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"Can we do an uruk marching song instead, sir? One that a lot of us know by heart?"
Trot, trot, trot, trot. Bullet mulls it over. "Alright, Zar, my lad, you're Acting Sergeant for the duration of your little sing-along. Break out of formation and run where I am now."
As Zar starts running in the platoon leader's position, I hear Bullet mutter to Zar, "I'm only allowing this because not many of your comrades have a fucking clue what initiative is. You stick your neck out like that, it makes me think you got potential. Don't prove me wrong, boy." Then louder, "The company is yours, Acting Sergeant!"
And, hoo boy. It turns out that uruk marching songs are not up to Bullet's exacting standards. Nor to mine, come to that.
Here are the lyrics, as best as I can remember them:
"Where there's a whip- there's a way!
Where there's a whip- there's a way!
Where there's a whip-
We don't want to go to war today! But the Lord of the Lash says,
nay nay nay!
We're going to march all day, all day, all day.
Where there's a whip there's a way.
A crack on the back says, we're going to fight!
We're going to march all day and night, and more!
For we are the slaves of the Dark Lord!"
If these Annals have given you any idea of Bullet's character, you know exactly how badly Zar just screwed up.
The song is jaunty, though, I'll give them that. Very energetic, very bouncy. I could see myself eating up the miles with a melody like that, and when sung in the uruks' deep voices it packs a certain punch. But the lyrics, man, the lyrics are fucked up in ways uncountable.
I think the only reason Bullet didn't halt the column after the first line was because he was convinced that he must have been mishearing the words.
"Company," he bellows, "halt!"
The ranks shuffle to a confused and uneasy stop.
"What. In the motherfucking hell! Was that. Anyone?" He gazes balefully at his uruks, daring someone to answer him. No one is foolish enough to open their mouths. "Where there's a whip there's a way. Fucking hell. Zar. Come to me right now."
It turns out, uruks don't show fear exactly the same way we do. They do that same sort of hunched over look that we do, like you're expecting something to be thrown at you. But they also have a habit of twisting their neck down to protect the throat with their jaw line. Also, their eyes don't get wider when scared; they squint. Until Zar approached Bullet, I didn't know that about uruks.
"Zar, I really need you to understand this," Bullet tells him in an almost conversational tone. "In the Black Company, we do not whip our brothers into battle. Do you comprehend?"
Zar eyes are almost entirely shut. "Yes, sir!"
"Do you understand why?"
Zar visibly strains to find an answer that won't fuck him over. If he says yes, and is told to elaborate, he's screwed. If he says no, he is screwed anyway. He decides that honest ignorance is a better shield against Bullet than pretended knowledge. "No, sir!"
Bullet's hand whips out like a viper and snatches Zar ear. He pulls the uruk close, very close. "Because that's that's how conscripts fight. That's how the weak fight. That's how incompetents fight. Did we fucking conscript you, Zar?"
"No, sir!" Here, at last, was a question he knew the answer to.
"Are you a fucking weakling?"
"No, sir!"
"Are you a fucking incompetent?"
"No, sir!"
"Then why, little uruk, do you feel the need to be fucking whipped into a fight!"
"I do not, sir!"
"Oh, fucking hell," Bullet sighs. "I do believe that it's time for an object lesson."
Bullet runs them all the way back to the training base. Then he runs them back to Grufoz. Then he runs them into the Tower armory.
"Papa," he addresses me calmly, ignoring the gasps and moans from the uruk company. "Do us a favor and go in and liberate about ten spears and twenty leather thongs from Quartermaster, will you?"
When I come back out with an armful of polearms, Bullet drags Zar back out.
"Papa, throw Whipmaster here a spear."
Zar catches it one-handed, suddenly looking very worried. His neck is so tilted I'm worried he'll break it on accident.
"Zar," Bullet says in a clear, loud voice. "Break that spear. Go on, do it."
Warily, the diminutive uruk snaps the shaft across his knee.
"Well done."
A chorus of nervous laughter from the ranks- more from tension than amusement.
Bullet grabs two spears from me, binds them together with the leather thongs.
"Here," he says, shoving them roughly at Zar. "Break these now."
Zar brings the pair down as hard as he can on his right leg and abruptly has to hide his pain. The spear closest to him had splintered slightly on his femur, but the outside spear was untouched. He brings it down again, and again, and again, wincing each time, until both spears finally break. Zar pants heavily, shaking out his leg and letting the pieces fall to the ground.
Bullet takes the eight remaining spears, ties them together one by one by one. Once they're all attached, he rolls them all up and binds them into one thick, unwieldy mass of shafts.
He tosses the bound spears on the ground in front of Zar.
"Now break these."
Zar stares at the bunched up spears. He swallows, averts his eyes from Bullet, and says, "I can't, sir."
"You all take a good look at this, now," Bullet begins. "In battle, your friends will depend on you. If you choose to save your own hides and fuck your buddies... then you got no fucking place on the battle line! Not with us! But if you consider your buddies' skins to be more valuable than yours, and you're willing to risk life and limb to keep them safe, then you and whatever army you're fighting for will be fucking invincible. On the Pelennor Fields, when the Northern marines came and drove us back towards Osgiliath, we survived because not one of us was willing to abandon our brothers to their deaths. But your former army, well, you had to get your backs striped to even turn up. Of course the armies of Mordor broke and ran. They were conscripts. Every man jack of you wanted to stay alive and to hell with the guy next to you. That is why we walked off that battlefield alive and 200,000 of your former comrades did not."
He stabs a finger out towards Zar's face. "Every time the lash comes out, you cut all the leather thongs and march into war as single spears. That is why you uruks die so fucking much. So stop reinforcing bad habits and stop singing that hideous song, you get me? Get it through your thick fucking skulls that you are luftig-hai burzum now. And you'll be marching into battle because if you don't, your brothers will suffer without you. Fall in. We're not running back to base, we're bloody sprinting."
The story of Bullet's spears got around quickly.
The next day, I heard a platoon of recruits singing a modified version
of the inciting song:
"Where there's a will- there's a way!
Where there's a will- there's a way!
Where there's a will-
We can't wait to go to war today! And the Luf! Tig! Hai!
say, fuck yeah yeah!
We're going to march all day, all day, all day!
Where there's a will there's a way.
A clap on the back says, we're going to fight!
We're going to march all day and night and more!
For we are the slayers of the Dark Lord!"
I reckon that Bullet must have gotten a kick out of that.
They may have nifty new Black Company badges (black background, white skull with vampire fangs, crimson flames in its mouth), they may have half a week's boot camp under their belts, and they may have been really inspired and shit, but the uruks aren't ready. Not by a long shot. But ready or not, the enemy was coming anyway.
A moderate sized host came down from the north, moving aggressively and speedily, aiming to take Grufoz before we got any hardcore defenses set up. They ran smack into a huge field of Sapper's caltrops, paused, and reconsidered. When they tried to flank us on our eastern side, they hit a decently prepared trench system that they couldn't punch through immediately. At which point they discovered that just because they couldn't move through the field of magical death doesn't mean we can't. Salim slammed a thousand uruks into the back of the enemy host, and then linked up with the defenders in the trenches. They hunted anything not wearing a flaming skull all the way back to the edge of Gorgoroth. Salim returned with tired soldiers and blown horses, still grinning like a madman. Losses on our side were relatively light.
That bought us a few days to prepare further. Salim celebrated by chopping off all the heads of the enemy soldiers fallen on our turf and planting them on a vast line of pikes, faces turned north. Let the next army know what's going to happen to them.
The bodies we'll use for target practice, for however long they last.
Prisoners of war are turning into an unexpected boon for us. There are quite a few of them; men, elves, and dwarves, all stuck in what amount to death camps. Oh, the Lidless Eye doubtless got some production out of them at little cost. But just like with the Moabs in Saintly's past, the point of the operation was not to profit Mordor, it was to make the prisoners suffer.
We saw men so skinny and malnourished that we honestly thought at first that the Eye was using necromancy to raise dead men from the ground. Their eyes had that thousand yard stare, like they were still gazing into the abyss they had been thrown into. Their midsections were missing four inches per side, and I wish to god I was exaggerating.
We're soldiers, and we've seen some of the most horrible things that people can do to each other. And hey, maybe we've even participated in it. But once we saw what the Dark Lord had done to these poor fuckers, our desire to ram some steel into his Eye is renewed and invigorated.
The men, mostly Gondorian peasants and colonists, are in no condition to fight for us, willing though they no doubt are. After we ease them back to a diet of more than scraps of pig slop a day, they can do some work for us. Every essential job done by a death camp survivor frees up an able-bodied uruk to be given a sharp stick and placed on the front line.
The dwarves and the elves, on the other hand, are a little more hardy and durable. Indeed, the elves appear so calm, collected, and graceful that we can hardly believe that they ever set foot inside one of those stinking hell holes. Yet the humans assure us that many of the Elder races had been mentors to them when they first arrived. Elves are deceptively young looking, it appears.
We've heard stories about the prowess of the elves and the toughness of the dwarves, so we offered them a straight up deal. If they fight under our command, then once we whip the balls off every army that the Dark Tower sends against us they can leave as they please. We've handed over a few cart loads of captured arms and armors and form both races into the Auxiliary Corps of the Free Army of Mordor. The Auxiliaries number just under five hundred, but I think it's safe to say they'll be worth more than mere numbers on the front lines.
Webfoot pitched an interesting idea to the Old Man, one which will likely prove pivotal in the coming campaign. Webfoot had seen the inventory lists that Quartermaster had drawn up, and noticed that we had a small fleet of commercial ships on hand.
Webfoot was a marine, a fighting man who grew up on the waves south of Umbar. He knew how ships worked, and he knew how to launch raids in an amphibious environment.
Give him just four hundred fighters, he says, and the enemy will never rest easy within ten miles of the shores of the Sea of Nurnen.
The Captain looks over the maps we've made, hard eyes scouring our future prospects. He's known from the start that our northern line will be pushed back, and I knew he had been searching for ways to counter-attack afterward.
He gives the go-ahead to start it up.
Webfoot grabs any Company man who has had any experience at all on the sea and gives him an instant promotion in the Navy of Free Mordor, and then starts recruiting uruks. He starts his pitch by saying he'll only accept the toughest, nastiest, craziest recruits available; pissants and weaklings need not apply. Once their pride has been challenged, he takes pains to explain to the applicants that their mission will be to raid and terrorize the enemy on his own territory- his marines will always be outpositioned and outnumbered- he can only make use of the baddest motherfuckers around. At which point all the recruits try to assure him that they are bad enough motherfuckers to make the cut...
Soon he has to start turning them away in droves, lest his ships capsize from the weight.
Clearly, Webfoot missed his calling in life. He should have been a mountebank hawking snake-oil in the market, not a grunt in a mercenary outfit.
Our advanced scouts inform us that the Eye is fielding an enormous army and heading our way. Mixed force of trolls, uruks, wolf riders and Easterlings.
Wolf riders. For fuck's sake. We didn't even know that you could use wolves as cavalry. Maybe we wouldn't have gotten our asses kicked at Pelennor if we had had some goddamned wolf riders to counter the Rohirrim, but hey, what do we know about waging war?
Anyway, the enemy numbers almost 65,000 warriors, as best as our scouts can estimate.
We infer from the relatively low number of enemy troops that the Gondorian coalition hasn't been crushed. If they had already been slaughtered, then the Eye would take all 200,000 of his boys up north and bring them down on us.
But still. We're outnumbered six to one, and you'd better believe that makes us a little uneasy.
But we have Bullet's training to improve our boys fighting ability. We have Webfoot supporting us on the open sea. In the Annals we have almost a millennium of military tricks, advice, and strategy.
Aye, fuck 'em. We may face horrific odds, deadly hordes of bogeymen and slavering beasts, but they will be facing the resurrected Black Company.
In this last period of calm before the storm, the Captain wants me to be absolutely clear on how the recruits fit into our ranks.
They are not Black Company brothers. Not yet.
They are on probation, so to speak. We are not willing to open wide and swallow 10,000 untested soldiers just fill our vacant ranks, no matter how much they are needed. And yet, we are not willing to go without them. So we've promoted them all to the rank of brevet-private and told them that if they don't disgrace themselves (and if they're still alive) by the end of the campaign, they will be sworn in without reservation. If they die, they will be posthumously promoted to the rank of private, and their name entered into the Book of the Slain.
Quibbling? Splitting hairs? Maybe. But we have always and we will always draw a clear line in the sand- if you're on one side you're one of us, if you're on the other side you ain't. As of right now, the uruks are standing directly atop the line, but the distinction must still be observed.
First contact, in the plains in between the shores of the Nurnen and the Plateau of Gorgoroth. Salim and 500 of his boys in the trenches against about 200 trolls and 2,000 wolves. The wolf riders couldn't flank us, because their steeds absolutely refused to go anywhere near Sapper's caltrops, which were still present from Salim's previous engagement. Nor could they break the lines- couldn't even get near the lines, in fact. All they could do was sit around and snarl at us, and hope they can rush any gap in the line and so savage everything in their path. Lucky for me, since being just five miles behind the lines means I would be in their path, they must rely on the trolls to break Salim first.
Salim holds the line for five hours straight, swapping axe blow for club smash, raining arrows on them as they retreat and as they advance. Quartermaster procured six ballista and had previously sent them up to the front with untrained crews and plenty of ammo. The ballista can only shoot twice a minute, but each shot can instantly kill a troll. They don't always find their target, and when they do it's not always fatal, but a half dozen of those big bastards dead every minute is nothing to sneer at.
Slaz and another thousand uruks burn every acre of farmland between Salim's lines and the fallback position to the ground. They booby-trap every source of shelter they can find, they poison every well, they dismantle every potential fortification to prevent it being used by the enemy.
Scorched earth policy. After all, we're gambling that they will all starve before they kill us.
After there is nothing but smoldering ashes and blasted landscape in between Salim and safety, they go and relieve him.
Salim has lost a third of his force, but the trolls are in even worse shape. They are in no condition to do anything to disrupt Salim and Slaz from retreating at their leisure. As we withdraw, the frustrated wolves charge them head on. They are checked because Slaz had the foresight to arrange his boys into square, hoisting a bristling hedge of spear heads in all directions. The wolves ain't stupid enough to hurl themselves headfirst into a pike, and their riders can't get close enough to slash at the pikers, our crossbowmen and archers having made a point to target the ones holding bows first. They wheel and turn, churning up dirt and soaking up damage and circling the formation trying to break in, until our archers sting them enough to force them back to the captured trenches.
Once the wolves retreat, Salim orders his men to break formation and drag the wolf carcasses into the square, because the enemy can eat the dead wolves and we want them hungry.
Plus, after a fight like that, he's of the opinion that his boys have earned some steaks tonight.
Over all, it wasn't exactly a victory, and it wasn't exactly a defeat. They wanted to advance, and they did. We wanted to delay them and bloody them, and we did. Both sides achieved their objectives. This was nothing more than the opening moves in what was shaping up to be a long and bloody chess game. White sacrifices pawn for a forward position, and nothing more. Not that we'll be spinning it that way for general consumption. As far as our army is concerned, we just dealt the other side a body blow they'll spend months recovering from.
Still, now we have a rough idea of what our uruks are capable of. And the closer to Grufoz they get, the harder our defenses will be to crack.
Let the game begin, O Eye of Barad-dur. Come to us, and we'll show you the cost of murder and betrayal.
Just a general update. The enemy is pushing forward, we're slugging them in the nose and backing up. Nothing unexpected, nothing significant. The enemy is starting to slow down because they're marching on empty stomachs, but they're still getting supplies off of Gorgoroth, but that will get more and more difficult as they get further from their supply bases.
Yesterday, Sapper got his own private moment of glory.
We established a temporary stronghold in the plains of Nurn- a really sweet area. We held a low ridge that was steep enough to knock the wind out of anyone marching up it, and the ridge allowed us to shift units around out of view of the enemy. We could sally from any section of our line with no forewarning, and repel all but the most determined of attacks. Our ballista, now increased to 15 engines and placed on the high, flat hilltops, can reach out and touch anything they damn well pleased. The only real problem was the ridge's flanks. There was nothing to prevent the other team from just walking around our west or east and continuing on towards Grufoz, so this spot was purely short-term for us.
Ghazi was in command of a detachment on a certain hilltop, and he dropped the ball.
It's not his fault. He's a ranker, a grunt. He never even made noncom before promotions in the Free Army of Mordor were handed out like candy. Ghazi was placed in a bad situation and had to make a choice, left or right, and no one can blame him for choosing wrong.
Trolls and uruks were pouring up the slope at him, and his unit engaged them. He was so focused on his little area of the battlefield that he neglected to realize that the units to his left and right were withdrawing. The messenger from Salim never reached him, due to some sharp-eyed sniper on the other team. But his real mistake was when he realized that about 1,000 enemy fighters were descending on him from all sides. He should have disengaged and gotten the fuck out of there, but he curled his flanks in and formed square.
When they finally knocked the enemy back, Ghazi had lost over half his force, almost fifty men. He then tried to make a fighting retreat and rejoin his buddies to the southeast, and found himself unable to withdraw due to being the target of a three-pronged attack. Any attempt to fall back would likely have broken the inexperienced uruks. They simply had to stand their ground and die. This is where Sapper came in.
Sapper sees that some of our boys were in deep shit, so he works fast.
He grabs ten jars of olive oil from the supply wagon, which had been confiscated from a farm nearby.
He waves his hands over them, whispering, "Hocus-pocus, Alakazam!" or whatever he says to get the magic flowing.
He goes up to the nearest company, tells them that they are under his direct command now.
They rush up to a hilltop overlooking Ghazi's plight.
Sapper's new command hurls down the ten enchanted olive oil jars onto the enemy ranks. The uruks of the Red Eye recoil and look up, and see a wildly grinning midget flipping them off, with just 50 very nervous troops backing him up. Obviously, I cannot know with any certainty what went through their minds, but I imagine they were enraged at first- this fucker throws shit at us, and challenges us? Let's chop this little prick into jerky.
Then, I like to imagine that the smell of what they've been doused with sinks in; it smells suspiciously like naptha. Few have seen what the Harad fire can do to people, but most have handled it personally; it's stored in great quantities in every fortress in Mordor.
I genuinely enjoy envisioning the scene. First they snarl savagely upwards at the wizard, preparing to charge, and they sniff themselves. Then they sniff themselves a little more carefully. Then they look up again and the wizard is now juggling fireballs.
They retreat. Oh, I can pretty up the language, give long and snarky descriptions to their fear, but that's what it ultimately comes down. They smell the "naptha", and run for their lives.
Sapper's been running around a lot, making his special little caltrops and helping construct defenses. He exhausted, but I imagine a minor spell to change something's scent is a great deal less taxing for him than lighting up a holocaust of destructive thaumaturgy.
I mention this not only to give all due credit to Sapper's quick thinking, but also so that future brothers of mine can put this trick in their arsenal. All you need to pull it off is a minor sorceror, a smallish quantity of liquid, and balls hanging down to your knees.
Saintly took off last night. He took Sapper, a newly back on his feet Spike (no Bop, though; he had landed a commision in the Free Mordor Army), Arrowhead and Kisander, and about 50 uruks. He then hared off to do what he does best- raid and terrorize his enemies until they are too ragged to think straight. He and his bravos were stationed on the extreme right flank, near the Lithui River to the north. They followed the river upstream and then headed west, cutting in behind the army of Mordor as wide as possible.
Bullet lets me in on the plan almost as an afterthought for posterity's sake. Saintly won't be engaging regular infantry if he can help it. Instead he'll wait for them to move further south towards Grufoz and then move into position near the Plateau of Gorgoroth; there's a narrow section in between mountain ranges that he intends to patrol regularly. He's going to burn supply trains and ambush messengers as soon as the other team gets settled into a routine.
They've been planning it since the beginning, Saintly and Bullet and the Captain. They've set up food caches in the Ash mountains, and in addition Saintly's crew will dine heartily on any food they capture. Saintly, in case my descriptions of him have been unclear, is a very resourceful fellow. He'll be out of contact with the Captain until the end of the campaign, but then again he's not a man in need of constant supervision.
We'll miss Sapper, though. Wizards are in short supply. But he'll do more good as a force multiplier in our little guerrilla band then in the wide open battles that are coming up.
March and countermarch, defend and withdraw. It's starting to wear on us. The casualty ratios favor us, because we're better trained and are using tactics more sophisticated than charging headlong at the other guys. But we're in the same basic position that the Gondorians were in, in that we can swap five of their guys for one of ours and still lose.
But fuck the odds, says I. The Black Company is slyer, meaner, tougher, and nastier than Gondor could ever be. If they could beat Mordor, so can we.
And now we're settled in at Grufoz. We don't intend to stay long.
You see, Grufoz is only useful in that it has lots of armories and a sizable population, most of whom lit out east somewhere once the revolution stormed through. If you destroy the armories, it's not actually profitable to spend lives and time to take it. There once was useful farmland in the surrounding area, but now not only are there no farmers around to sow and reap, we've burned the crops down.
Grufoz is functionally worthless, but the enemy host thinks it's essential to seize it no matter what the cost.
As any con man worth the name can tell you, there's nothing sweeter than charging a man an arm and a leg for sweet fuck all.
The plan is, we dig in, stand firm long enough to force them to commit reserves, then bug out lickety split. Then Salim slides about 2,000 men into their flank from down south. We kick the door in, kill anyone we find, steal anything useful, then vanish back south. At which point, they will either commit down south and so extend their lines of supply even farther; try to cross the Lithui river and carry on down the eastern shore of the Sea of Nurnen; or stay in place, psychologically paralyzed and uncertain, slowly starving to death. We're hoping they try to cross the Lithui, because then not only do their supplies get stretched paper-thin, they'll also have to cross the river itself, which Webfoot will enjoy immensely. We anticipate them heading south towards the Ephel Duath river. No matter what, we're ready for them.
Grufoz fell, much sooner than intended. They brought up a heavy hitter sorceror who blazed a breach through the stone wall and then sent in the trolls.
The sorceror was both human and white, as far as we could tell. That likely means Black Numenorean. That likely means centuries of perfecting his art and honing his skill. It's just as well we sent Sapper away- he would have been massively outclassed, protection detail or no.
Webfoot evacuated the lot of us, four hundred at a time, dropping us off ashore to the south and then going back for more. The street to street fighting was in our favor, since the troll companies had all gotten mauled coming in through the gap in the wall. Only uruks were trying to break our improvised lines near the docks, and they all had to be whipped into the fight. The Black Numenorean hadn't wanted to close distance on us and risk getting sniped or skewered in such a narrow fighting area, so he sent in swarms of battle fodder to do his dirty work instead.
Still, casualties on our side were light. Meaning only about 600 of us fell to about 1,400 of them.
600. Six percent of our total number died in a single day. Not very encouraging.
A defeat, though not a fatal one, I would say. We had intended to cost them time and effort, and force them to commit more heavily to the north, and we failed.
And on a completely separate note, I hope that the salt air doesn't ruin this document. I should probably make a copy of it once I get inland.
I imagine that we'll be setting up new lines down in the cities to the south. Our flank by the Sea of Nurnen won't be easily pressed, because of Webfoot's presence, so we can commit troops to the center and left. It's a very good thing that Quartermaster found and constructed so many shovels, because we're certainly using them a lot.
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