Song of the Sea Spirit: An epic fantasy novel (The Mindstream Chronicles) (10 page)

Throughout the afternoon and into the evening, six other boys, recently turned eighteen, joined Boden in the sleeping room. Boden greeted the first of them with a smile and offered hand but was blatantly ignored. At first, he thought the cuss was deaf, but the next man who joined them likewise received no reply or acknowledgment.

“One of those, I see,” the second one said with a toss of his head at the first. He offered his hand to Boden. “I’m Rasmus Bokk from Tourd, but my friends call me Ras.” Tourd, he explained, was in the mountains, a smaller city than Jolver or Halder, but the mining industry was huge. He claimed they supplied half the ore in Serocia.

“Where are you from?” Rasmus asked. The way he made eye contact and listened gave Boden the impression that he was genuinely interested and not making idle conversation.

Boden liked him. He was organized and neat with a sense of order about him that gave Boden the impression they were kindred spirits. “I’m from Kaild. It’s a town on the coast a few days’ ride north of here.”

“Fishing village?”

“We do a bit of fishing, a bit of farming, a bit of hunting.”

Rasmus nodded. “We have all the ore we want but not nearly enough fish. I love fish. I hope they feed us lots of it.”

“Only if someone else cooks it,” Boden said. “I nearly failed the cooking assessment.”

Rasmus laughed. “Me too, brother. I spent too much time perfecting my weapons skills to worry about cooking.”

While they both greeted the other men who arrived, the focus of their conversation returned to their shared interests. Rasmus, it turned out, had married a woman not unlike Jora—a creative, gentle girl with a penchant for music, though she was younger than Jora.

“So Jora is your wife?” Rasmus asked.

“No, just a good friend. My wife is Micah.” Boden told him how driven Micah been to capture his heart, though he still didn’t understand why. He was, admittedly, a lot like his father: driven, rigid, and not good at reading the emotions of others, particularly women.

“Me neither, brother,” Rasmus said. “If they don’t come out and tell me what they want, I’m likely to miss all the signs.”

They continued their conversation over supper. Though they both introduced themselves and attempted to include the others in their conversation, Boden and Rasmus were of such like minds that they ended up talking solely to each other while the others became engaged in conversations and discussions of their own.

The following morning, the new recruits were handed off to a sergeant who was missing his right arm. By the time they mounted up and headed south, there were ten new recruits.

“Are you in our company?” Rasmus asked the sergeant.

“No, I report directly to Captain Kyear,” he replied over his shoulder. “My sword arm got cut off, if you didn’t notice, and I’m not interested in giving the bastards a chance to take the other.”

“If I lost my sword arm in battle,” Rasmus said to Boden, “I’d take up the sword with my other.”

“The hell you would,” the sergeant said. “It’s easy to say what you would do in a situation without having experienced it yet. We’re all heroes in our own mind. If you lose your dominant arm, the one you’ve trained with, the one you’re best at using, then come tell me you’re going to fight with your weaker arm. Until then, my money’s on you begging to be sent home to your mama.”

The recruits laughed, and Rasmus had to concede that the sergeant had a good point.

For the next two days, they rode south along the coast, camping along the road the first night and at a Legion convalescent camp the second. Large pots steamed over cookfires while men scurried to and fro, some of them covered in blood. One man barked orders for men to be moved, meals to be brought, and more medics to report. One man, hobbling with the aid of a single crutch under his arm, had stained bandages wrapped around his head, covering one eye, around both hands, and a splinted leg. He paused to watch the recruits ride past and caught Boden’s eye. There was something different about this man, like he’d lived an entire lifetime in only twenty-five years. Boden shuddered, unsure why the man’s gaze was so unsettling.

“Take a look around you, recruits,” the sergeant said. “These are all men who had the same training you did, the same desire to fight for Serocia. These are the lucky ones who didn’t die on the battlefield.” The riders relinquished their mounts to the stable hands, and the recruits followed the sergeant into a medium-sized tent furnished with a dozen folding cots with canvas slings.

Later that night, after the lamps had been extinguished, Boden lay on his belly, scribbling in his journal about his adventure under the light of the moon that streamed in through a crack in the tent’s door flap. For the first time in his life, he felt some mild apprehension about fighting in the war, though he didn’t write that down. He set the journal back into his knapsack and closed his eyes. This was his life now. This was his duty.

The recruits traveled from the convalescent camp across Swan’s Crossing, the land bridge that led to the Isle of Shess, a misnomer, as Boden discovered, since the Isle wasn’t an island but a peninsula like the one upon which his hometown of Kaild had been founded. The land bridge leading to the Isle of Shess was much wider than the one he’d crossed leaving Kaild. Swan’s Crossing was a grassy plain that must have been paradise to the horses. The closest thing to a tree at all were scraggly shrubs, the tallest of which might have reached six feet in height, a couple of inches shorter than Boden.

They arrived at another camp that was located about a mile inland from the Isle’s northwestern shore. Like the last camp, this one had sturdy tents for the soldiers to bunk at night and brick-framed cookfires, but this camp had a log cabin that served as both residence and command center for the company’s march commander and his staff sergeant and sergeant. The soldiers here were big men, not necessarily in height but in muscularity and attitude. While the recruits ate supper, the older soldiers grinned knowingly, talked about them openly, and speculated about which of them would make it all ten years.

“Find out if any of them are from Kaild,” one man said. “He’ll be the first one to die.” The others laughed.

Boden felt his blood warm. He wasn’t the brawling sort, but he wouldn’t stand for people insulting his hometown or his father. He started to rise from his seat.

“Leave it be,” Rasmus said with a hand on Boden’s shoulder. “You can’t beat ignorance out of a man.”

The next morning, they rode across the plain to the southeast under a clear sky. Though the sun was warm, the breeze made the ride comfortable.

“Look there,” the sergeant said, pointing.

Boden made out the vague shape of a huge tree in the distance. The famed Tree of the Fallen God.

“Is that it?” Rasmus asked.

“That’s it, men,” the sergeant said. “That’s what we’re fighting for. That’s what our three nearest neighbors want to destroy.”

As they rode, Boden and his fellow recruits watched the Tree growing larger in the distance. Even from miles away, he could tell that it was the biggest tree he’d ever seen, but the closer they got, the more impossibly huge it seemed.

Its branches reached outward at least a thousand yards from the center in every direction. Under the shadow of its leaves were several horse-drawn wagons and dozens of men gathering newly fallen fruit from the ground, putting them into sacks they wore across their shoulders. Other men emptied bags into crates and loaded crates onto the wagons.

“Every company receives a delivery of godfruit every two days,” the sergeant said. “There’s a seemingly never-ending supply. The Tree is unaffected by drought or flood. There’s rarely a need to climb the tree to pick it, since it falls off as fast as we can crate it up.”

Rasmus huffed and rolled his eyes. “Do you believe in magical fruit?” he asked quietly.

Boden shrugged. “I have no experience with it, so I’ll wait to form an opinion.” He couldn’t forget his father’s warning, though.
Do not eat the godfruit.

“What about the extra?” another recruit asked.

“It’s taken to the cities to sell,” the sergeant said. He explained that the men who’d served their ten years in the Legion had either already benefited from the godfruit or no longer needed it because their lives weren’t in jeopardy every day. Women who ate it did so mostly out of curiosity, though some who were in dangerous professions, such as miners and loggers, consumed it daily. Because the godfruit had an unusually long ripe period, transporting it as far as Halder or Skelr wasn’t a problem, especially when it was transported by merchant ship.

At long last, they reached the camp where Boden’s company was stationed. It was a bustling place, like a small town, with soldiers everywhere. Once they gave their horses into the care of the stable hands, the sergeant introduced them to Corporal Pharson, a short, scrappy fellow who impressed Boden as a badger, not someone others would want to tangle with or piss off. Judging from Rasmus’s sideways looks of wide-eyed wariness, his friend had formed a similar opinion.

“Welcome to hell, boys,” Pharson said. “Three of you’ll be in my squad, the others divided between Corporals Algot and Vidar.” Two other men with the corporals’ band on their sleeves joined them. They called off names, and the recruits divided themselves into the three groups. Rasmus was in Algot’s squad, Boden in Pharson’s, for which he was glad. There was something about Pharson’s fierceness that impressed him. A tough commander generally molded tough soldiers, and Boden had every intention of becoming as tough as the hardened men around him. He would go home again, not because of the godfruit, but because of his skill and training. “We three corporals report to Sergeant Keskinen, who reports to Staff Sergeant Krogh. March Commander Turounce runs the company. Remember those names, boys. You’ll be meeting them next.”

Boden and his fellow recruits were taken into the sturdily built command building. Inside, a severe-looking fellow in his late thirties or early forties stood over a table. His head wasn’t cleanly shaven like the others in his command, but it was much too short to be grabbed by more than a pinch of two fingers. He wore a closely trimmed goatee and had a scar across the bridge of his nose, no doubt received during his years as a swordfighter. Two other men, younger by a few years, stood at the ends of the table, looking on. Judging from the insignias on their arm bands, the man in the center was the march commander, and the other two were his staff sergeant and sergeant. The three looked up when Pharson led them in.

“New recruits reporting, sir,” Pharson announced, snapping a salute. The ten young men stood at attention and saluted as well.

“Good,” March Commander Turounce said, looking the new arrivals over briefly. “Have supper, find your tents, and come back in a half hour.”

“Yes, sir,” Pharson said. This time, the boys were ready to salute with him. They followed the corporal outside and approached a man shouting orders to unload supplies. The two conferred for a moment, and Pharson took a piece of paper from him, then beckoned the recruits with a wave. “This way.” As they walked past the tents, each marked with a letter clearly sewn into the fabric above the flap opening, he called out a name, pointing to the tent. “Bokk, tent C.”

Rasmus glanced at Boden and gave a quick see-you-later nod before ducking into his tent.

“Hildus, tent E. Sayeg, tent F,” Pharson said.

Boden nodded, then pulled aside the flap of the tent marked with F and stepped in. Six cots made up two rows, but only four of the six had bedrolls stretched out on them. At the heads of the cots in the back row and the feet of those in the front sat knapsacks, two of them spilling over with clothing, the other two neatly packed. Boden chose the center bunk in the back row, reasoning that leaving the one immediately in front of the opening would make it easier for everyone to maneuver.

The flap moved aside, and Rasmus poked his head in. “Ready to eat?”

“Almost. Give me one second.” Boden untied his bedroll, unrolled it onto the cot, and set his knapsack at its head. He followed Rasmus out.

“Oh, good. Fresh meat,” one of the older soldiers said with a grin as he walked past. His arm was in a sling, and he had a bandage around his thigh. “Better gird yourselves, boys. Our enemies will make men out of you.”

Boden squared his shoulders, unrattled. Though he lacked actual battle experience, he’d had superior training. Gunnar had failed as a father, but he’d excelled as a drill master.

They met the other recruits near the cook pots, where a slightly stocky fellow ladled stew into wooden bowls for them. They each received wooden spoons and they took their meals to some nearby benches to eat.

Boden watched the goings on while he ate, as did Rasmus and a couple of the others. Though he felt sympathy for the wounded, he shrugged off the injuries as a natural, expected consequence of war. Men were fighting with real weapons, not wooden training swords, and someone was bound to be hurt or killed. In fact, that was ultimately the point of battle. The sooner they killed the enemy, the sooner their leaders would run out of troops and end their aggression. After all, the fighting was on Serocian soil. The Serocians were simply defending themselves.