"Shields!" The call rang out, and somewhere down the line Balthasar was blowing on a whistle. The front line brought their shields up, while the later ranks lifted them high overhead. Arrows fell among them, dropping men indiscriminately. Waldor had his own shield lifted, standing somewhere in the front ranks, eyes for the fortress walls ahead. He barely recognized that, somewhere behind him, five men had already fell screaming.
"Advance!" Waldor shouted, hearing Balthasar's whistle take up his order - two quick, sharp tinny sounds. The company surged forward at a run as more arrows fell. Seven more men fell to arrows, trampled underfoot as the unit surged forward toward the stone walls. And what when they get there? Ropes and hooks? It was a prospect he hadn't even liked joking about, and now here they -- He spotted one of the few siege engines nearby, pushed flush up against the stone, already feeding men to the battlements high above. A wave of his sword, and another screamed order, and his men turned toward it like a shoal of fish, their mail glittering like scales.
The siege engine was cramped and overcrowded when they reached it. Men filtered up the covered rampways, all jostling elbows and curses and panting and prayers. Then - the walls, spilling onto the battlements. Waldor stumbled as someone behind him shoved, regained his balance, then forced his way back toward the front of the lines. Men ahead. Sword raised, Waldor charged the enemy lines - and his men, forced to keep up with their king, followed. A man who had run beside him, shield raised to shield Waldor, fell noiselessly as another arrow took him in the throat. And then the man to his left crumpled as an axe crunched into his midsection. Waldor killed with his sword, and watched men die around him, but nothing touched him.
Then a hand grasped his shoulder and yanked him backwards. Men formed around him, protecting him - some with their lives. He was pulled back to the siege engine. Their charge had been arrested; they were retreating. But then they were reforming, and reinforcements were scaling the siege tower again, and they were surging into the enemies for another go. Twenty of his original hundred were already gone: dead or wounded. Militia from a nearby tower fired down onto the scene, sewing more chaos. They retreated again, rallied, pushed forwards. A counter-attack: twenty more men dead in a few minutes of fighting, three of them taken in the back as they fled to safer ground. Waldor, again, shielded by their bodies - unscathed, screaming hate at everything that was within sword's reach, feeling a familiar terror grip him. Two siege towers burning nearby. He could smell the smoke, and hear the roar of the waves in the distance, crashing against rocks.
"Again!" His voice was going; he was already hoarse from shouting out commands, and Balthasar was nowhere in sight - though the familiar sound of his whistle cut through the din, so Walt knew he wasn't dead yet. But eleven more men were, lost somewhere as the company retreated from the battlements toward a smaller fortification, one the Southern League still held. More siege towers burning, as Waldor wrenched his sword free from the body of a young man. They'd lost more ground, had to scale the towers again. The rampways streamed blood, and were slippery underfoot. Waldor stumbled again, wild-eyed and grimacing, and the company overtook him, surged past him. But then, like the tide, his men returned before he could even reach them - some of them carrying men slung over their shoulders, or dragging the wounded, or wounded themselves and stumbling past. He watched them, looked ahead - just enemies there.
He hesitated, a part of him longing to rush suicidally forward, but sense and self-preservation prevailed.
"Retreat!"
They pulled the wounded, the dying, and the dead they had recovered down from the walls, through the siege towers that remained, streaming out toward their encampments. Waldor's armor was torn and rent, his body stained with blood - none of it his own, but much of it familiar. Deep, rasping breaths. The breeze on his face when they reached camp: a balm in the uncanny calm that settled over him. A quiet broken by the screams of the injured. A -
"Walt? Walt? You've been staring at the sea for the last half hour, Your Majesty. Did you hear what I'd said?"
Waldor snapped out of it and looked to the side where Balthasar stood, still in his scarred armor. Walt had changed hours ago, before they'd even purchased the ferry back to Fissoa, but his captain hadn't had that luxury. The mustachioed man carried a scroll.
"Twenty of us came through the battle - mostly the veterans. About ten more have since recovered. That leaves twenty men... unaccounted for, as of yet. The rest are dead. We don't have the bodies, though, so we'll have to offer their widows - or mothers, whichever it is - an extra month of pay. It's in the contract. And that'll be expensive. A hundred gold, at least, to do it right. And these were all my men, even the new ones. It should be done right."
Waldor leaned against the side of the ferry and closed his eyes.
"Double it," he murmured after a moment, opened his eyes, then pushed straight. He reached over to clap Balthasar on the shoulder, held it a moment, then lowered his arm. "And throw in an extra five gold per child, for the ones with families. I'm going to see the wounded."
"See the wounded" amounted to strolling across the deck and climbing down through a small trapdoor into Hell. The lower deck of the ferry was covered with bodies - wounded, mostly, though a few now were draped in their cloaks. They'd be kept for as long as the smell stayed down. When the breeze died, though, the dead would be sent overboard with prayers and apologies. Most of them wouldn't mind, he thought, since it meant extra gold to their loved ones.
Waldor made his way along the rows of blankets and pallets, stopping here and there to offer some quiet encouragement, or confident banter. The Lurians were dogs, he agreed. And the Barcans - not so bad after all. Just look at them fight. And Fissoa? Fissoan men chew stone - everyone knows that. Why else all these damn sieges? Fissoans love walls. They love tearing them down. And, passing a man who cried out, his bandages soiled and his leg gone: Nasia will protect your children. To another, who begged his forgiveness: You've done well. Rest. And another, who just stared at him as the light died in his eyes: You stand at Nemordiabel's side. Go knowing you've fought well for Fissoa, and for your king.
The words were ash in his throat.
Later, in his own quarters, Waldor undressed and sat on the edge of the bed, a sheet of paper laid across his lap and quill in his hand. He wrote clumsily, but sincerely, a torrent of words that he later would palm off on his scribe with the instructions to send it as soon as their birds got their bearing.
