by Damien Lake
Trask paused, his mouth the tight line Marik remembered so well, one eye half-closing while he contemplated the mercenary. Marik was on the verge of asking the question over in different words when a response finally came.
“You can’t always count on skill in training to hold true in the field. Barracks-monkeys are good at looking good.”
“I am aware of that, captain. But how far…” He trailed off to cast his gaze across the open space at the men imitating their instructor. “Well, why don’t I go see in person? Is this their standard training?”
“Of course it is,” Trask growled. “What else would they be doing? Come on then. Let’s go and get this farrago over with.”
* * * * *
Two men in loose trainee uniforms fell panting to the ground. The larger clutched his forearm where Marik’s sword had slapped him hard enough to make his hand spasm. His blade tumbled away to the side.
Trask blew his silver whistle shaped like a narrow, hollow reed. “What in the flaming hells do you call that, Norren? You pull a cute stunt like that in real combat and it will be your head!” He glared at the entire assembly he had pulled together from six different training groups. “It would be all your heads! I don’t give a ripe shit what the bards say in their tales! A sword isn’t a copping plow, so stop swinging it around like you mean to split the copping ground!”
Behind Trask, the line of six junior officers nodded sharply to emphasize their superior’s point.
“You still need to come up to scratch,” Dietrik announced to the group. He had assumed the role of Marik’s evaluator, saying everything that needed to be said as the impartial observers Trask had made them out to be. If Marik critiqued the men after beating them down, it might surround him with a perceived air of arrogance, making the recruits resent the advice as much as their loss. “The black soldiers would have had you after the second swing. The beasts would have got you both in the same move right from the beginning.”
Marik, holding his silence, agreed with Dietrik’s assessment. He propped his confiscated sword against his right shoulder. Trask had made a dramatic issue of it being the exact same type that they would face if they were sent against the Tullainian invaders.
These men were dismal. Over half were an outright joke. They made the pathetic hopefuls who appeared outside Kingshome’s walls for entrance trials look accomplished.
To be fair, a handful took the matter seriously. These were the men who had not been scouted during the tournament. They had joined of their own accord, inquiring at the army’s recruitment buildings over the last year. Each one concentrated on their moves, used their motion to better effectiveness, listened hard to each appraisal instead of merely their own, and kept a cool head during the spar.
Marik had no idea what to make of the lot. Only knew that any plans for the kingdom’s western defenses would certainly not be centered around their newest soldiers.
Trask called three men forward this time. Apparently he thought that might provide a greater challenge to the mercenary. The captain, Marik reflected, must be experiencing a wash of emotions behind that stone mask. Among them, Trask probably felt irritated that his men, whom he had been attempting to train, were losing in humiliating fashion. Opposing that, he must also want to teach them exactly what sort of fighters they would eventually face, so was attempting to strip away their illusions by having a lone fighter best them in groups.
But if Trask thought three fumbling dullards could fare better against him than the last pair, then the man was sadly mistaken. Marik had long honed his swordsmanship versus multiple enemies. Multiple skilled enemies at that.
Following the pattern he had set, Marik allowed the new fighters three attempts before grounding them. After the feeble blows bounced off his sword, he quickly struck, knocking weapons from their hands, sweeping feet out from under them, slapping them with his sword’s flat. As training bouts went, Marik found it hardly enough to qualify as a warm-up.
From the surrounding eyes he could see impressed souls verging on the border of awe.
Dietrik sang out. He still had no idea why Trask had Marik testing his men in the middle of their training day, yet in true Dietrik fashion he swum with the current. “You should have noticed that these two,” he made a gesture, “both leapt forward to attack at the same time. Once in a while that pays off, but not very often, in my experience. Chaps who leap without knowing what their partner has in mind end up feeding the next generation of worms and beetles.
“Also,” Dietrik bellowed while the men regained their feet, speaking loudly to keep them from melting into the crowd, “they both made a dashed thickheaded mistake.” He ignored the glares from the pink-faced men, a raw color stemming from being forced to shave each morning rather than any mollification. From this trio’s bearing, Marik guessed that shaving, prior to enlisting, had been an activity indulged in once an eightday at best.
“Angled slashes,” Dietrik whispered to Marik before swiveling to face the assembly anew. Marik needed no further explanation; he had noted the same error made by the trainees as well.
Raising his voice, Dietrik continued while Marik enacted the physical demonstration. “If you are going to perform a downward slash while stepping forward…or leaping forward. It makes no nevermind. If you slash down while moving forward, you have to know exactly what your feet are doing. Stepping forward with your left foot,” he enunciated while gesturing at Marik, who took a single step with his left foot, “means you should be using a northwestern slash! That means to say, a slash that moves on a diagonal, from your left shoulder toward your right foot. This means that missing your target won’t have your sword cutting into your own bloody foot.”
Marik demonstrated by letting his blade strike the ground, about twenty inches from his boot.
“Otherwise you increase the odds of putting the death writ on yourself.”
This time, Marik stepped forward with the right foot, showing how the blade tip made a straight line at his toes. In truth, it would have to be a sword of the correct length, and a fast moving strike that completely missed the opponent, and a blow on precisely the right angle, and boots that were of a thin enough leather to be cut by the tip’s edge alone…but the point had been made.
They waited for the next pair. Evidently Trask decided that Marik had learned enough, or that the men had seen how poor they truly were. He ordered them back to their exercises. While men sorted themselves out, Marik cast his gaze around the encampment. Several groups were still hard at work.
A tall tree had been felled, recently by the look, its branches stripped off to leave a log tall as his waist. Forty feet in length, there were sixteen men rubbing shoulders while they rolled the log laboriously across a flat patch. An officer waited beside the marker stone with sixteen other men, his silver reed whistle clenched in his teeth. Once the insanely heavy tree trunk was rolled to his marker stone, the new group would line along the opposite side in order to use all their strength to roll it back in the direction it had come from. Marik supposed the pointless exercise built muscle or improved endurance or hardened the men’s conditioning.
Other non-combat routines were under way. The jogging around the perimeter continued, as well as a strange activity Marik had at first assumed was meaningful. Men were digging deep holes in one corner, which he had thought would be a building foundation. Watching them over the morning’s candlemarks revealed that the dirt from the holes being dug was used to fill similar holes thirty yards away. When a different trainee batch moved to take over that sector, new holes were started as they filled in the holes from the previous group.
Could any of that have positive effects on their abilities as fighters? Marik supposed a case could be made for it, but only in the loosest sense.
Trask had brought them around the training field before stopping for practical lessons in sparring. That morning, Marik had believed he possessed an intelligent estimate on what to expect. The answers to his various questions did nothi
ng to suggest he had been wrong in that opinion. These men…no, the army soldiers as a whole, would be closer to a liability than an asset.
How could they be of any use in the supposed ‘plan’ he was expected to present to the council?
His anxiety fluttered inside him momentarily. To control it, he exerted a forceful indifference. Throw something together and call it an end to the whole mess! All they want is ideas anyway. Ideas are not the same as solutions.
Dietrik hovered at his elbow, surely dying to know what was going on. He held his peace while Trask continued sticking to Marik closer than a shadow. His friend arched his eyebrows whenever they made eye contact. Marik would dart his irises sideways at Trask, which Dietrik understood meant, ‘we’ll talk later’.
The captain raised his hopes slightly when he mentioned, “The end-year men should be back tomorrow for evaluation.”
“End-year?”
Trask nodded absently. “The men almost ready to ship out. They started their training a year ago. We always send them out along the roads for light patrols the last month.”
“Then they should be better than what we’ve seen so far.”
“You don’t see these barracks-monkeys out on patrol, do you?”
That seemed to be the captain’s current favorite designation.
Walking around the field eventually brought them to the corner where the prisoners were being kept. Marik had wondered at the wisdom of keeping men flush up against the trees. Upon closer examination, he found a cleared space a hundred feet wide between the fences and the woods, much in the same manner that Kingshome kept the area around its walls free from concealing brush.
“Is that truly strong enough to hold them?” he asked Trask upon seeing the fencing. Rather than solid walls, metal wires were run between tall iron posts pounded deep into the earth. Vertical wires wound through the horizontal, forming a ten-foot tall web where no opening stretched wider than three inches.
“Walls can be tunneled under,” Trask snipped. “Especially when you can’t keep an eye on the bastards all the time to make sure they don’t get up to any tricks. That’s steel. They’d have a stone whore of a time trying to snap it. We’ve been promised builders from the city to come over and throw up a prisoners’ barracks, but they haven’t shown their hides yet.”
Marik watched them for a moment, seeing men in their underclothes squatting under the canvas tarpaulins that was all the roof they had against the elements. With their armor removed, their padding against their own steel armaments were the only clothing they retained.
Most of them returned his studied glare. One man in particular, with hair gray enough that he should have retired long since, met his eye without faltering. “Who has been questioning them? We need to ask them about….about one or two new developments.”
“Nothing out of them since you foisted them off on us.”
“What?” Marik glanced at Dietrik. “I know they speak a different language, but didn’t you say they spoke Traders Tongue?”
“That’s the flap,” Dietrik agreed. “Only a handful said anything in Traders, as far as I am aware.”
“We sent in an interpreter,” Trask told them, “sent over by the council as soon as we had them settled. None of them acted like they understood a damned word. Not much good knowing a few can speak the Tongue if you don’t know which ones they are, is it?”
Marik felt the scowl on his face. The Ninth Squad had not been charged with it, but if they had been, surely they would have been smart enough to keep track of which prisoners possessed such important language skills. A flaming mess of a job waited, having to sort out those particular individuals hiding in the larger crowd, especially when their confederates would be anxious to help them remain undiscovered.
“You haven’t got one we can question then. Not at the moment.”
Trask chose not to reply to a question he’d already answered.
Marik could feel his teeth grinding. After the startling revelations of the previous day, today he felt as though he had wasted every candlemark since awakening. Answers? None that he could name. Only a confirmation or two on matters that hardly needed it.
And was he any closer to seeing a possible battle plan?
Not by an inch.
Trask left a short while later. Marik, still wrapped in his thoughts, started wandering aimlessly. He had no destination, such as the tent or the cramped room in the palace. Before he could get very far, Dietrik’s arm clamped on his shoulder.
“Hold on a midge there, mate!” Marik jerked his head around to look into his eyes. Severely annoyed eyes. “Just when are you planning to explain what in the bloody hells is going on?”
* * * * *
If Dietrik had ever been so irritated as when Marik eventually left Trask’s camp, Marik could not remember it. Granted, Marik had first attempted to explain the situation without seriously touching on what was expected of him. That had proved foolhardy, and also insulting to Dietrik’s intelligence when his friend ripped into him with scathing observations.
After only a brief hesitation, Marik silently asked why he should keep any secrets from Dietrik. The council could stew in their own juices as far as he cared.
Dietrik remained out of sorts, offering the opinion that Marik was digging a hole deeper than his head. Marik held a similar view, but with no way out that he could see, he simply shook his head, stating that he needed to return to the enclave’s tower to see if Tru’s group had worked out any new answers. He left his pack with Dietrik after changing into fresh smallclothes, his friend still insisted on acting fussed.
The world hovered on the edge of evening. Brilliant sunlight reflected off thick clouds covering the western skies, gilding them with vibrant pinks and oranges. Bards usually compared such a sight with quilts. To Marik, it looked as if the sky were covered with mounds of raw intestines, the azure fields littered with the aftermath of a titanic war that had involved every living creature in the world.
When the sun sank deeper and the lining on the clouds tinged with deeper shades of red, Marik increased his pace, wanting to get inside the city sooner. He had the unsettling feeling that the sky was bleeding.
Entering Thoenar from its western side had never appealed to him. The smells alone from the various businesses run outside the walls, banished from the city as being un-conducive to civilized living, always made him slightly sick to his stomach. His sensitivities as a mage also meant that the soil, chemically poisoned until even the most tenacious weed struggled to live, had an effect on him.
He found no real improvement once he delved into the clusters of outlying buildings. These were the slums, buildings so poor that their owners found them to be burdens rather than sources of prosperity. The streets belonged mostly to the dark guilds rather than the cityguard. Knives hanging from belts found far greater use than anywhere else in the city.
Marik carried his sword openly. He bore the uncontested look of a fighting man by his stride and appearance. His sword should be the final factor that would make would-be cutpurses or robbers turn aside to find easier prey.
Shadows were lengthening along the ground, transforming the lopsided streets into a looming forest where dark things lurked on the edge of eyesight. Despite the ambiance, Marik felt no serious concern. He had trod these paths before, knew them enough to know what to expect and how to dissuade the locals.
His mind returned to the day’s events. Unsurprisingly, the army recruits were undependable. In the first place, their training facilities were lacking by Kingshome’s standards, offering little by way of variation. Their drills were mostly repetitious, hammering in certain patterns of movement until they were ‘mastered’. Far from teaching them how to fight until their swords became extensions of their own arms, all it did was teach them how to move their blades through the air.
Mostly their problem was attitude. The majority of those men would have avoided army careers. They had been swept up in the push to recruit as many new men as p
ossible during the tournament last summer. Promises made by desperate recruiters seduced the loafers with increased ease, especially following a particularly hard winter where food had run in short supply.
So how do you get around the problem? The Thrae Valley model at least had men who could be counted on to fight, whatever the plan. How can you hold off an enemy when your troops are likely to scatter like whipped dogs?
The black soldier prisoners, whom he had been depending on to provide answers, had been utterly useless. He wanted to chew through the wires and start beating them into the dirt until they started cooperating. What use in playing pointless games? Why bother pretending that none of them could speak Traders? Soon enough their inquisitors would sort the lot out, discover who was shamming and who not. Stubborn pride only meant it would go harder on them while gaining them nothing.
And in the meantime, he needed answers, damn it!
What to do? Today was supposed to have been spent in figuring out what forces the western defense would have to work with. At the moment, it looked as if they would only have the few struggling army regiments already scattered from hells to breakfast. If they could be organized into a single force, they might be enough for a single battle. Perhaps.
Provided the invaders were kind enough not to match the strategy.
What to do…
The street narrowed. An old chimney leaned dangerously close to collapsing into the road. Rather than tear it down and rebuild it, the residents had propped several timbers against it, the wooden supports anchored between the filthy paving stones. Lost in thought, Marik swerved around it without much notice.
This brought him within feet of a yawning black alleyway. Before he registered the presence of another, hands shot from the darkness to grab fistfuls of his tunic.