uncertainty about going through spy training, in the process of considering his messages he was able to focus his thoughts on the doubts he held, and to consider how he was going to address those doubts when the day came for him to do so.
After two months of training, he received a surprise. During the first two months, he had done nothing but train. Every hour of every morning was spent in the armory with the two human weapons, learning the techniques and gaining familiarity with them. Every afternoon was spent with his tutor, Artur, who drilled the human language into his brain and his mouth.
“Congratulations,” Arlen told him at the end of one morning’s training. “Kestrel, you’ve made it through two months of training. You haven’t flunked out of the system. In fact, you’re doing much better than most of our students do at this stage; it helps that you’re built like a moose, or maybe I should say human.
“So today we are going to reward you by adding another lesson to your curriculum,” Arlen said as they stripped off their pads. “Something that I guarantee you’ve never done before, or even thought about.”
Kestrel’s response was a feeling of curiosity and excitement. He trusted Arlen, who had been a hard, but fair and patient, teacher. “Let’s go,” Arlen said, leading the way out of the armory.
Chapter 12 — The Hostile Ally
Ferris spent a great deal of time thinking as he began the march back northeast across Hydrotaz, his squad and other squads of the nation’s forces accompanied by Graylee’s forces. He had spent his whole life warily thinking of Graylee as the large, potentially hostile neighbor on the west, and to now have their forces easily walking through Hydrotaz, observing the villages, learning the roads, consuming Hydrotaz’s resources in the process, made his hackles rise. It would all be great, he hoped, when the time came in battle against the elves, and Graylee’s militia would shed blood and die on behalf of Hydrotaz’s cause.
But in the meantime, Ferris stuck to his squad, and stewed. He had been soundly criticized by Nicholai, the seneschal of the palace, for the failure of his squad’s effort weeks earlier to start their own fire in the Eastern Forest, and he had stoically accepted the criticism, because no one who had not been there could understand the unholy appearance of the storm that had appeared from nowhere and doused the forest fire before its flames could kindle and consume a broad swath of territory.
That failed fire had been the justification for this new alliance with Graylee. Ferris knew that the details of such an alliance must have been negotiated over many weeks or months; the terms of the treaty had to have been the subject of discussion long before he reported on the failed fire effort, which had merely provided a convenient excuse for the new seneschal of the prince to announce the treaty.
And so, several weeks after Ferris’s report, Graylee had rolled wagons filled with the components of large siege engines across the border between the two nations, and put them in motion towards the forest boundary, teamed with the infantry formation that Ferris marched in. He wasn’t aware of any good way to use a trebuchet against a forest, but given his poor reputation, he had to bite his tongue and march along towards the forest, as he pondered the many ways that the whole campaign could end in disaster.
The column of men and materiel had come to a halt less than an hour short of the forest boundary, set up camp, and started the assembly of the siege engines. Squads of men had been sent out to over a dozen locations along a wide front with the forest, armed with shovels and picks, under orders to build defensive mounds to protect the crews of the trebuchets at the locations where the massive constructions were going to be stationed. Ferris’s men had been assigned the northernmost of the sites, and had spent two days building their improvised fortifications.
The constructed machines had been rolled to the redoubts, within clear view of the forest, and Ferris expected to receive an order to proceed with an attack of some sort. Instead, his squad, and every other group of infantrymen, had sat for a day without action. Ferris had fumed, knowing that they were giving the elves time to bring archers and forces to the edge of the forest, losing the advantage of surprise, and guaranteeing his men would be subject to a withering fire of arrows from the elves when the time came to storm the forest.
Then supplies had started to arrive for the trebuchet the second day of the entrenchment. A large metal pot, twice as large as the one Ferris’s men had carried into the forest, showed up, along with casks of solid pitch, and several large stones. Orders were given to start the fires to melt the pitch before dawn on the third day of the entrenchment.
When dawn’s rosy light began to shine, the large wooden buckets at the end of the trebuchets’ arms were filled with stones, and an hour after that, the steaming pitch was ladled over the stones, set aflame, and fired into the forest.
Ferris watched in amazement as the stones carried the burning pitch high into the sky in the blink of an eye, and he estimated they flew a half mile deep into the forest. He had never dreamed that the bulky machines could hurl their loads so far among the trees; he thought of how fearfully his squad had raced along the forest floor to get the same penetration into the woods, scared of being shot with accurate elven arrows at any second. Smoky trails above the forest showed the flight of the stones.
His men hastily rewound the trebuchet, reloaded the bucket, and fired another load of the incendiary material into the forest. He began to re-evaluate their situation, and suspect that success would be theirs today, provided another freak storm didn’t extinguish this fire as one had squelched his squad’s effort. With multiple fires being set, the vast amount of acreage that the Graylee incursion could gain for Hydrotaz suddenly grew into a considerable new holding, perhaps even a new duchy along the border, he estimated.
Then the elves came out of the woods. The elves who had expected to remain hidden among the trees to defend their home had come out of the trees to come within range of the trebuchet crews, and started firing their arrows at the men, who took refuge behind the fresh defensive mounds, and who fired arrows back. There were hundreds of elves coming forward, a mass of warriors whose arrows would have wiped out any effort to invade the forest in a traditional manner. The presence of the siege machines, and the effectiveness with which they were flinging fire into the forest, was forcing the elves into a battle they didn’t want, out in the open where they were suffering from arrows being fired back from the human lines.
Smoke was starting to rise to visible heights from deep in the forest, and Ferris realized that the elven forces were now trapped between the fire behind them in the forest and the human forces in front of them, men who were safely protected behind earthen berms.
“All forces take up bows and start firing at the elves,” he directed his men. “The fire is started,” he pointed at the smoky columns that were rising and darkening in the eastern sky. “The elves are our targets,” he commanded, as his men obediently left the pitch fire untended and gleefully took up their bows. Their stronger arms and sturdier bows were launching arrows further than the elves could fire their bolts, and even though the human shots were less accurate, they were falling with fatal effectiveness among the elves out in the open.
The elves were also coming to a realization of their dire situation, and reacted by sending one determined sortie forward on a virtual suicide mission to try to disable the trebuchets and their crews, while the rest of the elves retreated to the safety of the not-yet-burning trees on the forest fringe. Ferris and his men let the elves come towards them; he knew that in close combat the strength and skills of the men would be a huge factor in their favor.
Over the course of the day, the elves were slaughtered and routed, as the men in front and the smoke and fire behind eventually converged and overwhelmed them. Up and down the line knots of elves were trapped, converged upon by early afternoon. Most elves were killed, but a few were taken captive, facing the prospect of eventually being sold as slaves in faraway lands.
Ferris thought the prospect of subjecting anyone to slavery was the least promising aspect of the entire day’s battle, but he was so satisfied with the outcome, and the correction of the previous failed attempt to set a fire, that he still ranked the day as one of the best he’d ever known, and he sang victory songs with his men as they drank around the fires in the camp that night.
Chapter 13 — Horses and Surgery
