‘Are you on your way to the elven front?’ asked a guardsman. Fletcher saw it was Jakov, and ducked behind his stall. If Jakov noticed him, he might extract the price of the drink Fletcher had promised. He needed all his money to purchase the jacket.
‘I am indeed, but not because I’m a useless bag of bones, no siree. I was the only survivor in my squad. Got caught in a night raid whilst on a scouting mission. We barely had a chance.’ His voice had a hint of grief in it, yet Fletcher could not be sure if it was genuine.
‘What happened?’ Jakov asked, his voice dripping with disbelief as he looked the old man up and down.
‘I’d rather not say. It’s not a memory I relish,’ the soldier murmured, avoiding Jakov’s gaze. He lowered his head with apparent sadness. The crowd jeered and began to disperse, taking him for a liar.
‘All right, all right!’ the soldier yelled, seeing his customers slipping away. This was probably his last stop before reaching the elven front, and he would likely find it difficult to sell his goods to the soldiers there, many of whom would be all too familiar with the goods he had on offer.
‘Our orders were to scout out the next forward line,’ he began, as the crowd turned back to him. ‘The lines were advancing again. You see, the wood behind us had all been cleared, and we needed to move the trenches up.’
He began to speak with more confidence now, and Fletcher could see he was a natural storyteller.
‘It was darker than a stack of black cats that night, barely a sliver of a moon to light our way. I can tell you, we made more noise than a rhino charging as we made our way through the thickets. It was a miracle we made it more than ten minutes without being noticed,’ he intoned, his eyes seeming to mist over as if he were there again.
‘Get on with it!’ yelled one of the boys from the back, but his comment was met with glares and shushing as the crowd listened eagerly.
‘Our battlemage led the way, his demon had good night vision which helped somewhat; but it was all we could do not to accidentally fire our muskets, let alone keep our footing. A suicide mission if I’ve ever seen one. A waste of good men, that’s for sure,’ the soldier continued, twirling the spearhead between his fingertips.
‘They sent a summoner with you? Now that is a waste. I thought we had only a few hundred of them?’ Jakov asked, his scepticism replaced with fascination.
‘The mission was important, even if it was misguided. I didn’t know him well, but he was a good enough fellow, although he was definitely not a very powerful summoner. He was fascinated by the orc shamans, always asking the soldiers what they knew about them and their demons. He was constantly scribbling and drawing in his book, investigating the remains of the orc villages we passed over, copying the runes they painted on the walls of their huts.’ The soldier must have noticed their faces begin to go blank as he went off topic, so he hurried on.
‘In any case, it was not long before we were lost, the few stars we had been using to navigate covered by rain clouds. Our fate was sealed when the drizzle began. Have you ever tried firing a musket with wet gunpowder? It was one disaster after another.’ He dropped the spearhead on the cloth and balled his fists together with emotion.
‘The chosen weapon of the orc is a javelin. When one hits you, it sends you flying like a cannon ball, pinning you to the ground if it doesn’t go clean through and into the man behind. They whistled through the trees and plucked us from the earth like the world had flipped sideways. We didn’t even see who was throwing them, but half the men were dead in the first volley, and I didn’t want to hang around for the second. The summoner made a break for it, and I followed him. If anyone could make it back in the midst of that god-awful mess, it was him. We ran in a panic, following the chirps of his demon.’
‘What kind of demon was it?’ asked Jakov, his hands clasped together in rapt attention.