Memoirs of a Fallen God

Chapter 17

The next day, as we made our way down the road a call went up from the front of the column. 

“Clear the road!  Troops coming through!”

We conscripts cleared the road right along with everyone else.  My eyes widened as a double file of twenty men on horseback thundered by at a trot, their long purple capes shimmered behind them, while their jet black suits of weedwood armor seemed to grab the afternoon sunlight and swallow it whole.  That armor could turn a blade as neatly as chain, it was said, and weighed less than half as much.  Noting the easy way the men held themselves, along with the quick steps of the black steeds they rode upon, I believed it.

The Emperor’s Own, then.  It could hardly be anyone else.  The swift, elite troops were the gauntleted fist of the Imperial Army.  It was my first glimpse of them, and I found myself mightily impressed.  Now this--this was what a warrior was supposed to look like, what I’d always dreamed of becoming.  Not one of the motley and reluctant lack-wits I marched with, but a true, god’s blessed champion.

After the troops were well passed and we were once again on our merry way, one of the young men on the march remarked in a whining voice, “Why we gotta walk all the way?  Why ain’t we got some fancy horses like them troops?” 

“Because, you twit,” snorted Cage, “A horse is worth a hell of a lot more than you.  Grunts like you and me don’t warrant a horse.  Those men who just rode by, those Emperor’s Own.  Think they just signed up and somebody handed them some black armor and a horse? They damn well earned it.  They’re the best in the Empire, and on top of that, nobody bled harder than they did at the Shore.  Can’t be more than a few hundred of them left.”  He shook his head. “Besides, you even know how to ride?” He cast hard eyes up and down the road.  “Any of you know how to ride?” Nobody spoke up.  “I don’t, neither.  So we walk.”

A week’s worth of marching saw us through familiar territory, out of the lands we all called home.  Caldor was a green, fertile flatland, which some called, quite aptly, the Stomach of the Empire.  But soon enough we left behind the sprawling fields of wheat, barley and corn, and saw them replaced by hills and hollows as we entered neighboring Seisland.  Soon after, the hills gave way to dry plains of the flatland, as the days went by, and then flatlands gave way to forests. A few more days march and the woods grew thicker and thicker, until finally we neared the jungle riddled shores of Kemu itself.  Heart and home of the Empire.

Ahh, Kemu. I used to dream of it, from my cozy slave quarters in Caldor--a ragtag, whimsical sort of dream, a thing pieced together from a dozen whispered fire-side stories and bardic legends.  And why not?  There was a certain romance to it.  A tiny shoreside nation, a puny, inconsequential army, yet somehow it grew to swallow an entire continent within a single generation. 

Yet despite all that time spent in idle daydream I managed to get every little detail wrong.  It was nothing as I’d imagined.

Kemu belonged to the jungle.  I have no doubt that it would be the greatest place in the world to live--if one happened to be a bug, or a frog, or a leech, or anything else that slithers or hops or crawls.  Never mind that it was the birthplace of an Empire and the site of its capital; so far as I was concerned, it was no fit place for human habitation.

Add to that, the jungle seemed to actively resent any attempt to tame it. Nowhere else could a man so easily feel the transient nature of all that he might hope to create: the jungle was relentless.  It tore down everything a man might build, often right before his eyes, it pressed in on all sides, at all times, a constant enemy at the gates.  Nothing was proof against it.

But that didn’t stop men trying. There were cities.  Villages.  Roads, after a fashion, though road building, where it was absolutely necessary, was a never ending process.  By the time a team reached the end, however fast they built, the start would once again be a tangled mess of vines and overgrowth and weedtrees. Weedtrees were ever the worst of it--they sprouted up as quickly as any other weed, but grew as tall and sturdy and stubborn as any true tree in the jungle.  In a week’s time a clear plot of ground could turn into a forest of weedtrees twice as tall as a man’s head.

So, in many ways, the small, mobile squads of the Empire’s army made sense.  Moving a large body of troops through the jungle would have been a logistical nightmare, but a small group of men, carrying everything they needed and largely self-sufficient, had little trouble.  It also developed a more independent, capable soldier than traditional armies, and officers who weren’t afraid to make decisions on their own judgment. And it was those highly capable, highly mobile troops--under a ruler sickened by the endless, petty wars of his neighbors--that allowed the tiny nation of Kemu to carve out an empire a continent wide.

But the place was still a boiling, bug infested nightmare.  And it stank.  A day after arriving I was more than ready to simply let the Bleeders have it.

Kemu was a narrow jot of land, far longer than it was wide, and where it wasn't jungle it was craggy shore.  And it was along that shore where, so far, most of the conflict had taken place. Blood raiders coursed up and down the coastline, and a string of five forts had been hastily constructed to defend against them.

We, the very first troop levy out of Delokay, ended up at almost-completed Fort Bickard--the smallest of the five, and the furthest from the action.

The fort itself was perched upon a rocky outcrop overlooking the grey-green waters of the Angalic Ocean.  My first impression of the structure was that it looked very much like something a child might construct out of twigs and happy thoughts on an idle afternoon, only on a much larger scale.It was a large wooden structure, square, with very high walls--more defense against the encroaching jungle to the south than the Blood Raiders themselves, I think.  Its primary defense against the real enemy was a single high watchtower flush against the northern wall. At least we’d see them coming.

It was night when we first arrived, and late enough that we normally would have been an hour or two in our bedrolls.  The Captain had been insistent on sleeping in a real bed. 

I was exhausted after a day--a month—spent on the march.  I followed the herd as the quartermaster found us a place to billet down.  Heads raised out of sleep as we passed, cursing the commotion, and I found myself wishing our Captain hadn't been so eager for a late night arrival.  These men might well hate us tomorrow.  Still, the beds looked a lot more comfortable than so much bug infested ground.

Someone pointed at a few coarse pallets on the ground.  Quick as I could manage I scurried into one, covered myself with my cloak, and closed my eyes. Long days on the march had taught me one lesson very well: only a fool argued when sleep was in the offing. Time enough for questions on the morrow.