Robert Adams - Trumpets of War

The three hundred heavy horse of the Royal Army wound down the dusty road to the City of Pahtahtahspolis with the Leopard Banner unfurled and snapping smartly in the wind, the men all erect in their saddles, with polished leather and burnished weapons and armor, the horses all well groomed in the aligned ranks.

At the barbican that guarded access to the lowered bridge across the broad, muddy ditch that the moat became in the dry season, one of the flashy, bejeweled officers rode up to the barred gate and roared in a voice dripping with hauteur, “Open up the gate of your pigsty! We’re on king’s business, you baseborn swine!”

“Uhhh . . . but we-alls heared the king was dead, my lord,” said one of the pikemen.

“Oh, a king died, right enough.” Scorn dripped from the officer’s voice. “But whenever a king dies, you thick-witted bumpkin, a new king is crowned. He’s king of us all, and we ride on his royal writ. Now open this gate and signal the inner gate to be opened for us or I’ll have you fed a supper of your ears, eyes and nose, you yapping dog!”

The barriers were raised, the gates swung inward, and the column clattered and boomed across the bridge, then through the inner gates and onto the main street, thence in the direction of the palace of the komeesee. The sub-kooreeos was very easily intimidated, and at his squeaked command, his mercenary pikemen obediently laid down their arms before the bared swords of the Leopard Squadron regulars.

With the sub-kooreeos reflecting on the state of his soul in a cell far below, Captain Komees Stehrgiahnos found himself to be in possession of the city, two hundred mercenary pikemen and their officers who had been paid for six more months only a week previously and did not seem to care to whom they rendered that service so long as they could bide on in the safety and comfort of the city, his own troops, some pipes of a passable wine that had been the sub-kooreeos’ and a goodly quantity of silver and gold that he had found after he had smashed open a locked chest found under the great bed in which the cleric had been sleeping since seizing the city.

With shrewd use of the treasure, Stehrgiahnos had been able to add to the static defenses of the city and to provide and equip it well with provender and weapons, so it had ridden out the bad years before the death of King Fahrkos. He had lost his twin during the only attack that came anywhere near to succeeding, the bad leg having failed at a time and place that had caused him to stumble into two men, be suddenly drenched by the contents of the pot of boiling oil they were bearing and then to fall, screaming, from off the wall to the cobblestones forty feet below. By the time Stehrgiahnos had time to see to his only brother, Hohrhos’ terribly burned body had already been cold and stiff, his helm deeply dented and filled with blood and brains that had leaked from the cracked-open skull.

Then, after long years of absence, the outlawed rebel, Thoheeks Zastros, had returned to the Kingdom of the Southern Ehleenohee and had marched around much of the kingdom for months, fighting here and there, his following burgeoning to intimidating size as he went and fought. He had not come near to the lands of Komees Stehrgiahnos, of course, but word of him, his return with a Witch Kingdom wife and his recent exploits traveled far and wide, along with the measure of order that he had brought to the troubled realm.

When he had marched, finally, against the usurper, Fahrkos, he had triumphed, Fahrkos had suicided, and Zastros had been coronated High King of the Southern Ehleenohee . After announcing his firm intention to invade and conquer the lands to his north, to make himself High King of all Ehleenohee and every barbarian people from the borders of the Witch Kingdom to Kehnooryos Mahkedohnya and possibly beyond, he had sent out military units to scour the lands for troops to make up his great, formidable host, to be of a size not seen on the face of the continent since the time of Those Who Lived Before—more than a half million fighting men.

At length, a force of royal officers and lancers had arrived under the battered but still sound walls of the City of Pahtahtahspolis . Upon being admitted, the officers had proclaimed the new High King’s announcement of a general amnesty to all who had deserted the army of his usurping predecessor if they now would return to his service and join him on his path of conquest. Despite the fact that many of them now had wives and families and friends in Pahtahtahspolis, the surviving men of what once had been the Leopard Squadron of the Royal Heavy Horse were stirred like old warhorses on hearing the trumpet calls of war, even Komees Stehrgiahnos himself.

Planning to delay only long enough to set his city and lands in good order under a noble deputy, he sent his remnant of a squadron and as many of the onetime mercenary pikemen off with the troops of the new, powerful king, promising to report to Thrahkohnpolis himself within the space of a couple of months.

Due to the still unsettled conditions, when he rode the journey to the hold of the thoheeks, he rode armed and accompanied by a few also armed retainers. These men were skillfully separated from him at the ducal residence, and while he was awaiting his audience, well-armed ducal guardsmen disarmed him, led him to a secure if comfortable chamber and locked him in it.

Shortly after he had been fed, he was visited by the thoheeks, who came alone and seemed rather embarrassed about this imprisonment of a loyal vassal. “Look you, my boy,” he had begun, looking anywhere but at Stehrgiahnos, “I don’t like what I’ve had to do here, and I like even less what certain other men have in mind for you, do I obediently deliver you into their hands. Now what the Church hierarchy did to your sire and house was not right—legal, but not in any way moral—but neither was what you did in taking back your city, clapping asub-kooreeos who was only doing what his superiors had ordered him to do, after all, in a dungeon cell after terrifying him, and robbing him and hiring his troops out from under him.

“Now I know what your defense is going to be. Had that sad specimen of supposed masculinity stayed in ownership and control of the city, it would’ve fallen to the first warband that came along and would today be a charred, broken-walled ruin as so many others are now. But even so, you broke civil laws and your intemperate actions drove the previous kooreeos into such a rage that he suffered a fit and died on the same day that he heard the news. Therefore, his successor means to see you charged with and tried by a Church court for murder in addition to a plethora of other crimes. That trial will only be a mere form, of course; they consider you guilty of everything and mean to burn you or crucify you, after suitable torments and maimings and mutilations.”

The thoheeks ended by giving Komees Stehrgiahnos back all of his effects, adding a small purse of old, worn, clipped coins, plus a warning to ride far and fast and keep clear of the lands that had been his patrimony and, above all, to not allow himself to be taken alive by the Church or its agents. He regretted it, he said, but in order to maintain important relations with the Church, he would have to declare this son of his old friend outlaw and himself lead out a fast pursuit of him within days.

Only some week into his flight, the broken, outlawed komees found himself confronted by a dozen armed men as he rounded a brushy curve in a road. Without thinking twice, he snapped down his visor, unslung his shield, drew his sword and spurraked his horse into a startled lunge, determined to take as many of the bastards as possible down into death with him. He had cut down two and incapacitated yet another when a crashing blow of a mace hurled him down, out of his saddle, unconscious.