03 - Call to Arms Read Online Free Page B

was a canvas covering
over the back that shaded it from the elements, but it hardly outweighed its
remaining defects. The roads the caravan had been following for the last three
weeks were little more than a series of trails winding a roundabout path through
the northern reaches of the Great Forest. The trails were not made for ease of
travel, but weeks of heavy traffic had transformed them into a rutted,
wheel-scarred obstacle course.
    The cart hit another pothole, forcing Dieter to catch a heavy salted ham to
stop it falling on him. Placing the ham carefully to one side, he cast an
exasperated glance at the uniformed soldier lying in the back of the wagon with
him. Seemingly oblivious to the hardships of their journey, Hoist was asleep,
snoring loudly as he pillowed his head against a crate.
    “Sigmar’s beard, but your friend can sleep,” the cart driver Otto called down
to him from the front of the wagon. “I’ve never seen the like. We’ve been on the
road three weeks, and I swear he’s been snoring for most of it.”
    Dieter had no doubt of that. Having shared the back of the cart with Hoist
ever since Hergig, he had become unhappily accustomed to the other man’s habits.
Asleep, Hoist provided a one-man symphony of noises: snores, groans, snorts,
mutterings in his sleep, not to mention regular flatulent cannon bursts. So far,
Hoist had spent all but a few hours of each day sleeping, emerging from his
bear-like state of hibernation only when food was in the offing.
    “Still, it’s a useful talent to have in the army,” Otto continued, ignoring
the trail ahead as he craned his neck around to look in the back of the wagon.
“You spend a lot of time on the road. Better to sleep through it than be bored,
I suppose.”
    Sensing the driver was in a mood for conversation, and having had enough of
Hoist’s snoring to last him a lifetime, Dieter climbed over the partition
separating the back of the cart from the front and sat down next to Otto. The
driver may have made him pay twelve shillings for the dubious luxury of riding
in the back of the cart rather than walking, but Dieter held no particular
grudge. The man was good company, and without his camaraderie Dieter would have
been condemned to spend the journey listening to Hoist snore, wheeze and fart
his way toward their destination.
    “Of course, it’s better to sleep than to fight,” Otto said, turning his eyes
back to the road now Dieter was by the side of him. “No offence, my young
friend, but I think you’re mad. Imagine wanting to be a soldier. Never mind
being so set on it you’re willing to travel from Hergig into these damned
forests, chasing some pretty boy regiment of sword-wavers in the hope they’ll
recruit you. Mad, that’s what it is.”
    “But you’re making the same journey,” Dieter protested in good humour. In the
last three weeks, he and Otto had argued the point several times. “If I’m mad,
what does that make you?”
    “Ah, but I’m in it for profit,” Otto said. Feeling in the back of the wagon,
he brought up a half-empty bottle of wine and pulled out the stopper. “It makes
all the difference. You can keep all your talk of glory, honour and the rest of
that arse-water. I’m a greedy man and I don’t mind who knows it. There’s only
one thing that would bring me this far north along these Sigmar-forsaken trails.
Silver.”
    Gesturing with the bottle, Otto pointed to the long line of carts ahead of
them.
    “It’s the same with all these others. Some are professional victuallers, like
me. Others are first-time men. Amateurs. The war brings ’em out. It gets so
anyone with a cart thinks they only have to fill it with provisions and take it
north to be rolling in coin like a pig in fresh manure.”
    “I wouldn’t have thought there’d be that much money in supplying soldiers,”
Dieter said to him.
    “No? Well, you’d be wrong there. The army quartermasters will pay a fine
penny for every