Forest For The Trees (Book 3) (17 page)

Marik, holding his silence, agreed with Dietrik’s
assessment.  He propped his confiscated sword against his right shoulder. 
Trask had made a dramatic issue of it being the exact same type that they would
face if they were sent against the Tullainian invaders.

These men were dismal.  Over half were an outright
joke.  They made the pathetic hopefuls who appeared outside Kingshome’s walls
for entrance trials look accomplished.

To be fair, a handful took the matter seriously. 
These were the men who had not been scouted during the tournament.  They had
joined of their own accord, inquiring at the army’s recruitment buildings over
the last year.  Each one concentrated on their moves, used their motion to
better effectiveness, listened hard to each appraisal instead of merely their
own, and kept a cool head during the spar.

Marik had no idea what to make of the lot.  Only knew
that any plans for the kingdom’s western defenses would certainly not be
centered around their newest soldiers.

Trask called three men forward this time.  Apparently
he thought that might provide a greater challenge to the mercenary.  The
captain, Marik reflected, must be experiencing a wash of emotions behind that
stone mask.  Among them, Trask probably felt irritated that his men, whom he
had been attempting to train, were losing in humiliating fashion.  Opposing
that, he must also want to teach them exactly what sort of fighters they would
eventually face, so was attempting to strip away their illusions by having a
lone fighter best them in groups.

But if Trask thought three fumbling dullards could
fare better against him than the last pair, then the man was sadly mistaken. 
Marik had long honed his swordsmanship versus multiple enemies.  Multiple
skilled enemies at that.

Following the pattern he had set, Marik allowed the
new fighters three attempts before grounding them.  After the feeble blows
bounced off his sword, he quickly struck, knocking weapons from their hands,
sweeping feet out from under them, slapping them with his sword’s flat.  As
training bouts went, Marik found it hardly enough to qualify as a warm-up.

From the surrounding eyes he could see impressed souls
verging on the border of awe.

Dietrik sang out.  He still had no idea why Trask had
Marik testing his men in the middle of their training day, yet in true Dietrik
fashion he swum with the current.  “You should have noticed that these two,” he
made a gesture, “both leapt forward to attack at the same time.  Once in a
while that pays off, but not very often, in my experience.  Chaps who leap
without knowing what their partner has in mind end up feeding the next
generation of worms and beetles.

“Also,” Dietrik bellowed while the men regained their
feet, speaking loudly to keep them from melting into the crowd, “they both made
a dashed thickheaded mistake.”  He ignored the glares from the pink-faced men,
a raw color stemming from being forced to shave each morning rather than any
mollification.  From this trio’s bearing, Marik guessed that shaving, prior to
enlisting, had been an activity indulged in once an eightday at best.

“Angled slashes,” Dietrik whispered to Marik before
swiveling to face the assembly anew.  Marik needed no further explanation; he
had noted the same error made by the trainees as well.

Raising his voice, Dietrik continued while Marik
enacted the physical demonstration.  “If you are going to perform a downward
slash while stepping forward…or leaping forward.  It makes no nevermind.  If
you slash down while moving forward, you have to know exactly what your feet
are doing.  Stepping forward with your
left
foot,” he enunciated while
gesturing at Marik, who took a single step with his left foot, “means you
should be using a
northwestern
slash!  That means to say, a slash that
moves on a diagonal, from your left shoulder toward your right foot.  This means
that missing your target won’t have your sword cutting into your own bloody
foot.”

Marik demonstrated by letting his blade strike the
ground, about twenty inches from his boot.

“Otherwise you increase the odds of putting the death
writ on yourself.”

This time, Marik stepped forward with the right foot,
showing how the blade tip made a straight line at his toes.  In truth, it would
have to be a sword of the correct length, and a fast moving strike that
completely missed the opponent, and a blow on precisely the right angle, and
boots that were of a thin enough leather to be cut by the tip’s edge alone…but
the point had been made.

They waited for the next pair.  Evidently Trask
decided that Marik had learned enough, or that the men had seen how poor they
truly were.  He ordered them back to their exercises.  While men sorted
themselves out, Marik cast his gaze around the encampment.  Several groups were
still hard at work.

A tall tree had been felled, recently by the look, its
branches stripped off to leave a log tall as his waist.  Forty feet in length,
there were sixteen men rubbing shoulders while they rolled the log laboriously
across a flat patch.  An officer waited beside the marker stone with sixteen
other men, his silver reed whistle clenched in his teeth.  Once the insanely
heavy tree trunk was rolled to his marker stone, the new group would line along
the opposite side in order to use all their strength to roll it back in the
direction it had come from.  Marik supposed the pointless exercise built muscle
or improved endurance or hardened the men’s conditioning.

Other non-combat routines were under way.  The jogging
around the perimeter continued, as well as a strange activity Marik had at
first assumed was meaningful.  Men were digging deep holes in one corner, which
he had thought would be a building foundation.  Watching them over the
morning’s candlemarks revealed that the dirt from the holes being dug was used
to fill similar holes thirty yards away.  When a different trainee batch moved
to take over that sector, new holes were started as they filled in the holes
from the previous group.

Could any of that have positive effects on their
abilities as fighters?  Marik supposed a case could be made for it, but only in
the loosest sense.

Trask had brought them around the training field
before stopping for practical lessons in sparring.  That morning, Marik had
believed he possessed an intelligent estimate on what to expect.  The answers
to his various questions did nothing to suggest he had been wrong in that
opinion.  These men…no, the army soldiers as a whole, would be closer to a
liability than an asset.

How could they be of any use in the supposed ‘plan’ he
was expected to present to the council?

His anxiety fluttered inside him momentarily.  To
control it, he exerted a forceful indifference. 
Throw something together
and call it an end to the whole mess!  All they want is ideas anyway.  Ideas
are not the same as solutions.

Dietrik hovered at his elbow, surely dying to know
what was going on.  He held his peace while Trask continued sticking to Marik
closer than a shadow.  His friend arched his eyebrows whenever they made eye
contact.  Marik would dart his irises sideways at Trask, which Dietrik
understood meant, ‘we’ll talk later’.

The captain raised his hopes slightly when he
mentioned, “The end-year men should be back tomorrow for evaluation.”

“End-year?”

Trask nodded absently.  “The men almost ready to ship
out.  They started their training a year ago.  We always send them out along
the roads for light patrols the last month.”

“Then they should be better than what we’ve seen so
far.”

“You don’t see these barracks-monkeys out on patrol,
do you?”

That seemed to be the captain’s current favorite
designation.

Walking around the field eventually brought them to
the corner where the prisoners were being kept.  Marik had wondered at the
wisdom of keeping men flush up against the trees.  Upon closer examination, he
found a cleared space a hundred feet wide between the fences and the woods,
much in the same manner that Kingshome kept the area around its walls free from
concealing brush.

“Is that truly strong enough to hold them?” he asked
Trask upon seeing the fencing.  Rather than solid walls, metal wires were run
between tall iron posts pounded deep into the earth.  Vertical wires wound
through the horizontal, forming a ten-foot tall web where no opening stretched
wider than three inches.

“Walls can be tunneled under,” Trask snipped. 
“Especially when you can’t keep an eye on the bastards all the time to make sure
they don’t get up to any tricks.  That’s steel.  They’d have a stone whore of a
time trying to snap it.  We’ve been promised builders from the city to come
over and throw up a prisoners’ barracks, but they haven’t shown their hides
yet.”

Marik watched them for a moment, seeing men in their
underclothes squatting under the canvas tarpaulins that was all the roof they
had against the elements.  With their armor removed, their padding against
their own steel armaments were the only clothing they retained.

Most of them returned his studied glare.  One man in
particular, with hair gray enough that he should have retired long since, met
his eye without faltering.  “Who has been questioning them?  We need to ask
them about….about one or two new developments.”

“Nothing out of them since you foisted them off on
us.”

“What?”  Marik glanced at Dietrik.  “I know they speak
a different language, but didn’t you say they spoke Traders Tongue?”

“That’s the flap,” Dietrik agreed.  “Only a handful
said anything in Traders, as far as I am aware.”

“We sent in an interpreter,” Trask told them, “sent
over by the council as soon as we had them settled.  None of them acted like
they understood a damned word.  Not much good knowing a few can speak the
Tongue if you don’t know which ones they are, is it?”

Marik felt the scowl on his face.  The Ninth Squad had
not been charged with it, but if they had been, surely they would have been
smart enough to keep track of which prisoners possessed such important language
skills.  A flaming mess of a job waited, having to sort out those particular
individuals hiding in the larger crowd, especially when their confederates
would be anxious to help them remain undiscovered.

“You haven’t got one we can question then.  Not at the
moment.”

Trask chose not to reply to a question he’d already
answered.

Marik could feel his teeth grinding.  After the
startling revelations of the previous day, today he felt as though he had
wasted every candlemark since awakening.  Answers?  None that he could name. 
Only a confirmation or two on matters that hardly needed it.

And was he any closer to seeing a possible battle
plan?

Not by an inch.

Trask left a short while later.  Marik, still wrapped
in his thoughts, started wandering aimlessly.  He had no destination, such as
the tent or the cramped room in the palace.  Before he could get very far,
Dietrik’s arm clamped on his shoulder.

“Hold on a midge there, mate!”  Marik jerked his head
around to look into his eyes.  Severely annoyed eyes.  “Just when are you
planning to explain what in the bloody hells is going on?”

*        *        *        *        *

If Dietrik had ever been so irritated as when Marik
eventually left Trask’s camp, Marik could not remember it.  Granted, Marik had
first attempted to explain the situation without seriously touching on what was
expected of him.  That had proved foolhardy, and also insulting to Dietrik’s
intelligence when his friend ripped into him with scathing observations.

After only a brief hesitation, Marik silently asked
why he should keep any secrets from Dietrik.  The council could stew in their
own juices as far as he cared.

Dietrik remained out of sorts, offering the opinion
that Marik was digging a hole deeper than his head.  Marik held a similar view,
but with no way out that he could see, he simply shook his head, stating that
he needed to return to the enclave’s tower to see if Tru’s group had worked out
any new answers.  He left his pack with Dietrik after changing into fresh
smallclothes, his friend still insisted on acting fussed.

The world hovered on the edge of evening.  Brilliant
sunlight reflected off thick clouds covering the western skies, gilding them
with vibrant pinks and oranges.  Bards usually compared such a sight with
quilts.  To Marik, it looked as if the sky were covered with mounds of raw
intestines, the azure fields littered with the aftermath of a titanic war that
had involved every living creature in the world.

When the sun sank deeper and the lining on the clouds
tinged with deeper shades of red, Marik increased his pace, wanting to get
inside the city sooner.  He had the unsettling feeling that the sky was
bleeding.

Entering Thoenar from its western side had never
appealed to him.  The smells alone from the various businesses run outside the
walls, banished from the city as being un-conducive to civilized living, always
made him slightly sick to his stomach.  His sensitivities as a mage also meant
that the soil, chemically poisoned until even the most tenacious weed struggled
to live, had an effect on him.