Chapter Four

 

 

The feasting had been sublime. The warriors’ flesh had been lean and tender, and their blood had been maddening in its potency. Its sweetness had filled the victors with dark fires of animal rage and they had fought and rutted and lost themselves in a blood-soaked orgy that had lasted for days.

There had been so much meat after the slaughter that every single member of the herd had filled its belly. Even the pathetic, almost human things that skulked around the edges had eaten their fill of man-flesh, squabbling for precedence over remains which their betters had been too glutted to eat.

Alone amongst the thousands, Gulkroth had shown some restraint. While his lords lost themselves in the bestial excess that surged around the battlefield, and whilst his shamans, as gorged as ticks on blood, had used their gluttony to launch themselves into the terrible abysses of their nightmarish visions, Gulkroth had eaten sparingly and thought.

He had had the body of the humans’ lord brought to them. The meat was old and stringy, but that didn’t matter. Its heart was strong, and its liver was rich with wisdom. Human wisdom.

In the midst of the carnival Gulkroth sat and thought. Occasionally one of his herd would come too close or smell wrong or look at him. When that happened he killed with a natural savage joy, glorying in the power that warped through his veins and the effortless slicing of his fangs through hide and muscle and bone.

For the most part, though, he sat and thought. If he could have, he would have withdrawn his herd into the dark reaches of the forest, but he knew that to do so would have been to court mutiny. There would be no reasoning with any of his kind until the tide of their victory had ebbed away and the flames of their bloodlust had burned down to ash.

It wasn’t until the second night, after he’d had time to digest the human’s liver, that he began to summon his lieutenants.

Viles had been one of the first he had called. He had led the charge of his brother centigors into the humans’ wavering flanks, and had been feasting ever since. The man-flesh had kept him awake and wracked him with an almost unbearable energy which he had burned off in wide, wild gallops through the forest. His hide was torn and studded with thorns, but neither that pain nor the glorious waves of blood-fuelled euphoria that surged through him did much to allay his fear.

Gulkroth was the beast lord, and to be summoned to his presence was enough to send the musk of fear spraying down anybody’s tail.

The messenger led Viles into the forest. His eyes adjusted to the gloom, and in the perfect darkness the blurred outlines of the trees emerged, green-tinted against shades too deep for even his eyes to penetrate.

But he hardly needed to see. The scent of the urine with which the beast lord had marked his territory was unmistakable. Even here, on the outskirts of the forest, the terrifying musk of it was a rich enough stink to cut through the smell of ripening corpses and the horde which even now feasted upon them.

When the smell had become almost unbearable, the messenger who had summoned Viles fell to the floor in a position of grovelling submission.

“Viles,” a voice barked from the darkness, and the centigor found his hooves carrying him forwards into the clearing. His lord had carved it from the forest as easily as a maggot burrows into flesh, and the smashed vegetation that lay underfoot was littered with bones and rotten flesh.

Despite the darkness Viles’ night vision was strong enough to make out his lord’s silhouette. The goat legs were as sturdy as trunks, and the great sweep of his horns looked as high and as wide as the branches above. He was one of the most massive of his breed, but it wasn’t his physical bulk that buckled Viles’ knees in automatic submission. It was the burning glitter of his eyes, bright in the darkness.

They seemed like twin stars against the blackness of the void, and in the vertical slashes of the pupils Viles could see the life and the death of his entire herd. As he knelt amongst the ruin of his lord’s presence Viles knew in every twisted fibre of his being that the creature which studied him through those eyes was the only real thing in a world composed of shadows.

“Viles,” the lord asked, the growl of his voice so deep that it resonated within the confines of Viles’ own skull. “I want to know about the humans’ greatest town. The one where their lord sits behind high stone walls, waiting for us like a maggot in a corpse.”

“I know a little of it, lord,” Viles said, his voice an insignificant squeak. “It lies a day’s march away from the nearest forest.”

“Go. Find out exactly where it is. Find out how many humans enter and leave, find out how high the walls are, and whether water flows into or out of it. Find out how many animals are in the fields outside of it, and how much feed is brought into it. And find a way for us to arrive at it secretly. Do you understand?”

“Yes, lord,” Viles whispered.

“Then take your people and go. Return in one week, and tell me all that I have asked to know.”

Viles found that his voice had deserted him. With a whimper he backed away from his lord and, once clear of that terrible gaze, he bolted into the darkness.

When he had gone Gulkroth beckoned his servant forwards and bade him go and rouse the shamans. He would need them to inflict his will upon the herd when they were ready to be driven forwards, and as always the shamans would be the echoes of his own voice.

 

The baron’s council chamber was as clean, spartan and functional as the man himself. A single trestle table ran down the length of the hall. On one side glazed windows looked out over Hergig. The city’s red-tiled roofs seemed to huddle around the palace like sheep around a shepherd when the wolves are nearby.

On the wall opposite the windows there were half a dozen boards. Maps had been fastened to them. Maps, and projections, and rotas, and graphs and all the other paperwork of modern warfare.

It was an overcast morning outside, and the light which streamed in through the windows was heavy and leaden. So were the faces of the men who sat around the table. To take his mind off his own troubles Ganamedes, the scholar who had advised the baron for the past ten years, studied the assembled commanders.

Colonel Viksberg was a particularly interesting specimen. He was sweating despite the chill, and his eyes flitted constantly between Provost Marshal Steckler and the door. For his part Steckler had been staring at Viksberg since the man had entered the room, his gaze still and predatory.

Ganamedes knew why. He had been there when Steckler had asked the baron for permission to arrest Viksberg for burning down the hospital.

It had been a truly horrendous attack. The fire had been started amongst the most helpless patients, and as they had roasted so had the sisters who had gone to help them. Almost a hundred people had died, and it could have been a lot worse. Only Steckler’s timely arrival had seen the flames doused before they could spread beyond the hospital complex.

At first everybody had suspected that the enemy had had a hand in the crime. It was only when Steckler, conscientious as always, had interrogated the porters and one of the surviving sisters that the truth had emerged.

But by then a scapegoat had already been found and the baron had decided, quite rightly, that no purpose would be served by destroying the reputation of one of Hochland’s few heroes. And so Viksberg, all unknowingly, had been spared.

Ganamedes watched the arsonist squirm beneath Steckler’s unrelenting gaze. Eventually, perhaps after the war, the provost marshal would be let off his leash and allowed to exact an appropriate punishment. Until that happy day they all had other things to worry about.

“The Baron Aldebrand Ludenhof of Hochland!” the herald cried, and everybody leapt to their feet. A dozen pairs of heels clicked together, and a dozen heads bowed.

“Sit down,” the baron told them and took his own place at the head of the table. He was a lean, well-muscled man with a neatly waxed scalp. He moved with the clipped, controlled energy of the professional soldier he had been before he fought, schemed and married his way up to his present rank.

Quite an achievement, Ganamedes thought as his baron gestured down the table. Quite a man to serve. And quite a one to betray.

He shrugged off the shiver of guilt and fiddled with his pipe to calm himself.

“Provost marshal, you first.” The baron pointed down the table. “What’s the situation?”

“We have lost an entire army,” Steckler said.

“I think we know that, provost marshal,” Ludenhof said with a dangerous spark of impatience.

“Of course, my lord. But I think that it bears repeating. At the moment we have full granaries. We also have adequate supplies of hay, blackpowder, hemp, canvas, edged and pole weapons, cured wood and everything else we need. We have twelve great cannon from Nuln, good maps and perfect campaigning weather. What we don’t have is enough men.”

Steckler paused, letting this sink in as he looked around the table.

“If estimates are to be believed,” he continued, turning a sceptical eye towards Viksberg, “we are facing a force of perhaps fifty thousand beastmen, each one created by the Dark Gods for no other reason than our destruction. Even if we don’t believe those estimates, we know what these creatures are capable of against a man, and we know that we are outnumbered.”

“We are always outnumbered by the foul things,” one of the regimental colonels cut in. “That doesn’t matter. We have the discipline and technology to deal with them. With Sigmar’s help, we will prevail.”

There was a chorus of assent from around the council chamber, and the cups bounced on the table as the man’s brother officers banged the table in applause. Steckler waited for the noise to die down before he continued.

“I’m sure that General Count von Brechthold thought the same. Right up until the point where he and his entire army were devoured.”

It was Ludenhof who broke the ensuing silence.

“Well, Steckler?” he demanded. “What are you doing about it?”

“Militias have already been raised in all of our major towns, and of course in Hergig itself. We have also sent word out through our couriers to the free companies, although I don’t hold much hope in that direction. By the time the mercenaries arrive, things are likely to have been settled one way or another. There is also one more possibility, as your lordship knows.”

“Out with it, man.”

“Although we haven’t always seen eye-to-eye with our neighbours they do share a border with us, and it would be in their interests as well as our own to deal with this situation. They have sizeable state forces, and deep purses. If we could prevail upon them to send us some troops…”

“They would come, that’s for sure. But I doubt if they’d leave. What do you think, Ganamedes?”

Ganamedes, who had been lost in his own private thoughts, was startled enough to answer abruptly.

“I think that the beasts are the enemy of all mankind. The threat they pose to us, to all of us, is far more important than the petty squabbles of princes.”

Ludenhof snorted.

“Be thankful I know the value of honest advisors,” he said. “But petty or not, I have no intention of letting that bastard from Ostland station his troops on my land. Not the one from Middenland either.”

“Even so,” Steckler risked pressing the point, “we are dangerously lacking in manpower. Not only that, but the harvest is only a couple of months away. Then we’ll be faced with the choice between keeping the population under arms and gathering the year’s wheat.”

Ludenhof looked out of the windows. Across the gabled roofs of his city and beyond the ordered green squares of the farms beyond, the low line of the forest lay in the distance. It sidled across the horizon like some great animal getting ready to pounce.

“Your advice is good, but the political situation prevents me from taking it.” He nodded to Steckler, who sat down. “Now, Ganamedes. What news of the enemy?”

The scholar tapped the bowl of his ivory pipe on the table to hide his unease. It wasn’t what he could tell his baron that so troubled him. It was what he couldn’t tell him. The guilt that had begun to gnaw into him made him angry as well as nervous. It wasn’t fair. When all was said and done, a man had a right to save his own skin.

“The beasts are numbered between ten and fifty thousand, depending on the source. Captain Freimann of the long rifles estimates that we are facing perhaps twenty thousand, although he only made that estimate at my insistence.”

“What do you mean, ‘only at your insistence’?” the baron asked.

“I mean that he and his men have been skirmishing with such creatures for long enough to know how well they can hide themselves. To be honest, I am more concerned about reports of how they are behaving. There have been hardly any of the attacks on smaller settlements that we would have expected.”

“Then how can you have any information about how they fight?” one of the officers asked.

“Not how they fight. How they are organised. They should have dispersed by now, one herd attacking this village, another that town.”

“You seem almost to regret their lack of murderous spirit.” Ludenhof raised an eyebrow.

“I do,” Ganamedes told him. “Had they split up, we could have dealt with them one herd at a time. As it is…” He trailed off as the door opened and a messenger entered. He looked nervously around the room before handing the baron a scroll.

“Well, gentlemen,” Ludenhof said at length. “It seems that we will soon see exactly how many of the enemy there are. According to this, they will be outside the city walls within two days. Return to your regiments, make sure your men are assembled, armed and sober, and await further instructions. And remember, gentlemen. Sigmar is with us. We will prevail.”

For a moment Ganamedes almost believed. But of course, there could never be a real victory. He knew that now, even if nobody else did.

 

It took Erikson almost a day to bribe, bully and bluff his way into the provost marshal’s presence. He found him in the catacomb of rooms that lay beneath the baron’s palace, fighting to bring order to a lamplit chaos of messengers and applicants and stores being brought in or sent out.

“Herr Steckler.” Erikson recognised him by the authoritative boom of his voice as much as by his marshal’s baton. “Provost marshal. I am here at your service.”

Steckler, who had been sweating over a pile of requisition slips, looked up, his face set in the fierce expression of a man who does not want to be disturbed.

“Who are you?” he demanded.

“Free Captain Erikson,” Erikson told him. “Late of Praag, Bretonnia and Nuln. Me and my company heard that we might be of service.”

The scowl on Steckler’s face vanished.

“I’m very pleased to make your acquaintance,” he said, and shook Erikson’s hand. Although his hand was plump his grip was hard. “How many men do you bring with you?”

“One hundred and sixty,” Erikson exaggerated politely. “All fit, healthy and ready for battle.”

“Only a hundred and sixty,” Steckler said, disappointed. “And how are they trained? I have heard good things about these pikes you free companies are so fond of.”

“My former company had pikes,” Erikson told him, “but I found them to be unwieldy on the turn. Unless you have blocks of at least five hundred, they leave you vulnerable on the flanks and to the rear.”

“Yes, I suppose they would do,” Steckler agreed, his gaze slipping past Erikson to a chain of men who were throwing small barrels from hand to hand. “No, don’t throw them to each other, you damned fools!” he bellowed. “Pass them! Do you want to blow us all up?”

“So I take it that you will need our services?” Erikson asked. “It is just that the men are eager to take their new quarters and resume training. We are also road-weary.”

“But what did you say they… what? What is it now?”

The provost marshal turned as a messenger rushed up the hallway.

“It’s the baron, sir. He wants to know if the black-powder has been issued yet, and exactly how much we have in reserve.”

“I will come and see him myself,” Steckler decided. “As for you, captain, one hundred and sixty men are worth rations as available, ten crowns a month each, and their share of any and all booty.”

“Ah, but I don’t suppose that there will be any booty against the force we are facing,” Erikson said.

“I’m not going to argue,” Steckler told him, that impatience resurfacing. “Do you want the commission or not?”

“I do.” Erikson clicked his heels and bowed.

“Berndt. Berndt! Give him a free company contract for a hundred and sixty men at arms. Then give him a week’s rations, and quarter them in Fish Market Square. Captain, I will send somebody to inspect your company in the morning. We will have need of it soon.”

Erikson bowed again as Steckler marched off, pursued by a gaggle of assistants and messengers that followed him like chicks after a mother hen.

“You’d better follow me,” a voice said. Erikson, who had been lost in calculations of what might happen when his men were inspected, looked down to find a small, rounded man in a sackcloth robe.

“Why would I follow you?” Erikson asked him, and the man rolled his eyes theatrically.

“Didn’t you hear the provost marshal? I am to sign you up. Although why anybody would want to sign up after what happened to von Brechthold’s army, I have no idea.”

“No,” Erikson said, “I suppose you don’t.”

After completing the formalities Erikson took his contract, the company’s ration charter and the proclamation granting him the freedom of the Fish Market Square.

“We need weapons, too,” he told the clerk.

“I wasn’t told to issue weapons,” he complained.

“Yes you were. You were told to provision us. Weapons are provisions.”

“No, no that’s not… oh,” the clerk paused as Erikson shook his hand and pressed a coin into it. The clerk turned it over just enough to see the flash of silver before continuing.

“Now that you mention it, of course weapons are provisions. Here, take this chit to the armoury. They will give you something in that line, although I don’t know what they have left. There is a war on, you know.”

“Yes,” Erikson agreed happily. “There is.”

Then he left to find his men, who awaited him at the gaol.

 

They were not a sight to inspire confidence in a commander who was about to have his company inspected. They lay slouched around the yard, stooped with either fatigue, starvation or instinctive idleness.

Erikson fought back the instinct to bark them into attention. Instead he found the old man who had claimed to have once been a halberdier sergeant. He found him leaning against a wall. He was perhaps fifty, Erikson judged, and he had a face that seemed to have been lined with every hard year he had lived. The wrinkles were like the rings of a fallen oak, although he wasn’t fallen. Not yet.

His hair was grey but still thick, an inexpertly cut mane that stuck out in all directions, and his tunic was cut off at the sleeves to reveal sinewy forearms which were darkened with old tattoos. Erikson recognised none of them, but he had seen a thousand like them over the years. They were glorious tangles of weapons, animals, banners. Regimental numbers where names should have been.

“Is it true that you were a sergeant in the regiments?” Erikson asked him.

“Aye, it’s true,” the old man replied, and regarded his new captain with all the respect one would accord a dog begging for food.

“In that case,” Erikson told him, his voice as soft as his eyes were hard, “you’ll know that you should be standing to attention when an officer addresses you.”

The yard around them fell silent as the assembled convicts, who had been surreptitiously watching Erikson ever since he had returned, stared at the scene.

“Officers,” the old man turned the word into a sneer, “they are a curse on all of us.”

Erikson gazed at him, his yellow eyes hard as topaz. The old man didn’t flinch.

Good.

“No,” he said at last. “Indiscipline is a curse on all of us. Ever seen a square break? Ever seen a formation have its flank turned, or its standard abandoned, or disintegrate in panic before a charge?”

“Yes,” the old man replied simply.

“Then you’ll know that that’s bad enough when you’re fighting men.” Erikson lowered his voice and leaned forwards conspiratorially. “But imagine how it will be if we break before those things. They will devour us. All of us.”

For the first time the old man looked away. He spat onto the cobbles and sighed.

“You may have a point,” he allowed.

“Then help me to pull this rabble together into something with a chance of surviving on the battlefield. We will stand together or we will die alone. You were a soldier. A sergeant. You must know that.”

“I do indeed, captain,” the old man replied. His voice was heavy with sarcasm, and the salute he gave when pushing himself off the wall was sloppy enough to be an insult. Erikson didn’t mind. He returned it with a click of his heels and a perfectly executed thump to his own chest which could have come straight from a military manual.

“Glad to hear it, sergeant,” he said, his voice once more loud enough to echo. “You’ll keep your old rank of course. What’s your name?”

“Alter, captain,” he replied, forgetting to inject a note of sarcasm into his voice this time.

“Very well, Sergeant Alter,” Erikson said, voice booming. “Fall the men into six ranks, if you would be so kind.”

And in that moment it seemed that about twenty years rolled off the slopes of Alter’s shoulders and evaporated from the cynical depths of his eyes. When he went to address his comrades it was with the aggressive, game-cock confidence of the born NCO.

Erikson watched him work with a mixture of approval and relief. He heckled and cajoled and persuaded the men into the beginnings of their first formation, and he did it with consummate skill, knowing who to encourage and who to coerce. One little knot of men in particular seemed unwilling to join the formation.

“You can play at bloody soldiers if you want to,” said their leader. “All I want is out.”

Alter’s range of expressions wouldn’t have shamed a pantomime. Disbelief turned to horror which just as rapidly turned to rage. He leant forwards with the barely controlled aggression of a fighting dog on a leash, strong yellow teeth bared as he stepped so close to his recalcitrant recruit that the man was forced to take a step backwards, then another. He stopped when he was pressed up to the wall.

“Listen carefully,” Alter told him, although the volume was such that only a deaf man could have misheard. “I want you in the front rank, facing the gate and standing in whatever approximation to attention you can manage. If you don’t I will tear off your head. I will piss down your neck. And I will enjoy doing it.”

The man swallowed nervously and looked at his companions for encouragement. There was none to be had. They were already sidling away towards the ragged formation that was taking shape almost as though they had been meaning to all along.

“Why aren’t you moving?” Alter’s voice was so high-pitched that it was almost a scream. “Go. Go, go, go.”

Whether it was because of the desertion of his comrades or the insane glitter in his persecutor’s eyes, the man went. Alter hurried along until he broke into a run. By then those who weren’t already standing in one of the lines were trying to find their positions. Nobody wanted to be the next to be chased around the yard.

It took another five minutes, and as Erikson watched he remembered an old bow maker who had plied his trade in some other war. He had spent his days patiently working the knots out of dried sinews so that he could separate the threads and then weave them back into a whole. Alter, it seemed, had a similar skill, and by the time he had finished the rabble of convicts had been transformed into something that could loosely be described as six ranks.

“Thank you, sergeant,” he said as Alter evened out the last two lines. In time he would choose section leaders for each group of ten, but for now all he wanted was to be able to keep them in one group.

“A good beginning, gentlemen,” he told them, and he meant it. Already some were starting to look like soldiers. Not many, it was true, but it was a start. “Today we will go to find our new quarters. Does anybody know where Fish Market Square is?”

“I do, captain,” an enthusiastic voice rang out, and Erikson wasn’t surprised to see the red-headed youngster who had been so keen to fight yesterday.

“What’s your name, soldier?” Erikson asked him, and the lad’s pigeon chest swelled with pride at being addressed thus.

“It’s Randolf, captain, although everybody calls me Dolf. And I can lead you to Fish Market Square, no problem.”

“Good man,” Erikson told him. “Secondly, is anybody hungry?”

This time there was a much more enthusiastic chorus, and Erikson grinned.

“Then we will march first to the armoury then to the store house, then to our quarters. Then we will eat. And when I say march, I mean march. How’s that done, Sergeant Alter?”

“By the left, captain,” Alter bellowed.

“Instruct them, if you would be so kind.”

And so, in the gloomy confines of their prison yard, Sergeant Alter put the Gentleman’s Free Company of Hergig through its first drill.