A Midsummer's Saga

The Copper Hall was by far the grandest building in the village, constructed with great thick logs and topped, true to its name, with a fanciful steep roof of scaly copper tiles. Equally impressive as the hall was the carved wooden idol of the god of the forest in front of the entrance, overlooking the swath of flat beaten ground that served as the village's main square and marketplace.

The inside of the hall could easily fit over a hundred people. Right now it only needed to fit about twenty scouts, selected among those right before the initiation age. They sat on the floor, around a village elder on a dais, in the morning light that was falling in beams through the windows way above. There was at the moment no furniture; there were only the walls, decorated with shields, weapons, and ritual flags. A single old standard hung peacefully from the ceiling right over the elder's head.

The elder wasn't actually that old, his black hair only beginning to grey. But he was a legendary warrior. Great, gnarly Brecca. Why did he gather them today in the hall was not clear, but Aerin, seated near the back, was tense with anticipation. Were the rumours true? Ever since last week's festival Leapfrog wouldn't shut up that he had inside information about an upcoming invasion.

"We're going to war," Brecca said. Aerin clenched his fists. "We got a letter from the King of Harmen himself, a demand to furnish two thousand horsemen to send them in aid in their war effort against the Kingdom of Redona. This we couldn't spare even if we wanted to, as they well know. This is just a ploy, they'll use our refusal as an excuse to attack us, take away prisoners, settle our men as peasants tilling their fields, take our women to bear them children, to take our horses – the only valuable thing we have. This had happened before, and this is happening again."

Someone from the hall shouted out: "What, they already forgot how you kicked their ass? They want another round?"

Light flickered in Brecca's eyes, eyes of a man trying hard not to smile. "It was a closely fought battle, and we got lucky. I would not in fact describe myself as having, as you put it, kicked their ass."

"Well, you got their Eagle."

Twenty pairs of eyes shot up to the standard hanging from the ceiling. Its colours, purple and white and gold, were slightly faded now, but the emblazoned royal Eagle still watched them angrily with its wings outstretched. This was one of the great standards that only Harmen's royalty and appointed generals were allowed to carry to war. Losing one was a great dishonour.

Brecca could not resist a brief smile now.

"Yes, well, I got their Eagle. Or rather they gifted it to me, by walking their army right into our forest where it could be ambushed."

"They said you fought their general hand to hand!" An excitable chatter was rising.

"His bodyguard, to be precise. We later ransomed the general, but we've kept the Eagle. This, however, was sixteen years ago, and while the memory of that defeat has kept them at bay for a while – time goes on. They are moving against us again, and the man who's leading them is Titulus."

This silenced the audience. The concept of war alone was to them fairly abstract, and mostly recalled the din and flair of the heroic sagas. The name of Titulus, concrete and infamous, brought altogether less exciting associations.

In the hush, Brecca continued. "Titulus has moved from Harmen heartland with an army of several thousand, our friends in the Kingdom claim. He'll descend from the hills and be here in a matter of weeks. You understand now that this is no game, I can see that. Titulus and his veteran soldiers move in silence, and if we're to have a chance against him we need all our eyes constantly watching over Kontaria. Your eyes, too."

He set out their task for the coming weeks. They'd mostly continue their regular jobs, but at appointed times they'd serve as night scouts, keeping an eye on the roads leading up to Kontaria from Harmen. Brecca expected that Harmeni spies would precede their armies, and those could not be allowed to penetrate into the forest. Kontaria's hope in the war was stealth, deception and surprise on their home turf; if those advantages were to be lost, Titulus's hardened invaders would dispatch the Kontarian warbands easily. All the initiated warriors were, of course, called up to protect the forests – there would be a couple thousand of them, all excellent horsemen – but they could not hope to best fully armoured knights in open combat.

Aerin was deep in thought when they left the Copper Hall half an hour later. He clearly needed to be more careful with what he wished for. But then again, this was it. This was a moment to for bright young men to shine.

Just remember the sagas. Just imagine the glory to be won.

He was brought back to the present by Leapfrog slapping him on the back of his neck.

"Situational awareness, Aerin!"

"Ow! Fuck off," he replied, jabbing Leapfrog under his ribs.

They both lived a little way off the main of the village, and their path led them among fields and pastures, green and fresh in late spring, past post-and-rail wooden fences and sacred ancient trees. It was a bright morning, and the sunshine was warm on Aerin's skin. A girl with a back basket of forage smiled at him as they walked past her, which he comprehensively failed to notice.

"So you were actually right, huh?" Aerin said. "About the war."

"Yeah, told you, who has the best intelligence? Leapfrog the ace! Titulus can sneak around all he wants, he's not getting past me neither!"

Aerin laughed. "'Best intelligence' would be the last phrase I'd choose to describe you, Leapfrog."

"Oi how rude! I bet you wouldn't notice a spy if he walked right up to you and kicked you in the dick."

"I'll catch every spy that comes our way while you'll catch a cold and finally die."

Leapfrog leered at him. "Ah yes, because you're the toughest fighter we have now. You've been training all evenings for a whole week now, after all!"

Aerin hesitated. He had, indeed, been spending his free time doing weight training at the longhouse or taking long swims in the lake. "Yeah, well, I figured I could use some more practice, what with the rumours of the war and all. Turns out I was right, too!"

"Oh word? And it's not because you'd like to become a beefcake dreamboat like Bovo and pick up all the prettiest girls?"

Aerin cleared his throat. That was the problem with Leapfrog – he wasn't actually the complete moron that he appeared to be.

"Shut up Leapfrog, you're a complete moron."

"I kid, I kid. Your long career as a helping hand in the fields has equipped you with many valuable combat skills. For example, if you ever need to save someone's life by quickly building a scarecrow, you're gonna be a hero!"

"First, you're just jealous of my scarecrows, which are positively world class, and second, I'm now a helping hand at the horse pasture and not at the fields and I'll outride you any day. And third, fuck off."

"Alright then!" Leapfrog said, as they reached a crossroads. "I shall proceed to fuck off. See you tomorrow, horse expert."

"You're not gonna be by the grove tonight? There's gonna be a ball game and then we'll get shitfaced."

"Nah, I'm gonna visit my old folks today, I reckon."

"Since when are you a family man? Out of literally all people?"

Leapfrog leaned on a pinewood bar of the pasture fence.

"Yeeah. I mean, this village of ours is the largest and closest to the border out of our whole fine federation of Kontaria. It might well get proper fucked come the war. I think it's a decent time to go be with the folks today, when the news breaks."

Aerin walked the rest of the way to his place slowly. What Leapfrog had said was right, and he felt a little shitty for not considering this. Like most Kontarians, he'd left the household of his parents in his early teens to be apprenticed – but with how small the villages were, he was never further than two miles from his family home.

It's been a while since he'd visited his parents. Perhaps he should, after he was done with the horses that day. They would have heard the news by now, and they knew that he was of age to be tasked with scouting, and even though it was not yet a real warrior call-up his mum would still be probably worried sick about her only son. So would be the old man, though he'd take care not to show it.

Yeah, he thought. I reckon I'll go see them today.

*

In practice, scouting Kontarian roads mostly consisted in sitting in trees all night long.

On days when their watch was assigned, as sunset was nearing the night scouts would ride out in pairs for several miles west, towards Harmen, leave their horses at designated spots, and walk the remaining distance towards their outpost trees. The outpost trees were for the most part large oaks or beeches, selected for their thick boughs and ample foliage; you could climb onto them and remain unseen and relatively comfortable, with a good view over the road, until dawn – which fortunately was just several hours away now that the summer was coming.

You had to be careful not to lose your way, though. In wartime, Kontarians would dig out shallow-rooted shrubs and re-plant them at crossroads, obscuring paths, changing them constantly, leading enemies astray. If you played this right, you could keep the invaders away from your villages, going in circles for weeks. This was the oldest trick on the runestone, and if you fell for it and took a wrong turn when sleepily going back from your watch, Leapfrog would make fun of you forever.

Days passed and Aerin, to his disappointment but also some latent relief, found his life not much changed. He'd attend to the horses, very sleepy on the afternoons after his scouting duty, he'd talk with the same people, dream the same dreams. Only the mood in the village was now different. There was a background restlessness, an anxiety about the events to come. Even if they were trying to appear upbeat, the Kontarians anticipated any news with fear. All eyes, Aerin knew, were on Behem.

See the large map which they keep at the Copper Hall. Here is the dark dotted line indicating where the forests of Kontaria end, and to its left is the emptiness of the borderlands, until suddenly a strong black and almost straight line cleaves the parchment vertically, from the Free City of Ys in the north down to about the latitude of the southern border of Kontaria. These are the Blue Cliffs, going for twenty inches on the map, or a hundred miles in real life, and unless you are planning to invade with an army of mountain goats you are not getting through them.

So you must go around. Not from the north, though – the cliffs end in a dense forest there, beyond which lies Ys, and those guys will not let you march an army through their land. If you're invading Kontaria from Harmen, you have to go from the south.

There is a road there. The same road, in fact, whose small part Aerin walked every day, as both the pasture and the village lay on it. As you left the village and went west, after some day and a half's ride you'd leave the low-lying forests and lakes of Kontaria, and the land would start inclining upwards, towards the steep hills and the low mountains that were the border of Harmen. Past those, beyond the chain of frontier fortresses a farmland opened, and in that farmland, on a river, was a town and a castle that overlooked it. This was the nearest major Harmeni settlement – some seventy miles away. This was Behem.

Aerin had heard about it from many travelling merchants and venturing Kontarians that went there on various business; a place with thousands of people living together, beneath a vast structure of stone, was a thing always he found difficult to picture. No travelling merchants were coming now. The Kingdom of Harmen had closed off any traffic going to Kontaria, to prevent any intelligence from getting out.

Kontaria, of course, still had scouts – real warrior-scouts – who'd ride into Harmen, sneaking past the border forts, to glean any enemy movements in advance. It was their reports that everyone was awaiting.

"After all this waiting the actual attack will be a relief," Aerin complained one evening, as he and Leapfrog were riding towards their outpost. "Everyone's on edge."

"Takes a while to march an army all the way here I guess."

"Modi was at the market square today telling everyone it'll be any day now."

"Modi doesn't know shit, though."

Aerin shifted in his saddle. The forest trail laboured up towards a hill top. "Doesn't he? Why do they call him Modi the Oracle, then?"

Leapfrog smiled. "'Cause a few years back they pulled a prank on him and spiked his breakfast with ground wickwort."

"What? Why have I never heard that? What happened then?"

"What do you think? He spent the entire day sitting still on a log, thinking that elves were talking to him and telling everyone their future, and then spent the entire following day throwing up and shitting himself, both at once."

Aerin laughed. Classic. Some people only learn the taste and the smell of wickwort the hard way.

They reached the hilltop where a view opened over the dense forests and the many lakes scattered all around them in the sunset. It was a pleasant, long, early summer evening. All his life, Aerin was used to spending those around the people he knew – the pranksters, the ball-game shit-talkers, the ale connoisseurs, the more and less skilled but always bragging lovers. They've always been told, by the older people who remembered, that their reasonably carefree existence was never really secure. They all had their training, in scouting, in fighting, and they always knew that a day may come they'd have to use these skills – but after such long peace, knowing and believing are two different things.

Days were coming when their lives would depend on that training. Aerin hoped everyone actually knew what they were doing.

*

It was an evening about two weeks after Brecca's talk – a wet and noisy evening, rain showers having passed by that day, drenching the forest and disturbing the lake – that the news finally broke. A scout came galloping to the Copper Hall, and the people, even before they were called, all gathered on the square before the carved god. An elder, leaning on a gnarled rod, eyes black in the dusk, addressed them a short while later with the inevitable intelligence. An army, several thousand strong, had left Behem the day before, heading towards Kontaria. They'd be here in a week, tops.

Messengers were dispatched to the villages and every warrior was called to the warband at once. Every household had any precious movables packed and ready to flee if need be, deep into the woods where caches of food had been hidden.

The warband gathered at the ritual field gradually over the next few days. Two thousand men and two thousand horses, painted with four thousand sets of runes, different depending on the village but all believed to grant protection of Kontaria's ancient gods and spirits and demons. Aerin walked around the field and listened to the songs and laughter of this shimmering crowd. They seemed largely unfazed by the danger ahead. Maybe it was the presence of warriors like Brecca who still remembered the famous victory from sixteen years before. More than death, he thought, the men expected glory.

It was late in the afternoon. Aerin left the field and headed towards the village. He had scouting duty that night with Leapfrog, and those were crucially important now.

Walking into the woods between the field and the village and lost in thoughts, Aerin almost walked into a young warrior from another village and a local girl he only knew by sight, having sex under an old tree; he was standing up and her back was pressed against the bark, her limbs entwined tight around his thighs.

"Do you mind, mate?" the warrior said to Aerin. The girl giggled and hid her face in his chest.

"Yeah, sorry," said Aerin and turned back to take a different path. Damnit, this was going on all around the place ever since the warband gathered – Kontarians were a people that would use even the most serious of excuses to get together and fuck someone on the side. Was he the only one not getting any?

It was then that he heard the horn. Two rising and falling tones from the field – an urgent call to gather. There was at once a great commotion as everyone scrambled towards the signal. The young warrior passed him, cursing, trying to shove stiff wet cock into his trousers. The girl ran after him even to the open field, not caring to cover her naked body, and shouted after him.

"Take care after yourself! And come back, I'm not done with you!"

The warrior turned and blew her a kiss, then stumbled back towards the middle of the field. She smiled and returned to the forest. Some body paint rubbed off him onto her, and her pretty chest was stamped with faint blue mirrored runes.

The chieftains were giving some instructions somewhere in the swarming band, and with a surprising quickness it organized itself into shape – the warriors grabbed their weapons, mounted their horses, and found their groups. This was, in fact, what Kontarian warriors spent a lot of time drilling – not weapons training, but moving as one, a perfect co-ordination with the entire warband. Aerin watched them with poorly disguised awe, but as the sun's yellowing rays hit him from low above the treeline he remembered his scouting duty. Reluctantly, he turned and jogged towards the village.

At the longhouse he was awaited by Uradech, the old warrior in charge of the scouts, and Leapfrog.

"The warband's leaving!" he announced, barging inside.

"Yeah, Aerin, you genius," said Leapfrog. "You're attempting to bring information to the master of scouts." The ancient man smiled calmly under his sloping white moustache. "You took your time by the way, everyone's already been dispatched!"

Aerin ignored Leapfrog and turned to Uradech.

"Some five thousand Harmeni infantry are, right at this moment, attempting to pull themselves and their carts out of Turf Moor," Uradech said, in his deep rich voice. If he wasn't the master of scouts, he would have made a great bard. "The recent rainfalls have given us our enemy impeded, and we intend to push this advantage tonight."

Aerin could see it in his mind. Rivers of Kontarian horsemen riding single files silent through the night, descending upon the incapacitated foe, routing them back to their place. He tapped his knuckles together.

"Damn, to be there tonight!"

Uradech lifted his pale eyes. "You have an equally important task before you. Look at me and listen close. When the invaders were leaving Behem, our outriders reported several hundred mounted knights. Today, we hear only of infantry at Turf Moor and barely any horses. Means that we have a whole lot of heavy cavalry separated from the rest of the army, doing who knows what."

"They could be hiding somewhere and waiting to hit us at the back!"

"Exactly. That's why we need all our scouts on their positions tonight. Kontaria is an unforgiving homeland, I'm afraid, relying even on its youth with such vital tasks. But alas, we're outmanned."

With these words, he put on his cloak and ushered them out. "I'll be near the army, at the red tree by the Green Pond. If our army is pushed back, I'll be circling back towards the village along the stream. Your place tonight is Six Pines. Don't leave until I send for you. May the spirits watch over us all."

*

Light drizzle kept murmuring in the dead of night. Aerin pulled the damp hood of his cloak deeper over his eyes and paced around nervously. Leapfrog sat pressed against a trunk of a pine tree, though it was no use seeking shelter there; the water had long before seeped through the upper branches and was now trickling down the bark in sustained trails.