The Curse Upon the Captains
Even with the mage gone, the work had to go on. Thanks to Kaenerna's ransom, Johan would not have to worry about gold coins for some time to come.
Generous rewards went out to the vassals who had earned merit, and additional provisions were stockpiled in preparation for winter...
Thanks to the Republic's fleet, supplies flowed smoothly by sea. Merchants from other trading houses came sailing in as well, their merchantmen escorted by the Republican navy.
Johan took their gold and granted them the right to trade. The merchants had paid a steep price, and they would recoup it from the soldiers camped nearby. It was a kind of circulation.
"My lord. The sage is gone — are you quite all right?"
"The... the sage?"
Ezelia's concern caught Johan off guard for a moment. She seemed to have gotten entirely the wrong idea about Kaenerna.
"Kaenerna is no sage. Suetelg might qualify, perhaps. Wearing a long robe and casting suspicious spells doesn't make someone a sage, so I'd advise you not to be taken in, Ezelia."
"Is... is that so?"
Kaenerna had simply been a mage. Nothing more, nothing less.
"Everything I'm doing now is the product of my own deliberation and decisions. Kaenerna never advised me on any of it."
There was a misunderstanding that came naturally to those around Johan, simply because he was so young. He handled situations with seasoned command and laid out strategy after strategy, so people couldn't help wondering, Was it the mages giving him counsel?
"How disappointing. To think that's what you believed of me."
"N-no, my lord! That isn't what I meant at all!"
The moment Johan feigned sorrow, Ezelia began fidgeting in distress. The reaction was fun to toy with, and Johan laughed inwardly.
"Count. The suppression operation is finished."
"Good work. Go rest. See that the men get their rewards."
Goiden nodded and moved off with the slaves in tow.
Johan was now embarked on a wholesale hunt for pirates.
The largest monster horde in the region had been destroyed, and most of the vassals had come under Johan's banner — there was no longer any reason to wait. Johan moved aggressively.
His primary targets were the pirate bands that remained, blissfully unaware. Companies of cavalry, numbering from a few dozen to a few hundred, moved swiftly and struck at them from every direction.
The small pirate crews — no horses, and slowed by the plunder they'd hauled off — were annihilated wherever they were found.
The purge fell mercilessly even on those who had felt safe precisely because they kept their distance from Baron Monrado's domain. Johan himself rode out at the head of his knights and cavalry to sweep them away.
"You may keep the coin and valuables, but return the livestock and provisions to the nearby villages."
Even as he rode through the territories of his various vassals, Johan never neglected such careful management. By rights he could have seized it all for himself, but he chose not to.
Winning people's hearts required patience. This charity dispensed in Johan's name would, in the end, bear fruit and return to him.
Even now, priests everywhere were singing Johan's praises. Even serfs who knew nothing else knew who had beaten back the pirates and who was dispensing charity.
Nobles tended to underestimate the power of the loyalty such villages carried, but Johan did not.
To be sure, the real power lay with the vassals. The master of a village was, in the end, the vassal who ruled it, and Johan could not interfere with how they exercised those rights.
But invisible did not mean powerless. Why else would serf revolts and city uprisings keep breaking out across history?
The loyalty of these people was an iron chain fastened around the vassals' necks. Should any of them ever contemplate betraying Johan again, it would give them pause.
Six battles of respectable size. Dozens of smaller skirmishes besides.
By the end of it, the pirates of the southwest had either fled back out to sea or thrown in with the pirate bands gathered in the Marquisate.
The vassals who held territory breathed a sigh of relief, but not one of them believed the fighting was over.
Everyone could feel how strong and how ambitious this young count was who had appeared so suddenly.
Not only did the remaining pirate bands remain, but the fight plainly would not end until the matter was settled with the Marquis himself.
And the vassals wanted that fight.
Whatever their reasons, now that they had betrayed the Marquis and taken this young count as their new lord, the Marquis had to be destroyed.
If the Marquis remained standing, sooner or later he would exact his revenge for their betrayal!
"I was about to summon the mercenaries, and what in the world are these men playing at?"
At Johan's question, Gurerik broke out in a cold sweat.
As the pirate suppression progressed, Johan had begun trying to make contact with the mercenaries up north.
Johan, who had secured not only his own county but most of the southern vassals, had enjoyed a prosperous year — but so had the mercenaries hired by the Church.
The pirate upheaval had made their plundering all the easier. The Marquis of Crucho's army had even foundered along the way...
They would have split into two columns, pillaging the Marquisate to the north and the fiefs surrounding it, and Johan had meant to call them back down.
Mercenaries were greedy, but they weren't without a sense of order. If they'd looted the Marquis's lands, they needed to show loyalty to the Marquis's enemies. Attacking both sides was the act of a madman.
Yet there had been no answer. The envoys he sent never returned. Gurerik, flustered, dispatched the mercenaries again — and again they failed to come back.
"My apologies, my lord. It seems the men have something else in mind."
"Hmm."
Johan found Gurerik's explanation odd. Were the mercenaries truly that stupid?
Granted, having looted everything not nailed down, they might well prefer to sit out the rest of the conflict quietly.
But if so, they ought to have sent envoys with every excuse and apology they could muster. Ignoring contact altogether was something only a lunatic would do.
Of course, when a man wants to die, there's little he won't do...
"Shall we move on and leave the mercenaries be?"
"No. They're two or three thousand strong — too many to simply write off. I'll go and see for myself. It isn't far."
Marching the entire host north to investigate would have drawn far too much attention. Rather than keep sending envoys who never came back, it was better to check in person.
"I'll have the elites readied."
"Leave out the centaurs. They'd stand out far too much. The eastern tribesmen as well... pick out only the mercenaries skilled at fighting mounted."
He could have sent scouts, but Johan preferred to go himself whenever possible. Hadn't he ridden at the front throughout the fighting with the pirates?
On its face it was a reckless habit, but for a noble it was honorable and courageous conduct. There was a reason even the most militarily incompetent lords strapped on armor and led from the front.
For a noble, honor and reputation mattered far more than most realized, and a whisper of cowardice was fatal to one's standing.
By that measure, Johan was beyond reproach.
Courage like a lion's, and a faith as pure as fresh-fallen snow. Even the vassals who had bent the knee out of sheer terror acknowledged as much.
Of course, Johan himself wasn't acting out of any chivalric conviction...
"...So they weren't traitors after all."
Johan clicked his tongue. In the shattered village lay corpses dressed in familiar garb. Mercenaries. They had apparently been staying in the village when they were attacked.
"Pirates hit them, I take it?"
"That would be my guess, my lord."
"Idiots."
At Johan's words, Gowan barely suppressed a laugh. This young knight had become a count, yet still carried himself with the same easy familiarity as before.
It pleased him, but a lowly mercenary had to know his place. Gowan straightened his bearing before speaking.
"No doubt there were circumstances, my lord."
"Men who make their living doing this, done in by pirates... what a joke."
From the traces, at least a hundred pirates had come swarming in. Against numbers like that, the mercenaries should have banded together and fought. Instead they'd simply been slaughtered.
"There's someone over there!"
When one of the mercenaries shouted, Johan turned his head. He saw a wounded mercenary emerge from a collapsed house, freeze at the sight of them —
"Seize him."
"Uwaaagh!"
The man had evidently mistaken Johan's party for pirates and tried to flee. Pirate or not, running into armed men in a place like this boded nothing good — being fellow mercenaries was no guarantee they wouldn't run him through.
But the wounded man's legs were slow, and he was quickly captured. Forced to his knees, the mercenary trembled as he looked up at Johan.
"This is Count Yeitz himself. Mind your manners, dog."
"K-Knight... no. My lord Count?"
At the mercenaries' words, the man finally grasped Johan's identity and blinked. So that's why he seemed terrifying as sin. This was the knight who had led the soldiers from the very front when the Church marched out.
He'd heard the rumors — that the knight had become a count — but never expected to see it here. Astonishing, yes, but under the circumstances, rather a mercy.
"What happened here?"
The man belonged to a small company called the Laurel Mercenary Band. Their purses had grown fat on this campaign, and they'd been living it up in the village, feasting with his comrades.
Then the pirates had come swarming in. The mercenaries had shrieked and fought back, but the numbers were hopelessly uneven. In the end, he alone had hidden and survived.
"Where are the rest of the mercenaries, that your lot was off on your own? If pirates have pushed this far north, you damn well ought to be standing and fighting them."
At Johan's words, the other mercenaries nodded. Most of the pirates were currently massed toward the Marquisate, preparing to strike at the Marquis's seat.
Under those conditions, the ones who had climbed this far north couldn't be all that formidable. And they'd failed to hold even that.
"Did you not hear, Count? The mercenary captains are cursed."
"...What did you say?"
"Cursed, my lord! Cursed something dreadful!"
The man babbled, shaking like a leaf. Johan found it absurd, but the mercenaries around him crossed themselves in fear. There was no one on earth as wedded to superstition as mercenaries.
When they had first marched separately from Johan, the mood among the mercenaries had been splendid.
The enemy had barely managed a defense, and every passing day piled more riches behind them.
Then, at some point, the captain of the Gorgalle Mercenary Company collapsed. Next, the captain who led the Bastard of Aquitaine's men went down. After him, the captain of the Medusa Company...
Then it was the centurions' turn. Watching their centurions fall and writhe in their sickbeds, the mercenaries froze with terror.
By then the rumor had spread: the captains leading the mercenary bands must have committed some blasphemous act and been cursed for it.
Given the state of things, it was only natural the mercenaries could do nothing.
A few small companies and the quick-witted, faint-hearted ones deserted at once; those who remained, robbed of their commanders, could neither advance nor retreat and simply held their ground.
Morale, of course, had scraped bedrock. No one knew when the curse might leap onto them next.
So that's why they couldn't respond even when the pirates split off and ran wild this close by.
The envoys had either been attacked by pirates, or had visited the mercenaries' camp and caught the curse there. It was obvious, once he thought about it.
Johan posed the obvious question first.
"Isn't it a plague?"
The difference between the mercenaries here and Johan was, quite simply, how they thought.
These men feared God, feared superstition, feared everything under heaven. Johan believed in none of it.
Evil spirits feared those who did not fear them, and curses were no different. It stood to reason that Johan's soul was strong.
"It's not a plague, my lord!"
"Count, it doesn't appear to be a sickness. Surely those mercenary louts could tell the difference."
The other mercenaries agreed with the man. It was far too strange to be any ordinary contagion.
"Hmm... Fine. Let's have a look at these faces, then."
"C-Count! What if the curse latches onto you—"
These were men who would have followed Johan into an assault on the pirate main body with only a few dozen at his back, yet the mention of visiting cursed mercenaries set them all a-tremble.
Curses are scary!
Johan almost rapped them for their uselessness, then stopped. In fair weather they were brimming with loyalty, after all.
In times like these, you had to speak in language your audience understood.
"Look at me. I, Johan of House Yeitz, am a knight blessed by God. Was I not certified in the Church's own name?"
At his words, the mercenaries found themselves nodding. Johan's claim did carry conviction.
If that count was not blessed, then who in the world was?
"Just as priests drive out evil through the anointing rite, a sacred power flows through my soul and my blood — blessed by God, praised by His Holiness the Pope and the bishops. No wicked curse will dare come near it."
"Oooooh..."
The mercenaries crossed themselves. Perhaps it was only the noon sun beating down unusually hot, but they could almost believe they saw a halo behind Johan's head.
"W-would you... take my hand, Count?"
"...I don't mind, but why?"
"When I was a boy, a priest told me that those born of noble blood can cure sickness by touch alone."
...Wasn't that priest a charlatan?