Born a Monster

Chapter 80: Born A Monster, Chapter 80 – Harvest

Born A Monster

Chapter 80

Harvest

If you tell your military superior that you have Carpenter levels, expect to be assigned work as a Fletcher, Bowyer, or Arbalest (maker of crossbows). My first bow snapped rather than being strung, and my first crossbow ripped itself to pieces when the trigger was pulled.

And so I spent two weeks carving notched rods, and applying feathers and arrowheads to them. Honestly, the hard part is getting the arrow shafts properly rounded. The pine for them was readily available.

There were a number of things to do after work each day. The dog I had terrorized not two months earlier was in turn being bullied by a horse.

Now horses are big animals, with a Might of four and a frame to match. So of course it tried to bite me when I came near to where it was stabled.

.....

I told him.

He snorted.

Animals really are easier to negotiate with than humans.

I did, of course, explain to the stable owners that while mute, they had acquired a rare horse, able to understand human speech. Once they understood they could charge more not only for their Aware horse, but for his children as well... human greed saw my end of that bargain fulfilled.

The dog and mice were otherwise doing well, I was surprised to learn. Only half of the next generation of mice would be Aware, but I was assured that this was just the natural order of things, at least among sentient mice.

At the end of every Slothday, I would meet the others. Although they used different colors, the Kathani also celebrated the transition from large summer to small summer. They stalwartly refused to buy woolen garments until the first cold winds arrived, assuring Philecto and I that layers of lighter cloth did the same job equally well.

We talked through the points of killing Rakkal. How his left-handedness changed the deployment of our archers, how we could best set up the courtyard in front of city hall as a killing field, that sort of thing.

Stocks of oil and poison and bandages were laid in; promises of healing potions to be brewed at various times during the siege had been made and paid for.

And, of course, our archers needed arrows. I was able to get them the pine, cut properly along the grain, and arrowheads of metal and bone.

But, generally speaking, those two weeks went by placidly, if in a whirlwind of preparation.

And then it was harvest time, and there were stall-cities emergent at all three gates.

#

I wasn’t assigned to any of those, but spent some time at each. Craftsmen had come from Whitehill, including a stall for Raven Spear Brassworks.

I couldn’t afford the round shield their clerk brought south with them, but it was made to human size anyway. Nor could I even afford the fortified canteen.

I did buy bundles of arrow shafts at a price of five per tin, before someone reported the prices to someone with the ability to buy out all of them at a single purchase. I’m told the town officials bought them out, but we never saw those shafts while on fletching detail.

And, someone had convinced the town long ago that paying civic employees, including the guard, militia, and watch, just before the seasonal festivals was good for both morale and the economy. Good going, whomever you are.

When you’ve been minding your tin pieces, a windfall of three silver seems like a massive influx of coin.

Oh, I told myself that I’d spend it wisely, but there were pies and peppers stuffed with seasoned bread crumbs. There were meats and cheeses and paprika bread, balls of chopped walnuts stuck together with honey...

I flagged getting my Blubber back. My System must have started without me; the timer was only a week, and I would even get a point of Gluttony XP when it was done. Bonus!

Not that it was all fun and games. Even out of uniform, it wasn’t hard to remember the lizard-child was a member of the city military. I often had to chase thieves and pickpockets, and sometimes even caught them. (Although, to be honest, I chased more of them into groups of similarly off-duty guardsmen.)

Punishment during the festivals was light, especially for minors. I think only one of them lost a hand, and she had been a habitual offender. Most of them spent from dawn to dusk in the stocks, if that much.

And while there had been rumors of the siege, the town storehouses were full, and after all, the town walls had endured two sieges, and wasn’t the town just at the most ready it had ever been?

Each tower along the wall had a small root cellar, which had been emptied of detritus and filled with food rations.

Tar was in short supply, but pine sap heated up nicely and could be poured through the machicolations if need be. For now, they just hardened into resin inside their metal braziers and captured bugs.

Indeed, I often got caught up in the events. Once the buskers knew that I would tip for songs, plays, and even puppet shows, a constant stream of various children made certain my available hours were filled with such treats.

And thus, coin by coin, did my silver become copper, much of which became tin.

There was much of legerdemain passed off as magic, and many charms that WERE magic, at least until the next full moon. There were snake oils and hair tonics, love potions and readings of the omens through water, or smoke, or cards.

There were even a set of four folios, said to recreate faithfully the first eighty four pages of the Legendary Book itself.

But most of the real magic was subtle.

#

It wasn’t like I had developed my magical senses by then. I was just observant.

Water heated instantly to produce tea. Small winds that swept paths clear of leaves and other debris. Hooded cloaks that the rain beaded and dripped off of. That sort of thing.

But Harvest Week is only a week, and then people began to go back to work. Like vines without rain, the stalls outside the gates vanished, one by one. And then, on the sixth day, all of the remaining stalls were gone.

“Well, that’s that, then.” Sergeant Gilean declared. “They’ve gotten word that something’s coming. The tower is on rations, effective now.” He put a heavy padlock on the door to the root cellar.

They arrived some twenty six hundred strong. Mostly Uruk and Goblins, but with a good number of men, and some taller, thinner, folk I recognized as hobgoblins.

The watchtowers fell that first day. Each had four men assigned, and those who survived joined the work digging that outermost trench again.

Beyond the new trench, over five in six of the army camped in tents. Slowly, as the trench developed, more and more soldiers manned it. The others set about gathering everything edible that wasn’t already inside the walls.

No fewer than six wood lots were created, both for firewood and for the making of siege engines. The earlier sieges had provided them a good sense of our defenses; they gathered their siege engines to the southeast, but did not attack.

On the third night, when the inward running trenches reached the range arrows could reach from the walls, a horde of goblins was unleashed. Their ladders were too short for the walls, and nearly a quarter of them were dead when it was over.

My stomach grumbled, but I knew those goblins were just unavailable. Besides, ick, goblins.

I’m told in some areas they never even reached the walls.

But they’d done their job, buying time for the heavy stone barricades to be brought forward and set up. The second row of trenches began linking up.

We weren’t taking arrow fire yet; I passed the days whittling between crenelations, looking out every few knife strokes to be sure the enemy wasn’t up to anything.

On the fifth night, a kobold somehow slipped onto the walls, wounding two soldiers before escaping.

This seemed wrong; they hadn’t even finished their work on the outer ring. It was as through they were just bored with the early part of the siege, and wanted to just be done with it.

And I realized exactly what was happening.

Rakkal wanted to take Narrow Valley, and quickly. He had given orders, and people were racing to make them happen.

#

They built twin dams, one where the river entered Narrow Valley and another where it left. They could have changed the course of that river, but they didn’t. It was as though the dams were just to delay the water and catch all the fish.

So, yeah, the price of fish rose like a vengeful dragon.

In the meantime, our foes received multiple carts of goods from the south; eventually, they had the carts coming along one path, and departing along another.

The second night attack came on the seventh day of the siege. It started much as the first had, but they pulled up archers and siege weapons. Day shift was woken to help night shift, and it was immediately obvious why. The goblins had ladders that reached the top of the walls, and their infantry moved in, too late, to support them.

It is surprisingly difficult for grown men to use a fork-pole to push ladders away from walls, but less so when torches are dropped from machicolations to allow the archers to see the goblins.

Another hundred twenty or so goblins died, and many pyres build outside the trench hosted Uruk warriors, as well.

Some idiot among them must have thought that was a grand idea, because they tried the exact same thing just after noon the next day. The goblins broke before reaching the walls, and the entire attack dissolved away.

Our first hospitalizations had occurred, and although we didn’t know it, so had our first deaths.

They rushed again that night as well, goblins supported by man-kind infantry. They ran out of siege engines early that night, though, and their archers retired rather than suffer the attacks from ours. Nobody told their infantry to break off the attack. By midnight, the walls were secure again.

It still didn’t count as a full night’s sleep. Thinking back on it, they might have won in another night or two if they’d been able to keep up that pace. They definitely had the manpower to take those losses, if they’d been of a mind to.

Instead, they sent nightmares, knowing they’d be weakened by the enchantments on the city walls. As such things go, I had a pleasant conversation with a hobgoblin-headed bird on the futility of life, and being the defender in sieges in particular.

But our morale was high, and the enemy seemed to have expended over half their expendable troops. Our mood infected the town, who also took up the view that this was just another siege, and the enemy was already desperate from hunger.

Except they weren’t. Day and night, they labored at a feverish pace. Although the trenches had been filled in, they might have been packed improperly; it seemed they were dug right back in the same places, and even faster than before.

On the one claw, one in eight of the enemy were already dead.

On the other, they outnumbered the town population two to one.

#

I am told this last can be accomplished merely by treating cloth with the proper mixture of oils. If so, then I can only say that science is able to accomplish small miracles.