by S. U. Pacat
‘You mean that.’
‘I mean to win. Did you think I was here altruistically to throw myself on the sword?’
Damen made himself face the problem, stripping away the impossible, looking only at what, realistically, could be done.
‘Two weeks isn’t long enough,’ said Damen. ‘You will need closer to a month to get anywhere at all with men like these, and even then, the worst of them will need to be weeded out.’
‘All right,’ said Laurent. ‘Anything else?’
‘Yes,’ said Damen.
‘Then speak your mind,’ said Laurent. ‘Not that you have ever done anything else.’
Damen said, ‘I will help you in whatever way I can, but there will be no time for anything but hard work, and you will have to do everything right.’
Laurent lifted his chin and replied with every bit of cool, galling arrogance he had ever shown.
‘Watch me,’ he said.
CHAPTER 4
LAURENT, JUST TURNED twenty, and possessing an elaborate mind with a gift for planning, detached it from the petty intrigues of the court and set it loose on the broader canvas of this, his first command.
Damen watched it happen. It began when, after their long night of tactical discussion, Laurent addressed the troop with a portrait of their shortcomings. He did it from horseback, in a clear voice that carried to the farthest of the gathered men. He had listened to everything Damen had said last night. He had listened to a great deal more than that. As he spoke, there emerged nuggets that he could only have obtained from the servants and armourers and soldiers to whom, over the last three days, he had also been listening.
Laurent regurgitated the information in a manner that was as scintillant as it was scathing. When he was done, he threw the men a bone: perhaps they had been hampered by poor captaincy. They would therefore stop here in Nesson for a fortnight to accustom themselves to their new Captain. Laurent would personally lead them in a regime that would tax them, trim them and turn them into something approximating a company that could fight. If they could keep up with him.
But first, Laurent appended silkily, they would unpack and make camp here again, from kitchens to tents to horse enclosure. In under two hours.
The men swallowed it. They would not have, had Laurent not taken on their leader and beaten him, point for point, the day before. Even then, they might have baulked had the order come from an indolent superior, but from the first day, Laurent had worked hard without comment or complaint. That, too, had been calculated to within a hair.
And so they got to work. They hauled out tents and hammered in posts and pegs and unsaddled all the horses. Jord gave crisp, pragmatic orders. The tent lines looked straight for the first time since they had ridden out.
And then it was done. Two hours. It was still too long, but it was better by far than the sprawling chaos of the last few evenings.
Re-saddle, was the first order, and there followed a series of mounted drills that were designed to be easy on the horses and brutal on the men. Damen and Laurent had planned the drills out together last night, with some input from Jord, who had joined them in the grey hours of the morning. Truthfully, Damen had not expected Laurent to take part in the drills himself, but he did, setting the pace.
Reining his horse alongside Damen’s, Laurent said, ‘You have your two extra weeks. Let’s see what we can do with them.’
In the afternoon they switched to line work: lines that broke again, and again, and again, until finally they didn’t, if only because everyone was too weary to do anything but mindlessly follow commands. The day’s drills had pushed even Damen, and when they were done, he felt, for the first time in a long time, as though something had been accomplished.
The men returned to camp boneless and exhausted with no energy to complain that their leader was a blond, blue-eyed fiend, curse him. Damen saw Aimeric sprawled by one of the campfires with his eyes closed, like a man collapsed after a foot race. The stubbornness of character that had had Aimeric picking fights with men twice his size had also had him keeping up with the drills, no matter the barriers of pain and fatigue that he had had to push through physically. At least he would not be able to cause trouble in this state. No one would be picking fights: they were too tired.
As Damen watched, Aimeric opened his eyes and gave an empty-eyed stare at the fire.
Despite the complications Aimeric presented to the troop, Damen felt a stirring of sympathy. Aimeric was only nineteen, and this was obviously his first campaign. He looked out of place and alone. Damen detoured.
‘It’s your first time in a company?’ he said.
‘I can keep up,’ said Aimeric.
‘I’ve seen that,’ said Damen. ‘I’m sure your Captain has seen it. You did a good day’s work.’
Aimeric didn’t answer.
‘The pace will stay steady for the next few weeks, and we’ve a month till we reach the border. You don’t have to exhaust yourself on the first day.’
He said it in a kindly enough tone, but Aimeric answered stiffly: ‘I can keep up.’
Damen sighed and rose, and was two steps on his way to Laurent’s tent when Aimeric’s voice called him back.
‘Wait,’ said Aimeric. ‘You really think Jord has seen it?’ And then he flushed as though he had given something away.
Pushing open the tent flap, Damen was confronted by a cool blue gaze that, by contrast, gave away nothing at all. Jord was already inside, and Laurent gestured for Damen to join them.
‘The post mortem,’ Laurent said.
The day’s events were dissected. Damen was asked for and gave his honest opinion: the men were not beyond hope. They were not going to become a perfectly trained company in a month. But they could be taught some things. They could be taught how to hold a line and how to resist an ambush. They could be taught basic manoeuvres. Damen outlined what he thought was realistic. Jord agreed, and added a few suggestions.
Two months, said Jord frankly, would be a hell of a lot more useful than one.
Laurent said, ‘Unfortunately, my uncle has tasked us with duty on the border, and as much as I would prefer it otherwise, we do have to arrive eventually.’
Jord snorted. They discussed a few of the men, and tweaked the drills. Jord had a knack for identifying the root of camp problems. He seemed to take it as a matter of course that Damen was part of the discussion.
When they were done, Laurent dismissed Jord and sat in the brazier warmth of the tent gazing leisurely at Damen.
Damen said, ‘I should check over the armour before I turn in, unless you need me for something.’
‘Bring it in,’ said Laurent.
He did. He sat down on the seat and looked over the buckles and straps and systematically checked every part, a habit that had been ingrained in him since childhood.
Laurent said, ‘What do you think of Jord?’
‘I like him,’ said Damen. ‘You should be pleased with him. He was the right choice for Captain.’
There was an unhurried pause. Aside from the sounds Damen made when he picked up a vambrace, the tent was quiet.
‘No,’ said Laurent. ‘You were.’
‘What?’ said Damen. He gave Laurent a startled look and was even more surprised to find that Laurent was gazing back at him steadily. ‘There isn’t a man here who’d accept orders from an Akielon.’
‘I know that. It’s one of two reasons I chose Jord. The men would have resisted you at first, you’d have had to prove yourself. Even with the extra fortnight, there wasn’t enough time to play all of that out. It frustrates me that I cannot put you to best use.’
Damen, who had never considered himself as a contender for the captaincy, was a little chagrined at his own hubris to realise that it was because he instinctively saw himself occupying Laurent’s role, or none. The idea that he might be promoted up through the ranks like a common soldier had simply not occurred to him.
‘That’s the last thing I expected you to say,’ he
admitted, a little wryly.
‘Did you think I was too proud to see it? I can assure you, the pride I have invested in beating my uncle far outweighs the feelings I hold on any other account.’
‘You just surprised me,’ said Damen. ‘Sometimes I think I understand you, and at other times I can’t make you out at all.’
‘Believe me, that sentiment is mutual.’
‘You said two reasons,’ said Damen. ‘What was the other?’
‘The men think you bend me over inside the tent,’ said Laurent. He said it in the same calm way he said everything. Damen fumbled the vambrace. ‘It would erode my authority. My carefully cultivated authority. Now I have really surprised you. Perhaps if you were not a foot taller, or quite so broad across the shoulders.’
‘It’s considerably less than a foot,’ said Damen.
‘Is it?’ said Laurent. ‘It feels like more when you argue with me on points of honour.’
‘I want you to know,’ said Damen, carefully, ‘that I haven’t done anything to encourage the idea that I—that you and I—’
‘If I thought you had, I’d have had you tied to a post and flogged until your front matched your back.’
There was a long silence. Outside there was the quiet of the bone-tired, sleeping camp, so that only the tent flaps and a few indeterminate sounds of shifting could be heard. Damen’s fingers were hard on the metal of the vambrace until he deliberately loosened his grip.
Laurent rose from his chair; the fingers of one hand lingered on the chair back.
‘Leave that. Attend me,’ Laurent said.
Damen rose. This was an uncomfortable duty, and he was annoyed. The garment Laurent wore today had ties in front rather than in back. Damen unlaced it gracelessly.
It opened under his hands. He moved behind Laurent to draw it off. Shall I do the rest? he opened his mouth to say, after he put the garment away, feeling some urge to push the point, since this was as far as his service was generally required, and Laurent could just as easily have taken his outer garments off himself.
Except that when he turned back, Laurent had lifted his hand to his shoulder and was rolling it, obviously feeling slight stiffness. His lashes had dipped. Under the shirt his limbs were unknitted with languor. He was, Damen realised, exhausted.
Damen felt no sympathy. Instead, unreasoningly, his annoyance peaked, Laurent pushing slow fingers into his golden hair in an enervated gesture somehow a reminder that his captivity and his punishment were all the doing of a single flesh and blood man.
He held his tongue. Two weeks here and two weeks travel to the border, see Laurent safely escorted, and he was done.
In the morning, they did it all again.
And again. Getting the men to follow orders designed to push them was an achievement. Some of these men enjoyed hard work, or were of the type who understood that they had to be pushed in order to be improved, but not all of them.
Laurent accomplished it.
That day, the troop was worked, moulded and shaped towards its purpose, sometimes it seemed by will alone. Laurent had no camaraderie with the men. There was none of the warm, heart’s love that the Akielon armies had held for Damen’s father. Laurent wasn’t loved. Laurent wasn’t liked. Even among his own men, who would follow him off a cliff, there was the unequivocal consensus that Laurent was, as Orlant had once described him, a cast iron bitch, that it was a very bad idea to get on his bad side, and that as for his good side, he didn’t have one.
It didn’t matter. Laurent gave orders and they were followed. Men found when they tried to baulk that they couldn’t. Damen, who had been manoeuvred variously into kissing Laurent’s foot and eating sweetmeats from his hands, understood the machinery that confronted and compelled them, deep-buried individually in each circumstance.
And, perhaps out of this, a thin thread of respect was growing. It was apparent why his uncle had kept Laurent away from the reins of power: he was good at leading. He fixed his eyes on his goals and was prepared to do whatever he had to in order to achieve them. Challenges were faced clear-eyed. Problems were seen in advance, unravelled or sidestepped. And there was something in him that was enjoying the process of bringing these hard men under his control.
Damen was aware that what he was witnessing was nascent kingship, the first flexings of command of a prince born to rule, though Laurent’s brand of leadership—equal parts consummate and disturbing—was nothing like his own.
Inevitably, some of the men did resist orders. There was an incident that first afternoon when one of the Regent’s mercenaries refused to follow Jord’s commands. Around him, one or two of the others were sympathetic to his grievance, and when Laurent appeared, there were rumblings of genuine unrest. The mercenary had enough of the sympathy of his fellows that there was the danger of a minor insurrection if Laurent ordered him put on the post. A crowd gathered.
Laurent didn’t order him put on the post.
Laurent flayed him, verbally.
It was not like his exchanges with Govart. It was cool, explicit, appalling, and it reduced a grown man in front of the troop as utterly as his sword thrust had done.
The men got back to work after that.
Damen heard one of them say, in a tone of awed admiration, ‘That boy has got the filthiest mouth I’ve ever heard.’
They returned to camp that evening to find that there was no camp, because the servants at Nesson had dismantled everything. On Laurent’s orders. He was being generous, he said. They had an hour and a half to make camp, this time.
They trained for the better part of the two weeks, camped in the fields of Nesson. The troop would never be a precision instrument, but they were becoming a blunt but useable tool, able to ride together and fight together and hold a line together. They followed straightforward commands.
They had the luxury of being able to wear themselves out, and Laurent was taking full advantage of it. They were not going to be ambushed here. Nesson was safe. It was too far from the Akielon border to throw suspicion for an attack southward, and it was close enough to the border with Vask that any attack could lead to a political quagmire. If Akielos was the Regent’s goal, there was no reason to wake the sleeping Vaskian Empire.
Besides which, Laurent had brought them so far from the route the Regent had originally planned for him to take that any traps left in wait for them would be left languishing, waiting for a company that never arrived.
Damen began to wonder if the sense of steady building and accomplishment that was growing in the troop was infecting him too, because by the tenth day, when the men were drilling like they could face an ambush with at least a chance of survival, he had begun to feel the first fragile stirrings of hope.
That evening, in a rare moment without duties, he was beckoned over to one of the campfires by Jord, who sat there alone, stealing a moment’s peace. He offered Damen wine in a dented tin cup.
Damen accepted it, and sat down on the bowed log that was an impromptu resting place. They were tired enough that they were both content to sit in silence. The wine was awful; he swirled it around in his mouth, then swallowed it. The warmth from the fire was good. After a while, Damen became aware that Jord’s gaze was occupied with something on the far edges of the camp.
Aimeric was tending to his armour outside one of the tents, which showed that somewhere along the line he had picked up good habits. That probably wasn’t why Jord was looking at him.
‘Aimeric,’ said Damen, raising his eyebrows.
‘What? You’ve seen him,’ said Jord, lips quirking.
‘I’ve seen him. Last week he had half the camp at each other’s throats.’
‘He’s all right,’ said Jord. ‘It’s only that he’s highborn, and not used to rough company. He’s doing the right thing by what he knows, it’s just that the rules are different. Like how it is with you.’
That was chastening. Damen took another mouthful of the awful wine. ‘You’re a good Captain. He could do a lot worse.’
‘There are some lowlifes in this company, and that is the truth,’ said Jord.
‘I think another few days like today, and the worst of them will be shaken loose.’
‘Another few minutes like today,’ said Jord.
Damen let out a breath of amusement. The fire was hypnotic, unless you had something better to look at. Jord’s eyes returned to Aimeric.
‘You know,’ said Damen, ‘he’s going to let someone eventually. Better all round if it’s you.’
There was a long silence, and then, in an oddly diffident voice:
‘I’ve never bedded anyone highborn,’ said Jord. ‘Is it different?’
Damen flushed when he realised what Jord was assuming. ‘He . . . We don’t. He doesn’t. As far as I know, he doesn’t with anyone.’
‘As far as anyone knows,’ said Jord. ‘If he didn’t have a mouth on him like a harlot in a guardsroom, I’d think he was a virgin.’
Damen was silent. He drained his mug, frowning a little. He wasn’t interested in these endless speculations. He didn’t care who Laurent took to bed.
He was rescued from replying by Aimeric. His unlikely saviour had brought one or two armour pieces with him, and was making to sit on the opposite side of the fire. He had stripped down to his undershirt, which was partially unlaced.
‘I’m not intruding, am I? The fire has better light.’
‘Why don’t you join us,’ said Damen, putting his mug down and carefully not looking at Jord.
Aimeric had no love for Damen, but Jord and Damen were the highest ranked members of the company, in their different ways, and an invitation was difficult to refuse. He nodded.
‘I hope I’m not speaking out of turn,’ said Aimeric, who had either been punched in the nose now enough times to learn circumspection, or was just naturally more deferential around Jord. ‘But I grew up at Fortaine. I lived there most of my life. I know that since the war at Marlas border duty is a formality. But . . . the Prince has us training for real action.’