Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king

A raven croaked from the lintel of the door. Gils yelped, his knees buckling as he threw his hands over his ears. He squeezed his eyes shut until he saw dancing sparks. The black wings beat the air just above his head.

thump-whirr, thump-whirr.

Like a heavy cloak snapping in the wind.

He hated the black ones. They were too loud.No he did not hate it,hate was such a strong word.

He liked them less.

Their eyes were like bits of polished coal that saw too much. His brother, the Brave, had once told him ravens could talk. Gils had saved his pennies, counting them every night under his cot, copper after copper , until he bought a bird of his own from a mummers’ market in Yarzat.

ùHe had wanted it to say his name.

But the bird only ever said one word. Meek. Meek. Meek.

Gils knew why. He had seen his brother standing by the cage when he thought Gils was away, feeding the beast bits of suet and cracked corn, whispering to it.

”Meek,” he was sure he must have said, brother must have murmured with that handsome, easy smile that made women swoon and men follow him into fire. ”Gils the Meek.”

His brother had won every race, every brawl, every game of tiles. He was the sun. But the gods have a twisted sense of humor; his brother was cold in the ground, and Gils was still breathing the dusty air of the high towers.

A hot flush of shame burned up Gils’s neck. He is dead and I am alive, he thought. I am alive and he is rotting. It was a wicked thought. He shouldn’t think it. But he did. Who is laughing now, Brother?

He ducked his head low as he passed through the door. Gils was a tall man, broad in the shoulder and thick in the limb. People saw him and thought of a warrior, a man to hold a shield-wall. But the steel felt wrong in his hands. He didn’t want to touch the steel. He wanted to touch the feathers.

He moved toward the cages, his fingers fluttering in a nervous rhythm against his thighs. To the cages. To the cages. That was what the decurio would say everytime he saw him.

That was his task. The decurio called him a craven when he was angry and ”Meek” when he was bored, but he let Gils stay. He let him stay because of the Brother Brave’s memory.

The birds didn’t care if Gils couldn’t look a man in the eye. They didn’t care if he repeated his words or if he hated the sound of shouting.

He liked birds.

The rookery was filled with the soft, melodic cooing of pigeons. It was a grey song, a gentle song. Not like the ravens. Gils moved to the bins. Minced meat for the travelers, corn for the others.

”One for you, one for me,” he whispered, though he ate none.He once tried corn, he almost chipped his teeth. ”One for you, one for me.”

Betty was his favorite. She was a speckled bird with a breast that shimmered like oil on water, purple and green, purple and green. She didn’t peck. She waited. She knew the rhythm of his hand. When he held out the corn, she took it with a delicate precision that made Gils’s heart swell until it felt tight in his chest.

He always liked to caress her. But he couldn’t pet her anymore.

The message had sat on the table. It had to go. They always had to go.

Gils felt a tear track through the soot on his cheek when he tied the cylinder to Betty’s leg. He used to write the messages in advance to save time, to keep the world orderly. But the decurio had found his hidden stash. The man had turned red as a beet and beat Gils across the backside with a switch until Gils screamed.

”Waste of air!” the man had bellowed with every strike. ”Waste of parchment! You send what you’re told, you witless ox!Ox and Meek!”

Gils didn’t write ahead anymore. He did not spare time.

Gils didn’t cry when he beat him. But he cried when Betty had to go.

This was the only loud thing he loved. Betty lingered for a heartbeat on his finger, her orange eye fixed on him, before she took to the sky, joining the wind.

He watched her until she was nothing but a speck against the bruised clouds. She was free. She was majestic. She didn’t have to be brave or meek. She only had to fly.He hoped she had reached home.

But a new day had come and another was to be chosen

”Lorens, it is your task today,” Gils whispered, his voice a soft rustle like wind through dry straw.

Lorens puffed out his chest, the grey feathers ruffling until he looked twice his size. Gils let out a small, breath of a laugh and rewarded the bird with a kernel of yellow corn. He always gave them corn. They were his only friends, the only ones who didn’t call him a craven or look at him as if he were a dog that had learned to walk on its hind legs. His brother had always told him, while joining him at his table, surrounded by men of wine and laughter, that Gils was too meek for the world of men.

”The birds don’t mind,” Gils muttered to the empty room. ”The birds are kind.”

He turned to the small scrap of parchment. There was never enough space to say the things that needed saying, so he had to keep his words small and sharp, like the grit in a gizzard. He was pride of that, he could read. In the Legions, a man who could read was as rare as a winter rose, but to the others, he was still just Gils the Witless.

He dipped his quill, the scratching sound making his teeth ache. He hated that sound. Just as he hated blood and holding steel.

Attacked today. Three towers. One missed, two burnt. Repelled. Us light casualties. Them heavy. Safe today too.

Outside, a sudden cheer went up from the ramparts, a ragged sound of triumph that made Gils flinch and drop his quill. He hated the cheering almost as much as the screaming. He didn’t want to die. If Gils died, who would remember the corn? Who would protect them from Mirshol?

Mirshol was the under-cook, a man with a face like curdled milk who beat the birds every time he sneezed from their feathers. Mirshol was bad. Gils was good. The birds knew. They were smarter than the decurio and kinder than the knights.

Gils poked a finger through the bars of the cage, and Lorens pecked at it playfully, a tiny, blunt pressure that made Gils smile.

He bound the message to the bird’s leg and prayed to the Weaver so that she would bring mercy to the birds in their voyage.

He prayed for Lorens’s wings and for the wind. It was a cruel world for a pigeon; for every five he sent into the smoke, only four might ever return. He said a prayer for each of them every night, counting his beads as if they were seeds.

The days began to blur, marked only by the smell of blood and the meals that were visibly becoming more diluited in water.

He heard there had been some accidents, one of the warehouse had taken fire during the enemy barrage.

Now Stones flew like arrows on both sides.

Rain today. Arrows like needles. They tried the gates. Failed. Many screams. Pits are full. Still holding.Stench ugly.

Gils’s hands began to shake as he fed the birds on the twenty-sixth morning. The air in the rookery was thick with the scent of charred timber and something sweet and cloying that he knew was burning meat.

Unfortunately they havent’ had meat for ten days already.And the one they were burning was not to be eaten.

No sun today. Smoke too thick. Stones falling like hail. Warehouse burnt.Lost quarter of food. Water is low. They keep coming.Light candles for Rain.

By the twenty-ninth day, Gils did not smile when he entered the room. The cages were getting emptier, the silence between the cooing louder. He could hear the sound of steel clashing, not far off in the fields, but close, terribly close, as if the battle were trying to beat its way through the very door of his rookery.

He took another scrap of clean parchment. His fingers were stained with ink and soot, and his heart felt like a bird trapped in a cage of ribs, fluttering wildly against the bone.

Things went close today...

Foothold lost on eastern wall. Legate led charge, relieved positions.Many dead. The stone is red and still flying.Did not rain today either.Lord Ilbert of Bricaterun perished nobly in battle.

He closed the message and let Mirvi go high.

The well is dark.Enemy threw cadeveurs.Sickness spread. We are thirsty.Only the pond remain. Enemy h—

The quill snapped.

A scream tore through the heavy air of the Bastion, a sound so high that it felt like a cold needle being driven into Gils’s ear. It wasn’t the scream of a dying levy or the grunt of a knight; it was the roar of a great beast brought to its knees.

The rookery erupted.

The pigeons, usually so rhythmic in their cooing, went wild. A hundred pairs of wings beat against the wicker and iron of the cages.

thwack-thwack-thwack.

Jimmy puffed his chest until he looked like a grey bladder about to burst, his wings vibrating with a terrifying speed. Captain Hudson began to shriek, a sound pigeons should not make, hurling herself against the bars.

”Shh, shh,” Gils whimpered, his hands fluttering at his chest like wounded birds. ”Peace. Peace. It’s just a noise. Just a loud noise. One for you, one for me...”

But his voice was drowned out by a second roar, deeper than the first, full of a raw, unadulterated agony that made the very floorboards vibrate. Gils felt his stomach turn to water.

He stumbled toward the heavy oak door, pushing it open and blinking against the harsh, smoky light of the inner ward.

The commotion was a sea of white and red. Eight medics, their tunics stained with the fresh, bright crimson of their trade, were huddled in a frantic circle near the base of the Great Stair. They moved with a desperate, jerky speed, their hands blurred as they worked.

”Hold him!” someone bellowed deep into the sea of white. ”By the Five, hold the fucking lord down!”

Gils stayed back, pressing his spine against the cold stone of the rookery wall. He was too far to see the man’s face, the medics were a wall of frantic line, but he saw the man’s torso as they heaved him onto a litter.

There was so much blood....both there and spilling down onto the ground.

So much red.

He wore a surcoat of heavy, expensive wool, though it was now shredded and dark with wetness.That was the only thing he glimpsed and by chance he also saw what was emblazoned across the chest, with golden thread that shimmered even through the filth and gore.

It was a roaring lion.