Devan Chronicles Series: Books 1-3

by Mark E. Cooper

  Cragson shook his head. “They slit her throat when the attack began.”

  Navarien spat in disgust.

  The legion comprised of ten battalions each with ten maniples of a hundred men each. After Athione, Navarien had been ordered to bring his legion back up to full strength and had only managed to find enough men for eight battalions. He had to turn to the recently conquered Bandarians for the last two. Second and Ninth Battalions were exclusively Bandarian with Hasian captains and sergeants to lead them—veterans every one.

  During training, the Bandarians had been rebellious, but they had quietened down as the training took hold. Traditionally the Bandarians fought from horseback and never on foot, but they soon learned the benefits of having men who could fight effectively as infantry as well as cavalry. Navarien had decided at the time not to break up his veteran units and therefore weaken them. They provided a strong backbone to the legion on which he had hung the newly formed units. They were a considerable asset in a fight and could be relied upon to follow orders even when those same orders seemed insane. They had learned through experience that fighting together made them all ten times stronger. It was a lesson the Bandarians had learned the hard way during the Bandar War, when they fought in their traditional way. They had lost to the legions every time.

  He was wondering if he had set himself up for a fall. The new recruits in the other battalions were all Hasian, and although they didn’t take protecting women to the same extremes that Devans did, they were of similar mind where women were concerned. The Bandarians were a different breed though. Their outlook was closer to Japuran than Hasian or Devan. They didn’t have slaves as Japura did, but they did take more than one wife and treated them little better than the Japurans treated their slave girls.

  While he considered what to do, Cragson watched him for the imminent explosion he so obviously expected to see. Navarien wasn’t going to give him one. The legion was ultimately his responsibility, and so were its actions. The woman’s death… all the deaths were his responsibility, and it was up to him to make sure it never happened again.

  “Disband Second and Ninth Battalions,” he said quietly.

  “But—”

  “You heard me, Captain!” he roared as the rage finally escaped.

  Cragson flinched. “Yes sir, but what will we do with nineteen hundred Bandarians?”

  Reining in his temper was hard, but he managed it finally. “I know what I’d like to do with scum like that patrol, but I didn’t mean throw them out of the legion. I want you to bring Fifth Battalion back up to strength by re-assigning all the wounded men there. Then bring the others to full strength with Bandarians making sure they are not all in the same maniples.”

  Cragson nodded slowly.

  Navarien counted his points off on his fingers. “The rest of the Bandarians are to be shared equally among each of the battalions. When you re-assign the men, make certain at least three-quarters of any maniple is Hasian. The remaining battalions will obviously be over strength, but our people will be able to control any… deviant tendencies exhibited by the Bandarians.”

  Cragson grinned. “You can count on that, Sir.”

  Navarien looked at him silently, and then perhaps a little more coldly than he meant to he said, “I am counting on it. You can tell all the men—not just the Bandarians—why I’m doing this. Tell them if I hear of anything even remotely similar happening again, I will impale the men responsible… tell them.”

  Cragson nodded and left to see to it.

  Two days later Navarien’s resolve was tested when a young girl was raped and beaten, but thankfully she wasn’t killed. She was little more than a child. He called his captains into his room and screamed at them for almost a candlemark. He was red in the face as he berated them in a spittle spraying rage. His head was pounding and his hands were shaking with the need to punish those who were responsible. They left the room stumbling and almost dazed. They silently excited the inn and separated without so much as glancing at each other. In their turn they called upon their sergeants and screamed at them for an age; perhaps to relieve their own frustration at not preventing the atrocity, or perhaps feeling the same helpless anger as their General in some small manner. It didn’t matter. The result was the same for each battalion.

  They were assembled on the wharf amidst a nervous silence.

  The girl was almost catatonic when Navarien escorted her to see the assembled men. Pity and disgust painted the Hasian faces, but the Bandarians looked on blank faced and unconcerned. Would he ever teach them the Protectorate’s way of life? He didn’t know the answer, but whatever it might be, it wasn’t allowing the criminal to escape punishment.

  “Do you see the man, lovey?” he said quietly. “Don’t be frightened. I’ll protect you. Just point to him and you will never have to see him again. I promise.”

  She made no sign that she’d heard him.

  He sighed and kept walking. He was beginning to doubt she would ever respond when suddenly she whimpered and stopped moving. She was staring at a legionnaire in the second file. He was sweating and glaring at her.

  “Cragson!” Navarien bellowed.

  The rapist lurched out of formation and drew his sword, but his own sergeant backhanded him across the mouth before he could attack. Cragson moved to disarm him and drag him away.

  “You can’t do this!” the man yelled. “We conquered them! It’s our right to take them! Do you hear me? It’s our right!”

  Navarien held the girl close while she shook and cried. He gave her into her mother’s arms. The girl’s father stayed while his wife and child left. He looked at Navarien as if trying to understand some strange thing he had found.

  “You are his chief. Why are you helping us?”

  “I’m that man’s leader, yes, but I’m not a chief. Lord Mortain—may he live forever—is my chief, and I am his General. That means I represent him and follow his orders.” He waved a hand at his surroundings. “This city belongs to Lord Mortain now. The people here are his people. He gave us laws to care for his people and no one may break them without punishment. Not me, not you, and not that bastard over there.”

  The girl’s father watched the Bandarian being stripped and bound. “Why do you wish to cause him suffering? You should kill him cleanly with a blade. He must be sick in his head to force my daughter to do what he did.”

  Navarien was speechless. Didn’t he want the man who had raped his daughter to suffer? That seemed incomprehensible to him. “He will suffer so that others will understand that what he did was wrong, and that they’ll be punished harshly.”

  The Camorin tilted his head to one side in contemplation. “Why do your people need such harsh lessons to understand what anyone should understand from childhood? Did not your parents teach you what is good, and what is not?”

  “My parents taught me right from wrong, but some people are bad parents and their children become bad parents and so on.”

  The Camorin shook his head. “Not here,” he said and walked away.

  “Don’t you want to see him punished?”

  The man stopped and looked back. “I already know what is good and what is not. I do not need your lesson to understand.”

  He watched the man walk away and tried to understand what he meant. He knew what was right and what was wrong, and rape was wrong. Not only that, it was dangerous. The legion was all alone here. He dare not alienate the population too severely lest he have an uprising on his hands. The Bandarian was about to pay for his crime with impaling, surely that was right… surely?

  The rapist’s screams ended quickly, barely three candlemarks, and he was dead by the fourth. The Hasians among Navarien’s men had wanted to make the stake a short one to prolong his agony. They stated, and rightly to Navarien’s mind, that a rapist deserved worse even than that. Although he agreed with the sentiment behind the idea, he had overruled it after considering the effect on the locals. He didn’t make his men watch for longer than the first
candlemark. They were needed to patrol the city. He detailed five battalions to flatten buildings in the area chosen for his new fort. The fort was his top priority, more so now than ever. The mood in the city was ugly, and might become uglier. He wanted thick walls between him and the nasty sharp swords the Camorins carried.

  A few days after the first impaling, Navarien had to sentence another three to the same fate. This time the girls had been twin sisters, much older, and had died. The only witness was a passer-by. The old man was knocked to the ground and kicked unconscious when he tried to intervene. Later, a patrol discovered the scene and brought the man to the site of the new fort to point the men out.

  To Navarien’s great relief, the Bandarians settled down after their lessons and gradually became more Hasian in their ways. The men could always find willing girls when they were given a day off from duty by their captains. Forcing one was not tolerated or necessary. It was his policy to rotate a maniple off duty each tenday while in a city. In that way each of the maniples in a battalion had a day free each tenday, and the men were content to spend what little of their pay they had saved on drink and buying pretty baubles for the women. The same policy was used in varying forms throughout all the legions. It helped to ingratiate them to the city folk. In Hasa, the legions were eagerly anticipated for what the men would spend.

  Navarien often puzzled over what the girl’s father meant when he had a spare moment, but he couldn’t see how punishment for rape was wrong. The thought of the man knowing something he had failed to see bothered him, and made him look at every situation more closely. Finally, he went to see the man to ask him outright what he’d meant, but the house was empty. Many of them were these days. A good many people had left the city after the battle.

  Cantibria settled down over the following tendays and the patrols were reduced to the normal level for a captured city. The empty houses were a stark reminder of how many people had disappeared into the countryside. Hundreds were missing—especially young sons and daughters of the wealthy. Navarien assumed they had journeyed to the other cities, but they may have wandered south onto the plain. The clans were insular and unlikely to accept them. If they did find a welcome there, well, that was all right too. When the time came, he knew where to find them, and it would be easier to fight one or two large battles than dozens of skirmishes.

  He couldn’t help wondering about that family though.

  Navarien studied his new fort and cursed. The flaming gate was crooked! His men had done a wonderful job of demolition during their first days in Cantibria. The salvaged materials had been reused to build a proper barracks, stores, and curtain wall. He had chosen the location for his fort to take advantage of a deep well that had once graced the courtyard of a mansion house. The well stood dead centre of his shiny new fort’s parade ground. What remained of the courtyard had come in handy for sword drill. Admittedly, the fort was small, but stone was hard to come by. Unless he started dismantling even more of Cantibria than he already had, it would have to stay as is. He couldn’t, or rather he wouldn’t, demolish more of his city. The people he had displaced when the demolition began had filled the houses vacated by the exodus of the younger population. To uproot them again would be begging for an uprising. With all this in mind, he had ordered his men to build three barracks just large enough for the legion, but no larger. It was a tight squeeze, but no worse than the cursed boats had been. Besides, they wouldn’t be here much longer.

  Navarien had moved into the fort as soon as it was livable and turned his old headquarters back over to the innkeeper. His men often used it for picking up a woman for the day. No more trouble had been reported on that front, and although the streets weren’t as busy as they had been before their arrival, they did have people on them again. He was hoping the runaways would return once it became known that the city was peaceful again.

  “Cragson!”

  “Sir!”

  Navarien jumped. The Captain was right behind him and not in the fort. “I want that… that carpenter brought back here and set to fixing my gate! Look at it, just look! That’s flaming embarrassing. What will the militia think when they arrive to take over? Their colonel will say I did that on purpose!”

  Cragson’s lips twitched, but he managed not to howl with laughter. “I’m sure he’ll realise that you’re not a crafter, Sir.”

  “Ha, ha. Now get him back here to fix it.”

  “I’ll do that for you,” a voice behind them said.

  Cragson slapped a hand to his sword, but Navarien waved him off. “Who might you be?” he said looking the newcomer over. The man was medium height with flaming red hair and pale skin. He was so pale he was almost white!

  “I might be anyone, but my name’s Turner. You can call me Turner if you like.”

  “Well thank you,” Navarien said dryly. “Where did you come from?” he said looking around for other intruders. He couldn’t see any, but these people had an uncanny knack for sneaking.

  “Tindebraisha originally, but I’ve lived here for the last five summers… you say years do you not?”

  Navarien nodded absently. Tindebraisha was the old name for Tindebrai. It wasn’t at all what he had expected to hear. He had meant how had Turner managed to come so close without being stopped by the sentries, but his answer was more interesting.

  “Are you a wood crafter then?”

  Turner nodded and pointed to a small wooden toolbox on the ground at his feet. “I was the apprentice of one until you lot killed him in the square, but I’m good enough to be my own master if I do say so myself—and I do.”

  He certainly does, doesn’t he?

  “How much to sort this embarrassment out?”

  “A gold,” Turner said.

  “A gold!” Navarien howled in outrage. “It already cost me a flaming gold to put the flaming things up there! That’s daylight robbery!”

  Turner smirked at the crooked gates. “Well, there you are then. I would have charged two, but looking at what you got for only one, I’d say you did well.”

  “If I give you one as well, I am paying two,” Navarien spluttered.

  “Yes, and you’ll get a very nice gate too,” Turner said grinning for all he was worth.

  Navarien was speechless. The man was grinning with a mercenary twinkle in his eye, and even Cragson was close to laughing.

  “Right then! What—exactly—do I get for my gold?”

  Turner made a show of examining the craftsmanship of the gates. He made his bid when Navarien started grinding his teeth in annoyance.

  “How about both gates—not crooked of course—with a hefty drop bar for locking her up at night.”

  Navarien pounced. “I want that, and the whole lot smoothed so I don’t get splinters!”

  That wiped the smile off Turner’s face. Those flaming gates were big. They would take a lot of rubbing down to make them splinter free. Serves him right too.

  Turner frowned trying to make up his mind. “You drive a hard bargain, General, but I agree.”

  “Good. Cragson, pay him would you?”

  Navarien turned and walked away.

  “Here! Don’t you want to see the quality of my work?” Turner said as Cragson gave him a coin.

  Navarien turned back. “I trust you, Turner. If you cross me… well, let’s just say you won’t do it again.” He entered the fort and dismissed the gates from his mind.

  Navarien stopped to watch the men at sword practise and noticed sergeant Meran demonstrating a thrust and parry combination to his maniple. He wandered a little closer to listen.

  “See lads. Even the General does it like that. I don’t want to see you hacking and slashing like children. That goes double for you Lewin!” Meran said glaring at the offending legionnaire. “Yes, I saw you Lewin, don’t think I didn’t. Slashing like that will get you killed. Worse, it might get me killed!”

  The new men in his maniple laughed, but Navarien noticed the veterans didn’t. He nodded to himself. They already knew
their sergeant was deadly serious. Meran knew what he was talking about. When fighting on horseback, slashing had a place, but even then, it was far from the only way to fight, or even the best way necessarily. In tight formations on foot, like the battle in the square, thrusting was the best way to kill your enemy quickly. Parrying was fine, but most defence relied on the shield. Conversely, the shield took second place while on horseback, and the parry became more important. Legion shields were cumbersome to use on horseback because they took time to shift from one side to the other. Often you would see men discard their shield at the start of a battle and use a second blade for defending. Another short sword or a long dagger was the usual weapon chosen for this, but he’d seen a man use a small hand axe to good effect. When mounted, he preferred to stay with his shield for defending the left, and relied on his parry for the right, but there was an argument for both ways of fighting.

  The legion short sword, ideal for infantry, was a little too short for cavalry. Navarien had been vocal in his opinions back home, but although the legions were supplied with steel swords, the treasury was not inexhaustible. Longer swords would take twice the steel the current short swords did; worse, he wanted both sizes in his arsenal. The legions as infantry were unparallelled mainly due to the disciplined formations, and as cavalry due to strong tactics and leadership. There was no point in encumbering infantry with long swords better suited for cavalry and smaller independent actions. Maybe he could overcome the objections by mounting only a token force—two battalions say.

  Hmmm, that’s a thought.

  Still, these were things to consider in the future. He had no cavalry at present, and wouldn’t until he began the campaign against the real clans on the plains next year. Navarien watched the training for a while before interrupting.

  “Sergeant Meran!”

  Meran spun around and braced to attention. “Sir!”

  “Walk with me a moment, Sergeant.”

  “Yes, Sir!” Meran said, and turned back to his men. “Right you lot, I’m going for a little walk. I want you to pair up and practise the lunge and parry. You too, Lewin! When I come back, you better not be trying to slash.” He glared at the offending Lewin before joining Navarien.