The Proud Do Not Endure 17
- Location
- ?
Fincher calls a halt to the column so you pick over the looted weapons. The legionaries, already exhausted before the march started, take the opportunity to sit in groups by the dirt road and share out rations.
Before you sits a prince's ransom in loot. Many of the arms are finely decorated with engravings and metalic leaf, and even semi-precious stones. The panoplies of warrior-aristocrats, cut down in their glorious prime.
Your first choice is a familiar-looking hatchet, either the very one you used in combat or its matched twin. Its ivory haft is carved with waves down its length, and with a rougher surface of saw-toothed scales at its grip. The silvered head gleams in the late afternoon sun like a full moon. It whispers of its loyalty to your cause. You regard it as a traitor, useful but on no account to be trusted.
Next you select one of the longswords. These are apparently unpopular among the legion, unsuited as they are to formation fighting. It is a gently curved, single edged blade almost two thirds of your arm span, weighted towards the middle and gently tapering towards the tip. Its curved grip and hawks-head pommel feel awkward in your grasp, but the weight of the sword itself is strangely familiar.
INTEGRITY: DIFFICULT
CHECK: SUCCESS
INTEGRITY: Your training with a sword goes beyond anything a mind has the power to forget. The stances are notched indelibly into your core muscles. The ones coiled around your bones, the ones that won't wither away until you are rotting in the ground or burning on a pyre.
THOUGHT GAINED: The Opening Gate
The quilted jacket is dun-yellow cotton, wax-printed with white five-leaf flowers. It smells of the sweat of its dead owner, with an undercurrent of something that is similar to but is not wine. The hauberk that fits over it is composed of overlapping leaf-shaped steel scales, each painstakingly etched with wave-like scrollwork, with larger, palm-sized matching plates covering the vitals and paudrons. You feel richer just being near it.
You round out your new acquisitions with brass-plated gauntlets and matching buckler, a head-sized rounded plate designed to deflect incoming stabs and swings. It's heavier than most implements of its size, and spotted with a pattern of beveled studs designed to trap and guide incautiously swung edged weapons. The gloves are a little tight across the knuckles, but they fit surprisingly well for items that are usually custom made. Fincher supplies a spare bit of twine so you can tie the gauntlet finger covering your missing finger together with your middle, to avoid it hanging loose.
Fincher and Toothsome make sure you are properly fitted before standing back to admire their work.
FINCHER: "You look right fierce, boss. Can't wait to see what you can do when you're not running into battle with fists and rags."
"Hopefully I won't have to do that again, I think I still have a bit of spear lodged in me."
FINCHER: "That reminds me, I'll need to give you a once over when we finally get to a safe camp. Medically, I mean. Just to check everything's working fit-like."
Toothsome is about to say something but you both know from his weirdly suggestive eyebrows what it is before he says it.
FINCHER: "Toothsome, get back in rank."
He shrugs an sidles off, taking his horse with him.
FINCHER: "Sorry about that. I just meant for, you know, checking your identity. And your health. Never know what we might turn up."
[ ] I trust you to be a professional.
[ ] If I'm getting naked then sex is happening, that's just how it works.
[ ] I'd rather keep the mysteries of my body to myself.
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