B3Ch70-Dead Poets Society. (Patreon)

Harold shouldered out through the door of his bunker into a morning the color of wet slate, and the army was already awake around him.

Tents were coming down in rows. Wagons stood loaded and waiting in the snowy mud, tatanka stamping and blowing steam. The campaign started today. He'd been up half the night coordinating the various lords and assigning them to the various staging areas.

And under all of it, close on his left, two of his guards were having an argument.

He caught a few words on his way past and kept moving, there was no way the words were what he thought they were.

"—the point of the whole thing is that the rose is dying, you stupid starfish; that's the entire—"

"It's not dying, it's opening, there's a difference, and if you'd read the second verse—"

Poetry. Elroy and Jenkins were arguing poetry. He shook his head and kept walking, trying to ignore it. What's worse was that he knew the poem they were debating as well.

Then Jenkins said something so wrong that his boots stopped without asking him first.

He stood there a second, debating whether going over there was going to be worth it and he started moving towards them. I know I'm gonna regret this. He murmured to himself.

"What," he said, "is happening here?"

The two of them stopped their argument and up to a loose kind of attention.

"Morning, Lord Harold."

"How," Harold said, "are the pair of you standing here reciting poetry from home? How would you even know those lines?"

"Oh, we know it’s not from our home, Lord Harold. We are more of a simple common type folk. We didn't have time for poetry back home. Too busy working, you see." Elroy, earnest as a churchwarden. "It's Ms Bethel's. We asked if she had any lying about we could have."

"Figured it'd help us pick up chicks," Jenkins said, and brightened at his own point. "Chicks love poetry." He nodded to himself, so sure he was right.

Harold looked at him. Breathed out slowly through his nose.

"And where did you learn to talk like that?” He exclaimed. “Since when did you start calling women chicks?" He asked hurriedly.

Around the corner of the supply tent, Parker appeared, caught the tail end of Harold's question, and performed the cleanest about-face Harold had ever seen the man manage, gone again before his lead foot had finished landing. Both Elroy and Jenkins had swung to look at him the instant he showed up, which told Harold everything he needed to know.

"Of course," Harold muttered. "Of course it was him. Hot-blooded Knights."

"So walk me through it," he said. "You got a book of poetry, and now you just debate it in the morning and use those lines to try and pick up women from earth?"

"Well, not the same poem every morning, my lord; that'd be daft, and not only women from earth. We are equal opportunists when it comes to women. We will hit on women from anywhere." Elroy said, as the distinction mattered enormously. "New poem every morning. We work through the finer points of it. It's caught on, honestly — half your guard sits in now. Gets proper lively when Dorgan and the dwarven lads turn up." A pause, and something close to pride. "Did one about love and passion, the day before last. Dorgan took issue with my reading of the fourth verse. Called a grudmoot on me over it."

Jenkins snorted a laugh out.

"A dwarf," Harold said slowly, "opened a blood-grudge. About a poem."

"Oh, they’re a right passionate people, my lord. Dorgan is quite good at reciting it. You haven't heard him reciting some of the lines when we work out in the morning? The mad little bastard." Elroy shrugged. "We settled it, though. Matter's closed."

"This is catching on that much?" He asked.

"'Course it is." Jenkins spread his hands wide. "We're marching to a war, my lord. Everyone out here's hunting round for something warm to hold onto before some goblin does for them. You've got Ms Adeline, so you wouldn't understand it, but there is a—" he leaned in and dropped his voice to a soft, confiding hush "—powerful lot of sexual tension in this camp."

Harold looked him dead in the eye.

"Never," he said, "lean in that close and whisper 'sexual tension' to me again."

Jenkins nodded quickly, still leaning in. "Of course, sire," he whispered back.

Harold dragged a hand down his face and backed away.

"Fine," he said. "I know I can’t regret this conversation anymore. What's the poem this morning?"

Elroy produced a folded square of paper from inside his coat with the care of a man handling a relic, opened it along its creases, and held it out at arm's length to read.

Harold watched the ceremony of it for a moment before rubbing the scruff on his face.

"What are you doing?" he said. "Is this some kind of dead poets society?"

Elroy and Jenkins looked at him with identical blankness.

"Some kind of what, sire?" Jenkins said.“What is that? That sounds properly fearsome.” Elroy said

"Nothing. It’s a movie from home." He waved a hand. "Go on. Read it."

Jenkins looked at him curiously. “What’s a movie?”

Elroy cleared his throat. "'To His Coy Mistress.' By a fellow named Andrew Marvell. 'Had we but world enough, and time, this coyness, lady, were no crime.'"

"See, right there." Jenkins jabbed the page. "Straight to it. No mucking about. That's the move."

"That is not the move; you have to let it breathe." Elroy pulled the page back out of range. "It's a slow build. 'My vegetable love should grow vaster than empires, and more slow.'"

A pause went round while the pair of them considered vegetable love.

"The hell's that mean?" Jenkins said.

"Patience," Elroy said, with the authority of a bishop and the understanding of a brick. "It means patience."

Dorgan appeared as if from the shadow and leaned in over Elroy's shoulder, planted a blunt finger further down the page, and read it out with deep relish. "'Then worms shall try that long-preserved virginity.'" He straightened up, beaming through the beard. "That's the good bit. You wait too long, the worms have her first. Truest thing a man ever wrote down."

"That's the line you called a Grudmoot over?" Harold said.

"No, that bit's grand; we agree on that bit." Dorgan's face clouded. "It was the fourth verse. He read it wrong and said I was wrong."

Harold pinched the bridge of his nose.

"Let me save the three of you some time." He held out a hand, and Elroy surrendered the page with visible reluctance. Harold ran his eye down it. "Here's what this actually is. It's a clever man talking a woman into bed by reminding her she's going to die. Pretty for the first half — he'd love her ten thousand years if the world would give them to him. Then the knife: it won't, so she'd best stop being coy and get on with it before she rots." He handed it back and looked at Jenkins. "That's not romance you're studying. The guy is telling a woman to sleep with him while they are both alive and young."

Jenkins took that in. Turned it over. Broke into a grin like the sun coming up.

"So it works," he said.

"That is not—"

"Course it’s what you mean. How many hundreds of years and they still remember it." Jenkins elbowed Elroy, delighted. "It works. Told you. Chicks love poetry."

"The worms don't wait; gotta go find yourself a woman with a good beard and sprinkle some gem dust into it. Claim her fore the stone takes her heart." Dorgan agreed, gravely.Adeline appeared beside him, smiling at them. “I think it’s sweet.”

Harold looked at the three of them, and at the page, and understood there were some battles a man simply lacked the strength to win. He retreated as quickly as he could before he could hear any more of their nonsense.

He heard Mors before he saw him.

The big stallion had a stablehand off his feet and hanging from the lead rope, boots skating through the snow, while a second lad circled with a bucket and the doomed expression. Mors wanted to be somewhere else. 

"He does this," Harold said, laughing, coming up on them, "when he's bored. You gotta make sure he gets exercise every day."

"He's — my lord —" The hanging one got his feet back under him as Mors, seeing Harold in his eye, quit hauling and swung the great head around instead.

"I've got him. Go see to the others." The lads went, with feeling.

Harold walked over to his shoulder and put a hand flat on the animal's neck where the muscle was still bunched and jumping. He dug an apple out of his coat with the other. Mors took it off his palm with surprising delicacy for something that had been trying to terrorize two teenagers for fun a moment ago.

"Want to go kill some things?" Harold said, low, into the twitching ear. "It's been a little while, hasn't it?" He worked his knuckles into the crest of the mane. "Let's go hunt some goblins."

The ear came round. And low in his own chest, under the breastbone, the Nail stirred — a spread of warmth where cold metal sunk into him.

Harold stilled as he could feel the nail's excitement. "Oh," he said. "You too, huh." He breathed out. "Yeah. I think it's about time we did a little hunting. Let's get the boys together."

Boots crunched behind him. He didn't need to turn to know it was Carter, and the heavier tread beside him meant Hale had come along to be difficult about something.

"Morning." Harold gave Mors a last scratch and turned. "Get the army marching. I'll meet you at the staging ground — I've got a couple of errands on the way." He pulled his gloves on. "Brennig should already be moving on his grail relic — the one for the lower Blackjaws region— with Maren's household and a century of the knights. Stay in contact with him. And I'll be shocked if Caswell doesn't invite himself along for it."

"I know how to run a march, my lord," Hale said, flat as a board.

Harold laughed. "I know you do. Let me worry about it anyway. It's the one thing I'm actually good at."

Hale grunted. "What's your read on the mess in the Basin?"

"They'll handle it." Harold shrugged into it. "I left a couple of contingencies behind in case of something like this. And honestly, once the adventurers work out how to kill those ants, I'll be surprised if the place doesn't get overrun — with adventurers. The perks on those things will be worth dying for, and they'll know it. Especially whatever the variants are carrying." He rolled a shoulder. "It's not the ants that worry me. It's the other attack. There's a second strike coming from somewhere, and they've got to find it before it lands."

"You've got more faith in it than I do," Hale said.

Harold laughed again; he felt good this morning, clear and light in a way he hadn't in a while. Probably the sleep. He'd been sleeping. Or maybe it was the beautiful woman next to him. Still, he felt better than he had in a long time.

"What, you don't trust Margaret and Caldwell?" he said. "We left good people back there. Some of the best we've got. Let them do the job we left them to do."

Carter spoke up, already grinning because he'd heard the important part. "We bringing the whole century, then?"

Harold looked at him, and the grin was catching.

"Every last one," he said. "We're going hunting. There’s a death zone I want to go clear and loot. Then a couple of areas Sarah marked for me to take a look at."

Carter nodded, “I’ll get the boys ready. Leave in twenty?” Harold nodded yea that’ll do it. Then, in a lower voice, he went back to scratching Mors as he tossed his head in frustration. “If you can pull them away from their poetry.”Hale looked at him weirdly before just grunting and walking away. “I’ll meet you there. Don’t be late. I can’t keep this lot together the way you can.”

A hundred warhorses came up the long white shoulder of the hill at a gallop and crested it together, and two of Harold's guard were sitting their own mounts at the top, waiting for him.

They were good, this century. Every man of them a tier-two knight at the least, and near half sitting in the low reaches of tier three now, only accomplished because of some of the frankly ridiculous feats most of the people here had pulled off. They came up the slope in one breath and stopped in one, steam smoking off their horses.

"Sire." The nearer scout brought his horse around. "Warband of Blackjaws, a couple of kilometers east. About four hundred of them." He nodded off across the valley. "We can walk you round them easy enough. No need to—"

"Nonsense," Harold said.

"Nah, we'll take them." Carter was already grinning. "Half the lads still haven't got mounted perks. Won't get a better chance than four hundred goblins standing in the open. Let's do it."

The two scouts looked at each other, then at Carter. But they turned their horses and put heels to them.

"Follow us, then."

Harold leaned down along the great neck to Mors's ear. "Here we go. Let's get to it."

Mors did not need telling twice. He came off the mark like something fired, ran the two scouts' horses down inside a furlong, drew level, and then, because he was who he was, he edged half a length out in front of them where he thought he belonged. Harold rode him easily through all of it and snorted.

"Stubborn horse."

They went down the valley fast, a hundred warhorses at the gallop and the snow thundering up under them, and Harold reached back and drew his axe. He was short of kills on the thing. He needed more worthy kills with it to progress along the blademaster path Jack had been teaching him.

The valley narrowed and rose, and a scout twisted in his saddle and shouted back. "Just over that rise — other side!"

Harold nodded him off and looked back down his own line. Carter already had them opening out of column into a wide wedge without a word said. Jack and Ren and Corwin came up onto Harold's flanks with the pole, and the gold and black of the empire cracked open above them and held.

His blood came up to meet it. He let the aura off its leash, only a little, only enough — and he narrowed it out ahead of the charge in both directions at once, so that his own men sat straighter and grinned wider. And the Goblins waiting on the far side of the rise despaired his coming.

They crested. The goblins were below, a loose sprawl of them turning and starting to chatter and form into something that resembled a line, but the sight of a hundred warhorses pouring down the slope turned the chatter into a high panicked shriek.

"FOR THE EMPIRE!"

The cry came back off a hundred throats, and they charged in.

Harold took the first goblin's head off in passing, and Mors trampled two more under his hooves without breaking stride. The blood that came up off the axe hung wrong in the air for half a second, gathered itself into a thin red spiral, and drew down into Harold's chest where the Nail drank it. The wedge went through the warband like a blade through wet paper and out the other side.

They wheeled. Came back onto line. The goblins they'd scattered were already dragging themselves back into a knot, more discipline than most of their kind managed, and Harold ran a fast eye down his own riders — no gaps, no one down, no one bleeding who shouldn't be — and faced them at the knot again. There were maybe two hundred of them left. Their first charge shattered their formation.

A berserker came out of their line screaming, and swung a cleaver the size of a shovel at Mors's legs. Mors saw it coming and simply went faster than the swing, and the goblin was trampled under him a full beat before the swing could finish, and the horse loosed a great ringing neigh that Harold would have sworn was a laugh. In his chest the Nail sang along with it, glutted and delighted, as the knights came down into the melee around him.

He didn't drive through this time. He let the line break into its hundred small killings, the horses wheeling and dancing and lashing out with iron-shod feet while the knights did their deadly work.

It was over in a few minutes. Blackjaws were harder than common goblins and meaner in the heart, but hard goblins measured against the best the empire could field were never going to be a long conversation.

A last curl of blood spun up out of the churned red snow and came looking for him. Harold watched it thread toward his chest and murmured down at it.

"If you get my clothes bloody, I swear I'm going to be furious with you."

The Nail sulked a moment. Then, grudgingly, it agreed.