by Dragon Lance
“Noisiest invasion I ever led,” Gaias grumbled to himself.
The Qualinesti Forest stood just ahead. They would have heard the party from twenty miles back and seen them from ten. It was just as well. Harmless, hapless, and apparently happy kender were a fearsome invasion force, to be sure, but not one that elves would shoot on sight. Dwarves, on the other hand...
The kender, on a long wanderlust, had run across the armies of Solamnus just north of the Crossing. Despite Vinas’s misgivings, the kender had cleaved to the army, wanting desperately “to help.”
After two weeks of kender help, when many useful items had gone missing and many useless items appeared in their places, Commander Solamnus devised a way in which their help couldn’t hurt. They were named First-Class Ambassadors to the Elves of Qualinesti with a Special Emphasis upon Remote Operations. Simply put, they were assigned to stay far away.
It was more than that. Otherwise Gaias would not be along. Vinas truly hoped the band of ambassadors could establish an alliance with the elves – at least a pact of nonaggression, though perhaps even a pledge of elven aid and free movement through elven territories.
“Stop!” came a voice from the woods. Whether the imperative was meant to stop Gaias from advancing or to stop the kender from singing, it accomplished both. Gaias was grateful for the latter, at least. The voice warned, “Enter the realm of elves at your peril!”
Gaias squinted toward the woods, his eyes darting among the gray trunks and the slowly swaying boughs. He saw no sign of the speaker. Raising a hand to shield his eyes, Gaias called out, “We are ambassadors to your sovereign kingdom.”
“Ambassadors from where?” came the suspicious reply.
“We are from Vingaard, patriots of the true Ergoth. We still honor the Swordsheath Scroll,” Gaias responded. “We have come to speak with your king. We seek alliance.”
“Alliance to what end?”
Gaias grimaced, dropping his hand. He’d had this speech worked out on a scrap of paper. He fished through his pockets, his hands coming up empty
“Look what I found!” piped a voice beside him. “We, the patriots of Ergoth —”
“Give me that!” Gaias growled, trying to snatch the rumpled paper from the kender’s intractable grasp.
“You dropped it. I found it. It’s mine,” the kender reasoned.
The tearing sound that quickly followed demonstrated that it was no one’s anymore. Gaias stared in a rage at the tattered fragment. The kender, triumphant, began reciting his half of the page:
“We, the patriots of /
terrible atrocities /
abjure the elves to /
evil purposes. In our /
world domination, we /
torment you. If we can —”
The kender got no further. Gaias snatched that fragment, too, and tore both halves of the speech to shreds.
“Forgive us, sir elf. Our cause is good. Ask anybody but the tyrant, Emperor Emann. Alliance between us would strengthen both of our nations.”
Still the elf did not reveal himself. “Turn back. You are forbidden entry.”
Gaias put his hands out to his sides and slowly stepped forward. “I trust to your fair treatment of peaceful ambassadors. You will not shoot me in cold blood.”
“You are forbidden entry,” the voice responded worriedly.
Gaias kept walking. The kender tiptoed close behind him. “You will have to take us prisoners, for we will not stop.”
“I won’t take you prisoners!” the elf replied, indignant. “You have kender with you.”
“Then take us to Qualinost and your king,” said Gaias. “Better for you to escort us into your land than have us wander on our own.”
With a sigh, the elf appeared, separating himself from one green-black trunk and waving them forward. A shaft was nocked on his short bow. “If you must come, come, but be quick,” he said impatiently.
*
Three Months Hence, 4 Sirrimont, 1201 Age of Light
“He’s doing what?” Emperor Emann asked, incredulous, as he paced before the roaring blaze of his stateroom’s hearth.
Commander Julias Erasmus, acting head of the imperial war council in the absence of Commander Solamnus, said, “He’s sent kender to the Qualinesti. Something about renegotiating the Swordsheath Scroll.”
The emperor’s expression deepened into a scowl. “Renegotiate. Clever. He is as audacious and unorthodox as he is cunning.”
Julias frowned, running a fidgety hand through his gray hair. “I don’t understand. Kender wouldn’t be capable of convincing a rock to lie still. Why do you think the elves will listen?”
“The Swordsheath Scroll is a fragile enough peace. Any tampering will likely shatter it, bringing the elves out in a regular holy war,” Emann said.
“That is not all,” said Julias. “He has been distributing food among the peasants ever since the winter set in.”
“Bribing them. He’s made a duke’s power struggle into a full-blown peasant rebellion.”
“The peasants of Vingaard are under the impression that this has been their struggle from the beginning,” Julius pointed out. “Our spies say that sentiment for Vinas Solamnus is strong in the lower classes – not just in Vingaard, but everywhere.”
The emperor glared at his chief advisor. “All this is prelude to telling me we cannot send more troops to Solanthus?”
“With all due respect, Your Highness, Vinas Solamnus commands half of Ergoth’s armies – the better half. The men are already triple-bunked inside Solanthus, sleeping in strict shifts. To have so many men in a castle about to be besieged —”
“If Solanthus stands, Ergoth stands.”
“— not to mention the hundreds of loyal warriors that are sifting in from Vingaard and the plains outposts – the stocks will be depleted in months instead of years,” Julius said. “Of course, if you sent even two thirds of those men out to meet Vinas in the field, they would last only hours, not days or months or years.”
“If he has only half of our forces,” the emperor wondered aloud, counting armies on his fingers, “why can he field a force in excess of three armies – counting the bread crews and kender – while all we can scrape up are three thousand?”
Julias had always responded poorly to whining. “How many of your hundred-person black watch would you spare. Fifty? Seventy-five? Add those to the hundred men you could barely afford to pull from the elven border lands, the thanoi tundra, the pirate coast of Turbidus, the gnome-riddled island of Sancrist, the edge of kender county in the north, and you’ve a total of six or seven hundred soldiers. Then, perhaps we should thin by half the home guards of every province in an empire on the brink of popular rebellion, and we could add, say, four thousand men. Perhaps by some miracle, five thousand newly gathered troops could stand with the three thousand at Solanthus, making a force almost half of Solamnus’s. Perhaps we could hold Solanthus, but surely then the outlying provinces would rebel. Then we would have a war with ten fronts instead of one.”
Emann had long since slumped into a soft chair. “Why must you be so bleak?”
“Better that I deceive you?”
Emann’s jaw flexed beneath stringy flesh. “Conscript more.”
“The imperial treasury couldn’t pay them for longer than a year, and it will take months to gather, train, and equip them.”
“Do it,” Emann ordered bitterly. “Deplete the treasury. If we lose the battle of Solanthus, we lose everything, and the empty treasury will be someone else’s worry” He paused, glancing toward the shadowed ceiling.
“Adrenas, your son seems intent on bringing me down.”
*
Five Months Hence, 17 Aelmont, 1202 Age of Light
Solanthus was ready and waiting. They had made good use of the year it took Vinas to marshall his volunteer forces and make careful, bloodless headway down from Vingaard.
Ergoth had fully stocked Solanthus and garrisoned it with three thousand troops. Captain
Erghas had received a field promotion to become General Erghas, which placed him in charge of the castle. He had stepped up the refortification, which was now nearly complete. Despite the early snows this year, war wizards had kept the quarries thawed, kept the stone coming for the curtain wall.
The army of Vingaard Keep approached.
Even as Vinas marched his freezing troops along the roadway, they followed a sporadic trail of stones dumped from sledges only an hour before. The freshly cut cubes lay like toppled ruins in the desolation of snow.
Beyond, light gray and solid in the brilliant daylight, the castle stood. It’s curtain was complete, save for a course without battlements. The tops of the walls bristled with guardsmen and war wizards, staring in anger and apprehension at the long snake of Vinas’s army.
Fourteen thousand soldiers followed Vinas in this main company. Twelve of those fourteen wore polished Ergothian livery and bore the banner of Vinas Solamnus. They styled themselves patriots, fighting for the liberation of their homeland from dictatorial rule. Roughly two thousand more wore the tabards and chemises of Antonias’s army and bore his banners. Many of these were from the one thousand warriors “executed” by Vinas. The remainder were young enlistees with three months of training and not a minute of experience in battle. Whatever their stripe and color, they marched in a glorious panoply, bright as a feathered serpent against the bleak snow.
But these troops were only part of Vinas’s force. He also had a company of peasant envoys – common folk of Vingaard and the plains of eastern Ergoth. Originally, this group of twenty-six hundred had sought to join the fighting army, bringing pitchforks and scythes with them. Not wanting hapless innocents underfoot in battle, Vinas had created a civilian corps, placed Titus at its head, and charged them with relief measures for the beleaguered poor. Under Titus’s tireless guidance, the corps only grew in manpower. As happened with all people, noble or peasant – where the stomach led, the heart and mind followed.
There was also a kender contingent, thirty-some of them. After deciding to join the army, they had proved to be unshakably committed. The kender were tenacious, and their leader, Pitty Stingtail, at last convinced Vinas to let them stay by pointing out that the nation of Hylo wanted “to be as liberated as everybody else.”
The kender corps of diplomats to Qualinesti had settled the issue. Gaias had bravely taken the role of lead envoy, and apparently was meeting with some success – at least in keeping the kender away from the main army.
And last, of course, were the griffon cavalry and the scouts. Luccia and her eagle-lion riders had cleared imperial forces from all strongholds north and east of Solanthus, as well as those within twenty five miles south and west. She and her cavalry carried war wizards to harry reinforcement troops, driving them away from points of siege. The work was not hard, for the best and brightest of Ergoth’s army were stationed in Solanthus, and the winter made further muster impractical if not impossible.
If Solanthus stood, Ergoth stood. If Solanthus fell, Vinas and his troops would sweep Thelgaard away as though it were deserted, then push past the ghost-haunted Caergoth, and lay siege to Daltigoth, itself.
Vinas sat tall in the saddle. Courage stomped snow from his hooves as he led the way. A terrible loneliness had settled over him. His companions – Luccia, Gaias, Titus – were for the first time missing from his side as he marched into grave jeopardy. Those he had so often turned to were scattered across half of Ansalon. They led others in battle. They, too, fought for the first time without him.
There would be no battle today, he knew. General Erghas was a skilled leader. He would not have worked so hard to complete the curtain wall if he meant merely to sally forth into the teeth of a fresh army. No, today the armies would play the game of surrounding the fortress, setting pickets, and shouting threats. Perhaps a few bows would be fired to set ranges, but that was all.
Vinas drew in the icy air, sharp and sweet in his lungs. This would be a hard victory for a pragmatic commander, harder still for a dreamer, and hardest of all for the empire’s favorite son returned as rebel.
As he began the circling maneuver, a magic-augmented voice came to Vinas from the walls: So, the peasants you once slew, you now champion, Vinas Solamnus? And the nobles you once served, you now betray?
The voice of General Erghas. From the puzzled, startled look on the faces of his troops, Vinas knew that they all heard it. Every last one.
I hear you have traded self-serving treachery for effete honor. I applaud such improvements. However, I have yet to see your virtues in action. Your griffon-riders raid our outposts, your priests bribe the peasants with bread, your second even leads kender into Qualinost to stir up dissention and trouble, to break the ancient peace of the Swordsheath Scroll. Strange that you make peace when it suits you, and, otherwise, war.
As Vinas continued the maneuver around the castle, he cast a glare back at his wizard corps, who, in their sleds, struggled to nullify the voice spell. Vinas faced forward and rode stolidly onward, listening to the ravings of his foe.
He thought of Luccia, and wondered if he would live to see her again. A single tear came, whether from sun or wind or cold or dread, he could not say. It streamed down his cheek and fell from his jawline, turning to ice before it struck his cloak.
“How long?” he asked himself beneath his breath, “how long will this war of ice tears last?”
He had circled half of the fortress before, at last, the wizards were able to negate the spell. The unsettled expressions of Vinas’s troops were obvious. His own face looked no different.
Let them doubt, he thought. Let me doubt, too. I will not answer Erghas in kind, nastily and prematurely.
He had fully circled the fortress and drawn his noose of warriors, just as sun and horizon merged into twilight. Only then did he signal the war wizards to reverse the spell, sending his quiet voice to everyone within the castle.
Hello, Compatriots. I am Commander Vinas Solamnus. My folk and I have yon safely contained. Call it a siege, if you wish, though you will soon enough see how inaccurate that term is.
In a siege, an army surrounds a fortification and seeks surrender of those within, using starvation, dehydration, restlessness, and madness to win their ends.
I do not wish such things on my worst enemies. You, warriors of Solanthus – you are my countrymen. We isolate you not to deprive you of anything you need, but to give you time to heal, to think. We isolate you to protect the rest of Ergoth from the violent delusions you are under.
Every day, therefore, we will send to you a provisions wagon, of the exact variety we provide to the deprived villages in the countryside all around. The wagon will hold enough food to feed all your troops for a day.
Also, I have taken the liberty of asking a war wizard of mine to cast a spell of plenty on your wells, so you should not want for water. Both the food and the water will have been blessed by priests of Paladine, so they will fortify not only bodies but also souls. The water may be used as holy water, for purposes of purification and ritual.
Nor am I forgetting the needs of the mind. My war wizards have created some splendid devices to this end. We have ten enchanted chess boards that, when set up among my men, will appear mystically at points along your wall. Your men will discover they can touch the pieces and move them. It is harmless and wholesome entertainment for soldiers who must spend long hours watching an army that has no intention of attacking.
Also, the evening hours will feature the most-acclaimed bards and balladeers, singing and reciting to you. Some nights, troupes of jugglers, acrobats, dancers, and actors will perform on an enchanted stage. Their images will appear in the center of your courtyard. You shall not want for fine entertainment and pleasant diversion.
Do not fear. None of these diversions will be calculated to distract guards from their duties or cause any other harm. We have no attention of attacking, and will fight only if attacked. Otherwise, enjoy the best we have to offer in food, drink, and d
iversion.
The reason for this siege, as I have said before, is to give you time to heal and think, all the while keeping the rest of Ergoth safe from you. Yes, you are patients of a sort, in an enforced convalescence. I must admit, my motives are not purely altruistic. I want you whole and hale because I know, in time, you will be healed, and then I would like the aid of your strong minds and backs and stomachs, to help in our cause.
When I say I want you whole, I mean not only your physical, mental, and spiritual health, but also your social health. I neither welcome nor will accept deserters from your ranks. General Erghas is an honorable warrior, and deserves your loyalty. I will win none of you over until I win all of you over, until General Erghas himself decides to join me in this cause.
And what is that cause? Freedom and justice for all the people of Ergoth!
Meus Pater
Father, the treasure of honor you bore was at least this heavy, I know. Still, it is only now that I realize it is the very weight of the burden that makes laughter and grace so necessary. Otherwise, honor could crush a man alive.
You would be pleased with what my army is doing now. We have Solanthus surrounded, and yet we treat those within as honored guests instead of dishonored foes. I wonder how they will oppose such charity. It is, quite honestly, the most powerful weapon I can imagine – not slaying foes but transforming them into friends.
XV
One Day Hence, 18 Aelmont, 1202 Age of Light
Vinas stood beside the loaded provisions wagon. Its wheels were caked with snow. He looked to the young warrior sitting atop the buckboard, slim wrists extending from the fat sleeves of his cloak as he clutched the horse’s reins.