The Tattered Banner

by Duncan M. Hamilton

  They walked slowly back toward the Sail and Sword, Soren recounting his tale of the belek hunt. Ranph had spent the vacation running his family estate. His father had gone south with a regiment of foot to put an end to a border dispute with the Principalities of Auracia to the south. They had stopped their usual practice of fighting one another and were going through a period of national unity, taking the opportunity to try to expand their borders by flexing their collective muscle.

  Soren felt a rush of excitement as they entered the Sail and Sword. Alessandra was standing behind the bar, working the ale tap.

  ‘Two mugs of ale please!’ Ranph said.

  ‘Hello, back for the new term already?’ she asked as she reached for two empty mugs.

  ‘Not at all, back early just to see you!’ Ranph replied flirtatiously.

  ‘Aw that’s very sweet of you! Here you go, a shilling please,’ she said.

  They went back to one of the usual Academy booths, with habit overriding practicality as one of the servants was scraping the ash out of the fireplace beside them, with loud scraping noises irritating Soren and making conversation difficult.

  ‘No wine today, Ranph?’ Soren asked.

  ‘Gods no, I’ve had enough wine to last me quite some time. Last year’s vintage was awful and father made the decision to sell on our reserves of the good stuff to cover the bad year. Which means we’ve had to drink this year’s slop ourselves. No, it’s ale for me for the time being at least.’

  ‘Alessandra is looking well,’ Soren said idly, but hoping that something would come from the comment.

  ‘She always looks well. Just ask her out, stop being such a wimp,’ said Ranph.

  Soren put down his mug and looked over to the bar.

  ‘Fine, I will,’ he said.

  Ranph raised his eyebrows, and then his cup in salute when he realised that Soren was being serious. Soren stood up and walked purposefully to the bar. For some reason the image that was burned on his mind was that of the belek as it stared him in the face.

  ‘Finished already?’ asked Alessandra.

  ‘No, I, well, I was wondering if you might like to go for a drink some night, when you aren’t working,’ he said.

  She seemed completely taken off guard. The usual cheeky casualness with which she deflected requests such as this was gone. ‘Well, I work every night,’ she replied.

  ‘Maybe I could walk you home after then?’ he said, grasping for anything other than outright rejection.

  ‘Maybe,’ she said awkwardly, trying to seem distracted with the mugs she was stacking.

  Deflated, Soren returned to the booth, where Ranph had an uncomfortable look on his face.

  ‘Well?’ he asked, cringing.

  Soren just shook his head. Ranph nodded.

  ‘Nothing another few ales won’t fix!’ he said hopefully.

  Soren sighed. ‘I’m going to go home, I have some things to do before training in the morning.’ There was a sound of despondency in his voice.

  Ranph looked at him closely and realised there was no point pressing the issue. He looked away then, and over toward the bar. Alessandra was staring over at them, but quickly looked away when she saw Ranph looking back at her. He smiled to himself while Soren stared into his empty mug. Perhaps all was not lost just yet. They left the tavern, Soren shyly saying goodbye and Alessandra trying to avoid his gaze.

  Soren did not want to ever return to the Sail and Sword, but when his other classmates started returning it became impossible not to do so without letting his reason be known. Ranph was discreet enough and would not mention his refusal, and had given Soren space since then, not trying to pressure him into going into the city. When the others returned it was a different story though. They all wanted to share their summer tales and hear about Soren’s adventures in the snowy North. The Sail and Sword was the obvious place to do that.

  He felt a little sheepish going in, not knowing how to react when he saw Alessandra. A few months before he would never have thought he had a chance with a girl like that, but life had changed so much so quickly, anything seemed possible now. It was this sense of optimism that had led him to hope, and it was this hope that led to him feeling so disappointed.

  He recounted his adventure in Ruripathia, again and again, leaving out one obvious part, but gradually embellished the rest with each telling, despite it not being needed and without really meaning to. Each night, it was the same story but a larger audience. Some of the others had vaguely interesting tales to tell, but Soren could never really pay much attention to them. All he could think of was Alessandra, and all he could do was concentrate on not staring at her when his own tale was finished.

  Jost and Henn made regular exclamations of their envy. Their own summers had been mundane by comparison, with rural life on their family estates seeming very dull after the activity of the city. The more he heard of how little the others had been up to, the more he began to realise how lucky he had been in getting to go north with Amero.

  With term due to begin the following day and the restrictions that would place on their leaving the campus, a larger group than normal had gone into the city for drinks. Students would be welcomed back with several days of very hard training to shake the summer cobwebs off so the evening was far from a riotous party. No one wanted to be the worse for wear over the next few days, and then have to spend the rest of the year climbing back through the class standings. The mood was convivial; there was a lot of joking, laughing and shouting, but not a great deal of drinking, to the landlord’s chagrin. They stayed until closing time, the stories of what each student had gotten up to over the vacation keeping them entertained all evening.

  Gradually the students began to return to the Academy, and Soren’s group was among the last to go. As Soren was walking toward the door, he heard a voice call his name. He turned to see Alessandra standing by the bar, a small purse clutched in her hands and a nervous, hopeful expression on her face.

  ‘Do you want to walk me home then?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, yes, of course,’ replied Soren with surprise, his face involuntarily breaking into a smile.

  They left the tavern, walking out into the dark night. The air was cooler than it had been and Alessandra tightened her shrug around herself. Since returning from Ruripathia, Soren had thought it very warm, although he did notice that the evenings had begun to take on an autumn chill.

  ‘Why did you ask me?’ he said after they had been walking in silence for a few minutes. ‘I didn’t think you liked me.’

  She smiled, but continued to look forward. ‘I don’t know. I suppose I’ve been watching you, and you didn’t seem like the others. Not so full of it! Like you have nothing to prove. It’s nice.’

  They both laughed, the ice finally broken. They chatted and laughed for what seemed to be an age. It seemed odd to Soren that she would live so far away from where she worked, but he did not mind. The conversation flowed freely and without end. When she had first asked him, Soren had wondered what they would talk about, and had felt something like panic in his gut. After the first laugh however, his worries had been allayed. Just like Alys, they seemed to laugh at the same thing, to have similar dreams.

  They were both orphans. Her mother had died in childbirth, and her father had been a small merchant. He had gone off with a trading caravan to the east one spring, and had never returned. She had been left with her uncle and aunt and as the years went by they came to the sad conclusion that he was never going to return. Soren felt a pang of sadness for her, even though he had never known either of his parents. It must have been harder to have known him, and then lost him.

  Soren had been completely honest with her, telling her how he had been thrown out of the Cathedral orphanage at fourteen to make room for younger children. He said it matter of factly. It had only been fair, they had looked after him for more than a decade, and at fourteen you were considered old enough to fend for yourself on the streets. She had listened sympathetically, b
ut he tried not to labour on his deprived youth, which even he found depressing. He tried to put emphasis on the life that was ahead of him now, all the fantastic opportunities that had been opened up to him, through a stroke of luck and the generosity of the Count of Moreno.

  He hadn’t really been paying attention to where they were going as they talked, and was thus surprised when he looked up to see that he was standing back in front of the Sail and Sword.

  ‘What are we doing here?’ he asked incredulously.

  ‘This is where I live,’ she said, with a smile.

  ‘But?’

  ‘Take no mind of it. I told you I didn’t think you seemed like the rest. I just wanted to make sure!’ she said. She rested her hand against the doorknob, but paused before she opened it. ‘I know it gets tougher to get out of the Academy in the evening once term starts, but will you call on me when you can?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Soren. With that she opened the door and disappeared inside. He felt as though his heart was going to leap from his chest.

  C h a p t e r 2 7

  THE PICNIC

  Soren had missed the first week of term the previous year, so he had no idea what to expect from the first week back that all of the other students seemed to hold in such dread. He was not too worried about it though, as he had been training hard with Bryn twice a day, and then spending an hour or two in the evenings with the drones since he had gotten back. He had been keeping careful track of any symptom that could be attributed to the special ability that Dornish had suggested he might have. He began to suspect that it had something to do with how he perceived time. On any occasion where it seemed that something was moving more slowly than Soren felt it ought to be, he paid particular attention. The effect seemed to be stronger when he fought the drones, less so when he trained with Ranph or Bryn, but Soren felt that it was always present to some degree. It was never so strong as it had been in the final moments of his fight with the belek. He did not understand what was going on, or if indeed he was just imagining it all because Master Dornish had put the idea in his head.

  He found it both frustrating and exciting. If it was true he had something that set him apart from all others, that thought was more than a little intoxicating. There was something very appealing to him about having something in common with the heroic bannerets of the past. He also wondered, if indeed he did have the ability, what other benefits there were to be enjoyed.

  Despite the two weeks of hard work, the first few days back at the Academy were a mix of painful limbs, strenuous exercise, and a ravenous appetite to allow the body to repair itself from its exertions. When the end of the week approached, he was almost too tired to leave his bed, but he was determined to do something with his day off as a reward for all the hard work and in order to spend some time with Alessandra. The weather was still fine, although the autumn chill in the air was becoming ever more pronounced, particularly in the mornings and evenings, so he had decided to take Alessandra on a picnic.

  He had approached the issue coyly with Ranph, who was envied for courting some of the most beautiful young ladies in Ostenheim’s society. Ranph had teased him mercilessly, but Soren had prepared himself for that, and had reckoned that the advice would be worth it. Ranph’s suggestion had been to take her on a picnic to one of the Breakers’ Islands. They were a small archipelago of islands in Ostenheim Bay that were sheltered from the sea by a series of reefs that were a danger to shipping at low tides and during stormy weather.

  In times past, ne’er do wells from the city that were no better than common pirates had used false signals to lure unsuspecting ships onto the reefs, and then scavenged the cargoes that washed up on the small beaches of the islands. The Empire had stamped these activities out long before the Mage Wars, and one of the remaining landmarks from those days was the great lighthouse that stood on one of the islands as a warning about the reefs and to direct safe passage into the harbour. The largest mage lamp in existence sat at the top of the lighthouse, and its light had not dimmed an iota in hundreds of years. They said the lighthouse would crumble into the sea long before the brilliance of the lamp was diminished.

  Ranph regaled him with a story of how he had taken lady something-or-other to one specific island, and that she had been putty in his hands as a result. The story also included the finely equipped family barge he had used to get there, the team of servants who had rowed it, and the staff at his town house who had prepared a sumptuous picnic. Soren could see immediately several issues in transposing this suggestion to his own needs with less than modest resources.

  Nonetheless, it was better than any of the ideas he could come up with himself. After investigating the possibilities and expense of hiring a small rowboat for the day, he came to the conclusion that he could just manage to scrape together enough money from his small allowance to hire the boat, and the food he could sneak out of the dining hall. He had a note sent to Alessandra, who responded right away. Her enthusiasm was obvious from her note, and she outlined at length, in what was approaching being a written stream of consciousness, what she would bring in the picnic basket, the responsibility for which she made her own.

  The reply came as something of a relief to Soren, both her pleasure at the thought of spending the day with him and also that she was taking charge of the picnic basket, something that Soren had briefly put his mind to, but had come to no satisfactory decisions on.

  He hired one of the small rowboats that were available at the slip in Oldtown and collected her from the pleasure boat docks that were a brisk row across the busy inner harbour, which left him with a sheen of sweat on his brow. She was waiting for him, a basket in hand on the dock side, looking beautiful and attracting admiring glances from every man that went past her. He held the boat steady for her as she stepped down from the dock, feeling an enormous sense of pride as she looked at him with a trepidatious smile for reassurance as she cautiously climbed into the boat.

  ‘So, what’s our destination then?’ she asked, as they pushed off and Soren broke into a steady stroke.

  ‘That’s a surprise,’ Soren replied mirthfully, as he tried to concentrate on their course, weaving between wherries and lighters that darted back and forth between docks and ships. He was able to keep up a brisk pace, almost matching the boatmen who plied the waters on a daily basis.

  He breathed a sigh of relief as the traffic eased when they passed between the two great towers that guarded the entrance to the inner harbour and out into the open anchorage in the bay. He was beginning to tire though; despite all of his training, he still found the rowing to be hard physical work. He wished he had been able to afford to hire a boatman as well as the boat, as those heading out to the islands ordinarily would. Having access to a private barge and crew would be even nicer. Alessandra sat comfortably in the stern of the small boat, idly curling her hair as she watched the bustle of the harbour traffic slipping by. Occasionally she would cast Soren a coy look, and for a moment the burn in his arms would seem to fade.

  The boatman had warned him that the row was longer than it appeared, but Soren had presumed that he had exaggerated in the hope of earning the fare as well as the rental. It was indeed farther than it appeared from the shore though, and Soren was grateful when they finally reached the sandy beach of the island he intended for their afternoon.

  It was a small island, but consisted of a dozen or so trees and a small patch of grass and a sheltered beach, just large enough for a picnic. He helped Alessandra out and then hauled the boat halfway up the pebbly shore before tying it to a nearby tree. As Alessandra spread a rug which she had taken from her basket on the grass, Soren took the bottle of Blackwater wine that Ranph had given him out of its hiding place in the bottom of the boat. Ranph had told him that it was good, so it was with a smile on his face that he presented the bottle to her. Her jaw dropped when she spotted it.

  ‘Where did you get that?’ she asked.

  ‘I have my sources,’ Soren replied, trying to sou
nd as mysterious and well connected as he could, the latter of which, it struck him, wasn’t all that far from the truth in this instance.

  ‘We keep a couple of bottles of this at the tavern, but no one ever drinks it because it’s too expensive! You are really spoiling me today!’ she said.

  They exchanged slightly awkward small talk for the first few minutes, commenting on how lucky they were with the weather that day, and how it was nice to be away from the chaos of the city, but soon their conversation once again slipped in to the same easy flow that it had the night he walked her home.

  She had filled the picnic basket with all sorts of treats, pilfered, she had said mischievously, from the pantry of the Sail and Sword. There were slices of delicious pastry pies with various fillings, grapes, apples and oranges, and a pie of custard and lemon that Soren thought was one of the nicest things he had ever eaten, even nicer than the desserts in Brixen. It was all washed down with a fruit cordial that Alessandra had brought, and the bottle of Blackwater wine which, even to Soren’s unrefined palate, was quite superb.

  The day seemed to slip by dreamily, in the light haze of the wine and easy conversation. They lay beside one another on the rug, chatting and laughing bathed in the warm sunlight. Soren wished the moment could go on forever.

  C h a p t e r 2 8

  A GRATEFUL NATION

  Soren always felt awkward in his full dress uniform, and despite having worn it several times now, he doubted he would ever feel completely comfortable in it. This occasion was one of the many ceremonial functions that Academy students were obliged to attend as a mark of respect. Ranph’s father was being awarded the Grand Cross and several of his officers and men were being given lesser awards for bravery in what had been far more than the small border dispute that Ranph had casually referred to it as.

  Seemingly quite a major action had been fought in one of the more strategically important southern passes on the border where Count Bragadin’s regiment had been dispatched. It appeared that they had been outnumbered and caught by surprise, but had fought tenaciously and had turned back the attackers from the Confederation of Free Principalities of Auracia. The Grand Cross was the highest award that could be given to a citizen of Ostenheim, noble or commoner and required Count Bragadin’s presence to receive it from, as was the tradition, both the Duke and Grand Bishop, who were the nominal heads of the Order of the Grand Cross.