Victory Soup
A Spellmonger Story
By Terry Mancour
Copyright © 2012 Terry Mancour
First Kindle Edition
Early Autumn, the Alshari Wilderlands
“. . . when the clash of two strongly opposing forces happens in such a short period,” Rogo Redshaft lectured me as we rode eastward, “the results can be catastrophic. Especially in the early period. That’s when your basic assumptions get challenged, and everything you thought you knew is suddenly wrong.” He spoke in a low, deep, calm voice with just a trace of Wilderland lilt, but his words were coins for my eager hands.
“It can be hard on a man, to face a situation that seems hopeless at the outset,” he continued, steadily. “But your die was cast, and you have little choice but accept the situation as it is, and not as you wish it would be. You must act, though every part of you wants to freeze up or flee. What you do at the beginning is critical.” He barely emphasized the word, but that just seemed to lend additional gravity to his advice.
I reflected on his words of wisdom in this most important of endeavors as the horses walked leisurely along the road through the hilly woodlands on either side of us. We had stopped passing cultivated fields yesterday, and were now in the forests that ranged the northern frontier between Castal and Alshar. Redshaft’s home was near here, a few dozen leagues east. I, myself, had a date at Wilderhall, before catching a barge and proceeding south to more important business.
But the important thing was that we were riding away from war and battle, away from the thousands of goblins who had inconveniently invaded the northwestern human lands. We had fought hard, fought all summer long, and now with the chill of autumn in the air, our purses rich with spoil and wages and reward, warrants of leave in our hands and our honor straining from the weight of our glory . . . and we couldn’t get away from that wretched battlefield fast enough. I had chosen to ride away, with my two apprentices, from the Battle of Timberwatch and its aftermath in the company of a group of auxiliaries who had served under me there, the Nirodi Free Mounted Archers.
Their captain, Rogo Redshaft, was a learned man, an able commander, a veteran of many battles and had decades of experience. He was universally respected amongst his comrades, hardened mercenaries all, even though he was common-born and a bowman, at that. The Nirodi were famous for their puissance, however, and Redshaft epitomized the professionalism of his men. They had performed heroically for weeks under his calm, deliberate command.
It hadn’t been easy, being his commander. I had always felt as if I was ordering my father about even as I had given him orders during battle. Yet he had executed my orders as well as any commander could expect – and far better than a mediocre general like myself deserved. The ghosts of the men who had died at my command were beginning to haunt me.
But I had a hard time feeling somber that beautiful day, for which I suppose I should feel at least a little guilty. I’ll have to crave the gods’ pardon for that, however: after weeks of blood and death and battle, I was finally at leave to pursue the truly weighty matters that encumbered my mind. Thoughts of politics and panoplies of war, of retribution and revolution, of magic and manipulation faded from importance to me with every hoofbeat. I had the ear of one of the wisest men I knew for days to come, as we returned to Castal, and I wanted every scrap of advice I could on the subject he knew best.
“So there’s no room for error, in those first moments,” I repeated, like a good student. “But that would seem the best time to me for some element of conciliation, some willingness to—”
Rogo chuckled wryly. “One would think, wouldn’t you? But from the moment the contest is engaged, it’s a test of wills. One you must not lose, or all else is lost before it begins. Nothing is what it seems. You have little idea how important the smallest of your decisions could become. It’s a struggle, a constant challenge to your sanity and your heart. But one that you can not lose, else . . . well, the result can prove . . . catastrophic.” His tone was even more dire than usual. That was pretty dire.
“So how might best I prepare—?” I swallowed hard. This is what I’d been asking for. The benefit of his wisdom. There had to be some key, some secret . . .
“Prepare? There is little that can prepare you for that, my boy,” he said, with sad humor. “You cannot prepare for that day. You must just face it, and do not yield against it. That’s when you discover what kind of man you are. You can daydream about what you will do beforehand all you wish, but when that day comes . . . no amount of preparation can get you ready for that conflict. Every situation is different. But there is only one rock you may cling to, one thought that must sustain you, or any of us: you are committed.”
“Committed,” I repeated, my mouth dry.
I heard a snort behind me, as my apprentice, Tyndal, rode up from the rear of the column to join us. He was five inches taller than he had been a year ago, and rode his palfrey like a warrior, not a stable boy, now.
“Huin’s sack! You make marriage sound so appealing, Captain Rogo. If that’s is a man’s future after bring wed, it’s a wonder anyone ever gets married!”
“Oh, it’s for the bravest alone, and not just any summer soldier,” the Nirodi captain chuckled. “I’ve been with my wife for twenty years and four.” Rogo sat up in his saddle and again looked back to make sure that the rest of his men were riding peacefully in formation. “And there isn’t a day I don’t see her face that I don’t regret.” I could see it in his eyes, the longing, the hunger to see his wife and children again. It had been months.
He and two dozen of his men had taken their leave of army life as quickly as possible after the battle, as a vanguard for their fellows, headed for the green lands of the Castali Wilderlands. They would bear the tale of the glory of battle, list and mourn the dead, and prepare the town for the rest of the company. Most of the Free Mounted Archers were policing the battlefield or helping range the northern wastes, still, but would be following soon enough as reinforcements replaced them for the long winter garrison duty.
Nirod was a free commune, without a lord, but Rogo commanded a lot of respect there thanks to his position as Captain of Archers. There was much to prepare before the rest of his men returned. Solace for the wounded and the weary. Widows to console and dead to bury. Estates to be divided and loot to be shared. A smart commander made certain that those details were attended to with as much attention as his preparation for a campaign – and Rogo Redshaft was among the smartest commanders I knew.
“Happily?” Tyndal asked, an eyebrow raised skeptically.
“Oh, a good nineteen of ‘em,” Rogo admitted with a twinkle in his eye. “But that’s the point: it took us a bit longer to smooth out the shaft, as you’d say, but the wood was solid. The first five were . . . painful. It was just because I was a damn fool who thought I knew better, and she was a maid with a head full of fluffy fantasies about the subject instead of proper sense. We flew true, in the end, but it could have gone smoother if I’d been less twitterpated and stood my ground. Instead, she stopped respecting the man I was, when I retreated. If I had won a few of those battles in our Maidenyear, we could have gotten to the pleasant part a lot sooner.”
“So what’s the ‘pleasant part’? Tyndal asked, freckles dancing in a smile. He had a young man’s natural skepticism about matrimony, compounded by the obvious but unspoken fact that he had mislaid his boyish virtue sometime between leaving Boval Vale and arriving at Timberwatch. When a young man first discovers the pleasures of the flesh, it’s often hard to make taking a wife seem appealing. Especially a
young man whose life has been steeped in danger and adventure and exotic places. I understood that.
In fact, I was understanding that all too well. Hence my long discussions with Captain Rogo. It wasn’t that I didn’t love Alya – I did – and I wanted to marry her. I just knew ass-all about being married, save what my Dad had imparted to me. And he wasn’t around.
“The pleasant part?” Rogo asked, sitting back in the saddle and dropping the reins to remove his riding pipe. “The pleasant part is this: riding back after battle, bone-tired and weary, knowing there’s a warm hall, a hot kettle, and a warm ass to back into on a cold night.”
“An inn and a whore will provide as much, and for less coin,” Tyndal said, crudely.
“A whore wouldn’t dice with Ishi nine times to prove seven stout children,” Rogo countered. While he didn’t seek to correct the new-made lordling, I could tell he wasn’t pleased with Tyndal’s attitude.
Tyndal looked as if the notion appalled him. “Children? All the more reason to stick with whores!”
“Comfort and love are all the reasons you need to wed,” countered Rogo. “You can’t trust a whore. Nor will an innkeeper hold you in the middle of the night when the terrors come.”
“But a wife just grows old and fat!” my apprentice dismissed with a face. “And plain! Even the noble ladies I’ve seen, they get old and fat just like the goodwives. You can find a new whore every night, each younger and prettier than the last! And with a whore the only argument you have is the price. With a wife . . . the argument is the price!”
I didn’t know a lot about his home life, before I discovered his Talent, but apparently Tyndal’s parents had not been the ideal of matrimony the gods had intended. His sire was long dead now, and his mother a refugee caring for his half-sister (paternity unknown) in the south.
Rogo smirked knowingly. “Nay, lad. You’ve got it wrong. The argument is the prize, not the price. But you’ll learn. I remember being your age myself, and always thinking with my shaft. If you’re lucky enough and don’t die a glorious hero, perhaps you’ll learn to appreciate the comfort of a goodwife compared to the charms of a whore.”
“May the gods save me from any other fate!” he said, disgusted. Tyndal was enchanted with errantry, even after all he had seen and done at Timberwatch. His youthful passion couldn’t be stemmed even by that bloodbath. And enobling him hadn’t reduced his ego one bit. I was about to intercede – the conversation had turned from the friendly bantering between camp-mates on campaign to coming dangerously close to being insulting to one of them – when one of Rogo’s younger Nirodi scouts came galloping back from the vanguard, and nearly skidded to a halt in front of us.
“My Lord!” he said, quickly and earnestly, “trouble ahead! A conveyance of supplies from Wilderhall has entangled with some gurvani, apparently. The men are mere militia, but they have the band pinned to one side of the road ahead.”
It took me a moment before I realized that the scout was talking to me. He’d addressed his report to ‘my lord’, and that meant . . . oh. Me. I was a lord now, too. By the Gracious Hands of Rard and Lenguin, Dukes of Castal and Alshar, a Magelord and Knight Magi of the Realm. I’d been enobled, and I wasn’t quite used to that yet. Particularly being called by title.
I can’t say it had shrunk my ego much, either.
"Gurvani, you say?” I asked, the prospect of battle suddenly sounding preferable to discussing the merits of matrimony with these two. At least less bloody.
“My Lord,” Rogo reminded me, “we are on leave.” His tone wasn’t begging or pleading or even requesting, it was merely informing me that this wasn’t necessarily our fight. Hell, I wanted to get home to Alya as much as he wanted to return to his wife – more, perhaps – but damn it, I had responsibilities.
“We’re also at war,” I countered. “And this road is filled with refugees and supply shipments.” I looked behind us, at the bulk of our little column. Together with my two apprentices, there were slightly more than two dozen. Not enough to make much difference, if there was a large band, but quite enough to finish off a small one decisively. “We can at least stop and find out if they need assistance,” I conceded.
“And it might be a trap,” Tyndal said, eagerly. He wasn’t done killing goblins this season, apparently.
“Then let’s go see to these goblins,” Rogo sighed, expertly stringing his bow from the saddle.
“It really would be impolite not to,” I agreed, the thought of the comforts of matrimony receding for at least another day in the process. “Perhaps we can find out how the gurvani feel about marriage.”
* * *
It would have been an interesting question to ask them. The problem was they weren’t gurvani.
Gurvani stand four to five feet high and have black fur from head to toe, like a furry twelve-year-old. They are also cunning and vicious warriors. They are also nocturnal. They don’t move around in the sun voluntarily unless their dark master compels them, or their shamans provide cover from the overbright sun. This band was in direct sun, and didn’t seem bothered. That was my first clue. The group that the soldiers had surrounded was not human, true, but the fur that covered their bodies was also not black. It was various shades of brown.
The soldiers were a simple escort company of militia, local fellas from around Wilderhall quickly conscripted and armed for duty as soon as the harvest could spare them. They had the same basic accent as the Nirodi. They had been ordered escort their train to Tudry in support of the war effort, but they were young and eager for battle. They were ready to avenge their human brethren from Alshar who’d been slain in the nasty genocidal war.
Only these brave stalwarts from the Castali Wilderlands had cornered . . . a harmless band of terrified River Folk. I had to stop myself from laughing out loud.
The River Folk are typically smaller than gurvani, with few reaching four feet tall and most adults being around three feet to three and a half, the females being a few inches shorter. What they lacked in height they more than made up for in girth, however: River Folk are fat.
That’s not exactly fair – River Folk are built differently than humans, and their proportions do not match ours in several ways. Because of this, a healthy adult looks to human eyes to be scandalously overweight, if he were human. They have proportionately wider hips and narrower shoulders, their hands and feet look larger than they should be, attached to stubby little arms and legs. And their heads are half again as large for their shoulders as a human’s.
Add to that their actual fat – and the River Folk can pack it on, a defense against lean times – and their course, fluffy coat of brown fur, and the over-all effect is a kind of enormously obese rodent who happens to enjoy eating and getting drunk and smoking and carousing more than life itself.
That was one reason the River Folk had such a bad reputation in their native Riverlands. Booze. They knew the art of brewing like my dad knows baking, and they practiced it with the enthusiasm that would make the drunken folk of the Pearwoods envious.
While the advantages of having a colony of River Folk near your village were clear, since they were such ideal smallholders and consistently produced large surpluses, the disadvantages were fairly clear as well: left to their own devices, they usually became purveyors of liquor, wine and beer, and could leave a human peasant village thoroughly bankrupt and demoralized.
Worse, they bred like the rabbits they kept in such abundance. River Folk mature into adulthood early, compared to humans, in a mere ten years (although they are not considered ‘mature’, socially, for another ten). They also produce multiple births at an alarming rate when there is a sufficient food supply. It seems cruel, but the only way to keep them at a reasonable population is by curtailing their victuals.
If they bred faster than goblins, they were also longer-lived than the gurvani. Instead of a mere forty years before dotage, they could go twice that or more.
The Riverlords of Alshar and western Castal loved the huge su
rpluses the River Folk brought to them in tribute, but they hated the problems implicit with taking them on as vassals. You couldn’t conscript the River Folk, for instance, like you could a human peasant. You could put a sword in their hand (a very small one), but their stature, slowness and their short limbs made them easy targets in battle against humans.
At most they could use small bows, or man crossbows or fire duty stations in a siege, but even that was against their generally-peaceful nature. That meant that in inter-fief wars the River Folk were often the first raided and slaughtered, and rarely was any thought given to their defense – if even a few survived, then they would be back to productive levels in just a few years.
Affairs between them and their lords were handled communally, with a single representative (sometimes misleadingly called a River Folk Lord) handling the negotiations for the whole burrow. When the population in a burrow gets too large – over a hundred, say – then it splits off and forms a new burrow. If it is allowed to settle too closely nearby, then rivalries inevitably begin between the two.
While open warfare between burrows is almost unheard of in civilized parts, their intricate codes of family honor and filial responsibility permit some pretty nasty duels, and property damage in fights is always a problem. There are even occasional riots. Human lords largely leave such matters to the burrow’s leadership to deal with, unless it involves a human subject.
There were places in the Riverlands where human lords had devoted large areas to River Folk cultivation – but they also had to devote a significant amount of time and energy in managing the colonies, or risk almost continual chaos. It takes a strong hand and a fair nature, for the little people have a very distinct sense of justice, but if you had the temperament for it landing the River Folk could be a profitable enterprise for a lord.
I’d seen a few of their villages in my travels. Their burrows are great, circular structures, often built partially up against a south-facing hill or even deep into it, depending upon the size and age of the colony. There is almost always a courtyard in the center, often with a spring, well, tree, or rock formation forming the center-point.
Victory Soup : A Spellmonger Story (The Spellmonger Series) Page 1