I woke up to discover that sometime during the night, I had decided Katya’s lap would make a better pillow than the bags of cloth filled with goose down designed for the purpose. She was still more or less sitting, head leaned against a bedpost; lightly dozing, and startled to full wakefulness when I lifted my head. The dark circles under her eyes, the rapid blinking, and her difficulty attaining a completely vertical position convinced me she had not fallen asleep quickly, but had been sitting vigil until sleep had ambushed her sometime early in the morning.
When I pointed out the various evidences of her exhaustion, she shifted from talking about how she was still awake and had merely dozed off just for a moment to claiming she felt fine and well-rested and was ready for another day full of dutiful wakefulness and watchfulness. By this point in our conversation, I was up and about and dressed for the day; and she was still sitting on the edge of the bed, listing visibly to one side.
“Katya,” I told her, grasping her by the shoulders and shaking gently, cutting off her meandering account of how she didn’t actually need much sleep, “I’ll be fine for breakfast. You should sleep.”
While she worked on figuring out how to rebut this, I gently picked her up, laid her down flat on the bed with her head on a pillow, pulled the blankets back up over her, and tucked her snugly in.
“There you go. Now go back to sleep. That’s an order,” I said, with mock ferocity.
Then, on a sudden impulse, I bent down and kissed her on the forehead. When I straightened back up, her eyes were closed and she was breathing evenly; if not fallen back asleep, at least making an effort to pretend, which in her current state was very likely to lead to the real thing anyway. I watched for a few moments; and then quietly went off to breakfast, Yuri trailing in my wake.
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An awkward silence descended on the high table after my arrival; it started with a respectful fall into silence as everyone turned my way, and when I sat down at the officers’ table and started eating without a word of greeting, the silence continued for some time as none felt like being the first to breach it. Truth be told, I didn’t mind being able to focus on the food for a change rather than being distracted by the business of command or my officers’ attempts at polite small talk. We would be leaving soon, and the quality of the cooking would not be improving for being done in the field instead of a real kitchen.
After clearing my plate, I decided to go straight into business.
“Well,” I said, “Fyodor was in charge of the night watch, so everybody is here who will be here. Let’s just get started, shall we?”
We usually ended up having an informal officers’ meeting for a short period of time after breakfast; inevitably one or two officers needed to go take care of something in the wake of breakfast, and the officer in charge of the late watch would be sleeping barring an emergency of some kind, but that still left most of the officers at the same place at the same time, something that wouldn’t happen again until dinnertime.
“That red-headed wench, what’s her name, not going to be here this time?” Torvald was still working on learning the names, faces, and ranks of everyone, though he was trying.
“Katya didn’t get much sleep last night, I told her to sleep in,” I said, then immediately wished I had put that another way.
The knowing grin Torvald flashed to his cousin and quick elbow jab told me that the rumor mill was going to be grinding at full speed with grist for a fresh story about how I had kept Katya up all night. This would probably turn into a graphic description of fraternization somewhere along the grapevine, bearing as fruit a variety of lewd jokes. I briefly considered correcting Torvald’s misconceptions to nip that shoot in the bud, then remembered something I had heard early during my training as a soldier about fraternization within the ranks and proper military discipline in general.
I had been told (by way of contrast with how the soldiers of the Golden Empire were supposed to be) that mercenary companies were rife with discipline problems; fraternization of that sort, in particular, wasn’t unusual. Katya had an unusual amount of unofficial authority, in spite of her lack of official rank, and that sort of combination would make a lot of sense if we were thought to be personally involved. It would add a touch of verisimilitude to our facade as a mercenary company, and it would be all the more plausible if the rest of the company really believed it.
On the other hand, rumors spread unpredictably. Vehement denials sometimes draw more attention to the issue than simply ignoring them, so perhaps if I wanted to keep it in the realm of scurrilous half-believed rumors rather than taken for certain fact, ignoring it might be better. My unwise remark and Torvald’s immediate inference would only draw so much attention, and might not even be remembered after all of the officers had made their best attempt to fill each others’ brains with minutiae. If I corrected Torvald’s misconception, it would be remembered by most of them.
Having come up with conflicting reasons to keep silent on the issue of Katya, I focused back on what was being said. Vitold was giving a progress report on our efforts to cosmetically alter the steam knight suits and mechs to make them seem less like official Ruthenian military equipment and more like a grab-bag of mercenary machinery. Battlefield salvage was a useful source of parts, and we had even inherited some intact mechs with our mercenaries. Unless Vitold could get some more qualified mechanics, we would have trouble finishing the job quickly, and we didn’t want to wait long enough at the manor to get attacked again.
I dumped the job of searching through all the soldiers for suitable assistant mechanics for Vitold on Fyodor and Torvald. Torvald had worked alongside the Romanians for some time; he also had a sort of peculiar cachet among my own troops that sprang from a combination of his outgoing personality and his status as the first of the mercenaries to sign on with me.
As for Fyodor, he was one of the infantry officers and thus immediately familiar with the largest share of our troops. In addition to this, the infantry captain had handed Fyodor the job of distributing the mercenaries’ equipment back to them; going through making lists of everyone’s possessions leaves you with impressions of a great many of them. For that matter, the requests our own troops made of Fyodor for equipment gave him a better idea of what talents they thought they had other than those the military had told them to use.
The more senior Rimehammer, I noticed, had out a sheet of paper and was taking careful shorthand notes. Halfway through the supply colonel’s litany of complaints, he made a marginal note to the side highlighting the fact that the supply colonel had given two very different figures for our diminishing supply of vodka, and gave the supply colonel a curious look.
The supply colonel continued without appearing to notice and launched into his next complaint. He was deeply concerned with the fact that we were feeding the wounded and former prisoners three-quarters of a full standard ration of food just like everyone else, instead of the third of a standard ration of food he felt they would be able to minimally survive on. He seemed rather put out that we had not simply executed the prisoners and been done with it; feeding them generously wasn’t helping our supply situation any.
After the meeting ended, I reported to the workshop personally to put in my own contribution of skilled labor. I was also hoping to mend fences with Vitold. Our easy camaraderie had foundered, run aground on the rocks of my strange new abilities and rank during the storm of our mission. I wanted to reassure him I was still the same old Mikolai he’d played countless games of cards with, drunk with, made silly bets with, and gotten into mischief with.
We were working on reassembling a damaged elemental cage, a relatively quiet task, when I realized I was wrong. I couldn’t tell myself, much less Vitold, that I was the same old Mikolai. After the miles and months that had passed since our idyllic days at the garrison, I was a different man. War had changed me, left its stamp on me; I had faced its horrors and come out with bloody hands gripping the reins of command. Vitold, too, had been changed by the war; but in a very different way. If I was riding the wolf so it could not turn upon me, he had climbed up a tree and was hoping the wolf would go away.
The innocence was gone for us; we could not simply joke around and pretend that our service in the military was a temporary nuisance requiring us to live temporarily in a great big house full of other unhappy men in the middle of nowhere, or that our combat service drills were purely theoretical in nature. Pranks were no longer delightful and funny relief from boredom; but potentially deadly distractions. And Vitold could not forget that I was now his commander – and a man who commanded fearsome unnatural powers.
The best that I could do was to tell him I was still his friend in spite of being a new and different Mikolai. Even if I seemed strange, I was not a stranger. He grunted and asked where the three-quarter French inch wrench had gone, as the three-quarter Avar inch wrench didn’t quite fit.
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After cleaning up and getting lunch, I went upstairs to check on Katya. I found her awake, though lying in bed (I think the sound of the door opening woke her).
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“Good morning,” I said, and she responded in kind.
After some brief inquiries as to her alertness, sense of well-being, and a successful bid to interrupt her profuse apologies by handing her a sandwich and an apple and telling her to eat breakfast, I recalled my own breakfast. In particular, I remembered that Torvald had noticed her absence. My unfortunate choice of a truthful but poorly worded response to his inquiry about said absence also came to my mind.
Katya deserved to know that the rumors were likely to return; I also wanted to convince her that the best course of action was simple silence. This, I thought to myself, was going to be difficult. Katya was in many ways a fine soldier, but she was not well-equipped to handle social subtleties.
“Katya, you remember those rumors that were going around camp after that night I had you in my tent trying to make the rune plate light up?” I asked, with a little trepidation.
She nodded and made a vaguely affirmative noise through a mouthful of food.
“Well, it seems like some of the men know you were sleeping in my room last night,” I said, glossing over the specifics. No need to get Torvald (or myself!) in a particular spot of trouble for my poor word choice. “So those rumors are probably going to be starting back up again. And …”
I held up a hand, trying to formulate a diplomatic way of saying this. I didn’t want her to think I was the sort of man who wanted her to suffer, and I could remember she took the rumors badly before. How could I tell this woman that I wanted her to just let her reputation be dragged through the mud in order to bring the mercenaries and the regular soldiers together, and to help lend an air of mercenary disorder to the way the company acted?
She looked at me silently, swallowing.
“Well, in the light of everything that’s been going on lately and how this mission is going, I was thinking that it might be better if we just…” I hesitated again. I wasn’t about to tell her to lie outright. She was charmingly honest, and I doubted she was any good at lying. Katya swallowed, put the remaining half a sandwich on the end table next to her sword, and looked at me apprehensively, waiting. After a little while of groping around for the right phrase, I thought I found the right way to put it.
“…if we just allow the rumors be taken for truth.” I thought it was a neutral phrase; her reaction took me off-guard, and she covered the distance between the bed and myself with remarkable speed, considering that the blanket ought to have slowed her down a little bit. I closed my eyes and flinched away from her attack.
I could taste lingering notes of pumpernickel and cheese as I staggered back from the impact of Katya’s body slamming into mine, her arms wrapping around my neck and her legs wrapping around my waist. The tastes were, I soon realized, because I had left my mouth open, and Katya was kissing me vigorously. She had not quite tackled me as much as climbed up me, though the speed with which she had done so made for little difference between the two; and I found myself returning her kiss before I knew I was doing so.
My arms were around her, supporting her and embracing her, the slender curves of her body apparent to the touch in a way that was not visible to the eye through the rumpled uniform she had slept in. My heart kept hammering, for a reason other than anticipation of attack. She pulled her mouth away from mine for a moment.
“I am happy you also want the rumors to be true,” she breathed in my ear. She nipped at my earlobe and kissed her way from there down to the base of my throat before locking her lips back onto mine.
I thought back to the previous night; the very quiet, very earnest, almost whispered statement of “You are a good man and I like you.” To the beaming smiles she had been giving me lately. Vitold, talking to me after the battle, telling me he thought I liked spooky women and that they liked me, too; and how he seemed to be referring to Katya. She had taken my hesitancy for the hesitancy of a shy man confessing his love in the most singularly awkward way possible. “Just allow the rumors to be taken for truth,” I had said. That hadn’t been my intention, I thought; and then started to pay attention to what I was doing.
While I reflected on Katya’s thought processes and emotions, I had continued to respond and react to her passion without conscious effort; we were now both on the bed, and articles of clothing were being thrown in the general direction of Yuri, who was looking decidedly uncomfortable about the whole affair and was retreating backwards towards the closet. (I should be thankful he was not barking.)
Perhaps I, too, had feelings that extended beyond friendship, I thought to myself, reminding myself of the impulsive kiss I had laid on her forehead this morning; the way I lit up inside when she smiled at me; the way that she drew my eyes even while climbing over a wall in the middle of a raging battle; even, so long ago, the shock of discovering her softness and smallness in the dark as I helped her in and out of my armor. We truly did, I realized, both truly want the rumors to be true; and with the good lieutenants rounding up plenty of helping hands, my own hands could be easily spared from the workshop to help turn false rumor into solid fact.
And with that last thought, I shifted the whole of my focus to Katya; and the two of us spent the afternoon in its entirety on the enterprise of making up for the time we had lost to military propriety, misunderstanding, mourning, and miscommunication.
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When we had worn ourselves out several times, it came to my notice that the sun was sitting quite low in the sky; that we were both quite hungry; and that the small army I was purportedly in charge of might be starting to get itself into one or another kind of mischief or mishap during the period in which I had been thoroughly preoccupied instead of closely supervising my fractious officers. As focused as I had been on Katya, I would have missed anything less obvious than the manor house burning to the ground.
This last worry, it turned out, was misplaced; since I had left them all with clear orders (something I had clearly failed to do several days before, in dealing with the prisoners) and then stayed out of the way afterwards, my officers had impelled the men to heights of efficiency and productivity that surprised me pleasantly. There was an important lesson about leadership here, which I was beginning to learn, though it would take me more time to master it: Great leadership comes from knowing how to delegate, and half of knowing how to delegate is knowing when to step back out of the way.
The job of disguising our hardware was, for one wonder, mostly complete, or at least the more difficult parts were. What little remained could be accomplished in the field or explained, easily enough, as the use of battlefield salvage in field repair and refit. It would be obvious on close inspection that a modified heavy mech had been originally built in Khoryvsk; but with enough parts and weapons replaced or rearranged, they would pass readily enough for battlefield salvage.
The most difficult part had been re-housing the valuable elemental cages so that they would not be recognized as being from the Golden Empire. The elemental cage is the most valuable part of a mech; but also the most difficult to recycle from a disabled mech salvaged from your enemies, as they are generally secured against unauthorized use. Without the correct passcodes, compelling the elemental spirit into loyalty is impossible, and there is no way to read those codes short of tearing the cage apart. The easiest thing to do is melt down the orichalcum and rebuild the whole thing from scratch.
The rest of our equipment was, while not completely refurbished, already beginning a remarkable cosmetic transformation. Even Yuri had new equipment; Torvald presented me with a set of armor for Yuri cut down from the barding for a mercenary’s horse (the horse did not miss the barding, as it had not survived the fight). Yuri sniffed at it dubiously. He’d come with an armored harness, one that marked him as an honorary sergeant of the Imperial Army.
I thanked Torvald, Vitold, and Fyodor for their fine work. I had learned by then another valuable lesson of command: Rewarding good behavior with praise seemed to be as effective with officers and soldiers as it did with horses and dogs, a curious commonality between man and beast.
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That evening, I addressed my troops in the dining hall.
We would, I told them, be leaving the manor behind the next morning. We would not be coming back to it in the foreseeable future; instead, we would be making our best pace northwest, crossing the northern part of the Sarmatian range and out of Avaria somewhere near the border between Lithuania and the various petty princes who answered to the Emperor in Oenipons. The great forest there was wild, reputedly home to ogres and witches; it had stopped the Romans from going any further north in times of old and helped limit conflict between Vilnius and Oenipons in more recent times.
This route would be safe because our enemies would not expect it at all. It would, I cautioned them, be slow going, especially since we could not expect to come by much coal (meaning that the mechs and steam knight suits would need to spend most of their time riding on carts). We would make charcoal along the way, and use it as a field expedient to the best of our ability.
The colonel and I were all too aware of our coal problem and had spent a great deal of time talking about it. The northern Sarmatians were not a place to buy coal on the civilian market; there was little organized settlement of the area. Even if we chanced on a village with an adequate supply, local prices were unlikely to be particularly reasonable. We might be able to “expeditiously requisition” (or more accurately, steal) their coal anyway, but that in turn would draw attention to us.
We were both dubious of charcoal as a field expedient; him, because he didn’t understand that using charcoal didn’t harm our machinery (even after my assurances to the contrary); I, because I knew how long it would delay us (stopping to fell trees and then turn the wood into charcoal in the middle of potentially hostile territory seemed unwise). Charcoal is a fine fuel that burns more cleanly than most coals, if you do not mind the fact that it is half the density; you will burn through a full bin of it quite quickly.
I didn’t want to lecture the troops on the tight supply situation, so I moved off the topic of coal and charcoal after mentioning it just that once; and left them with a reminder that our cover identities would be all that stood between us and the opportunity for a heroic last stand. While I was, I told them, confident in their ability to heroically die to the last man, I would rather we not put such a matter to the test. After the speech, I had a lengthy talk over dinner with the other officers, going into the nuts and bolts of our departure and planned route.
I wanted to avoid attention from Avar soldiers. One of our recent recruits, a nobleman with a French name and some sort of kinship claim on a Wallachian estate, explained to me at length that King Ladislav’s marriage to Emperor Leon’s daughter somehow meant that the King of Avaria would not send any troops over the northern Sarmatians. His explanation included a family tree, which I cannot remember and will not attempt to reproduce.
After the end of a dinner that lasted quite late, Katya and I went back up to bed; where we held one another close and talked (well, whispered more than talked) late into the night about anything but strategic or tactical plans. We talked about home and family; about food and drink; about cats and dogs and weather.