4646 words (18 minute read)

Chapters I-V


The Defeated; Chapters I - V; Joseph G. Calcagno


I

The Fifth Legion dragged its feet across a great, unbroken expanse of swaying grass along an otherwise featureless plain. No cliffs for small bands of natives to creep upon and rain spears and stones and arrows along the men as they marched, too high and too few for rebuke. No clustered, mud hut villages filled with hateful citizenry. Only a great and mind-splitting nothing. All around soldiers grumbled, but Benvolo Cyprian at least gave praise for that small measure of comfort.

Lidless sun beat upon the column from a blank sky. Sweat flowed from every pore. The stink of them as fierce and powerful as an army twenty thousands strong. For a while he had stopped noticing, but since crossing the river he had rediscovered the stench.

A fog of biting flies hummed around his ears as he led his horse by its bridle. He swatted futilely and plodded along. The whole of the march could be spoken in such metaphor. A tired, underfed, and overburdened man trudging as the insects nipped and stung.

Trukeans of all forms had nipped at them.

The southern nomads firing a single volley at their flank before riding off with all haste and intimate knowledge of the ground. Impossible to pursue and the losses too small at each turn to concern General Belsar or his staff. But those losses were mounting, as were the lumps each flying nuisance left him.

Herders just north of Onos, plinking missiles harmlessly off shield and helm and armor. Too slight an offense to break discipline and punish, and worse still when dealt with. Ragged boys and wisp thin men cut apart over bruises. Crying wives and children beaten and tossed to the dusty earth as their fallen husband's and father's sheep joined the column.

Captain Cyprian had hence refused to eat mutton for two weeks on principle. He hoped food was all the beasts had been used for, and he tried to entertain his thoughts otherwise. But after a fortnight of raids near the forested hills of the Geritae, he ate the finest mutton he had ever tasted. Great Glychos had mapped the Orders of Man's Necessity centuries prior, but in Cyprian's thinking it did not take a philosopher to discover that a starving man will choose food over honor.

Shikram staggered beside him. With little fresh water and less to eat, even the black Nurabi fell prey to the boiling sun and humid air, too thick to breathe. Cyprian hauled the lanky legionary onto his own saddle, slapped him awake, and offered him the last drops of his canteen. The boy accepted before slumping over the horse, his midnight skin ashen and dry when it should have been running with sweat. Two days from a river, and yet so scarce is water.

The raids had taken it out of them. Where the varying breeds of locals were content to wound or kill a few of them at each encounter and fly away, the mercenaries the Trukeans had hired to harass the Legion on its winding serpent's path to Old Trukai had been more cruel. Fighting spirit dwindled at their hand.

Now and again little rock walls or ruts would appear across the road. The infantry would clamber over the walls and through the trenches. The cavalry simply rode around them. But the supply wagons and the wheeled artillery, confined to the road itself, were forced to halt and move soil or stone to clear their paths.

As they cursed the miles of unthinking comrades who had come before them and tended, grunting, to their labors, light infantry would spring madly from cover of hillocks or dense brush. The sell-sword madmen killed the soldiers more as consequence than intent. Never once did they fail to steal away with the contents of the wagons.

Food stores. Barrels of clean water. The last of the ill-gained mutton. Once they had made off with a month's worth of the Seventh Cohort's pay.

Other officers had told him a man named Aedenhrir led them. An Eran tribesman, as it was told, but the name seemed oddly familiar. It had also been told that he had promised the Trukeans he would break the Legion before it reached the ancient walls of Trukai. That they had paid him a king's ransom in silver and jewels. That the Seventh Cohort's pay had been returned in the night with a note in good Catalonian explaining Aedenhrir and his men had too much wealth already and he'd had a pang of conscience over the “pittance” he had taken. He had signed the apology beside a sketch of the Sa'amish glyph for “heart,” a common Catalonian shorthand meaning, “with love.”

Insulting, miserable, arrogant, honorless cur.

Yet, Cyprian could not help but admire his head for strategy. In all the texts he had read at the Academy, in all his talks of maneuver with the Legendary Raj Belsar himself, Cyprian never knew a commander to suggest hurting soldiers where they get hurt most. In their bellies, in their purses, in their aching hearts.

A man might win a war and not kill quite so many people in the process if he fought such. Cyprian would remember that lesson.

Corporal Aliq stumbled. Cyprian had not expected him to be next. The captain observed his own willowy brown frame, and the big brute on his knees, and the great height of the horse's ass. His windburnt gaze sought out aid and found Mannet two files to his left.

“You there!” he croaked, throat drier than he'd realized. “Mannet! Help me with this one.”

“Ay, Sir.” the old mender muttered.

It may have been the first time one of the men gave him more than a dissatisfied sigh and a pleading glance toward Sergeant Razan. And a “Sir,” no less? Cyprian wiped his brow and positioned himself below the corporal's armpits. Mannet eagerly snatched up the corporal's ankles and nodded. Is that acceptance on that weathered face? The heat has me hallucinating.


II

Lysisca drew up her hood to shield her eyes from the stinging wind. In other circumstances, such a breeze might be a blessing in this forsaken land, but with miles of dust kicked up by the tramping hooves and stomping boots of some twenty thousands Catalonian soldiers, she would accept the heat and keep her vision. She wrapped her delicate hands around the rough, worn handles of her wheelbarrow, unafraid any longer they might betray her disguise. She descended the hill toward the road, the covered hand-cart bouncing behind her, and made her way toward the legionary column. An army of her countrymen, scrambling in profane glory to make camp in the fading daylight. For the moment, she was safe.

Meandering around wagon ruts and through the clangs of hammered tent-stakes, ducking under hempen ropes and weaving between dogged troopers, her awareness of their lack of awareness swelled. Here she walked, Lysisca, an agent of the Empress herself, cloaked in the garb of a Trukean commoner, suspiciously entering their ranks and not even a sentry to stop her? She had every right to be among them, of course, but to remain unquestioned for this long seemed disgraceful. Small wonder Aedenhrir had blackened General Belsar's eyes.

Her dwindling faith in their competence neared outright rage as she dragged the cart deeper. Whole cohorts paid her no mind. She could have been hauling powder in that cart, for all they knew, and it made no difference to them. Legionary lion-head standards, their tarnished gold glinting off campfires and torches like blazing gargoyles roared agreement with her dissatisfaction. Regimental colors fluttered at the entry flaps of command tents. Had they not whipped this way and that so swiftly, she might have made a report on each and every unit that ignored her.

A heavy hand fell upon her shoulder. Ebony fingers gripping just enough to hint their massive strength. The hand gently pulled her around, until she faced a great black mountain of a legionary. His clean-shorn scalp turned to a thick neck, and close beneath that, a chest and shoulders broad as a cape buffalo's. The Nurabi man glared silently down at her in challenge.

“Well it's about time,” Lysisca released her grip on the cart-handles and gently guided his hard, weighty forearm off her. “Who are you and what is your unit? I'd like to tell General Belsar he has a single company in his ranks which shouldn't be flogged.”

“I'll be the one asking questions here,” his voice was deep and slowly metered, the hand freed from her shoulder now resting on a dagger's hilt.

Others joined him around her. A lean and wolfish Catalonian youth with a thief's brand on his cheek. An old bearded healer with Sa'amish head-wrappings. Two squatty, swarthy Murghar ruffians no taller than her, each tapping a cudgel on his leg. A milk-white Galas with a single stripe of wild, lime-bleached hair and a chipped battle-axe clipped to his belt. The pride of the Empire, she chuckled to herself. The dregs of every province gathered to conquer another.

Lysisca cleared her throat, “Then, ask me a question.”

“What do you have in the cart?” the Nurabi giant inquired.

Her tone remained even, her nerves steady, “Maps, some provisions for the road, and intelligence reports for General Raj Belsar.”

He sent the Murghar thugs to verify her carts contents. They rummaged like animals. Nothing inside that cart could not be replaced or had not been memorized, but it irked her. Still, she supposed this was better than a whole army letting her approach their commander unabbated.

“You Enelese? Verdonian?” the Nurabi asked.

“She is Enelese,” came a well-spoken answer to her rear.

Lysisca knew the tall, thin man the instant her eyes caught him. His aristocratic stride, a floppy unlaced tunic paired with fitted trousers, boots that though currently caked in filth had cost him more than his soldiers likely made in a month. Sable hair greasy but still neatly kept. Long angular face a little rouged upon the nose and cheeks but otherwise tanned like a bronze effigy. A fellow Enelese, and one she might never have thought to claim friend, but those had been different times.

“And I know her well enough,” he continued.

“Are you certain you know her intentions, sir?” the hulking Nurabi narrowed a suspicious gaze at his captain.

“I am sure, Sergeant Razan, thank you,” the young officer placed one hand on the filigreed hilt of his saber and took Lysisca's in his other.

“Well met, Captain Cyprian,” Lysisca followed him through more lanes of tents, passed more withered, uncouth, bitter soldiers. “Your men don't seem to like you.”

His dark eyes bespoke his distress, “No, they rather don't.”

“I am sure they will, in time,” she ventured, but she was not sure.

“General Belsar is in there,” he gestured toward a garishly decorated pavilion, draped in wreaths and tapestries and a thousand silken banners. Smoke tinged by the scent of herbs and fine meats billowed from a hole cut into its roof, and Lysisca even saw a carpet laid in the dirt at the entrance.

“Thank you,” she said.

“I hope whatever you have to report is something to lighten my heart.”

She thought on that and truly pitied him, but she would not lie. “It depends upon what the good General does with it.”

With a sad smile Cyprian vanished into the darkness, and Lysisca stepped into General Belsar's quarters.


III

Thick, nut-brown fingers pinched his moustache into fine curls. A flourish of Murghar pomp at the dour corners of his dark lips. One hand lowered to preen the sharp point of his beard, the other sank gracefully to the map draped over his father's staff table. Haseen Belsar's ears opened wide, drank in every uttering of the other officers encircling the map.

“The campaign needs hastening to its true goal,” advised a prim Enelese.

A Catalonian in filigreed riding boots concurred, “These towns and villages are meaningless. We cannot continue to dawdle when they will all bend the knee at the fall of Trukai.”

Haseen's father stared somber and silent at the map and said nothing. Is there something he sees the others do not? What so fixes his gaze? General Raj Belsar had ever been a solemn, reserved man, but these deadly grim moods, Haseen knew well, typically preceded great moments of action. If only he could unwind the knot of mystery and beat his father to it.

A whole life in pursuit of becoming his father. Such is likely the tale for many sons, Haseen considered, but for most sons their father is not the most legendary commander in imperial history. Anqara. Bletucaro. Sanjuk. The Horn. Now Karnassos. What sons but he and his brother ever had such storied triumphs to live up to? He pondered his father as his father pondered the map.

Old now, but still fit as any warrior. Raj massaged his braided hair at his silvering temples. He stroked at his sharp, hairy jaw and rubbed at his hooked nose. Dark and focused and uninterested in the petty noise around him. What a wonder was his father.

The colonels of every regiment among his legions gathered at this map, inside this tent, by the dying light of scarcely attended oil lamps. They sat on soft velvet cushions and reclined on silk covered couches befitting their lofty stations. Noblemen of fine breeding, schooled in the finest academies of war from across every satrapy of the Empire. But Raj Belsar ignored them. What an absolute wonder.

“Sir,” a Sa'amish officer Haseen knew from the Fourth Legion straightened his uniform and pled for the general's attention. “Sir, what say you?”

A gust of stiff night air tore about the tent and the low lamp fires flitted this way and that. The stale smell of mildewed gear and stinking soldiers poured in with it. Haseen choked on the odor.

Slow and deliberate, Raj Belsar raised his gaze to meet the newcomer – a hooded woman standing yet in the tent flap. The general's face lit with measured glee before returning to its restive state of coldness. The woman threw back her cowl and stepped forth.

Her face, the color of honey with lips like stained oak, had a round softness betraying common birth, but she was no less beautiful for it. An edge too, though, carved in the stiff line of her mouth and the furrowed fury of her visage. For a peasant, there was something distinctly uncommon, and even Haseen could recognize that.

“I say,” Raj spoke at long last and the clutter of staff officers and regimental commanders instinctively hushed, “we hear what intelligence the Empress's agent might report.”


IV

“General,” Lysisca dipped her chin in acknowledgment and brushed passed a chubby fellow with a twirled moustache and pointy chin whiskers to reach the map.

Aristocrats wearing epaulettes marked with purchased ranks huddled around ranks deep. So thick she thought she might suffocate under the weight and heat of them all. Heads craned over shoulders broad or slumped to see more clearly what she might present their General. No small bit of respect for an urchin of the Palladium.

Her slender fingers ran over the rough parchment, grateful the map's ink had long since dried in the heat and the dust of Trukea. Her eyes searched for a single feature, but came short over and again. The river here. The encampment here. Then to the east it must be... THERE!

Her hand halted over a curiously shaped crescent with a small black dot soaked to its south. She knew it to represent Kepretos Plateau and a long forgotten fortress built into its cliffs. She had seen it that very morning, bustling with life. Most importantly, she had seen it bustling with life under the waving banners of three very particular companies.

“He's there, general, and I am sure of it.” Lysisca drew back all her digits but the index, which lay over the blotch for the fort. “Kepretos. Hardly a day's march from here.”

“Are you sure, girl?” General Raj Belsar may have been old and reputable, but it irked Lysisca to be called 'girl.' She had been a woman for some time.

“I am certain.”

She produced a small leatherbound journal from a pouch at her hip and slapped it open on the table. Pages turned and turned until her most recent entry. A sketch of the flags over Kepretos with a detailed entry of notes below. The first was sable with a red glyph meaning “first” in Trukean. She pointed to it.

“The survivors of your victory at Karnassos, under whichever among their captains could not recognize their crushing defeat,” she explained.

Raj betrayed a smile, “Good. They've been harassing our column ever since.”

She lay her finger upon the second, a white gryphon on a pale blue field. “Auxiliaries from Persepho, but not many. They were driven off by Pro-Consul Jarbahn's troops en route to reinforce the region and few survived.”

“Let us not speak of Jarbahn,” acid humors dripped from the general's words. It was well-known the two were old rivals, but Lysisca doubted the use of such petty contentions in time of war. He eagerly continued, “What is the third.”

An ivory pennon emblazoned with a eight black feathers in the shape of a wheel, “The Black Plume. A small company of mercenaries that have plagued your march. They are commanded by an Eran tribal named Aedenhrir.”

“After all his insults, that is the very one I have sought,” Raj's stony face brightened. “What is their strength?”

“The best I can tell, scarcely over two hundred,” she replied.

“What is the look of their defenses?” asked Raj.

Lysisca considered this for a while. She no more wanted to see Aedenhrir dead than to see him harass her countrymen. The two had history, and after all, he had saved her life once upon a time. Duty and ambition won out for the moment, “Strong but hardly impregnable. The fortress at Kepretos is near enough a ruin, excepting what modifications the Black Plume has made. It looked as though they have been using it as a base of operations for their raids on your supply wagons for some time. They are well stocked and well armed, but it is built into the cliffs and there would be no escape should they be encircled.”

“And lacking artillery, I would assume?” spoke the chubby fellow with the ornate facial hair she had bumped on her way to the table.

Lysisca hesitated in response, but the general gave her leave. “None from what I have seen.”

“Sir,” he addressed Raj, sighed and then, “father, my brother leads the Sixth Legion to crush the last major body of resistance to our west. I wish to do the same for this Kepretos to our east. The honor of our household would be exalted only higher when Trukai buckles beneath your heel.”

Raj scanned the other commanders, “Are there any objections to Colonel Belsar taking the Fifth against Kepretos?”

Lysisca's hatred for the nobility cemented only further as each dismissed the chance to fulfill his duty to the Empire. She knew the look well. Aed and his mercenaries were beneath their grandeur, regardless of their strategic significance. She almost hoped her old friend would emerge triumphant and embarrass their sensibilities. Almost.

“Then it is settled,” General Belsar concluded. “Lysisca, at dawn you will escort Colonel Belsar and his regiment to Kepretos and advise until the siege is at end.”

“I will not fail you, sir,” his son bowed low.

Raj's response came as unfeeling as his expression, “You'd better not, Haseen.” The narrow line of his mouth tightened further, “And, Haseen, see to it my books return to my possession.”


V

Few luxuries soothe the day's aches so well as a soft place for your arse and a flagon of scrumpy. When an arse is so shapely a thing as Aed's was, and attached to so finely sculpted a body as Aed's was, and when that shapely arse and fine sculpted body are in turn below a face so fair and dashingly noble, eyes so charmingly blue, and hair blacker than a starless midnight, all such as Aed's were, well then, a particularly well-cushioned cushion and only the finest scrumpy will do. At least Aed always thought so.

He surmised that the pillows were Sa'amish. Not quite so fashionable as the Murghar ones he had lounged on the night prior, but spun and sewn by the delicate hands of some desert artisan far away and intended for a consummately exalted arse. Whoever commissioned them, Aed doubted, had an arse with half the exaltedness of Aed's. It was good he'd stolen them from General Belsar's baggage train. Otherwise they might never have met the manner of arse for which they were so meticulously crafted.

The scrumpy came from Geritae, west of Karnassos. Orchards in the wooded, hilly lowlands grew the tart apples the scrumpers turned to hard cider. He spent his boyhood in the ragged gray mountains above those very orchards, and the fragrance and flavor that so defined his youth set a tear rolling down his bearded cheek. Scrumpy. From a place called Bletucaro...

A sudden wave of discomfort set him wriggling on the Sa'amish pillows. The masterwork Muntemarro longsword stood most proudly among his possessions, but just now all it was, was in the way. He rocked until the scabbard at his hip slid comfortably in its frog and allowed him the peace to lay down free from annoyance. Just Aedenhrir and his pillows and his scrumpy. He pulled the brim of his black-plumed leather hat down over his face and sipped on his cider.

The sandy red fortress walls, roughly weathered and beyond their prime, drifted from thought. Those walls and half-tumbled turrets, more the skeleton wreckage of defenses than aught else, wrapped like bent bow-limbs to tuck a cluster of ragged wooden buildings safely into the face of the towering mesa behind. A lonely iron gate fixed shut at their center, sneering its black smile beneath the eyes of twin gatehouse towers. Rust flecks on its bars just as blood dripping from cold, jagged teeth.

But Aedenhrir wasn't considering the stone of his battlements or the metal of the portcullis. Not thinking on how soon they would collapse in a proper siege. Not thinking on it any more than he was thinking on the ten score refugees taking residence in the ramshackle barracks and storehouses nestled within those defenses.

He admired the resilience of these folk. How they yet played music on what instruments they had salvaged from the lives they lived before. How the old baker woman and her kindly niece stoked the fires in the ancient remnants of a forge and used it for a pastry oven. How raucous they could be when they frolicked and drank and danced with Aed's men and the Trukean soldiers.

Admired them, but wasn't hardly thinking of them.

Just Aedenhrir. And his pillows. And his scrumpy.

“Excuse me, Captain,” a small but intrepid voice pierced the sphere of his bliss.

Aed folded his arms and yawned, ignoring the disturbance.

“Captain,” the peep came with some force behind it this time, “there are the matters of your ledgers, the care of the defenses, shifts to be assigned, and the Trukeans want to meet with you about a hundred topics and one.”

Aed croaked curses in reply to his clerk, “Thanum an Thune, Horatio.”

Horatio leaned over his captain and lifted the brim of his hat. The little Enelese boy had grown some since Aed took him on with the company. A few inches taller, some shabby gray fuzz on his scarred upper lip. But most of all Horatio was bolder now. A proper scrappy bugger. Waif thin but with a sharp mind for both business and survival. Of all the cutthroats and scoundrels employed under his banner, Horatio was Aed's favorite.

“Captain,” Horatio lifted the cavalier's cap a touch higher, and Aed could see now that the Trukean officers were behind the lad, impatiently tapping their feet and glaring over crossed arms, “I think it might be in your best interest to talk to them rather soonish.”

Reluctantly, Aedenhrir rose from his cushions and tossed his flagon to Horatio. “Have some scrumpy, lad.”

“Never heard of it,” the boy took a swig on faith. His cheeks rouged straightaway, and with a widening grin he smacked his tongue against his palate. “It's good! Is it some kind of wine?”

“What it is,” Aed rubbed futilely against a sudden pain in his brow, “is scrumpy.”

“Captain Aedenhrir!” the Trukean officers shouted and stepped forward.

Taking a shallow bow, he laid one hand on the swept hilt of his long sword and doffed his hat with the other, “Gentlemen, I am at yer service.”

The prim Persephon captain shook his head in disgust. “You're laid out drunk with Raj Belsar tightening our noose!”

“I'm not worried about Belsar,” Aed spat back. “I stole his journals two months ago, and I know how he thinks.”

“Hah!” The other, a swarthy Karnasson who had been with Aed when the books were seized, slapped his back with hairy-knuckled paw. Even through Aed's leathers it stung. “I love this boy!”

Aedenhrir hated being called a boy, though he supposed he looked years younger and handsomer than his companion, so he accepted it. “If there's nothin' else, Eumenos, I'll be back to me pillows,” he slapped the Karnasson on the arm in return and hoped it hurt. It must've, because Eumenos appeared pleased by the gesture, and displays of rugged manhood were wont to please him.

The Persephon refused to relent, “Your men are reveling among the refugees. They've led my own to rampant indiscipline.”

“My lads'll do that,” Aed sallied a retort. “The beautiful buggers.”

Eumenos, sensing trouble, moved between the two. “What Gorgos is trying to say, Aed, is that the situation needs to be addressed. The western stairs of the curtain walls have collapsed and no one will repair them. Such a thing would be devastating to our potential defense of this place.”

“Bull's Balls,” Aed hissed. “Let's to it, then. Horatio, bring some parchment.”