by Vox Day
“Precisely. As it happens, the contract was actually an indenture in which I had sold my body to become the deeded property of one Captain Hilderus, who owned the Bloody Crows. It was a small consortium, only forty-five men, more than half of whom barely knew which end of the sword to hold. Or rather, spear. Although what I was given was little more than a long, pointed stick.
“The Savonders make war in the strangest fashion. Their king doesn’t want the expense of a standing army, but he doesn’t want to become too dependent upon the great lords, either. So while he provides the engineers, the mages, and perhaps a third of the heavy cavalry, the nobles provide the other two thirds.
“The infantry is a haphazard collection of royal levies taken from wherever the king chooses, land levies taken from the estates of the great and lesser lords, and the ‘auxiliaries,’ which are simply whatever mercenary companies happen to hear that the king wants men. So,there’s a fair number of captains who make a living turning foolish young farm boys into corpses every summer.
“Only two weeks later I found myself marching with the rest of the Crows under the banner of a baron from the other side of Savondum. The baron—his name was Gourgaud, if I recall correctly—was charged with capturing a group of elven raiders that had been burning farms near Voyence.
“We were one hundred horse and six hundred foot, and there were only supposed to be sixty or seventy raiders. Therefore the baron and Captain Hilderous were far more worried about being able to find the enemy and run them down once we did find them than they were about what those sixty elves might be able to do to us. But, you recall what I told you about them before we stopped today?”
“They prefer to keep their distance?” Marcus said.
“Just so. After five days of sighting them and chasing them all over the hills, our outriders ran into their scouts on the edge of an old forest near the western border. In retrospect, I realize they had been leading us around by our noses just to keep us occupied while their commander prepared the ambush. When we finally encountered it, it proved to be as well prepared as any ambush I’ve seen since.
“The baron thought we’d have the advantage in the hills since they wouldn’t find it as easy to use their archers at long range. I’m not sure what he was thinking when we finally brought them to bear with their backs to the forest. My best guess is that he thought they were afraid to run since they were all afoot and outnumbered by our horse. They formed their line with their backs to the trees. It was a double line, but it didn’t look very impressive since they were so badly outnumbered and they didn’t have much in the way of armor.”
Serannus chuckled without amusement and patted the armor packed behind his saddle. “Not that I did, either. I was standing in the third rank with my stick in my hand and nothing but a smelly old red tunic with a shapeless black thing sewn onto the front. It had two big tears in it. Suddenly, and as I watched that small group of elves raise their bows toward us, it occurred to me that I was probably wearing a dead man’s shirt. The tears were probably arrow holes. Maybe it was even a shirt that had been worn by two men dead before me.”
Serranus stared across the sea of sun-scorched grass and the shapeless, straggly bushes that dotted it like small islands scattered at random. “When the elves loosed their arrows the first time, most of them struck home. It’s a terrible sound, an arrow striking a man. Have you ever heard it?”
Marcus shook his head.
“A hiss, a thump, and then usually a scream. But sometimes there’s not even that. One man was one rank in front of me and two men to my left. I could have reached out and touched him with my pike. An arrow hit him in the throat. And the way he fell, I figure he was dead before he hit the ground.
“A funny thing, battle, especially when you’re just standing in the ranks and people are falling dead to your left and your right for what looks like no good reason. There’s a lot of screaming and shouting, but you don’t really hear it, and part of you doesn’t really believe that you’re there at all. It’s as if all of the blood and the madness and the shrieking just happens to be taking place around you.
“They loosed their second volley just as our horn sounded the charge. The captain shouted at us to charge with the rest, and like the fools that we were, we ran forward, screaming like a mindless horde of damned souls. I didn’t watch how I was holding my pike and nearly stabbed the man in front of me, although I can’t see how it would have done him much harm—it wasn’t sharp enough to scratch bare skin. But no sooner did we start moving forward when both of the elf lines began to melt back into the trees.
“It was a trap, of course, as I said before. A few stadi in, there was a great defile that was disguised by the brush and trees. It was hard to see where most of the elves were. But when at least a score of them were seen fleeing down into a large defile, we followed them down in the hopes of cornering them at the end of it.
“No one noticed that all the rest of them had slipped to the sides and were hidden above it, on the ridges. I wouldn’t be surprised if their confounded mages had disguised them somehow, although elves can move quietly when they want, and they’re hard to see in the woods anyway.
“Whoever had prepared the ambush had strung a pair of ropes hanging down from large trees on either side of the ridge. One moment we were chasing them and thought we had them, and the next we found ourselves stacked like cordwood at the far end of the defile just as the very last elves were climbing up the ropes right in front of our eyes. At that point, they began to loose their arrows again. And this time they didn’t run away after a pair of volleys. We lost three hundred men that day, most of them in that forest. Only fifteen of the forty-five Crows survived.”
“How did you make it through?” Marcus said, imagining the slaughter.
“Mostly cowardice. When I saw that the captain had no more idea what to do than I did, I dropped that useless spear and hid under a fallen tree. I cried, wet myself, and vowed I’d go home to the farm and live my whole life as a better man if only God would spare me from the arrows of the elves.”
“Did you?” Marcus could understand the experience of surviving such a terrible ordeal would naturally tend to drive a man to seek the Most High.
“No. If anything, I went the other way. You see, lad, there’s no promise less likely to be kept than one made by a frightened man. You’ll do well to remember that, should you ever find a frightened man making you one.”
“But I thought that was how you came to become a priest. How did you become a Michaeline?”
Claudius Serranus smiled. “That’s between me and St. Michael, Marcus Valerius. And until today, it had nothing to do with elves. Now, do you want to hear how we beat that very same group of long-eared devils? Better yet, let me ask you. How do you think the baron went about it?”
Marcus stared at the scarred, sun-leathered face of the old warrior. But the Michaeline’s half-mocking smile told him nothing that he did not know already. He viewed Marcus as a noble, still wet behind the ears and innocent of battle for all that he might well be expected to send men to die in it—if he did not take refuge in the Church.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I expect you found a way to trap them between the horse and your surviving infantry, but I don’t know how you could manage it in such broken ground. Especially since you implied that they had at least one battlemage, who would’ve been better than any the king would have given a minor noble charged with pursuing a small group of raiders. And while the cavalry would have been faster on the plains, I would think a well-trained elven force would move more quickly through hills and forests.”
“All elven forces are well trained,” Serranus said. “Between their long lives and the experience of their commanders, which no man can hope to match, no troop of men has ever been an equal, man for elf, to any elven force. But, perhaps due in part to that very excellence, they are more prone to a weakness of character that makes them vulnerable. Hubris.”
“Pride? But all t
he strategists write that soldiers must be proud in their service, particularly in their units, if they are to fight well.”
“I said hubris, not pride. God hates the arrogant and He hates the proud. But not all pride is out of place. There is a pride that would rule and a pride that would serve. The pride that makes a man hold his ground and refuse to be the first to run when his cohort is being pressed hard by the foe, that is a good thing, a needful thing. It is a strength. The pride that causes a commander to despise his enemy counterpart, that is a fatal flaw.”
“How did the elven commander despise the baron?” Zephanus asked. “I can only assume that’s what you’re implying, but I still don’t see how that helped him beat them.”
Serranus glanced at his brother in the order and the irritation in his eyes silenced the younger priest. “I’m not concerned whether you see it. I’m seeking to determine if the scholar here can ascertain the answer, given the suggestions I’ve provided.”
“The elf despised the baron,” Marcus answered. “He’d beaten him, beaten him badly, and so he must have assumed that the baron would fall back into a defensive position. The elf had already been raiding the area for some time. So, having accomplished whatever he’d come there to do, he’d think he could withdraw with impunity, without any serious risk of being attacked again.”
“So what would you have done if you were the baron?”
“I would have done just what the elf expected. I wouldn’t have wanted to risk losing any more men. I’d have tried to defend the villages most likely to be attacked. I’d garrison those villages with my remaining infantry and half my cavalry, then station the rest of my horse in a central location from where they could react to the first sign of a fresh incursion.”
“Conventional, but sound. And yet you seem noncommittal.”
“I already know that the baron didn’t do that because you suggested he attacked the raiding force somehow.”
“Very well, what would you do if you were ordered to prevent the elves from withdrawing?”
“I know where they’re withdrawing to?”
“Of course. They were from Merethaim. If they were from Kir Donas, they’d have been around the coasts, not near the western border. The High King never risked his elves on raids and such.”
Marcus tried to remember his geography. He could almost picture the scroll upon which a detailed map of Savonderum had been painstakingly inked. He remembered it had a red border that ran the length of the scroll and the ornate compass on the bottom left had two animal heads facing east and west. A wolf and a unicorn?
He forced his mind’s memory to travel north from the compass, up past the very road from Amorr they were currently riding, but east of the mountains that within days would appear in the distance to block their path. The eastern half of Savonderum consisted of flat, rich-soiled plans that produced the kingdom’s wealth. But the west was covered by the hills and forests that led to the Elflands and the savage wilds.
There were no large cities in the west, for the land would not support it. Only small towns and villages scattered haphazardly over the hillsides. In the south, the border was relatively open and was marked by a large lake that devolved into the marshes inhabited by the swamp goblins and a few degenerate orc tribes.
In the north, however, the hills swelled into proper mountains, through which only a small number of high country passes might offer transit for a force the size Serranus had described. It was through one of these that the withdrawing elven raiders could have been relied upon to use as they returned to Merithaim and safety.
Marcus smiled. He had it!
“Your baron withdrew his infantry to defensive positions near the key villages to discourage further attacks, then sent his horse to block the passes before the elves could reach them. He had them dismount and fight as infantry, where their heavy armor would help protect them from archery and give them the advantage when the elves were forced to close with them.”
Marcipor beamed at him and he felt a measure of triumph when Serranus nodded.
But then the Michaeline held up a finger. “Well done, but there are four passes through the mountains between northern Savonderum and Merithaim. The baron had only one hundredhorse. How did he know which pass they were going to use?”
“He guessed and got lucky?” Marcipor said.
“What would have prevented the elf commander from simply withdrawing and attempting a different pass once he found his first choice blocked?”
“Oh,” Marcipor made a face, disappointed.
“The boy’s forgetting something,” Lodi growled unexpectedly. “You were there, priest-man. And you weren’t on horseback neither.”
Marcus’s jaw dropped. He was too surprised by the truth of the comment to rebuke Lodi for the lack of deference the dwarf had showed for ‘the boy’ who was, after all, his present master. He’d forgotten that Claudius Serranus must have been there for the fight, based on his earlier comments, and as a lowly auxiliary pikeman he certainly hadn’t been with the cavalry! And hadn’t Serranus said something about the cries of warhawks in the mountains?
“I know,” Marcus said excitedly, waving his arm and nearly causing Barat to shy. “He didn’t send his horse. He force-marched the infantry and divided them between the four passes. And he didn’t take any defensive positions. He used the horse to trail the raiders until they gave up and decided to go home. Only, when they did, they found their road blocked by fifty or more spears!”
“Gourgaud divided us into three groups, not four. Groups of one hundred each. He knew they wouldn’t use the southernmost pass because that would take them quite far out of the way on the elven side of the border.
“My group marched for six days, stopping only to sleep and eat. Eighty-two of us made it to the top of the Summus Nufeninus, the highest and most narrow pass of the three. Think yourselves fortunate that we won’t be riding through any ground as difficult as that confounded goat trail. We reached it just as night was falling. So exhausted we were from the march up the winding path that we didn’t even post guards.
“When the first man woke up the next morning, he saw the sun reflecting off the shields of our cavalry approaching the base of the pass. Which meant the elves were closer still. Indeed, the elves were already more than halfway to the summit, so we had no time for anything but to clear the camp and position three lines of twenty men just below the crest of the pass, with the other twenty behind a huge boulder that marked the summit on the southern side.
“The Savonder who led us would have liked to hit them from both sides as they came over the top, but there was no shelter on the north side. There was nothing there but a drop of three or four stadium from the ledge.”
“I should think sweeping them off that ledge would have been an effective measure,” Zephanus said.
Serranus nodded. “It was, to an extent. Pursued as they were by the cavalry, the elves hadn’t happened to notice the marks of our recent passage. We hit them just as they crested the rise. The men hiding to the south killed ten or twelve of their vanguard as they broke from cover, but the difficulty of the climb had caused the elven line to extend itself to the point that the ambush wasn’t as devastating as it might have been otherwise.
“I was in the first line blocking the pass. But only a few of the elves, four or maybe five, came our way. We killed them, of course. I stuck one through the leg with my wretched stick before two other Crows got him in the chest and throat. But they were tremendous fighters. Fast and deadly, wielding two longswords more easily than a legionary uses his gladius. It was six to one, and they still managed to kill four of us and wound eight more before we brought the last one down.
“The rest of them retreated back down the trail and behind a curve. A few of our men followed, but they went down with arrows in their eyes. At that range, no elf was going to miss. So we fell back and waited, thinking that once the cavalry worked its way up the pass on foot, the elves would be forced to try to break through o
ur line at the summit.”
“Where did the warhawks come in?” asked Marcus.
Serranus smiled at him, but there was no warmth in it. It was a grim expression of recollection, a remembrance of deaths past. “Armored as they were, the cavalry wasn’t able to climb as quickly as we had. I daresay they were a little reluctant to climb too, knowing that they’d be climbing into range of the elven archers. Regardless, they’d barely passed the second switchback when we saw a huge bird flying over the mountains to the west.
“The elves must have had scouts out every day flying over the passes to see when their raiding parties would be returning. From below us, their mage sent some sort of flare high into the air. There was a burst of red light, and the bird swooped down upon us. I’d never seen a warhawk before, but I can tell you, they’re much more frightening than you think a bird could be.
“It had wings more than four perticae wide and a beak that could crush a man’s head like a seed. But the real danger was its rider. I later learned that only sorcerers are permitted to be sky riders, so I didn’t know to take cover when the bird dove down at us. I can still remember he was wearing some sort of leathers covered with fur—I suppose it must get cold so high in the sky—and he threw a ball of fire at us just as he swept past.
“It was fire from hell, it must have been, because it wasn’t like a normal fire that burns away a man’s clothes before his flesh. This magefire no sooner touched a man than it burned right through him. I was lucky: it barely singed my left arm. But four others died screaming within seconds.” He pushed back his sleeve and, with a mild flourish, extended his arm toward the others.
Marcus could see a strip of puckered, twisted skin, the mark of a burn made long ago. He shivered with horror, thinking of the heat that could produce such a scar so quickly and what it would be like to be engulfed in it.
His eyes shot to the two elves riding ahead of them. What madness it seemed to court the ire of these inhuman devils. And yet, was it not equally unthinkable to suffer them to live proudly in their high mountains, scorning both God and the kingdoms of man with their dark, demonic magics?