Morning broke. Thomas Warwick was the last one to rouse himself from slumber. The Englishman was not severely late, but he blamed the foreign food for upsetting his humors and keeping him from rising.

“Bloody Swedes and their bloody herring – they should have some good, simple English cockscomb.” He complained as he left his bed.

After he had a swig of ale for breakfast and changed into his red and white uniform, he grabbed his crutches, threw open the flaps of his tent and grimaced with frustration at what he saw.

Swedish soldiers walked, ran, and danced about the camp, chasing invisible insects, talking to inanimate objects, and screaming silently at the sky or the ground. The poison had clearly not worn off yet, but today was the day that the shelling was supposed to commence. The guns were lying unlimbered, pointing towards the enemy and ready to fire, but their crews were missing.

As he hobbled around the camp shouting in vain for the gunners, Warwick realized that it was like trying to summon a fish to heel like a dog. No one understood him, and no one was capable of understanding.

However all was not lost – Talbot Company had cannons of its own, however without gunners. The cowards who had once manned these guns had deserted the company during the battle of the bridge on the Oder River. Warwick would have to train a new crew to replace them, and he had one name that he had in mind above all others.

James Fletcher was interrupted from his curious task of collecting various flowers to “present to a certain officer” and selected for gunnery detail along with several other men from Warwick’s irregular unit. They all spoke English, so giving instructions would not be as difficult as it would be if Warwick had to train a mixture of Swedes and Germans. Besides, manning the guns was a dangerous thing indeed. If Fletcher were to perish, perhaps he could attempt to console Sophia. Perhaps more would come of it.

Warwick instructed the men to position Talbot Company’s guns alongside those of the Swedes to form a single combined battery. That way, there would be four cannons on an elevated place that would be able to fire as one. The issue at hand though, was that after the men had lugged the cannon up to the Swedish position and positioned themselves near the guns with six soldiers per cannon, they had yet to receive instructions on how to fire them. Warwick sought to remedy that issue. He hobbled along the line, giving his instructions as he went back and forth.

“Gentlemen, our first order of business should be to extinguish any sparks left in the gun from the previous firing. As these guns have never been fired before, there is no need to do that, but when the need arises – and it will – take yonder woolen sponge and dip it in water. We shall do this now to form a force of habit.”

After a few seconds of hesitation, the one man per gun began grabbing their sponges and did as they were told, listening with great intent and focus.

“Drive the wet sponge into the breech of the gun and thrust and withdraw as if you were diddling a damsel.”

Some of the younger men giggled but went to work just the same. Fletcher, who stood by the end of the gun, smiled with the slightest hint of embarrassment.

“Now that your woman is all wet and ready for you, insert your whore-stick into her. Grab one of the cartridges filled with black powder, and ram it in.”

The giggles turned into low laughter and the men proceeded.

“Think of the powder as your liquid rapture. Too little will cause no pleasure at all, and too much will cause childbirth – and I know none of you boys want that! Measure powder to adjust how far your shot will fly.”

The entire battery was now laughing.

“Now for the shot itself – serious business this is, boys. This is the thing that pounds your enemy harder than Captain Jaeger pounds his expensive whores!”

The gunners had begun to howl, and even Fletcher began slapping his knees. Some lunatic Swedish soldiers nearby, who understood nothing, laughed in unison as large iron balls were inserted into the tubes.

Strangely though, the Swedish rounds did not roll down and were very tough to insert. They had to be guided down with ramrods.

“Now, we poke through our little vents with our little pricks,” Warwick said as he approached a Swedish cannon, “insert our priming wires and light our matches.”

Fletcher along with the other cannoneers took spears with wicks on them and lit them as other men stabbed through the touch holes on top of the cannon and inserted fuses.

“And now boys, we touch our matches to our holes… and give fire.”

The men did as they were instructed one by one, and the first two guns belonging to Talbot Company sent cannonballs careening towards the walls of Jarlsberg.

However, just as the lit match from the third cannon – of Swedish make – made contact with the touch hole, the gun exploded with a great roar.

The wooden gun carriage splintered into millions of pieces, sending shrapnel everywhere while the bronze tube of the gun warped and broke, forcing red-hot shards of metal to fly into everything around it.

The explosion threw Fletcher to the earth as bits of wood and metal zipped over and hit his cannon. Smoking bits of cannon littered the earth around him.

All the archer could hear was a loud tinny sound in his ears. His vision blurred, but he could make out figures of men crawling on the ground in front of him – many were bleeding. The Swedish soldiers around them were still laughing and did nothing to help. Slowly, the sun began to lose its light, and everything faded to darkness.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

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“Messere Freccia! Svegliati!”

Fletcher’s eyes slowly opened to reveal Sophia standing over him. From the cloth ceiling, he could tell that he was inside the surgeon’s tent. His head hurt and her voice had an echo to it, but otherwise, he believed that he was in good health.

Sophia stepped away as another face came into view. Calvert the archer and part-time surgeon now loomed over Fletcher, grinning from ear to ear like a child about to receive a sweet treat.

“I told you! I told you he did not die! By God’s Blood at least we saved one of them.”

Fletcher paused and wondered what he meant by that. Opening his mouth to speak, he managed to utter a single word,

“Warrick…”

Calvert’s grin turned into a somber frown at the mention of the captain’s name. He shook his head at Fletcher and remained silent. He wanted to say more, but darkness clouded his eyes once again, sending him into a deep sleep.

“Master Fletcher will be all right, my dear.” Calvert said to Sophia in French, who stood over Fletcher with a look of anxiety on her face. “All he needs is his rest and he will be fit for duty in no time.”

Calvert then covered Fletcher up with a blanket, hiding the bandaged cuts and wounds from the shrapnel he received. They were all minor, and most of them were from wooden splinters and very small bits of metal that were propelled by the force of the blast. Since Fletcher was standing on the right side of his gun when the explosion occurred, the gun itself took most of the damage from the explosion. Fortunately, it was still serviceable. The same could not be said for the other three guns, and neither could it be said for Thomas Warwick.

Outside the surgeon’s tent, Talbot Company archers piled up the bodies of the fallen gunners and stripped them of their clothes and belongings. The dead were then covered with lime powder to help with the stench and prevent decay so that the bodies could be buried properly later.

Warwick, however, was different. The men did not remove his clothes for there was not much to salvage. He and the cannoneers of the third and fourth gun had body parts strewn all throughout the field. His once handsome face clung to his skull, but the blast had caused it to break, and now his head, separated from the rest of his body, looked like a bloody broken egg wearing a fleshy mask. Bits of his crutches were in the bodies of the other men, while his torso lay some ten paces from where he stood, split in two with his jacket torn to bits.

The explosion had been a grave misfortune, and there was to be a terrible reckoning. MacRae and Gunther had arrived on the scene of the explosion moments after they had heard it, and were now looking for signs of foul play. Cannon explosions did occur often, but most of the time it was due to the inexperience of a gun crew. Warwick had commanded artillery before, and this should not have been the case.

MacRae was trying in vain to get information from Swedish witnesses, who were still hallucinating out of their gourds that they could not tell illusion from reality. He would have had Greve Stenbock himself interrogate his own men, but he had no patience, and the greve, by all accounts, was out hunting.

“What happened here, ye boy-buggering sack of herring shit?!” he said as he pinned a grinning Swede down on a rock. The colonel was very tempted to choke him to death and was trying his hardest to restrain himself. The Swede said nothing but made spit bubbles with his saliva, laughing as they popped. MacRae could not help himself any longer and began beating the soldier to a bloody pulp, screaming curses each time his fist landed.

Gunther, meanwhile, had gone to the Swedish munitions tent. He had gone through it and now held a powder cartridge in his hand. Many of the ammunition barrels were far away from the site of the explosion, and he wanted to be as thorough in his investigation as possible. The Swedish troops did not stop him from going through their supplies, as giddy as they were with laughter, so opening barrels that did not belong to him was an easy matter. These cartridges were much heavier than the others.

Opening one with his knife, Gunther found bits of metal such as musket balls, nails, and even caltrops embedded together with the powder. Someone had clearly been making these cartridges into bombs.

“Voinko auttaa sinua?” said a voice from the shadows.

Gunther turned to see the silhouette of a man in what appeared to be a Swedish uniform who was strangely not dancing, drooling, or delirious. Gunther did not know how to speak Swedish, but knew that whatever strange tongue the man was speaking was not it.

“Eh… Bonjour.” Gunther said, gauging the situation carefully. He watched as the foreigner moved out of the shadows and into his field of view. He was an older man with a bushy blonde beard. In his hand, he held a strange knife-like weapon, shaped like a rectangle with a sharp tip. He eyed the cartridge in Gunther’s hand.

“Monsieur,” he said, switching to heavily accented French, “It seems that you have discovered something that you were not meant to discover. For this, you must die.”

Without saying another word, the foreigner lunged at Gunther, raising his knife overhand.

Without drawing his weapon, Gunther blocked the blow by grabbing his opponent’s wrist and twisting it, making him wince in pain and scream in surprise, dropping the knife. This was followed by a quick, snappy punch to the gut, causing him to reel back. The two now fought hand to hand.

Gunther’s foreign opponent tackled him to the ground, landing blow after blow against his face. The German mercenary captain then pulled out his own blade, a short katzbalger, and thrust it into the side of the foreigner’s rib.

In shock and pain, the foreigner yelled and gripped the side of his rib as blood came pouring out. Gunther, seeing an opportunity, then thrust his knife into his opponent’s neck, killing him.

Blood from the man’s neck wound splattered all over Gunther’s face as he collapsed on top of him. Gunther pushed him off and got on his feet and watched as the foreigner thrashed about on the floor. He would no longer be a problem.

As a matter of habit, Gunther began looking through the dead man’s things. He found a leather notebook tucked away in his belt containing accounts of food, clothing, ammunition, and war materiel. He reasoned that this must have been the Swedish quartermaster. If that were the case, he had just killed the man responsible for all the allied army’s supplies. All this was important information that needed to be reported to MacRae.

The blood on his clothes and face did not need rinsing. It was proof to everyone that there was a murder involved. His jaw felt painful to the touch, and he could not be sure if all the blood on his face was that of his opponent.

Still in pain, Gunther shook his head and made his way out of the tent. The Swedish soldiers still ambled about aimlessly, but some had already collapsed due to exhaustion. Hopefully, when they woke up they would be sober. MacRae was still making his rounds outside, “interrogating” potential witnesses with his fist, shouting insults at them in a language they could not understand.

“Herr Oberst!” Gunther yelled out to him.

“What the fuck is it, Master Jaeger? Can ye not see that I am busy here?” MacRae yelled back as he held a bloody soldier by his collar.

“I believe, mein Herr, that I have found the cause of our mysterious exploding cannon incident.”

MacRae turned to see Gunther’s bloody face and clothes.

“I trust ye have dealt with the matter appropriately, Master Jaeger?”

Gunther nodded, “Ja, it was the Swedish quartermaster. He intentionally turned the powder cartridges into bombs.”

“Why would a Swede want to sabotage his own fuckin’ army?” MacRae said, dropping the wounded soldier he was beating.

“He was no Swede, mein Herr. He spoke… differently.”

“A spy, perhaps? We must inform the greve upon his arrival.”