Chapter three
The rest of the season was much like the beginning, with one pointless battle after another. But it felt different to Eothen; it didn't seem like any of the battles were one side against the other, followed by another dispute with one side against the other. It felt more like there were six or eight sides, or rather any number of them, fighting against each other all at the same time; sometimes these two nobles were fighting each other, the next battle they were fighting together against a third person. There was no sense to it. The entire world seemed at war, albeit not nation by nation, but noble by noble. The governments of the nations tried to intervene, but they were only half-hearted in their efforts; their rulers were not much more than figureheads, and their armies, while well-trained, could not stand against the armies and mercenaries of all the nobles under them.
Most of the time, the governments withdrew in order to preserve themselves; they waited inside the borders of their capitals and hoped the fighting would play itself out. Some of the nations refused to allow the battles of nobles wage uncorrected, but they were not powerful enough to withstand the onslaught of such complete chaos; the Haighlei Empire was the first to fall, descending completely into anarchy and small cities ruling themselves, fighting amongst each other periodically in order to gain supremacy. Seejay was next. Jkatha was close to crumbling; the government still existed, but it held less and less sway over its population. Most people stopped paying their taxes; this only led to more fighting as the tax collectors attempted to enforce the law, and loyalists fought against anarchists to either comply or reject their rulings. Karse was still holding strong, and Rethwellan; any farther north than that, none of them really heard any news at all.
Eothen didn't much worry about the state of the nations, though; she worried about the state of her skin. At the moment, that state was in jeopardy. It had rained the day before; torrentially, in fact, to the point that the field was so muddy that she didn't want to use Orin. He would lame himself, or worse, trying to maneuver in this muck. On her own, as a foot soldier, she was knee deep in some dreadful combination of mud, blood and gore as she was defending herself against a maelstrom of enemy soldiers, some from this army, some from that – this was another of those strange battles where instead of having two identifiable sides, there were at least three and she wasn't sure if there were more than that. It didn't much matter to her; her job wasn't to determine which soldier belonged to which army, her job was to kill whoever was coming for her before they succeeded in killing her. Which at the moment, was not at all easy.
She parried one sword easily on her left and dispatched that attacker, and held off the more aggressive fighter on her right. The next attacker on her left was a pikeman; more difficult to fend off with her sword, particularly when most of her effort needed to be focused on her right. She cursed the fact that the pikeman was apparently well-off enough to have his pike reinforced with iron; most of the time, they were made of hard wood, which was strong but she was able to hack off the pike with her sword. This one, though, the best she could do was slap it away repeatedly before it could fully pierce her armor. She needed to be rid of this attacker on her right and in a hurry, or the pikeman would have her heart as a trophy. She parried the attacker on the right hard, planted her sword in the mud at her side and pulled a throwing knife; with a whole-hearted prayer to some ancient goddess, she threw it at the attacker's head. By some miracle it was on target and the man fell; she pulled her sword back from the ground and proceeded to parry the pikeman faster than he could reposition the pike and severed his arm.
It wasn't as if that would give her a break, though; this was a battle, between several different armies, each evenly matched against the next. She continued to defend herself against the next attacker, and the next, and the one after that until the light grew dim and no one could see well enough to kill each other anymore; someone sounded the bugles and the fighting died down as each side began to retreat towards…..well, no one was really sure where their individual camps were anymore, so even the retreat took a long time and was entirely disorganized. Eothen trudged back to her camp with the rest of her troupe; she was not undamaged. The pikeman had actually scored a good hit – for him – to her side, and she was bleeding fairly profusely. If she didn't see the chirurgeon soon it might be disastrous. So she dropped off her weapons and her armor at her tent, hoping she'd have time to clean them yet this evening, and went in her shift to the chirurgeon's tent. She hadn't realized that the armor had been keeping some degree of pressure on her wound, which was now bleeding freely down her side; she kept a hand over it, but by the time she arrived she was lightheaded and weak. She half sat, half fell into the waiting area with the world starting to spin out of control into darkness –
"Well," said some unidentifiable voice coming from somewhere out in the ether. "I see another one of you fools couldn't stay out of the way of a sword."
"Pike," she heard herself say. "It was a pike."
"Oh, even better," said the voice. "Get her up on a table."
Eothen felt hands under her arms and knees pick her up. She groaned – this was the first time she noticed that anything hurt. They laid her down on a table – and that was the last thing she knew.
When she woke, she groaned again; she wasn't on the table anymore, she was on a cot, and she hurt. She felt around her stomach where the pike had hit, and it was sore but bandaged; she could tell that the bandage was a little bloody from the stickiness, but it didn't seem to be out of control. Her arms and legs felt stiff; when she prodded at them, she noted stitches in various places where she had apparently been injured. She opened her eyes slowly. She looked around; there were soldiers on every single cot she could see and some on the ground. They were missing limbs, they were missing eyes, they had bandages on their heads and their bellies and the one next to her – well, he was dead.
"Look who's awake," said a voice that seemed oddly familiar. "When you got here I was fairly sure you weren't going to make it, but here you are."
"I wasn't that bad, it was just a pike stab," said Eothen. She was shocked at how raspy and weak her voice was.
"You lost a bit more than half your body's blood content," said the voice. "You should be dead. I am a good chirurgeon, but I have no idea why you're not dead."
"Well," said Eothen, "I guess I'm just too stubborn. When can I get back to work?"
"You fighters are all the same," said the chirurgeon, who was apparently the owner of the voice. "All the work I put into putting you back together, all you want to do is go out and ruin it as soon as you possibly can. You're as bad as Heralds, you are."
"Heralds?" asked Eothen. "What are Heralds?"
"I forget," said the chirurgeon. "They are the couriers of Valdemar. They spread messages, they raise armies, they fight bandits – that sort of thing. And all on these bright white horses with bright white uniforms, like they're trying to get themselves killed."
White uniforms? White horses? Who in their right mind would go fight a battle while being that obvious a target? There had been one white horse in her family's herd. He had been a beautiful stallion, and had a wonderful personality; but even her people, who mostly just traveled around, couldn't be traveling with a herd full of bright white horses. He was gelded.
"They don't sound very intelligent," said Eothen. "How is Valdemar such a stable country when their whole system depends on idiots in white? And here we are, wearing sensible colors for people on battlefields and we're falling apart every chance we get."
"Magic, I guess," said the chirurgeon.
"Phhttt," said Eothen. "You mean mind games? There's no such thing."
"Don't I know it," said the chirurgeon. "I hear some of them can make wounds heal just by thinking at them. What I wouldn't give for something like that around here! You get a new leg, you get a new leg – oh hellfires, new legs for everyone!"
Eothen laughed. Weakly. She sure could use a new….whatever it was that got hit by that pike.
"Seriously," said Eothen. "When can I get out of here?"
"You'll be here for about a sennight, maybe a bit less. I need to make sure your wound doesn't get infected and that it doesn't start bleeding again. Plus I know that if I send you back to your tent, you'll just disobey instructions and go back on the field, and all my miracle working will have been wasted," said the chirurgeon.
"On my honor, I wouldn't," said Eothen.
"That's the problem," said the chirurgeon. "You're a mercenary. Everyone knows you don't have any honor!"
"Hey!" said Eothen.
"Kidding, kidding," said the chirurgeon. "Still. Better safe than sorry."
It was a fair jest; Eothen knew that there were a great many mercenaries that in fact did not have any honor. There was a Guild, of course, and they had rules they were supposed to follow; the were allowed to break their contracts if they were in an untenable situation, they were not to turn attackers on the ones who hired them, they were not to loot and rape and pillage the villages they helped conquer; but it was well known that many troupes, or even individual members, broke these rules. They were supposed to be expelled from the Guild for breaking rules, but if the Guild was paid enough chit they usually turned a blind eye. The Fire Eagles were reputable, though; they did not extort their contractors, they did not break their contracts and they did not wreak havoc on any of the villages they conquered in any way. The chirurgeon knew that, which was why Eothen allowed him to survive the joke.
Also, she couldn't yet move.
She lay in that healing tent for half a sennight, and was released to her own after that only on the condition that she not re-enter the battle. While she was there, she got to know several of the healing tent staff, and no few of the other patients; she was the sad witness of limb amputations, gruesome deaths, and the worst – in her opinion – people who thought they had been repaired, thought they were going to be fine, end up with some kind of wound infection and die. The ones who had lost limbs or eyes, well that was terrible, but they lived; the ones who died outright never had the hope or the solace that they were going to be fine ripped out from under them. She trusted the chirurgeons and their helpers, but nonetheless she kept a careful monitoring of her own wounds, ready to point out the slightest tinge of pink, the smallest amount of drainage that didn't look quite right. In the end, though, she recovered nicely, and was allowed back on the field after the first sennight. During peacetime, the chirurgeon would likely have ordered her to remain inactive for a full moon; but this was not peacetime. Everyone who could fight was needed on the battlefield.
So Eothen fashioned an abdominal guard out of particularly hard-boiled leather as armor to protect her healing wound and sent a silent prayer to whatever gods may or may not care about her, and got back on the field. She resolved to only fight in battles that she could utilize Orin for, figuring that the added height would give her a little bit of extra protection; but of course, she didn't actually have the ability to pick and choose which battles she fought, so by the time this fight was over – they had won, but her wound was reopened and she had several new ones. So the trip to the next battle was spent visiting the chirurgeons, riding Orin in several rather unconventional positions including lying flat on her back with her head on his rump – good thing she had learned to do this on long travels with her family – and hoping she would be healed by the time she got to the next fight.
"Hello, lassie," said Rozem, riding up on his pony as Eothen was sprawled across Orin's rump. "How ya feelin' today?"
"Sore," said Eothen. "Wondering if this wound of mine is ever going to heal. But I'm on the right side of the grass. How are you?"
"Same," said Rozem. "Only minus the sore part, I jes' cooked! No more fight'n' for these old bones!"
"You're hardly old," said Eothen. "But then, neither am I; I only feel like an oldster."
"It be this life, lassie," said Rozem. "This life, it ages us all. The injuries add up, lassie, and we all be feelin' older than our years. It be the punishment for making our living by killing our brothers."
"That may well be true, my friend," said Eothen. "That may well be true."
The army rode on. They fought battle after battle; none of them were any different from the last. They were chaos, all with more than one army fighting in multiple directions; no one could tell who was enemy and who was ally anymore, and there were quite a few people killed by soldiers supposedly fighting on allied terms. Eothen didn't much care, and she knew her comrades felt the same; it made little difference which insignia was on anyone's armor. If he was attacking her, she would either die or she would kill him. She was not about to sacrifice herself in order to save the life of a supposed ally.
By the time the season ended, she was tired. Her contract was up; she had decided not to stay on. She had no idea what she would do, but she couldn't continue fighting battle after battle with no purpose to them that she could see. The world was chaos; there was no order, only one army fighting every other army for power and control, while the governments of the countries they fought in either crumbled in their attempt to restore order or they holed themselves up in their ever-shrinking capital cities in their attempt to pretend that nothing had changed and they were still in control. And they were; their sphere of control just shrank considerably than it had been in the past, or even from where it was in their imaginations. Many of the rulers that still existed believed that this chaos was only temporary, and eventually one of the armies fighting would defeat all the others; the rulers believed that when that happened, they would make concessions and deals and that army would become the new army of the nation, and they would retain control. Eothen did not think that was likely; in her experience, no one who had established that they were the most powerful leader around, as the commander of any eventually victorious army must be, would willingly hand over that power to some robed royal in a castle who had never even bloodied his own sword.
She returned with her troupe back to the stronghold; she did not have to announce her retirement just yet. She was allowed to remain in her hut for the offseason, but she must vacate by early spring to make room for any new recruits. They hadn't had many, lately; most fighters wanted to remain free agents, so they could fight for whichever army was demanding the highest price. Very few of them actually signed a contract anymore, but the Fire Eagles required at least one season's commitment for anyone to fight under their banner. Other troupes were not so picky; not only did they not require experience, but they would sign on fighters for one battle contract at a time. This was obviously beneficial to many fighters, who could go from troupe to troupe based on how much the battle contract was paying, rather than hoping that whatever troupe they had signed on with managed to garner the best fee. It was certainly contributing to the lawlessness of the mercenary troupes in general, and the lack of honor among the fighters, but Eothen didn't really see that there was anything anyone could do to fix it.
She spent the winter resting, hunting, gathering skins to make cloaks and clothing and curing meat to take with her. She spent a good deal of time in the tent of the chirurgeons, trying to finally get her pike wound to heal; it had been reopened several times over the fighting season and had become infected, but by the end of the winter season it had finally closed and no longer gave her pain. By spring, she had enough meat salted and cured to serve as travel rations and perhaps to trade in town for bread and fresh fruits; she wasn't sure what she was going to do for a living, so she needed to be able to feed herself until she could find work. She was a little bit scared; she had never been on her own without a plan before. She had left her family straight for the Fire Eagles and had planned on making the rounds of all the troupes if she failed to be accepted by them. She felt a little bit like a Clan of one of her people, since her plan to wander around offering up her services as a bodyguard or bandit relief was very much like the tradition of her people as a whole. She supposed that if nothing else worked, she could always return to them.
She hoped something else worked. As much as she loved her family and her people, she had no desire to return to them. She hadn't left them only so that she could go back home.
