Chapter 8

Disclaimer: This is a work in progress as part of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). You are reading the work product of a first draft writing session and not a finished product. Comments are welcome, but bear the first draft nature of the work in mind. Thank you and enjoy!

Start with Chapter 1 here.

The march south from Gladestown began on the rutted road south for the first several hours. Then Sergeant Verell called a halt and explained the way they would forage for food on the march. It was also the first time he explained the Legion’s standing orders to the group. The standing orders were important to a group of scouts who would be operating separately from the rest of the army. Because of their frequent separation, they would have to be more self-reliant than the forces that usually had large supply trains supporting them. The standing orders were to be memorized, and there would be penalties for those who could not recall one of the standing orders when requested by an officer or sergeant. The Legion of Solon Standing Orders* were:

1. Don’t forget nothing.
2. Keep your weapons clean, sharpened, thirty arrows in your quiver and be ready to march at a minute’s warning.
3. When you march, act the way you would if you were sneaking up on a deer. See the enemy first.
4. Tell the truth about what you see and what you do. There is an army depending on us for correct information. You can lie as you please when you tell other folks about the Legion but don’t never lie to a Legionnaire or officer.
5. Don’t never take a chance you don’t have to.
6. When we march we march single file, far enough apart, so it is difficult to gauge our numbers when tracking.
7. If we strike swamps or soft ground, we spread out abreast, so it is hard to track us.
8. When we march, we keep moving till dark, so as to give the enemy the least possible chance at us.
9. When we camp, half the party stays awake while the other half sleeps.
10. If we take prisoners, we keep them separate until we have time to question them so they can’t compare stories and deceive us.
11. Don’t ever march home the same way. Take a different route so you won’t be ambushed.
12. No matter whether we travel in big parties or little ones, each party has to keep a scout twenty yards ahead, twenty yards on each flank, and twenty yards to the rear, so the main body can’t be surprised and wiped out.
13. Every night you’ll be told where to meet if surrounded by a superior force.
14. Don’t sit down to eat without posting sentries.
15. Don’t sleep beyond dawn. Dawn is when the enemy is likely to attack.
16. Don’t cross a river at a regular ford.
17. If someone is trailing you, make a circle, come back onto your own tracks, and ambush the folks that aim to ambush you.
18. Don’t stand up in the open when the enemy’s coming against you. Kneel down, hide behind a tree or rock.
19. Let the enemy come till he’s almost close enough to touch. Then let him have it and jump out and finish him with your tomahawk, knife or sword.

Cori knew the standing orders for the most part. She didn’t know them to memorize them but as concepts her father and brother Logan talked about as the best way for a scouting unit to fight on the frontier and borderlands. Now she had to remember them, or she could be singled out for extra duty.

“You all will be shooting and gathering your own food for the group on the march from here on out,” Sergeant Verell announced. “We all eat what the scouts at the front, flanks and rear of the party manage to shoot while we’re on the march. That means that we all need to move as quietly as possible on the march. No talking amongst yourselves unless you want to scare away your dinner. This is the way we move, hunt and find the enemy before they find us.” He looked over the recruits as they sat on the ground on the side of the road. “We’ll be moving off the road and start marching parallel to the road while Brother Marras takes the cart to the next village and prepares for the Legion muster of recruits there. You all will be living in the forest, off the land for the rest of this march until we connect with the rest of the Legion and Lord Logan to the south.”

“Cori, Gebhard, Shelby, and Declan, you will be our scouts for the day,” Sergeant Verell ordered. “You’ll stay twenty yards ahead, to the left, right, and rear, respectively, of the main group just as our standing orders dictate. Keep your bows ready and an arrow nocked. You’ll also be hunting our dinners. We will march until mid-afternoon, contrary to standing orders. This is only so we can train you all to use those weapons against other men and women we are likely to encounter once we start off to this war.”

Cori looked around at the small group of recruits. Many of them were from farms and should be able to move silently in the forest, but a group this large was not likely to move quietly enough not to scare all the game away for hundreds of yards around. They were likely to spend the next few nights hungry. She stood and strung her bow. She was determined to make sure that she’d not miss her chance to feed the group if an opportunity presented. The other scouts stood and did the same. Sergeant Verell nodded in approval.

“Okay, Legionnaires, let’s move out.” The sergeant led the way to the left of the road and into the woods. He pointed to Cori and told her to take the lead. She jogged ahead of the group, trying to pick their path while still paralleling the road to the right. She was also intent to the forest ahead of her. She figured she was the best chance to catch any game unawares at the lead of the group. She was painfully aware of the noise of the group behind her on the march. If they didn’t get better at this, they’d never sneak up on the enemy or their dinner.

By the time the group stopped for the day, Cori had managed only to shoot two scrawny squirrels. There wasn’t much meat on those bones, and she hoped that the other scouts for the group had managed to get something more substantial. When she returned to the selected campsite with her meager catch, she discovered that only Geb had managed to shoot anything. He had a single rabbit. They were going to be hungry tonight.

Sergeant Verell detailed Lissa, Shelby, Kieran and Katina to take up sentry positions around the small clearing they would use for their camp. He told them to listen to what he was saying in the training but not to take their eyes off the perimeter areas they were watching for anything. “If I catch any of you turned to look in towards the camp to see what is going on, you’ll regret it,” he said.

Then the sergeant pulled some items from his large pack that looked like children’s toys. There was a two wooden short swords, two wooden tomahawks, a two wooden long knives, resembling the ones he and Cori carried, and a two wooden daggers. He spread them out on the ground. We are going to drill in close weapon combat. Most of you have demonstrated you’re a decent shot with the bow or another ranged weapon. That’s to be expected for people raised on the frontier. But fighting another person, face to face with weapons in hand is something else. We are going to prepare you for that. I’ll select each of you to come against me with a pair of weapons of your choice. I’ll teach you how to hold them and block with them and then we’ll each spar. If any of you get a strike in on me, You’ll be excused from nighttime sentry duty and can sleep through the night. But that is not going to happen.”

“Recruit Declan, you first,” The sergeant said, selecting the apprentice blacksmith with the hammer at his belt. “You can use that hammer since it doesn’t have a blade edge but select another weapon for your off-hand. Declan looked over the wooden practice weapons laying on the ground and selected on of the long knives. Sergeant Verell picked up a wooden tomahawk and long knife. “That hammer is heavy, but I suspect you’ve got the strength to control it. The most difficult thing will be to control the over-swing with that heavy weapon. It will carry your arm away from your body and leave you open to a strike. When blocking a bladed weapon, use the flat of the blade to block the other person’s weapons and sweep them to the side then counterstrike to the center while their weapon is out of the way. Of course they are going to try and do the same thing to you.” He gave a grim smile after saying that last bit.

He and Declan squared off in the center of the clearing, and he showed the boy some basic blocks and attacks with each of his weapons. Then they began sparring. Each time Declan attacked, the blows were nocked aside by the sergeant. After each attack was blocked, the sergeant’s other hand weapon would strike home on Declan’s body, arms and legs. Eventually, Declan started getting the rhythm of strike, block, strike, block that the sergeant was teaching, and fewer of the counter-strikes from the more experienced soldier were landing. After a few minutes of the drill, the sergeant selected Geb to step forward and repeated the drill. Each of them took a turn learning what the sergeant taught them. Cori, Katina, and Lissa did the best of them, but each of them had previous weapons training. Katina was an experienced merchant caravan guard, Lissa had her years as a bandit and whatever preceded that and Cori had been trained by Uncle Vernon, her father, and her brothers. When Cori was finished her turn, the sergeant looked her over with a raised eyebrow.

“Still want us to believe you’re a simple farm girl whose father used to be a Legionnaire?” He asked.

“I am who I am, Sergeant,” She replied, still breathing hard after the sparring session with the more experienced soldier. “I am a Legionnaire who wants to serve the Kingdom.”

None of the group landed a single blow on the sergeant though Katina came closest. He detailed Katina, Lissa, and Cori to work with the others for the rest of the evening while those who weren’t drilling or on sentry duty set to boiling up a stew of their meager catch from the day’s hunting. Once the stew was done, they each got a single mug of the stew with a few pieces of meat, broth, and some root vegetables, Shelby, and Gil found around their campsite. Gil was the boy from the town who followed her from the inn to the recruit test. Cori had learned that he was considered the town layabout and his mother was infamous for being very friendly with many of the men in the town.

As darkness fell, they settled down, with half their number awake and on sentry duty for half the night. Cori got to sleep first and would be awakened halfway through the night with the others to take their turn on sentry duty. She was sore from the hard blows landed by Sergeant Verell with the wooden practice weapons, she was sore from the march, she was tired and knew that the coming days held more of the same. Still, she would have it no other way. She had done it. She had joined the Legion, and she would not let the training get her down. She would persevere and learn the things she needed to become a true Legionnaire. She fell asleep with that thought in her mind in the center of their small Legion camp on the road to the next town.

———

In all, the platoon stopped at three more villages on their road south and picked up new recruits at each one. By the time they had finished at the last of the three villages, their number was just over thirty, and the sergeant declared the platoon muster filled. The rest of the gear was parceled out to the remaining recruits who needed it and the empty cart was left behind. Her squad in the platoon was filled out with two more members. Bram Fletcher joined them in the second stop on the way south. He was a bowyer and fletcher by trade, living up to his surname. He was also the only recruit to best Cori in archery. He was a tall man with a bushy mustache above and a small patch of a beard below his mouth. His long brown hair hung just below his shoulders and was pulled back and tied with a spare bowstring. Purvis Kitson was a forester and logger who wore a large broad-headed ax across his back. His blond hair was cropped short, and he had a sour look on his face most of the time.

There were three squads in the platoon, each with about a dozen recruits. Sergeant Verell found other experienced fighters among the other groups of recruits, as he had in their squad. He divided his time at each stop in the afternoons. Shifting between each squad to train them in weapons combat, leaving the others to spar with each other while he worked with one group at a time. Cori saw that they were getting better. She was impressed that when she sparred against Katina or Lissa that she landed as many touches as she received and the other recruits were improving as well. Katina, or Kat as she said most people called her, brought in some of her own tricks to the sparring that taught Cori things she hadn’t learned before and Kat told her that she was learning from Cori and Lissa as well. Lissa didn’t say much about it either way when Cori asked her. She just grunted and went off to be by herself like she usually did.

During one break in the sparring after they’d been together on the road for nearly a week, Kat pulled Cori aside and asked her which man in the platoon she wanted to claim for her own. Cori snorted in a laugh until she saw that the former caravan guard was serious. She remembered Kat’s romp with Kieran on the last night in the stable loft back in Gladestown. Kat looked out at the rest of the platoon sparring amongst the trees at their latest camp and then back at Cori.

“I don’t want to cause problems, and we ladies need to stick together,” the scar-faced legionnaire said.

“I don’t want any of them, Kat. I’m not interested in any of them that way, I assure you,” Cori replied. “Have you asked the others in the group?”

“Shelby and Gil are clearly an item,” Kat replied. “Lissa didn’t say much, but I’m not sure she has eyes for the boys anyway. She’s been eyeing up a woman in second squad. Erin answered as you did. I’m not sure what that means, but I don’t want to cause problems in the group when it comes time to be fighting the enemy. We shouldn’t be fighting among ourselves over which guy we’re sleeping with.”

“Seriously, Kat, take your pick of the men. I’m just interested in getting this training over with and making it to the company muster then to the Legion meet-up north of Rhodes,” Cori said.

“Good, then I think I’ll start with Declan and work my way down to the monk. He’s the strong, quiet type and pretends he’s not interested, but I will just have to change his mind.” She strode off calling to Declan to pick up some sparring gear, telling him she had something she wanted to teach him.

Cori shook her head, the woman’s libido clearly took precedence in her life which was something Cori didn’t want to deal with especially since she was virgin. Tackling that life milestone in the midst of a camp of soldiers was not something she wished to do. There were cute boys and men in the camp, and she caught some of them casting an eye her way, but she did not want to get entangled in anything like that right now. She settled on wiping her bow with some linseed oil to keep the moisture out of it. Then she rubbed both her primary and back-up bowstrings with beeswax to keep them supple and dry.

Bram Fletcher walked by and stopped to look at her bow. He reached out a hand for it asking, “May I?”

Cori nodded while she kept waxing her bowstring. He picked up the bow and turned it, admiring the workmanship. She knew it was a good bow. It had been given to her just a year earlier, after the master bowyer her father had brought in measured her arm span and the strength of her pull on a few sample bows brought in for the purpose. She watched as Bram traced a finger along the lamination between the belly, core, and backwoods of the bow. Three different types of wood have been laminated together to compose the three different parts of the bow based on what function each performed. The belly, closest to the archer had to withstand compression forces as the bow was bent to the center, while the backwood, farthest from the archer, had to withstand tension or being stretched as the bow was bent away from it. She knew her father commissioned the bow to be made from some of the exotic woods from the east along with a core of the finest yew wood found in the northern parts of the province.

“I’ve never seen the like of this workmanship, and I can’t identify the wood used in the back. The belly appears to be yew laminated to purpleheart but the blond backwood is something new to me,” Bram said looking along the length of the bow. “Do you know its name?”

“It is called bamboo,” Cori said carefully. Lying to the bowyer would serve no purpose but she also knew the wood to be a rare and expensive option from the Empire to the far east.

“I’ve heard of it but never seen it,” He said. “It is said to be extremely flexible and resistant to cracking.” He handed the bow back to her. “That is the work of a master bowyer the like of which I have never seen. I could only dream that my workmanship could live up to that type of craftsmanship. Thank you for letting me examine it.”

“You’re welcome,” Cori replied. “I’ve seen your workmanship as well, Bram. You are a fine craftsman yourself. You work with what wood you have to use and turn out a fine product any man or woman would be proud to have.”

“Where did you come by such a fine weapon?” Bram asked.

“My father gave it to me,” Cori said. “I never question him on his gifts; it would be impolite.” She hedged her answer, concealing the truth within her answer.

“Perhaps someday I will be able to meet your father, and I can inquire where he found such a magnificent weapon.”

“Perhaps, when this war is over I will be able to do that,” Cori answered. She knew that the other had noticed the superior quality of her weapons and the fine tailoring of her cloak and other clothing. It was unlikely that anyone was buying her story of being a farm girl anymore, but the others didn’t press her for answers beyond what she was willing to share. The Legion had a code of sanctuary that pardoned past crimes and allowed any recruit to start fresh, and they all had things in their past that they wanted to keep secret in one way or another. She knew that secret would be kept until the platoon, and the rest of Stag company joined the Legion muster. Then Logan would see Logan or Jonathan would see her among the recruits, and that would be that.

—-

* Adapted from Robert Rogers Rangers Standing Orders from the French and Indian War era of American History.

—-