Summa Elvetica: A Casuistry of the Elvish Controversy and Other Stories (46 page)

We’d twice beaten the blasted breeds back from the very pass they was marching through now, but once they’d managed to haul up their catapults to where they could drop rocks on our heads, the capitaine gave us the order to fall back and join the rest of the elf king’s army.

“How many do you make?” I asked the elf perched on a large boulder above me. He was a scout from the Silverbows, one of the king’s elite troops, and he had eyes so keen a hawk might envy them. Today he and me was on the same side. Problem was, tomorrow might be a different story.

“No more than eight thousand.” He spoke good Savonnais, with only a hint of elf. “They don’t matter. I think the problem lies with what follows.”

I squinted, trying to make out what the large, black objects following the goblin columns below might be. The shapes was too big as to be orcs or goblin wolf-riders, but there was a lot of them, and they moved in an even less-disciplined array than the gobbos.

“I can’t see what they are.”

“Big pigs,” said the elf grimly. “Orcs ride them. Like wargs, only not so fast.”

“Warboars?”

“Is that how you call them? We say pigs of war. Very big, very fierce. I think maybe three hundred.”

Damn it all to hell and back! If heavy cavalry wasn’t the very last thing we needed to see at the moment, it was pretty bloody close. Three hundred godforsaken warboars!

Ever seen a pig? I don’t mean a nice little piggie with a pink arse and a curly tail, I mean a big old he-boar, with black, bristled hair, sharp yellow tusks, and a giant hump on his back. Now, imagine one twice the size and three times as mean, not a whole lot taller than a donkey but a damn sight wider and weighing more than a horse. Then strap iron armor across the front, sharpen the tusks, and throw an overmuscled breed carrying a greatsword on his back. That’s a warboar.

King Everbright don’t have nothing in his army as can stand against a charge from three hundred of those monsters, except for the Company, and to be honest, even we can’t expect to do much more than get run over. The blue-bloods of Savondir and their men-at-arms might laugh at the boar riders before skewering all their mounts on lances and throwing them on the firepit for dinner, but us wardogs don’t have lances. Or plate. Or pretty warhorses.

I climbed down from the rock on which I’d been sitting and shouldered my pack. It was going to be a long walk down to the camp, so I had to get moving if I hoped to get there before night.

“What will you tell your capitaine?” The elf scout stared at me with his weird yellow-green eyes.

“That there’s an avalanche of big pigs about to fall on our heads.”

“What will he do?”

“I don’t know. Probably send a few of the younger lads home with messages for our kin. I suppose most of them will be last wills and testaments.”

“He will stay and fight? He will not run?”

I laughed, but if it came out more bitterly than I’d meant, the elf didn’t seem to notice. Or maybe he just didn’t care. “I suppose it would be a particular regiment of archers who’d be told to take us out if we tried to skedaddle, wouldn’t it?”

The elf didn’t confirm or deny that the Silverbows had been ordered to turn us into human pincushions if we attempted to withdraw our services without warning. But when his cat-slit eyes narrowed, I was pretty sure he caught my drift.

I shrugged.

“Nah, he wouldn’t run anyway. Contract’s a contract. We get paid, we stick around and fight.”

The elf nodded. “It is good to know not all men are without honor. I wish you many kills before you fall.”

I’ll bet you do, I thought. Sod honor! Especially since all those right honorable elves will be off escorting His Royal Elven Arse to safety while we get ourselves trampled into a bloody muck by oversized hogs.

But it wasn’t the Silverbow’s fault, and he was a decent enough sort for an elf, so I waved him farewell and set off down the rocky mountain trail. It wasn’t going to be fun trying to make it before sunset without breaking my neck, but it sure as hell beat what the Company was going to be facing in a day or three.

You might think you know what you’re getting yourself in for when you take the Company’s coin, but I daresay not one in a hundred who takes it truly does. Some hire out their sword arms from desperation, some out of boredom, and some for nothing more than the price of a drink and a wench. The younger ones usually do it out of some romantic sense of adventure.

But romance dies fast in the wardogs—those it don’t manage to kill first. It’s one thing to dream of seeing the world, but your dreams change right around the first time you see a man die choking in his own blood with an arrow through his throat or a sword in his gut. They don’t actually end, though you wish they would. You just learn to call them by their real name: nightmares.

It’s no secret that wardogs are paid to fight and die. Even the idiot farm boys know that getting involved in the wars is one of the easier ways to ensure you never see the north side of thirty. But there’s not a farm boy alive who thinks he’s going to be the one to draw the Black Queen when he signs on with a troop. I didn’t, and so far—knock wood—I haven’t, although I’ve seen a score or more of men who joined on after me pull the wrong card.

Of course, I didn’t make none of the money I thought I’d make neither. Well, I guess I made it, but none of it stuck to my fingers for long. Wardog’s luck, always bad. I’ve made five years serving under Capitaine Donnier, long enough to be in for three shares and a sergent’s stripes. But if what that elf scout said was true, it don’t look as if I’ll make a sixth. None of us will.

We shouldn’t be here in the first place, trapped somewhere in the elven mountains more than three weeks’ march from the nearest human lands. The capitaine, damn his eyes, took the contract from the Comte de Vic-Vionnaz without asking the right questions first.

It seems the elf king pulled the comte’s great-great grandpappy’s chestnuts out of a fire a few hundred years back, so great-great grandpappy had to promise to send one hundred fifty men to the Elvenwood should the king ever call for them. Elves have long memories, so when an army of gobbos descended on Merithaim, King Everbright didn’t see any reason his elves should get themselves killed when there was perfectly good men to do it for them.

Since the comte likewise failed to see any reason why he and his vassals should get themselves killed on the elf king’s behalf when the rich bastard could simply hire a mercenary troop to pay the butcher’s bill, instead of the easy bash or two with the nobleman next door, like the capitaine was expecting, the Company found ourselves marching over the mountains to face an army of shrieking breeds under the command of an orc chieftain.

Damn and double-damn his eyes! I even told the capitaine that no border lord ever needed no company our size unless there was some funny business lurking about.

Goblins ain’t the issue. There’s a lot of them, but they’re small, their armor won’t stand up to a man’s strength, and they usually break and run once they see they can’t quickly overrun you. If they wasn’t more scared of the orc chieftain, Ulgor Thumb-up-his-arse or whatever his name is, than they is of us and the elves, we could safely camp out here in peace until our contract ran out. But Ulgor’s got a hard-on to get the elf king’s head on a stick, so in addition to keeping his whip hand to the gobbos’ backs, he brought in his big pigs.

The elves, they’re good fighters. They’re wicked deadly with their longbows and real flashy with their swords. They like to use two of them, instead of using a shield and sword like any sensible man does. That makes them more effective on the attack than when they’s defending. They use their long legs to run circles around the enemy and attrit them, bleeding them to death by picking off soldiers one by one in a thousand little ambushes along the march. It’s effective, but only to a point, and all you need is an army that’s big enough to survive the bleeding until the elves start running out of room to hit-and-run.

We’re not exactly pinned here, but over the next ridge is the first big elven village, and if King Everbright don’t make a stand here, he’ll have to give up half his kingdom before he’ll find ground this favorable to him. Capitaine Donnier figures we’re outnumbered around eight to one, but if it wasn’t for the warboars, we could figure to stand them off without losing many men.

We’ll make a fight of it no matter what. The capitaine will get the boys to making caltrops out of every piece of metal he can lay his hands on, melting down damn near everything but our swords and armor. The elves will dig a trench and fill it with burnables, and their mages will ignite it when the charge comes. But it won’t be enough. All Ulgor needs to crack our lines is for thirty or forty boar riders to break through the traps, the arrows, and the artillery, and then five thousand gobbos will pour in behind them to slaughter us.

I hear gobbos like the taste of man-flesh. Some of the boys have been upset by the idea of getting eaten. But once you’re dead, what does it matter if you’re buried whole in a churchyard or spread out across a dozen goblin gullets? Dead is dead, I figure.

• • •

It takes me more than two bells by my reckoning, but I finally make it down the hillside and back to camp. The capitaine, he isn’t around. He’s dancing attendance on the elf king. While waiting, I pull the thong from around my neck and look at the coin hanging from it. It’s more black than silver now, but it’s still got the king's tulips on one side, and has some words that I figure must be “Compagnie de Fleurance” on the other. Bloody thing’s going to get me killed soon. The thought of throwing it away briefly crosses my mind.

But I know I won’t. It’s the coin that makes the dog, and at the end of the day, a wardog is what I am. I got nowhere to run, and even if I did, where would I go? What would I do? I don’t know how to do nothing else but fight. A man could do worse than to die at the side of men like Fat Pierre, Baldo Bigarse, and One-Eyed Jacques. I wouldn’t like to let the capitaine down neither. He may be stupid when it comes to contracts, but he’s not a bad one as they go.

“Sergent!” The capitaine is back and is calling for me. I can see he’s out of breath as he approaches from the direction of the giant tent that serves as the elven headquarters.

“Sir!”

“Turn your section over to Jacques. I’ve got something for you to do tonight.”

“Can’t get it up, Capitaine? You’re probably just nervous about them pigs I seen in the pass. No worries, I’ll futter your whore for you.”

He completely fails to react to the news of the warboars, which ain’t like him, so he must already know. I figure the elf sent word down the hill magic-like or something. Must be nice.

“Shut up, Sergent. While I stand second to none in my admiration for your equanimity in the face of death and danger, I have no time for ribaldry today. One of the mages in service to King Everbright, bless his long and pointy ears, believes he may have a solution that would allow us to extricate ourselves from the unfortunate situation in which we presently find ourselves.”

“Sell our contract to the orc? Bloody generous of him.”

“No such luck. No, I believe the idea is to drop a pair of raiders inside the enemy camp once it gets dark. Since our friend Ulgor has the habit of keeping his boars in large pens—the assumption is two of them, given the numbers reported—it should be possible to sneak in and fry them all with the help of the elven mages.”

Hmm. Interesting. Sneak, spell, and incinerate. I suppose it could work, so long as absolutely everything went according to plan. Which, of course, I ain’t never seen happen once in the five years I’ve been with the Company. I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it myself, until I remembered that we didn’t have no giant flying birds or sorcerers. Capitaine Donnier would have loved to hire a battlemage, but even a young one fresh out of the academy commanded more than the Company could ever hope to pay, even if one was available.

“I like it,” I said. “Less work than caltrops and a hell of a lot more likely to keep their cavalry off our throats.”

A sly look crossed the capitaine’s face. Not a good sign. “Who said anything about less work, Sergent?”

“You said raiders. And mages. We got no raiders, and we definitely don’t got no mages. So I figured…”

“No, we do not. But, Sergent, we do have you. And you are not an elf. Which fact, I am given to understand, is integral to the success of the planned raid.”

“What? That don’t make no sense! I don’t know nothing about no frying magic!”

The capitaine grinned and tapped the side of his nose. “You don’t have to know anything about it. The salient fact is that you don’t smell like an elf. It seems pigs have a remarkably keen olfactory sense. So do warboars, being pigs of an exaggerated sort. And these particular boars appear to have been trained to fight elves, orcs, and goblins. Not men, thank Immaculée. So, two men of great courage and stealth should be able to approach close enough to the boars in their pens for the requirements of the mages. At least, that is the theory.”

“Close enough to do what? Threaten to make bacon out of them?”

The captaine’s brow furrowed. “I confess, I did not understand the details involved. The mage explaining it was less than perfectly clear, but it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that it involves magic of some kind. All that matters at the moment is that the king wanted two men, so I volunteered you and Slim Shadow. Given the severity of our predicament, veterans are in order, and the two of you are the least likely to trip over your own feet in the dark.”

“I ain’t volunteering for nothing! I ain’t getting on one of them elf birds! What if it bites me? What if I falls off?”

“Excellent, Sergent, your élan and esprit de corps have been noted. I commend you for it and wish you the very best of fortune! Now, find that dratted Shadow and tell him that all the sneaking out of barracks the two of you did last winter should serve you well tonight.”

“You knew about that?”

“Of course I did. A pillow tucked under a blanket seldom snores convincingly, Sergent.”

• • •

Shady exchanged a dubious look with me. I could see we was in complete harmony regarding the utter lunacy of the elf plan as it had been explained to us by the mage. The other elf, who I guessed must be one of their raiders, judging by the thick, faded grey leathers he wore instead of the usual silken foppery, didn’t seem to think much of it either. Unlike most of the elves, the raider wore his long blond hair tied tightly back. I suppose they don’t want all that hair whipping around their faces when they fly.