Forged in Battle (26 page)

Sigmund managed to find a number of carpenters from the men
on the barricade and sent them down to the docks with Theodor. He had five of
Frantz’s dockers go to the Crooked Dwarf and bring back ten empty barrels.

Then Sigmund went to the north gate, where there were about
fifty free company and twenty spearmen. Since the attempted treachery of Squire
Becker, there had been half-hearted attempts to attack the north gate—but they
had been easily beaten back. The beastmen had not been expecting to find the
walls held strongly against them.

Sigmund found a similar story when he met Gunter. The veteran
had a bandage around his chest, and there was a red patch on his right side,
near his armpit.

“A lucky arrow,” he laughed, giving no sign of the pain he
must be in.

Sigmund described the battle at the palisade and the
barricades and Gunter nodded in approval. Bringing the beastmen into the streets
was probably the best thing to do. It limited their numbers and gave them no way
to use their speed to outflank the halberdiers.

“We are going to try and destroy the herdstones,” Sigmund
said.

“You’re doing what?” Gunter said. “That’s madness!”

“We cannot beat them.”

“We are beating them!”

“This is our only chance! I have seen the numbers that these
beastmen control. We can fall back from barricade to barricade. We can burn each
house to gain a respite, but it is as if the whole Drakwald Forest has emptied
itself. And there are only so many houses in Helmstrumburg. When we have burnt
them all then we will line up, shoulder to shoulder on the docks, and be
killed?”

Gunter didn’t say anything.

“If we do not return by nightfall, take over command of the
defences.”

Gunter nodded. “Good luck!” he said and the two men embraced
and then Sigmund strode down towards the docks.

There was a crude raft on the dockside when Sigmund arrived,
and twenty of Osric’s men standing round four firkins of blackpowder. With them
were the best fighters that the barricades could spare.

The Vorrsheimers had sent Stephan, the young spearman with
the scar on his cheek.

Next to him stood Elias, who had stopped feeling like a new
recruit at the palisade. Already he had lost count of the number of times he had
killed. Black-haired Schwartz grinned as Sigmund approached and Sigmund nodded
to Theodor. He had seen the man fighting and knew that he was a man to be
counted on.

Osric had found a shield from somewhere and had a drawn sword
in his hand. Baltzer had a cut on his cheek, but was otherwise unwounded. The
short thin man leaned on his halberd for support, regarding Sigmund with
ill-concealed contempt.

Theodor had his pistols loaded and ready.

Frantz stood next to him, with an unlit clay pipe in his
mouth. Four or his dockers stood behind him, still armed with their swords and
shields and steel caps.

The dockers had put up a magnificent fight on Altdorf Street,
but Sigmund didn’t want them here. He wanted trained soldiers only.

“Who is going to carry these barrels and let your lot do the
fighting?” Frantz demanded.

Sigmund paused to consider. “Fine. Now you all know why we
are here?”

Baltzer and Stephan shook their heads.

“Putting it simply, we are going to cut the head from the
serpent,” Sigmund smiled.

The dockers lifted the raft to the water’s edge and lowered
it in. It bobbed on the water and the soldiers began to slip into the water,
holding onto the sides as they slid their weapons onto the top of the raft to
stay dry.

When all the men were in the water, Sigmund lowered the
firkins of blackpowder and they were strapped onto the top of the planks, well
above the water. Last of all he handed Stephan a hooded lantern.

“Keep that well away from those barrels!” Osric warned “Or
we’ll end up in Tilea!”

The men paddled the raft out of the harbour then caught the
current of the midstream water and began to drift downstream.

Sigmund clung on to the wet wood as he passed the houses of
Helmstrumburg. There was black smoke billowing up from the burning houses. Half
the new town seemed to be burning. When they were alongside the palisade he saw
all the dead bodies that filled the ditches and that were piled up in drifts
against the palisade. They had killed so many beastmen, yet there were still so
many left.

Edmunt took over command of the barricades and as the houses
burned there was no danger of attack. He went from barricade to barricade
assessing the damage. The men saw him and felt heartened: people were already
whispering that this was the man who had held Eel Street all alone. They
imagined Butcher would be an enormous battle-axe, such as men used in ancient
times, and when they saw the simple woodsman’s hatchet they were amazed.

Edmunt paid no attention to the whispers. He talked to the
leader of each free company and took stock of how many fighting men each still
commanded, laughed at their stories of bravery or sheer luck, made them feel
like heroes, just by having spoken to him.

As the lull continued a few doors opened and here and there
an old woman or child stumbled out into the dead-littered streets. Somehow they
had managed to hide from the beastmen and only the approaching flames had
finally driven them from their hideouts. They clambered to safety, shaking with
terror.

Edmunt sent a number of his men onto the north wall to spy on
the beastmen, then took ten halberdiers and a number of the blacksmiths and went
from house to house, hunting any beastmen that had been trapped in the
buildings. They came back with nine horned heads that they tossed into a pile in
front of the barricade.

As Edmunt hunted trapped beastmen Gaston walked slowly along
the lines of wounded men who were propped up against the walls of Tanner Lane.

“Well done, Johann!” he told a man he had known before
enlisting, who had a bandage around his left ear. “That’s the poorest excuse of a
wound I’ve ever seen!”

“I can’t hear you!” Johann retorted.

Gaston grinned. The next man was one of Osric’s. He had a
stab wound in his leg. A dirty strip of cloth was seeping blood but the man had
a tankard in his hand and was happy to be still alive. “You couldn’t face taking
orders from that thieving lowlife any longer?”

“I just couldn’t let your boys keep running away!”

The next man was slipping in and out of consciousness. A girl
was trying to stop the blood from a cut to his head. She saw Gaston and smiled
shyly, but Gaston passed on.

He was too shaken to notice how pretty she was, and it wasn’t
until he was three paces along the line that he caught himself and turned back
to smile.

“He looks to be in good hands!”

“Thank you, sir.”

“What’s your name?”

The girl put a hand to her hair, where she used to have
ribbons. But she had used all her ribbons as tourniquets on the wounded men.

“Beatrine,” she said, and blushed.

Gaston nodded. He put a hand to his moustaches and smoothed
them down, feeling a knot. It was only after he had pulled the hair free that he
realised that the knot had been a splatter of blood that had scabbed the hairs
together.

“We are lucky to have such pretty nurses,” he said and
promised himself that if he came through this day that he would seek this girl
out.

Sigmund and his men clung to the crude raft like survivors
from a shipwreck and steered themselves far out into the river stream away from
the banks and spying eyes.

The water lapped against them, and here and there the men
could feel long weeds reaching up to tug at their legs.

“There’s something in the water!” Baltzer hissed.

Osric reached up and took a knife from the raft, but no one
looked reassured. If the forests had hidden all these beastmen for so long, then
what might the waters of the Stir hide?

Sigmund kept his eyes on the land. There was no one he would
rather not have on this mission than that cut-throat. His mind started thinking
about the things that Theodor had told him. He didn’t believe in river monsters.
He was sure that he and his men would reach the land. Who else would fight the
beastman leader?

He laughed silently at himself. Now he was starting to
believe the prophecies too.

As they followed the current of the river the beastman army
came into view. They were all lined up the bottom of the hills and there were
more scattered through the woods and orchards, well back from the river banks.
There were countless creatures grouped in their warbands, their gruesome banners
flapping in the breeze.

The men on the raft went silent. They kept as low as
possible, paddled further into the wide waters, wishing that they were not so
exposed on the plain water surface. If any of the beastmen thought their raft
was anything more than a piece of floating debris then the alarm might be
sounded, and their attempt would be little more than suicidal—and
Helmstrumburg would be doomed.

As the flames kept the beastmen back, Edmunt led his men into
a huge coaching inn on Altdorf Street, called the Blessed Rest. The bar was
empty, but the sound of hooves on floorboards showed that there were beastmen
inside, disorientated by the corridors and doorways.

Edmunt and his men were familiar with this drinking house.
Many of them were patrons. They silently crossed the room and took a back
staircase to the servants’ rooms in the back. From there they hunted, room by
room. They found three beastmen in one room. One of the blacksmiths killed one,
while the halberdiers stabbed the other two beastmen. One of them died but the
other was only wounded. It shrank back, goat legs curled up to its stomach as it
put its hands up to its horned head, and opened its mouth in something
approaching a nervous smile of sharp teeth.

Butcher hit it full in the forehead and the strange
expression froze on its face. Edmunt turned away as he pulled Butcher free and
wiped it on the back of an overturned couch. He didn’t notice the hand sticking
out from underneath the piece of furniture.

There were two doors at the end of the oak-panelled room.
Edmunt tip-toed to the left-hand door. There were strange sounds coming from
inside the room. He nodded to the blacksmith and they came close to the door,
then Edmunt kicked it open and rushed inside, axe ready to strike any that might
be waiting inside.

The sounds were coming from a four-poster bed at the end of
the room. Edmunt kept his axe ready and crept over the shredded bolsters and
ripped clothing. There was something kicking and struggling on the bed. Edmunt
bent low and edged towards the bed, ripped a curtain and brought his axe up to
strike—but his axe stopped and he let out a strangled gasp.

Staring up at him was the skinless face of what he guessed
had been a middle-aged woman: the eyeballs bulged and the lipless mouth opened
and closed. He saw that her tongue had been torn out.

The hands and feet of the woman had been struck off and the
wounds cauterised with hot irons. It seemed the beastmen had started torturing
this hapless victim and then been disturbed or had broken off to find more prey.

Edmunt averted his eyes and pulled the sheets over the
woman’s body. But one of the woman’s mutilated arms came up and touched him. He
turned to face her and saw pleading in her unblinking eyes. Pleading and
understanding and—in an instant—he saw forgiveness in her face, for what he
had to do.

“What is it?” the blacksmith hissed from the open doorway.

Edmunt shut his eyes and brought Butcher down into the
skinned forehead, keeping his eyes closed until he had pulled the axe free, and
let the curtains drop.

“Nothing,” he said.

It hardly seemed credible to Sigmund that they had sailed
this way in the
White Rose
just two days before. In some stretches of the
river it was hard to believe that a ferocious battle was raging not more than a
few miles away. Tranquil and undisturbed, chickens still pecked through the
broad apple orchards. Behind an unburned hut, the first shoots of spring wheat
were showing—but then another beast camp came into view and the effect was
jarring. Beastmen had no place here. Smoke billowed up from Helmstrumburg, and
every now and again the roar of battle or the blowing of a horn or ringing of a
chapel bell came to them over the water.

As the raft floated on, Sigmund wondered if they might drift
downstream all the way to Altdorf. Finally, when it seemed the men could endure
the cold and the wet no longer, they came alongside the mound and the four black
standing stones, sharp and angular against the scattered forest.

From the river, Sigmund counted at least ten beastmen as well
as a strange shambolic figure that was capering around the top of the mound.

Sigmund tried to see what the figure was doing, but then the
raft drifted past the ridge of land and the mound was hidden. Out of sight, they
all paddled and kicked hard to bring the raft to the shore.

The jetty was unoccupied. The land behind the ridge of land
was much as they had left it two mornings earlier: bushes and the occasional
trees silent and still. The slopes were empty. It seemed that all the beastmen’s
attention was focussed on the battle in the town. The only creatures were those
that were around the mound.

Sigmund thanked Sigmar. It looked like they had a chance of
success.

The men kicked and steered the crude raft towards the jetty.
Osric caught the nearest upright and the raft swung round as he held them
against the tug of the stream. For a moment it seemed that Osric would not be
able to hold on and they would spin out of control back into the river, then
Sigmund reached out and caught one of the uprights and they managed to drag the
raft close enough to the edge for the men to pull it ashore.