Steel And Flame (Book 1)

by Damien Lake

  “Not yet! I’ll be sure to inform you before I do.”

  The company moved out, and the messenger or scout or whatever he was rode away toward the Green Reaches.

  Time passed slowly for the men continuing through the rain, the escape from the heat soon losing its relief, turning instead to discontented grumbling. Thankfully they were not riding with Balfourth. He’d elected to remain with the other three men of upper class assigned to this detachment. It pleased everyone to let him go wherever he wanted, as long as he went away from them.

  For the moment the Ninth rode among the men Balfourth brought with him from his father’s barony, as well as four regular squads from the army. Together they totaled nearly five-hundred, half the men under the command of Balfourth and his peers. Dornory’s son stayed half a day behind, riding through the field after the Kings and the point group ascertained no foes endangered his precious skin.

  That was how Marik usually thought of it. He knew Dietrik had been right and no ground should remain uncovered for long, but leave it to Balfourth to stay with the group least likely to run into trouble.

  It had become the normal routine after days on patrol. Their company split into two; the first half leaving before dawn, the second shortly before noon. The latter half would not arrive at the next depot until long after sundown, yet war demanded such trials of stalwart men. Marik could imagine how Balfourth would embellish the terrible hardship at court, making it seem a cruel sufferance he had endured for the good of the kingdom. At least I had enough time in the morning to fluff my lace and crimp my hair!

  He snickered to himself, causing Dietrik to look over at him. “What’s so jolly?”

  “I let my mind wander. It’s nothing.”

  “Tell me anyway. I could use a good laugh. Look, there’s another scout reporting to the captain.”

  “Good.” Marik stopped when the captain raised his hand, the command for a company halt, and slid off his mount as quickly as he could. He began stretching when the command came to remount immediately, eliciting a groan all down the line. “That was fast. What’s the rush?”

  Dietrik looked as far ahead as he could through the rain. “I don’t know, but it looks serious. He’s ordering fastest speed.”

  “Looks like the war finally found us then.” Marik climbed back into the saddle. He took a long pull from his water skin while he waited for the horses ahead to move.

  They remained on their original course, which must mean the trouble lay ahead. Best odds, as laid by Kerwin, placed trouble at the Sixth Supply Depot and they needed reinforcements. Marik thought as much, so stayed out of Kerwin’s bet this time.

  Riding hard in the rain was a damned unpleasant experience, Marik quickly learned. The rain beat hard against his face, cutting his visibility. His clothing stuck uncomfortably to his body and he knew it would rub the skin raw by the time they stopped. Also, horses were far from the most intelligent creatures around. They tended to plow straight into mud holes unless directed around them, and puddles seemed to be the favorite pastime of his own mount. He thought the blasted creature should have learned by now that puddles could be a lot deeper than they looked. Either his horse was slow to catch on or used to letting its rider do all the thinking.

  They refrained from an all-out gallop which would have exhausted the horses quickly. Instead they alternated between an easy canter and a fast trot. Every so often they slowed to their normal walking speed to allow the horses a breather.

  After two candlemarks, they reached the Sixth Depot. Marik first thought he should have taken Kerwin up on that bet after all. As far as he could tell, the base remained normal. He assumed the captain would order them onward, to continue past the depot to trouble further north, but Peet signaled to the watch, who extended the ramp out to them.

  Inside, they were told to stable the horses and report to their immediate commanding officer. This being a supply base rather than a full camp, the horses were gathered in a clear area inside the trench and earthworks. Marik heard from the master handler what had happened.

  “A scouting group came in,” the old man said through a mouth missing half its teeth. His remaining gray strands of hair were plastered to his taut skull while rain dripped from his bushy eyebrows. “Said they saw a horde of enemies cutting through the Reaches up north. Said they was turning south to come attack us.”

  “When?”

  “Don’t know that for sure. Report come in several candlemarks ago. Could be they attack any time.” The old man swiveled to repeat his story to the next man who wanted answers, happy to be the center of attention.

  They left their mounts and rejoined Fraser. “Everyone here?” he called. “Good. Archers, take every arrow you have and get up on top of those earthworks over there. Keep your strings dry as possible. Everyone else find a foreman and start hauling dirt. He’ll tell you where it’s most needed. Keep alert and be ready to drop your loads and grab your weapons at the alarm.”

  “Do you know how far away they are?”

  “No, Marik, I don’t! Your life could ride on that dirt over there, and mine too, so quite wasting time and get working!”

  Chapter 22

  Scouts followed the progress of the invading Noliers. They came in at irregular intervals to update the depot’s commander. Marik had grown used to them storming in, nearly riding him and the others down where they labored beside the entrance ramp.

  Thankfully, the rain had softened the ground. Digging through it had become easier, if much messier, than at the main compound. He and Sloan used spades to hurl shovels of muck and dirt clods from the trench floor up the tall earthwork. Stakes had earlier been set while the soldiers built the mound. Crawling up the side to place loads in specific locations could no longer be done safely, not if they needed speed. Their immediate concern lay in making the trench deeper and the slope steeper.

  They uncovered yet another son-of-a-whore root, thick as Marik’s arm. In unison, as though they had spent a lifetime doing so, they uncovered it across the trench’s width until it stretched bare along the bottom. Sloan grabbed a one-handed mattock with a hatchet head on the back side and chopped at the root until it severed. Marik pulled the loose end upward so Sloan could hack at the other side. Once it came free he tossed it up the mound where it landed between two closely set stakes. With luck, a Nolier might trip over it and impale himself.

  They bent back to their labors. Sloan worked tirelessly as a mill’s waterwheel, hurling mud with a steady rhythm Marik was unable to match for long. He would swear the silent man enjoyed himself.

  Sloan had certainly not enjoyed the digging at the main compound, but that tightening of his face must be a twisted breed of smile. Marik thought, knowing Sloan as he now did, that the prospect of being attacked and fighting for his life at any moment lit a spark within him. Dietrik had been right; Sloan truly enjoyed battle.

  Marik found that vaguely unsettling, realizing such about a shieldmate.

  They had worked for three candlemarks, with two to go before the light faded altogether, when the alarm bell clanged. Everyone in the depot pivoted toward the three-story lookout tower that had been the first structure built on the depot’s low hill. The crisscrossing log structure supported a platform large enough for four men. A brass bell hung in the center, only a foot tall yet with a voice to be heard miles away.

  One lookout yanked the clapper rope back and forth, shouting words nobody could hear over the vibrant ringing. He pointed with his left hand an instant before the other lookouts.

  Marik saw movement near the tree line a mile to the north. The rain forced him to strain in order to see clearly. At first they seemed to be a cluster of the many scouts who had ridden back and forth, except figures kept pouring from under the trees. Far too many for scouts.

  Everyone reacted. The workers grabbed their tools and raced into the depot or clambered up the side of the earthworks. Those on top reached down to help those slipping in the mud, in danger of losing their lives t
o their own defenses if they tumbled.

  After running across the ramp, Marik and Sloan tossed their tools into the nearest supply wagon without bothering to clean them off. They raced north to join the Kings atop the earthworks. Marik retrieved his sword and a bow he’d requisitioned while he took his assigned place between Hayden and Edwin, the latter having been waiting at the depot with Landon when the patrol arrived earlier in the day. Among the first scouts to report the penetration, they had been kept by the depot’s major for their archery skills.

  “Nice to be at the fore where we’ll be the first to catch it in the teeth, eh?”

  “Someone has to be here, Hayden.”

  “And always us expendable mercs.”

  “Think of it as an honor, being given the most important position all the time.”

  Hayden glanced behind them at the camp’s latrine trenches. “Some honor. At least it’s not hot anymore. I think I’d faint dead if the rain wasn’t pounding the smell into the ground.”

  “Just don’t bring a torch over here,” Edwin said. “We’d cook in our own pyre.”

  “Then you’d better hope this fight ends before nightfall.”

  Edwin asked, “You think if I stood up and explained to the Noliers, they’d extend me the courtesy?”

  “Better not count on it.”

  “Nock up!” shouted Earnell from elsewhere, the rain concealing his whereabouts. “Release on my command, then keep loosing until you can’t!”

  The Nolier riders stopped beyond bow range. Unmounted fighters running behind them also paused to regroup. They wore the dark blue of Nolier’s banner, making them easy to distinguish from Galemar’s green and brown. Once the Nolier foot soldiers reformed, they stormed forward while the horses stayed behind.

  Of the thirteen-hundred men defending the depot, only half wielded bows. It’s too bad there aren’t more, Marik thought. If we could all let off, this might be over before any reach the trench!

  Earnell and the sergeants shouted to shoot. The archers launched their first volley. Thrumming bowstrings echoed in Marik’s ears over the rainfall. Piercing whistles shrieked for brief instances as the shafts split apart the air. Arrows struck the fore ranks of the approaching enemy. A hundred tumbled beneath the feet of their fellow soldiers. Marik snatched up a second arrow. He still fumbled to fit it to his bow string when Hayden and Edwin released their next flight. Despite the culling, Noliers reached the trench and jumped in.

  At nearly seven feet deep and several feet across, all the excavated earth had been used to form the mound. The Noliers faced a climb of nearly fifteen feet up slippery mud dotted with sharpened stakes. Marik targeted one man reaching for a secure hold on the mound. His arrow took the enemy in the shoulder, making him fall, dead or not Marik didn’t know. If the man survived, he would soon be crushed under the other Nolier soldiers leaping into the trench.

  “Damn it all!” he heard Kenley swear from Hayden’s other side. “They’re going around the stakes!”

  “They’re supposed to, boy,” Hayden growled while he released his next shot. “The stakes are only there to slow them down enough to pick off!”

  Marik shook his head. If the younger man survived, it would be a miracle.

  The arrow whistles became a staccato riff weaving around the raindrops as the skills of each archer altered their nocking speed. Marik heard a single whistling buzz followed by four atop each other. Under the arrow song and the rain and the shouting on both sides, the howling cries from the wounded played as a disturbing accompaniment. Men clutching shattered wooden shafts in their flesh wailed while bright life’s blood gushed through their fingers into the mud. Already the water accumulating in the trench had turned murky red.

  Marik ignored the ululating sobs of the dying, focusing instead on a climbing Nolier when a blur streaked past his cheek. Its passing breath sighed against his skin. He yanked his head down and around instinctively. Beyond the latrine trenches he spotted it protruding from a supply warehouse’s wall.

  Cries of sudden agony and pain erupted along the Galemaran line as he shouted, “Crossbows! Crossbows!”

  “There!” Edwin yelled, though Marik had no idea where Edwin meant. The bowman pulled back his string and loosed a shaft while bellowing, “Horse archers!”

  The frontline’s rush had driven the horses from Marik’s mind. They had spread out to ride behind their foot troops. One finished reloading his artillery, aimed and fired without stopping. His horse must be trained to respond to either verbal commands or knee cues when rider squeezed the mount’s sides.

  “Do they have the range on us?” Marik shouted over the battle’s roar to Hayden. Edwin answered in his stead.

  “Don’t think so. We’re elevated above them, so that extends our range. ‘Course in this rain with wet bowstrings, it might take that extra right back!”

  Edwin attempted to shake his plastered hair from his eyes while he targeted again. Marik reached over to scrape his hand across his shieldmate’s forehead, flopping the hair back over Edwin’s head in an arcing spray of water. The archer grunted thanks without averting his gaze from his mark.

  Nolier foot soldiers advanced while the mounted crossbows occupied the archers. Water dripped into Marik’s eyes. He missed his intended target but struck the following Nolier, who tumbled backward, upsetting those below.

  Men surged upward. The mass of bodies seemed to expand like yeast-thickened bread dough. Many attained the earthwork’s heights. They were met by Galemarans bearing swords. Metal on metal joined the cacophony reverberating in Marik’s ears. The slippery ground made for bad footing, hindering both Nolier and Galemaran swordsmen as they engaged their enemies. Slain Noliers were hurled down on those still struggling to advance, dislodging climbers or becoming an obstacle to be overcome by the living.

  One rider drifted closer than he must have realized during his ride back and forth along his line. Marik shot, wanting to take him despite being no hunter. His arrow fell far short due to rain weighting down the shaft. The same held true for the other men who sent their arrows at the rider.

  Edwin was a hunter, though. As Landon also missed, Edwin drew a lead on the target, accounting for the horse’s speed as well as the rain with its accompanying wind. He let fly, missing the rider, instead taking the horse in the flank. It stumbled to a sudden halt. The horse ended its life and its master’s when several archers fired on the stationary target, turning them into a macabre parody of a porcupine.

  The Nolier officers decided they were losing too many men. They pulled their forces back while they reconsidered their strategy. It startled Marik to see it had grown no darker than when the assault had begun. He would have sworn that whole marks must have passed.

  Archers held their bows at the ready while they watched the massed enemy in the field beyond, wondering what the next move would be. Boys acting as squires or pages used the lull to run along the earthwork top, distributing arrow bundles and helping wounded men to the warehouse the chirurgeons were using. Most of the dead and injured resulted from the crossbow fire they had taken.

  While the boys helped the wounded, men dealt with the Nolier bodies. Close by Marik lay a blue uniformed figure. Still alive, his hands groped feebly at his torso. A sword slash had eviscerated his stomach, allowing his orange-pink entrails to bubble out into a grotesque pile beside him. Two Galemaran fighters roughly snatched him from the muck. They ignored his sobbing howls and tossed him down slope. He rolled to a rest against a protruding stake where he twitched weakly, his guts extending in a twisted line back up through the slimy mud.

  This was a raw, primal type of warfare very unlike Dornory’s battle to destroy the dam. Though he had killed men there and fought to conquer the enemy, that campaign could hold no candle to the excoriated carnage of a war between kingdoms. Marik pondered why that should be. What hatred so turned average men to the brutal butchery of living souls, hacking until their opponent resembled meat scraps fit only for village canines? But perhaps
there was no difference between the two battles. Perhaps only the pouring rain made this one seem so savage

  Marik took the water skin he’d had the foresight to tie to his belt, drinking deeply until his insides were as wet as his out. There was no telling how much longer the unfortunate Nolier would live. He decided not to think on that, blotting the man’s tortured wails from his ears as well. All part of the job he had chosen.

  The Noliers decided to forgo further attack for the moment. They pulled away from the depot and made camp in the field.

  * * * * *

  “Listen,” Fraser told Marik. The gloom of a day ended surrounded the two. “Expect them to come in the dark. They know there’s no way they can starve out a supply depot in a siege and they know damned well that if they spend too much time here, reinforcements will show up to chew them apart.”

  “What about Balfourth?”

  “His group isn’t due in for three candlemarks. Scouts went out to find him, same as us, but even if his group hustled, it’d be another two. So get up there and use those night eyes of yours. I asked Tollaf what I could expect from you and he told me you can see better in the dark than us normal types.”

  Marik grimaced. “Only in a sense.”

  Fraser poked him in the chest with one hard finger. “Then you’d better use that sense. If you do see them, don’t ring that damned bell! Send word down the tower directly to the major. And to me, of course.” Fraser cocked a half-grin as he said that last.

  “How?”

  “There’s a messenger boy assigned to the lookouts. He’s probably already up there. Get going.”

  Marik walked to the lookout tower. A square, spiraling staircase with a short railing wound between the crisscrossed logs and beams that supported the platform. When he reached the top, he found two other men already in position. They spared only a moment to glance at him before resuming their study of the darkened lands. In the platform’s center sat a boy no older than eleven by Marik’s reckoning.