Free The Soldier's Tale by Jonathan Moeller

The Soldier’s Tale

    I woke up with a hangover and a headache so
sharp it felt as if someone had pounded nails into my head.
    I usually did, these days.
    It was a fine bright day in the summer of
the Year of Our Lord 1471. The sun rose over the plains and hills
of Durandis, and one of those damned rosy rays of dawn came through
the arrow slit that served as my window and hit me right in the
face.
    It annoyed me, but I didn’t care that it
annoyed me, and I didn’t care that it made my headache worse.
    I had to get up anyway. I had yet to miss a
day of duty because of a hangover, and I would be damned if I was
going to start now.
    So I got up. As an Optio of the Dux’s
men-at-arms, I had my own room in the barracks of Castra Durius,
albeit one that was little more than a stone closet. One of the
halfling servants had refilled the water basin while I had been
dead drunk, and I lifted it and drank about half of the contents. I
used the rest of the water to shave, watching myself in the little
mirror of cloudy glass as I scraped away last night’s stubble. I
looked terrible, my gray eyes bloodshot, my brown hair marked with
gray streaks, the lines on my face deeper than they had been
yesterday.
    I looked like hell. Of course, those lines
and those gray hairs hadn’t been there until three years ago,
hadn’t been there until…
    If I dwelled on that too long, I would
start drinking again, and that was not going to happen while I had
duty. I was a man-at-arms of the Dux Kors Durius of Durandis, and I
would be damned before I showed up for duty drunk. Even after
everything, I was still an Optio of the Dux’s men-at-arms, and I
suspected I would die that way.
    I wondered if drinking myself to death
counted.
    By the time I finished shaving, the water
had a chance to work its way through me, so I relieved myself and
got dressed, pulling on my tabard over my chain mail. The Dux’s
colors are green, and his badge is a gray tower upon that field of
green. Sometimes the new men grumbled that the colors looked drab,
but they soon changed their minds. They were easy to clean, for one
thing.
    And when the Mhorites came down from the
Kothluuskan mountains to make trouble, the colors made it easy to
hide in the hills.
    I left the barracks and strode into the
courtyard of Castra Durius, my scabbard tapping a little against my
left leg with every step. The castra occupied a hill at the edge of
the Kothluuskan foothills themselves, its walls tall and strong,
its octagonal towers topped with war engines, its keep a massive
block of stone. Long ago, a knight named Sir Durius had claimed the
hill, driving the Mhorites into their mountain valleys. The High
King had granted him the land as Dux, and Durius had given the name
Durandis to the plain between Kothluusk and the River Cintarra in
honor of his father, who had fallen fighting the Mhorites. Ever
since, Durandis and Castra Durius had stood as guardians, defending
the rest of Andomhaim from the malice of the Mhorite orcs and the
creatures that dwelled in the Deeps below the mountains.
    I remembered my wife telling my daughter
that story, the last time I had seen them. Before…
    I thought of the whiskey waiting underneath
my cot.
    I pushed the thought out of my head and
walked to the gate.
    Sir Primus Tulvan stood there. He looked
the way I always thought the Romans must have looked upon Old Earth
in ancient days, with his graying hair close-cropped, his face
stern, his nose like the beak of a proud bird of prey. He was the
youngest son of a prominent noble family of Tarlion, and so had
come to take service with Dux Kors. He had risen to the rank of
Decurion, commanding a company of men-at-arms, and I served as his
Optio, his second-in-command.
    The Decurion and I had been in a lot of
rough spots together, but we had survived. Sir Primus knew how to
keep his head in a battle. Both in the literal and the metaphorical
sense.
    “Sir,” I said.
    “Optio Camorak,” said Primus. He glanced