Kingshelm (Renegade Druid Cycle Book 1) (26 page)

Torune frowned. “Betina, my dear cousin, I am afraid that you will find ruling half of a dominion to be more burdensome than you expect.”

“And I am willing to take on that burden to rule Brynn as it was meant to be ruled—under your banner, Lord Torune,” the Duchess said.
 

Marek wished Duchess Betina would just poison Torune and engineer a takeover of their own province. It would be easier than trying to wrest Brynn away from Lady Drucilla and her loyal hound Grantham. But he shared the old fool Torune’s misgivings to a certain extent.
Why the hell are the Guild mercenaries sitting this one out? What is really transpiring in the heathen woods and fens? When we take Brynn, will we then bleed defending our new territories from a barbarian invasion those Knob Heads have provoked?

He walked silently beside Duchess Betina as they left Torune’s chamber. Marek reluctantly admired Betina for her ability to cajole Torune into a war that he would never have had the stomach to instigate himself. And, for that matter, she was very effectively dragooning Marek himself into this scheme as well.
 

If I didn’t enjoy fighting so much, and if the bitch weren’t offering me a dukedom, I would almost resent being manipulated like this
.
 

Marek decided he couldn’t complain about the situation. He had been the one assuring the Duchess that he could defeat Brynn if given the resources. And she had delivered in spades, giving him cash outright to hire sellswords and working for the better part of a year establishing a parallel supply chain to the guilds in case they suddenly embargoed Relfast.
 

Marek bid the Duchess a polite farewell and strode toward the grand stables where his men and horses awaited. He felt amusement at Betina’s naked ambition, frustration at Torune’s doddering, a tinge of worry about the multiple unknowns waiting to meet him and his army. But Torune had given the final order to launch the invasion, and the time for dithering was at an end.

The nobleman swung onto his horse and smiled. The grand city of Relfast lay before him, the impenetrable citadel of Torune behind him, the blue sky arched above him. He was soon to carve himself a dukedom from the flesh of his province’s old enemy Brynn, and he felt grand.
 

“Onward,” he ordered his retinue. “We’re about to make history, my lads!”
 

Marek divided his forces into three battalions and launched the invasion of Brynn during the Midsummer celebrations.
 

Several miles to Marek’s left, Lord Rufus and 50 lances of trusted retainers led the hired free companies, a motley collection of 2,000 men-at-arms and mounted infantry. Their orders were simple: cut a swath of destruction through the countryside and report daily.
 

Lord Gaston with 1,500 knights rode five miles to Marek’s right, also burning and looting in their path. Marek trusted his brother-in-law far more than that fool Rufus and the sellswords, and thus would rely on them to support him when they finally met formidable resistance.

Marek himself rode at the head of 3,000 mounted knights, men-at-arms, free mercenaries and commoners pressed into service as infantry to fulfill their feudal obligations.

No siege engines or sappers accompanied Marek’s forces, for there would be no need. Marek had given strict orders to Rufus and Gaston to hit the soft spots between the castles and walled towns on the frontier. The invasion would be fought like the previous winter’s campaign, but on a much larger and bloodier scale.
 

“If you allow a few chickens to escape unharmed, I’ll understand,” he had told his commanders the week before. “But do take care not to let anything larger than a goat survive.”

Chevauchee. They would burn and rape and pillage their way through Brynn until they reached the capital of the province or Duke Grantham met them on the battlefield—the
open
battlefield.
 

Siege warfare is for imbeciles. Who has time for such nonsense?
 

Marek reflected on the campaign before him as he rode at the head of his battalion. The route he had chosen was almost identical to that which his great uncle Maharzath had ridden almost 50 years ago during the Just War. His ancestor had conquered the lands Marek rode through, only to have them ceded back to the Lord of Brynn after peace was concluded.
 

But the campaign had established Maharzath as a hero of Relfast and secured his family a place in the upper nobility of the province.
 

This land made my great uncle a lord
, Marek thought as he rode through the whispering grasslands.
If I hold up my end of the bargain, it will make me a duke.
 

The first night of the campaign, Marek received word from Rufus and his mercenaries that they had taken minor losses assaulting a village that day. The peasants, Rufus said in his dispatch, were standing up their local guardsmen and fortifying their villages as best they could under the leadership of their reeves.
 

“Sacked village, set fire to same. Killed 325 men, 145 women, unknown number of children. Took 45 head of cattle, 125 chickens…” the dispatch detailed the plunder in great detail.
 

Rufus missed his calling. He would have made an excellent clerk if our family’s social position would have allowed it.
 

“Splendid work. Divide the plunder as you see fit. Ensure just and contractually stipulated compensation for hired companies. Continue to march,”
 
Marek scratched on a parchment. He sealed the document and handed it to the messenger awaiting him in his command tent.
 

Similar news came from Gaston, but in less detail.
Merciless slaughter, thorough plunder. Excellent
, Marek thought
.
 

Marek’s column had done well just foraging enough to keep up with the day’s food and fodder consumption, but this was a sparsely populated area. Tomorrow would bring more opportunity, he assured his lieutenants. They were half a day’s ride from a prosperous village called Bell Haven.
 

“Rest your sword arms tonight, gentlemen,” he said before dismissing them. “We’ll all break a healthy sweat tomorrow.”
 

Marek and his lieutenants sat upon their horses under the midday sun sizing up the densely arrayed phalanx of 1,500 pikemen blocking the only direct approach to Bell Haven. The village defenders had taken a very strong position, Marek admitted to himself, placing themselves in a triangle formed by a small brook running into a larger stream behind them. The open end of the triangle was heavily wooded, as was the point where the two streams converged. The pikemen would be almost impossible to flank, and they guarded the single bridge that led to the side road into Bell Haven.
 

To get to them, Marek’s soldiers would have to cross the marshy land on either side of the brook, ford the thing, and reform their ranks for battle. Then, of course, they would need hack through the pikes to get to the men.

“We can bypass them,” said Aramand, the commander of Marek’s infantry complement. “There must be easier pickings farther on. Let them have their backwater.”
 

“Balls! Cowardice! To think you could brook such a notion—to be turned away by churls with sticks!” spat Tancred, a banneret who brought a formidable detachment of knights to the campaign.
 

Marek wiped sweat off his nose and cocked his head. He let the gleaming helms and pike heads in his vision blur as his eyes went out of focus. Then he nodded and looked at Tancred.
 

“I think you can take them,” he said. “Bring Lord Jarek’s battle along with your men. Ride until the ground gets soft, then dismount and advance on foot. It will be a slog, but you can push the enemies’ backs to the stream and kill them off them where they stand. They put themselves in a death trap. I want you to push them in and close it around their necks.”
 

“We are knights. We trample churls beneath our horses’ hooves!” Tancred said, then wheeled his horse toward his own men.

“Do as I say!” Marek yelled at the brash young nobleman. “Twenty-three hells! Aramand—ready your men. You may need to finish this.”
 

Marek watched helplessly and fumed as Tancred disobeyed his orders. The banneret and his 500 knights galloped through the marshy lowlands and splashed through the brook; he never bothered to summon Jarek’s men. Then the formation bogged down, broke ranks and struggled out of the water in near disarray. The pikemen advanced in orderly ranks on the struggling knights.
 

“He got his horses stuck in the mud. Oh, fuck him. Fuck that motherless son of a bitch,” Marek growled through his clenched teeth. “He’s pissing away our heavy horse! Aramand! March your infantry!”
 

Marek’s anger turned to grim resignation as he watched the pikemen massacre Tancred’s knights while his own infantry marched across the intervening field toward the battle.
 

The pikemen were well disciplined for a peasant levy, but they had not reformed their ranks when Aramand’s infantry met them on the killing field, and they fell back under the merciless press of Aramand’s fresh soldiers.
 

The battle was over in less than an hour, and Marek led the rest of his knights and the victorious infantry across the bridge. They spent the remainder of the day systematically destroying Bell Haven and exterminating its inhabitants (“…like rats,” he instructed them. “Don’t leave a single brick on top of another. We will make an example of them.”)
 

Once the slaughter was complete, Marek ordered camp to be set among the ruins of the village to take advantage of its defensible position.
 

“Lord Marek,” said a knight on guard outside the command tent that evening. The smell of smoke from the burned village hung thick in the air. “Lord Tancred has returned!”

“Come in, Tancred, come in! Aramand and I were just congratulating each other on our stunning victory and the instrumental part you played in it,” he said.
 

The muddy, blood-caked nobleman limped into the tent. “I am sorry, Lord Marek. I, I…”
 

“You fucked us, you little sot!” Marek roared and grabbed his armor.
 

The battered nobleman whined, “There were so many of them! The murderers slew us while we were stuck in the mud!”

“That is what you do! You kill your enemy when he trips on his own dick! You wasted 500 of our best men, you worm. I told you to dismount, but you charged through the morass. Your disobedience killed your men! Stop crying.
Stop crying, Mahurin damn you!
”

“Lord Marek!” Aramand said. Marek barely heard him over the roar of his own blood in his ears. He felt the blast of obscenities rumble out of his chest, but he lost track of what he said, and felt the dull shocks in his forearms as he pounded Tancred into what he assumed would be a bloody mess. At some point, they slipped and knocked over the field table. By this time Tancred had gone limp, and that somehow further stoked Marek’s already white-hot rage.

“Lord Marek,” Aramand said again when the anger subsided. “You’ve…”
 

“I know,” Marek croaked. He was already hoarse from screaming. “I know. Five hundred men, Aramand! He lost 500 men in our first battle. Against a fucking peasant levy.”

Marek stood, wobbly and weak from the exertion of savaging Tancred. He straightened and wagged a gory finger in Aramand’s face. “There will be no more insubordination on this campaign. I do not give a good god damn who it is. If I give an order, it will be obeyed. To the letter. On pain of death. Otherwise we will all die, because I promise you that Duke Grantham does not fuck up like we did today. This was an expensive lesson for you all.”
 

Marek stooped and pulled a broken table leg out of the red mass that used to be Tancred’s handsome face.
 

“I’ll need a new field table,” he said, and hurled the bloody shard of wood out the tent door. “Guard! Come in here. Drag this useless sack of meat behind a horse through the camp. The whole camp, damn it, including the lords’ and bannerets’ areas. They especially need to see this. I want the entire host to know what happens when a leader disobeys my orders, gets his men killed in the process, and is stupid enough to come back to me alive.”
 

As spring wore on and became an unseasonably hot summer, Barryn and his fellow recruits had continued to drill and sweat under the merciless sun. All of the recruits were now proficient with the spear, sword and shield, and crossbow—the standard weapons for infantrymen in the Black Swan Company. They also learned how to maintain and operate the light artillery pieces, the scorpion and the onager, that accompanied the infantry into battle.

The yelling from Sergeants Drake and Otaraz had gradually abated, and by late spring they no longer accompanied the recruits on their marches. Instead, they chose a recruit each week to be the detachment leader and let him execute their orders for the next day’s march. By this time, only the chosen recruit leader had direct contact with the sergeants, and that was only once each evening when they rode in with the supply wagon and the next day’s orders.
 

Barryn woke the recruits before the sun rose one morning and helped dismantle the camp. Ashara only knew how many miles away from Falgren Keep they were. Delton was the recruit leader for the week, and he had chosen Barryn to take final watch. This was roughly equal to naming him executive officer, since the man on final watch was responsible for waking is comrades on time.
 

They marched for two hours to a hilltop and found three men waiting for them, along with five wagons, a lighted torch in a stand, and two strange machines. One looked like a huge crossbow mounted on a pintle, and the other looked like a catapult from the illuminated books Barryn had read at the House of Portia, but much smaller.