Chapter 1: Chapter 1

Hauling Gresham through the chaos of the back lines was heavy work, and few folk spared us a glance - the battle had degenerated long before into an unorganized skirmish. Under any normal circumstances I would have had little difficulty taking the weight for the old man-at-arms, but we were both fully armoured in iron brigandine and patchwork steel plate, and an hour of battle had taken it’s toll. The heavy armour dragged at us, causing us to stumble as often as step cleanly, and Gresham grunted in pain at each jarring step.

“Giddy?” I yelled, my voice dampened by the cries of the camp followers, the wounded, and the cheers of victory. “Giddy, we need you!”

“It’s ain’t all that bad, boy,” Gresham grunted. His sallet helm was off, dangling from the hand that wasn’t wrapped around my shoulder, and his bushy white moustache was stained red with blood after his oft-broken nose had suffered another impact during the fighting. He coughed, wincing at the pain, and pressed the helmet to his hip as if that would stop the bleeding of his wound. “I could walk if I needed to.”

“I found you pinned under a horse, you old fuck,” I said. “With a spear poking out of you like someone was waiting to roast you over a campfire tonight. Giddy!”

“I’m here, I’m here,” the woman said, rushing towards us. Her blonde hair was tied back, hidden under a simple bandana to keep it out of the way as she worked, and her mouth was a firm press of concern as she looked us over. Giddy was technically my ‘footwoman’ in camp, meant to organize my affairs and maintain our campsite and the like, but she only did her fair share of that work and was much more useful for her skills with the horses and as our sometime physiker. She ducked, swinging Gresham’s other arm over her shoulders and helping take what weight she could. “Bring him back over to the tents.”

“Have you seen Castor?” I asked. “Or either of the lads?” I’d gotten unseated from Castor during the second charge of the Free Lancers, just as the battle was turning from battle lines to churning chaos. The warhorse was trained to stay near his rider if he could, but I’d been knocked clean off his back by a lance ricocheting off of some else’s shield and bouncing into my steel chestplate. He’d been in the midst of a group of other horses, forced to gallop on and unable to turn or stop. Without the ability to see me, Castor had likely tried to return to Giddy at the camp.

“Neither hide nor hair,” Giddy said. I wasn’t sure whether she was more worried about Castor, or our two archers.

“Farthing and Shilling know their business,” Gresham groaned. “If they ain’t on the battlefield claming loot like they fucking should be, then they ain’t doing their fucking jobs.”

We wormed our way through the camp, which was only slightly less riotous than the back lines. The camp followers, those who were not part of the fighting but necessary to a warparty on the march, were gathered near the front waiting for news - who had survived, who was still alive to pay debts, who needed a new employer or patron? Blacksmiths and whores, fletchers and washerwomen, each had a vested interest in the living and the dead. Wounded had already been dragged back further, footmen and a couple of battlefield barbers setting to their work under the blazing sun of the midmorning. 

As we passed one of the tents repurposed for the wounded one of the barbers looked up from his work sawing through a man’s forearm, removing a pulped hand that looked like it had been trampled under several horses. “Don’t tell me you’re sleepin’ on the job again, Cutter,” he crowed. “You need me t’ wake you up or summat?”

“Fuck off, Niles,” Gresham said from between Giddy and I. “You ain’t touchin’ me with a ten foot pole. I’d rather die than let you dress my wounds again after the last time.”

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Niles boomed a laugh, and set back to his sawing. His patient was blessedly unconscious.

Our tents loomed ahead, along with our pickets of riding and pack horses. We were set up among the Free Lancer tents, on slightly better ground than the Sellswords who made up the infantry of the warparty. I helped Giddy lay Gresham out next to the fire, where she already had a pot of water boiling and bandages lain out carefully. I started to help unbuckle Gresham’s brigandine - the process of doffing the armour fully would take a few minutes if he were fully mobile, let alone wounded as he was - but the old man grabbed my arm. “Bucko, you ain’t got time f’ that,” he said. “Y’ know how this shite works. Your just hurting our take.”

I grimaced, but nodded. “Don’t die on me, Cutter.”

“He’s not going to die,” Giddy said. She’d gotten the laces undone holding Gresham’s iron brigandine coat to the steel cuisse that protected his upper legs, and pulled them apart to check the stab wound on the mans hip. “He might walk with a limp, but he’ll be alive.”

“Ain’t no one gonna see me limp,” Gresham said. “I’ve survived worse than this. I ever tell you ‘bout the time I lost my left leg below the knee? Got popped right back on by Van Breur the Green hisself.”

“Only every time you get drunk,” Giddy sighed. “But I’m no arcanist hoarding magic, you old fart.”

I left them, the banter helping calm my worries for the old man. For all that he’d seen more summers than me nearly four times over, he was like a force of nature. A final gift from my father, my true father, before we parted ways.

Pushing back through the camp, I trudged towards the battlefield once more. More wounded were being brought back, carried on litters by the camp followers who cared enough to go look for them. The cacophany near the wounded tents was rising - men who had roared in battle now wailed like babes, crying for their mothers and to the Lost Gods.

The back lines had scattered further. The field of battle had spread from a slow rise in the west, down to a creek in the east cutting a barrier between the grassland meadow and a dense copse of woodland too thick to provide anything but a barrier during the battle. We had met the enemy on our choice of field, forcing them to meet us. The dead were scattered across a quarter mile - the best guess was that Baron Vicelli, who held my current commission, had fielded three hundred sellswords alongside his own fifty or so bonded spearmen. Thirty Free Lancers, and a similar number of man-at-arms, had served along with me as the heavy cavalry. Duke Tirnollo, who styled himself the proper ruler of Vicelli’s lands, had come across their shared border with a similar number.

The dead now numbered in the hundreds, and now they and the wounded were being picked through by the carrion - man and vulture alike. I grimaced. I needed to find my horse, my archers, and gather the trophies I was due. While I didn’t regret helping Gresham from the battlefield for a moment, I knew doing so had likely cost me at least one of those goals.

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