02 - Empire Read online

  “It shall be as you say, my lord,” said Aloysis with a bow.

  “I will return to Taalaheim immediately,” said Krugar.

  Aloysis turned to Krugar and the two counts embraced. The gesture was forced and awkward, but it was enough for now. Both men faced Sigmar, and bowed before withdrawing from the great hall. As the door shut behind them, Eoforth rolled up the map, and Alfgeir descended from the dais of the throne. The Grand Knight of the Empire sheathed his sword and sat on the edge of the table as Eoforth tied the leather cords around the map.

  “Do you think they will do as you say?” asked Alfgeir. “Krugar and Aloysis, I mean.”

  “They had damn well better,” said Sigmar. “Or else they will see what it means to incur my displeasure.”

  “You don’t really believe there are bandits in the forest, do you?”

  “There are always brigands,” said Sigmar, “but not raiding Cherusen or Taleuten lands. Each of them was right, they were being attacked by their neighbour.”

  “Why? It makes no sense,” said Alfgeir.

  “Human nature,” replied Eoforth. “Without a common enemy, men will look for foes in the one place they can guarantee finding one: the past. The Cherusens and Taleutens have fought to control the fertile lands around the Taalbec for centuries. They only came together when King Bjorn forced them to join forces during the Winter of Beasts, you remember?”

  “Aye,” said Alfgeir. “The vermin-beasts from beneath the Barren Hills, I remember it all too well. I had my first taste of battle and blood in the snows around Untergard.”

  “Long before I was born,” said Sigmar with a wry smile.

  “Not that long,” muttered Alfgeir.

  “The point is,” continued Eoforth, “that powerful men with warriors to command will always look for someone to attack, and past grievances, unsettled wergelds and ancestral grudges are a good place to find them.”

  “So what are you suggesting?” asked Sigmar.

  “That we give our troublesome kings a better target for their warlike tendencies.”

  The summer muster began early, with riders bearing letters, sealed with wax and imprinted with the twin-tailed comet emblem of Sigmar, despatched to the furthest tribal lands of the empire to rouse the counts to war.

  The marching season had come, and it was time to call Marius of the Jutones to account.

  As the days of spring warmed to summer, hundreds of warriors pitched their tents in the cleared fields around Sigmar’s capital, and over the next two moons, sword bands from the furthest corners of the empire arrived to join the Unberogen.

  Autumn-hued Asoborns rode in on chariots of lacquered black and gold, provoking cheers and wolf-whistles from the richly-attired Brigundians who waved their spears and bared their many scars to the fierce warrior women.

  Armoured warriors from the Fauschlag Rock marched to Reikdorf bearing news from Pendrag and Myrsa, and Sigmar smiled as he read of his friend’s tribulations in attempting to modernise a populace rooted in tradition. As difficult as Pendrag was finding the task, Sigmar could read between the lines well enough to know that he was relishing the challenge, and he was pleased at the optimistic tone of his friend’s words.

  The southern kings had sent two hundred warriors each: grim-faced Merogens in their distinctive rust-coloured cloaks, and slender Menogoth swordsmen in shimmering greens and golds. Taleuten horse archers rode though the campsite, showing off their skills to any who cared to watch, and competing with the shaven-headed Ostagoth bowmen for bragging rights in the coming march. Galin Veneva led the Ostagoths and he presented Wolfgart with a gilded bottle of koumiss and a promise of a drinking challenge at the end of this muster.

  In addition to two hundred swordsmen, Count Krugar sent a company of his Red Scythes, armoured horsemen bearing glittering lances and wickedly curved sabres. Krugar did not attend the muster. Nor did the Cherusen count ride south, though the sending of five hundred tattooed warriors in earth-coloured cloaks and tunics was a grand gesture indeed. A hundred of the famed Cherusen Wildmen had also come to Reikdorf, their near-naked bodies crusted with coloured chalk and writhing tattoos.

  By spring’s end, over nine thousand warriors had assembled beyond Reikdorf’s walls. The majority of these were Unberogen, though close to a third were men who called another land home. So great a host required feeding and watering, and since Sigmar had first begun to build the empire, the size of its armies had grown enormously. Consequently, the task of supplying them had grown ever more complex.

  To make war so far from home, an army needed huge amounts of wagons, and thus Sigmar sent loggers out to chop down vast swathes of forest to enable carpenters to construct them. The lands around Reikdorf were squeezed of every last grain of corn, and the fletchers, bowyers and smiths of the city worked day and night to fashion thousands of arrows, swords and axes. Ropes, picks, levers, scaling ladders, saws, adzes and shovels were stockpiled alongside the heavy timbers of Sigmar’s disassembled catapults. Such was their weight that new yokes had to be designed to enable the oxen to pull them. Mobile forges were hauled onto the backs of reinforced wagons, and hundreds of craftsmen joined the muster in order to maintain its equipment ready for battle.

  Tens of thousands of pounds of grain, flour and salt were stacked alongside hundreds of barrels of cured meat and fish, and enough food to feed the army for several months was quickly assembled. Eoforth and a virtual army of scribes and bookkeepers kept track of the supplies coming in from the country, and yet more wagons were set aside for the quartermaster’s records, for so large an army could not operate without a thorough understanding of the available resources.

  As the sun rose on a glorious summer’s morning, Eoforth declared the army ready to march, and the priests of Ulric burned offerings to the god of battles on a great pyre atop Warrior Hill. Led by Alessa, the priestesses of Shallya moved through the host of warriors, blessing their hearts and asking the goddess of mercy and healing to watch over them.

  Sigmar, Wolfgart and Redwane rode through Morr’s Gate at the head of two hundred White Wolves and took up their position at the front of the column. A great cheer echoed from the hills around Reikdorf as Redwane lifted the crimson banner of Sigmar high, and with the Emperor’s banner unfurled, a rippling flurry of tribal colours rose above the assembled host.

  The White Wolves led the way along the paved western road as the army set off to war.

  * * *

  A week later, Sigmar’s army was joined by five hundred Endal warriors in dark armour at the river crossing of Astofen. A cavalry squadron of Raven Helms led by Count Aldred and Laredus met Sigmar in the centre of the bridge where Trinovantes had died, and Sigmar wished good fortune to the spirit of his old friend.

  Swollen with these reinforcements, Sigmar’s army now numbered nearly ten thousand swords, with perhaps a thousand camp followers bringing up the rear. As the army halted each night, ostlers, craftsmen, drovers, healers, merchants and night maidens would make their way through the camp to ply their trade and maintain the army’s battle readiness.

  Spirits were high, and each night Sigmar moved from campfire to campfire, speaking with his warriors and listening to their tales. All the men were looking forward to teaching the upstart Marius the price of cowardice and driving his warriors across the sea. Sigmar would remind them that the Jutones were still men and that it would be better to bring them into the empire than destroy them, though the words sounded hollow, even to him. Marius had deserted them in their hour of need. What manner of ally would such a man make?

  The army turned northwards, and Sigmar led the march across the fertile flatlands that made up the northern reaches of the Endal lands, skirting the marshes and swampland around the Reik estuary. Though the vast expanse of marshland was still a treacherous mire of sucking bogs and stagnant pools of black water, the mists no longer clung to the earth, and sunlight bathed the landscape in warmth.

  At the Great North Road, which had once marked the bou
ndary between the lands of the Teutogens and Jutones, Sigmar’s army encountered a force of Thuringian warriors led by the giant Count Otwin. The berserker king had answered Sigmar’s call to arms with four hundred warriors, painted men and women in a riotous mix of plate armour, mail shirts and baked leather breastplates. Otwin’s warriors proudly bore the scars earned at Black Fire Pass, and Sigmar saw the berserker woman, Ulfdar, among the Thuringian host.

  Otwin presented Sigmar with three prize bulls from his herd, and hundreds of Thuringian beef cows were slaughtered to feed the fighting men before they began the march to Jutonsryk. A grand feast was held on the Jutone border, with offerings made to Ulric, Taal and Shallya.

  The following morning, with Otwin and Aldred at his side, Sigmar’s army crossed the Great North Road.

  The war against the Jutones had begun.

  ——

  The Namathir

  The boulder sailed through the cold morning air, describing a graceful arc before slamming into the damaged walls of Jutonsryk with a distant crack of splintered stone. Heavy wooden thumps and the creak of ropes signalled the release of the other catapults, and two more missiles were hurled towards the walls of the Jutone capital.

  Accompanied by a bodyguard of ten White Wolves, Sigmar watched the rocks slam into the walls with a grim nod of satisfaction. The impact cratered the repaired stonework and broke loose a tumbling avalanche of masonry from the promontory.

  “You knew your craft,” whispered Sigmar, speaking of whoever had raised these formidable walls, “but I will break your work down, stone by stone if need be.”

  The battlements were finally beginning to crumble, but Sigmar raged that he had allowed Marius so long to prepare his city’s defences, for it had taken nearly two years of siege to bring Jutonsryk to the edge of defeat. To have constructed walls this strong must have cost Marius dear, but wealth was clearly one thing that Jutonsryk had in abundance.

  Situated in a sheltered, sandy bay of the Reik’s coastal estuary, Jutone settlers driven from their lands by the Teutogens had quickly recognised its worth as a natural harbour. They had built their settlement on a raised, leaf-shaped promontory known as the Namathir, and over the last twenty years Jutonsryk had developed into a thriving city of merchants. Traders arrived in Jutonsryk every day, their ships laden with exotic treasures from lands far to the south and, it was rumoured, from the mythical kingdoms beyond the Worlds Edge Mountains.

  Dominating the coastline, Jutonsryk was an imposing city of formidable walls and solid towers. Snow shawled its battlements, and the machicolations worked into its towers were hung with icicles that looked like fangs of glass. Beyond the unbroken walls, the red clay roofs of the city huddled close together, and sails billowed from towers and flagpoles, proudly bearing the five-pointed crown of Manann.

  Marius’ castle sat at the highest point of the Namathir, a citadel of pale stone, slender towers and large windows of coloured glass. The majority of the city was built on the promontory’s western slope, spilling haphazardly down to the harbour on the edge of the ocean’s dark waters. The city’s architecture reflected the maritime culture of the Jutones, and a great many of its buildings were constructed from the hulks of wrecked ships, or were hung with nets, ships wheels and brightly coloured figureheads.

  A long wall of dark stone encircled the town, and solid drum towers topped with curving battlements shaped like the hulls of ships studded its length. A dozen warships sailed the wide estuary, blocking any passage down the river towards Marburg or out to sea. In the opening days of the siege, Endal ships had attempted to blockade the city, but the Jutone fleet had sunk them all in a horribly one-sided battle.

  A single mast jutting from the icy water was all that remained of the Endal ships, and Count Aldred had sworn vengeance for their drowned crews.

  Since then, Sigmar’s army had battered itself bloody against the walls of Jutonsryk, and the first attempts to carry the walls by storm had taught them all a valuable lesson in underestimating their foe. Expecting the Jutones to be weak and cowardly, a tribe more suited to trading and commerce than battle, Sigmar’s warriors had charged the walls with scaling ladders and grappling hooks.

  As the warriors came within bow-shot of the crenellated walls, a long line of warriors with swarthy skin had appeared at the embrasures, carrying strange weapons at their shoulders. Like a thick bow laid upon its side and mounted on a length of wood, the weapons were loosed, and hundreds of men were cut down as volley after volley of short, iron-tipped bolts punched through shields and mail shirts.

  The attack faltered, but kept going under continuous hails of bolts. By the time the ladders were thrown against the walls there were too few warriors to pose a serious threat to the defenders. The hardy souls who survived to reach the wall-head were killed without a single warrior gaining the ramparts, and the survivors fell back in disarray. Jutone axemen had sallied out and captured the ladders, and the humiliation of the defeat had stung the pride of every man in Sigmar’s army.

  Since then, the attack on Jutonsryk had proceeded at a more methodical pace, with retrenchments built on the ground before the main gate, cutting off the northern approaches to the city. Jutone sally parties hampered the work at every turn, and it was a full two months before the trenches and palisades were completed.

  Sigmar’s catapults were assembled within reach of the walls and the bombardment had begun. The walls of Jutonsryk had been built against the slope of the promontory and were as solid as the rock they stood upon. Hundreds of rocks had been hurled at the walls over the next seven months, but no practicable breach had been made. A number of fresh assaults were launched, warriors moving forward under cover of wetted mantlets and darkness, but blazing bales of straw turned night into day, and the chopping blades of the Jutone fighters kept the battlements clear of attackers.

  The campaign, which had started in such high spirits, stalled, and cold and hungry warriors huddling around their campfires began to lose faith that the city would ever fall. The days grew shorter and the temperature dropped, but Sigmar rejected talk of lifting the siege and retreating for the winter. To withdraw would only give the defenders heart and further opportunities to fortify their city. Jutonsryk would fall, and it would fall to this army.

  Winter closed in, and freezing storms blew off the sea, whipping past the Namathir and across the flatlands around Jutonsryk like a blade. Food grew scarce, and only convoys of wagons from Marburg and Reikdorf kept the army from starving.

  Morale rose with the coming of spring, but any optimism that the battle would soon be over was dashed when fleets of strange ships bearing the flags of unknown kings arrived from the south, their hulls groaning with provisions and mercenary warriors with dark skin and brightly coloured tunics.

  Spring turned to summer, with Sigmar’s army growing ever more frustrated as the siege dragged on and every attack was repulsed. A section of the eastern wall was brought down at midsummer, and the Thuringians immediately charged towards the breach, screaming bestial war cries and brandishing their axes and swords like madmen. An unbending line of the southern mercenaries held the breach with long pikes, and Count Otwin’s warriors were hurled back without ever reaching its summit.

  By morning, the breach had been filled with rubble and refortified, but Sigmar’s catapults had concentrated their efforts on this weakened portion of the wall. At first, it had seemed like this was the change in fortune the attackers had been waiting for, but that night Jutone raiders had made their way through the circumvallations and set three of the mighty war-machines ablaze before being caught and killed.

  Sigmar had the night sentries put to death, and stationed a permanent guard of fifty men from each tribe to protect the remaining catapults, for he could ill-afford to lose any more of his precious war-machines.

  Months passed, and still the walls of Jutonsryk stood in defiance of Sigmar as his army faced its second winter on the western coast. His anger towards Marius grew at the thought
of spending frozen nights huddled around a brazier, wrapped in a wolfskin cloak and subsisting on meagre rations, while Marius ate heartily in his great hall before a roaring fire.

  Sigmar shook his head free of such thoughts, knowing they would only cloud his judgement, and watched as sweating Unberogen warriors hauled fresh cart-loads of rocks from the shoreline far below. Drovers whipped the starved oxen that pulled the catapults’ windlass mechanisms, and the process began again. He told himself that the damaged section of wall was ready to collapse. Once it was down, his warriors would storm the breach, and they would not stop fighting until Jutonsryk fell.

  Footsteps on the wet ground made Sigmar turn, and he saw Count Otwin climbing the hill towards him. The Berserker King—for he had never shed that name, despite his new title—wore little to insulate himself from the weather except for a furred loincloth and a threadbare cloak of foxfur, yet he seemed not to feel the cold.

  “Working such a machine is no task for a warrior,” said Otwin, staring in distaste at the backbreaking labour required by the catapults. “Blade to blade, that’s the way to kill a man.”

  “Maybe there is no glory in employing such weapons,” said Sigmar, “but if the walls of Jutonsryk are ever going to be brought down, then the catapults need to be manned night and day.”

  “But where is the honour in such a weapon?” pressed Otwin. “To kill a man without cleaving your axe through his body or feeling the sensation of his blade cutting your flesh is to deny the joy of battle and the sweetness of life when it hangs in the balance.”

  “There will be plenty of opportunities to risk your life soon enough,” said Sigmar. “The wall is almost breached and we’ll be dining in the great hall of Jutonsryk before the first snows.”

  “Damn, but I hope you are right,” said Otwin, his fists clenching and unclenching repeatedly. “I lost a hundred warriors to those devils with the pikes, and their deaths must be avenged.”