Chapter 1

I hadn't the slightest thought in my mind of signing up for Lord Hamworth's Regiment, which already composed nearly all the majority of the men and lads of our town, Meryton. Besides, I was 'too young', I kept insisting to everyone in town who kept asking why I wasn't wearing the blue and gold arm banner of enlistment around my arm! I was too young, being still three months from my sixteenth birthday, even for the beating drums and whips of a conscription team, eager to claim their silver crown for each and every conscript they obtained. No ... not for me! My birth record at the church was quite clear and unambiguous; I was too young to go and no one could make me! Besides, this particular war didn't sound like any sort of fun anyway.

From what I'd heard from travelers, the Eorfleode invasion of the Southern Duchies had caused tremendous damage and the slaughter at many of the cities and towns had been great and nearly total. In my view, this was going to be a nasty vicious war that was going to earn its soldiers very little glory, and get a large number of them buried under foreign soil. Fuss or not, I was determined to miss all of the fun by any means possible and just stay home!

My father had a good bit of coin, being the steward for Baron Hamsworth's estates. He also had a nice big fertile farm of his own with a dozen farmhands to run it, and a stipend waiting for him when he retired. He had placed me into the best local private school to learn to read and write and do sums, to someday soon become an apprentice clerk for him, learning the duties of the baron's estates, and ready to in turn replace my father someday as steward. Surely he would not want me to leave school over two years early as well? This sort of attitude, when I thought I had logically presented my case to my stern patriarch, just earned me a cuff to the ear and a good many harsh words.

True, I was too young to be forced into military service, but voluntarily serving in the army was honorable duty, he insisted. His own father had been a career sergeant, and he in turn had served in his youth for two years during one of Caestor's regular incursions onto our lands. He had volunteered, and a bit too early as well to be taken by the conscription gangs. Why could I not do the same, he wondered, to uphold the family honor? Even the baron's young son, Larque, who was just barely seventeen himself, would be the commanding officer of the regiment, which would also comprise all of the men from the Jasper Valley, which included our town and about a dozen surrounding villages.

"The Boar-Men had invaded Tellismere!" So what. It was just a place far to the west on the other sea shore that I had learned about only as a place on a map. Why the Duke of Oswein had decided that his entire army must be gathered to sail, and with fresh recruits as well, completely escaped me! My father's words of duty and honor touched me not, and I privately decided that it would be a very chilly day in the seven hells indeed before I'd willing take arms to go to battle ... especially a battle very far and beyond our shores.

A war to go repulse the Caestorian legions from our borders once again? Ok, maybe ... that was an honorable purpose for which perhaps even I could be probably persuaded to go. But to risk my young life for fetid stinking Tellismere? What was even there that anyone cared about?

Melenna Carlson, in her own unique manner, found a way at school the next day to change my rather firmly made-up mind. While boys and girls did not share classes together, or even much free time except during our lunch period, she and her tightest friends, Elma and Hillæ were checking out the boy's armbands, eager to find some craven lad from the upper classes who had not yet signed up for service, with the deadline before muster and departure being just two days away.

"Malcome, where is your armband? Surely you've already made your oath-pledge!" She asked in a much too loud voice, so that everyone in our lunchroom could clearly hear. The room fell silent and I knew that I was going to be in serious trouble. Now I suddenly realized that her long postponed revenge was coming quite due!

We had been friends once, sort of. Well, we had held hands together for a month or two during the early summer, in private, and we'd kissed a bit, and she'd even once let me feel her bare breasts inside of the open neck of her dress. Melenna was a bitch with a stuck up nose, but she did have very nice round soft breasts! She tired of me suddenly, for reasons that I never did quite figure out.

It was perhaps because one late evening while we were kissing, that I ran my fingers along her legs, up the inside of her dress, curious to see how far she'd let me go, and she didn't stop me at all until my fingers reach her secret hair-covered place. For one magical young teenaged moment I had my hands inside of her, fingering her slit and hole until she screamed and squirmed in my hands. I was untying my trousers so that she could do the same for me when she suddenly got all formal and angry with me. She avoided me for the rest of the month, and a month after the autumn start of school, I saw her kissing another boy, Jensen, from the senior class ahead of me. School rumors were that the two of them were 'doing it', fucking like rabbits, every day after school, but I didn't much care by then anymore.

Jensen had his armband, as did every single one of the other lads from the two classes above me. Every single one of my seniors was going to war, but then again they were all a year or two older than me. Another quick look showed that nearly all of my class year was now wearing the regimental armband as well. Why didn't anyone seem to get the point?

"I'm too young." I replied to her, for what must have been at least my tenth explanation of the morning, so far.

"That's cowardice talking!" She exclaimed, delighted to now make me twist under her knife. "Robeson, Matters, Carver and Rudulf ... all friends of yours from your class year, have just made their oaths to go volunteer this very afternoon, why not you as well? Will you be left here then all alone, devoid of any honor?"

In fact, a quick accounting of the situation showed that the odds of reasoning with her now were quite remote. Virtually all of my classmates, even the under-aged ones that were still fifteen like me, either now wore the armband as well, or were standing and lifting a hand in oath to say that they would be joining that very day. As one, they had all been shamed or browbeaten into volunteering. Few of them looked happy about it, but they had now agreed to serve.

It was madness! There were even some armbands on younger classmen boys from the classes lower than mine. They had their armbands as well, boys of thirteen and fourteen driven by a storm of masculine enthusiasm towards the rocks of war! Was I the only one left that had any sense at all? What good were boys who didn't even have pubic hair yet going to be in battle against inhuman monsters nearly double their size?

What a bunch of rat-assed bastards! Leaving me alone, the only one from my class not volunteering for service! The way Melenna and her friends were glaring at the few remaining holdouts, by the end of the day there wouldn't be a lad or boy in the entire school left who hadn't made their oath-pledge. Had everyone gone completely mad?

"Since you apparently have no notions of honor," she sniffed, as if I were a freshly dropped cow turd, "I shall leave you alone in your cowardice with this one little gift!" She then dramatically flourished and presented a white bird's feather to me. Probably a common gull feather, but the symbolism of this singular gift was much more important. She had publically branded me as the lowest sort of coward, unfit for honor or the respect of any of my peers ... pretty much forever. This sort of black stain did not wear off like drops of ink from my fingers. For a month, a year, or even ten or more until the end of my life, I would be known as the town's coward, and shunned accordingly.

The scheming manipulative cunt had now really left me with no other choice at all. I had to defend my honor, such as it was, and with anger I rose to my feet.

"Fine. If Pieter will join with me, we'll take our oaths this afternoon."

There! That had really done it! Other than Pieter, who was sort of my best friend and the poorest of us at sports, I was apparently now the last lad or man left in the village that hadn't joined. He gave me a frightened look, but after watching the rest of our schoolmates glare at him, he quickly nodded his head in agreement. He was going to be as useless in war as tits upon a bull, but I swore to him that I'd try to keep his skinny and short ass protected, and somehow we'd both try and live to the end of this fiasco!

Together that afternoon, we walked dejectedly over to the recruiter bearing the baron's banner and reluctantly swore our oaths to serve for the duration of the emergency, or at the pleasure of the Duke, and we signed our names to the muster-roll sheet. We each received a single silver shilling, symbolic pay for our enlistment, but we were each pretty sure that this was the last coin we'd ever see again while in uniform. Not quite so, we did get a small wage for our service, which was very irregularly paid, but that's a later complaint.

It was indeed madness, but we were all caught in a flood that we could not escape from! I was not the only male who had received a white feather, and by the time the regiment was ready to march out of Meryton two days later, the jingo-women, and girls like Melenna had done their job well, for there was hardly a male face left in the entire valley to watch us march off to war.

For better or worse, and to my eyes it seemed worse, every lad capable of growing a pubic hair in the next year or three, and every able man still without a full field of gray or white hair upon their heads, had signed their lives and perhaps their very souls away as well. Every one of us had raised our hand and taken oath to serve our Duke, and our young pimply commander who was barely older than I was. Virtually every single male in the entire river valley was now under arms, except for young boys and aged grandfathers.

As they watched us march off, I wished I had rocks to throw at the smug faces some of some of the women, like Melenna Carlson, and her friends. A few of the smarter, more reasonable women were just now realizing that it was quite possible that many of us wouldn't return.

Most of us, in fact, did not.

Four hundred and eighty-eight men of Meryton, and the villages of the Jasper Valley marched out together on that cool autumn day, watching the women, all alone, tend to the remaining harvesting. Five years later we returned ... just eighteen of us, to a strange land that we didn't quite remember and no longer understood.

A land nearly entirely without men.

The terrible winnowing of our ranks started nearly at once as we marched east towards Palista, the most southern port city on the Paliskios River. It was not at all far, barely three days travel if it were to be straight marched, but it took us a full five, as we had many stops for drill and exercise, stopping and starting our trek along the stony river road.

Jacobs, a senior from my school, was the first to die, falling from the roadside down a deep and rocky hill into the river. His head struck a stone sharply and he could not be revived. Two others, valley villagers that I didn't personally know, drowned while practicing an exercise to cut logs and then cross a river. The Paliskios was rapid that day, swollen by rains on its short trip to the Inner Sea, and the two were swept away by the current and were never recovered.

Another I did not know, died from a blow to the head stuck by an improperly unpadded weapon during drill practice. He died slowly, over two days, crying loudly nearly constantly for his mother. Most of us, myself included, just wished the lad would hurry and die, or at least be quiet about it. This memory bothered me considered in the years afterwards, but I already knew that our numbers were cursed to further decrease, without respite.

The wrecking of our troopship, a tired worm-eaten old merchant ship named Gruul's Anger, a week later in a storm on our first night out of sea, just confirmed for me our dire fate. Fortunately we were not at all far out to sea when the keel of the ship broke upon a hidden rock, tossing us all to the tender mercies of Lagufæ, the banished Sea Goddess. We had been packed into the old half-rotten ship like sardines, both above and below decks. Those of us who were topside managed to leap safely into the sea, but some of those below were trapped unable to escape in time when the old merchant ship turned turtle and rolled over into the sea, soon lost under the angry waves. Some of the survivors in the water fared harshly as well when thrown by the great waves of the sea unto the jagged rocks of the coast, but most ... the ones that the goddess deemed to be spared for yet further torment, made it to the upper sands of the shore, and to safety.

Of our number, barely more than half, two hundred and seventy-one to be exact, survived to be boarded upon another transport. Friends and chums I had known for my entire life were swept forever away from me. Already, with but the first major blow, over half of the men and boys that I knew in life were now dead, and we had yet to face our terrible, legendary enemy, the Boar-Men. The only comforting thought to this disaster was that my former romantic rival Jensen was one of the ones lost to the sea. Not that I wanted anything to do with Melenna anymore, not under any circumstances!

Joran, a young man I knew well who worked on my father's farm, died four days later on the ship and was the first of our number to be formally buried at sea. Two other younger boys that I barely knew from the lowest form at our school, both caught the flux and died within a few hours of each other, with just weakly croaked whimpers at their fate. I saw no honor or glory in their deaths either. Already about half of our number were lost, with not a single tale of glory earned in return.

After landing briefly in Broadmore, and with but a short stretch of our cramped legs, we were once more loaded back onboard ship, with another long voyage to Tellismere ahead of us. The ship's scuttlebutt did not bear any particularly happy news. Rumors of the complete and total devastation of that Duchy were everywhere. Reports of the size of the horde that we would face were preposterous, and their numbers only seemed to grow. While I could tell that other armies on the other fleets of ships were near us, it was clear that we could be outnumbered, and we would be far away from any further friendly support. Alone, together, we would stand or fall.