The man who later introduced himself as Bathory did not seem to be lying about wishing to hire me as a guard for his return journey to Meran, and the next morning he showed up at the same place where we sat the evening prior ready for travel. He rode a horse about the same size as mine just in a different color, and he had no issues keeping pace with me on our journey. Due to the fact that we were both cautious to keep a solid pace when traveling, we had to stop often and let the horses rest so that they wouldn’t collapse from exhaustion.
Bathory was a very talkative fellow, who divulged a lot of information that I doubt I would be able to find out even if I asked around multiple people. Whether it be due to nervousness over how unsafe we were between settlements, or if this was just a quirk of his character, he would monologue for long periods of time, and when he seemed to reach the end of whatever it was he wanted to say, I’d ask a question to lead him on even further. We discussed many topics that gave me a better idea of Bathory’s circumstances, and also the reason why Tarli was so unsafe compared to Jenusia.
Bathory said he was the son of a wealthy merchant, and that his guards that he hired at the mercenary guild in Meran only agreed to escort him to Strus, but not on his return journey. He had come here for business, but the person he was meant to meet had been dead for many weeks by the time he had arrived. The money he brought with him lasted him a good length of time at the inn we stayed at, and he had been scouting out a potential traveler like himself to offer the job instead of going to the mercenary guild branch in Strus. According to Bathory, the line between a law-abiding mercenary and a bandit was practically non-existent outside of the capital, and that depending on how much they earned people would alternate between the two professions regularly. He was afraid that he would get stuck with a mercenary who would rob him, or even worse, sell him out to his bandit buddies past the limits of the city after which he would be held for ransom as the son of a wealthy man.
I commented on how weird it was that there weren’t any guards within the city proper, even at the gates and how unusual it was compared to other cities I had passed through. He also agreed with my sentiments about this state of affairs being unusual, but he said that it was more and more common as the years went on due to the deterioration of trade between the cities. Guards who would check incoming and outgoing goods from cities weren’t paid that much, the lion’s share of their income came from bribes which they would regularly take from merchants who wanted to save on paying tolls and taxes. With no money to be made from merchants and peddlers, city guards would either quit their jobs for more profitable endeavors, or skip their shifts and still get paid regardless.
In the eyes of many of the people in power, it was better to have some semblance of an armed force to contend with the bandits, than none at all, even if it was unreliable. I made a naive comment about the situation to Bathory about how could the nobles in the Tarli Kingdom allow things to deteriorate to such an extent, to which he laughed in my face and began to insult the nobles using a multitude of words, some of which were entirely new to me. Bathory was a wealthy commoner, not a noble, and it seems he had a very negative view on nobles in the Tarli Kingdom as a whole. He said that nobles were either too incompetent or poor to deal with the threat to the safety of their domains' residents, or would be getting a cut of the spoils from the bandits themselves. He told me of a rumor of how in a nearby duchy the duke himself was caught raiding trade caravans himself, which made his father’s guild pull out of the area entirely.
I couldn’t believe that such a situation would be allowed to fester for so long without at least someone trying to make an effort to fix it, and he agreed with a frustrated look on his expression. He said that a count within Tarli tried to make an alliance of like-minded nobles to unite their forces for an effort to eradicate the bandits from their lands entirely, but this was perceived as a conspiracy to rebel against the crown by the King and other nobles, which resulted in his arrest once he was summoned to court under false pretenses. It was when telling this information to me that he leaned in a little closer, and looked around to make sure that we were alone sitting on some grass while our horses rested and drank their fill from a nearby stream. He told me how he had his suspicions that such things were the result of pressure from the Jenusian Empire.
This confused me a little, why would the Jenusians seek to keep the countries around them infested with bandits, wouldn’t that hurt their trade as well?
Bathory informed me that Jenusia was so large, that almost anything they could want to obtain for themselves could be found within their borders, and by making sure that the states around them remain weakened by lawlessness, they would remain reliant on Jenusia, and will not dare to oppose their whims. This painted a very clear picture in my head that made a lot of sense, with my mind automatically drawing parallels between Euphelia and Earth, where powerful states would prefer weaker neighbors rather than strong ones.
Bathory also told me that land trade was nowhere near as profitable as sea trade, and since the Jenusian Empire had two seas on their borders, the Rising Sea to the west and the Golden Sea to the north, they were not displeased whatsoever by the banditry in their neighbor’s lands.
As we journeyed south towards Meran the weather essentially stayed the same, with it being nowhere near comfortable enough to sleep without a fire at night. Bathory may have been a man who came from wealth, but his own life was much more valuable to him than his comfort, so he agreed with me when I suggested we don’t start fires at night. I suffered through the cold for a few nights all for the sake of gold coins, and as we were on our fourth day of our journey I started to feel better about our prospects of getting to Meran without any unpleasant encounters along the way.
We rode on a path which by the looks of it wasn’t as well traveled as it once was, with the main path where horses hooves, wagon wheels, and human feet looked to have made an impression on the landscape a long time ago, but now had a lot more green sprouting up along it. As we approached a more forested area through which the path led, Bathory stopped me and suggested that we take an alternate route. I wasn’t entirely sure why he would propose such a thing and began to question his reasoning behind his suggestion. The man locked up and continued insisting we take a big loop around towards the west instead of heading straight south as he had suggested, which made me very suspicious of Bathory’s motives.
I wasn’t foolish enough to immediately trust a stranger's words, and demanded that he explain his reasoning before I ever agreed to such a thing. He didn’t seem to want to tell me straight up what the reason for his fear of using the path further was, and he was almost in a state of tears by the time he managed to convince me to at least head west for a few miles. I was extremely uncomfortable seeing his distressed state of mind, so eventually relented and agreed to ride west, all the while remaining vigilant of our surroundings and keeping an eye out for any sort of movement.
We stopped at a meadow a fair bit away from the place where he suggested we change the path which was the easiest to follow, and he finally opened up to me to explain his reasoning, but not before making doubly sure that I would still escort him all the way to the gates of Meran. He apologized for lying to me about the specifics of his circumstances and explained that he originally set off for Strus with two guards which were in the employ of his father’s guild, and not just some mercenaries. He recanted to me a harrowing tale of how on the way to Strus his party came under attack by bands on multiple occasions, which eventually resulted in his guards holding the bandits off while he escaped. The place where most of these attacks happened, he said, was in the more forested areas, one of which he clearly remembered was the one I intended to pass through.
He spent most of his efforts apologizing to me and begging me to see the situation from his point of view, who would volunteer to be an escort on such a perilous journey when knowing that the men who previously traveled on it had perished escorting him. Bathory was no warrior, and the dagger he carried was mostly just for show to scare off those who were not confident of taking on an armed opponent, he reassured me that he knew the terrain of the Kingdom by heart and that if we headed first west, and then south east after a certain point that we would still end up along a path which was much more open, and that in some places had a cobbled road.
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I didn’t entirely fault Bathory for deceiving me in the beginning as it was reasonable to assume that no sensible person without a death wish would take up employment under him, but I didn’t let it show on my face. My only interest in escorting Bathory was to finally be able to enter a relatively large city to make some purchases, and use Bathory’s money for some equipment and travel expenses.
While Bathory was using me and deceiving me about the situation from the start, I was doing exactly the same thing to him so I wasn’t entirely as outraged as he might have thought. I saw this situation as not a setback due to the extended length of the journey to Meran, but instead countered that due to our detour I would demand greater compensation from what was originally agreed upon. He had given me an advanced payment of a golden grown, which already was equivalent to about two month’s earnings for an average mercenary. He had promised me another gold crown if I brought him to Meran alive, so I pressured him to upping the final reward to two golden crowns when we came to the capital, something he seemed happy to do in return for me forgiving him for his lies.
The man was definitely a coward, but he was a wealthy coward so I saw it as a win-win situation to earn what amounted to half a year’s pay for a mercenary from him. He was also an unending stream of information, which at times became quite troublesome but I endured it for the sake of hearing things which I otherwise might not be able to find out. I asked him some leading questions about suggestions on where the best place was to work as a mercenary, to which he replied with Jenusia. I informed him that I had already worked there as a mercenary beforehand and was not entirely impressed with the earnings one could obtain, to which he responded with a disbelieving look in his eyes.
He said that he based his answer on a ratio of pay to the relative safety of the work a mercenary could do, and that if you were just looking for earnings then the place where you would end up would be quite dangerous, even if there was a chance to make it big, albeit small. My vague plan for the future was to make some money as a mercenary, before settling down somewhere far away from the Jenusian Empire, perhaps somewhere in the east, where I could live out the rest of my life doing something more peaceful. He explained that if I headed east towards the Kingdom of Hessia or south-east to the lands known as Targis, that there was more work to be had there, but a problem of banditry and lawlessness permeated their lands, albeit nowhere near as intense as Tarli.
I thanked him for his suggestions, and our conversations returned to topics of lesser importance which interested Bathory a lot more than more serious discussions. It turns out Bathory was a learned man by the standards of Euphelia, knowing how to read and write Rahlian just like I did. I asked him about his favorite books that he had read which made his eyes turn cold, before he told me about the many materials he had been forced to read about by his father in relation to his profession. He lamented about how difficult his life had been as he had been groomed by his father to be his successor from the very beginning of his memories, he even joked that sometimes in his nightmares the object of his fear was not a nasty monster but a massive abacus which threatened to crush him beneath it’s massive weight.
I knew in theory of what an abacus was, but had no clue as to how to use one. I mean I doubt the average person in the modern world would have need of such a thing with a calculator being available on most phones at our convenience, so I asked him about what an abacus was and details on how to use it. He began his explanation with more advanced knowledge, assuming for some reason that I would know the basics of how to use an abacus already, to which I stopped and asked him to explain it to me as if I was a child who knew nothing of an abacus.
He was amused by such an idea, and began by explaining that an abacus was a counting frame, usually made of wood, that had multiple sticks or metal poles along which pieces of wood would slide which would allow one to alter or perform operations on numbers. He explained that each of the ‘rows’ was like a digit in a number, with the one furthest to the left counted in ‘ones’, the one to the right of it in ‘tens, and so on. He informed me that he was most proficient in using the ones which used one, ten, hundred as the differentiators between the different sliding blocks, but that he had witnessed one from far to the east use specific beads for fives and tens instead of the one he thought was a lot more uniform that he had used. He went through with me about how an abacus functioned, even using a stick to draw a simple diagram in the dirt to aid my understanding.
I could see how an abacus could be useful in professions which dealt with numbers to keep track of the numbers without having to write them down, which saved costs on parchment which Bathory informed me was prohibitively expensive. While the things that Bathory was happy to teach me about were definitely a positive in undertaking the escorting job, the fact that I didn’t have the freedom to train my sorcery was a huge downside. I had a very clear understanding that sorcery was a rare thing, and that if I displayed my abilities in front of Bathory then the blabbermouth would definitely make sure my nondescript appearance would make its rounds within the surrounding areas. That did not mean that I couldn’t practice my swordsmanship, and Bathory seemed to find it interesting enough to sit in silence and watch me go through the forms as best I could with just one sword in my possession.
Bathory was by no means an imbecile, and he noticed that the way I fight was very different from the way in which the men in the employ of his father trained. I explained that I learned a school of swordsmanship from Yas, which was a very far away place that even Bathory’s father had never visited. He assumed that that was where I come from, but I informed him that I have never been to it, and had learned this style from a Yasian man in Jenusia. This caused yet another misunderstanding to occur between us as he assumed I was a son of some noble who had a private swordsmanship tutor, and it took an even longer time for me to convince him of my common origins.
He proposed to me that he could try and convince his father to hire me on a more permanent basis when we arrived in Meran, which I kindly declined not wanting to stay for a prolonged period of time in a country which was for all intents and purposes under the Jenusian’s thumb. I did counter that if he knew of any place in Meran where I could buy a shortsword that I would be glad if he could introduce me, to which he readily agreed.
The rest of the journey was a lot more safe and luxurious, the closer we came to the capital the safer things became, and the more prosperous the villages we passed by looked. Having my traveling companion be a rich ‘young master’ helped a lot with our accommodations, and thanks to Bathory I slept in a feather bed for the first time since I left the relative comforts of the compound in Krilos.
Meran itself was massive, and had properly maintained walls, something which struck me as odd when comparing it to a city like Strus. How can these two cities be within the same country, and be so vastly different? The population was somewhere near 70,000 according to Bathory. We passed through the gates with a little bit of trouble this time, that was until Bathory took out a pendant from his pouch which he showed to the guards, and their attitude changed immediately from arrogant to reverent.
We rode towards the inner parts of the city where a massive multi-story building stood, which seemed to be our final destination. The large sign saying ‘Whitestar Guild’ at the front along with a symbol that matched the name matched the one that Bathory had on his pendant, and after we left our horses at the stables behind the building he led me eagerly inside. The workers within greeted Bathory with warm smiles, while shooting me cautious glares in contrast.
We went up multiple flights of stairs until we reached the fourth floor, where Bathory led me into his father’s office. Inside a man sat at a comically large table, which was definitely used as an intimidation tactic in business negotiations. A man who was very similar in appearance to my traveling companion, though much older, was buried in paperwork, only looking up once we came into the room.
“Father, I'm back!” Greeted Bathory, with an earnest smile on his face, as he sat down on one of the chairs at his father’s desk.
His father did not immediately respond, first examining his son, and after noticing that he was alright and safe he shifted his gaze to me, where his eyes rested on the sword at my waist.
“You were meant to return at least a fortnight ago, where are Aga and Leker?” He asked, displeased with his sons delayed return.
“They gave their lives to save me from some bandits that attacked us on the way, Lev here is the only reason that I am able to sit here in front of you safe and sound” Bathory said proudly, before gesturing for me to sit at the chair opposite his.
“So you allow an armed man to come into the guild, just because he protected you on your journey? Are you that naive my son? Our rivals have plotted far more deviously before!” He scolded his son, before shooting another dirty look my way.
“You misunderstand father, let me explain you the details” His son spoke calmly to assuage his father’s rage.
He managed to explain this far more concisely than I expected, owing to the long time I spent with him where he could go on and on about just about anything. By the end of his retelling of our journey his father no longer looked at me as maliciously, understanding that I performed such a deed not out of the goodness of my own heart, but out of a desire for money, something he understood all too well.
“So you are here for payment then? That won’t be an issue” He said, taking out three gold crowns from a drawer at his desk, before sliding them on the table to where I was sitting.
“Your son already paid me a gold crown in advance, the reward he promised for his safe arrival was only two gold crowns” I clarified, not wishing to scam a man of means out of money.
“The payment is two gold crowns for the service you have rendered the Whitestar guild so far, the extra gold grown is for the service you will perform by remaining silent about my son’s incompetence in losing two of his guards to mere bandits” He calmly ordered, making sure I accepted this future ‘service’.