madnovel Chapter 55: The Red-Hot Iron Ring
Chapter 55: The Red-Hot Iron Ring
On the open ground on both sides of the inner fortress, where underground drainage ditches were laid, three rows of low, long, earthen pit houses had already formed a continuous stretch. The newly incorporated elderly, weak, and new refugees of Dairui City were crammed into these earthen shacks connected by firewalls and blind ditches, in family units.
A large number of people gathered in this dark, poorly ventilated hut. To save firewood, only half a piece of dry wood, emitting smoldering smoke, burned in each earthen bed. The white breath from hundreds of mouths and the stench of stale skin from months of not bathing formed a layer of yellowish-green, slippery icicles on the walls.
Chilblains are spreading. Some people's toes, which have been kept in damp, cold, and worn-out boots for a long time, have developed blackened frostbite.
In front of the longhouse camp, Instructor Toren breathed a breath of cold, bloody rain onto his frozen palms.
"My lord, we're running out of charcoal." Toren looked at Otto mounting his warhorse. "When people are freezing, even a bellyful of thin porridge won't keep them shivering. If we lock them up in a room to boil them, the frostbitten bandits might even chew each other up against the stone walls."
Otto didn't reply. He was covered with a thick felt made of raw tanned leather, and his body was shivering in the north wind.
He brought only sixteen guards clad in armored suits, plus Rosso, a light cavalryman carrying ropes and broad axes. At the rear of the cavalry, twelve-year-old hostage William Charlton, wearing an ill-fitting, oversized fur coat, clung desperately to the icy mane of his horse. He carried no sword, only a rotten elm shield covered in wrought iron, and a short, sharp dagger used for butchering dead horses.
This is all the capital Baron Bluefork River possesses.
The city gates opened. The wind whipped up coarse, sand-like snowflakes that pelted their faces. The cavalry silently disappeared into the thirty-mile stretch of greyish-white frost-covered wilderness.
The target was marked at sunset—a dilapidated wooden post station occupied by defeated troops from the Red Fork River.
There were at least fifty or sixty men. They were all remnants of the army, scattered and abandoned by their lord, during the fighting between Blackwood and Brecken. They survived the winter famine by eating frozen horses and human flesh.
They were hungry, infighting, and without leadership.
There were no countdowns, no pre-battle rousing vows. As dusk turned the snow-covered ground a murky, deathly gray, Otto jerked the reins, and his warhorse crushed the frozen half-open wooden door of the post station. Sixteen armored infantrymen formed a shield wall in the narrow, dilapidated courtyard.
"Kill." Otto's cold, hard monosyllable was drowned out by the sound of breaking wood.
The routed soldiers rushing out of the post station were green with hunger. Two starving, heavily armored two-handed swordsmen, like madmen, slashed at the old soldiers on the left, who were stacked in three layers of shields.
"Retreat, hook!" Toren's bone whistle blared.
The farmer on the far right leaned back in the snowmelt and threw his crescent-shaped iron sickle. Brute force pulled them down on the ice.
Two burly men fell heavily into the snow, their faces covered in mud and water. The short-headed battle axe on the left had smashed their spines.
This isn't war, it's slaughter.
Otto did not hide behind the shield wall. He mounted his warhorse, each sword aimed straight for the throat.
But even in chaotic times, some stray dogs manage to escape the net.
A rout, his body strewn with broken crossbow bolts and his face covered in blood, pulled out a sharpened wooden spear from somewhere. Using the broken wall as cover, and before Otto could retract his sword, he thrust the spear fiercely into Otto's still-healing left rib!
Otto caught a glimpse of the cold glint in his eye. But his warhorse was stuck halfway through a snowdrift, unable to lift the reins.
The spear tip was about to pierce through the armor.
"Heh!" A childish, distorted roar exploded beside the horse.
Twelve-year-old William had somehow dismounted from his inferior horse. He held up the heavy iron and wooden shield with both hands, using his frail body to block the blind spot where the lances would inevitably pass.
"Bang—Crack!"
The spear smashed through the cold iron sheet. The force pierced the wooden shield, snapping the birch handle holding it in two.
William heard a sharp crack from his left wrist. The excruciating pain drained all his strength. He screamed and collapsed backward into the blood-soaked mud.
But this brief pause of less than half a breath caused the spear to lose its piercing power.
Otto's longsword slashed upwards along the wooden spear, slicing open the burly man's exposed right neck. A gushing fountain of blood splattered onto William's face, who was lying on his back below.
The smell was fishy, metallic, and hissing as if air was leaking from the throat.
In less than an hour, there were no more outsiders standing at the Rotten Wood Inn.
Otto brushed the heat stains off the back of his sword. He offered no further words of comfort, halting his horse before the pile of corpses and coldly surveying the hostage who had collapsed to the ground, clutching his wrist and trembling.
The boy's face was scalded red by the hot blood of the dead, and he was convulsing violently in the cold wind because of the pain of broken bones.
Otto carried the captured boning knife in one hand. With a clang, he kicked the muddy handle in front of William's boots.
He pointed to two soldiers not far away, still breathing, groaning softly in the snow.
"I don't keep useless people." Otto bent slightly in the north wind. "Go, slit their throats and strip them of their winter vests. Once you've done that, you can have a big bowl of meat with the old soldiers under my command tonight."
William stared intently at the dagger in the snow. He gritted his teeth, grabbed the knife with his trembling right hand, and crawled step by step toward the two men who were still groaning.
Late at night, the wind and snow completely blocked all visibility on the Blue Fork River Plain.
The convoy, loaded with three large carts of worn-out leather armor, dull and blunt weapons, and more than a dozen bags of moldy beans, crossed the barricades and entered the gates of the Gray Stone Fortress.
At the very bottom of the stone tower, no large charcoal fire was lit. Only two dim oil lamps flickered in the cold air vent.
Otto slammed onto the hardwood bench. The large windproof blanket was soaked through with ice and snow, turning it into a cold, hard iron.
He coughed twice in succession. Each cough was accompanied by a tearing sound like a bellows being pulled from his abdomen. The severe injuries he had just recovered from, the exhaustion from overexertion, and the freezing rain on the way back to the city finally caused the extreme cold to tear apart this young body that was constantly being exploited.
High fever.
His forehead was burning hot. His lips, however, were ashen from the cold.
"Sir! This high fever can damage your brain! I'll go get the medicine!" Pollifer's voice changed in alarm as he turned to run away.
"Close the door. Don't move."
Otto gripped the edge of the table tightly with his right hand, his knuckles turning white. He absolutely did not want the soldiers outside, who had just eaten meat, to see the Baron trembling.
His pupils were bloodshot from the fire. His vision began to blur and distort.
The moss on the stone walls, the broken pieces of armor on the ground, even the chilling stone floor—in his feverish hallucinations, they all transformed into that cold, stinking dead end in Braavos.
He saw the old man with lung disease. The old man was coughing up large mouthfuls of black blood, grabbing him by the collar, and roaring as he whipped his back with a rattan cane.
"I don't owe the City of Seafront a single grain of oatmeal... The Duke hasn't even paid for a single broken spear for me!"
Otto muttered to himself, his voice strained and hoarse from the intense heat. His throat felt like he was swallowing sand.
"Those endless defeated soldiers, those tangled messes of debt... why should I have to pay for it all with my life!"
He felt nauseous in the cold winter night. He felt like a rat sitting on a pile of bones, eating carrion. The territory was like a rotten net infested with maggots, binding him tighter and tighter.
But as soon as he closes his eyes, his father's dying screams will pierce his mind.
"Wear the iron ring! Plant the eagle banner over the corpses of their entire tribe!"
The sound was like a red-hot iron, piercing straight into his bones. He couldn't break free at all.
From the moment he dug his first bronze star out of a pile of corpses at the age of fourteen, the idea of building the main fortress walls became a millstone around his neck, pushing him forward relentlessly, never stopping even in death.
Otto slammed his sweat-drenched head against the cold stone wall. His clenched back teeth cracked with a sharp, snapping sound in the empty stone chamber.
"Wait until spring. Wait until the ice thaws..."
His hoarse voice, honed in the flickering firelight, sounded rusty.
"This entire wasteland... will be filled with sharp iron stakes that I'll use to skin and bleed the animals."