The left flankman, Private Ham of Greenwood, gasped for breath as the survivors of a company of goblins fell back to the north in disarray, with fewer retreating than lay before the Danlier's Cerulean Foot Regiment. Opposing battlemages continued to neutralize either side's magic, leaving sword and muscle and fatigue to decide the ultimate victor. The Horde of Evil was slowly but steadily losing the war of attrition. After a quick prayer of thanks that he remained uninjured, Ham dropped his pack, gulped from his waterskin, and fished out a handful of nuts and dried fruit. No telling how long (or short) a time the enemy would need to regroup.
A shouted word dropped from the wooden observation tower behind the lines of the Cerulean Foot. It was picked up by the exhausted fighters and passed toward either flank.
Ham began chewing as the word reached him. He glanced back at the tower. The lookout was down, and the draft horses were moving the tower to the rear. He glanced to the far northeast where five huge shapes had lumbered over the crest of a ridge. A cold hand clutched his heart. He gasped and passed the word to the right flankman of Craig's Loden Foot Regiment. He crammed as much food as he could into his mouth and threw aside what remained in his hand. He shouldered his pack and unsheathed his sword, preparing to run for his life. You had to make sacrifices in wartime, but suicide for no purpose? He couldn't believe Sir Willam would order a stand against suddenly overwhelming odds.
Breathing deeply, sucking strength into his body, he turned and eyed the wooded hilltop where the Knight-Paladin's headquarters tents occupied a clearing at the military crest. Surely Old Silverwings was now out of tricks and it was time to flee.
Knight-Paladin Willam of Stokes-on-Fourche strode wearily from his command tent, the upswept silver eagle's wings on his helmet flashing in the sun. He flicked a speck of debris from his gleaming white tabard, then looked northeast to where Lieutenant Tomson was pointing.
"There, Sir," said Tomson, his constricted throat causing his voice to squeak. "War mammoths."
The shaggy beasts lumbered southward toward Sir Willam's Serenity Brigade, the center regiments of the Forces of Good defending the critical Shepford Valley approach into the Free Kingdoms of the south. The Knight-Paladin said nothing, but put a calming hand on Tomson's shoulder. His military aide was a man not easily frightened. He glanced toward the tent where his warmages huddled. The blue-white flashes escaping at the bottom of the tent walls told him that they were fully involved with countering the spells of the Horde of Evil's own sorcerers.
The Knight-Paladin sighed. He could think of only one option. He didn't want to do it, but it seemed that the Vile Lord's Horde had left him no choice. He turned and seemed surprised to find his staff huddled in the tent's doorway, staring at the approaching beasts with wide eyes and gaping, speechless mouths. Waving with the backs of his silver gauntleted fingers he shooed them back into the tent like chickens into a coop. "Now you've seen them. You have work to do. Get to it."
"Tomson," he said in a quiet voice, "ask Ayelin to join me and bring in Bjorn." The Lieutenant blinked, shuddered, and ran toward the warmage's tent. Sir Willam turned to watch the approaching creatures and pray that his men would hold position long enough for him to win what was already being called the Gateshire Forest Campaign.
"Sir."
The Knight-Paladin turned at Tomson's voice and looked down between the two bearers at the large, reeking, hairy man sleeping on the litter. The creature was shaggy as an ape. His curly red hair and beard were matted and tangled. He wore nothing but a once-white breechcloth, now yellow and brown, a steel collar, and steel wristbands, each plain except for loops where heavy securing chains had been attached. Beside him lay a huge bastard sword, plain except for two words forged into the blade in liturgical script. Sir Willam closed his eyes and prayed.
"Willam?"
He opened his eyes. He had not heard his beloved Ayelin approach, but that was her way. She was staring at Bjorn, her beautiful face ashen but her voice controlled. Eighty years of countering the magicks of the Horde of Evil would instill such strength of will.
His head tilted to indicate northeast. "War mammoths...."
"I see them." She glanced at the front litter bearer. "Carry him inside."
The bearers were all too eager to be away from this strikingly beautiful witch who commanded such deadly power. They would rather fight Bjorn bare-handed than remain in her sinister presence.
Sir Willam gazed deep into her amazing eyes, light blue irises surrounding pupils of lapis lazuli. The eyes of a battlemage. Words knotted in his throat. When she closed those eyes and began murmuring he swept his own over her in an appraising glance while removing his right gauntlet. The brown hair which fell behind her shoulders to mid-thigh was dull. Her simple ankle-length robe matched the lapis lazuli of her pupils. It had not been changed in the six days since the battle had begun, nor had it been slept in. The robe's only adornments were two small patterns of interwoven gold and silver threads where the hood attached at either side of the neck closure. They indicated her specialty and her rank amongst the warmages, and they were dull. He knew that was an indicator of her physical condition to her brothers and sisters in magic. He did not need their power to know that reviving potions worked only so long against fatigue toxins. Her once flawless face had tiny lines at the corners of eyes and mouth, and her reactions were slightly, but noticeably, slower to his accustomed eye.
She opened her eyes. "They will strike at the juncture of the Loden and the Cerulean, behind a wall of goblins about to crest the ridge and move ahead. We have adequate, but little, time."
He took her slender left hand in his right. "Send me someone...."
"No." Her remaining strength and resolve gave steel to her voice. "I cannot."
"But...."
She pressed her right fingertips to his mouth. "I must do this myself. None of the others have the strength. The energy loss would kill her."
Fear swept the Knight-Paladin's face for the first time since the Gateshire Forest Campaign had begun. "Nor have you! This might kill you, Ayelin."
Her fingers caressed the gray-flecked, short black beard at his chin. "I have no doubt that the transfer would kill any of them. I will not sacrifice another if I can do this myself."
He fought to keep tears from collecting. "But I need you, Ayelin, and I need you to lead the battlemages. You would sacrifice yourself?" His voice softened and the tears came. "You would sacrifice us?"
A hint of a smile flickered as her fingers stroked a narrow gap in his armor above the covered scar. "Bardstown Bridge."
Where Sir Willam had personally led the heavy cavalry charge to rescue two surrounded companies. Where Sir Willam had found the point of an enemy lance. Where Sir Willam had been so severely injured that Lieutenant Tomson had begun funeral preparations on the advice of Ffolkestone, the senior healermage.
When he sighed his resignation she sealed the argument with, "If I sacrifice us, I do it for them."
For them. During one of their now-infrequent nights together, as he recovered from his ecstatic release and held her soft, warm body to his in the pale moonlight, he had looked at the afterglow adorning her lovely face and had casually mentioned, "in another reality, perhaps we could wed." She had gone strangely silent and withdrawn at the comment. After some gentle coaxing she revealed that in another reality they had indeed wed, and that she had given him three strong sons and a daughter who together would usher in almost two centuries of prosperity, and that their children's names would be known to historians for millennia.
At first she had been reluctant to tell him that particular reality would come to be if the Forces of Good overcame the Horde of Evil and destroyed the Pillar of Chaos in the Vile Lord's tower far to the north. None of this around them would be or would have been. Somehow, through a process she could not explain in words he could understand, history would change eighty years ago and would be forever different. It was at that moment that he understood the true stakes of the war: a hundred thousand now-dead men would not have died, and he would have his beloved Ayelin as his wife.
Sir Willam's shoulders sagged and he brought her fingertips to his lips. "I do wish you had a different spell to awaken, strengthen, and control him," he said and kissed them again.
Ayelin gave him a weak smile. "Do you not think we've been looking for another? Surely, my love, you cannot think we enjoy this."
Sir Willam motioned her ahead of him into the tent as he pulled on the gauntlet. "No, I do not. Nor do I envy you in the least."
Lieutenant Tomson had rigged a privacy curtain to the left of the entrance in the large tent. Sir Willam nodded his appreciation and escorted Ayelin behind it.
The stench from the sleeping man was overpowering in the close area. The litter bearers had removed his breech cloth and now stood with spear points inches from the hairy creature's chest. If Bjorn awoke and was not placed under immediate control, they would have scarcely a second to kill him. That witch was about to awaken him.
Without hesitation Ayelin unfastened the neck closure and pulled the robe off over her head. Sir Willam took the robe as she used her hands to pull her hair through it. It fell in disarray about her, hiding the small, high, firm breasts, shapely thighs and hips, and sculpted backside of a twenty year old woman. Magical talent was a blessing to a woman with a century of summers behind her.
Her hands gathered the long, brown fall behind her as she glanced to the two litter bearers. They were desperately trying to look as if they were not avoiding glancing at her for any reason except the berserker asleep before them, lest she destroy them with a flick of her finger. Having to endure others' unreasonable fear of the unknown was the price paid by all with the power.
Ayelin knelt beside Bjorn and grasped his shriveled length of stinking flesh with an uncontrolled shudder. She quickly stroked him to erection, straddled his hips, and squatted, halting with the point of his weapon just grazing the brown thicket surrounding her tunnel. She looked at Sir Willam as if awaiting an order.
The Knight-Paladin closed his eyes and nodded. At the same time distant noise told him the arrows of the advancing goblins had reached his lines. The soldiers and then the war mammoths would not be far behind. His forces could eventually kill the shaggy creatures but too late and at a terrible cost, one he could not afford. The Vile Lord would sacrifice those magnificent beasts to gain the breach through which he might ultimately defeat the Forces of Good and enslave the Free Kingdoms of the South. In return he must risk the sacrifice of his two most powerful weapons.
Ayelin lowered herself around Bjorn's short staff, paused an instant, then began lifting and dropping her hips, alternately releasing and engulfing it. Her face impassive, her eyes closed, she began murmuring the words of the spell.
Sir Willam shook his head, unable to fathom what had possessed the battlemages of ages past to create a weapon that had to be activated and controlled in a manner that sacrificed the dignity of the woman he loved and of her sisters in magic. Beyond his personal experience of the magic of the love act itself and the energies it created and released, he found himself incapable of understanding her explanation of the spell. Yet, this was not the love act. This was merely a pale imitation of it, as devoid of true emotion and the true magic of love itself as the rutting practiced in the back rooms of taverns and in bordellos. This was a false magic; a powerful one to be sure but pitiful compared to the true thing.
A brilliant, sickly, yellow-green light from outside, accompanied by the sucking sound of a monstrous boot being pulled from mud, told him that the Warmages had just thwarted a deadly attack on his headquarters. For a moment all was as silent as death in the camp as that realization struck home. Before his staff resumed its buzz of activity he clearly heard the wet "slish" "slish" sounds of Ayelin's tight, wet sheath around the disgusting shaft of the berserker, clearly heard the murmured words of the spell that vanished from his mind even as he comprehended them, clearly heard the sudden clash of sword against sword and shield and the death screams from the battle below.
Clearly heard the grunting gasp he knew so well as Ayelin achieved release. She turned her face toward his, devoid of the afterglow, the smile, the chimes of laughter evoked when she rode his battle lance to release. "It is done," she whispered, faint to the point of inaudibility, before closing her eyes and falling sideways. He was not fast enough to catch her.
"Tomson!" Sir Willam shouted as he tore back the curtain. He found himself staring into the green irises around lapis lazuli pupils of his senior healermage. The faithful military aide, unencumbered by the emotional distractions of his commander, had prepared for this expected result. Tomson had summoned Ffolkestone and a litter.
With no wasted movements Ffolkestone squatted beside Ayelin, pressed the fingertips of his left hand to the space between her breasts while opening one eye with the fingertips of his right, lifted one hand by the wrist and ran a fingernail from the base of her thumb to the base of her little finger, and rose with a small hand signal to his litter bearers. They placed her on the litter with gentle swiftness. Ffolkestone took her robe from Sir Willam with that glance the Knight-Paladin had seen all to often, that glance which conveyed his deepest concern about the adequacy of his significant talent. He draped the robe over her as they were moving. And they were gone. It had taken mere seconds, yet it had seemed a lifetime.
He had to put all of that behind him. It was time to leave her in Ffolkestone's hands, to sacrifice his concern for her and replace it with the immediate concern for the greater good. It was time to awaken his response.
"Wilfred?" Sir Willam called to his personal aide. "Do we have any boiling water?"
The old man's bald head bobbed. "Yes, Sir."
"Then fix me a cup of tea and awaken him. Quickly."
The staff suddenly remembered something that needed to be done at the other end of the tent. Bjorn's litter bearers knew they could be of significant assistance to the staff in whatever the task was, raised their spear points, and joined them. Even stalwart Lieutenant Tomson was casting glances as if he wished to join them.
As Sir Willam expected, Wilfred had anticipated the request. With true indifference to the threat on the litter he hobbled over with a cup in one hand and the pot of boiling water in the other. He handed the cup to Sir Willam and threw the water on Bjorn.
The shaggy man roared with more volume than was humanly possible and sprang to his feet, bringing the sword up over his head. The Knight-Paladin softly spoke a word known only to himself, Wilfred, Tomson, and Ayelin. Bjorn froze and his eyes, six feet and a half feet above the tent floor, glared down at Sir Willam. The Knight-Paladin had five seconds. He pointed out the door and across the battlefield. "Those mammoths did it. Come back when you're done." Two and one-half seconds to spare, at the end of which Bjorn again roared and charged out the tent door.
At the first roar from the hilltop, Private Ham of Greenwood grinned. At the second he risked a glance back. A huge shaggy figure rushed from the command tent, sunlight glinting off a sword swinging wildly above its head. Ham removed the head of one goblin and continued the stroke to detach the sword arm of one threatening Private Sutton beside him. He compared the approach of his Knight-Paladin's berserker to the approach of the Vile Lord's mammoths, laughed, and parried a sword strike. He wished now that he'd eaten more when he'd had the chance. It would be at least an hour before he had another opportunity.
Afterward there would be more of the Horde to sacrifice on the altar of war.
© Russell Hoisington 2004