Chapter 1334: Levelling the ground (1)

Ser Rodry Longspear sat and breathed, each a shudder against the chill.

His bench was the mossy trunk of a fallen oak, and the damp morning dew clinging to the grass soaked right through his breeches, wetting the backs of his thighs and calves. He stared up at the featureless gray sky, wondering where the rain was when a man actually had a use for it.

He had never been a greatly religious man; most people spent their lives begging the five gods to be good, but the heavens had seldom been good to him. Right now, he would have given a week’s pay, if he had one, which he did not, for a proper downpour, if only to rinse the clotted gore off his armor and his white cloak. The crimson streaks smeared across his wool were far more vivid than the pale bodies littered around the clearing.

A sword, his sword now, was stuck upright in the earth beside his knee. His trusted battleaxe was gone, currently buried deep in some rebel’s chest or shoulder socket; he couldn’t quite recall the specifics of the melee, but he’d go hunting for the steel once his legs stopped shaking.

Indeed as soon as they did.

It was his lucky axe that one.

For the time being, he had this new blade. He had wrenched it from the fingers of a fallen bastard and put it to immediate use. It was a surprisingly fine piece of work, well-balanced and meticulously sharpened, far better than anything he reckoned a common forest bandit had any right to possess.

The bastards had been surprisingly well-equipped today; many of them, he noticed, even wore heavy chainmail shirts and iron helmets. He now perhaps understood all the trouble the legate of the Fourth were having. They were proper opponents with a knack for unconvential warfare.

Exactly the same one they adopted during the Bastion.

Still, they died all the same.

Blood was splattered across every inch of him, staining his knuckles, his enameled plates, his tunic. He would have to scrape the crust off his skin later, but he didn’t mind the chore; it was just blood, after all, and crucially, none of it was his own. This was the second time the ambushers had swarmed out from the thickets, and the second time the guard had broken their teeth and scattered them back into the western forest like kicked puppies. Perhaps by now the local wretches would realize the trouble wasn’t worth the reward.

As if there were even a single coin of reward for them to steal.

The dumb fucks probably thought they were hitting a wealthy merchant caravan delivering some grand luxury to the provincial capital. He could understand their confusion, of course; seeing members of the King’s Guard marching alongside common baggage wagons usually meant there was treasure afoot. But all they were going to get here was timber, iron nails, and bags of gods know what else. They were protecting a mad bastard of a craftsman, though evidently not mad enough to lack fear for the very shithole the King had exiled him to.

"Is it... is it safe?" a trembling voice asked from behind.

Rodry turned his head, watching the rotund-bellied, shivering form of the Great Master Maker of Yarzat approach. It was a spectacular change of pace to see the man, usually so insufferably proud, with his chest puffed out like a prize rooster, rolled up into a trembling child in the face of a real storm. The maker looked as though he might wet his fine breeches when his eyes drifted down to Rodry’s new sword. Looking closer, Rodry realized the iron wasn’t embedded in the wet earth at all, but rather driven through the soft flesh of a body left behind in the dirt.

Now wasn’t that queer, how did he miss that?

"For now? Yes," Rodry replied, his voice coming out in a hoarse, raspy growl. He realized then just how raw his throat was from shouting over the din of clashing steel. He unhooked his canteen and wetted his mouth, wincing as the water hit his throat. It hurt to swallow.

Still, a pained throat was a sight better than a sliced one. The day had been a bloody, desperate mess, but the King’s men had held their own. It was a minor blessing that a cohort of the iron legions had been stationed nearby to secure the perimeter.

Granted, they were green boys, freshly raised recruits out of training, experiencing their very first brush with death, but they had handled the steel as well as could be expected. It was a good thing they were the ones holding the handle of the brush in this particular case.

"Will they come back?" Pontus asked, shuffling closer, his chins wobbling.

"Might. Might not," Rodry shrugged, entirely indifferent to the man’s panic. What was to be, would be. All men had to obey something, a king, a captain, or a grave. This was his mission, and to his mission he would tend until the dirt took him.

He could not say he had not lived.

He had fucked, he had laughed and he had fought. A life without great regrets, perhaps that was his greatest pride.

"They lost a great many men," Pontus offered, trying desperately to find some solid ground. "Surely the bastards must have realized by now that we are a tough nut to crack." He tried to force a small, courageous smile, but it twisted into an ugly, twitching grimace.

What, is the fat fool trying to make polite conversation with me? Rodry thought bitterly.

"Maybe, maybe not," Rodry snapped, his temper fraying as his body groaned. "Sometimes the sweetest fruit is hidden behind the harshest shell. If those bandits suspected we were hauling ingots of silver and gold before the fight, they likely believe it even more now. A man doesn’t fight this hard to defend a wagon full of turnips.Or in this case tinder and nails...."

"But... we don’t have any gold!"

"Try telling them that!" Rodry growled. He was really not in the proper frame of mind to entertain the craftsman’s anxieties.

As he shifted his weight to stand, a sudden, sickening wave of agony flared up his left flank, catching his breath in his throat. He leaned heavily against the tree trunk, his eyes watering at his failure and the pain. It seemed the heavy axe-blow he had taken to his side during the second wave wasn’t nearly as harmless as he had first assumed. His armor had deflected the edge, but the sheer, crushing weight of the impact had done its work.

Gods’ mercy, I’ve cracked a rib or two, he realized, cursing silently. He absolutely loathed rib injuries; they meant a swarm of white-hot pain every time he took a deep breath, coughed, or tried to roll himself out of bed. Not to speak about fucking. Even laying back and doing nothing with the girl jumping on him would hurt him.

At the very least, he comforted himself, this miserable, mud-soaked outpost is still a hell of a lot better than my previous assignment. Anything was preferable to accompanying the young brat in his days. Rodry had tried his absolute best to show the boy proper deference, to be the dutiful shield a royal heir required, but for the life of him, he couldn’t stomach the lad.

There was a stubborn, haughty bone in his body that simply held a deep, unyielding hatred for the poor honest knight.

Let the others fawn over the boy’s clever tongue; Rodry would take a broken rib and a field of corpses over the prince’s spoiled court any day of the week.

Pontus squirmed a bit under the knight’s harsh glare, a thick trickle of sweat running down his smooth, bald head despite the winter chill. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, putting on an air as if he had actually done something useful during the frantic chaos of the battle instead of hiding beneath a reinforced baggage wagon. Not that Rodry truly grudged him his cowardice; the man was an architect and a engineer, not a warlord. A sword in Pontus’s hand would have been far more dangerous to their own lines than to the bandits.

Wiping his brow with a silk-trimmed sleeve, Pontus cleared his throat. "Ser Rodry... I actually have something of great importance to ask of you."

Rodry let out a low, pained groan, his fingers pressing hard against his mangled side.Perhaps they were three ribs not two.

"It can wait."

"But, Ser—’’

"I said it can wait, Master Maker," Rodry growled, his voice brooking no argument. "First, I have to settle myself, get these legionaries to tend to the wounded, and figure out what the hell we’re going to do with the prisoners we dragged out of the thicket." He took a shallow, cautious breath, trying to keep his ribs from shifting. He did not have the spare forces to get to them to the capital, which meant they would torture them themselves and send someone back with the informations. ’’

There were so many things to do. "Is it urgent? Are the supply currently on fire?"

Pontus blinked, finally taking a proper look at the stark, battered state of the knight. He noted the thick crust of dark blood sealing the plates of Rodry’s armor, the gray exhaustion shadowing his eyes, and the way his left arm was pinned tightly against his ribs to stop the agonizing shaking.

The architect swallowed hard, his grand question dying on his tongue. "No. No, it isn’t burning. It can wait, Ser. Perhaps... perhaps you could simply join me for dinner in my pavilion tonight? We can speak then, when the blood has dried."

Rodry gave a stiff, tight nod of approval. "Aye. Dinner." He could go with some good food. And say what you want about Pontus, but he had good servants and good cooks.

With a grimace, the knight reached out his right hand, extending his blood-stained, iron-gloved fingers toward the craftsman. Pontus stared down at the open palm with a strange, utterly bewildered expression, as if Rodry were offering him a dead snake.

"Well?!" Rodry suddenly shouted, the roar cutting through the quiet clearing and causing the fat man to jump. "Don’t just gawk at it, man! I need a bloody hand to get on my feet!"