The Princess and the Wizard
By
UCSbdad
Disclaimer: There are Castles and castles in this, but I own neither. Rating: K Time: 1967 and elsewhen.
Author's note: To get a look at what Castle's unit looks like, go to http colon back slash back slash ctrp dash 3d dash 4thcav dot com backslash troop dot html Click on org chart.
Castle and Alexis the Red sat on the opened top hatch all the way at the back of the track. The rest of the crew took their positions.
They drove for several hours without any problems. Then someone called out.
"Something's flying towards us and it sure isn't a Huey."
Castle looked to where the man was pointing.
"It can't be. That's a dragon. A dragon?"
Everyone tried to raise their machine guns to engage the dragon, but they couldn't raise them high enough. Everyone grabbed their M 16s and began tracking the dragon.
"Wait!" Cried Alexis. "Don't attack him. I recognize him. That's Cosmo. He's a friend."
"Cosmo, the friendly dragon? Any relation to Puff?" Castle asked, somewhat sarcastically.
"I don't know this Poof, but Cosmo is a friend." Alexis stood up and waved at the high flying dragon. The dragon turned in mid air and landed in front of the column.
"Red, baby! How are you? Got some new friends?" Said the dragon.
Castle looked the dragon over. He was a good thirty feet long, was a quadruped, with a long neck and a mouthful of what looked like very sharp teeth. His wings were folded back over his body, but Castle estimated his wingspan as about a hundred feet.
"This is the great and powerful wizard, Richard Castle. He defeated the Rings of Death from Meredith the Mad and killed the Slobberer with some sort of female familiar."
Castle decided there was no point in trying to explain to Cosmo what he really was.
"Glad to meet you, Cosmo." He said.
"Any friend of Alexis the Red is a friend of mine."
"So, you're a dragon? You shoot flames from your mouth?"
Cosmo laughed.
"Man, what kind of dragons do they have where you're from?"
"It must be the Poof dragon he spoke of." Alexis said.
"Man! Breathing fire. Do you know what that would do to your mouth? And your teeth?"
"You don't breathe fire? What do you do?"
"Since you ask…"
"You don't need to…" Alexis yelled. It was too late. Cosmo pointed his rear end at a grove of trees perhaps four hundred yards away and let go with an enormous fart. The leaves on the trees went from green to brown almost instantly. The humans only got a small whiff of the fart, but those in the first three vehicles felt nauseous.
"Next time, just tell me." Castle said, trying not to vomit.
"Can you fly to King James and tell him a powerful sorcerer is on the way. I'm sure King James will want to welcome him properly." Alexis asked.
"Assuming he's more or less upright." Cosmo said, but then unfurled his mighty wings, took a running start and soared off into sky.
"What did Cosmo mean with that crack about the king being more or less upright?" Castle asked.
Alexis blushed.
"The wizardly war with Meredith the Mad has put a great strain on us all. None more than our good king."
Castle felt that there was something Alexis wasn't telling him, but decided to let it pass for the time being.
They stopped about an hour before dusk and went into a night defensive position. The vehicles were arranged in a circle with the mortar track in the center. The mortar itself was mounted on a turntable so it could fire in any direction. The soldiers put up sections of chain link fence in front of their vehicles. This was a defense against Viet Cong sneaking up and firing rocket propelled grenades at a vehicle. They were sure there were no VC anyplace near, but they did it anyway, just to be safe. They strung razor wire between their vehicles and set up claymore directional mines covering all approaches to the platoon.
The Moon came up shortly after dark and Castle looked at it through his binoculars. It looked like the same Moon back on Earth, but he really couldn't be sure.
He looked over at Alexis who was just finishing her dinner.
"What do you call your planet?"
"Earth." She replied.
"Earth? Just like where we're from?"
"You're from a different planet? You are truly the greatest wizard of all."
Castle was interrupted by Sergeant Esposito.
"Sir, I just checked with the vehicle drivers. We had ninety five gallons of diesel in our tanks this morning and we still have ninety five after driving all day. And one other thing. The boxes of C rats we started on today are all full again. Lastly, you fired three rounds of .50 caliber bullets into that dude with a sword. That should have left you with forty-seven rounds in the ammo box. I just counted them. You have fifty rounds still."
"Somebody or something loves our asses." Castle said. "Let's hope they keep it up."
Castle set up watches and checked that everything was in order. He wrapped himself in a poncho liner, the beloved woobie of grunts everywhere, and went to sleep. He had trained himself to wake up every few hours to check things. He was approaching one of the scout ACAVs when he heard someone whisper to him.
"Lieutenant, over here."
Castle crawled on top of the ACAV.
"What?" He whispered back.
"I've got movement in the tree line. You can see it through the starlight scope."
The trooper handed Castle a night vision device that amplified starlight or moonlight to see in the dark. Castle could see something moving, then he could see several somethings moving, but he had no idea what they were.
"I'll get Alexis. She might know what they are."
Castle woke the redhead and explained what they'd found. He also woke Sergeant Esposito and told him to go to each vehicle and very quietly get everyone awake and ready for anything. Then he led Alexis back to the ACAV.
"Have you seen anything?" He asked the trooper still on watch.
"I'm pretty sure there are more of 'em. Whatever they are."
He handed Alexis the starlight scope and asked her to look through it.
"This is amazing. What is it?"
"A starlight scope. It amplifies starlight, or moonlight. But what do you see?"
"Those are orcs. Since they're orcs, they intend to attack us."
"Why?"
"Because that's what orcs do. They attack and eat humans."
"How are they armed?"
"Swords and spears. No bows or other ranged weapons. They like to kill close up."
"Any idea how many?"
"No. But they rarely go about in packs of less than a hundred."
"Kemper! To me." Caste said quietly.
His RTO was beside him in seconds. Using the radio, Castle moved his infantry squad and Sgt. Tranh's scouts to the section of his perimeter the orcs were massing at. There were two tanks that could fire into the mass of orcs he could see. He told them to turn on their million candle power Xenon searchlights on and light up the attackers like it was daylight as soon as he gave the word. The one minigun he had was in the wrong section to hose down the attackers, but between the tanks firing anti-personnel beehive rounds, the machine guns and infantry weapons, he figured he had everything covered.
He had to wait less than a minute before there was a low pitched roar from the trees and orcs began pouring out of the trees.
"Lights on! Open fire!" He screamed into the radio's mic.
The tanks' Xenon lights bathed the whole area in the brightest light imaginable, which caused the orcs to come to a crashing halt, just as the tanks main guns blasted gaping holes in the mass of orcs. The machine guns, M16s, grenade launchers and AK 47s tore into the remaining orcs.
The orcs had no fear, charging into the fire and falling in droves. One orc in particular, a giant among the huge attackers, roared and waved his sword over his head as he was pinned in the beam of a searchlight. He disintegrated as a dozen or more men fired at him.
Then the last orc had fallen. Castle and his sergeants screamed "Cease firing" over and over before the troopers, filled with adrenaline, stopped shooting.
"Anyone see any movement out there?" Castle called.
Sergeant Esposito stood on the deck of a track and looked over the scene with the starlite scope.
"I got nothing. Nobody's moving, sir."
Castle got back on the radio.
"Charlie ten to platoon. Tanks, kill your lights. We don't want to attract any more attention than we have to. Who knows what the fuck is out there besides orcs. Check your ammo and tell me how much we have left."
He wasn't surprised when he got the results. Esposito told him.
"We have as much ammo as we started out with. I know I fired a whole belt of M2 ammo into them and I have the same full belt now. Tankers have the same number of beehive rounds they started with, same with mortars, machine gunners and grunts. I don't know how the hell that could be. Grobner said he just kept firing his 16 without changing mags. He thinks he fired maybe fifty times. When he checked his mag after the firefight, it still had 18 rounds in it. Weird."
Alexis interrupted.
"You're unbelievably powerful, Great Wizard. You must know astrology to make the stars show you your enemies through that tube, and you can bring the light of the sun itself down to Earth to blind your foes. No one, no warriors, no matter how brave, no wizard no matter how skilled, has ever defeated a force of orcs and suffered no loss. Amazing."
"Look, Alexis. No matter what you think…"
"Sir, can I speak to you. Alone?" Esposito interrupted.
The two walked away from the redhead.
"Sir, we've seen some awfully strange shit here. Dragons, orcs, endless ammo, the lightning and…I don't know what all else. I don't think you should keep telling Red over there that you aren't a wizard."
"You think I should lie to her?" Castle demanded.
"No. What I'm saying is that you shouldn't contradict her. If she wants to tell everyone you're a great wizard, okay. If you're asked, just tell the truth. We're from a far away land and have great powers no one here has seen before. We don't want anyone to think we're too easy to take."
Castle thought and then nodded.
"Okay, we're just wandering…what?"
"Soldiers. They seem to have soldiers here."
Castle told everyone to go back to sleep except for those on watch, but not many people got much sleep that night.
In the morning, Castle sent his infantry squad under a shake and bake sergeant, Sergeant Tom "Wiggy" Wiggins out to check the orcs. Vietnam had showed that the Army had too few sergeants for the war there. They had set up Non-Commissioned Officers' Schools that were quite similar to Officer's Candidate Schools, except that officers incurred an extra year of service while newly promoted sergeants did not. Such sergeants were called shake and bake sergeants.
Wiggy came back to talk to Rick.
"What a mess. There'll all dead, sir. Not just dead but shot to bits. I don't know how many beehive rounds the tanks fired, sir, but there must have been thousands of the little fucking flechettes flying last night. That redhead couldn't believe the damage we did. She seemed real happy about all the dead orcs, though."
"According to her, Wiggins, the eat humans. And they charged us waving weapons last night."
The platoon mounted up and kept going.
It was near lunch time when Alexis told Castle to stop.
"What is it? Enemies?" He asked.
"Friends are around. I think."
TBC