Chapter 48

Earl John of Sheffield had been waiting for this moment since the summer. He hated that his serfs had been liberated, and it pissed him off that some of the minor nobles in the area were now making more money than he was. He couldn’t bring himself to pay the lower classes to do work they should have been doing anyway. They were not suitable for anything else, at least in his opinion. It pissed him off when Marion’s labor board fined him for shorting his employee’s paychecks. He was smart enough to know he would have to wait for the perfect opportunity to revolt, or Marion’s army would crush him. As he waited, he wasn’t idle. He put out feelers to the other nobles in the area to see if they would be interested in joining him. He found four other relatively minor nobles interested in joining his revolt. As his diplomatic efforts were underway, he sent men to infiltrate Marion’s army to learn about her style of warfare. As his diplomatic efforts were coming to fruition, he found a black-market small arms supplier for his army but couldn’t get supplied in the needed numbers. However, even a few firearms would help level the playing field.

One of the minor nobles who joined him was named Hildyard, and John didn’t think much of him. He was arrogant and constantly thought of himself more than he was. As far as John was concerned, Hildyard would make good cannon fodder and a better scapegoat should things go badly. Hildyard’s wife, on the other hand, was against rebelling; she had been making really good money under Marion’s rule and knew Marion’s troops would crush any rebellion. She was angry enough to kick Hildyard out of her life and told him she wanted nothing to do with this rebellion. Her goal was to protect her family, at all costs, from Marion’s backlash. She had seen the price of rebelling and wanted no part of it. She could afford to do this because most of Hildyard’s property came from her family. Her father loved her enough to include a clause in their wedding contract. It stated if Hildyard were ever kicked out of the home, the land would stay with the wife.

John observed Marion’s army crush the Viking invasion with ease. He had a front-row seat to the action because he had been in York when the Vikings invaded and was worried about how fast Marion’s army won. His next hope was that Godwinson’s army would fight Marion’s, but that didn’t happen. Marion had impressed the king so much that he left her alone.

After the Viking invasion had been beaten off, his spies returned and began to train the rest of the noble’s combined army in absolute secrecy. John watched as his army was brought up to the standards that Marion’s army used. John found he couldn’t wait to bring Marion’s army to battle and crush it. The goal was to make Marion his whore and fuck her every day while she was tied to his bed. With Marion as his whore, he wouldn’t have to look at his ugly wife. As his army was training, John looked for the ideal place to battle.

He knew he would do much better to stay on the defensive, so he looked for land that was easy to defend but still would allow him an escape route if his plans were upset. It also had to be a spot where Marion couldn’t afford to ignore him. He found the perfect place in a high location surrounded on three sides by impenetrable swamps that were only a half-day march from Marion’s main supply depot. Carefully, he fortified the site, and to protect his men against the expected artillery barrage, he built bunkers and earthen walls around the area. The earthen walls and bunker ideas came from Marion’s training. This added to their appeal for John because he was using Marion’s ideas against her.

Finally, he was ready, and now he just had to find the perfect opportunity. It came much sooner than he thought or could have hoped. Five days after King Godwinson got to York, the Normans invaded, and he took off back South. By mid-October, word came that the King’s army had been defeated. John had been waiting for this because he was sure that Marion would send her army south, and when she did, he would revolt. He was convinced this would force Marion to further divide her forces with enemies to the north and south. Sure enough, she did exactly what had been expected, and he watched as Marion’s army moved through the area. With Marion’s army divided, John was sure he could defeat the smaller parts in turn. As he defeated each group, he would add their firearms to his army. Soon, he would be as strong as Marion, and since there were no longer walls around York, he was sure he could capture it without much effort.

A week after Marion’s army left Sheffield, no word had come, and John thought it was safe for him to revolt. He sent coded messages to the rest of his co-conspirators, and they mobilized their armies. They had almost 10,000 men, but only a part was armed with firearms. The lack of artillery bothered John, but he was banking on cutting Luke’s supply lines, and hopefully, he would shoot through his supply of ammunition, making his artillery useless.

The nobles would take a few days to gain control of the entire area, so they had spread out some. Their first target was the rail depot and supply dump there. Since Luke hadn’t been expecting a revolt in the area, he had left only a token force behind to guard it. John’s forces quickly overwhelmed the guards, but not before the commander had set demolition charges in the powder stores. As the guards were being marched out, the powder went up with a massive explosion. The explosion had been caused by a booby-trapped door and caused the death of John’s oldest son and several of his men. John’s army might not have captured the powder stores, but they did capture a large number of rifles.

John was so upset with the destruction of the powder stores that he ordered the female guards to be brutally raped before they were drawn and quartered. The male guards were to be castrated before they too, were drawn and quartered. Although the guards suffered, they understood John’s war effort would be crippled since he had been relying on capturing those powder supplies intact. It took almost a day to kill the guards slowly, and the commander was the last to die. This way, he would have to watch his troops suffer because of what he had done. Once all the guards were dead, John ordered every building to be torched, and the army moved to the appointed gathering point. After the noble’s armies had gathered, they would march on York and forever end all this bull about men and women being equal and the lower classes having equal rights with the nobles.

What John didn’t know was Luke was already on his way north. He wouldn’t find out until he got a message from one of the other nobles. It had been sent hurriedly because the noble didn’t have time to write it down. The message was simple:

“Marion’s army is back.”

John knew he wouldn’t have enough time to gather the rest of the men, so he headed toward his swamp fortress. At least two of the other nobles had met up with him. They had just over 7,000 troops, most now armed with rifles but lacking adequate ammunition. John was sure Luke had suffered casualties in battling the Normans, and the commanders figured the armies would be about equal.

Almost as soon as John settled into his new fortress, he got word that Hildyard’s forces had also been eliminated. Luke had launched a night attack that caught Hildyard’s army by surprise. John had tried to warn that idiot about underestimating Luke. He had spent some time talking with Luke during Luke’s summer campaign in the area and had come away from that meeting with a considerable amount of grudging respect for Luke’s command talents. Now, Hildyard paid the ultimate price for his stupidity.

John spent the time before Luke arrived, strengthening his defenses, and had several scouts posted to inform him when Luke’s forces made it into the area. One of the other things John had done was to create a hidden path out of the back of the marsh so his forces could escape if anything went wrong. He placed secret fortifications where the trail came into the fortress if Luke tried to come up that path and had even set many booby traps along it to slow Luke’s forces down. All there was to do was wait. They had enough food, water, and ammunition in the bunkers for a short siege and enough bunkers for all the men to shelter in.

The morning after Luke had crushed the Duke of Normandy, his army was on the road again. This time, they were headed to Scotland to settle some unfinished business. Everyone in the army was worried about just how cold Luke had become. Not long ago, he would always be the one who would warm the room’s mood with his presence. Now, the air turned subarctic everywhere he went. Everyone still had the utmost respect for him but wondered what had happened. Once the army was back north of the Thames, Alice cornered him:

“Okay, Luke, you can stop with the little voices now! The campaign is over, and you survived just like everyone else in the army.”

“The campaign is over now? Since when and who said anything about the voices bothering me?!?! While we were on the subject of the campaign, when the fuck did you become a god-damn fucking general? I don’t remember saying anything about the campaign being over yet!” Luke’s voice rose until he was screaming in Alice’s face.

Luke’s eyes were on fire. Alice could see the blood vessels pulsing in his neck, and his face was ghostly white as he chewed Alice out. This was the first time that Luke had ever terrified Alice. For a second, she was petrified, but then she fled with tears in her eyes. The look in Luke’s eyes told everyone around he didn’t feel anything from making Alice cry. Everyone who didn’t need to be near Luke made themselves scarce. Luke terrified not only Alice but also every soldier in the army.

Luke then received a message that some nobles in the Sheffield area were rebelling, and his supply depot had been destroyed to keep it out of the rebel’s hands. The army had been gone about a week and a half with no news if they had won. Luke had sent a single highly coded message to Marion telling her of their victory, and he was taking the army to Scotland. He also asked her not to say anything to anyone because he wanted to see if any nobles would rebel. He was determined that Marion could rule without having rebellious nobles to worry about when he died.

Up to this point, the army was making about their usual distance of just short of 22km a day. As soon as Luke got the message, he ordered the pace to be picked up to almost 40km a day. With this, everyone knew something bad was happening, but Luke was close-lipped about it. The army raced north, arriving back in the Sheffield area in a matter of days. They found the whole area in an uproar, and it seemed that a number of the remaining nobles had been waiting for the army to be away so that they could rebel. The nobles hated the serfs who were freed, and many of them had taken massive hits to their incomes as a result.

Luke moved his army so fast that he managed to catch one of the rebellious nobles by complete surprise, and he annihilated the noble’s army within only fifteen minutes. The noble had been captured alive, so Luke ordered the noble and his entire family to be impaled and left at the side of a major road. The noble was forced to watch as everyone in his family was stripped naked and impaled with objects from his castle to drive Luke’s point home. Once they had been impaled, he was impaled as well. The way Luke had them impaled left them alive for several days. He had even placed the noble on the opposite side of the road, so he had to watch his whole family slowly die. Luke was tired of nobles rebelling every time his back turned and was determined to put a permanent end to this. Luke didn’t even take time to loot the noble’s possessions before going after his next target. Luke sent a small unit to guard the noble’s residences until he had time to sack them properly. The next noble had some warning, but it wasn’t enough for him to get completely ready.