Horseclans' Odyssey

11

Although all of the court of Duchess Ann and more than half the residents of Twocityport cordially despised their duchess’ husband and openly welcomed her invading brother-in-law, Duke Alex of Traderstown, the folk of the farms and hamlets and villages of the countryside loved or at the very least deeply respected their overlord—he who had wiped out the ferocious river pirates, had kept alien invaders off their lands, had decreed and seen strictly enforced just laws, many of which had served to protect them from the depredations of the nobles and gentry. He had broken up the huge estates of the old families and made yeoman-farmers of men whose fathers had been landbound serfs, and his heaviest tax bites fell upon those able to bear it: merchants, foreign factors, rich ship owners and the like.

The duke’s soldiers, retreating before the enemy army which vastly outnumbered them, had but to say the word and the non-city dwellers did their duty. Duke Alex, as he advanced into the rich farmlands north and east of his objective, quickly realized to his dismay and rage that his plan of feeding his army off the country of his foe was doomed to failure. Storehouses and granaries gaped as empty as every house and barn, and the few unreaped fields now sprouted only charred stubble. Aside from the occasional stray goat or half-wild pig rooting in the midden of a deserted village, nothing that might possibly be of use to him and his host remained. Cursing sulphurously, he sent yet one more messenger riding back the way they had come, with orders for supplies to be ready for barging across the Great River as soon as he had secured the surrender of the ridiculous little pile of stone that went under the misnomer of “citadel.” It would be ten days or two weeks, he estimated, probably only half that time.

Just outside the low walls of the city, Alex set up camp and, while he met with his sister-in-law, her retainers and courtiers and the chief men of the city, his troops were marshaled and groomed to give the best appearance. Then on the morning of the third day, to the cheering of the city folk lining the street—High Street, which led straight from the North Gate to the Palace Square in the exact center of the city— beneath the bunting-draped shops and homes, he and his army paraded in, with drums beating and banners unfurled. And Duke Alex felt every inch the liberator he had convinced himself he was. This heady mood lasted all the way to the Palace Square. As soon as the square was jam-packed with his soldiery and Alex was staring in horrified awe at the bulk of a completed citadel in the lower reaches of the city, a number of black specks were seen arcing from the top of the inland walls, growing steadily larger as they neared.

The boulders slammed sanguineously into the massed troops, shattering against the pave in deadly, flying shards or bouncing high—once, twice, sometimes thrice—to mash out the lives of still more men. And the carnival atmosphere was become, in a matter of short seconds, purest pandemonium and screaming panic. Nor did the second volley of bushels of smaller stones or the third of blazing pitchballs help to calm the terror-stricken throngs. It was later reckoned that as many or more were trampled to death trying to flee the Palace Square as actually died from the engine missiles.

Duke Alex thought it, in toto, a most inauspicious beginning for the siege. And the following weeks went no better. Early on, it was discovered that the usual trenching manuevers would be impossible anywhere in the Lower Town, for no sooner was a trench deep enough to give a minimum of protection than it commenced to fill with groundwater from the high riverside water table. Therefore, on the advice of his staff, Duke Alex had many nearby homes and other buildings demolished and the rubble carted to fill in the canals the trenches were fast becoming. Then the rest of the rubble was used to give some measure of cover to the crews of his engines.

But no sooner were his stone and spear throwers in place and taking their first, ranging shots at the walls of the citadel than their crews and Duke Alex were made painfully aware of the error in the staffs reckoning. Not only brick, stone and mortar had gone into the filling of the trenches and the erection of the protective wall, but much splintery wood, lengths of dry, dusty timbers that flared like brushwood at the impact of the first pitchballs. The fire spread with unbelievable rapidity, its heat driving the crews away, crackling flames leaping in every direction, soon adding the wooden portions of the engines to the conflagration. Slowly eating into the wetted wood in the trenches below, the fire smoked and smoldered on for days.

The oldest portion of Tworivercity or Twocityport (which bore a third and still older name, Tworivertown) was the riverside section, in the center of which the citadel now squatted, ringed about by its moat. A hundred and more years agone, when the ancestors of both Duke Alex and Duchess Ann were nothing more than river pirates, who sent their swift galleys beating out to levy tolls on or board and plunder passing river traffic, the lower section had been all the urban area there was and the only edifice on the stretch of bluff behind the town had been a watchtower to warn of the approach of prey from up- or downriver.

It was only after the town became richer and conquered much of the inland farmlands and small towns and the then rulers began to style themselves high nobility and hire on soldiers to protect their holdings and add more by conquest that the first part of the bluff-top palace was built, and the present city had grown up around the palace. In the beginning, only mansions of the nobility and gentry and the quarters of the soldiers had occupied the newer section of the city.

In more recent decades, however, pursuant to the many and sweeping changes wrought by Duke Tcharlz—and much to the screaming outrage of the old nobility, whose wealth and power had declined precipitously in the wake of the new duke’s reforms—non-nobles, newly rich ship owners and merchants had bought or built in the once exclusive Upper City.

Prior to the erection of the new fortress-citadel, the Old Town had been entirely given over to huge warehouses, mean bordellos and low dives frequented almost exclusively by river sailors and low-ranking mercenaries, fringed at north and south by a ramshackle aggregation of the huts and hovels of the poor, the aged, the outcast and the indigent.

Wisely, Duke Tcharlz had raised the landward walls of his new fortress several yards higher than called for in the original plans, that they not be overshadowed by higher elevation of the bluff-top city. However, as days became weeks, Duke Alex, frustrated at every turn in his attempts to open a normal siege on the citadel in the old town, determined as his sole real advantage the fact that the bluff area, which be did fully control, was almost on a level with the walls of the objective and that it was the only feasible place, both within range and affording some measure of protection, on which to mount his batteries of engines.

Although only a little better than half of the promised troops to garrison the citadel had ever arrived, Captain Count Martuhn still felt well served and secure in his firm belief that he could hold the fortress as long as might prove necessary. True, he was devilishly short of archers, having only those from his own mixed company and the unit of crossbowmen from Pirates’ Folly. But in the absence of any attempt at a frontal assault against the fortress, he had as yet had no need of them.

A more serious problem might have been the nonarrival of the company of engineers and artificers, save for the multi-talented Lieutenant Nahseer and two happy turns of fortune.

Quite a few of the yeomen-farmers who had stripped and deserted their land in the face of the invaders had come through the Upper Town to the Lower and sought admission to the citadel. Most had brought their whole families, their livestock and wagonloads of personal effects, furniture and victuals. After cogitating the ticklish matter and discussing it with Wolf and Nahseer, Martuhn had admitted a few, but only those who had relatives among the garrison or those who were retired soldiers. And that was how he acquired not one but two veteran engineers’ artificers, one a company sergeant, one a sergeant-major, with a total experience of nearly fifty years between them.

With a few simple adjustments and a few days of drilling the amateur crews, the two sergeants had rendered the existing engines more flexible, longer-ranging and harder-hitting. The missing spearthrowers they had replaced with an ingenious device consisting of a wooden framework holding a wooden, V-shaped trough to support the spear and springy boards to propel it. When both of the retired noncoms flatly refused the offer of commissions, Martuhn transferred Nahseer from his personal staff to the command of the fledgling engineer unit, promoting him at the same time to senior lieutenant. Well aware from times past of the inherent dangers of idleness among soldiers, especially under the present conditions, Martuhn made certain that every member of the garrison had work of a sort to perform for almost every hour of daylight. The men, of course, grumbled at the unending rounds of drills, weapons practice and inspections, but it was the good-natured grumbling of professional soldiers and to be expected in any command.

In the absence of a real bowmaster, Martuhn, hesitantly at first, placed Bahb and Djoh Steevuhnz in charge of the small contingent of bowmen, with Sir Wolf to back them up was their authority to be questioned. But Wolf soon returned to the commander requesting a more urgent assignment, remarking that every bowman deeply respected the deadly and matchless accuracy of the two boys and was more than anxious to himself acquire such a degree of skill. Martuhn too respected the nomad boys, and not solely because he. had never known them to miss any target—still or moving—at which they had loosed their short, black-shafted arrows. Under his and Nahseer’s tutelage, Bahb and even the slower-witted little Djoh had rapidly learned the Game of Battles, and a session or two in light brigandines with dulled lancer sabers—Martuhn taking a blade somewhat shorter to allow for his longer arms—had pleased the veteran captain immensely. The wiry older lad was as fast as a greased pig, though he depended little on the various point attacks, seeming to prefer the hack and the slash and the drawcuts of a horseman. But that the boy was a quick study and highly adaptable was proved early in the second session, when he startled Martuhn by employing the entirety of an attack he had seen but once and penetrating the older man’s guard almost to the juncture of contact. “I tell you, Nahseer,” he had averred that night, when once the two boys had been packed off to their bedchamber, “if Bahb had been but a wee bit bigger with no more than three more inches of arm, he’d have had me. A perfect thrust to the high belly or low chest. And I know he could’ve learned that bit from no one but me. The only things those nomads ever stab with are their dirks and their spears. All their saber drill is pure edge fighting. Some of their sabers don’t even have real points.

“But he’d only seen it once, man, and that in the midst of a very brisk bout of fence,” Nahseer, lounging back in one of the four chairs set at the table-cum-desk, which with the narrow bed and a trio of clothes and weapons chests made up the only furnishings of the captain’s spartan chamber, sipped at the cup of cool apple juice—cider which had been briskly boiled to rid it of the alcohol that was forbidden him by his religion. “Yes, Martuhn, you, I, Sir Wolf, any man would feel proud to be able to name as his get such sons as Bahb and Djoh, especially Bahb.

“You obviously stand high in the regard of the duke, your sometime employer and now your overlord. And your lordship of this city and its environs is worded to be a hereditary one. But, my friend, your age is a bit advanced to go about the siring of heirs, if you mean to see them grown and properly reared. So why not, once this silly little war be concluded, prevail upon the duke to legalize your adoption of these two boys and make Bahb your legal heir?” Martuhn sighed. “Would that I could, my dear Nahseer, but they two talk of nothing else but a return to their clan and their prairies.” Raising a shaggy eyebrow and nodding, Nahseer replied, “Yes, I know, but I also know, as do you, what they do not Returning them to the prairies were difficult enough, reuniting them with their clan a virtual impossibility, as it could now be hundreds of miles away in any direction. As they get older, the boys will come to appreciate just why they could not be returned to their savage relatives. Of this I am certain, my friend.”

“I promise to think on your idea, Nahseer,” agreed Martuhn, “and to discuss it with you and others at more length once Duke Tcharlz comes to lift the siege and affairs of the duchy normalize once more.”

In the press of everyday affairs, Martuhn had almost forgotten Sir Djaimz Stylz. Then, one night, pikemen and a sergeant of infantry marched that very man before him. This Sir Djaimz, however, looked more like a half-drowned rat than like the precious young fop that the captain remembered. With a crashing salute of his poleaxe, the sergeant intoned the ritual phrases, then got to the meat of the matter. The prisoner had swum the moat and had made sufficient racket to draw the attention of the wall sentries. They had, of course, called for the sergeant of the guard, who had, in his turn, sent for the officer of the guard. That worthy had had a rope lowered that the sodden, shivering swimmer might be hauled up the outer face of the wall. “He don’t know nary a one of the passwords, m’lud count, but he tawks like gentry and he swears he be a friend of m’lud, so Lootenunt Brysuhn ordered he be haled afore m’lud. It was a sword strapped ‘crost his back, a dirk at his belt and a dagger in the boots he had slung ‘rount his neck, but he ain’t armed now, m’lud.”

“Very good, sergeant,” Martuhn said. “You have done well this night, as has Lieutenant Brysuhn. Return to your duties.”

With another crashing salute, the sergeant ordered his brace of pikemen to face about, then marched them out of the chamber and down the narrow, spiraling stairs.

“So, Sir Djaimz, we meet again. But whatever possessed you to take such a deadly chance, man? Had you not lucked onto a set of level-headed sentries, you could now be on the bottom of the moat or floating toward the river with an arrow or two in you.”

However, despite the heat radiated by two large braziers, the chattering of the young man’s teeth made his reply all but unintelligible. “Wait, Sir Djaimz, hold on.” Martuhn sprang to his feet and crossed to one of his chests in two long strides. From it he removed a thick blanket and tossed it to his visitor. “Strip those wet clothes off and wrap up in this while they dry; hang them from those hooks, there, near that brazier.” Then the captain filled a jack three-quarters full with strong honey wine, added a generous dollop of barley hwiskee, pulled a loggerhead from among the coals of the other brazier and blew off the ash before plunging it into the jack, releasing a small cloud of fragrant steam. He proffered the jack to Sir Djaimz, then filled another for himself.

“Get yourself outside this, lad, and you’ll have another. Now sit you down and tell me why you risked your life to join me this night.” “My lord count did, after all, invite me,” said Sir Djaimz, bluntly. “He offered to teach me, to make me into a true knight and soldier, not simply one of Duchess Ann’s lapdogs.”

“You’d forsake your sinecure then, Sir Djaimz? I am certain that Duke Alex would’ve taken you into his army, if you’ve just a taste for the life of a soldier. Then you’d have still had the good graces of her grace to fall back upon, if you chose to return. By coming to me, man, you’ve burned your bridges behind you, with a vengeance… unless…” Martuhn rested his elbows on the table and, with hooded eyes, stared at his blanket-wrapped guest over steepled fingers. “Unless you are doing your mistress’ bidding by coming here. Are you, Sir Djaimz?”

When the young man made to speak, Martuhn raised a hand in warning. “Wait, before you say a word, I do not hold it dishonorable to perform the dictates of one’s overlord… or lady, as the case may be. But if you are doing such by coming here, tell me now and I’ll have you put outside tomorrow morn in health and honor.

“For if you say not and I later discover the lie—as I will eventually—you will die very slowly and painfully in humiliation and dishonor, as befits a spy and a forsworn liar.

“Do I make myself clear, Sir Djaimz?”

The head of water-plastered hair sticking out from amid the folds of the gray military blanket nodded wearily. “Abundantly clear, my lord count, but all that I shall tell you will be the unadorned truth. I swear this by all that I hold dear. I have done many things for her grace, a few of them of a base nature, but I have never and would never perjure myself for her… or for any other man or woman.

“Lord count, I am born of that class now known as ‘the Old Nobility.’ My late father owned twenty-five thousand acres of rich farm and pasture lands, woodlands and fish ponds. When I was barely three years old, Duke Tcharlz dispossessed my house of all, save only our hall and our town-house in Twocityport, neither of which we could afford to staff and keep up without the income from lands that were no longer ours. Our estate was parceled out to the serfs who had worked it. The duke freely gave these rural scum title to that which should have been the patrimony of me and my brothers. “My father died shortly after he had been plundered, in an ill-conceived attempt to exact a measure of vengeance from the flesh of Duke Tcharlz. My widowed mother and my brothers and I were taken in by Duchess Ann, who is a distant cousin of my house. My brothers and I were reared in her court, fed and clothed, educated, trained and equipped by her charity.” Martuhn felt his heart go out to the young knight. He too knew how it felt to be bereft of lands by a greedy overlord, to be cast into a hostile world with only his wits and the strength of his sword arm to sustain him… but he was also Duke Tcharlz’s man and must try to defend the actions of his overlord, no matter how reprehensible.

“Sir Djaimz, your class fought Duke Tcharlz—openly and in secret ways—at every turn, almost from the day of his ascension. He had no choice but to break them, render away their wealth and strength. Nor was that all; to your late father’s generation, the men and women who actually worked the land were little better than slaves, lived far worse than slaves in most cases and often starved even when the harvest was good, which was damned poor incentive to work hard, you must admit. Since his grace broke up the estates and parceled out the land to those serfs and their sons and a scattering of old soldiers, yields have doubled and redoubled to the point that no one who is willing and able to work starves any longer. And this duchy, which formerly was obliged to import beer and ale now ejrports both, to the vast profit of a large proportion of the folk of the duchy, directly or indirectly. Why, his grace…” Now it was Sir Djaimz who held up a hand. “Hold, my lord, please hold. You need not waste your time in convincing me. A few weeks agone, yes, but not now. There is an-other side to the duke, this I have always known, though I have long pushed that knowledge to the back of my mind.

“Even though my father tried to take his life, and, in fact, wounded him sorely, five years later the duke saw to it that my mother was paid a good price for Stylz Hall and the acreage hard by it. Furthermore, at his own expense, he had every stick of remaining furniture, paintings, carpets, every movable of value, carted to our townhouse in Twocityport. Would a true tyrant, an ogre such as the duke is painted by Duchess Ann and her court, have done so much for the widow of an enemy? I think not.

“When first Duke Alex arrived, I—along with the duchess and all the rest of the court—welcomed him, hailed him as a liberator, a savior… but I have had reason to reconsider. Using as excuse that there is nowhere nearby the citadel to set up his tents, this unbearable man has quartered his men and officers on every household in the Upper City, to be housed, clothed, fed and… entertained, with no hope of any reimbursement. By this time, I doubt there’s a girl or a woman of the lesser gentry or the commoners between the ages of ten and sixty who has not been raped at least once. Yet Duke Alex merely laughs off any complaints for redress, and the duchess dotes on him. cannot praise and honor him and his pack of raping, thieving, guzzling cutthroats enough. I can but be thankful that my own poor mother is dead, for she was a comely woman. “The Stylz townhouse, the last single piece of real property left to me and my brothers, was one of the row of buildings Duke Alex chose to raze to provide him material for that wretched little useless wall of his. But, to add insult to injury, he and his officers trooped through my house and all the others just prior to the demolition and had them stripped of anything that caught their eyes or fancies.

“When, they would have forcibly prevented such blatant thievery, both my younger brothers were cut down, coldly butchered. I was in attendance on the duchess at the time, but neighbors and servants apprised me of these atrocities. By the time a messenger fetched me and I got back to what had been my home, it was fast on the way to becoming a heap of rubble.

“My just complaint to the duchess brought from her the answer that I and every other soul in her cities and lands were hers to do with as she wished, and that my poor brothers had been criminals for attempting to save our possessions from Duke Alex. That night, trying to sleep in the mean quarters assigned me by the palace majordomo, I began to compare the two dukes—Tcharlz and Alex—and to sift through the lies and distortions that had been my daily fare for most of my life.

“After some week or more of soul-searching, I thought upon you and your offer to one who had treated you with naught save contumely. I thought me that I had wasted enough of my life in service to a blind hatred of a man who had truly done much good for the duchy and who, even at his worst, was far and away a better man, a more just and honorable man, a more noble man in all senses than his rival will ever be.

“Had his grace been at Pirates’ Folly, I should have hied me there to humbly beg that I be allowed to enter his service in any capacity he might deem fitting. But he is on campaign downriver, so I came to you, my lord. Will you have me?” Sir Djaimz’s mind, because he possessed no scintilla of telepathic ability, was as an open book to Martuhn, and nowhere in the roil of confused thoughts could the captain sense that the young knight was trying to delude him. He decided to add this former foe to his staff for a while. When he had proved himself, he could be trained for duties of a military nature. In his final instructions to Captain Count Martuhn, Duke Tcharlz had bluntly granted his surrogate much latitude in defense of the citadel. “Martuhn, as matters sit that city is not worth a pinch of cow shit to me; most of its residents cleave to that fat bitch and hate my guts, despite all I’ve done and tried to do for them. So don’t be afraid to bombard or even fire the city, if it comes to that. You’ll hear no complaints from me. The damned palace, too, for all I care!

“I would prefer that the cables and the docks remain more or less intact, but if push comes to shove, cut the frigging cables and render the docks to gravel and splinters. If you wish I’ll put all this in writing, legally witnessed and sealed, that there be no misunderstanding.”

Martuhn had taken his overlord up on that last offer and the written, witnessed and sealed orders now reposed in his strongbox, in the hollow under a certain stone in the floor of his tower room. And for this reason, he had no compunction in ordering the engines to return fire against the cleverly concealed enemy engines at the edge of the bluff.

After a day of being too busy dodging stone shards or bouncing boulders or the collapses of battered-down house walls to get many missiles launched at the citadel, the engineers of Duke Alex elected to recommence by night. After all, they knew the distance and direction, so there was scant need to actually see the target.

Their first boulder produced Martuhn’s first casualty of the siege when it knocked down a merlon which, in falling, broke the leg and crushed to paste the foot of a sentry. It was then that Martuhn decided to teach the enemy not to repeat this night’s work.

Fifteen minutes after their initial loosings, the engineers atop the bluff heard the long-drawn-out creakings, then the basso thuummpps, and cringed despite themselves, recalling the carnage and destruction of the past day. But no single stone fell among them. Rather a hail of red-glowing, hissing, spluttering, fire-tailed pitchballs passed high over them to fall onto and around the palace. After the first volley of pitch-balls came a second, a third and then a fourth.

No more missiles were thrown at the citadel that night or on the day following. The engineers and every other man, woman and child, slave or free, were far too busy trying to prevent the city from burning to the ground. Two months to the day after he had landed with his army on the beach north of Tworivercity, Alex, Duke of Traders-town, sat alone in a room of the south wing of the singed and charred palace chewing at his thumb in a high dudgeon. He and the army were in serious trouble, and well he knew it. His support within the city was fading away like morning dew under a hot sun, and even Duchess Ann was beginning to whine at him.

“No wonder,” he thought, “that Tcharlz keeps so far away from her. Were the fat slug my wife, had I wed her instead of her sister, I’d likely have slit her damned gullet by now, and shut her yapping mouth for good. Tcharlz must have far more patience than have I.”

Absently, Alex chose a strip of jerked meat from a plate before him and gnawed at the hard, stringy stuff. It was about all the victuals that he or anyone else in the city would have until supplies from Traderstown could be gotten to him. The supplies he had brought with him and those received shortly thereafter had mostly gone up in the same smoke that had taken almost all the stores of the city on the night the engines of that accursed citadel had fired so many buildings.

When his big yellow teeth had worried off a chewable piece of the jerky, he masticated for a while, then sipped from a goblet of honey wine to dilute the salt and mask the abominable flavor of the meat And his mood was as foul as his repast; servants and retainers tiptoed past the open doors to the room, for he had already injured one man with a thrown dagger. Duke Alex was by now convinced that all the world had turned against him. The damned little fort down yonder refused to surrender, refused to face the fact that Duke Alex held the city. Due to the high level of the groundwater in the Lower Town, the fortification could not be properly invested. None of his many and varied attempts to pound down the walls of this thorn in his side had been successful, and now he and his staff were loath to even try, again; should they, they feared that the satanic bastard who commanded might very well finish the burning down of the upper city.

Even his ally the King of Mehmfiz, that craven little fart Uyr, was turning against him, reneging on his sworn word. The plan had been for him to leave behind sufficient force to hold Tcharlz and his forces in the south, then to sail upriver with the bulk of his men and. attack from the dock area, while Alex attacked from the landward side. But the puling bastard had never sailed upriver, and each succeeding message from the forsworn scoundrel was more evasive than the last.

Nor had the coward even been able to hold Tcharlz in the south as he had promised to do. Tcharlz himself had been identified leading the strong force of dragoons, lancers and irregulars that had captured or destroyed three of the last five supply trains bound for the city, had eradicated smaller patrols of Duke Alex’s cavalry and had fought pitched battles with larger bodies. The weather had become frightful, freezing cold long before its time, with little cordwood and less charcoal and no way to secure more. So many officers and men of his army had been assaulted or murdered in the streets recently that they were now forbidden to venture abroad in lesser numbers than a full squad, by day or by night, nor had salutary executions of suspects or hostages picked at random seemed to do any good. It was become very difficult to feed the horses properly, and the beasts were, moreover, beginning to disappear. His own favorite stallion had been taken from a guarded stable; later the animal’s glossy hide and a few of the larger bones had been found on a midden pile. Watching the stable guards die slowly had done little to assuage his grief.

So sorely beset, Alex was no longer sleeping well. He was drinking more than had been his wont, which meant that when sleep he did, he invariably wakened red-eyed, with throbbing head and queasy stomach and nerves taut as the ropes of a catapult. The rough and paltry food available even to him had so addled his belly that he alternated between painful constipation and debilitating diarrhea. Why would not that damned little fort surrender? He had offered generous and handsome terms, all refused.

A few hours later, Duke Alex watched in impotent rage as Duke Tcharlz and his horsemen swept down upon the southbound supply train, butchered guards and drivers alike, then drove off the wagons and carts in triumph. And still later that dreadful day, he gazed dejectedly from a window of the palace to the square below, where citizens and his own soldiers fought like starveling dogs for the basketloads of offal and refuse hurled into the city by the engines of the citadel.

For the sake of his slipping hold on sanity, it was perhaps as well that Alex, Duke of Traderstown, was not aware that his real troubles had not yet begun.