As well, Valkar and his lieutenants trained us in the use of the short throwing javelin which I had seen used ere this, in the lasso, a favorite weapon of the Thanatorians and in whose use they are amazingly adept, and with the hand axe and the war bow as well. I found myself tackling my meals with a ferocious appetite and slept each night the deep slumber of the bone-weary.
Valkar was an excellent officer: firm but restrained, utterly fair, and a man of his word. Each warrior under his command was given to know exactly what limits were set over his actions, beyond which he would stray at peril of punishment. The rules―which, incidentally, were original with Valkar himself, and were not the general orders obeyed throughout the rest of the Legion, as I later learned―were very precise. The women of the city were not to be molested, neither were the homes of the Shondakorians to be entered, on penalty of twenty lashes. Fighting with other warriors, drunkenness, and leaving the barracks during the night were punishable by ten lashes. To be caught sleeping on sentry duty was rewarded with death.
While most of my fellow warriors in the cohort of Valkar were an unruly lot, mere surly oafs for the most part, even the most brutish of them responded favorably to the just discipline of their commander. No man was ever punished on whim, and every man who was punished was made aware of the exact reasons for his culpability. Valkar explained that the Shondakorian citizens vastly outnumbered the occupying forces, and that while the presence of the Black Legion was tolerated, any abuse of the native women, or robbery of a native home, might well touch off the tinderbox and rouse the citizens to resistance. As well, he pointed out that a man who became drunk or who fell asleep on guard duty might well be responsible for the death of his comrades and the defeat of the Legion, were foes to creep past his post. The men came to reward Valkar with a grudging respect and, eventually, with a doglike devotion that was a testimonial to Valkar’s ability to lead and to command.
Although Valkar and I were good friends, he gave me to understand that it would be detrimental to discipline were he to be seen to have a favorite among his own troops, hence I saw little of him in private during this early period of my service under his command. I, of course, understood the very good reasons for this, and my estimate of him grew. But we never met without a friendly word or look or smile and I was well aware that he kept a close eye on my progress. Indeed, ere long, once I had gained a certain proficiency in the martial arts, I was awarded a minor role in the training of the less intelligent and more awkward warriors, and from this I soon rose to the rank of squad leader, a rank equivalent to that of a second lieutenant.
As a minor officer, I had a semiprivate room near the front of the barracks, which I shared with five or six other men of similar rank, and I ate in the officers’ mess, in which Valkar himself dined. He found occasion to compliment me on my rise in the ranks, and we occasionally exchanged a friendly word.
Once my own training was over, and once the squadron under my command had completed their training in the finer arts of war, my duties slackened off. We were on duty one full day and off duty the next, which gave me frequent opportunities to explore the byways of the city and to discern something of its structure.
The fifteen men under my command were a brutal and oafish lot, but, bearing in mind the methods of command I had observed Valkar to use with such excellent results, I took to treating my men with utter fairness and utter firmness. I believe I won their respect quite early, when my authority was questioned and I was challenged by a hulking bully or two, whom I promptly and soundly whipped with the same sort of pugilistic display which had lowered Bluto in the dust. This small trial-by-combat was performed in privacy, and my superior officers never learned of it. If they had, the men I had fought and beaten would have been whipped until they were unconscious, a fact of which the men themselves were fully cognizant, and I believe they came to respect me all the more for the fact that I was willing to settle with them on my own without invoking the superior authority of the hierarchy of command.
At any rate, the general appearance and performance of my squadron was of an obviously superior degree, which earned us the commendation of our commander, and I found myself elevated to a full lieutenantcy and put in charge of two additional squadrons as well as my original command.
Weeks had passed, however, and I was nowhere nearer to finding the Princess Darloona than on the day I had entered the city.
I consoled myself grimly with the fact that at least I had a career in the military service if I desired it!
My new rank threw me quite often into close proximity with Valkar, for which I was grateful. For among the warriors of my command, or even among my fellow officers, I had found none of my own sort with whom to establish friendly intimacy. I think that Valkar, too, felt the loneliness of command, for his fellow komors were a brutal lot, given to gaming and drinking rather than to intelligent conversation. Hence he now rather frequently paid me the compliment of asking me to dine at his table, and not infrequently we went down into the city together on our off-duty days. I came to know him quite well, and, if anything, my respect and trust of him grew.
It was so obvious that he was of a finer sort than his fellow commanders, that I puzzled myself over the mystery of why a well-bred gentleman of good family such as he could have desired a place in the Chac Yuul for by now I had learned that he had joined the Black Legion only a few months before my arrival. His rise through the ranks had been the mirror image of my own, for while the Chac Yuul are a band of coarse ruffians for the most part, the senior commanders of the host have a keen eye for a gifted and intelligent commander, be he of whatever race, and do not hesitate to promote such a man whenever they find one. But, all this notwithstanding, he seemed very out of place in their ranks, and more than once I mused curiously over the mystery he represented.
In all honesty, it never once occurred to me that his presence here might be accounted to much the same reason as that which had motivated my own.
The mystery deepened one evening some weeks after my rise to command. As our off-duty day had fallen on the same time, Valkar suggested we attend the theater together, and I readily agreed.
Dressed in our best, the medallions of our rank pinned to our leathern tunics, we found a box in a lower tier of the King Gamelion, a theater of supreme prominence in Shondakor; indeed, the Gamelion was virtually a national shrine of the arts, and its position was not unlike that of the Comedie Francaise in Paris, or the National Theatre of Great Britain. The highest families of Shondakor attend its performance of the national classics, and although most of the warrior nobility of the realm had fled into exile with Darloona and Lord Yarrak, her uncle, there were of course certain nobles or aristocrats unable to leave due to age, illness, or infirmity. Hence the cream of that which remained of Shondakorian society attended the Gamelion, as well as the upper crust of the Chac Yuul command, who were themselves now the dominant social class.
The play that night was unknown to me, a verse tragedy called Parkand and Ylidore by the renowned poet, Sorasto, of an earlier generation. My acquaintance with Thanatorian literature was rudimentary, hence I was all the more eager to repair that lack, and greeted Valkar’s suggestion with enthusiasm.
I found the play an admirable work, not unlike some of the lesser dramas of Shakespeare, although the stilted dramatic vocabulary of an earlier epoch was somewhat difficult to follow.
Halfway during the first act, a stir went over the audience, and people turned to whisper to their companions, while casting a curious gaze at one of the boxes above. I turned to look, nudging Valkar, and froze with astonishment.