Accidental War Mage

What had been planned as a short detour to find a stag turned into a lengthy detour without much conscious intention. When the sun set, we set camp and resolved to catch up to my battalion on the next day. Surprisingly, they had chosen to follow my orders with alacrity instead of waiting for us – Katya wondered aloud if they had meant to leave us behind, and I assured her otherwise with more confidence than the situation warranted. We spent two days following their trail before a storm hit; after the storm, it took us a week just to find the trail again, and much longer before we caught up.

When we did catch up, they were stopped in a mountain pass, officers deep in argument. A group of hollow-faced soldiers carried loaded arquebuses as they stood nervously around a pair of supply wagons. After Yuri barked to announce our arrival and ran out to greet us, we were made to feel welcome and I immediately found myself busy with matters of command.

The infantry captain we’d left Yuri with didn’t feel like she had quite enough authority to boss around the other officers beyond earnestly repeating what I had told her; they seemed to be sharing her doubts. The colonel in charge of supply was theoretically the highest-ranking officer in our force; while he and the other officers accepted that General Spitignov’s orders placed me in charge of the force in an unusual rearrangement of ordinary matters of rank and seniority, he was unwilling to deviate further from protocol.

To him, it wasn’t clear that the most junior captain in our army had the authority to issue new orders in my absence that more senior officers might need to obey. It certainly wasn’t clear to either the supply colonel or said captain. This was unfortunate because, in spite of his seniority, the supply colonel was not a person I wanted to leave in charge of matters in my absence, as he didn’t seem to be inclined to make any decisions I agreed with. (The inclination was mutual.) My army needed its officers sorted out into a proper and functional pecking order so it could function smoothly in my absence.

This matter also wasn’t clear to the Swedish captain, who didn’t feel that his contract had placed him under the orders of anyone who wasn’t me, up to and including the supply colonel. The supply colonel and the infantry captain both agreed that the various mercenary officers should answer to both of them, but Captain Felix Rimehammer felt otherwise. He objected strenuously to both the supply colonel’s ration cuts and the infantry captain’s nervous requests for the command codes for his self-propelled guns.

I spent the rest of the day smoothing (or in some cases plucking) various ruffled feathers among the officers as we rode through the cold wet snow. For now, the ground was still frozen and hard, and I wanted to put the miles on before ice turned to mud. If this happened before we reached a railroad or a navigable river, the thaw of ice into mud would make it quite difficult to take the wagons cross-country. A shut-down mech is a heavy load for a wagon even on a good road; in mud, it is a recipe for immersion.

All the little details of supervising a force on the move weighed down on me. Whenever any two soldiers from different units (or officers from the same unit) had the least difference of opinion, my own opinion was needed to resolve the matter. And then there were the real problems; horses throwing shoes, fixing burst water pipes, clearing trees spaced too near to let the larger carts through, and all the other necessary tasks required to keep the entire circus going in the correct direction all at once.

When evening fell, we set camp, felling trees to make space and create a secure perimeter. My throat was hoarse, and I was reduced to whispering until the watch schedule had been put together for the night. After that I snuck away in silence, pen and ink still clutched absently in my hands, escaping to Katya’s little tent to evade further attention. It was a snug fit for the two of us; but after a few minutes of quiet wriggling, we managed to fit ourselves comfortably inside and around the tent, blankets, kit, and one other without too much damage to any of those things. Yuri had to be satisfied with parking his furry self right outside the tent, as there was no room for him.

When I dozed off at long last, it was with the warm friendly weight of Katya weighing upon my body and the cold unfriendly weight of my worries weighing upon my mind.

I dreamed about organizational charts, and about ice melting into mud. About running out of fuel. Of sinking carts trapped in peat bogs. Organizational charts chained to sinking carts trapped in peat bogs, with the severed heads of my officers swinging off their branches instead of names and ranks, with a mysteriously dry open trench full of corpses waiting ahead. Then I looked away to the east.

General Ognyan Spitignov was there, trying to chop down a tree. On top of the tree, there was a cave, and a man came out of the cave. The man was dressed in red; his hair was long and flowing, his mustache was thick over a bare chin, and his eyes were intense. On top of the man’s head was a felt cap rimmed in small pearls, with a great dark gem set in a sunburst topped with a crescent moon made from larger pearls. The stranger turned back into the cave with a swirl of his cloak, and in the shadows of the cave, there was a movement as of the stretching of a bat’s wings.

Then I saw a woman’s head impaled on a stick; at first, it was Katya’s, and then it became the head of the girl whose life I had spared in the massacre, then it became the head of the little old grandmother whose name my aunt had refused to ever tell me, which then came alive and started talking to me in between sips from a floating teacup; but I couldn’t understand what she was saying, because it was in a language I didn’t understand.

I pulled out my sword from the ground and began to carve on a tree. I couldn’t understand her words, but I could see how and where the charts, their inky black limbs struggling in the mud, had broken and failed; where the heads were tangled; and which ones fit better the yokes that tied them to the carts. And peat; there was something about peat. I took off from carving the tree to cutting out squares of peat and hurling them on top of the carts, watching them float higher in the water under their added weight, a paradoxical reversal of the normal order of things.

Then I turned back to the tree and the head. The head was gone, leaving a half-empty teacup, which I drank; and then I went back to slashing the bark, carving into the bark a diagram. It was a network of arrows and short words, the words written down in runes that I could not read. This did not bother me; I didn’t need to read them, only to write them down. When I finished, I walked on top of the water, across the water, following a trail of golden coins to the ocean. Then a raven, which I suddenly realized had been on my shoulder all along, cawed and took wing.

I woke in the pre-dawn gray with a sudden understanding of what needed to be done; and a picture of the rank structure I needed to impose on our disorganized force. Feeling this understanding was ephemeral, I grabbed for my pen, sketching down the image before I could lose it, inking down a tree of names, ranks, and units. We needed three things: Coherent function; the appearance of being a single unified force; and certain senior officers’ authority neutered.

My fears that I would forget the solution before I had finished writing it down were grounded; even as I blew on the ink to dry it, I found myself surprised by what I saw. Had I not been so quick to write it down, I would have surely forgotten it. Then the diagram wiggled under my breath, and the blanket slid down a little further away from the drying ink, revealing the gentle swell of a hip.

“Mikolai, that tickles,” Katya said, her voice a little muffled.

“What are you doing?”

Have you ever tried to persuade a woman to stand naked out in the snow so you can get a better look at what you wrote on her backside in ink?

I cannot say I recommend it. My experience to date suggests to me that women are not fond of being used as writing desks, not fond of cold air when they are sleepy, and (last but not least) not fond of being exhibited nude in public places. It is not my claim that your arguments will necessarily fail; but rather, whether or not you succeed, you are likely to find that a certain amount of unpleasantness ultimately results from the request.

It was a tight-lipped and thoroughly unhappy Katya, bundled up in her coat, who rode off; leaving me word indirectly that she was going to scout out well ahead along our intended route. This explained her absence from the officers’ meeting after breakfast. I did not actually learn of Katya’s quiet exit until after the meeting was done, though it happened before the meeting had gotten anywhere; I simply thought she preferred not to sit through yet another iteration of the diagram inked on her back, and had ducked out to avoid a terminal case of boredom.

The officer’s meeting ended up running for half the morning as the army grew restless. Before the meeting was halfway done, I had begun to sympathize with General Spitignov’s method of dealing with insubordination. Have you ever tried to persuade a senior officer to adopt the pretense of being a lieutenant?

As you might expect, this is another thing which, rather like asking a woman to stand naked out in the snow so you can get a better look at what you wrote on her backside in ink, is likely to result in a certain amount of unpleasantness. I had a compelling set of reasons ready for the support colonel’s demotion.

First, I said, in the interest of force integration, I would take Captain Felix Rimehammer to be nominal second in command of the force, as the most senior of our newly recruited officers. However, while Captain Rimehammer would be nominally second in command, he would be placed in charge of the logistical apparatus and not in charge of combat operations in my absence.

His role in logistics necessitated placing Captain Rimehammer over the supply colonel; naturally, with the supply colonel being junior to someone called a captain, this necessitated calling the supply colonel a lieutenant for the purposes of operational security. He would naturally continue to draw appropriate pay but would have a respite from the stressful task of dealing with the complex logistics of a force equipped and organized in a very ad hoc fashion.

Vitold was also moved to the supply division; also at the rank of lieutenant. I joked that this was to keep an eye out for the Swedish captain accidentally wrecking our machinery. I hoped Vitold understood that, underneath the quip, I really did need him to keep an eye out on the newly demoted colonel. The apparent favoritism involved in the combined demotion and promotion produced a large volume of objections from the supply colonel, as well as a lesser volume of complaints from other imperial officers.

The combat troops would be divided into three groups, each a company within the battalion. The young infantry captain would be placed in charge of the main infantry division, which included the main bulk of the soldiers, and which needed, still, to be fully integrated on the squad level. I pointed out to her that this was in effect a promotion, roughly doubling the number of soldiers under her direct command.

The heavy armor company – steam knights, mechs, and the well-armored Swedes with their swordstaves and self-propelled guns – would be placed under the command of another imperial captain, an older gentleman supplied with not much initiative of his own (but with more intelligence than the supply colonel, which I did not note aloud). I wanted our fuel-burning war machines used cautiously and cleverly if I was absent; if I was present, I would likely take direct command of this unit myself.

During the circumstances of actual combat, I said, Captain Rimehammer and the support division were to consider themselves subordinate to the heavy armor division and the senior imperial captain, even if the Swedish captain was nominally senior outside of combat. The other captains – two imperial captains and a pair of mercenary officers claiming the rank – were ruthlessly demoted to acting lieutenants.

This was greeted by more objections from the supply colonel and the demoted captains in question, though the elderly captain of the heavy armor company and the young infantry captain remained prudently silent in the face of their good fortune. So, for that matter, did Captain Rimehammer, in spite of his earlier objections to taking orders from anyone other than myself – and the junior officers, who saw opportunity in the demotions.

Military officers like their hierarchies to be neat and orderly; but for the most part, the Ruthenian officers not being directly demoted were, at this point, satisfied with the idea that “nominal senior” meant “not really senior,” while Captain Rimehammer seemed fully cognizant of the fact that I was still handing him an unusually large responsibility considering the nature of the relationship.

The supply colonel found this particularly irksome, pointing out he was now being placed under the orders of a more junior imperial officer (the elderly captain) and I found myself needing to go back over why I’d placed the colonel under Captain Rimehammer in the first place, with the addition of trying to diplomatically emphasize the fact that if he had been placed in charge of the heavy armor unit, he would be unable to concentrate his full attention on logistical matters.

Fortunately, everybody was running low on spirit for further argument by the time I introduced the third company, which I called a “cavalry” company in spite of the fact that not all the soldiers in it were mounted. It was an undersized division including all our more irregular troops. I had put all of these under the command of a single mercenary officer, who I announced had the rank of lieutenant.

Katya, I added, would be his direct superior as my fourth captain. There was a brief round of muttering about favoritism at the promotion of an absent sharpshooter to captain, with all of the senior and formerly-senior officers loudly deploying reasons why the third company should be under their command instead. Then I said that given the nature of this command and the fourth captain’s habit of operating solo, as she was doing at present, I expected the newly promoted Lieutenant Gavreau to be in frequent communication with the other three captains.

And with that, the demoted officers seemed to come to the conclusion that Katya was a captain in name only, and in practice simply my bodyguard and bedmate with no real authority of her own, while Gavreau’s real commander was one of the other three captains. Later, I learned that each of my other three captains had reached the same conclusion, which proved a recipe for disaster.

As for myself, I would style myself by the rank of colonel, and encouraged the officers strongly to start referring to me as “the Colonel.” Lieutenant Gavreau appended that I should perhaps not go by “Mikolai,” and suggested the name “Marcus” as generically Latin, something that could belong to someone from anywhere from Loegria to Lithuania. This seemed fine to me, and I agreed. At some point later, someone (I do not know who) decided to start appending a surname, and I became “Colonel Marcus Corvus.”

After another several rounds of questions and gripes (in many cases related to worries that the round of demotions would lead to reductions in their pay) I ended the meeting and ordered the army put on the move, following our advance scouts, who in turn followed the markings left by our newly unwittingly promoted Captain. I had hopes that the promotion, even if it was only a promotion in name, would leave her happier than when I had last seen her.

The diagram I had drawn on Katya’s back in my sleepy moment of inspiration hadn’t included her as a captain. It had included the mercenary lieutenant, but the diagram placed him directly under my command. She had actually been entirely missing from the table of organization and equipment I had drawn on her own back; and added hastily later in the morning when I noticed her absence from it.

In truth, the demoted officers’ assumptions had been correct. When I had drawn up the chart, I had not been thinking of her as a military officer; just as my indispensable and adorable self-appointed bodyguard and bedmate. Now that she was absent, I missed her presence sorely, both as an officer at my right hand and as a woman at my side.