The problem with using slaves in your armies was that slaves were people, and had their own wants and desires. Saying so might have gotten you arrested in Wasolan, but that didn’t make it less true.
As far as anyone knew, the two soldiers called Heft and Pest had only a single, shared desire: to work together. Various assumptions were made about this desire, but since they worked well together and were totally passable soldiers, the desire was entertained.
Some thirty years ago, Pest and Heft had been born on the same day, only a couple of hours apart, in a city called Ivterran, one of three cities that had once been called the Independent Cities. Their parents had not known each other at the time, but it was a fun enough coincidence that they had become friends and Heft and Pest had grown up together.
When Pest and Heft were a little more than three years old, Ivterran had been conquered by Wasolan. It was the second of the Independent Cities to fall. The third city, Borirnna had not been far behind. Now, the Independent Cities were the largest of Wasolan’s northwestern cities.
Almost everyone in all three cities had been enslaved by Wasolan. Unlike the Lord’s House, Wasolan did enslave children under the age of five. They weren’t expected to do much until they turned eight, but they were slaves just like the rest of their families.
Heft and Pest continued to grow up together in Ivterran, as slaves of Wasolan. They went to school together, were trained and assessed together, and at age eight, they worked together as carpenters’ assistants.
The work wasn’t too bad, all things considered. The carpenters didn’t care in the least about their assistants, as long as they did what they were told. Despite being slaves, Pest and Heft were provided with some degree of safety equipment.
Still they had scars, from their childhoods, from misplaced hammer blows and splinters and knives and planes. But, by the time Heft and Pest turned sixteen, they were still in very good health, and they were both quite strong.
During times less war, Wasolan had never actually experienced peace, the vast majority of the slaves in the army were labourers before they were soldiers. Pest and Heft were picked for the army to build fortifications and siege engines, and to dig the toilets.
Even as the fighting with Kzara gradually turned into a proper war through the pair’s early twenties, the only times they had had to fight were times when their battalion was engaged in open combat. By the time they reached twenty-six, Heft and Pest had killed precisely one person each.
Though Kzara claimed to not practice slavery, they had a version of it. People who had committed one of a certain set of crimes were sentenced to be indentured, to work to repay the community for damages they had caused. Like slaves, they weren’t paid and couldn’t leave. Unlike any of the slave owning nations around, people who were indentured knew they would be released, and when.
By the time war had officially begun between Kzara and Wasolan, indentured people weren’t allowed in Kzara’s military. It was deemed a bit too inhumane to force someone to possibly die for crimes as minor as assault or property destruction.
What people in Kzara knew, that people in Wasolan weren’t allowed to openly know, was that if the people in your military don’t want to be there, they’re not going to be nearly as useful as those people who do.
As the war with Kzara continued, slave soldiers were expected to fight more and more. The number of slaves in each battalion steadily grew until there were more slaves than free soldiers.
Though Ovek had not been at war for quite a long time, what they had learned from having slaves in their military, and were more than happy to tell the free people of Wasolan, was that having any amount of people in a fighting force dedicated entirely to forcing others to fight was and inefficient use of personnel.
Human psychology is an interested and complicated subject. There are so many influencing factors it can be hard to know how to approach it. For example, it’s hard to say for sure that people in a bad situation will want to leave that bad situation.
Slave in the Lord’s House, for example, often rationalise the continued to decision to not try to escape their slavery by citing the consequences if they’re caught. They would be returned to slavery and publicly beaten. Their situation, as it stands, is that they are enslaved and there’s a very good chance that they will be publicly beaten at some point anyway.
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Is it a question of hope, perhaps? If a slave doesn’t escape, they are free to hope for freedom. If a slave escapes and is returned, what hope is there? Certainly it’s more complicated than that.
In Wasolan, slaves who escaped from the military and were caught, were executed. There’s no hope of escape if you’re dead.
Those indentured people who had once been part of the Kzaran army were only there if they requested to be. The culture of Kzara was broadly very focused on community good and there was a strong argument to be made that if the alternative was being enslaved by Wasolan, fighting in the army served the community good.
In the Lord’s House and Ovek, slavery was not absolute. There was some chance that someone enslaved in one of those nations could work their way free of their bonds. It wasn’t very common, but it did happen.
No one was born into slavery, in the Lord’s House.
In Wasolan, if a slave worked very hard and was very dedicated to their work, there was a chance that their children might not be born into slavery. A chance that got slimmer the more in need Wasolan thought they were of slaves, but a chance.
All that to say that it would be impressively foolish, even for Wasolan, to have slaves in their army without dedicated overseers. As the proportion of slaves in the battalions grew, so did the proportion of overseers until a battalion of three hundred might have only a hundred free soldiers to a hundred and fifty slaves and fifty overseers.
The additional, obvious, problem that the Lord’s House would never admit had motivated their decision to not use slaves in their military, was that teaching slaves how to fight made them drastically more difficult to keep enslaved.
As the war with Kzara escalated, so did the amount of hope generally found among the slaves in Wasolan’s army. This was not an outcome that anyone in charge of thinking in Wasolan had thought of.
Pest and Heft heard stories from time to time of battalions lost to Kzaran ambush. The stories spread inevitably from slave soldiers who had overheard it talked about.
The stories weren’t always about ambushes, but that seemed the most common starting point. A lone battalion somewhere near the border was suddenly showered in arrows and quarrels. But, lo and behold, none of the slave soldiers received so much as a scratch.
The Kzaran ambushers sidled out of the woods or tall grass or hills or wherever the ambush had taken place, and offered the slave soldiers freedom, if they came to Kzara.
Sometimes there was a catch, the slave soldiers would have to switch sides, but more often it was presented as a solution to an obvious problem. The slave soldiers and Kzaran ambushers still needed to get back to Kzara. So if the slave soldiers wanted to leave Wasolan, they may have to fight their way out.
Heft and Pest far from the only slave soldiers to see the potential opportunity in these stories. They were far from the only slave soldiers to treat them with a healthy amount of scepticism.
But then, every so often, news of slave soldiers executed on mass for trying to defect, or escape to Kzara, would drift through the battalion. It wasn’t confirmation, exactly, but it pointed in the same direction, at least.
The closest Pest and Heft had gotten to thirtieth birthday presents was trading their identical rations as their battalion was convalescing in Borirnna. They had very nearly been successfully ambushed two weeks previously, and were getting a short break for the free soldiers to recover and more slaves to be added.
Their actual thirtieth birthday present was a surprising and unintentional gift from the battalion commander, two days later. Their troop was being sent into the wastes to deal with some raiders who had been attacking caravans headed for Ovek.
Heft and Pest, twenty-eight other slave soldiers, ten overseers, and twenty free soldiers marched south into the desert. Everyone knew that the wastes were dangerous and only those with the harpy’s blessing could pass through safely. It was the best birthday present a pair of slave soldiers could ask for, really.
Add the fact, unknown by Wasolan of course, that most of Haven had spent years practicing their archery and ability to disappear into the sand at a moment’s notice, and you had the perfect recipe for thirty missing people and thirty missing slaves.
Pest and Heft mused vaguely that the tiny faming village they’d found three days into the wastes seemed awfully nice for a bunch of raiders. One of the overseers told them to shush.
When only eight defenders, quaking in their boots, opened fire on the free soldiers leading the troop, Heft and Pest were starting to worry that this wouldn’t be as good an opportunity as it had seemed.
With only one casualty, the troop dispersed into the dunes and scrub, keeping low and moving erratically. The archers at the farm managed to land a couple more injuries, but the troop from Wasolan was advancing rapidly.
Four overseers had died before anyone who cared to do so raised an alarm from the back of the troop. No one was even sure how many more there were, popping up and disappearing around the edges of the troop.
This, Pest and Heft decided, constituted a perfect opportunity.
By the age of thirty, Heft and Pest had reached a combined total of twenty-one people killed. By the end of the ambush, they had reached a combined total of twenty-nine.
The slave soldiers seized on the chaos and within five minutes, all of the free soldiers and overseers were quite dead, sadly accompanied by two of the now freed slave soldiers.