Traveling Companions
And Eldans was a traveling merchant under the Kettana Merchant Guild. If he made trouble here, he'd find himself blacklisted everywhere the guild's reach extended.
Damn it... can't we just run?
Shit. Who risks their neck for a few coins?
The mercenaries gritted their teeth and watched the two men talk. It was only the presence of their captain, Gowan, that kept them from bolting.
"I know it. I've no intention of crossing blades with a knight."
Eldans grimaced, turning the problem over in his head.
"Didn't we already check every lord holding land in this area?"
"Of course we checked!"
The middle-aged Cat Beastfolk's mind raced. Every territory around here had been accounted for. They'd even paid their tolls in full...
So were these men truly bandits, then?
Eldans shot a glance at the forest. It would be hard to track anyone who fled into those trees, but entering the woods was suicide in itself. And if these men really had come to rob them, there could well be an ambush waiting under the canopy.
While he wrestled with the question, Johan reached the party. The mercenaries clutched their weapons tight. If things went wrong, they planned to scatter in all directions — coin and reputation be damned.
"M-may the gods' blessing be upon you, Sir Knight. From which honorable house do you hail?"
"The gods' blessing upon you. I am Johan of the House of Yeats."
Johan changed the name of his house. A different spelling of Eitz — Yeats. The continent was home to plenty of small, obscure noble families, so no one would question a name they'd never heard of.
"Ah, of course! I see!"
So he's a real knight.
There were two kinds of knights.
The first were commoner-born mercenaries who happened to scrape together equipment and a horse and rode around as men-at-arms declaring, I'm a knight. With truly exceptional luck, one might catch a noble's eye on the battlefield or at a tournament and be granted land — a genuine title. Of course, such men were tolerated to their faces and laughed at behind their backs. A mercenary who didn't know his place.
The other kind were knights of noble birth, in the true sense of the word. There were ill-trained ones like Johan's half-brothers, but they were the exception; a knight forged through brutal training from boyhood was in a different class entirely from a commoner-turned-sold-of-fortune.
The noble knight drilled ceaselessly from dawn to dusk — systematically schooled in every weapon art, horsemanship, the handling of armor and shield, hunting, chess, tactics, and more. The commoner mercenary had picked up a handful of moves from some old village sellsword in his youth and survived the battlefield by the skin of his teeth.
Tales of lowborn men earning knighthood through valor were things bard songs were made of. Reality was far colder and crueler.
Naturally, noble-born knights despised and distrusted these self-styled knights of common blood. One might think, Couldn't you simply dress the part and pass? But no. A commoner imitating a noble was next to impossible. Accent, bearing, manners, knowledge, attitude — these were things a man could not learn without being born to nobility.
In that respect, Johan's accent was flawless — the accent of the aristocracy, to the letter. Even within the same Imperial tongue, the way nobles spoke and the way commoners spoke differed sharply.
Eldans rolled his eyes. He knew the man was no mercenary pretending to be a knight, but that didn't mean his situation had improved. If the man were an enemy, he was now a far more dangerous one. A mercenary would almost have been preferable.
"What business brings Sir Johan this way...?"
"Where are you headed?"
"We make for Lutzbeck, milord. From there we intend to pass through to the city of Marcel. We've paid our toll to the great Count Zarfen..."
Dropping the name of Count Zarfen — the lord of the land they now stood on — was a subtle warning aimed at Johan. We've paid our taxes to Count Zarfen; we stand under his protection now, it meant.
Of course, if the man decided to ignore all that and kill them anyway, an absent count couldn't stop him. Still, it beat saying nothing. Sometimes a name was mightier than a blade.
Johan understood the implication and smiled thinly. So that's why they were so wound up.
Fair enough. Caution first, I suppose.
"I'd no intention of harming you. Our roads seem to run the same way, so I thought I'd ask — would you care for a traveling companion?"
"Ah...! The honor is ours!"
Eldans's face visibly brightened. Escaping unrobbed was fortune enough; a knight at their side was a gift on top of it.
It was an offer he couldn't have refused even if he'd wanted to — and he had no reason to refuse it anyway. Eldans accepted on the spot.
"Why would a knight want travel companions? Aren't you suspicious of us?"
"Suspicious of what, you idiot? Shut your mouth if you want to keep breathing."
"Looking at him, I'd say he's a hedge knight... that's a decade's worth of bad luck right there."
Muttered Kahn, the oldest man in the company. For his years, he had seen much and knew much.
"A hedge knight?"
"A knight with no land. Probably a third or fourth son of some house."
The eldest son inherited the estate; everyone below him got nothing — not even the broth from the pot. Each younger son had to scratch out his own path in life. Still, it beat being a commoner. They had connections, and some measure of inheritance besides. Played well, a man might find a new liege lord and win land of his own — a far more plausible dream than anything those self-made commoner knights could chase.
"But he doesn't even keep a squire or a servant, does he? Why would a man like that wander alone?"
"How should I know a noble house's affairs? There are poor nobles too."
Kahn shrugged and shut his mouth. The other mercenaries did the same. Before Johan, silence was the safer choice than idle talk.
Johan naturally fell in beside Eldans. None of the mercenaries were mounted, and even if one had been, he wouldn't have dared ride abreast of the knight.
Still, all this equipment...
Johan was startled as he studied the mercenaries' gear. It was far shabbier than he'd expected.
No one wore metal armor. Not one of them. They were all in ragged cloth, padded thick with stuffing — and even with that, the limit was obvious. The best-equipped man of the lot had iron plates layered over his chest and chains wrapped around his arms for protection, and that was all.
Their weapons were worse. Spears and bows were one thing — forgivable. But there were men carrying woodcutter's axes. Even a man with a club. He knew that the good hardwoods of this region were as hard and heavy as iron, but still. A club.
That's a far cry from the Aquitaine Wolves, isn't it?
And here Johan was mistaken. The Aquitaine Wolves were among the most famous mercenary companies on the entire continent. When word of them had reached his remote little territory, it meant they were the peak of the trade.
This era had almost no standing armies. Recruiting, training, and maintaining soldiers cost a staggering fortune. The usual practice was to drill a handful of slaves into bodyguards, or train up a few promising commoners or household servants for the same purpose.
Most lords preferred to hire mercenaries as needed, when needed. Only the great magnates kept mercenaries on permanent retainer. And the Aquitaine Wolves were the company the Emperor himself kept on retainer — their equipment and arms inevitably outclassed those of petty knights.
Among the mercenaries a man could actually find for hire, Gowan's band was decent enough. Every man but the greenest had seen real combat; Gowan himself was capable; each of them owned at least one suit of armor, and shields besides.
Poor mercenaries, are they? Well... I suppose a company's always poor at the start.
Thus did Gowan's mercenaries labor under a wildly mistaken impression.
"You say you're guild-affiliated?"
"Yes, milord."
"I hear the merchant guilds make a fortune. Is it true?"
"Haha... The great guilds turn a handsome profit, certainly, but a wandering peddler like myself, bound to a guild and forever on the road? What could I possibly earn."
Merchant guilds — trading houses, as they were called.
The people of the Middle Ages banded together by trade, protecting their own interests and rights. Merchants were no different. The great trading houses established branch offices in city after city, generating staggering profits through the merchants on their rolls.
The Kettana Merchant Guild, to which Eldans belonged, was one such house — its operations centered on the southern cities of the Holy Empire and, further south still, the free cities of the Catalia Peninsula beyond the Dwarf Mountains.
"I'd have liked to join a guild myself, once."
"Wahaha! Your words alone are an honor, milord!"
Mistaking the remark for a joke meant to flatter him, Eldans laughed. Plenty of merchants dreamed of becoming nobles; nobles who wished to become merchants were rare. Knights, rarer still.
Even so, it didn't feel bad. Eldans found himself warming to this young knight.
Ah — careful, now. All the more reason to be on my guard at a time like this.
The man looked to be around twenty. Had Eldans married, he might have had a son that age — but such things counted for nothing in the face of rank. This was precisely when one had to be careful.
"You know, my dream as a boy was to become a knight. An utterly impossible dream, of course. How could a man like me ever fight on those battlefields? I still shake like a leaf just traveling as I do. Meeting you is a stroke of luck, Sir Knight."
Half of it was genuine.
These were the days when the roads crawled with every manner of danger. Another sword at their side could only be a blessing — and if that sword belonged to a knight, so much the better.
"Isn't this region relatively safe, though?"
Count Zarfen was a reasonably capable lord, and as far as Eldans knew, the man took his peacekeeping seriously. In an age when plenty of nobles pocketed the tolls and wiped their mouths clean, that much made him a very fine lord indeed.
"That was the old days, milord. I hear the House of Zarfen lost its territorial war, and now the pay owed to its mercenaries has fallen behind. So the bulk of those men deserted..."
Eldans shrugged.
Mercenaries were greedy and rough. Few of them would sit patiently on an overdue wage. They drifted to other employ, or prowled the countryside for a while, turning to banditry. The line between mercenary and brigand was a thin one.
"This whole region is on edge right now. I only pray those deserters hurry off to some other war."
The continent never stopped overflowing with blood and iron. War was a fact of daily life. The Holy Empire fought itself within — lord against lord — while abroad it warred with the nobles of the Kingdom of Erance and with the city-states of the peninsula south of the Dwarf Mountains. The Kingdom of Erance, for its part, squabbled internally among its elven nobles while fighting the Holy Empire and the nobles of the Kingdom of Findland without.
Not the wars of nations marshaling their full strength to fight until one fell — but the wars of lords contending over a handspan of land, a sliver of honor, striking bargains when it suited them. And in wars like these, it was always the mercenaries who fought hardest.
Most of the deserters now playing bandit would, the moment a major conflict broke out nearby, flow toward it like water downhill.
"And with things as they are, is this many men really enough?"
"Quite enough, milord. We keep to the Imperial highways, and even the rankest mercenaries don't cause trouble openly on the roads."
Bandits preyed on the weak — on softer, easier marks.