone who rebels, everyone will.”
Titus responded, “Perhaps. Perhaps it is too late for Vingaard. But if the empire were a wondrous thing to belong to, who would ever leave it?”
“In other words, who willingly stays in a prison?” Vinas said. “And who willingly leaves a feast?”
“Precisely,” said Titus, raising his glass to toast Vinas’s words. “And I would imagine it takes more money to guard, feed, clothe, and shelter prisoners than it would to throw a feast for the same folk.”
“And no one gets killed at a feast,” said Luccia quietly.
“Well,” Anistas observed, “not if the food is good.”
Amidst the chuckling, Gaias said, “But Vingaard has committed treason. We must be punitive. If we do not punish them for leaving, others will follow.”
“And who could blame them?” burst Titus. “Daltigoth is five hundred miles away on foot, two thousand miles by sea and five hundred thousand as far as any peasant can determine. They are taxed into starvation, into extinction; their food is stolen from them and sold back to them at a dear ransom; the senate and the emperor are deaf to their pleas; and ogres and bugbears only cease their pillaging when tax armies come marching by. We – the rich and priestly elite – have harvested the peasants as though they were wheat, whacking off their heads with the certainty that more will grow back to replace the ones we eat, and we dare call it treason when they stand up and say, ‘No more’?”
Titus had said too much. He knew it and so did everyone else. The silence in the wake of his rant was broken only when the priest himself swallowed the last of his spirits. He struggled to stand. “Well, I sup
pose I should be going. I don’t want to ruin the night for the rest of you.” He wobbled toward the tent flap, stopping only long enough to lay a massive hand on Vinas’s shoulder. “Lovely party, Commander. We’ll have to have another one like it in Vingaard Keep.”
Then, the giant was out of the tent.
The forced lightheartedness had left with the bombastic priest. Even Vinas Solamnus looked old again, his shoulders perceptibly sunken. His skin was lined and dull in the lantern light.
The others departed soon after, more sober than when they had arrived. At last it was only Luccia and Vinas, sitting silently across from each other, staring into distances far beyond the tent’s walls.
Luccia said, “I should be going. It’s an early start tomorrow.”
“Don’t,” said Vinas simply, his gaze lifting to meet her eyes for the first time since she had entered. “Not yet. Sit awhile more.”
Her brow beetled. “We aren’t even talking, Vinas.”
“I know,” he said with a nod. “But stay, anyway, Luce, for old times.”
*
After the night of whimsy came a grim morning. Rank on rank, the soldiers filed down into the basin and took their posts. Colonels and captains rode among the soldiers and gave orders. Spells, arrows, rocks, even bodies would be raining down upon them soon.
Banners snapping, the army was arrayed. Cavalry formed a long, thin envelope around the infantry. Beyond the cavalry, griffons flexed their wings, orange and flame-bright in the early morning air. Half the scouts were already in place, atop the eastern ridges and plotting their trail across the broken and forbidding terrain. The other half were climbing up the eastern edge of the canyon. They would no sooner top the rise than they would set out at a run to keep pace with the advancing lines.
As usual, Commander Solamnus had asked Chancellor Titus to bear his standard, and Colonel Luccia to remain close at hand, ostensibly to relay his orders.