“Can’t you feel it, Captain Charing?” asked Ploster. “They do want us here. All this you see about you is what happens when the people do their best to pretend that something is as it should be. The soldiers that Warmont sends are not part of this vibrancy – they are the interlopers, not us.”
As I considered Ploster’s words I started to see evidence of what he meant. Even though the plaza was busy, a space formed around us as we walked, and people stopped to stare. Our lady’s radiance expanded around her, touching the life glow of each person in the plaza, telling them that this was how the town was meant to be - how it would forever be if Warmont’s soldiers were gone. This is what the Duke feared most – no matter how many men he sent here, he couldn’t suppress the hope. As we went by, the power of our lady took this hope and magnified it, firing it with the strength to act. I saw a number of people pause and they stood blinking in puzzlement as if they had felt something, but without knowing quite what it was. For hundreds of years, the Emperor and his nobles had ruled these lands; their destruction and hatred brought a miasma of bleakness and despair. Our lady’s birth was a rebellion against that despair – I knew this, even if I didn’t know why or where her power had come from.
There was a commotion behind us, accompanied by cursing and shouting. I craned my head to look over the crowds and made out the high-plumed helms of Warmont’s justiciars as they pushed their way towards us. There were cries of pain alongside the shouts – the justiciars were never gentle.
There was only one place they could be going and we turned to face them, rather than stand to one side to see if they would go past. They did not and a group of twenty halted before us. Unlike the soldiers we’d encountered earlier, the justiciars were fully armoured and armed. They always were, for they needed to maintain their image of power in order to keep the citizens cowed. These justiciars had leather breastplates, with gleaming plates of metal studded onto them. They each carried the familiar combination of sword and metal cosh. I had to suppress a sneer at the blue plumes on their helmets. There’re few things that piss off an infantryman more than a fine helmet with a feather sticking out of the top.
The lead man was broad and of medium height. He didn’t pause to speak, merely nodded at the justiciar adjacent to him, who took a step forward and swung his cosh at the closest member of our team, who happened to be Scram. The justiciars liked to impose themselves before descending to formalities such as talking or negotiation. Scram was one of my more effective soldiers, which is why I’d brought him along. He leaned to one side and grunted as the cosh took him on the shoulder. The man lifted his arm up for another swing, but was brought short when Scram’s knee connected with his balls, lifting the justiciar from his feet with the force of the impact. Every man who saw it winced involuntarily. The justiciar collapsed to the ground, wheezing. Soon the numbing shock would turn into a violent all-consuming pain and the man would shortly wish for someone to cut his throat in order to end his misery.
I met the lead justiciar’s gaze and smiled at him, pulling back my hood once again so that he would know who we were.
“Good evening, Captain.” I said. “What can I do for you?”
The man almost spluttered, thrown off guard. “You’re going to die, Cohort bastard. And then each and every one of Garg’s men is going to take their turn fucking your Saviour bitch. After we’ve finished with her, of course.”
The justiciar talked too much. I assumed it was part of the job – engender fear through word and deed, until no one dared to cross them. I had no time for their methods, being a more practical man by nature. The plaza was lit, but there were many patches of darkness. It had taken hardly any sleight-of-hand for me to conceal a dagger in the palm of my hand, with the blade pointing up my sleeve. The justiciar saw the action as I flipped it around so that I had the hilt gripped correctly. He swung his cosh at my face in a backhand motion, surprisingly fast, but he’d likely had a lot of practise. I blocked his swing with my forearm, catching the metal on my flesh. There was pain, distant and hardly felt. I ignored it and thrust my dagger into the man’s belly, the broad, hard metal of the blade piercing easily through his breastplate and into his intestines beneath. He gasped and his eyes widened in shock. I withdrew the dagger and pushed him backwards. He stumbled two paces away, until his men clutched at him to offer their support. My attack had been quick and they hadn’t yet realised what had happened.
“He’s stabbed me!” the justiciar wheezed. “Kill the fuckers.” With that, he toppled to one side, clutching his hands over the red wetness which oozed through the hole I’d given him.
Swords were drawn and the people in the market fell away from us, which was the usual reaction when two armed groups faced each other. We had the initiative – the justiciars were not used to meeting opponents who were as ready to resort to violence as they were. And we were a lot better at it than them.
I tucked away my dagger and drew my sword. I held the hilt with both hands and drove it into the throat of the closest justiciar. Blood sprayed out in a wide gout, covering my clothes, while the man fell to the ground gurgling. Lieutenant Faye engaged another – the man swung his cosh desperately as he tried to draw his sword. Scram and Heavy spread out to the sides as the justiciars did the same, in order that they might surround us. The citizens of Gold scrambled to get themselves even further away and I saw one justiciar cut at two of them in his petulance, severing a woman’s hand and bouncing the blade of his sword off the side of another woman’s head, opening up a terrible wound through the skin and bone beneath.
“More of them are coming,” said our lady calmly from her position behind me. “Soldiers.”
I parried an uncertain blow from a man to my left and kicked him hard in the knee. To my right, Heavy used his long blade to weave a pattern in the air. To look at him, you would have thought him to be clumsy to match his size, but he was not. Three of the justiciars stood back warily, making the occasional tentative jab in Heavy’s direction, unable or unwilling to commit themselves in order to break the stalemate.
I bludgeoned away another man, displaying less finesse than I would have liked, though my sword left a thick dent across his breastplate. A second arm ventured into my periphery and I took it away with the return swing. The resultant scream was faint in my ears as my brain dropped into its battle-trance and filtered out the sights and sounds I didn’t need to think about.
Two justiciars at the back burst into mageflame, the exposed flesh of their faces and arms adopting the familiar appearance of melting candle wax as it dripped from their bones. One of the men fell screaming to the ground, but the other attempted to run in panic. He didn’t get far, but he stumbled into some of the onlookers, inflicting burns upon those also.
“Jon, no more,” I heard our lady’s voice say, just as a thrown cosh hit me above the eyebrow. I felt the bone crunch and hoped it would not sag onto my brain beneath. I was as tough as old boots and assailed another justiciar close to me, aiming an almighty downward cut at his neck. He knew how to use a sword and raised his in time to block my swing. My sword sheared his in two, scarcely slowing as it entered his neck through the gap between helmet and chest plate. My strike cut him deeply, from front to back and I wrenched my sword out, even as the dying man tried to stab at me with the jagged end of his sword. His blow failed to land and I saw the recognition in his eyes as his brain told him that he would die while I would live.
The soldiers which our lady had warned us about were coming from the front and behind. I could only see those in front and they looked to be in formation. They were organised and in great numbers.
“Plenty coming,” said Scram.
“Fifteen for every one of us, I reckon,” said Lieutenant Faye. She was proving to be something of a marvel with the sword, having killed three and wounded two more.
“Keep killing the man in front of you and eventually they’ll stop coming,” I spoke. It was something we said to each other when we faced much greater n
umbers. It told you to focus only on what was before you and ignore the everything else. If you thought of nothing other than killing the man who wanted to kill you, there was no other distraction which could reduce your efficiency at that single task.
Ploster had joined us now, his beard tucked under his clothes out of sight. He was equipped like us with a sword, though he also held his dagger in his second hand.
“Fuck me, Ploster! What do you think you’re playing at?” asked Scram.
“Come on, keep your guard up, Jon,” I said, as Ploster immediately found himself hard-pressed by two of the justiciars who had circled around as they tried to reach our lady.
Honour dictated that Ploster should make a suitable response, but he could do no more than tell us to piss off as he fended away his opponents.
Our opponents were plentiful, but they were not trained soldiers. They were cruel enforcers of the Duke’s laws, who were sent ostensibly to keep the peace after the infantry had been through a place. Still, we were troubled by their greater numbers. When a battle was truly balanced so finely on its fulcrum that it could tip to either side, my men fought in silence as their concentration was at its utmost. Our pithy comments stopped as we focused on doing what we had to do.
At that point, my battle sense whispered something into my mind. The soldiers to our rear have not reached us. I took advantage of a split-second lull to glance over my shoulder. Away from us, over the plaza, I saw that the crowds had become more densely packed, as if they clustered around something.
I returned my attention to our front, just as a sword snaked over my own. I rotated my wrist and was able to deflect the thrust and the justiciar’s sword point slid past my bicep. I could have sworn I felt it tickle my skin as it sliced open my robes. The man had overcommitted and was slightly off balance. I tried to kill him with a riposte, but as I stepped forward to make the killing blow, I saw something grey carom off the side of his helmet, knocking him to the side. The unexpected impact saved him from instant death and my sword entered his shoulder through the hardened leather, rather than piercing through his rib cage and into his heart as I’d intended.
His respite did not last and as he backed away from me with his sword raised defensively, something else struck him from the side. This time it was not a stone, but a man I had never seen before. This man wrestled the justiciar to the ground, pulling cruelly at the sword wound in his shoulder and pinning his sword arm behind his back. Suddenly this stranger was joined by another – a burly man with a beard kicked the justiciar in the side of the head, half dislodging his helmet. A third man joined from out of nowhere, unintentionally blocking my path to my foe. I need not have worried. In the scrum, I saw this third man’s arm rise high above his head. In his hand, I saw he held the justiciar’s heavy cosh, evidently snatched away. The cosh came down, and through a gap in the melee I saw it connect with the justiciar’s chin and mouth, shattering teeth and bones. The cosh came down again into the same place.
“Fucking shit, fucking shit!” the man babbled as he clubbed viciously at the justiciar beneath him. “My daughter, my daughter,” he cried, weeping now as the cosh came down again and again. After a moment, the violence ended and the man stared at the bloody mess he’d caused, with emptiness in his face. I knew the look well – here was a man tortured by his desire for revenge who had found what he looked for, only to discover that once the thirst was quenched, nothing remained.
All of this had taken only a few moments to play out in front of me, as if time had slowed down to permit me a glimpse of this one man’s history. I didn’t give any more attention to the tableau and cast my eyes about me for the next justiciar to kill.
Everything was in disarray. The people of Gold, emboldened by the brave actions of a few, swarmed around the justiciars, striking at them with wooden sticks and whatever motley weapons they could lay their hands on. Those of my party stood watching, with our swords at the ready, temporarily reduced to mere spectators. More and more of the town’s citizens pressed in close, forcing us back and putting a wedge between us, the justiciars and the soldiers. The normal shouts and calls that you’d hear in any market had been replaced with the different sounds of fighting.
The remaining justiciars were killed quickly – I saw at least a dozen men and women from the town armed with short-bladed knives, which were thrust eagerly through gaps in armour or into the exposed flesh of legs and arms. I didn’t know where these knives had come from – maybe the citizens carried them as a matter of course, but they were savagely effective in close quarters.
We’d been jostled back by the throng at this point. I could see that the soldiers who had hoped to kill or apprehend us had been set upon viciously and they were making no headway. With sufficient space, a group of trained soldiers could have chopped the people of the crowd into pieces. As it was, they were taken by surprise and dragged over by sheer weight of numbers, their formation destroyed. The fact of these bloody acts was exactly why I had been reluctant to try and take the town by force.
“Come on, this way!” I urged my group. I put an arm around our lady and drew the edge of my cloak about her shoulders so that she might have a small amount of protection against anything that was hurled in our direction.
Where before we had been afforded a circle of space about us, now we were pushed and tugged as we made our way out of the plaza. We experienced that peculiar vortex of humanity, where one group seeks to come, while another group seeks to leave and where the two sides meet, everyone turns and twists as they try to squeeze by. There was no malign intent, but the townspeople acted as though someone had set fire to their boots and they all had somewhere to go as fast as they could get there. I caught snippets of excited talk as the people going one way passed those going the other.
“The Saviour has come!”
“We’ve killed the soldiers. And those justiciar bastards too!”
“Tell everyone!”
“Get to the market and kill some more of them!”
“Get away from the market and kill some more of them!”
Amongst it all, we were seemingly forgotten. Using a mixture of force and nimbleness, we reached a place where the crowds thinned sufficiently that we could take stock of the situation. I pointed towards a nearby tavern and we bundled inside, hoping for some respite. I had a feeling that was somewhere between elation and amazement at the speed with which things had happened.
The tavern was almost empty, though I noted that most of the tables had half-finished cups on top.
“The Saviour’s come, they say,” said the bar keep before he’d even greeted us. “Killed a hundred of the Duke’s men, they say. What a load of balls, if you ask me. There’s no Saviour coming for Gold.” He finally raised his eyes from the notched surface of his wooden bar and looked at us – properly looked. His eyes widened as he saw my face and then looked like they might pop from his head when he saw our lady.
“Is it you?” he asked, struggling to form his words.
Our lady did nothing more than smile at him and I saw that the man believed.
We left the town under cover of darkness. Before we left, our lady had tried her first cup of ale – at her insistence, though I had tried to persuade her to try something mellower. She had gamely managed to finish a quarter of her cup, pretending that the bitter taste was nothing of any concern. When she’d noticed us struggling to contain our laughter, she had conceded that it may be something of an acquired taste.
The injury to my skull was painful, but after pressing at it gently with my fingertips, I found, to my relief, that the bone had not been pressed back. Already, I felt it knitting together, with a burning sensation to accompany it. Scram had taken a couple of sword thrusts, both in the same leg. He’d looked down at them with a dismissive snort and grumbled that he’d have to work on his technique as the justiciars had evidently located a weakness in his defences.
I had considered that we might find somewhere to stay until the following morning, b
ut the risks outweighed the benefits. I’d alternately stationed Heavy and Scram outside the door of the tavern for the two hours we’d remained inside, so that they could watch the streets and relay any developments as they happened. It wasn’t pretty – squads of soldiers were out in force, but in groups of mixed numbers, which made me think that they had little organisation or strategy as to how they would deal with the rioting populace.
There is a tipping point when it comes to insurrection. When there is a disaffected group – perhaps two or three disaffected groups – within a town, they may resort to violence in an attempt to get their voices heard. In these cases, swift and decisive action can quieten the minority, whether by force or negotiation. In cases where there are many disaffected groups, or indeed the entirety of a town feels a certain common goal, then riots turn into outright rebellion. Our lady had pushed the teetering discontent into something much more dangerous for Duke Warmont and the soldiers he had stationed in Gold.
When Scram came inside from his guard duties and told us that he’d seen at least three different groups of soldiers in bloody conflict with opposing groups of soldiers, I knew that we could do no more.
“The Duke has conscripted a lot of men from Gold itself,” said Lieutenant Faye.
“If he has, he’s made a mistake by posting them here,” I said. “It looks like good news for us.”
“He may have thought it would help keep the town pacified,” said our lady.
“A foolish error, when a town is so close to declaring itself against him,” I told her.
“Remember that he had eighteen thousand men here not very long ago and these men had been called from cities much further afield. It could be that many men from Gold were sent here with his other regulars and he planned to return them to their bases after his intended victory in Treads.”
“That would make sense,” said Ploster. “The Duke is not known to suffer from bouts of foolishness, whatever his other failings.”
So, we left the tavern. Our lady’s radiance had affected the bar keep, but not so much that he let us drink his ale without paying for it. I had my hood pulled down and we walked quickly and purposefully towards the outskirts. The streets were busy with armed groups and it was mayhem. Chaos brings out all sorts of people - I didn’t want us to be subject to the wrong sort of attention and deemed it best if we become as anonymous as possible.
Soldiers' Redemption (First Cohort Book 1) Page 21