Trumpets of War

by Robert Adams

  "With the plan, nothing," sighed Hohrhos. "It's the city. We don't own the City of Pahtahtahspolis anymore, my lord brother."

  "Have you gone mad of siege fever, Hohrhos?" demanded the new komees, "What the hell are you talking about? Of course we own the City of Pahtahtahspolis, it's part of my patrimony, it's been a part of this komeeseeahn since the very beginning of our house, time out of mind!"

  "Well, maybe so, but it's not ours anymore, my lord brother," said his crippled twin brother flatly. "The Church owns it now, it and its plowlands and pastures."

  Stehrgiahnos had never known his brother to lie about anything of importance, and he just then felt as if an iron mace swung by a giant had crashed against his battle-helm. "But . . . but, how . . . ?"

  There was a bare trace of bitterness in the cripple's voice then as he said, "Your damned promotion after Ahrbahkootchee, my lord brother, that's how! Our sire didn't have that kind of money, not the amount you needed, but he was hungry for the honor for you, for him and for the House of Papandraios, so he rode up to the thoheeks and tried to borrow it, but the thoheeks didn't have it either, and it was he suggested that our sire seek out the kooreeos, and he did, ending by mortgaging the city and its lands to the Church for enough to buy you that blasted promotion and outfit you properly for your new rank and status. Even 1 approved of what he did . . . then.

  "But after that, ill luck dogged us. One year, a drought made the crop yields skimpy. The next year, the rains came too soon and too heavy. Then there was trouble on the land, with rebels and bandits—I can't see much difference between the two stripes, if there is any—trampling grain fields and driving off livestock and raping and looting in the villages.

  "What it boils down to, my lord brother, is that our sire could not manage to pay the enormous interest on time, much less touch upon the principal, so six months or so back a sub-kooreeos and a detachment of hired pikemen marched into the komeeseeahn, served our sire with a document signed by the ahrkeekooreeos in Thrahkohnpolis, the kooreeos of this duchy and our own dear thoheeks, then entered the city and occupied it, claiming everything of ours in it."

  The three hundred heavy horse of the Royal Army wound down the dusty road to the City of Pahtahtahspolis with the Leopard Banner unfurled and snapping smartly in the wind, the men all erect in their saddles, with polished leather and burnished weapons and armor, the horses all well groomed in the aligned ranks.

  At the barbican that guarded access to the lowered bridge across the broad, muddy ditch that the moat became in the dry season, one of the flashy, bejeweled officers rode up to the barred gate and roared in a voice dripping with hauteur, "Open up the gate of your pigsty! We're on king's business, you baseborn swine!"

  "Uhhh . . . but we-alls heared the king was dead, my lord," said one of the pikemen.

  "Oh, a king died, right enough." Scorn dripped from the officer's voice. "But whenever a king dies, you thick-witted bumpkin, a new king is crowned. He's king of us all, and we ride on his royal writ. Now open this gate and signal the inner gate to be opened for us or I'll have you fed a supper of your ears, eyes and nose, you yapping dog!"

  The barriers were raised, the gates swung inward, and the column clattered and boomed across the bridge, then through the inner gates and onto the main street, thence in the direction of the palace of the komeesee. The sub-kooreeos was very easily intimidated, and at his squeaked command, his mercenary pikemen obediently laid down their arms before the bared swords of the Leopard Squadron regulars.

  With the sub-kooreeos reflecting on the state of his soul in a cell far below, Captain Komees Stehrgiahnos found himself to be in possession of the city, two hundred mercenary pikemen and their officers who had been paid for six more months only a week previously and did not seem to care to whom they rendered that service so long as they could bide on in the safety and comfort of the city, his own troops, some pipes of a passable wine that had been the sub-kooreeos' and a goodly quantity of silver and gold that he had found after he had smashed open a locked chest found under the great bed in which the cleric had been sleeping since seizing the city.

  With shrewd use of the treasure, Stehrgiahnos had been able to add to the static defenses of the city and to provide and equip it well with provender and weapons, so it had ridden out the bad years before the death of King Fahrkos. He had lost his twin during the only attack that came anywhere near to succeeding, the bad leg having failed at a time and place that had caused him to stumble into two men, be suddenly drenched by the contents of the pot of boiling oil they were bearing and then to fall, screaming, from off the wall to the cobblestones forty feet below. By the time Stehrgiahnos had time to see to his only brother, Hohrhos' terribly burned body had already been cold and stiff, his helm deeply dented and filled with blood and brains that had leaked from the cracked-open skull.

  Then, after long years of absence, the outlawed rebel, Thoheeks Zastros, had returned to the Kingdom of the Southern Ehleenohee and had marched around much of the kingdom for months, fighting here and there, his following burgeoning to intimidating size as he went and fought. He had not come near to the lands of Komees Stehrgiahnos, of course, but word of him, his return with a Witch Kingdom wife and his recent exploits traveled far and wide, along with the measure of order that he had brought to the troubled realm.

  When he had marched, finally, against the usurper, Fahrkos, he had triumphed, Fahrkos had suicided, and Zastros had been coronated High King of the Southern Ehleenohee. After announcing his firm intention to invade and conquer the lands to his north, to make himself High King of all Ehleenohee and every barbarian people from the borders of the Witch Kingdom to Kehnooryos Mahkedohnya and possibly beyond, he had sent out military units to scour the lands for troops to make up his great, formidable host, to be of a size not seen on the face of the continent since the time of Those Who Lived Before—more than a half million fighting men.

  At length, a force of royal officers and lancers had arrived under the battered but still sound walls of the City of Pahtahtahspolis. Upon being admitted, the officers had proclaimed the new High King's announcement of a general amnesty to all who had deserted the army of his usurping predecessor if they now would return to his service and join him on his path of conquest. Despite the fact that many of them now had wives and families and friends in Pahtahtahspolis, the surviving men of what once had been the Leopard Squadron of the Royal Heavy Horse were stirred like old warhorses on hearing the trumpet calls of war, even Komees Stehrgiahnos himself.

  Planning to delay only long enough to set his city and lands in good order under a noble deputy, he sent his remnant of a squadron and as many of the onetime mercenary pikemen off with the troops of the new, powerful king, promising to report to Thrahkohnpolis himself within the space of a couple of months.

  Due to the still unsettled conditions, when he rode the journey to the hold of the thoheeks, he rode armed and accompanied by a few also armed retainers. These men were skillfully separated from him at the ducal residence, and while he was awaiting his audience, well-armed ducal guardsmen disarmed him, led him to a secure if comfortable chamber and locked him in it.

  Shortly after he had been fed, he was visited by the thoheeks, who came alone and seemed rather embarrassed about this imprisonment of a loyal vassal. "Look you, my boy," he had begun, looking anywhere but at Stehrgiahnos, "I don't like what I've had to do here, and I like even less what certain other men have in mind for you, do I obediently deliver you into their hands. Now what the Church hierarchy did to your sire and house was not right—legal, but not in any way moral—but neither was what you did in taking back your city, clapping a sub-kooreeos who was only doing what his superiors had ordered him to do, after all, in a dungeon cell after terrifying him, and robbing him and hiring his troops out from under him.

  "Now I know what your defense is going to be. Had that sad specimen of supposed masculinity stayed in ownership and control of the city, it would've fallen to the first warband that came al
ong and would today be a charred, broken-walled ruin as so many others are now. But even so, you broke civil laws and your intemperate actions drove the previous kooreeos into such a rage that he suffered a fit and died on the same day that he heard the news. Therefore, his successor means to see you charged with and tried by a Church court for murder in addition to a plethora of other crimes. That trial will only be a mere form, of course; they consider you guilty of everything and mean to burn you or crucify you, after suitable torments and maimings and mutilations."

  The thoheeks ended by giving Komees Stehrgiahnos back all of his effects, adding a small purse of old, worn, clipped coins, plus a warning to ride far and fast and keep clear of the lands that had been his patrimony and, above all, to not allow himself to be taken alive by the Church or its agents. He regretted it, he said, but in order to maintain important relations with the Church, he would have to declare this son of his old friend outlaw and himself lead out a fast pursuit of him within days.

  Only some week into his flight, the broken, outlawed komees. found himself confronted by a dozen armed men as he rounded a brushy curve in a road. Without thinking twice, he snapped down his visor, unslung his shield, drew his sword and spurraked his horse into a startled lunge, determined to take as many of the bastards as possible down into death with him. He had cut down two and incapacitated yet another when a crashing blow of a mace hurled him down, out of his saddle, unconscious.

  When he regained his senses, he was lying on the ground and looking up at an ill-matched pair of warriors—one thin and wiry, the other big and beefy, Mainahkos and Ahreekos by name. When he realized that his captors were bandits, not agents of the Church, he admitted to his recent outlawry and ended by being offered a place of command in the sizable force led by the two warlords. Stehrgiahnos had accepted.

  Chapter X

  Over the years, Stehrgiahnos had done what little he could to influence his commanders as to the merits of treating the inhabitants of places they did not have to take by storm and force with less than their inbred savagery. This did not, however, apply to Church-owned communities; on the evidences of what horror had taken place at a rural school for the training of priests, its farms and walled town, the renegade nobleman had been afforded evident respect and a generous degree of comradery by Mainahkos and Ahreekos, certain from the bloody signs that he could be naught save one of them, a true brother of the soul if not of birth or background.

  His military training and vast experience had proved of inestimable value to the two warlords; the strict discipline that he and some few other once-noble officers and veteran sergeants had enacted and very harshly enforced had rendered the heterogeneous mob with which they had begun into a relatively more reliable and dependable force of troops.

  Stehrgiahnos' strong, compact, wide-ranging corps of dedicated sadists had marched from place to place, deliberately seeking out only Church properties, towns and cities, storming them without offering to treat, and visiting upon the miserable survivors of the stormings the ultimate in depraved atrocities. Then, after all of value or interest had been plundered, they invariably burned the places to the ground, with such few of their human victims as by then still lived left helpless to roast alive.

  So many Church places fell to Stehrgiahnos' corps that all of the as yet untouched places felt constrained to desert their smaller, less defensible habitations and join together in a few larger and stronger if less comfortable spots, not beginning to return to their holdings until the authority of the Council had begun to make its steel-clad presence felt throughout the former kingdom.

  But when he had marched against the city that once had been his, the broken komees had been keenly disappointed, finding both it, his natal hold and the ducal city and hold to have fallen to some other band at some earlier time and become but sacked, smoke-blackened, ghost-haunted ruins.

  When he had heard the entirety of the sorry tale from the lips of his newest slave, Thoheeks Grahvos had sat in silence, staring hard at Stehrgiahnos for a long while. Finally speaking with a gruff gentleness, he had said, "There's an ewer over there on that commode, along with a brace of goblets, Stehrgiahnos. Pour for both of us, then take the chair yonder. I had thought that I had ferreted out everything about you and your past; I was wrong and I freely admit to the fact. You've had a hard, bitter time of it, haven't you, lad?

  "A man of your military antecedents would be of some great value to our army, but of course that's out of the question so long as our Grand Strahteegos and Thoheeks Portos remain fixtures of it. Our old Pahvlos was bitterly disappointed that you weren't at the least hung up on a cross; Portos would've had you crucified with an iron pot of starving mice strapped to your belly.

  "However my feelings toward you have altered now, Stehrgiahnos, little else of what I earlier told you has; some of it cannot, like it or not. You still are a slave; I cannot free you, that was part of my purchase agreement, you see, nor can I sell you, though I may give you to anyone I wish if no money or goods or services are bartered for you. I'll not be having you branded, but there will be a mark cut into your flesh; however, it will be so shaped and placed that it will pass as an old wound scar to the scrutiny of any who don't know exactly what to look for and where to look for it.

  "I'll still be using you as my clandestine agent in certain matters for me and, through me, for Council. Between such assignments, I think you'll be a body servant and bodyguard; in such a capacity you'll not only be able to dress like the gentleborn man that you are, you'll also be able—indeed, expected—to go armed. Anent that, before you leave this room, choose a sword that suits you from that rack over there; the dirks and daggers are in the drawer above. When you've regained your energy and strength, I'll expect you to start exercising regularly with the palace guards, both ahorse and afoot, with and without armor. As I'm certain you know, you won't be the first slave bodyguard; indeed, some noblemen will have no other kind."

  The Stehrgiahnos who responded to his master's summons on a certain blustery winter day looked the part of a gentleman-retainer to the hilt. His ease of movement warned knowledgeable observers that he had worn a sword for many a year and presumably, therefore, could be expected to know well its use.

  Stitched between the layers of his suede-trimmed, half-sleeved, satin-brocade gambeson was a shirt of fine, light, very expensive mail, and his soft-looking felt cap incorporated a steel skullcap. Like these items, none of the other bits and pieces of protective armor scattered about his body in vulnerable or sensitive spots were openly displayed, nor were the highly visible sword and short dirk the only weapons on his person, or even the most incipiently deadly ones.

  He had burnished his service bracelet until it gleamed like the gold-and-garnet finger ring that had been presented to him after the first occasion on which he had saved his master's life through the expedient of forcing a would-be assassin to take some inches of blued steel to heart. The other, more massive, ring was of chiseled silver and set with a piece of dark-blue kiahnos-stone; that one he had won dicing in the barracks of the Council Guards.

  Upon hearing the words of his master, Stehrgiahnos had frowned briefly, stared into his goblet of mulled wine, then brightened and declared, "A begging monk, my lord! They're under the control of no one, really, not their order, not any kooreeohsee, yet any Church facility will welcome one, for right many commoners consider such to be far more holy than any other stripe of churchmen. They're allowed to wander about, poke into just about anything, and other Church folk behave and converse as if the begging monks were inanimate objects or livestock."

  Thoheeks Grahvos pursed his lips and nodded. "It sounds good, yes. But could you carry it off? Remember, it could be your very life if you're found out, my boy."

  A grim smile lingered momentarily on Stehrgianos' scar-seamed face. "I've done such before, my lord, back when I was scouting out ahead of my corps of bandits, determining the richest, least-protected places to attack. The first few times, I went in with and under
the tutelage of a real begging monk who was also a bandit, but after he was killed in combat, I did it alone for some time with never a bit of trouble.

  "You see, my lord, all that is required is a fluency in Pahlahyos Ehleeneekos—the ancient tongue of our forefathers, which I happen to own, since my own sire was something of a scholar—appalling personal hygiene, a fair knowledge of Church ritual and the ability to give the impression that one is more or less mad.

  "The man from whom I learned all of this was indeed mad, mad as mad could be. He was like three entirely different men inhabiting but a single body. The begging monk, Ahthelfos Djooleeos, was a meek, gentle toper who was never quite sober. There was also a noble priest of exquisite manners and gentility, a most devout and caring man, but he was never much seen, and then only briefly; he was called Pahtir Leeros. Then there was Rawnos the Blood-drinker, a true berserker in battle, murderer, rapist, sadist, arsonist; he was vicious, grasping, a bully and braggart, a user of hemp paste and leaves, callous and greedy to unbelievable limits; he would never have been tolerated in any aggregation of men other than the bandit army. But there was many a madman and sociopath in that army."

  "What exactly will you need to prepare yourself for this mission?" inquired Grahvos.

  Stehrgiahnos shrugged. "Not much, my lord—a hooded robe of unbleached wool with a length of rope to girdle it, a traveler's wallet and brogans of hide, a wooden alms bowl, a stout staff of ash or oak, flint and steel, a couple of knives, a brimmer hat. None of these things should be new, if possible; the more signs of long, hard use they show the better."