A wounded and dying bandit lay on the ground, his trousers soiled, with blood gushing from a stump that used to be his arm. He pleaded for his life as a Talbot Company irregular struggled to remove his armor. He had to hack through his limbs to make it easier. The wailing of men in similar predicaments filled the air.

“Twenty-three.” counted Gunther Jaeger, as a Scottish irregular threw another bloody steel corselet onto a pile. He added another tick mark to his inventory list. “You, stop.” he said, pointing to a soldier about to dump a heap of bloodstained clothing onto the pile. “Those go over there. This is for armor.”

“I beg your pardon, sir?” the soldier raised his voice. It was hard to hear with the cacophony in the background. Dying bandits screamed while their corpses were hacked and looted as Talbot Company’s men joked loudly or got sick and vomited on the bloody earth.

“I said those go over there! This is the wrong pile!” Gunther shouted over the chaos. He sighed in frustration. The noise of a battle’s aftermath was something that he had gotten used to long ago, but the racket still made post-battle accountability annoying.

A rider approached. It was Otto, riding up to meet his comrade without the slightest dent in his armor from the battle.

“This is absolutely terrible,” said Otto, raising the visor of his helmet.

“What do you mean?” replied Gunther, not looking up from his tally sheet.

“No jewelry, no gold teeth. Not a single one of these damn peasants has anything valuable. You would think they would at least have lockets or silver crosses or damn gimmel rings, but nothing!”

“Or it could be that these items were liberated from the bodies before you arrived on the scene, Herr Koenigsherr.”

“Perhaps. How goes accountability?”

“I believe we have sixty dead and counting. Thirty-eight deserted.”

“What of the wounded?”

“I have not counted them yet. You remember how I deal with the wounded.”

Gunther had a rather medieval way of dealing with the wounded. His sergeants scoured the field looking for those who cried out and offered them a choice – life or death. If they chose death they were stabbed on the spot; if they chose life, they would be hauled back to the baggage train and treated by the surgeon, who also happened to be one of the archers. They would most likely still die, but they would die as drunk as a lord since the surgeon liked to use schnapps to dull the pain.

A soldier walked up to the pair of officers, grinning widely.

“Sirs, I believe you will want to see this. I have found the enemy commander. We will get a handsome ransom from him, we will.”

Gunther rolled up his tally sheet and tucked it into his belt.

“Show me.”

After the three took a short walk through a field of the dead and dying, and into the forest beyond, they found the enemy commander, Graf Fritz von Bulow, standing there with his arms crossed, flanked by Talbot company swordsmen on either side.

“Good day,” said Gunther.

“Good day,” replied the graf in German.

“You did not run?”

Von Bulow said nothing but gestured towards his leg. He had indeed tried to run but had his leg caught in a badger hole, where he was now stuck.

Otto could not help but let out a good chuckle. Gunther, stern-faced, took the tally sheet from his belt and prepared to take notes.

“You are dressed in expensive armor. Am I correct to assume that you are a noble, sir?”

“You are.”

Gunther jotted that down.

“If you are thinking of ransoming me, it will not do you any good, you know,” Von Bulow said, with a tone of resignation.

“And why is that?”

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“I am the lord of this county.”

“And why should we believe you?”

“You passed by a boundary stone on the way here, did you not?”

“Yes, we did. It had the insignia of the local lord on it. There was a coat of arms with several yellow buttons in the shape of a triangle on a blue field.”

“Behold,” said von Bulow, and showed his ring, which bore the same mark.

“This proves nothing.” Otto scoffed, “You could have stolen that from the real count.”

“And what use would I have to keep it if I did? This would be very valuable to a politician, not some simple forest bandit.”

“He is right.” Gunther sighed, drawing his sword. “Since we cannot ransom you, would you like to die from decapitation or stabbing?”

“I would like to…”

Von Bulow’s severed head hit the forest floor before he could finish his last words. Otto and Gunther headed back to the column while the soldiers surrounding von Bulow’s body began stripping him of his belongings like vultures.

“You think we could have gotten something more out of him?” Otto asked.

“No, nothing.” Gunther replied stoically, “Since we cannot ransom a robber baron to himself, the only other person we would be able to garner ransom from is the Prince of Orange himself.”

“And why would the prince pay the ransom of a robber baron?”

“Exactly.”

The two were quiet for a time. Crows watched them from the trees, drawn by the scent of death.

“Do you think MacRae will accept this high number of casualties?” Otto inquired as the two walked.

“No, of course not.” replied Gunther.

“It is not as if we could have done anything about it.”

“That is not what he will say. He will say that we should have drilled them more before we reached Rotterdam. The same can even be said of some of our officers.” he added as he passed by the commander of swords, sitting motionless on a rock on the side of the road, being attended to by an archer.

Sophia stared at the corpses that lay sprawled on the road before her. The screaming was bothering her, but she could not seem to tear her eyes away or cover her ears. Perhaps she did not want to appear weak to her men.

“Her” men, she thought. They had just attacked without her when she froze in fear. This would not happen again. It was ironic since her last name meant “fortress” – something strong and unbreakable, something she was clearly not.

The corpses disturbed her in more than one way. It was not just that some of them were still ‘breathing’ with air escaping from their lungs, or that some of them had their dead, unblinking eyes fixed on her. It was that, in some strange sense of pareidolia, she was seeing familiar faces among the dead. The baker from the panaderia across the street from her old house in Milan had been stabbed through the neck; the boy she used to tease in the marketplace had an eye missing, and her uncle Giovanni had no arms left and was sitting naked against a tree. But that was impossible. All those people were back home in Milan, and she was… where was she?

The sound of footsteps drew near. A young man approached. He spoke to her in a strange, funny-sounding language. She could not understand the words but she slowly turned her head towards the speaker.

It was that archer that pulled her into the bushes. He was looking at her worryingly, with his hands gently resting on her shoulders. He noticed tears starting to well up in her eyes, but she did not actually cry even as they rolled down her cheeks. His words and facial expression had a tone of genuine concern, but she continued to stare at him. She thought of nothing, but it was nice to feel that someone cared about her.

Still speaking, he gave her a kind smile and reached for something in his pouch. She recognized the word “salame.” The archer produced a bit of sausage from his pouch and tenderly placed it in her hand. She thanked him in Italian and took a bite, then another larger one. She had not realized how hungry she had been. The archer smiled at her, satisfied and a little amused at the way she ate. A gloved hand suddenly grasped his shoulder.

“Lágarse, campesino.” Beat it, peasant. Don Alfonso had arrived to check on his ward.

The archer was about to stand up and leave, but with a mouth full of salami, Sophia raised her hand to stop him. The don, confused, allowed the Englishman to stay but said nothing to him.

“Did your first battle go as you expected?” he said to her in Spanish.

“No,” she said in Italian, wiping her mouth. “It was so quick. I did not know what to do.”

“You did not know your father’s things? What?” Don Alfonso said, confused.

Sophia laughed. Laughter was good, she thought. It was good to relieve some tension. She explained that the Italian words for “what to do”, cosa fare, sounded like the Spanish cosas padre, or “father things”, which made no sense. The don allowed himself a quick chuckle, but immediately changed his tone.

“Hija, you were clearly not ready yet. I am sorry that this had to happen to you before you could receive a proper discourse on drill. Also, who is this?” he said, gesturing to the archer.

“He is a peasant, one that hid me during the battle. A nice fellow, but he seems to be a bit of a buffoon. He does not speak like us.”

“He is speaking English.” the don replied, before turning to Fletcher. He looked the man up and down and told him sternly, in heavily accented English,

“Englishman, I would like to have a word.”

“Certainly, milord.” Fletcher humbly replied.

“I applaud you for your actions. It was brave of you to consider saving the life of your superior officer while putting yourself at risk. However, I am not entirely sure I can trust you. It is nothing personal. I trust no one. Can you see what is different about our commander of swords?”

“What about her?”

“Yes, exactly.”

Puzzled, Fletcher tried to respond, but the don interrupted him.

“Do not do anything that would jeopardize your life or the sense of order that we have in the company. We have no women here, señor, only soldiers.”

Fletcher was beginning to understand what he meant and responded with a meek bow.

A horn sounded in the distance. It was time for the company to regroup and continue the march. Fletcher bowed to both of them and scurried off to rejoin the irregulars as Don Alfonso wordlessly walked back to his men. Sophia finished the last bits of her salami and dusted herself off, once again thinking, what had she gotten herself into?