Angelika saw halberdiers, leaning against the long hafts of their huge
weapons with elaborate blades. Legs spread staunchly apart, they struck haughty
poses for the benefit of their minions—the common foot soldiers. Their helmets
gleamed; their green plumes trembled fiercely in the wind. Plumeless, their
inferiors skulked around them, pretending to take no notice, as they polished
swords and fumbled with the buckles of their breastplates. Handgunners stood at
a remove from both classes of fellow soldier, checking their flintlocks for
defects.
Old men and young boys, wearing the green armbands of the auxiliary, helped
artillerists unload mortars from a great wagon of oak planks which was held
together by a frame of riveted steel. The gunners shouted and waved their arms as the knees of young
and old alike buckled under the weight of cast-iron mortar barrels. Angelika
watched others unload the brass-shod wooden bases from which the mortars would
fire their deadly shells.
She counted three cannons, each with its own complement of oxen and anxious,
milling drovers. The weapons rested on carriages of copper-bound oak, and were
cast in iron. If Angelika remembered her artillery correctly, the barrels would
each bear the insignia of Mad Count Marius: a sun wearing a bored expression,
surrounded by flaring solar petals, alternating between large and small.
Angelika reckoned there were perhaps five or six hundred Averlandish soldiers
and officers present in the basin’s confines. That was not counting auxiliaries
and other noncombatants. She did not place absolute store in her estimations,
because she was better at counting the dead. Though it was not the smallest
force she’d ever seen fielded by an Imperial state, it wasn’t particularly large
either. And she saw no sign of battle wizards. But this regiment could certainly
do the trick, if it were massed here for the reason she surmised.
Angelika’s attention returned to the fleeing townsfolk. A procession of
civilians streamed out and around the small army, in carts, on the backs of
mules, and on foot. Teams of foot soldiers manned checkpoints to interrupt the
exodus. They searched the refugees and their belongings, confiscating swords,
bows and even scythes. Angelika watched the soldiers extract departure taxes
from the fleeing residents: they removed rings and necklaces, and laid claim to
wheels of cheese and links of sausage. Horses and mules were taken from the
refugees and led to a makeshift corral. Angelika saw a fat sergeant seize a
chicken, wring its neck, and drop it to his feet—no doubt for later roasting.
The line of refugees collided with an opposing mass of civilians, some with
carts, who circled around in search of favourable positions. Where these two
groups met, an ever expanding, barely moving knot of the annoyed and frightened
was created. The new arrivals were camp followers of various sorts, come down
from Averland in hopes of wringing profit from a lengthy siege. They must have arrived before the exodus began;
there would be no getting carts in now. Butchers had brought sheep and cattle to
slaughter and skewer; some had already staked out places for firepits, and were
spading them out, as sacks of charcoal waited to fill them. A family of
entertainers, stringy as yellow beans and wearing belled, floppy caps, pounded
nails into a stage. Peddlers erected canvas stalls to exchange looted goods for
coin—some of the checkpoint men had lined up already, to pawn the items they’d
stolen from the departing border rats. In front of one such stall, Angelika
detected the threat of a brawl, as fist-shaking refugees gathered to reclaim the
goods they’d just been stripped of.
Her eyes lighted on a high-walled cart, painted violet and flying a windsock
in the shape of a toothy pike fish. She moved toward it, entering the crush of
soldiers, evacuees and opportunists, and elbowed her way through. It took nearly
half an hour to get to the cart, her toes ached from being trodden on, and her
legs were splattered with mud and the dung of livestock.
The purple cart’s doors were shuttered tight; its owner was too cautious to
open for business until the refugees had gone, and the possibility of a riot.
Angelika banged on it with her sharp, knuckled fist.
“We’re not open yet!” came a voice from inside.
Angelika identified herself and backed up for the door to open. A fat and
familiar face beamed at her; it was her best customer, Max Beckman. Ringlets of
dark hair laid flat against his large, round skull, cemented by a grease of
Max’s own formulation that was scented with lilacs. He wore a sheepskin coat,
dyed deep blue and embroidered with diamonds and moons. Gold rings encircled
each of his stubby fingers; they were inlaid with gems which, to Angelika’s
experienced eye, were obviously made of glass. He reached his hand out for her
and helped her up into the cart.
Franziskus was perched inside on a leather bench. Shelves and drawers cramped
the interior of Max’s cart; its roof was not high, and they were forced to
stoop.
“I was going to ask if he’d seen you,” Angelika said, to Franziskus.
“I recognised the cart and thought it as likely a meeting place as any,” he
said. He’d met Max twice before. Angelika knew he disapproved of the merchant
and his business, but was mannerly enough to keep this opinion to himself.
“You’ll have many competitors, I’m afraid, when it comes to plucking this
battlefield,” Max said, tossing small blocks of wood into a tiny iron stove.
“Care for a toddy? Chill has gripped my bones all morning.”
She sat beside Franziskus. He squeezed over, but there was little room on the
bench, so her right leg pressed tightly against his left. He cleared his throat
and patted his chest.
She asked him what he’d learned.
“Did you see the Black Sabres’ banner flying out there?”
“I saw banners, but not that one.”
“Benno commands this disorder, with Gelfrat as his number two.”
“All of this, just to retrieve Lukas? Their father is as mad as the count he
serves.”
“What are you talking about?” Max asked, wrapping his hand in a towel, to
insulate it from the heat of the stove. “Jurgen dispatched these detachments to
make an example of Davio. They intend to show the other border princes the price
of defiance.” He shut the oven door and held his hands out, smiling as the
warmth entered his muscles. “When this is over, they’ll fear the Empire more than
they fear the orcs. Or so the theory goes.”
Angelika told Max who Lukas was, and briefly told of their exploits of the
last few days. Max knew the brothers; it was he who’d sold them Claus’ pendant,
and pointed them to Angelika. “You aren’t ever going to do that again, are you,
Max?” she said. “Send armed men my way?”
Max perspired. “They assured me they meant to hire you! I thought I was doing
you a favour!”
She unclenched her fist and shook her head slowly. “Never again.”
Max nodded. “No, never, of course.”
She turned to Franziskus. “So do the brothers know that Lukas is inside?”
“I haven’t been able to establish it myself, though I assume so. I believe
they passed by, found one of their father’s regiments, and asserted rights of
command.”
“Of course.” Realising she was too cramped on the bench, she shifted to the
floor, which was covered by a worn rug from far-off Araby. “After failing to
secure Lukas, they need to make good.”
“Perhaps Davio can trade him, if they agree to attack some other border
prince instead,” mused Max, placing a tin pot on top of his stove.
Angelika screwed up her face. “I am not proud to say this…”
“What?” said Franziskus.
She couldn’t look at him. “We can’t let that happen. Can we?”
“I knew you would see right eventually, Angelika.”
“Remove that grin from your face. Even if it was right to hand him to Davio,
which I now doubt, the entire idea was to protect him from his family. Now
they’re about to snatch him anyway.”
“Unless we do something about it?”
“You stay here. I made the mistake; I can’t ask you to risk your neck
correcting it.”
Franziskus rose from the bench, careful not to smash his head on the roof.
“Keep those toddies warm for us, Max,” he said.
They jumped from the cart. The noise of the throng had sharpened. Franziskus
put his hands to his face.
“I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“Orcs don’t hole up in fortresses or towns, so sieges are rare these days,”
Angelika said, pushing past a toothy, furtive soldier with a live goat kid slung
over his shoulder. The frightened animal gave her an imploring look. “When one
does come along, everyone wants to get in on it.”
They stepped through a group of a dozen women, with faces crudely rouged, who
bent to tap tent pegs into the ground. Franziskus’ mouth fell open. One of the
tent builders, a heavy-bosomed, curly-haired specimen who could have been his
mother’s older sister, parted her painted lips to leer at him. “Fancy a tumble?”
she asked.
Franziskus shivered and waved his hand in front of his face. They made their
way through the tents.
“Perhaps I’m naive…” he began.
“You are,” Angelika affirmed.
“But these people—they are acting as if this is some kind of carnival.”
“Better than a carnival, if you’re a woman of trade. A man’s ardour is never
greater than when he thinks he might die—or after he has killed.”
“It’s ghastly.”
“If their presence keeps a few soldiers from taking their urges out on the
unwilling, I say we pin medals on them. Though I doubt this Jurgen will be so
inclined.”
Sticking to the outskirts of the throng thereby avoiding the soldiers in the
middle, Angelika and Franziskus wended past a crew of soldiers erecting a
makeshift shrine to steely Sigmar, made of scrap pine and topped with a
pewter-headed hammer; a hawker toting a basket of puckered, wormy apples; and a
sneaky-eyed girl intently studying the purses of passersby. They smelled cooked
meat, flatulence, urine, straw, perfume, wood smoke and the stink of gangrene.
They heard laughs, shouts, sobs, curses, the twanging of a lute, the banging of
drums and a choking noise the origin of which they could not identify.
They skirted a checkpoint, moving upstream through the oncoming column of
escapees. A shout rang out after them. They kept going; the voice grew louder
and more insistent. It was a soldier, his breastplate smeared with dried mud,
the creases of his face accentuated by caked-in grime. His narrow eyes huddled
close to the bridge of his long nose; his open mouth revealed a conspicuous pair
of buck teeth, like the chewers on a rat. “Halt, you!” he called, waving a short
staff with steel-shod tip. “Come here!”
Angelika let him come to them. When he reached them, she said, “What?”
“Where do you think you’re going?”
“Into the Castello. Why?”
“Did you not see our checkpoint?” He slapped his staff into the curled
fingers of his hand.
“You’re checking people coming out. We’re going in.”
“This whole area is under Imperial aegis.” His tongue clicked against the
backs of his rat-teeth. “You can’t just come and go—in either direction.”
Twin fabric epaulets, flared and feather-shaped, hugged the shoulders of his
tunic. Franziskus seized them, jerking Rat-Teeth’s face into his own.
“You idiot!” Franziskus hissed, through bared
teeth. “Do you not know who I am?”
The soldier’s eyes darted fearfully across Franziskus’ face in search of an
answer. His lips worked silently up and down.
Franziskus pulled the man closer. “I asked you a question, you useless chunk
of dung!”
“I—I—
“Tell me, soldier, who I am!”
“Ah, you are—you must be—you are one of them, aren’t you, ah—sir!”
“One of them?” Franziskus thundered. “One of them
who?”
“Oh—ah—oh—ah—oh sir, you know. Please don’t make me say. I’m sorry
sir—oh, so sorry. It’s all so confusing here, this press of people.” He
altered his tone, dropping the officious clipping of his consonants in favour of
a porridgey peasant accent. “I’m just a poor lowly muck-tramper, please, I don’t
deserve no flogging! Besides, you want us to challenge everyone, yes? This is a
test, yes? You don’t want any people who aren’t supposed to be getting through,
getting through, do you?”
“You presume to tell
me
what I want from
you?”
“Oh, ah—no, no, oh sir, no. No. Please don’t…”
Franziskus pushed him away. The soldier’s boots skidded backwards and
squished into the cold muck. “Then go about your business,” Franziskus growled,
“and consider yourself lucky I’m in a merciful mood!”
“Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, sir,” he said, still backing away. He returned to
his station, deliberately looking anywhere but at them as they continued through
the crowd.
“Well,” said Angelika, as they dodged a pair of short, stubble-faced men in
knit caps, carrying a rolled-up carpet. “I see you have quite the talent for the
cowing of underlings.”
“Mrm,” Franziskus replied.
“Your breeding comes to the fore, hmm?”
Franziskus said nothing.
When they got to the town gates, they saw that they were propped wide open.
The bottlenecked crowd groaned with collective complaint as some of its members
squeezed through, laden with property. Once free of the crush, Angelika spotted
the guardsman, old Halfhead, leaning against a wall, an upturned bottle of rotgut glugging down into his mouth.
She waved, and Halfhead rubbed the dribble from his lips. He held the bottle out
to her. Smelling his breath, she declined.
Angelika watched the crowd struggle its way past the gates and said, “I had
no idea there were so many people in this louse-ridden town.”
“Me neither,” Halfhead answered. He offered a swig to Franziskus, who held up
a hand of polite refusal.
“You’re staying to fight?” Angelika asked the gatekeeper.
“I got nowhere better to go. And nobody I’d sooner stick my sword into than
the type of swine who’d swear themselves loyal to von Kopfs’ ilk.”