The Marcher Lord (Over Guard)

All words of thanks have to go to my beautiful wife, my editor-in-arms. This wouldn’t have been possible
, save for her.

“While many have recounted,
with ranging detail and audacity, all that has transpired in the recent times, little has been said of the beginnings of those most deeply involved. And so it seemed good that I might attempt to trace that which has affected so much.”

—Tryus Young, chief recorder to His Royal Majesty

*
              *              *              *

Dear mother,

I must apologize one last time for not writing more often. I have tried (and only partially succeeded I think) to explain the good-natured, but very serious, atmosphere inside the barracks that discourages such dealings with home. It’s quite an assortment of men here (those of the higher classes who have left home for want of excitement, I gather—and those of our more common sort, looking for a higher establishment in life that only the army can offer), but the same sentiment runs through both that home is something to be left at home.

I am very sorry, but I'm afraid I won't be able to visit home before departing as I had mentioned last Easter the possibility of. Unforeseen and very good circumstances came suddenly just before my graduation from regimentals (which is the official way they refer to our training). As I was to proceed with high honors, I was selected, with a handful of others, to be offered the opportunity to undergo additional survival training, and, if successful, to become a part of the Royal Arsmen Reconnaissance of the Over Guard, or more fondly, Tanser’s rangers. It was with enormous pride that I immediately consented, though the rigors of the last three months have more than made me earn it, as the demands far exceeded those of the regimentals. But I was again able to graduate with honors, if not quite as soundly as before. I am having difficulty restraining my excitement—for imagine the station I've been graced with, not even a year from home!

All in all, in response to your question, the army has treated me well. The clothes and bedding have all been new, if stiff, and the food hasn’t been as good as yours, but it’s all been very reliable. The best part of being done with training now is that they’ve assigned me my own gear and uniforms. My own yeoman, regulator, rifle—and the watcher’s cloak I never dreamed I’d get to wear, are all presently stowed in the army pack they also issued me. All the people I try to tell disagree that these are better than any hundred of accolades the army can give us, but they are.

So I’ve been afforded these last three days as a kind of brief leave, as they had some confusion with my posting, giving me this time I now take to write you. Only just this morning I received my assignment, which is the only mixed news I have. I will be placed under the command of a Captain named Marsden, of the 143
rd
Split, upon arrival at Carciti, the chief port of the planet Orinoco. While this, such a renowned and strange planet, especially in the last couple years, would normally be cause for great celebration, I have been informed that our section will primarily be responsible for escorting a margrave I haven't heard of, as well as his family, on a sort of sightseeing and hunting expedition. I must admit that I'm somewhat apprehensive of what exactly this will amount to, but I suppose it would be horribly childish to regret anything so little in the face of all that I've been blessed with. After all, in these settled times, it's unreasonable and probably quite barbaric of me to hope to see any sort of excitement immediately. In any case, I will be boarding the HMS
Regulus
at six tomorrow morning, and then it will be another two weeks before we land in Carciti, followed—

Forgive me, I hadn't realized until just now how much of this space I've been devoting to myself. Please excuse my excitement. How are things with you and my siblings? I am very glad to have gotten word that you have been receiving your portions of my pay without trouble. How is dear old Peter? Is he getting along better now with his leg? I must say that I've come to appreciate him all the more after regimentals, as I now realize how extraordinarily blessed I was to be able to sit in the family room beside the fire in the evenings, and drift off (but only sometimes!) listening to his hugely wonderful voice talk on history and politics and music and goodness knows everything else. I have come to suspect that even the most costly tutored men around me haven't had the privilege of such a rich education, of which I am deeply grateful for. As I am for all your love and support, doubly difficult as it has been since father's passing. I pray all goes well for you all.

In sincerest blessings,

Ian

—Only known letter of Private Ian Kanters, Year 4861 UI

*              *              *              *

There was a trembling in the deck and an energy in the air, both of which were speaking to some silent, thrilling part of him.

The
main deck was host to a variety of different kinds of soldiers in various stages of emotion. Most were milling together, either standing or sitting on the rows of seats that ran in columns down the length of the main deck, which also ran the better part of the ship's length. Above them the wash of Baldave, the Bevish Empire's home planet, in its early morning colors over the edges of its outer atmosphere, were played out all over the ceiling, unhindered by the ship's prymanite canopy.

He wasn't nerv
ous, not really anxious either.

Ready.

That was the word that kept running through his mind.
Ready.
The ship, the hour seemed to be singing it to him, tolling it up through his legs, which he realized, with a bit of embarrassment, were shaking even when the ship's engines weren't vibrating the floor.

“S
ometimes the view alone’s worth it, eh?” an older voice came from beside him.

“Yes, it
is,” Ian agreed, looking over at the seasoned-looking ship hand.

“I saw a good game of breks going near the back,” the ship's hand continued.
“If you're near at it, now's the time to be joining.”

“I think I'd rather see this,” he answered.

“Quite a privilege for you lot here,” the shipman went on. “Here's
Regulus
, first of its kind, first ship not made for war to be berthed with e' active drive. Whole different breed of propulsion. The warships been trialing them for awhile now, but this is the first not berthed in a cruiser or frigate—we make twenty-one units a day when the slip's fair.”

Ian looked
at the corners of Baldave’s morning, trying to fathom being displaced through space at that rate, that kind of distance. He was almost tempted to try to calculate how many diameters of his home world that would equate, but the dockyard's subtle spin was making Baldave dip down past the range of vision the viewing canopy allowed, which was noticeable enough to make his stomach squelch.

“Never been off
planet, have you?” the shipman asked.

“No, sir,”
Ian said, staring back ahead as he felt the ship lurch a bit.

“Well ... here it comes, boy,” the shipman said.

There came one last tremor, and then a wave of release as the ship began sinking ever so slightly from its berth. Though he didn't take his eyes off the bottom of the horizon, Ian could feel even the most dismissive of attentions all around them stopping to see and feel.

A voice came over the ship's announcement system

                                                                                                  “To God and King—”

             
                                                        a bare moment before the engines fired behind them, the
Regulus'
berth jolting, and then accelerating by, around, and then behind them.

“En hemoth!
En hemoth!”
people shouted from all around him, a chorus of cheers and raised fists.

He'd forgotten all about the traditional voyage salute
, translating as a request for “fair winds” in Old Bevish. But he probably wouldn't have joined in even if he had, at least this time. The shouts were still ringing in his ears, whispering down his neck.

“You going far, boy?” the shipman asked.

Ian tried to think of something to say, something memorable, but he found he could only smile harder, his face hurting almost as much as his knuckles on the chair in front of him.

This was it
, after having waited so long. He would be happy from now on.

This he thought
as they made their first jump into the stars.

“
Your gold fits my hand better than yours,

does
wonders for the soul.”

—Carciti thief saying (translated from Dervish)

Of course the accompanying choruses had come well before Ian had even considered the possibility of being posted to Orinoco.

“Carciti's streets will
cook you faster than an oven.”

“Better buy a new 'lator, boy.”

“Rather rent the devil for a night than spend it there.”

Most of these quips
had been good-natured, but Ian knew that none of the people he had heard them from had actually ever been to Orinoco. The hollowness of being secondhand was in their voices. He could hear it like the naiveté of a man with no real idea of who had held his sovereign just two transactions prior to him. Ian knew this because anyone who had ever been on Orinoco would not have treated it like a small joke that they only remembered when the topic was fresh in the air.

It hit
Ian in waves immediately upon disembarking from the
Regulus
. Orinoco's fairly small sun had a reputation for being the hottest of the civilized worlds, helped along by Orinoco's unique atmosphere. The combination of the two was also what made travel to and from the planet treacherous and only possible during very brief timeframes.

After the initial shock of the transition from inside the
transport, Ian summoned a few brave minutes of believing that it wasn't quite all that bad. But the longer he stood under Orinoco's blistering sunlight in his mess dress uniform, his full pack still an unfamiliar weight on his shoulders, the longer he came to understand the absurdity of brave sentiments. The regulars who disembarked with him were bitterly cursing as they all stood impatient in the shuttle yard. Like in a dream, Ian stumbled outside the aging docking complex and into the teeming mess of people and through the streets that lay sprawling beyond, as far as he could see—a shiny, incoherent mass that choked in the heat that pressed so persistently.

He was feeling
dizzy, nauseous, like the top of his stomach was contemplating mutiny. So it was only with the barest twinges of pride that he adjusted his regulator as high as it would go. It did help, the fresh layer of relatively cooler air washing up from where the machine was attached to his belt, up and over his face and head, and then down over his back. But it was more of a way to numb the heat than anything else, the military issue regulators being what they were. Still, he couldn't help but feel fairly grateful, especially when he remembered how worn out his old regulator back home had been. Although, his old 'lator usually had been trying to keep him warm rather than cool through the bitterly damp Wilome mornings.

Wilome
and Carciti were something of distant opposites, tied only by the most arbitrary and recent changes in relations. And though Orinoco as a whole had officially become Bevish, the blood that ran through Carciti's streets was still definitely indigenous Chax, tinged at the pompous, uppermost edges by Dervish sentiments.

The Dervish and Bevish peoples
both fell in together as being Ellosians—Ellosia being the region of space that was home to the mixture of the galaxy’s different breeds of humans. This was a grudging sharing of ties between the two, however, not all unlike discordant cousins who had shared far too much bitter proximity and history to ever be warm terms. Orinoco was merely one more perfect illustration of that.

But all that was nearly just a side note here, with so many Chax faces pressing and peering around him.

Ian caught frequent sight of disgruntled-looking Bevish regulars marching here and there in the streets, their damp, red uniforms looking uncomfortable. But aside from that, he found himself in a disorienting blur of unfamiliar colors and faces. He was mostly able to suppress the unexpected anxiety of imagining how much he was sticking out, but only mostly. He was used to seeing a steady sample of foreign faces back home, but they had always been a temporary minority, especially in the quarter he and his family had lived. This was something that all the grand talks of conquest and control and excitement and welcoming frontiers hadn't prepared him for—that here he was the minority, the outsider.

And though he d
idn't have it as bad as the red-sleeved regulars, he was to be in his semi-formal wears until he reported to his captain and their assignment officially commenced. This mess dress uniform consisted of gray trousers, which were fairly light and comfortable, his evening dress boots, freshly polished on his shuttle down to the planet, and his stiff half-mess tunic that was mostly colored the bright Bevish crimson, every little measure of it feeling even heavier than usual under Orinoco's sun. His pack also lay hard over his shoulders and back, which were already damp with sweat. Inside his pack was all the rest of his gear, including his other uniforms, a week's worth of rations, toiletry and mess kits, ammunition packs, and his Tanser sabre. The new watcher’s cloak he’d been issued was also neatly folded inside for now, which turned out to be a far more suitable arrangement in these sorts of crowds. His Allen rifle was also securely locked into the left side of his pack, and all of its other compartments were also magnetically locked, which was a personal relief. Stories of Carciti's looseness with personal property always followed quick on the heels of its temperature.

“
Jolly tides,” he murmured, wiping at the beads of sweat on his brow. It was a fairly open square that the shuttle yard opened out into, so he started off to the right toward a more shaded street. He'd get more precise bearings after finding some shelter. The apparent lack of guidance following his shuttle down was somewhat disorienting, especially after all the structure that regimentals had embodied.

There was a fairly stolid stream of people on foot running through the square and draining into
its side streets, interspersed by all shapes and manners of handcarts, enclosed transports, mobile vendors, pack animals, and a jumble of other things he had a hard time identifying. He quickly found it impossible to skirt around the edges, settling to be sorted through one of its thinner threads. The tide as a whole didn't seem to strive for any attempt at coherence, which even Wilome at the very least could claim. The middle of the flow generally seemed to be passing by him, with either of its sides heading in his direction, but those didn't appear to be rules anyone was interested in publishing. It was all noise and jostling, of the strange repetitions in foreign tongues, some of them in Dervish, but he guessed the majority must be in the Chax language.

“Ah, a true Bevish gent'man!” a human merchant
called out ahead of Ian in a slight Dervish accent. “A good eye for a bargain! Freshest golorck fruits in the quarter, two pence apiece, six for a lot!”

Ian tried to steer himself further off to the right, but the tide of bodies was wedging him
toward the merchant at the center. As he watched, in a mild sort of horror, the merchant was expertly using the flow to his advantage, which Ian supposed was something success in his profession required.

“Gent'man, for a gent'man,” the merchant persisted as Ian waved his hands, “I knock a pence off a lot for a gent'man
—”

“Sorry,” Ian answered as
they both came as close as the merchant could manage, then began to pass him by, “maybe next time.”

But he need not
have bothered, as the man was already hailing his next query. Ian heard two Chax women not far ahead also hailing him as a gent'man even before he had turned his head back around.

Sighing, he pulled the top of his rifle away from an older
Chax man who was reverently running his fingertips up and down the barrel.

“Excuse me, excuse me,”
Ian said, striving for politeness as he shouldered off at an angle that was as congenial to the flow of people as he could manage. He was beginning to notice just how many people, mostly Chax as it seemed, were touching his gear pack behind him. Though it was not in any really worrisome way—they mostly seemed to brush their long fingertips across the material as they passed. And as long as they left it at that, Ian didn't mind so much; it would take a lot more effort to be able to get into any of the compartments. But it was odd the way they were doing it—the way they were looking at him in general. It wasn't with any apparent malice, though it wasn't necessarily respectful either. A sort of passive curiosity. Ian remembered that the appearance of Bevish regulars in any sort of force would still be a fairly new sight for them, and he was doubtful that very many Bevish rangers had come through here.

A good reminder
of the representation of the Bevish Empire that they were all responsible for here, Ian thought as he hoisted his pack up a bit more squarely on his shoulders.

He stepped off into the first alleyway he could reach.
A healthy trickle of people was still coming in and out of it, mostly women carrying various baskets, but there was enough room for him to stand off to the side. It also had healthy shade, which did much to make the heat amiable.

Ian’s short progress from the shuttle yard hadn’t afforded him much opportunity to
evaluate the Chax themselves. He had certainly seen a good number of them before on Wilome, but they seemed different here on their native planet. As a non-human, non-Ellosian species, they visibly measured as much slighter and a bit shorter than humans. Their skin colors were varying shades of black and a little gray, evidently with the lighter gray becoming more prominent as they aged. They grew no hair on their heads and were known for their eyes being completely black. He had never really talked to any Chax but had heard a great deal of how fragile but dexterous their hands were. Most of their tribes were deemed primitive and savage by civilized space, but they were renowned for handcrafts and especially jewelry, as well as their distinctive music.

He
could also readily observe that they did indeed wear far less clothes than Ellosians, with baggy pants and sashes for their bottom halves. Some of the men wore loose vests, but most appeared to forgo shirts entirely. The women dressed far more colorfully, adorning their top halves with light shirts that weren’t exactly blouses as far as Ian understood. Their necklines were far more open than Ellosian cuts, the backs of some of the shirts draping nearly to the ground as something of a train behind them. The women also were far more likely to wear hats, or perhaps rather turbans, multi-faceted and vibrantly colored as they were.

Ian reflected that soon the Bevish Empire would be enlisting the Chax for the
standing army here, more after the regimental school of thought than the Dervish continental system. Previously, the Dervish Empire had staffed Orinoco almost entirely with Ellosians from Derfi herself. As would be soldiers, the Chax natives seemed modest in fighting stature but nimble, which didn’t strike Ian as a bad thing.

Absently pulling at his collar, which wasn't nearly so stiff anymore, he l
eaned against one of the alley walls and watched the progress of the street. There seemed to be at least two public dramas going on at any one time within the stretch of people he could see. More often than not, it was the merchants shouting after one direction, presumably after some successful thief. Twice Ian was quick enough to see it happen, both times involving a merchant distracted by a potential buyer.

The first time
it was only well after the successful sale that the merchant realized what had happened and shouted off in a direction that wasn't quite correct. The second instance Ian saw, however, the merchant turned around fast enough to catch the skinny-looking man by the hand, quickly following it with a fist to the thief's face. And though the thief had been caught and struck handily, the thief was also handily able to wrench himself under the merchant's grasp and dart away. Ian mostly lost sight of him, the man leaving only a faint trail in the line of people that looked down and were slightly jostled as he scampered by. So while the merchant had managed what many probably yearned to do multiple times a day, the merchant also probably shouldn't have bothered, as the disturbance after he had punched the thief turned out to be more than enough to have another handful of hands making friends with his goods. Upon discovering this as well, the man closed his shop, probably much earlier than usual, one sale up and another six or more down. The merchant hurriedly shoved his way against the flow of the crowd, shouting what were probably loud curses all the way. But another few seconds and he was out of Ian’s sight, the commotion and varied reactions from the scene moving away and subsiding, and the next moment the whole event had been washed away as cleanly as if it had never happened.

There were of course many
other situations that arose in the bare couple of minutes that Ian watched—children being chased, jostling in the crowds brimming over into the verges of a fight, a young man singing and swinging his girl up on top of his shoulders as they made their way along, a brief gap in the stream as hired men cleared a path for an enclosed and ornate ground transport carrying someone of some importance—though none of these or the rest were of such legal interest to Ian. He felt guilty about not attempting to intervene in any of the thefts, though he knew that even the barest of pragmatics were against him even being able to get to such a scene before it was over and forgotten in the wash of all the momentary lives.