by Lee Abrey
****
Chapter 28 - No Escape
Around the fort, the jungle was cut and burned back, far enough that the Sriamans were past their range but we still had a good chance of hitting them. That night I was on guard duty. More exciting than it sounded thanks to the Sriamans infesting the jungle-encrusted hills. Lancers didn’t usually do guard duty but the fort was short-staffed.
“You have all been given a crossbow,” said the sergeant, and shook his head as if he couldn’t believe the cavalry had come to this. “Can anyone not use a crossbow?” We all looked doubtful, even those of us who’d used one before. There were several men saying,
“Me, sarge.”
“They’re simple,” said the sarge, “even a child can use one.” Everyone was trained to use bows but nobody was trained on a crossbow. Well, I was but played dumb. Sarge showed us how to load up, cock and fire. We had to mime with the lance corporals overseeing, making sure nobody caught themselves in the mechanisms. No actual ammunition for the drill, we didn’t get that until afterwards.
“You will only pull the trigger of a crossbow,” the sarge continued, “if it is pointing at a Sriaman. Never joke with a crossbow.” My left arm throbbed deep in the bone. I shuddered. “What is it, Shawcross,” said the sarge, “some allergy to bow weapons?”
“No sarge,” I said, “well yes sarge, I was shot by a-” I hesitated, unsure how to explain it with the least number of words, “-a crossbow sniper. Broke my arm.”
“That when you threw yourself in front of your friend while crossing the Green?” said Lance Corporal Dandy. I winced. Several of the non-com’s and most of the troopers sniggered. I sighed. I supposed it had to happen. A copy of at least the second book about my life was floating about the platoon.
“The books are inaccurate,” I said. “First thing I knew about the sniper being there was when my friend’s head exploded. She moved in front of me, not the other way round, but it was accidental.” Dandy shushed me but I was going to say the last bit despite a glare from him.
“Then the bastard sniper shot me while I was running away.” I shut up, hoping I wasn’t on a charge for insubordination.
The bastard in that case was an assassin sent by Azrael’s half-brother, Young Perry, the second-in-line to the Sendrenese throne, something that wasn’t in the book. The hack who wrote the books claimed my would-be murderer was the jealous lover of one of my conquests. As married people often say, my life was a bit complicated. I hadn’t married anyone yet but I had accidentally joined the army, so who knew what depths of idiocy I had yet to plumb? To my surprise the sergeant said,
“Sensible lad.” I hoped Dandy stopped tormenting me. He did, pretty much. Sarge began to harangue all of us. “Hear that, children? At this range the Sriaman bolts will bounce off your wonderful Kingdom armour. You will run away from a crossbow if you have no armour. Take it from someone who’s been shot with one,” he said, and nodded in my direction. “Do not shoot your fellow soldiers as a joke or in an argument. If fired short range the bolts can penetrate armour, if fired into skin they can take off a limb or remove several internal organs.”
The Sriamans loved to sit in trees for days, waiting for one of us to come past, and there were so many of them on the hills around us the officers decided we would start shooting back, something they hadn’t allowed previously. I found this hard to believe but apparently sniping from cover was considered unsporting. Sarge said the change of mind had come about because casualties had reached unacceptable rates with the deaths in the platoon and that infantry squad’s disappearance the previous day.
The squad came into contact with a Sriaman warband and scouts were sent back to the fort for reinforcements, but when the reinforcements arrived more than half the squad were already dead, the rest missing. Eleven poor bastards had MIA PD inscribed on their records. Missing in Action, Presumed Dead, instead of MIA PC or Missing in Action, Presumed Captured. Sriamans didn’t take prisoners as such.
We pretended not to be afraid and made black jokes. It should be MIA PB, said one wag. Presumed Barbecued. Sweat trickled down inside my armour as the sergeant told us where to patrol. Our orders were simple.
“Walk along the wall. The Sriamans will shoot at you,” he said, “shoot at anyone outside the fort who fires at you. You will not fire back at anyone inside the fort who is idiotic enough to let off a bolt at you. You will tell me and I will deal with them. Your bow weapons have better range than the Sriamans and they can’t penetrate your armour at this distance. Shawcross, you have the Blood night vision?”
“Aye sarge,” I said.
“Good,” he said, “your pair won’t need an officer.” This was excellent news, leaving Griff and I unsupervised on top of the wall. “I will be watching you,” said the sarge, reading my mind, “as will the officers either side of your post.” I was careful to look innocent.
I was learning a lot. I was no longer Sendrenese. We called ourselves Kingdom men. The Sriamans called us much ruder names, mostly to do with bestiality involving reptiles. Pretty much what the commoners had always accused me of back in Lower Beech. Being part-Dragon invited that kind of comparison but the Sriamans called us all, Blood or peasant, lizard-lovers.
“Without permission or a direct order,” Sergeant Billings went on, “you will not under any circumstances leave the fort and the safety of the walls.” He wagged a bolt at us. “No matter what the Sriamans call your mother.”
I couldn’t help thinking that it was bizarre. How was Sriama moving south? Sriamans weren’t better soldiers. They didn’t like to wear too much armour, considering it effete to wear more than a breastplate with basic guards on head and limbs. They thought horses in battle made soldiers lazy, that really only women should ride.
“Visors down!” shouted Corporal Dandy. We all reached up to the tops of our heads, flipping the visors down all the way. You could leave it half-down, but not on guard duty.
I saw my first Sriaman from the wall that night. It was after the first time I was hit with a bolt.
As the bolt thumped into my shoulder I panicked, jerking out of the way of something that had already bounced off safely. Flashbacks rolled over me and I was back when I was shot, left wanting to run but knowing I couldn’t.
Off in the distance I saw the Sriaman who shot at me, moving in a tree. I fired a shaky bolt back at him, missing by maybe twenty yards. Several spent shots bounced off my head, and I lost count of how many hit me, landed around us, or skimmed past. It was insanity. Nobody did more than eight hours up there or you started to go crazy. I had no idea how anyone could do it without mindweed.
After a while I stopped shaking and began noticing a pattern. The Sriaman would fire a bolt then hide, the soldiers would fire back and usually the Sriaman stayed safe behind a tree bough until the firing stopped. Then he stuck his head out in the same place. I wasn’t a great shot but definitely got one that night. We trundled back and forth for hours, allowed to stop to sight and shoot our weapons, or at one end of our path to use the facilities or to grab a quick water.
We were also allowed a forty-minute break for a meal. Too strung out to eat, we drank coffee and chain-smoked outside the mess. As Griff and I kept telling each other, armour stopped all but a lucky shot. Every time we said it, we giggled.
“How are you lads going up there?” said the sarge, arriving unexpectedly with Dandy, making Griff and I nervously check our memories for something we recently did wrong. I tried to remember if I was allowed to take off my helmet inside the fort, because I had.
“Score so far is Sriamans nil and us one, sarge,” said Griff. I nodded. There had been four of them firing at us, now there were only three. That was just on our stretch of wall.
“Came to tell you, Shawcross,” the sarge said, and I braced myself, “you’ve been mentioned.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant but he and Dandy seemed pleased about it. It turned out to be ‘mentioned in dispatches from the front to the higher-ups.’ I hadn�
��t counted on what the officers would make of me showing the kind of initiative that brought breakfast and showers to the fort. I was commended for my actions. It being the army, they did it in writing. In triplicate. Porky, our squad commander, was supposedly talking me up as a young man with promise, one unfairly removed from the Military Guild.
“I did kill three cadets,” I said. “I mean, they attacked me in a mob, but in hindsight I was a bit tightly wired.” The sergeant and Dandy thought that was very funny and wandered off laughing, repeating,
“A bit tightly wired!”
“They’ll promote you next,” Griff said as we watched them go, “lance corporals are only two to a room.”
Promotion would get me out of the barracks? I hadn’t considered that. I was big enough and mean enough to protect myself among the enlisted men but the non-com’s were altogether more civilised. I remembered Fenric telling me I was a lucky bastard. Maybe I should ride that luck out of the ranks.
The sarge came back past, Dandy gone somewhere.
“Food and hot water, lads,” said the sarge and laughed. “The way to an officer’s heart. Don’t you forget your helmets when you finish here. Full armour, especially you Shawcross, with those glow-in-the-dark eyes.”
Dragon were not intended to be soldiers but hard-to-kill settlers. Some three thousand years ago on a planet named Lucas we were designed to be farmers and miners. In a rather harrowing process the first Dragon was bio-engineered from good-looking genetic stock, tall and strong, with various traits enhanced to survive on a harsh planet with savage fauna.
We weren’t like other people in more ways than met the eye. Especially our eyes. Apex predators had eyes like that, so our eyes would scare other predators away. They were also the marker that the line was breeding true.
An unexpected side-effect was that humans found the eyes hard to cope with and for a soldier, eyes that shone like a cat’s at night were a liability, showing a target in the dark. As was planned, the new traits bred into the children, but nobody realised what the full extent of the traits might be. As Cree once told me, when Man created Dragon he accidentally created magic.
Man’s suspicion of Dragon meant that instead of settling on Lucas, Dragon worked as mercenaries and roamed the Quadrant worlds for two thousand years, moving on each time the townspeople realised that the new folk in town weren’t quite normal. Then Dragon found Galaia. On the continent of Pangea were the multitudes of old kingdoms standing against Sriama. What attracted Dragon at first was the gold to pay mercenaries that Sendren was awash with. Once the war was over Dragon decided to assimilate, mostly with the people of the old kingdoms.
The descendants of that crossbreeding, the Blood, were the rulers and the officers. And me.
Sarge misinterpreted my distraction, thinking it was bloody-mindedness over armour. “Don’t care if you can’t breathe, you keep your bloody visors closed. Already lost one of the officers tonight, shot right in the bloody eye.”
“One of ours dead, sarge?” said Griff. The sergeant shook his head.
“Resident infantry major. None of his men were game to remind him to shut his visor.”
Griff and I both tutted with the sarge at the foolishness of Some People, Especially Commissioned Officers, and I promised to keep my helmet closed. The sarge headed off and we got ready for the next few hours. On the wall, everyone sneaked smokes, one quick hit at a time, giving the Sriamans a target in the dark. I remembered my father telling my mother, who was having a pipe on the back veranda, that you never faced the darkness when smoking.
When I was shot as a boy the bolt was at the limit of its range and still went straight through my bare arm. The surgeon told me I was lucky. The flesh on the inside of my arm hadn’t exploded as the bolt exited, and nor had the broken bone shattered and torn through my flesh. One over a slightly shorter range killed poor Virginia. Her head had been nearly gone. I was very careful to keep my face turned from the darkness whenever I popped my visor.
Being shot at did pass the time. I was quite surprised at how soon the watch bells rang out two in the morning.
Before bed I wrote to my steward, catching him up on my adventures a little, assuring him I was fine no matter what rumours he heard, and quadrupling my order of mindweed.
I dreamed of walking across the Green behind the citadel, a constant flurry of bolts hitting my armour. I looked down and saw the armour was wearing away. It began to crumble and fall off me. I started to run. A bolt hit my left arm and went straight through. I heard the bone snapping, was knocked off my feet and woke with a yelp.
Someone swore at me. I realised where I was and managed to get back to sleep, my right hand tucked protectively over the scar on my left shoulder.
****
Chapter 29 – Settling In
We had a late start the next morning, before a night off while the squad changed shift to days. I was out doing my katas on the small lawn outside our barracks, bleary-eyed, about to toddle along to the officers’ pits. I wasn’t on duty but was supposed to complete a number of tasks every day, like spar, work my horses, keep my gear in good condition. In practice that meant we didn’t have much spare time. One slept, ate, worked, and went on duty.
“You any good?” said the sarge, appearing next to me. I was never a morning person, even speaking Anglic seemed too much.
“Uh,” I said, pausing my exercise, “good?”
“At sparring, Shawcross, at sparring.” I thought about it.
“I’m good, sarge, but not frontline good. My father trained me since I was a boy and I trained against veterans up to the time I joined the army. And I did do two terms of the Military Guild by my own efforts.” He raised his eyebrows.
“That should be enough,” he said, “now don’t you go telling the officers you’re adequate.” I nodded. “It’s alright if you lose but try not to, eh?”
“Aye sarge.” I knew a betting plunge when I saw one. “I’m a green recruit,” I said, “but because I’m Blood I have to spar with the officers. Poor Polo, they’ll give him someone nasty and with any luck we’ll get very good odds on me.” He grinned.
“That’s my boy.”
****
Inside the pits building nobody was in uniform, everyone in fatigues or sparring armour. I presented myself at the armoury there for practice armour. I was fitted out and handed a wooden sword, weighted inside with lead so heavier than a normal one. I went back out to put my name down for the timekeepers. They kept track of the spars, which pits were in use, who was waiting and most importantly, who would spar whom. At their table I pretended to be slightly less sure of myself than I was.
“Excuse me, sirs? I have to spar with the officers on account of being Blood.”
“Name?”
“Trooper Shawcross, sir.”
“Trooper?”
“Aye sir.” As predicted, they were so busy having a chuckle over Blood in the ranks they forgot to ask anything else. Also as predicted, they set me up with someone they thought would thrash me.
“You’ll be fighting R. Sing, Pit Three.” He looked up at the clock. “He’s waiting outside the pit.” I walked down and introduced myself to Sing.
“Trooper? Gods, Shawcross, what did you do?”
“Do, sir?” Then I realised what he meant. “Oh, no sir, I joined as a trooper.” He frowned over that, so deep I could see it through the visor.
“What on earth for?” he said. I shook my head.
“I was drunk, sir.”
“They’re setting me up, aren’t they?” I wasn’t sure who he meant.
“Setting you up, sir?” I said.
“Stop calling me sir, it’s not even eleven. What’s your first name?”
“Polo.”
“I’m Rafe.” He offered his hand. I shook.
“What are you,” he said, “some ringer from the West Coast Command?” I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.
“Sorry, si- Rafe?”
“You move lik
e a swordsman, Polo,” he said, more gently, “so they have to be setting me up, making me spar you on your first day.” I had wandered into someone else’s paranoia.
“Oh, no,” I said, “I’m who I say I am. Obviously, there are people who’d like to win some coin on me, if you underestimate me because I’m a trooper.” He seemed a nice person, so I told him. “I’ve been to the Military Guild, Rafe, but only a couple of terms. I’ve only just arrived on the front line, been in the army a few days.” He nodded.
“So let’s see which of us is better.” I nodded.
“I’m betting you’ll be faster,” I said, hoping he didn’t kill me. About ten minutes later, after three bouts, we gave it up, sweating and wheezing, arms aching and parts of us throbbing where we had connected with fists, elbows, knees and swords.
I didn’t have a clue who won any of the bouts until the judges told us. I lost the first bout then won the second and third, purely on points.
“Gods,” said Rafe, “you’re very good, kiddo.” I laughed, mostly with relief that it was over.
“So are you.”
****
Sarge was over the moon. For the third bout, with the price-setters deciding my second bout win was a fluke, he was offered even better odds on me.
“And I didn’t go large on the first two rounds,” he said, “but when they upped you from ten to one to a hundred to one for the third, it was hard not to.”
“A hundred to one?” I said. “I should have bet on myself.” He laughed.
“I bet a silver for you,” he said. “You won a hundred silvers,” which was three golds and ten silvers, “which you’re donating into the squad entertainment fund.” My winnings were just over three-quarters of an annual peasant wage, or about what an unranked soldier earned.
“What’s the entertainment fund?” I said. Sergeant Billings grinned.
“It’s something I just invented. The very moment we find somewhere we can spend it we’ll all have a night on the tiles.” He paused. “You can have it if you want, but I figured you don’t need it.” I shook my head.