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Out of Character:
Rebellion must have an unassailable base, something guarded not merely from attack, but from the fear of it: such a base as we had in the Red Sea Parts, the desert, or in the minds of the men we converted to our creed.
T. E. Lawrence
The prize was a chest.
A Major of the Brotherhood of the Castigars was struggling to save the box, while a Colonel of Corone’s Imperial Guard had been ordered to capture it. The imperial had been unleashed to the task; told that he could destroy or kill whatever or whoever got in his way. It was a task he took to with enthusiasm. Even chasing his quarry through the daunting lands of Raiaera and having to evade the attention of the Elven patrols wouldn’t put him off.
The strongbox itself was a chest made of a wood so old it appeared as black and shiny as coal, a solid oak that was bound with two iron bands that, though tainted with ancient rust, were still strong. The old chest was two feet long, eighteen inches wide and as many inches high. It was locked with two hasps that were fastened with brass padlocks. The joint between the humped lid and the chest was sealed with red seals, some of them so old that they were now little more than wisps of scarlet wax imbedded in the grain. An oilcloth had been sewn around the chest to protect it from Raiaera’s weather, or rather to protect the fate of the Castigars that lay hidden inside.
On the second week, the Coronian Colonel almost captured the strongbox. He had been given a regiment of Imperial Dragoons and those horsemen had caught up with the Brotherhood close to the city of Beinost. The Castigars had only escaped by retreating and climbing into the highest part of the Twilight Mountains where they were forced to abandon their horses, for no mount could climb the steep, ice-slicked tracks where Major Harore sought refuge.
It was winter, the worst winter in memory in these parts and the worst time to be in the Twilight Mountains, but the pursuing Imperials had given Major Harore no choice. Corone’s armies were resolved to stop the Castigars at any cost, and Harore had fled with his precious cargo just one hour before the enemy horsemen had entered the area. He had ridden with a hundred and ten Castigar vanguard; the mounted ‘hunters’ who carried a straight bladed sword and a short barrelled carbine. But the hunters had become the hunted as, in a nightmare journey across Raiaera, Harore had twisted and turned to avoid his Imperial pursuers.
He had hoped to find safety in the northernmost parts of Raiaera, but, only two days before the Dragoons had forced them into the mountains, escalating tensions between the Raiaerans and Alerar had stonewalled that plan. Harore was alone now, stranded in the mountains, with just ninety of his men left.
The others had died. They had died for the chest which the survivors carried through a desolated and frozen Raiaeran countryside, a place still bearing the scars of Pode’s recent work. Snow thickened in the passes. When there was a thaw it only came in the form of rain; a pelting, relentless rain that turned the mountain paths into mud which froze hard in the long nights. Frostbite threatened to decimate the vanguard. In the worst of the cold the survivors sheltered in caves or in high deserted farmsteads.
On one such day, when the wind drove a bitter snowfall from the west, Harore’s men hunched in the miserable shelter of a narrow gulley high on a mountain’s crest. Harore himself lay at the gully’s rim and stared into the valley through a long barrelled telescope.
He stared at the enemy.
Brown cloaks hid the pale green cloaks of the Imperial Dragoons. These Coronians had followed Harore every inch of his bitter journey but, while he struggled in the highlands, they rode in the valleys where there were roads, food and shelter, all the while evading the attention of their Raiaeran counterparts. On some days the weather would stop the Coronians and Harore would dare to hope that he had lost them, but whenever the snow eased for a few hours, the dreaded shapes would always appear again. Now, lying in the shivering wind, the Major could see the enemy horsemen unsaddling in a small village at the Twilight Mountain’s base. The Coronians would have fires and food in the village, their horses would have shelter and hay, while his own men sobbed because of the cold that lashed the mountainside.
“Are they there?” Harore’s second in command, Lieutenant Gan, climbed up from the gully.
“They’re there.”
“The Colonel?”
“Yes.” Harore was staring directly at the two horsemen in the village street. One of them was the Coronian Colonel of the Imperial Guard, gaudy in his scarlet pelisse and dark green overalls.
The other wore no uniform; instead he was dressed in a black, tight waisted riding coat above white boots. Harore feared him more than he feared the Colonel, for it was he who guided the Dragoon’s pursuit. The black-coated man knew where Major Harore was heading, he knew where he could be stopped, and he knew the power of the object that was hidden in the ironbound box.
Lieutenant Gan crouched in the snow next to Harore.
Neither man looked like a member of the Brotherhood anymore, nor a revolutionary in waiting. They were swathed in cloaks that were made from common sacking. Their faces, boots and hands were wrapped in rags. Yet, beneath their makeshift cloaks they wore the scarlet red and white of a Castigar elite company, and they were each as hard and efficient as any man who struggled for the Brotherhood’s cause.
Gan borrowed Harore’s lens and stared into the valley below. Driven snow blurred the view, but he could see the splash of the scarlet pelisse hanging from the Colonel’s right shoulder.
“Why doesn’t he wear a cloak?” the Lieutenant grumbled.
“He’s showing how tough he is,” Harore said curtly, “Fucking show off.”
Gan shifted the glass to see yet more Dragoons coming to the village. Some of the Coronian company led limping horses, and all carried heavy duty sabres and flintlock rifles. “I thought we’d lost them.” Gan said sadly.
“The only way we’ll lose them is when we bury the last one with our own hands.” Harore slid down from the skyline. He had a face hardened by sun and wind, a pugnacious face, but saved from coarseness by the dark eyes that could spark with humour and understanding. Now, watching his men shiver in the narrow gully, those eyes were rimmed with red. “How much food is left?”
“Enough for two days, maybe.”
“If I didn’t know better,” Harore’s voice was scarcely audible above the wind’s noise, “I would think the gods had abandoned us.”
Lieutenant Gan said nothing. A gust of wind snatched snow from the crest and whirled it into a glittering billow above their heads. The Coronians below, he thought bitterly, would be helping themselves to food, firewood and bedding in that town. Children would be pointing them to the mountains. The men in the village would be interrogated to reveal whether or not they had seen a tattered band of men carrying a chest. They would truthfully deny any such sighting, but the man in the black coat and white boots knew the vanguard would still be in the area. What the men missed, the children playing in the street had seen with their own eyes.
Gan closed his eyes. He had not known what it was to hate until this uprising had began, and now he didn’t know if he could ever root the hate out of his soul for these Imperials. The same people whose ancestors had carved through his people with their bloodied swords, who had destroyed Arius Mephisto’s dream of a united and peaceful Althanas under one unifying banner.
“We’ll separate.” Harore said suddenly.
“Major Harore?”
“…and you will wait here with the other men. When we’re gone, and when the Imperials are gone, you will cross the Twilight Mountains into Alerar. You will not move until you are sure the valley is empty. That Colonel is clever, and he may have already guessed what I am thinking. So wait, Gan! Wait until you are certain, then wait another day. Do you understand?”
Gan nodded. “I understand.”
Harore, despite his agonizing tiredness and the cold that leached into his very bones, found some enthusiasm to invest his words with hope.
“Go to Alerar, Gan, and see if you can find Shinsou Vaan Osiris. Tell him I need him. Tell him I need horses and I need him to look after the men. Take those men and horses to Etheria. I will find you there.”
Gan nodded. There was an obvious question to ask, but he could not bring himself to speak. Harore understood anyway.
"If the Imperials have captured the box, " he said bleakly, "then you will know. They will trumpet their capture across Corone, Gan, and you will know because our cause will be lost."
Gan shivered beneath his ragged cloaks. "If you go, you may find help from the Dark Elves?"
Harore spat to show his opinion of the Alerarian army.
"They would help you?" Gan insisted.
"Would you trust the Dark Elves with what is in that strongbox?"
Gan considered his answer, then shrugged. "No."
Harore eased himself to the crest once more and stared down at the village. "Perhaps those devils will meet the Dark Elves, or the Raiaerans become alert to their presence. Then one pack of barbarians can kill the other." He shuddered with the cold. "If I had enough men, Gan, I would fill hell with the souls of these Imperial dogs. But I do not have the men. So fetch them for me!"
"I will try, Harore."
It was as much of a promise as Gan dared offer, for no descendant of the Castigars could feel hopeful in these early days. Arius Mephisto was dead, and in his place the council of the Brotherhood had been enthroned in Whitevale, the spiritual home of the Castigar insurrection against the Republic. The old military might of the Castigars, which had shown such fine defiance all those years ago, had been crushed by remnants of the Ixian Knights and those that had been sent to help them had been ignominiously chased towards the sea. All that was left to the Brotherhood of the Castigars were fragments of its broken armies, the defiance of its proud people, and the strongbox.
The next morning, Harore’s men carried the box to the west. Lieutenant Gan watched as the Imperial Dragoons saddled their horses and abandoned a village that had been plundered for resources and from which smoke funnelled into the sky from chimneys below. The Dragooons might not have known where Harore was, but the man in the black coat and white boots knew precisely where the Major was going and so the company forced their horses to the east.
Gan waited a full day; then, in a downpour of rain that turned the snow into slush and the paths to thick mud, he went southeast. The hunters and the hunted were moving again, inching their intricate paths across a wintry land, and the hunted were seeking the miracle that might yet save their Brotherhood and snatch a glorious victory from defeat.
More than a hundred men were abandoned in the village, and there was nothing more to be done for them. They were drunk. A score of women stayed with them, and they were drunk too. Not just drunk, but insensible. The men had broken into a tavern’s storeroom and found great oaken barrels of last year’s vintage with which they had diluted their misery. Now, in a bleak dawn, they lay about the village like the victims of a plague.
The drunks were men who had been the small, advance force for the Castigars in Alerar. They had joined the Brotherhood because of crime or desperation, and because the Brotherhood gave them a third of a pint of rum a day. Last night they had found heaven in a miserable tavern in a miserable Alerarian town on a miserable flint road that led to Etheria. They had got drunk, so now they would be left to the mercy of the Dark Elves, who were furious that men from Corone were so freely patrolling their sovereign territory and would be along soon to wipe out any stragglers they found.
A tall man wearing the white uniform of a Telgradian moved among the bodies which lay in the stable yard of the plundered tavern. His interest was not in the stupefied drunks, but in some wooden crates that had been jettisoned from an ox-drawn wagon to make space for some of the wounded men. The crates, like so much else that their force was now too weak to carry, would have been left to the pursuing Dark Elves except that Shinsou Vaan Osiris had discovered that they contained rifle ammunition.
Though not a user of firearms himself, his assigned escort carried snub nosed flintlocks and they were already low on bullets, so the Telgradian was rescuing as much as possible.
“Come on, move it!”
Shinsou had already filled the packs and pouches of his small force with as many of the precious cartridges as his men could carry; now he and one of his elite Riflemen crammed yet more into the panniers of the last mule they had.
Rifleman Amadeus finished the job and then stared at the remaining crates.
“What do we do with them, sir?”
Shinsou looked back at the crates. “Burn it all.”
“Fucking hell!” Amadeus gave a brief laugh and then gestured at the drunks in the yard. “You’ll kill them!”
“If we don’t, the Alerarians will.” Shinsou had a savage, cold expression on his face. “Or would you rather the Dark Elves started killing us with our own gunpowder?”
Amadeus did not much care for what the Alerarians did. At this moment he cared about a drunken girl who lay in the yard’s corner. “Pity to kill her, sir. She’s such a pretty little thing.”
“Leave her for the Alerarians.”
Amadeus stooped to pull open the girl’s bodice to reveal her breasts. She stirred in the cold air, but did not waken. Her hair was stained with vomit, her dress with wine, yet she was a pretty girl. She was perhaps no more than sixteen years old.
Probably married one of our lot and followed him here. Now she’s drunk and the Alerarians will have her.
“Wake up!” Amadeus said.
“Leave her!” All the same Shinsou could not resist crossing the yard to look down at the girl. “The stupid bitch has gotten herself in this mess. She’ll answer to them.”
Six months ago, no man of the Brotherhood would have spoken thus in front of the men, but their long, arduous journey had jaded tempers and brought hidden antagonisms to the surface. Men who would have normally treated each other with wary respect or even a forced cordiality now snapped like rabid dogs. Shinsou’s mood wasn’t improved by the mess he had found here, where men of the Brotherhood had idled on their tasks and gotten themselves in such a state they were incapable of being useful any longer.
“Who do these people think they are?” Shinsou snapped again. “Do they think the whole force will wait for them to sober up? Then there are people like you Amadeus. Gaping at some whore’s tits whilst the Dark Elves are on their way over here to kick us out of Alerar. We’ve got a job to do, and we need to get it done quickly, so step fucking to, alright?”
Abandoning the drunks to the Alerarians, Shinsou emerged from the tavern yard with company in tow. They'd have to look after themselves now.