“Don’t worry, we won’t be,” Gerhardt replied. “I’ve just been discussing the
matter with Sergeant Bohlen. We break camp first thing in the morning.”
“How’s Kuranski?” Hoist asked.
“No better,” Gerhardt shook his head sadly. “I’ve given him food and water,
as much as he could hold down, but it seems to make no difference. He’s starting
to develop a fever.”
Kuranski was the Scarlets’ last remaining casualty. The other wounded men who
had escaped from the battle had either recovered from their injuries or already
died on the march southwards.
With Kuranski, it had been different. The half-Kislevite swordsmen had
sustained a deep wound in his thigh from a boar tusk during the protracted
struggle with the boar riders. He had managed to limp away from the battle
otherwise intact but in the weeks since, the wound had become infected.
Kuranski’s condition had worsened to the degree that he could no longer walk.
For the last week, his comrades had been forced to carry him everywhere on a
makeshift stretcher.
“The wound has started to develop pus,” Gerhardt said. “I’m sure it’s
treatable, but since we don’t have a surgeon with us, there isn’t much we can
do. We just have to try and keep him comfortable, and hope for the best.”
“It’s not the
only
choice we have,” a voice interrupted their
conversation.
It was Krug. He had survived the battle along with the toady Febel. The two
men walked over now, drawn by the discussion of Kuranski’s condition.
Dieter had always heard that war was unfair. He supposed it was an example of
that unfairness that Krug and Febel still lived, while better men like Captain
Harkner had been lost.
“There is another choice,” Krug said. “A more practical one.”
“We have discussed this already, Krug,” Gerhardt’s eyes narrowed. “I have
talked to Sergeant Bohlen about it and he agrees. Kuranski is one of us. He will
be given every chance to recover.”
“You ask me, you’re making a mistake,” Krug continued. “You said yourself,
Kuranski has a fever. He’s only going one place from now on, and that’s
downhill. Besides which, it is slowing us down having to carry him everywhere.
At the very least, we should put the matter to a vote. With that in mind, why
don’t we ask the young blood what he thinks?”
Krug turned toward Dieter, his eyes glittering with malice. Ever since Dieter
had stood up to him at the old woman’s hut, he seemed to delight in trying to
needle him.
“You’re a country boy, Lanz—aren’t you? You must know all about these
things. What happens when a farmer has a lame horse or dog? He doesn’t carry it
around with him everywhere, does he? Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting
we just bash Kuranski’s brains out like we would with a dog. We can be more
humane. I’m sure we can scare up some strong drink from among the men in camp.
Then, we get Kuranski good and sodden, and one of us does the job when he’s
insensible. Maybe the farm boy here could do the dirty work, if he’s got the
stones for it.”
“Shut up, Krug,” Gerhardt said, tightly. In the course of the argument,
Rieger had come to join Hoist and Gerhardt in standing beside Dieter, backing
him up. “I’ve warned you before. Now, I’m going to make myself very clear. There
will be no more loose talk about Kuranski. He is a comrade, a fellow soldier,
and he will be treated in the same way as we would hope to be treated if we were
in the same position. Do you understand me?”
“I understand you.” For a second, Krug held Gerhardt’s gaze as though he was
willing to push the dispute further. “I think the decision is foolish, but I
suppose I will have to let it pass. For now.”
Averting his eyes, Krug walked away. Febel scurried behind him.
“Someone should teach him a lesson,” Dieter said, after a moment had passed.
“I’ve half a mind to call him out. Challenge him to duel—”
“Shut up, boy,” Gerhardt said quietly.
He rounded on Dieter.
“You are young and full of vinegar, so I make exceptions. But if I hear you
say anything on the subject of challenging Krug to a duel again, I will clip you
around the ear and give you a boot up the arse. What do you think is more
important—a few harsh words between comrades, or the survival of the
regiment?”
“I…” Dieter’s tongue seemed frozen in his mouth. His words were stymied.
Facing the full force of Gerhardt’s anger, a man he looked up to, he felt the
colour drain from his face.
“In case you haven’t noticed, we’re in a bad situation,” Gerhardt continued.
“We’ve lost a lot of good men. Our commander is missing and most of our
sergeants are dead. Just like the rest of our army, the Scarlets are in tatters.
We are like hunted animals, alone and on the run, our every step dogged by the
enemy. What’s worse, the entire province is at risk. We were supposed to defeat
the orcs and protect our people. Right now, we couldn’t protect a privy pit from
a company of pigs. And what do you want to do, at this, our worst hour? You want
to pick a fight with a fellow soldier. You want to fight a duel in which one or
both of you could get killed, at a time when your province needs every fighting
man it can get. Well? Are you ashamed of yourself and your big mouth, Dieter
Lanz? You should be!”
With that, Gerhardt stalked off, leaving Dieter white-faced and open-mouthed
in embarrassment.
“I wouldn’t take it too personally,” Rieger said, after a decent interval had
passed. “With most of the sergeants dead, Gerhardt has been forced into a
position of command alongside Sergeant Bohlen. With things the way they are, the
two of them are struggling to hold the regiment together. We’ve lost over half
our men. That means there’s a lot of pressure on Gerhardt’s shoulders.”
“I didn’t mean to make it worse,” Dieter said. He shook his head, still taken
aback by Gerhardt’s outburst. “I was just sounding off.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Rieger commiserated. “Don’t brood on the matter
too long. Least said, quickest mended, as some sage once put it. Anyway, we’d
better get to work.”
He indicated the bodies of the dead wolves they had brought into camp.
Already, the smell of woodsmoke in the air had intensified. Glancing at the
centre of the camp, Dieter noticed men had started building up the fire, adding
more wood to increase the temperature ready for roasting meat.
“These wolves won’t get to butchering themselves,” Rieger said. “And I don’t
know about the rest of you, but I’m so hungry I could eat them pelts, teeth and
tails in all.”
Later, when the cooking was done and the Scarlets had feasted on roasted wolf
meat, Dieter considered their position. With his belly full, the situation
seemed less bleak than it had earlier, but he realised it was an illusion born
of his temporary contentment.
The wolf meat was the first real meal the men had shared in a week.
It was not so much the fact that they were camping in the wilderness which
had led to their lack of food. Summer had given way to the autumn in the time
since the army of Hochland had suffered defeat in battle. In the deep woods it
was a period of comparative plenty. If a man knew where to look, there was a
surfeit of easily gained provender in the form of wild mushrooms, edible berries
and other fruit, not to mention small game like rabbits and birds.
What was more, having been raised in the country, Dieter knew exactly where
to find this bounty. Like every other child in his village, he had spent the
majority of his autumns helping to gather from among the available foodstuffs in
order to increase his family’s stores in preparation for winter.
In the last few weeks, such hard-won knowledge had proven invaluable. Most of
the rest of the Scarlets had been born and raised in an urban setting, either in
the slums of Hergig or in the latticework of towns and villages that surrounded
the capital. They were the sons of soldiers and whores, of innkeepers, of
craftsmen, of scribes, even of minor landowners.
With the exception of Dieter, none of them knew how to best lay snares for
rabbits, or knew how to tell the edible dwarf’s cap mushroom from the almost
identical, and deadly, brown shade. One made a good meal when cooked in the hot
ashes of a fire, the other meant a lingering painful death of the kind Dieter
would not have wished on his most hated enemy, not even Krug.
In the last few weeks, Dieter’s knowledge had allowed him to prove his value
to his comrades on numerous occasions. Even with such knowledge, however, it had
been hard to find enough food to keep body and soul together. The greenskins
were on their trail constantly, meaning there was little time for gathering
food. Most of the time, the Scarlets had been forced to concentrate on keeping
ahead of the enemy’s scouts, rather than being able to spend the hours needed to
find food for themselves. It was not that there was a lack of food. Simply, the
Scarlets lacked the time to find it.
Even the feast they had just shared was a fleeting resource. If they had been
able to salt the meat, pickle it in brine or smoke it, there was enough left
that it might have lasted them for the best part of a week. As it was, they had
no salt or brine, and they could not afford the days needed to build a
smokehouse and put it to work. They could take the remains of their feast with
them, but it would probably only last a day or two before it began to spoil.
Then, they would be back exactly where they had been before they had killed the
wolves. Hungry.
In the aftermath of the army’s defeat by the orcs, Dieter had come to realise
precisely how dependent a human army was on the assorted supply train that
trailed in its wake. Unlike the greenskins, a human army could not afford to
forage for their food. Without a small subsidiary army of cooks and victuallers
to provide for them, along with the requisite provisions, any force of human
soldiers existed forever on the brink of starvation.
Dieter remembered the victualler Otto, and how certain the man had been of
his importance to the army. Time had proven Otto’s words were correct. Having
lost the cooks and victuallers, along with all their cookware and provisions,
had proved to be more of a blow to the Scarlets’ hopes of survival even than the
number of fighting men the regiment had lost.
However Dieter looked at it, the future seemed dark and uncertain.
The next day, as the sun rose high in the midday sky, the Scarlets came face
to face with temptation.
It did not take the same shape as any of the temptations they were usually
prey to; the pitfalls endangering their souls that the priests were always swift
to warn them against. It did not take the form of strong drink, the various
games of chance, or of a beautiful woman of uncertain virtue. It was a
temptation of a more subtle character.
It took the form of a gently swaying field of wheat.
“There has to be enough there to feed the regiment for a month,” Hoist said,
as they sheltered among the trees of the forest at the edge of the field,
watching with hungry eyes as the wheat swayed gently in the breeze. “I never
thought I’d be so excited to see some farmer’s field. Look how golden it is. It
has to be ripe. We could use it to make bread.”
“We’d have to grind it first,” Rieger said from the side of him. He turned to
look to Dieter, who was standing beside them. “Well, what about it, Dieter?
Helmut Schau was a miller. Do you think you could grind us the flour to make
some bread?”
“It would take too long.” Dieter shook his head. “Besides, we’d need to
thresh the wheat first, and make a grindstone. And we’d need an oven if we were
going to make bread properly. But we’d only need some water to make porridge
from the wheat. It’s better if you let the wheat grains get wet first, so they
will sprout overnight. Then, you mix them with water and boil it to make
porridge the next day. The taste is a bit dull without salt, but Hoist is right.
There’s enough in that field to feed the entire regiment for weeks. We wouldn’t
have to go hungry again. Each man could carry his own supply of grain with him.”
The three of them, alongside another half-dozen men, had been on scouting
duty. Sent on ahead of the rest of the regiment, they had encountered the wheat
field first. Hoist had sent a runner back to notify Sergeant Bohlen of their
find. Now, turning to look deeper into the forest, Dieter saw Bohlen and
Gerhardt hurrying towards them.
“I don’t like it,” Gerhardt said, staring into the field. “It could be a
trap.”
Several minutes had passed since his and Sergeant Bohlen’s arrival. In that
time, Hoist had given them his report on the situation, leading to a discussion
among the men present as to the best way forward.
In the meantime, the rest of the regiment had taken up a position a little
way back from the edge of the field. Wary that there might be greenskins in the
area, Sergeant Bohlen had ordered the rest of his men to wait in silence.
“Still, we can’t just bypass the field,” Hoist argued. “Think of all that
food. Even without any scythes, Dieter thinks it wouldn’t take more than a
couple of hours to harvest the grain. And we’d be set up for weeks. No more
going hungry.”
“Better hungry than dead,” Gerhardt said. “By now, every village and
farmstead in the region will have heard that the greenskins are coming. The
people will have fled south. There’s no way a farmer would leave his crops
behind like this. Either he’d harvest them and take the food with him before he
left, or he’d burn them so the enemy couldn’t have them. He wouldn’t leave it
ripening in the field like that.”
“Perhaps he didn’t have time,” Dieter said. “For all we know, the orcs may
have already been through this area. Perhaps the farmer was forced to flee at
short notice and he didn’t have time to set light to his fields.”