DAY ONE

Rancid pig-bladder smell on the air, hovering above the point of the nose and then burning the hairs. The storm was to come calling.

Farmers herded their cattle, merchants loaded wagons dragged by mules with what wares they could. Very few stayed.

A trio of geese had flown over Orchard Swank’s shop yesterday evening, so said some of the citizens who fled. Three geese, one omen: the fortress would hold out for exactly three days more than would the inner and outer town. How long and how well the town would manage was anyone’s guess. Every amateur soothsayer and sign-reader clamped his chapped lips and buried his eyeballs in the pig’s piss that disguised itself as beer in desperate times. And these were desperate times. One last drink before leaving everything you’d known behind for good.

Everyone wanted to chat Bux up. The afternoon was wretched chilly. The last of the crops had been harvested far too early. All the food would be green, tough and foul to the taste. Not that anyone would eat any of it until times got a bit more desperate. Just before everyone started trapping rats to bolster the protein supply of Lomendiam at large. And once the rats ran out, who knew?

No one listened, but Bux reminded them anyway that, for now, the grains were safely in the silos and the shredded pork had been salted and set to rest in the smokehouses. His words seemed to reassure at least the nearby children, who waited for their parents to board up the windows good and proper. But then Two-Tooth Torkle, a notorious veteran, started spouting that he’d “seen mah share, cert’ly. And I gots a ring around me, I can see. A ring o’ idjets, and no one’s listnin’ to me tails.”^[1] He was wrong, though. People were listening, and he had a lot of stories, did Two-Tooth Torkle. Almost as many as had Punctured Lung Jeb. That boy’o had some tales, sure enough. Two-Tooth, though, he could spin a yarn well as any broken soldier. The farmers ate his words like flat cakes. And he sowed the seeds of fear, reaping its rancid harvest.

Those who had nowhere else to go lent a steady hand to the conscripts who’d set about digging trenches behind each of the major gates. In case the enemy—Sisters forbid—broke through, they’d be met with pitfalls and dug-in defenders. And walls were patched as well as they could be. Had to break down the school house to do it. Very few children complained.

“Pah, arit’metric,” Two-Tooth snorted at Bux and the small clique of listeners who’d gathered. “When I were in the war, we didn’t have no arit’metric. We had only blokes like Wallows Barnsley and Jack ‘All’s Lost’ Langsnip at our sides and a hell-lot o’ people runnin’ at us with knives and stuff. All we could do was count. We couldn’t afford no arit’metric and numbers. Spoiled, these days. Mark m’words.”

The other men and women grunted or nodded in agreement.

Thus Buxtehude Perdurable watched Lomendiam become a ghost town. Mostly, anyway. Honestly, that’s really what he wished would come about. No such luck, though. While the vast majority of the citizens abandoned ship, the crazies would be on deck until the waters swallowed them all.

And the Cardinal of the Temple of the Sisters shrieked the world was ending until his second, the Chaplain, clubbed him over the head, stuffed him inside a pickle barrel, and saw that he was shipped as far south as Tapple-on-Swells.^[2]

Sir Vive, the fire-breathing, lightning-gargling giant of a war hero.

As Bux trailed behind him in the dim blur of cloudy dawn, he thought the legendary knight appeared rather gaunt and pale. His arrhythmic gait made his slight slouch more pronounced, and his sharp jaw, covered in stubble, jutted like a crumbling cliff. In the circles under his eyes, you could find every shade of sickly green and purple. Those crystalline-green eyes were not fonts of wisdom. He wore a worn brass-studded leather jerkin and chaps with cloth leggings underneath. He looked an unimpressive specimen, at best. Bux didn’t let down his guard, though. The squire reminded himself that this sweaty man, tangled in loose clothing tinged with the musk of decay, was the source of an evolving mythology seeping from his very name.

When Vive spoke, Bux thought about the knight’s eyes again. Far more than the centerpiece of his face, they presented, unequivocally, a shrewdness that had lost its edge. Bux’s mind raced through all the stories he’d read about Vive, trying to find a way to understand the man. If he could somehow bond with the knight, maybe he’d make it out of this mess alive. He looked at Vive and saw a mental armory that had been blunted through jading experience, hammered in over the course of three decades. Rather than disarm his peers with the once ever-sharp whippings of his tongue, he now had for himself a flail (or one of those fifteen pound balls bodybuilders throw for sport).^[3] This new kind of ‘wit’ bludgeoned those around him into submission because they could not withstand the assault. To put it another way: the subtlety was lost, while the effectiveness remained.

Or maybe Bux was full of shit.

“You’ve been brought to me to serve my every need,” said Vive.

“Yes, sir.”

“Do not speak without permission.”

“Yes, sir.”

Vive flicked his sword scabbard at Bux. The hard-boiled leather whacked his shin. Bux yelped.

Vive hit him again. “Not one uninvited sound.”

Bux waited.

“Understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

The knight grinned, his teeth white and sharp.

He led Bux through the courtyard, through the clamor, the animated commands and hand gestures. Directions hollered, boxes hauled, horses led, bundles of arrows hoisted onto the backs of boys no taller than the average chair. Where Bux caught the boys’ glances, he wished he hadn’t.

Vive enumerated Bux’s duties, ticking off hairy, gnarled fingers. “My chainmail will be scrubbed with sand, plate-mail polished. Sword and dagger to be sharpened with a decent whetstone, and oil-of-clover applied (sparingly) after. Three meals per day procured from the kitchens, and tailored to my very reasonable specifications. These standard chores will fill your every day. I’ll expect you to perform them without prompting, without the faintest hint of complaint. Further tasks at my discretion. Understand, squire? A nod will do. Good.” Vive pushed open a barely shoulder-width door and shoved Bux through. “And you’re about to meet a very special friend.”

The stables.

“On your toes, Buxtehude,” the knight said, shoving him between the shoulder blades again.

Bux heard the expected whinnies, whickers, and various sounds of defecation. So far so good. A moment later, however, he picked out a keening screech accompanied by several thuds, like bodies dropping onto a wooden platform from on high.

Vive came to a halt in front of a stall which contained a four-legged monstrosity only the cruelest of pranksters would misrepresent as ‘horse.’

“This is Eater,” he said.

The dull throb of Bux’s shin reminded him not to answer unprompted.

“Well?” said Vive.

Bux gulped a breath. “Why is his name Eater?”

“Because he eats things.” Vive reached over to pat the horse between its eyes (he had to stand on his toes). He yanked his hand back right as Bux heard a snap like a hundred year old branch breaking in a storm. “Sometimes fingers.” Vive laughed. “Anyway, you’ll be feeding him, too. Twice a day. And mucking out his stall. And grooming him.” Eater head-butted the door to his stall, apparently uncaring that he now had long splinters wedged in his flesh. “Big softy likes to preen.”

Eater’s lopsided eyes locked with Bux’s and the squire was stricken dumb.

“Here,” said Vive. He tossed a green apple, which thudded against Bux’s forehead, landing in the mud. “Give him that, and he’ll love you forever.”

Bux blinked. He let his upper body drop, arms hanging, and scooped up the apple. He rotated it, examined its every angle. Finally, he edged toward the stall, one shaky step at a time. Raising the apple, with the tips of his fingers, he levered it to Eater’s nose. The horse’s sniff was like a bear’s snore. A thick pink tongue flopped out, trembling, and brushed up against the apple. Then Eater’s head knocked into Bux’s hand. The apple tumbled into the stall, and the war-horse trampled it as if the apple had ordered the assassination of his entire family.

After the fruit had been crushed into a muddy pulp, Eater simply stared at Bux. Stared, breathing hard.

Vive laughed. “Ah, right. He hates apples.”

The knight walked back the way they’d come, chuckling until he was out of earshot.

Dangling his feet over the edge of a stack of boxes, Bux wrote, in his flawless cursive, a letter to his mother. They both knew no word would get out of Lomendiam until the siege was broken, “But I’ll read every loop and swoop you put to parchment,” she’d told him. So he overlooked the Basilian Fields, facing north. North, from whence they’d come. They, the red-beard, potato-eyed, axe-swinging savages. Bux sat, awaiting the breaking of their iron wave upon the brittle shoals that were the city walls.

When the walls fell, boys would be walls instead.

Though the enemy hadn’t yet planted his rotund, hairy bottom in Shiron soil, Lomendiam had been, for all intents and purposes, already sealed off. No more traffic, be it foot or horse. Only runners and riders on military business thundered through the streets every quarter hour or so. Most of the citizenry had fled days before, but sometimes a nose poked out from a window, or a pair of hands held open drawn curtains. Those who were too proud to leave, or too concerned for the safety of their stores of bolt and cloth, had stayed. Some were simply too infirm: a bent old woman whose knobbed legs ensured the best she could manage was to prop a stool against her rotted door. The final category consisted of those persons who were unable or unwilling to face losing everything. Perhaps not for the first time.^[4]

The army was getting its money’s worth out of the pages today. Little legs pumping as if to stay afloat in a stormy sea, they dashed up and down. Puppets bouncing by their strings, bright in their livery. Bux watched the world unfold to the tune of leather soles thudding onto cobblestone and earth, cut by a sporadic whicker and clack of hooves. All these letters delivered, and Bux’s would more than likely never leave the city. Except, maybe, as ash on the wind. But he’d promised his mother. Buxtehude J. Perdurable was a man^[5] of his word, by crumb.

Sir Vive had given his squire the morning off—advising he “never expect a favor again”—as he had war council business to attend to. This left Bux with time enough to think. Always a dangerous business. The writing couldn’t quell the thinking, but it did help channel the mental whirlwind into just a whir.

As the sun approached its apex, signaling the nearing end of the brief delay of his new life, Nap flopped down to sit next to him.
“Ho, Bux.”

“Ho, Nap,” said Bux, setting his pen and parchment aside. “What’s the word?”

“I’m starving,” said the other. He took a hefty bite out of a red onion. Mouth full, “And I’m exhausted already. So exhausted, in fact, that I could use a—”

“Yeah, a nap. Like your name. Ha, ha.”

“Don’t give me no grief today, Buxy boy. My master really let me have it this mornin’.”

Bux burst out laughing.

“Wasso funny, eh?” said Nap. “M’ ears is still ringin’ from that backhand.”

“Your morning was a rough one? Yours was? I’m Sir Vive’s squire!”

“So?”

“So? Don’t you read?”

Nap scrunched his face and puffed his cheeks.

Bux said, “Right. Sorry.”

Jopwell, his face level with their heels, said, “You should feel honored.” He tapped Bux’s boot. “He’s supposed to be a hero. A culture-warrior and great defender of the realm.” He hawked a wad of phlegm. “Least you din’t get saddled with Captain Wallop.”

“Oh, so your master smacks you around a bit, does he?” Bux snapped. “I’m gonna die, Jopwell. Read my lips: the Perdurable line ends with me.”

“Nah. You’ve got a kid brother.” Jopwell ducked under Bux’s kick.

“If anyone’s gonna die, it’s me.” Nap rubbed his bulging belly with both palms. He then pulled the loaf of cheese bread out from under his shirt. “Look at me, I’m wasting away already!”

Jopwell and Bux laughed.

“Squires, why don’t the pair of you grow a pair? Each, or, at minimum, between the two of you,” said the voice which was as cleansing as the deep thrum of a gong.

Bux let his head fall back and thus looked at where the upside down elegant woman herself, garbed in blue and silver, stood above him.

“My Lady Tiberia.” He leapt to his feet, righting the world again. “What brings you to this part of town?”

“Here to watch the show.” She gazed down at him. “Aren’t we all?”

“The show?” said Jopwell.

“Fool.” Tiberia brushed his comment away with a black-gloved hand, but grinned as she did so. “Look on ahead. The northern hills. There.” She pointed. “Where the sunrays fall fiercest.”

“A blinding glare. Agh.” Nap wrapped his arms around his head. “My eyes.”

“For once keep them open, Nap,” said Bux. “The Lady’s right. That’s the bloody, beet-licking Lindils come, for sure.”

Scurrying across the hill, as a single shiny beetle, the vanguard of the army from Wyllyglindil had finally arrived. He could almost hear their barbaric war-chants. Probably saying, More potatoes now. Where’s the beets? Where’s the wurst? The Shirons have stolen our hams. Kill, kill, kill, maim, kill.

“Shouldn’t we sound an alarm, or something?” said Jopwell.

“Everybody knows.” Tiberia pursed her lips, painted white. “Well, everyone who needed to.” She sniggered at them. “At ease, gentlemen. They’ll not attack today. Just set up shop, I expect. Tents, palisades, fires, and lots and lots of boisterous posturing.”

Nap licked the crumbs from his fingertips. “Ain’t you worried, m’lady?”

“Ought I be? I don’t think so. I’m the Baron Cordreef’s eldest daughter. The worst that’ll happen to me is that I go without hot water a few days, maybe my father sheds a thin layer of my titanic dowry to ransom us.” She shook her head, her long, dark ponytail swishing. “It’s you who’re in for it, my chaps, sorry to say.”

Nap wailed. “We’re boys!”

She said, “Boys don’t wear swords.”

“This here twig?” Nap dangled his rapier an arm’s length away. “Purely decroa-rative. Ain’t even sharp.”

Tiberia smiled. The other two recoiled, but Bux saw only sadness in her face. She said, “Best rectify that, then. The warriors of the Warschteig, when the bloodlust takes them (and us), will not so readily discern between men with swords and boys with sticks. The ten thousand of them see only a little pile of rocks housing one thousand obstacles. Obstacles which block their way into the realm at large. Obstacles made of meat, when you get down to it, and perhaps a spruce of hair or two. And, no matter how many bits of metal you slide into place to contain it, meat will be cut.”

The Lady Tiberia turned away and disappeared from view on the balcony.

“Cheery tart, ain’t she?” said Nap.

Bux’s pulse exploded. Don’t call her a tart—I will skin you with my bottom front teeth. He took harsh breaths, letting the words slide out with care, “She’s right. We’re soldiers now, lads.” Bux shook his head. “We’ve got to become men—and quick—because the bloody Lindils are damned well going to treat us as such.”

As twilight casts its gossamer strands over the castle town of Lomendiam, the Basilian Fields, and the Lomenshire at large, Buxtehude monitored the movements of the ant-sized Lindils scurrying about the northern hills from atop the tower the squires had nicknamed ‘The Crutch.’^[6] Peering through his grandfather’s spyglass, he counted row and column; he noted in his journal the more significant of the enemy host’s standards and banners. Dredging what he recalled of Wyllyglindil heraldry, it seemed that all the vassals of the Prince of Taünmarck were represented on the field. Their honorable support of their master didn’t matter one lick to Bux. He cared more about the form such support took: thousands of pointy pieces of metal. More than enough to be aimed squarely at his chest.

He slid the spyglass back into its sheath and performed some calculations. He knew his multiplication tables back to front and inside out. “Mistake” exited Bux’s mental dictionary in matters pertaining to arithmetic.

“Crumb.” He counted again, scribbled the numbers on a scrap of parchment. He grit his teeth. “I don’t believe it. Crumb me to the power five.” When he still hated the answer, he tried a third time. “Oh, no.”

Tiberia’s estimation of the enemy’s strength, whether guessed or figured, had been correct.

“Ten thousand. Ten. Thousand.”

Day one.

He closed his journal.

[1] Two-Tooth Torkle’s illiteracy was so pronounced that even his speech contained spelling errors and erroneous homophones.

[2] That’s pretty far south, by the way.

[3] This is where someone should say, “I’ll show you some fifteen pound balls.”

[4] “They’re what? Invadin’? Again? Bugger my ear and eye socket—Young Tom, grab up the cat and your mother’s crocheting kit. Why? We’s movin’. I know. But the Lords is in a tizzy. Be a dear and help your old Nan wheel out the door.”

[5] Broadly defined, sure.

[6] The squires were quartered therein, and knights couldn’t stand without the support of their squires.