Chapter 62: Guardia del Varco

The wine had made a few rounds when the work finally began to move, orders creeping forward under all the shouting and noise. The soldiers came away from the fires two and three at a time, to plunder whatever and deal with the bodies before full dark swallowed the field and made the job twice as troublesome.

Vito worked with the rest of them, elbow deep in the ugly business as every other man there.

There was no special bench for a patrician when the dead needed stripping and the living needed carrying. The corpses came first, and nobody wasted ceremony on that.

Coin, blades, mail worth cutting loose, anything that looked useful or expensive, all of it went into sacks before the bodies were hauled to the pyres already climbing downwind of camp. The fires were close enough for the men to watch the smoke and far enough away that supper might still be eaten without tasting of it.

A picchiere held up a fine leather belt he’d taken from one of the dead and turned it slowly in the firelight.

"Look at this, some knight bastard dressed finer to die than most men dress to get married."

As for the platoon, their three dead were handled differently.

The bodies were brought away from the others, washed, and wrapped in whatever clean cloth available. Then they were laid apart from the pyres altogether.

No priest had come this far west, so one of the veteran soldiers took the job himself and worked through rough prayers to San Marco and whichever saint that happened to be listening.

Every man who could still stand made the sign of the cross over each body in turn.

The youngest dead was a lad named Zanetto.

He had spent two weeks promising to teach the platoon a card trick and had never managed to perform it correctly even once.

Now, he went into the ground with his cloak folded beneath his head.

The work done, Vito went to find the barber-surgeon and spotted him bent over Ruggiero’s leg.

He had to personally enforce some commands. "Boil the water first, and wash your hands before you touch anything else. Wine on the wound, then the bandage."

The surgeon made one hideous expression of disapproval. "I’ve been treating cuts like this since before you had your own teeth, Ser Barozzi. My masters bled wounds to cure them, not damned scrubbing."

"Amico, when I asked about your complaints? Do what you were told."

Ruggiero was propped against a saddle, his leg bound tight, and he managed a grin thin enough to show the price of making it. "Still there, Ser Barozzi. Whether it’s still mine to stand on is something we’ll find out tomorrow."

Bortolo lay pale nearby, his side wrapped in linen dark around the edges. Vito crouched beside him without asking whether he would wake for the attention.

Zuane, with one arm in a sling and his good humor still intact, waved him off before he could spend another minute worrying over what, compared with the rest of the day’s injuries, amounted to little more than a scratch.

Then the surgeon got to Vito.

He pulled Vito’s collar aside, poured wine straight into the cut without any warning, and wrapped it with plain satisfaction.

"There. Boiled, washed, and wined, exactly as your excellency wants."

"Ow. Beautifully done, amico."

Eventually, with time, the camp began to look like a camp again.

First the rough perimeter went up, four watches posted. Then the enemy horses, a dozen or more still wandering loose, were driven into a corral made from rope and stakes.

The latrine trench came last. It was dug well downstream from the water they intended to drink, despite the objections of men who had already spent a day fighting and had no desire to spend their evening digging holes.

"Holy Christ, if I told you to dig, just do the bloody job." Vito told them.

He didn’t bother explaining. Soldiers had never dug faster because explained why the hole mattered, and there was no reason to begin expecting miracles now.

Next task on the list, Vito found Nico to pass a message. La Contessa was to leave the sand and spend the night off the mouth of Chania’s harbor, close enough that anything leaving the city by water would have to pass her first.

"Repeat it back."

Nico did, word for word, then rushed toward the shore.

Domenego was able to find Vito not long afterward, and for once there was no trace in his voice of a man speaking for an audience. "Three dead, fourteen wounded. Ten of those will walk again inside the week, while three won’t be walking anywhere for a while, and one of them may never walk again."

Vito accepted the numbers without flinching and without need for repeat.

"Then tomorrow we bury three and carry four. Tell me about the road to the gates instead."

Domenego told him.

His account was plain and practical now, and they went over tomorrow’s march step by step until there was nothing left worth discussion that could not wait for dawn.

When the work was done, Domenego permitted the camp what he’d promised, and all at once.

Within an hour the whole field looked less like a battlefield than a wedding where the bride had been forgotten and everybody had decided the important part was drinking.

"To Fosco!"

Domenego roared the words with one arm hooked around the man’s shoulders and the other holding a cup high enough to lose half its contents. "Who held that gap alone long enough for God himself to send reinforcements out of pity! And who, I am reliably informed, filled his braies somewhere around the third charge! I call that a badge of honor, because better men than you have shat themselves over considerably less!"

Fosco made no attempt to defend himself, mainly because he was laughing too hard to get the words out.

Nearby, one soldier was already on the third telling of his afternoon, and each telling had added another enemy to the dead.

Two in the first, told hoarsely and with suspicious honesty.

Four by the second.

By the time Momolo took charge of the story, it had become five of the archon’s guardsmen and a horse, all delivered from the top of an overturned barrel with both arms stretched wide, as if Homer himself had personally appointed him keeper of the facts.

He announced to anyone foolish enough to doubt it. "Momolo was there, and Momolo swears before every saint presently listening that the horse alone took two separate prayers to bring down!"

"They rode like men reaching for their mothers’ skirts the moment the ground turned bad!"

Vito let himself enjoy some of it.

He passed the last of a wineskin with Momolo and laughed. "You did well tonight, better than well. San Marco’s going to owe you a favor after that performance."

"San Marco owes Momolo several already."

Momolo looked pleased with the accounting.

"I’ve stopped keeping count out of Christian charity."

Somewhere in the middle of that laugh, Vito felt himself slip loose from the noise. Before he’d quite decided to do it, he was beyond the firelight toward the rise above camp.

From there the fires looked smaller.

Beyond them, three wrapped shadows lay waiting for dawn. Vito found that he could not look away from them.

Three men were dead because he’d read a chart correctly, read a streambed correctly, and on his own authority felt the battle was worth the risk.

He hadn’t been wrong.

The shield wall held. The city’s army had broken and run, and none of Vito’s men had died for nothing. That was precisely how he’d hoped it would go.

None of that altered what lay beneath those cloaks.

Without meaning to, he thought of a waterfront half a world and eight hundred years away.

He thought of a hand he’d trusted around a pistol instead of a handshake, of every time he’d promised his mother next month, when what he’d really meant was tonight. Only he hadn’t been brave enough to say it.

He had sworn to himself, waking in this body with an arrow wound barely closed in his own neck, that the next time he died it would be by his own decision and nobody else’s.

He had never made that promise on behalf of the men who would die because of him.

Vito sat with that for a while.

🪙 [SYSTEM NOTIFICATION]

Quest Complete : The Battle For Chania

Reward : 200 Fate

Reward : Perk — Guardia del Varco (Third Platoon, Compagnia del Leone Nero)

I’ve had to invent an entirely new heading in my own records for this one, which is more work than you generally deserve. It doesn’t belong to you.

Vito blinked at the box before his mind caught up with the second line.

"Not mine?"

The Third Platoon earned this perk without you waiting to take the credit. I understand that must feel like a novelty.

"Fair enough. What does it do?"

Their strength and vigor will increase whenever their mission is to hold any chokepoint against obscene numbers. It follows the banner, and even if the platoon grows from sixty men to six hundred, every one of them inherits exactly the same shrug from providence that the present lot did.

"Then I hope providence has decent taste in banners."

It rarely does. Congratulations regardless.

Vito looked once more at the fires, then beyond them.

"Today, the field," he said to nobody. "Tomorrow, we collect the prize."

Then he turned toward the light, toward what remained of his men, and let the night keep whatever was left.