༺ 𓆩 Chapter 43 — Homeward 𓆪 ༻
「Translator — Creator」
᠃ ⚘᠂ ⚘ ˚ ⚘ ᠂ ⚘ ᠃
A blaring horn split the night.
Hooooooooom!
Boom—!!!
Boom—!!!
Boom—!!!
Boom—!!!
In the dead of night, chaos erupted within the military camp. The wail of the war horn tore through the still air, and the urgent pounding of drums dragged soldiers and tribespeople alike from uneasy sleep.
“Attack! We’re under attack!”
“Hellwolves!”
Voices, taut with tension and with fear, repeated the same words again and again as the soldiers shouted.
"And the brat, ah, and his lordship?"
"Out, with the chief."
"And the captain?"
"With them, also."
At present, the camp stood without its highest commanders.
Left with no choice, the veterans stepped forward, forming squads of ten and assuming command themselves. Among them was Günter.
“What the hell’s going on?” Günter asked of the veterans.
"Damn me if I know. The man at watch upon the tower says he has spotted a pack of Hellwolves."
"What is going on, what is going on. Gods, my head."
A soldier checking over his arms, and another clutching his head and reeling under his hangover. Not a man among them seemed to know with any certainty what was unfolding.
"Hwaaah—"
The children, frightened, broke into wailing, and the women clutched the children to themselves and cast uneasy looks. Günter spoke a few reassuring words to the tribesfolk and then ran up toward the watchtower from which the horn had sounded.
"What is it that you saw?"
"There. There, look."
The soldier on night watch pointed.
The moonlight was thin, and the night was clouded. Whatever lay yonder upon the rise could not be made out plainly.
"Are those not just dry brush?"
"Look, look properly. The light. The red. Light."
"……"
Something was crouched upon the ridge, that much was so. But for the torches, he could not see clearly. Only a dim, dim outline.
"Wh, what are you doing?"
"Quiet."
Günter took the torch from the watchtower's bracket and pitched it down beyond the wall. By degrees his eyes grew used to the dark, and at length even Günter saw the beasts arrayed upon the ridge.
"Ah."
A low groan escaped him.
The worst of foes had come at the worst of hours.
"How is such a thing possible?"
A dozen and more Hellwolves. The glint of their eyes shining out.
If he were the only man seeing a thing that was not there, the watchman would not have raised the horn.
"Günter! What can you see! Are they Hellwolves for certain!"
One of the veterans who had assembled the men shouted up from below the wall. Günter drew the line of his forefinger long along his cheek from the corner of his mouth. Then he held up two fingers, the index and the middle, and clenched his hand into a fist.
A gesture meaning Hellwolves, twenty at the very least.
"Damn it. The barricades. Set the barricades! To arms!"
"The dogs come again! This time we leave not a one of them living!"
With Günter's confirmation, the veterans bellowed it with grim purpose, and a war-pall settled over the encampment in an instant. Soldiers half in dream shook themselves clear as though cold water had been thrown over them, and went about their weapons with their discipline freshly drawn taut.
"Put something into the women's hands too, and the children's, and the old folk's!"
Daggers, fire-irons, wooden spears. Such were pressed into the hands of the tribesfolk. They caught at the sleeves of the soldiers of tribal stock and learned the situation, and soon enough they had gone pale, and clutched the weapons in their fists tightly.
"Th, then, what of his lordship? What has become of the young lord?"
So Hans asked of the hawk-nosed veteran. The veteran's nose was red, as though he had drunk heartily again the night before.
"…Damn it."
The red-nosed veteran was the same man who, not long since, had personally educated Hans, with his fists, when Hans had grown insolent. Hans had quarreled with him because the man had laughed at the work of laying manure that Isaac had ordered.
“The young master will come back, right? From the Black Forest? He’s not someone who’d die in a place like that.”
“…Worry about your gear, you bastard.”
The red-nosed veteran cuffed Hans lightly upon the back of the head and tightened, with his own hand, the belt that hung loose at Hans' waist.
"He will be on his way back. Sir Carlson is with him. And so is Lord Bessemer."
Hans' voice trembled, faintly.
"He will be alive. The brat is called the Ice Demon, no? Where is the home of devils, then? Hell, no? And what are Hellwolves but the watchdogs at hell's gate?"
"..............."
"You said you have a son, no?"
"..............."
"Whether it is your son, or that brat of a young lord, if you mean to see him alive, you see to your own life first. Do you hear me?"
The red-nosed veteran clapped Hans twice upon the cheek.
"See to your sword. If you are not minded to die for nothing."
"..............."
Hans, his eyes vacant, slid the scabbard between the bands of his belt. The tips of his fingers were trembling, ever so faintly. The first battle in which a man's life had hung upon him. The nightmare of that day was rising again before him.
"Who knows? The little devil-brat may yet come riding up upon a Hellwolf. Oh, hell. That would be a sight."
"..............."
The red-nose had meant it for a jest, after his own fashion. Hans gave no reply. The red-nose cast him a sidelong glance and ran off into the press of men setting up the barricades.
"They come, they come!"
Günter shouted.
"Faster, faster, move them faster!"
"Move, you whelps!"
"Put your back into it if you would not die!"
The soldiers, all of them clamoring after their own fashion, threw themselves upon the barricades.
"Bowmen, form up! Bowmen, form up!"
The bowmen, each with longbow or crossbow in hand, fell in at the veterans' command, in a single rank some ten paces from the gate of the encampment. Before them the barricades were being set in a zigzag pattern. The crossbowmen wound their bows and the bowmen set arrows to their nocks.
The great battle in which the King of Wolves had come in person had been a recent first, but the men were no strangers to holding off lesser numbers of Hellwolves. What was different here was that Bessemer was not among them. That their numbers had been cut by more than half. That there were now tribesfolk to defend at their backs. That much, and not more.
"Three at the front, charging in! Two hundred! One hundred and fifty!"
"Damn."
The longbowmen cursed under their breath, cold sweat at their temples. The numbers Günter called were closing fast. The distance between the foe and the camp.
But three? Only three?
Had he not said more than twenty?
A bowman who had seen Günter's gesture frowned in puzzlement, but soon shook the thought from his head. There was no time for such pondering now. To call a man bowman was, in this place, only to say that he could shoot well enough to pass for one. In the end it was the bloody close-quarters work that had been their way of fighting all along. If only, before that, the goddess of fortune should look upon him kindly. Then perhaps, with one arrow, he might put out the eye of a Hellwolf. He set his hopes upon that thin chance. To take whatever small advantage he could, before the fighting closed in earnest.
The crossbowmen, their weapons wound, were already aiming past the barricades, at the gate of the encampment.
"One hundred! Fifty!"
Skreeet—!!!
The longbowmen drew their strings as well. The cords, drawn back by the nock, showed a tension that seemed it might fly forth at any moment. The bowmen's arms shook.
"They are upon us!"
At that moment, three massive beasts burst into view at the camp entrance.
Twang—!!!
Twang—!!!
Riding the thrumming spring of the strings, arrows and bolts flew toward the gate. In the moment of releasing the arrow, a bowman knew it.
This one strikes.
When a man has seen battle long enough, such a feeling comes to him. Bow or blade, fist or shield. The instant of the swing, the instant of the loose, the feel of, this one will land. That sense, bound up with a man's life, only sharpens the longer the soldier survives.
The bowman's instinct was sound.
But there was a wide gulf between a strike, and a strike that bit home.
Sssh.
The whetted edge passed through the air with a sound. Carlson swept aside one of the arrows with his sword, and Bessemer caught, with his bare hand, the bolt that had been streaking toward Isaac.
Krrrrrn!
In the firelight of the brazier set at the gate, the three Hellwolves came clear. Snarling, baring their teeth, the beasts stood there. And only then did the soldiers grasp that something was off.
There had been no howling.
No savage growling.
Even now, their hostility felt… restrained.
More warning than intent to kill.
"Damn me, am I half asleep yet?"
The red-nosed veteran rubbed at his eyes.
Three great wolves. And upon their backs, mounted, the officers who had gone out from the camp.
Carlson and Bessemer, and Isaac.
The soldiers could not tell whether their wits had gone out from them, or whether the world itself had come unstuck. When astonishment passes a certain pitch, it makes a fool of a man.
"How say you? Will this serve?"
Within the gaze of soldiers turned to fools, Isaac asked of Carlson.
"Not yet, my lord. There is more polishing to be done."
"With those at the top of the chain absent, would not even this much pass for tolerable?"
Bessemer turned the bolt he had caught between his fingers as he spoke.
"What in the name… what has happened here?"
Günter asked, descending from the tower.
***⚜***
A few days passed.
And things changed.
Bessemer and the soldiers no longer had any need to enter the Black Forest in search of the meat of demonic-beasts.
Thud!
In the midst of the dawn run, a Hellwolf set down the carcass of a wild boar before the gate of the encampment, and then made off beyond the ridge. Some while later, another Hellwolf brought a deer. And not long after that, yet another came carrying a hare so great that it stood as high as a man's waist.
"What are you about? Do not break formation!"
When the wolves' sporadic visitations broke the order of the run, Carlson barked the men back into line.
From the next day, one of the Hellwolves began to dig at the frozen earth. Where the manure had once been laid, the blue flowers that had bloomed there were torn up by the roots, and the beast sank his claws into the frozen ground.
At the first it was the one wolf alone. And even that was scarcely to be trusted, and gave the men no small unease, so a watch of three or four armed soldiers followed him as a matter of course.
Then it was two wolves, and three. The Hellwolves digging at what was to become a field grew in number. Whenever the meat of demonic-beasts was wanted, the Hellwolves came carrying it, and the wolves who tore at the frozen earth came with the dawn and went back into the Black Forest at the falling of the sun.
The soldiers, who had at the beginning watched the Hellwolves with eyes full of wariness and old enmity, came, by degrees, to grow used to standing face to face with those vast demonic-beasts.
A fortnight or so further passed, and the children of the tribesfolk, knowing no fear, began to make a game of the Hellwolves. They would burrow their heads into the wolves' fur, or pull at their tails, or do their utmost to scramble up onto a wolf's back.
Krrn!
The Hellwolves growled at such times, but it was only a sign of their being put out. They showed no aggression at all. The children found this so amusing that they laughed and laughed, and tormenting the wolves became a daily diversion.
A scene as strange as any could be, slowly, settled itself into a part of the ordinary lives of the people of Vinfeldt.
"My lord, a letter has come."
Carlson came to Isaac's tent. Isaac had thrown himself deep into the study of how to make use of the change that had come to him.
Bound now to the Hellwolves in spirit, and able to share their senses at one remove, his perceptions had grown keener than they had been before. More than that, the structure of the mana-channels of demonic-beasts who wielded mana by instinct had opened a new horizon to Isaac. By the lore of magecraft, he had known of such things in a way of speaking; but to know a thing in study and to live a thing in flesh were two matters utterly distinct.
"My lord."
"Hh."
Isaac let his breath out long and opened his eyes.
"Schiller, no doubt. Hand it here."
Isaac took the letter from Carlson and looked it over.
"What does it say?"
"One piece of bad news of the sort I expected, and one piece of bad news of a sort I did not."
The common-tongue script was neat and even. It was Schiller's hand.
"And what would those be?"
"That he could not procure beasts fit for the plowing of fields. Father will not allow horses, and oxen and donkeys are scarce to be found in Goethe, or in the regions about it. Those parts make use of horses themselves."
"That is the news that could be foreseen. And the news that could not?"
"An inspector is being sent from the royal court."
Isaac folded the letter.
“…An inspector?”
“Could be routine. Or… something else.”
Isaac folded the letter.
“My father has summoned me.”
“…Then we prepare.”
Isaac stretched.
“We need to stop by Bern anyway—to find blacksmiths.”
The wolves could not till forever with claws alone.
"We are going home. Make ready."
"As you say, my lord."
Whooooom.
When Carlson had stepped from the tent, the sound of the wind seeping through the gap of the canvas could be heard. Vinfeldt was a wasteland with little to break the path of the wind, and so the gusts came stronger than in other places. For that reason, the wind that pressed in among the camp made, as it passed between things, an uncommon sound. Some called it the weeping of the dead. Some called it the whispering of spirits. Whichever a man chose to believe, this voice of the wind was a thing to leave a man feeling alone in the world.
Was that why, perhaps?
Without warning, Isaac found himself wishing to hear Jonas' playing upon the piano.
END σϝ CHAPTER