Brelira Story Draft 1

Will was losing.

He ducked under his opponent’s sword, barely avoiding the blow. He feinted left, trying to get an opening, but he was blocked yet again. He backed away, trying to get room to recover and plan his next attack, but his foe would have none of it, pressing him hard for several strides. Will backpedaled faster, trying desperately to avoid the slashing blade, but twas so focused on avoiding the blade that he didn’t see his opponent’s foot darting out to sweep his own feet from under him until it was too late. He went sprawling on his back in the sand, and before he could so much as start to sit up, he felt cold, sharp steel at his throat. Damn it.

“Better, Thompson,” Drill Sergeant Carter said, removing his sword and pulling Will to his feet, “But you still need to pay more attention to your footwork. If you had, you wouldn’t have fallen like that.”

One of the boys standing on the sidelines snickered. Sergeant Carter’s head whipped around. “Oh, you think you can do better, Wilson? Come on, let’s see it, then.”

Sam Wilson, a tall, broad-shouldered young man who looked much older than his sixteen years, stepped into the open space of the yard. “Sure, why not?”

Will handed his practice blade to the sergeant and brushed himself off as he headed back to the loose, thirty-foot wide circle of onlookers, making for the opposite side from Sam. Will was the tallest in their group of twenty sixteen-year-old conscripts, and the best sword, but Sam was half again his weight and a practiced fighter and troublemaker. Will had gotten a hard time from several of the other boys for showing them up in training but seeming to back down easily outside the practice ring. He just wanted to avoid trouble, but the others regarded it as a mark of cowardice, and had no compunctions about showing their contempt.

So, he took up his customary place on the edge of the circle of onlookers, a few feet away from the nearest trainee. Nobody much wanted to be seen talking to him, lest they get on Sam’s bad side, so they kept their distance. Will didn’t have any particular desire to talk with them, either, so he was perfectly happy to stand off by himself and watch Sergeant Carter put Sam in his place.

The match started out as it always did: Sam took his sword (a relatively short blade that was designed to be most effective in quick parries and slashes) in both hands and made great, slow, arcing swings at the sergeant. Sergeant Carter, for his part, calmly dodged the first three swings before catching the fourth on the crossguard of his own blade and giving a little twist that sent Sam’s sword flying ten feet through the air to bury itself point first in tha loose sand of the practice yard. As usual, Sam stared after the sword incredulously for a moment before giving a roar of frustration and charging the sergeant with fists swinging.

Sergeant Carter, a wiry man who stood at perhaps five and a half feet tall in boots, was most of a head shorter and a hundred pounds lighter than Sam, but he didn’t so much as blink as he spun out of range of Sam’s attack and brought his blade up to the boy’s unguarded throat. Sam skidded to a stop. The entire fight hadn’t lasted thirty seconds.

“Well, Wilson,” the sergeant said lightly, “it seems that you have somehow managed to learn nothing in the past week. In the past five weeks, in fact.” He lowered his sword and snorted derisively. “Really, the stubbornness with which you cling to your ignorance is astounding. How many times must I tell you that swordplay is not like a bar fight? Speed and skill matter far more than brute strength.” He shook his head. “Go on. Get the sword out of the ground and get back in line. Cooper! You’re next!”

Sam shoved the practice blade into David Cooper’s hands, glowering as he stalked back to his place in the circle. His strength made him a dangerous opponent when fists were the only weapons involved, but that success only made him arrogant and stubborn in his halfhearted attempt to learn the sword.

Will watched the rest of the bouts carefully, trying to spot the weaknesses in each boy’s approach before Sergeant Carter pointed them out at the end of each fight. He was much better at it than he had been a month ago when he first joined the army.
He wasn’t sure how to feel about this new skill of his. Like most boys, he had been quite fascinated with swords and fighting from a young age, often playing at being soldiers with stick swords and pot helmets as a child. His fascination had gone much further, however; he had devoured every book about strategy and tactics he could get his hands on-- not that there were terribly many in a poor crafting neighborhood in the small city of Elanea where he had grown up. By age eight or nine, he had devoured the half dozen strategy books his neighbors had possessed among them, along with several more gathered from all over town, and had had no interest in the generic war games played by the other boys of his neighborhood. He had wanted to reenact the Battle of South Bend, the Siege of Aramea, the Conquest of the Western Hills, and had been very upset when he realized that his playmates knew nothing more about those events than their names.

All of that had changed, of course, when his parents had discovered just what he was spending so much time reading. They were staunch Loyalists, certain that the rightful king would soon return and set right all that had gone wrong since the Coup. They refused to listen to any of his explanations that all of these battles had been fought long before the army had turned on the monarchy, that he hated the High General as much as anyone and maybe there was a way to defeat him to be found in historical campaigns, that with the conscription law he was going to have to join the army when he was sixteen whether he liked it or not, so he ought to prepare as much as he could. His father had taken all of the books back to the various people Will had borrowed them from and forbidden him from leaving the house for weeks.

Will agreed with his parents about certain things. The High General was clearly unfit to rule. The conscription law was unjust, and no one should come to power by murdering their predecessor and most of his family. What they disagreed on was methods. Will’s parents insisted that anything to do with the military had to do with the High General, and was therefore inherently bad. Will, on the other hand, thought that tactics and strategy were really about getting inside the mind of your enemy. In order to defeat someone, you had to learn to anticipate their actions and prepare for them. The High General, after all, had not achieved his rank for nothing. He had been high in the king’s councils before the Coup, and was a master strategist, adept at the art of accepting short term loss if it meant the possibility of greater long term gain, skilled at waiting for the opportune moment, and without equal in discerning the thoughts of others. That was what Will hoped to gain from his books and observations. Not respect for the traitor High General, but a weapon to use against him. After all, if the rightful king could be deposed by a tactician, why not his usurper, too?

Will was drawn out of his thoughts by the sound of approaching footsteps. He looked up to see Sam approaching with two of his friends flanking him. Uh-oh.

“So, rich boy, whatcha doin all by yourself over here?” Sam asked.

Will sighed. “I’m not rich.” If he was rich, he wouldn’t be here, his parent’s would have paid the fee to avoid conscription. Yet another unfair aspect of the supposedly more egalitarian system.

“You’re richer’n any o’ the rest of us,” Sam’s thick-necked friend Greg said sullenly.

“My father’s a butcher. That’s hardly a profession known for making its practitioners rich.”

Greg frowned. “What’s ‘practishner’ mean?”

“I’ll tell you what it means,” Sam said darkly. “It means that rich boy here thinks he’s better than us because he can say some stupid fancy words.”

Their quarrel was starting to attract the attention of the nearby trainees, but Sergeant Carter was still busy with his evaluations and hadn’t noticed the growing tension. “My opinion of you has nothing to do with the size of your vocabulary and everything to do with the fact that you intimidate your fellow recruits into giving up their rations.” A few more people looked up at that, mostly those who had been victims of the practice.

Sam glanced behind him and seemed to realize that the opinion of the audience was not in his favor. “Intimidating, huh? Well, they’re not the only ones scared o’ me. You always run and hide from me when we’re not allowed to use swords.”

I am going to regret this. Will smiled mockingly. “Wow, you actually knew what ‘intimidating’ means? I was expecting to have to explain it to you.”

Sam gave his familiar frustrated bellow, exactly the same as he had in his training bout earlier, and charged Will, fist raised.

Exactly as he had seen Sergeant Carter do so many times, Will spun out of the way. He didn’t have a sword to put at Sam’s throat, though, so he improvised, completing his turn and throwing all his weight into a kick at the overbalanced Sam’s back. Sam landed sprawled on his stomach several feet away. Will straightened and looked around to find twenty shocked pairs of eyes fixed on him. For a long moment, no one spoke.

“That wasn’t exactly the kind of footwork I meant, Thompson,” Sergeant Carter said sternly, and Will felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. He had been too busy worrying about keeping Sam and Greg from breaking his neck and had forgotten that he might be punished for his part in the altercation. Then the sergeant smiled. “But I suppose it’ll do.” Will practically sagged with relief.

On the ground, Sam moaned and rolled over. “As for you, Wilson, the standard punishment for attacking a fellow soldier is ten lashes.”

Sam’s face went white.

“Since you’re only in training, however, and already got a rather pointed lesson, I’ll let it slide. This time.”

Sam sighed in relief, sitting up. Sergeant Carter’s expression hardened. “This accusation of stealing rations is another matter entirely, however.” He looked out over the rest of the boys. “Is this true? Has Wilson been stealing from you?”

There was a moment of shifting feet and uncomfortable glances before a short, skinny boy named Jeremy said, “Yeah.” Once someone had been the first to own up to it, others nodded their agreement.

Sergeant Carter turned back to Sam. “Wilson. You will spend every evening scrubbing out chamber pots until you are no longer under my command. You will be the last one to eat at every meal for the same duration.” He paused and bent down to get right in Sam’s face. “And if I ever hear of you doing such a thing again, I will have you flogged through the streets. Do you understand?”

Sam looked sullen, but nodded. Even he knew he could only push so far.

“Good. Now all of you break for supper. Not you, Thompson. You I want to speak to privately.”

Will waited anxiously in the dimming evening light as the others filed away. “What was it you wanted to talk about, sir?” he asked hesitantly once they were alone in the yard.

“The fact that you exposed bullying and extortion is admirable. I applaud you for it, and urge you to always report such abuses to your commanding officer in the future.” He turned a hard gaze on Will. “To your commanding officer. Dealing with it yourself undermines cooperation within the squad and leads to strife and factionalism. You seem fairly educated; surely you’ve heard that the point of drill sergeants is to provide a common enemy for the recruits as much as it is to train them to fight. That means that it’s me, not you, who should be showing Wilson up. Do you understand?”

Will looked down. “Yes, sir. But with all due respect, sir, he was already causing division. The boys he was stealing food from weren’t exactly his friends.”

Sergeant Carter sighed. “I suppose that’s true. And I don’t deny you the right to defend yourself; after all, he attacked you first. But you’re not completely innocent in this. You baited him.”

“Yes, sir. But he would’ve come after me anyway. I figured it would work out better for me if I knew when and how it would happen.”

The sergeant raised his eyebrows. “And how would you know that?”

Will blinked. “I... I’ve been watching the others’ evaluations, sir. He always attacks the same way once you disarm him and make him angry. I figured making him angry by taunting him would produce a similar result.”

“Did you?” Sergeant Carter looked contemplative. “Have you ever considered a career in the military, Thompson? You’re a fine sword, particularly given how little training you’ve had, and you think like an officer.”

Will didn’t know how to respond. “I guess... I’ve never really thought about it. My parents have never much liked the army. I was planning on only serving my required term, then going home.”

“Pity. Of course, no decent young man wants to be associated with the army these days. We get the thugs, the power-hungry, and we few who were around before the Coup and are too old to leave now. Sometimes I think I should have, after they killed the royal family...” He shook his head. “Never mind. I’m just an old soldier rambling on about things long past. Go enjoy the evening. I imagine this afternoon’s little escapade will have earned you a few new friends.”

Will saluted and headed back to the barracks to change out of his sweaty practice clothes. At the edge of the ring, he paused and looked back. Sergeant Carter was still standing alone in the middle of the practice ring, looking absently up at the darkening sky. Will almost called out to him, to ask if he was alright, if he wanted to come inside, but changed his mind at the last moment. Better leave him to his thoughts. After all, Will had plenty of thoughts of his own to occupy him. Thoughts about whether he should consider the idea trying to work his way up through the ranks of the army, and about how many other officers were of a like mind with Sergeant Carter about the Coup. Maybe I’m not so alone in my loyalism here as I thought.