Dragongate I

Sergeant-at-Arms Bartaland was an old soldier and he knew a thing or two, oh yes. He had kept his ears open and he had made his own appraisal of the situation. When the King had asked him to join him on the ride from Dragongate, he had wondered. The number of Lords and Knights travelling to the Gryphonhold was explained by the need to make a show for the Lord of Trenisslia and his entourage. You had to get these things right, understood Bartaland, who’d seen his fair share of spit-and-polish ceremonial. It was about rank and swank, he knew. Yet, the number of men-at-arms accompanying the party, and, especially, the inclusion of archers and specialist artificers, seemed an unnecessary supplement to the forces of the Vale. He had hardly needed to be of the party; Gryphonhold had its own armourers. They were good, he’d trained them himself. A tour of inspection of the Gryphonhold armouries, the King had said, to ensure everything was to Bartaland’s satisfaction. Well, that had seemed innocent enough. Radwin was the Warden’s man, a Valeman and not of Dragongate or the Hidden Realm. You could probably say that of most of the King’s human subjects, come to that. It did not usually cause a problem, and it hadn’t here. Radwin had made him welcome and Bartaland could see that his system had been well implemented. The alarm, calling all the off-duty men and the trained bands to arms, had seen it working well. Yet Bartaland heard things. For one thing, he learnt there had been a crop of visitors to Stowham a few weeks back. Nothing that odd, just a few more than usual. They had apparently arrived a little before the delegation from Trenisslia. An old soldier is a good judge of men. He needs to be. This lot he hadn’t cared for. He’d only had time for one swift lunchtime half in the alehouse since he’d got here, but he’d seen a few of these newcomers. They were talking to locals, and he thought he saw the odd familiar face from the garrison in conversation with them. Seeing he wore the garb of Dragongate, some of these strangers had tried to be friendly. Well, you get a lot of that, he conceded, bound to. But this lot? Different, he thought, like they thought they could play old Bartaland for a garrulous fool. Then ‘Her Ladyship’ turned up, always trouble, that one, though at least she was on your side. You hoped. And that dark, striking young women, dressed like a footpad who was in the armoury this evening. He hadn’t liked the look of her one bit, and he recalled that he may have seen her at the alehouse, consorting with the undesirables. Now she had apparently gone off with Her Ladyship, and the elf-lady, and that pocket paladin with the ginger hair, and he wasn’t at all sure what to make of all that. Still, all he had was a sense of disquiet and incomplete information. Plans laid with incomplete information were likely, he knew, fatally to miscarry. He couldn’t do much about it then, could he? Still, he reflected, the thing about old soldiers is that they can smell trouble on the wind. What that trouble was, he had been unable to guess, but he knew it was coming all the same.

There was, he reminded himself, an abundance of trouble already at the gates, and there was something he could do about that. Of the clearing of the town, he knew a little and guessed more. They would need to spare some stout men for the task. No doubt they would call for volunteers. As an old soldier, he knew never to volunteer. Not volunteering, for anything, had, in fact, to be an old soldier’s first rule, he concluded. Never to be broken, that one. Expeditions that he himself contrived, though often insanely tough and dangerous, were, to his mind, entirely different. And he’d never ask for volunteers to go with him. No, that wouldn’t be right. No, you didn’t ask people to come, you told them they were coming. And he had enough gnarled old cronies stuffed about the place, both here and at Dragongate, that he could always find someone that he could ‘volunteer’ to come along on whatever madcap adventure he’d dreamt up. Never mind that these old sweats would gladly follow him through the Gate of Hells, and, like as not, back out again, with a few more enemy to their account, some choice souvenirs and a plump chicken for the pot. No, the important thing, the decent thing, was to make out they didn’t have a choice whether they came or not. In a military life, no less than elsewhere, the proprieties had to be observed.

So, he shut up shop, roused Radkin in his quarters, and pressed the spare armoury keys upon him, explaining, cryptically, that he had to see a man about a dog. And, so, he went on his way, armed, armoured, with a pack on his back, a coil of rope that had been struck off strength for being an inch shorter than regulation length, a dark lantern he’d won at dice off some really dodgy looking bloke at the alehouse the last time he was here, and a set of keys that he really, really, should not have had.

Bartaland stalked round the castle in search of his mates. He’d known most of them since extreme youth, when they’d met at a levy muster in the south kingdoms. Gawky kids trying to look older and tougher than they were, called to drill in the district’s Trained Band in a dusty village square. Farm hands, shop boys and tradesmen’s apprentices, mostly, their hum-drum occupations interrupted. Their names had been called in the ballot to form a band to train for a season and, if lucky, to come home again before any fighting happened, for were war to break out among the squabbling kingdoms, then their time would be extended and their lives expended at the whim of their king. If all was well, nothing would happen. and they would be released before the next harvest. They were then bound by the law to band together again, every other year, for a shorter period of training, to maintain some degree of readiness. So, they saw each other again a couple more times at the Trained Band’s muster before, as the Powers would have it, they’d been whisked off to war. Thereafter, as happens so often in such cases, they’d found themselves in thrall to a life they both loved and hated. Thus, they had continued, each year adding to their tally of wounds, and tall tales, hard lessons learned and complaints well-honed, until they knew, and could do, nothing else but soldiering.

He’d told them all to meet him in a storeroom by the western wall at midnight, and now, in a narrow room of barrels, Bartaland surveyed a circle of familiar faces in the candlelight, most feigning complete disinterest in whatever he was about to say. Yet, they’d all come to hear it. Their glory days behind them, they’d earned the reward of less arduous duties. Some were still in the ranks, legendary old Sergeants like Bartaland, but they represented all aspects of life, here or at Dragongate; castle storekeepers, tradesmen and an innkeeper in the upper town, a sub-captain of the town watch, water bailiff, steward to a lord’s house, craftsmen (various), one a priest. All respectable men of standing. All with deeply unrespectable pasts. And then there was Pogg the Unreliable, resolutely still in the ranks and without any rank. He must be the oldest footman in the King’s armies, thought Bartaland, and a man who repelled promotion like an oiled helm threw off water. Yet Bartaland could not wish for a better man beside him in a fight.

“Well Lug”, said Pogg at length, “now we’re all ‘ere, what d’ave in mind?”

“It’s like this, Lads,” replied Bartaland, “I’m getting the Band back together.”

A little later, through a narrow postern gate giving directly on to the lake shore, some eighteen or twenty figures, between them carrying six rowing boats laden with kit, slipped out of the castle and crunched softly upon the shale. Quickly, with practised quiet and purposeful efficiency, and only the odd barely audible groan and curse, they launched their boats and sped silently across the smooth surface of the mere while the moon was lost in the cloud above.