Death After Death

It seemed like every time he left Crowvar, he came back with some souvenir. When they rousted a nest of bandits just before the first snow, Simon chose to take a nice set of stolen silverware as his prize from that tidy little horde. After that was gnoll raiders, where he found a lovely necklace for Freya, which she swooned over. In the spring, he was called upon to defeat an actual goblin infestation and then to put down a tax rebellion. In the former case, he finally found a lovely spinning wheel in a house where the occupants had been murdered. In the latter, he actually chose to give a few gold coins from his stash away to resolve the situation peacefully when he decided that the Baron was in the wrong.

He didn’t want to spend those coins, of course. He knew they’d never get that sort of windfall again. However, his only other option was to crush the skull of the headman and hang every poor bastard without a coin to their name or join them and overthrow the Baron. Simon was fairly sure he could do the latter, but the chaos that would have been introduced into his life would have been awful. He needed peace to enjoy this time with Freya more than he needed a couple of gold coins anyway.

He felt like both of them were improving and growing closer all the time, which made their time apart that much more unbearable. While she learned to spin yarn and knit it into a blanket to replace the threadbare one that had barely got them through winter, he focused on other things that were almost as important.

Simon spent the winter getting halfway decent with his long bow and forcing the men he fought beside so often to train to work together a little better. Quite frankly, he thought their performance was a little embarrassing because everyone used a different weapon and style. Still, it took forever to improve that situation. He doubted they’d have even made the effort if they didn’t secretly call him the miracle worker behind his back.

That was a rumor he’d tried to quash, but it had only grown since that first fight. Even the Baron had pulled him aside to ask if it was true that he had magical healing powers. Simon had learned the hard way that the more he denied it, the more they believed. Now he just ignored it and tried not to add more fuel to the fire. Still - it was hard to do that when you watched someone bleeding out on the battlefield and knew you could save them with a few whispered words.

These days he tried to heal just the internal part of the wound. That way, he left it bleeding but no longer life-threatening to allay suspicion. However, even with that little trick, people still noticed that of all the Baron’s patrols, his routinely came back with the fewest casualties. So, they tried things his way and practiced things like shield walls and short bows, and by spring, he had a halfway capable fighting force.

By spring, everything felt like it was starting to fall into a routine for the first time since he’d entered the pit. That was when Freya told him that she was pregnant.

“Really? Are you sure?” he asked. That was apparently the wrong answer because after she stopped crying, she wouldn’t speak to him for hours.

That night they had a fight, and he apologized, but he wasn’t really sure what he was apologizing for. He was the one with his mind blown, after all. He was only thirty, after all. Was he even ready to be a dad? It wasn’t a conversation he’d ever planned on having in his life. Still, eventually, he acted excited enough to placate her while he processed his own feeling on the subject.

Simon tried to look on the bright side. This was among the smallest curveballs Helades could have thrown him. It was only a few days later that they heard the news that the orcs were coming.

Two days after Simon got the Baron to agree to let him take some time off from the field, a messenger came to let them know that a war band of orcs had been sighted in the east and seemed to be heading this way. For the last month, they had been dealing with increased centaur activity, and suddenly everything snapped into place: the centaurs were moving further west and warring with the humans because the orcs were displacing them. It was grim news, and though the lord of Crowvar kept it a secret for as long as he could so as not to cause a panic, the panic still came when refugees fleeing the path of danger arrived in the walled town.

“Are we going to leave?” Freya asked. “They say that the horde has thousands of warriors. There’s no way anyone could defend against that.”

“If everyone is saying something, it’s almost certainly wrong,” Simon sighed, slumping into bed with her. He explained that the reality was somewhere between dozens and hundreds of orc warriors. While that was still enough to kill 3 times their weight in men, Crowvar had more than enough men that could hold a sword or a crossbow to fend them off.

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In truth, Simon was more than a little worried. Not just for his wife but also for his unborn child, that was just starting to grow inside her. He couldn’t leave, though. The road hadn’t been a good place when it was just the two of them, and there was no way they’d be able to manage as her body began to swell with life.

He didn’t tell her any of that, though. Instead, he told her he would think about it while they fell asleep. His mind was already made up, though, and in the morning, he went before the Baron to suggest a plan that was a feverish combination of various action and fantasy movies he’d seen.

“Sire, we must defeat this army, but the only place we can hope to do so is here. We must let them come here and even lure them here if necessary, and then we must break them against the eastern walls,” Simon said as passionately as he could.

“The eastern walls, you say? And why is that?” the Baron asked. “My son thinks we should be prepared to retreat to the tower and wait for them to lose interest. Rumors say their army is too big to hold back until the Count or even the King sends reinforcements.”

Simon carefully explained that the orcs moved like a wave of locusts and that they carried no supplies with them, so they could not stay in one place for any length of time. Then he explained his plan. “They will attack from the east because that is the direction they come from, and they will attack at night because all green skins hate the light, but we will be ready. They have no siege engines or scaling ladders, so we will line the walls with men wielding spears and keep them from gaining a foothold while we pepper them with arrows.”

“Arrows will just make an orc angry,” Varten said haughtily. “Don’t you know anything?”

“I know you can bring anything down with enough arrows,” Simon snapped, almost saying bullets by accident. “We will hold them in place, we will weaken them, and then in the morning, when they are trying to decide whether to retreat, we will launch our cavalry from the tree line and crush their weakened force against the wall and obliterate it.”

“What you describe is a fine plan, Simon,” the Baron said wearily, “but it would take many more men than we have, and these orcs will be here within a fortnight.”

“More soldiers would be better, but I do not think we need too many,” Simon answered. “We will keep most of them on their horses in the wood while we put a bow or a spear in the hand of every farmer and refugee that’s old enough to wield them, and we shall tell them that they are all that stands between their family and a gruesome death.”

Eventually, the Baron saw things Simon’s way and agreed to the plan, which infuriated his son. “This plan is reckless to the point of danger. No man will follow it,” Varten declared, storming out of the room.

Simon didn’t actually think he was completely wrong. It was reckless, but only a little. In the movies, the orcs would have had giant trolls to knock down the walls or catapults, but here they were just savages using salvaged weapons to murder and devour everything they could find, and Simon would be ready for them.

Every day more people pressed into the small town for the slender promise of safety offered by their walls, and every day, the people worked as hard as they could to prepare. Blacksmiths worked late into the night, and Simon drilled the men on the plan. An orc’s main advantage was size and strength, and his plan aimed to deny them both.

On the day the horde was sighted from the tower, Simon pressed a dagger into Freya’s hand and promised to keep her safe even as she cursed him for not fleeing when they had the chance. She was almost six months pregnant now, and travel beyond the market would have been impossible, but that didn’t matter.

To her, all that mattered now was that he was safe, but just the opposite was true for him. He was going to keep her safe no matter what. So, with a look of grim determination, he strode out into the twilight to prepare for the long night ahead.

The orcs reached the walls just before midnight, and Simon called for the first volley of death moments later. Their supply of arrows was not infinite, of course, but they would make sure that every single shaft ended up splattered in green blood before the end of the night.

Simon took to the walls sometime past one in the morning when one of the defenders was yanked off into the milling crowd below. Most of the orcs tried to climb the walls without success, but some of them had grapples and would hook onto the top bricks, and they did their best to bring down the ancient fortification one brick at a time. It was working too, and it hadn’t been part of Simon’s plan. As Varten had mentioned, they shrugged off arrows and instead used their massive strength to pull chunks of masonry off into their fellows as they sought to lower the walls enough to gain entry.

It almost worked. Despite severing every grapnel he could, they still almost managed to create a breach in the southern part of the western wall. In the end, it was only dawn that saved them. As false dawn began to light up the eastern horizon, the warriors began to have second thoughts about whether or not to continue the assault. It was too late for second thoughts, though, because even as they turned to leave, the horn blew, and the cavalry appeared on the far side.

Simon ordered the gates open then and sent every man still capable of swinging a sword outside to join them. There had been perhaps three hundred orcs at the beginning of the night, and even though there was only half that number now, that would still be too much for the knights that were charging in to save the day. The result was a bloody melee that lasted for hours, but for all their strength, the orcs were wounded and exhausted, and in the end, they were wiped out to the last man, inflicting only several dozen casualties on their enemies for all their effort.

Simon was elated. Some of the soldiers wept that morning, embracing each other in the greatest victory that part of the world had seen in some time. Simon would have loved to join them. Instead, he hurried home because there was one person he needed to share this victory with more than anyone else.

“We did it, baby, we’re safe and…” Simon never finished that sentence as the words died in his throat. Both Freya and Varten turned toward the sound of his speech, but it was too late. He’d already seen them kissing.

It should have been the most joyous day of Simon’s life. For once in his life, he was the hero. He’d saved the day. He couldn’t celebrate, though, because when he came home, he opened the door to find his beloved wife in the arms of another man.