War of the Misread Augury: Book One of the Black Griffin Rising Trilogy

by D. S. Halyard

  “No.” Fyrdman Warin added. “But we’ll make camp north of town tonight, and I’ll bet you half of the whores in Brenwater Duchy will be by to take care of you lot.” That seemed to mollify the fyrde slightly, but they shot resentful looks at any townsmen they passed as they marched up the broad boulevard from the ferries to the Duke’s keep and on through the north gate.

  “Likely the damned merchants in the baggage train will buy all the good things in the market, and then sell it to us at twice the price.” Said Masci Barliman, fingering the strap of his leather skullcap. Even on the hottest days, he never took it off. Without it, anyone could see that his forehead stretched all the way to the back of his head, and at just nineteen that was embarrassing. His fingers seemed too thin and delicate for a sword, and he bit his nails to the quick.

  “Well, that’s for certain sure.” Said Warin cheerfully. “But once we get some battlefield loot we can come back through here and sell it for a lot more than they’re going to take off of us.” Several of the men grinned at the prospect.

  At camp that night, Warin’s words proved prophetic, and there was a constant coming and going between the military camp and a temporary and much less orderly tent city the whores erected in a cattle common nearby. Aelfric heard the giggling sighs and faux cries of passion long into the night, and he knew most of his fyrde would be thin on coin until the next payout day.

  Aelfric did not frequent the tents of the camp followers. His father had taught him many things, but very little about women. On one point he’d been quite clear, however, and that was that no matter how desperate he got, whores were out of the question. In his heart, he felt a vague and largely undefined yearning for women, but around them, he never knew what to say or do. In Root’s Bridge, even the peasant girls had made him nervous, with their strange and secret smiles, their mysteries. His one entanglement, with one of his housekeepers, had ended in embarrassment and shame, and no small amount of relief on his part. He had a sense that his life would become terribly complicated should a woman come into it.

  Maybe better. He was not sure.

  The army of the Silver Run muster took a day to reorganize itself, resupply and repair before beginning the long march that would take them into Northcraven Duchy. Extra supply wagons had to be found in Brenwater Common, for although the first ten days of their march would be through Brenwater Duchy, with many small towns and villages along the road, the final ten days would be on the king’s road through Whitewood Forest, where there were few towns, and those unlikely to have supplies.

  In the morning Aelfric convinced Warin to allow him to seek out an armorer, and he purchased ten sword-arm gardbraces for the Blackhill Gang. He’d had such a difficulty teaching them to keep their swords up, that he was afraid they would all lose their arms without the shoulder protecting plates. The gardbraces weren’t new, nor were they of very good quality, but they were a hundred times better than the rusting thin chainmail the men had been issued. Aelfric had to pay a gold mark for the armor, but it would be worth it if they were needed. He taught the men how to strap them on himself, fearing the poor job they would do if left to their own devices.

  Warin confronted him about it by the fireside, when just the two of them were awake.

  “You never bought these on soldier’s wages, Aelfric.” Warin observed, holding up one of the pieces. “What are you on about?”

  “I just want the men around me to remain standing if it comes to a fight, Warin.”

  “Aye, but armor for the men, that’s Barith’s job. Weapons and equipment is provided. You’re going to piss him off, standing in his place like.”

  “I don’t think he’s going to be pissed, Warin. Even if he is, so what? Look, if we get into a battle, I mean a real stand up battle, we’re going to be disposable. Mercenaries are always the first troops to be thrown in where it’s hottest. I don’t want the only thing between my neck and an Aulig’s sword to be a thin bit of old chainmail. Do you?”

  “Just be careful, Aelfric. There’s a chain of command, you know? Plus, listen man. You wasn’t ever in the damned Blackhill. That much is obvious to a knowing man. I’m from the King’s Town, and I seen all kinds. You ain’t that type.” Warin gave Aelfric a measuring, knowing look. “And you don’t talk like no Zoric man.”

  “I never said I was in the Blackhill, Warin. That’s something Barith came up with on his own. I don’t have any intention of talking about where I’m from or what’s behind me. That’s my business, same as every man in this company.”

  “Hey, I’m just giving you a bit of advice, son. You don’t want to look like trying to better yourself. Not in these here Red Tigers you don’t.”

  Aelfric nodded, saying nothing for a few minutes. “Thanks for the warning, Warin.” He finally said. “Good night.” He thought about Warin Bibiker for a moment, and then dismissed him. The fyrdman completely lacked ambition and imagination, and would never be anything more than he was now.

  They marched through a prosperous and easy country of well-traveled roads, lined with old oaks and birch, alder and willow. Most of the trees were leafed out, and the late spring sun was tempered by a sweet-smelling breeze. There were a few low hills, but the road, called here the Brenwater Road, swept around them, and the marching was easy, to the extent that marching is ever easy.

  People came out of their houses to line the roads and wave to the soldiers or cheer, but their line of march was long, and the Red Tigers always at the rear, eating the dust the other soldiers raised. By the time their part of the parade went by, most of the people had returned to their homes or their trades, or had moved back to trade with the merchants in the baggage train.

  Each little hamlet or town along the way sported a tavern and a church, a market green and a keep; or at least a tower for guard. The churchmen were all of them formally robed, and many paused beside the marching men to offer benedictions and prayer, waving white staves or smoking censers of incense. Most of them wore the plain brown robes of priors, but a few inquisitors could be seen from time to time, the four-pointed star on their gray cloaks and tabards causing the men to look away quickly. The lowest part of the star was longer than the others, and some called it the inquisitor’s dagger. The Red Tigers were not permitted to linger in any of the Brenwater towns, but were ordered to march through, camping at evening in cattle commons or pastures.

  For eight days their march continued, and they made good time as the cottages and hamlets grew farther apart, the patrols fewer in frequency, and the road less traveled and narrower. Only the trees and hills seemed more numerous as they began to pass into a lonelier country, with broad stretches of unsettled forest lining the road as it dwindled in size.

  The elevation rose as they left the Dunwater River Valley, and they began to see clusters of the giant sycamores and white poplars that gave the Whitewood Forest its name. There were fewer open areas in which to place their camps, but no lack of firewood.

  Travelers on the road brought rumors from Northcraven, and those rumors passed to the Red Tigers third or fourth hand. It was confirmed that the city of Northcraven was under siege, and at least one fortress burned and abandoned to the enemy; the Auligs held both banks of the Redwater River, and were burning farms; and there would be fighting north of the Whitewood.

  At camp each night the training was now in earnest. The few veterans of the last Aulig war were much in demand for their advice and experiences, collecting groups of soldiers to learn what they could of their enemy. Aelfric chanced upon one such cluster on the night they passed within the bounds of the Whitewood Forest, and under the dense canopy of the sycamores Tuchek was talking. He was wearing a green cloak over chainmail, for the army had been ordered to march in armor now at all times.

  “The Auligs are strong, and their warriors are very tough.” He was saying. “They live in wilderness camps most of the time, and they are used to hard living in the forest. Most of them are tougher than most of us, that’s just a fact. Their front line
s will have the biggest warriors, carrying heavy maces and axes of stone, which they use to smash into shield walls, letting the knife and spearmen come up from behind.

  “Their biggest weakness is lack of a command structure, and a lack of organization. Each Aulig sees the battle as his personal chance to earn glory. They don’t fight as units, but as individuals, and they don’t listen to commands. In a pitched battle we always took them apart, because no matter how many of them there were, they couldn’t break our formations for long.

  “Also, their footmen have no armor, or shields at the most. This makes them fast, but they can’t hold ground for long against determined Mortentian troops.

  “On the other hand, their archery is very strong. Even while we won the battles, we always took very heavy losses. Keep your helmets on, and even if you aren’t in the front lines, always keep your shields up. They like to send runners up with bronze or iron-tipped javelins, which they throw at our shields. You can’t use a shield with a javelin sticking out of it, and that’s another way they get through a shield wall.

  “If we pick the battlefield, we will beat them, every single time. They can’t stand before armored horse, their arrows won’t punch through Mortentian armor, and we’ll be bringing a lot armored knights to Northcraven. They like to shoot the horses if they can.”

  “Ach, dot’s disgusting!” Exclaimed a red-faced Orrman. “Shooting the poor horses. Dot’s a dom dirty trick!”

  “Aye, well, it’s a trick they learned during the last war. The weakest part of any armored knight is always the horse. You kill the horse, you’ve most likely killed the man. They’ll be throwing spears and arrows at the horses for sure.”

  “What if they pick the battlefield?” Aelfric asked.

  “If they pick the battlefield, we’re in trouble. One of the things they liked to do in the last war was to get their archers on the edge of a wood, with pikemen in the trees. They’d shoot arrows at our cavalry to provoke a charge, then once the cavalry were strung out in the woods, the pikemen would kill the horses and then knife the horsemen. If you have a choice, don’t meet the Aulig in the woods. He’s lived his whole life there, and he knows what he’s doing.”

  The soldiers looked nervously at the dense forest around them. Every dark shadow seemed filled with lurking menace. Their camp lay just on the southern edge of the Whitewood Forest, and from all they’d heard the war was still far away, but day by day it grew in their thoughts and fears. The leaves of the sycamores rustled in the dark like dead men’s clothes.

  The road through the Whitewood Forest was just wide enough for four horsemen to ride abreast, and the men in the baggage train had to occasionally get out with axes and clear passage for the wider wagons. Because of the narrow way, the army was strung out over nearly a league, with the camp followers and wagons needing another half league behind them. Scouts and outriders were sent out to ensure that there were none of the enemy lurking in the forest, for even though it was very unlikely, an ambush here would be catastrophic.

  Gigantic trees loomed on either side of the road, and the army moved in their constant shadow. It was a respite from the sun, but no breeze reached here, and the trunks of the trees marched in columns to either side of the road for as far as the eye could see. The road was carpeted with a thin straggly grass growing out of a thick layer of decaying bark and mould. Occasionally a deer or squirrel could be seen in the wood, but these were rare, and the Whitewood forest gave the impression of being empty and abandoned.

  Aelfric was sure that the movement of so large a body of men in the forest had frightened away most of the game. Although there was nothing to hunt, the men still had fresh meat, for included in the van of the army were several hundred cattle purchased in Diminios for the feeding of the troops. Three thousand men went through a lot of food each day, however, and the cattle were dwindling rapidly.

  Aelfric reckoned that the quartermasters knew their business, but he double checked their arithmetic in his head to ensure they had rationed out the food carefully for the march. His father had told him nightmare stories of marching with armies when the provisions ran out. Men were sometimes reduced to eating the leather straps of their harness, eating grass or worse things. Looking out from the road he saw endless tree trunks of enormous size, and little to differentiate one place from the next. He reckoned an army could get in that forest and never find its way out again.

  Barith must have had experience campaigning at some point, because he ordered that all of the meat be cooked nearly black, and any greens carefully washed in clean water. Dysentery could kill an army nearly as swiftly as any battle, and the Red Tiger commander was taking no chances. Aelfric approved.

  At night the forest was as dark as a Thimenian’s soul, and the road could not be seen. They kept a few lamps in camp for the thanes to read orders by or for the watchmen to use, but their tents were pitched under trees and were completely invisible in the night darkness. An evening trip to the privy was perilous for the danger of tripping over tent stakes or ropes. As soon as it was light enough to see the tents were packed up and the army marched on.

  As they moved north, the army marched faster. Occasionally they encountered a patrol from Brenwater on the road, but these were few and far between, and there was little news. On their fourth day in the forest they began to encounter a different sort of traveler, wide eyed families of terrified refugees with little more than the dirty clothes on their backs, making their desperate way south out of the war. From these they heard firsthand accounts of farms burned and plundered, women stolen, and the terror of the Cthochi Auligs and the night. At first the soldiers gave a few pennies to the refugees, but by afternoon they had seen so many families begging for help that all they could do was to move them out of the roadway and pass them by, ignoring the desperate way they looked at the food in the baggage train.

  That night in camp there was little humor, and the soldiers begrudged every hour not spent marching toward the enemy. Wrath had replaced money as a motivation, even among the mercenaries. In the morning things would get worse, Aelfric thought, nor was he disappointed.

  Whereas the southern side of the Whitewood Forest had no plain border, but was some point when the woods became thick enough and tall enough to be called a forest, to the north the line was quite sharp. At noontime they were walking within the deep forest canopy, and scarcely a hundred ells later they were blinking in the broad sunlight and looking out over the open fields and farmland of southern Northcraven Duchy. Half a mile down the road stood the low wooden stockade walls of Walcox, a medium sized village of perhaps three thousand people, although thousands more lived in the surrounding farmland. It had a single large square tower rising at its center, made of enormous blocks of unmortared stone. Aelfric could see already that the town’s main Inn, the Dashing Snake, was choked with the soldiers and knights of the army. The air was full of the tempting smell of freshly baked bread, for Walcox had half a dozen large bakeries. Wagons full of barley were lined up at two large hillside windmills half a league east of town, grinding the spring’s first harvest.

  It would be hours before any of the Red Tigers would be able to visit, and setting up camp would have to come first.

  Walcox had been built at a major crossroads, with a broad and well-tended road that crossed the plains running west to east from the Redwater River to Northcraven Sound and the slightly less frequented road the army had used to come north through the Whitewood Forest. This road ran along a lesser tributary of the Mission Creek River called Valkaz Creek to the town of Brinnvolle and onward to Theotman Common and Tarnanvolle. Although Walcox was less than twenty leagues from the Redwater River, it had been ignored by the Auligs during the last Aulig war. The town fathers had apparently taken this as a sign that it would always be ignored, for it was poorly sited for defense and had only a wooden stockade and the single fortified tower for defense.

  At the moment it was fairly choked, what with streams of refugees coming east from the
settlements on the Redwater River, which the Auligs were raiding, and the armies coming north from the heart of Mortentia, and more coming west from landings on the coast. Every room in the town’s three large inns was full, and the taverns and eateries had long lines stretching down the wooden boardwalks beside them. The central crossroads were paved with broad, white stones, but the unpaved portions of road had been churned into mud by the heavy cart traffic.

  Army camps lay sprawled to the north east of the town, and the ripe scent of overfull privy pits hung over everything. The army of the Silver Run muster was not the first army to have camped in Walcox, and the camps had an over-used and ugly appearance.

  The Red Tigers marched through Walcox to set up camp in their designated area on the town’s north side, and the men spent the day pitching tents and trying to learn what their orders were.

  There was a great deal of confusion. A muster had been held in the city of Nevermind, and an army of some four thousand footmen had arrived in Walcox the day before. The Duke of Dunwater Duchy was present, having come with that army, and as he was the ranking member of the nobility and as he had arrived first, he demanded that the Silver Run army merge with his and that he assume command. The captains of the godsknights, on the other hand, saw the Silver Run army as an extension of their cavalry, and insisted that they should serve as support troops to secure the victories the armored knights were sure to achieve.

  None of the mercenaries wanted any part of the army of Dunwater’s Duke, for he was known to hang soldiers who didn’t obey his least command.

  In the midst of this debate it was discovered that there was a general shortage of firewood for the camps, and the sword fyrdes of the Red Tigers were tasked with procuring it. Barith delegated the task to Warin, who then delegated it to Aelfric so that he could join a group of officers trying to get places at the Dashing Snake.