Friday, March 21, 2014

The Desserter and the Kitten (Part 2)


It was the small victories that Wilhelm savored most.  As fate would have it, he managed to put together a nice string of victories which made him a hero of his regiment.  In the battle of Hanover Gorge, he accidentally stumbled upon the enemy trying to prepare an ambush for his team.  Always one to act alone, he let his crossbow sing into the enemy ranks.  Once the enemy had identified their attacker, they pursued him on foot and horseback.  Weaving in and out of the nearest tree line, he managed to confuse the enemy while blowing his horn to notify his own regiment of his need. 

The enemy was counting on their foe to lead them back to the encampment where hopefully they would be caught unawares.  Their thinking was that in flight, Wilhelm would flee back to the familiar and safe territory of his men.  Wilhelm instead was leading them down into a gorge which eventually led to a shear mountain wall.  Soon, the sounds of his horn died away and he was trapped.  The mounted soldiers pulled up as they got within sight of the mountain wall.  There was no sign of Wilhelm trying to climb out of the gorge and they know he couldn’t have climbed the mountain without being seen from this distance.

As the mounted enemy waited for the footmen to catch up, one by one, they fell to an arrow from Wilhelm’s crossbow.  He was prolonging the inevitable, they thought.  Worse for Wilhelm, he was making them mad.  At this point, they wanted to take him alive and make him pay for the dozens of men felled on this day.  When the last of the footmen arrived, they place the pike men at the front, intermixed with the mounted officers.  From the rear, the bowman formed up and marched along.  There was no sign of Wilhelm, and the occasional bolt felling mounted officers turned into nothing but silence. 

As they approached within fifty meters of the wall, the enemy was surprised when hundreds of bolts rained down on them from all directions.  From the top of the gorge and from the rear, Wilhelm’s soldiers rained death upon their enemy.  As the afternoon wore on, the prisoners were transported to the divisional encampment and the dead were picked clean of their valuables and their weapons.  Not a single soldier in Wilhelm's regiment was lost.

The night found Wilhelm wandering into Duck Park.  The forest cleared into a meadow with unnaturally glowing blue light.  After removing his mail and armor, he set up his bedroll next to the soothing fountain that brought him piece.  Midway through the night, the kitten was found snuggling up to Wilhelm’s chest.  In the stupor of his dreams, he kitten was a beautiful woman he would hold tight while he slept. 

Strange dreams behind him, he returned to the camp to find Sir Neil clapping him on the back and boisterously bragging of Wilhelm’s exploits on the battlefield the previous day.  Throughout all of this, Wilhelm’s mind would only ever take him back to the meadow in Duck Park.