A Scholar's travels with a Witcher

We learned to keep our heads down. Keep our heads down and our noses out of it. That was the way to survival you know? Keep your heads down, work hard and they would leave you alone. I mean… I know that that were a lie too. I knew it were a lie but I just told myself that this were how I was going to go about surviving. How my wife and I would live and get to raise our daughter. We kept our heads down and we had faith that Kalayn and his fuckers would leave us alone.

I mean, we knew it was a lie sir, of course we did. It was a lie and we knew it but you tell yourself this stuff to get you through the day you know?

But not everyone was as sensible as us.

Somewhere, someone had organised some form of resistance amongst the workers. They never approached me about it, never asked me to join. I’m not bitter about it. I had a wife and kiddie to look after and they all knew it. I was also a blacksmith and important. I were watched. There were constantly guards and soldiers and knights and nobles that were coming to check on the progress of my work. I was watched so even if they had asked, I would have turned them down.

I would have wanted to help but I couldn’t. You know?

Some people don’t understand but they weren’t here milord. They weren’t here. They don’t understand.

But occasionally I would get called in to repair something that needed some skilled labour rather than the kind of thing where they were getting farm labourers to do it. Things that needed precision and careful work on the trebuchets and ballista.

They would call me over and I would take my tools and my small, more portable forge and see what could be seen. It would turn out that there would always be a couple of nobles or knights nearby that were complaining that they had let one of the workers get at it and soak the hinge in apple juice or honey or something which had caused the thing to rot.

Sometimes what the fuckers thought of as sabotage was actually just poor maintenance but I soon learned that if I tried to defend anyone from the horrors that were being inflicted then I would be just as culpable.

I have the scars to prove that so…

No… No one has tried to…

No one disbelieves me. But sometimes… Sometimes I need to prove it to myself.

So the war machines were sabotaged, and there would be things introduced into the mortar for the extra fortifications that were being built that made them less dependable than they might have been. The mortar would crumble. The bricks would not be as level as they should be and so the entire construct would not be as stable as it should have been. It was that kind of thing, I hope that you understand me on that.

And one day, I had heard that they were chasing a few of them.

I were out collecting charcoal. You need the charcoal to make the forge burn at the right temperature. I try to point this out to people but it’s one of the things that people forget. They worry about the hammers, the anvil and the forge itself. They talk about technique and…

But they always forget about the fuel for the fire itself.

So I were going out, taking my buckets out and going to get the charcoal.

I were tired and I saw these three people running away. I was nowhere near them, there was nothing that I could have done and this is one of those times that there really WAS nothing that I could have done. That isn’t just the delusion of a guilty man wanting to believe that there was nothing I could have done, there was nothing that I could have done.

They were far too far away.

There were three of them. A young man and a girl, sweethearts by the look of them, just around marrying age and they were being pushed on by an older man that had found a sword. The sword wasn’t bloody so I guessed that he had taken it.

The couple were holding hands and running, she was the more pragmatic of the couple as she was just… head down, arms pumping and running. But she was shorter than the boy and they were insisting on holding hands. So he had time to look back and see what was going on behind him which meant that he had time to be scared.

A soldier was chasing them. Just one and he looked as though he had a bloody nose. He had a long knife in his hand and he was holding his trousers around his waist with his left hand as he ran. He still had his helmet and chestplate on it so even then, he had good odds against the unarmoured swordsman and he was shouting the usual stuff.

Yes, I see that you know it. “Stop them, don’t let them get away, that kind of thing.”

I didn’t recognise them, nor the soldier. But I heard them.

And just as I saw them and had time to register what was happening. I like to think that I took a step forwards but I didn’t have time for much more than that.

The red in the clouds seemed to boil. I have no way of describing it than that. It moved more like liquid does when it’s dancing around on the hot metal when you plunge the blade into the water. It boiled and then the redness came forward in a cloud. At first, it seemed gentle as it billowed towards a point before it moved faster and faster until it became like a spear of smoke. A spear that was swirling above the heads of the fleeing three people.

The soldier was gaining on the three of them. Training and proper nutrition will count for a lot when you are chasing someone and it was clear to all four of them that the soldier was going to catch them.

The older man with the sword turned to be ready for the soldier, other soldiers were coming.

The young lad wanted to turn and help the older one but the girl pulled him on.

It occurred to me that there was something in the smoke.

The soldier was still yelling about “stopping them” and people were running. A few crossbow bolts were being fired now.

Your woman was in the smoke. I could see her now, the remains of her dress were flapping around her in the wind. She looked as though she was screaming but at first, there was no sound. Blood, I think it was blood, her eyes were black and they were leaking red fluid. I thought it was blood and the same black redness was leaking from her mouth as well. She was covered in gore and… Flame preserve me but she was covered in it. I barely recognised her and only then because I later figured out who she must have been. The beautiful woman that I remembered looking so enamoured at you had become this screaming, horrific… thing… Death. She was Death in the smoke.

She extended her hand and that became the point of the spear. She landed on the ground. I remember seeing a blur and then the fleeing girl just stopped where she was.

Your woman had made a blade out of her hand… not a literal blade. I could still see her hand and it was as though she had just pushed it through the girl's chest from the back.

Then it was as though your woman’s screaming just came in. As though someone had removed their hands from covering my ears so that I could hear something that I hadn’t been able to hear before. She was screaming as she killed the girl and the smoke coalesced around her.

Blood exploded from the girl’s mouth. She choked a couple of times before your woman pulled the arm out of the gore.

The boy screamed and went to catch the girl as she fell. Your woman moved again and her arm fairly sheered the boy's head from his neck.

I’ve seen the headsman work. I’ve seen how much effort it takes to cut a man’s head off and I’ve helped forge an executioner’s axe. Those things are huge, brutal, ugly and crazy sharp. Of course, I tried to lift it and tried to split a log with it.

And it still, sometimes, takes more than one swing to get the head off the neck.

Your woman cut that boy’s head off with her forearm.

The older man with the sword turned back to see what had happened. He gaped at the dead couple as the girl had stopped her own death throes.

He screamed something and hurled himself at your woman.

He was clumsy, obviously, he didn’t know how to use a sword. He just swung it over his head at her. I could have dodged that strike let alone a fucking Vampire. But it was as though she just stood there and watched as the sword struck her in the shoulder and bit deep before it stuck.

To me? She looked disappointed. And she hadn’t stopped screaming. It became quieter, more subdued. More like a whimper.

I don’t know for sure what happened after that, but I’m pretty certain that I saw what I saw. She looked at the older man before she looked over his shoulder at the soldier that was still coming, still struggling to keep his trousers around his waist.

Then she grimaced and looked back at the older man before reaching up and snapped the old man’s neck. Fairly twisting his head around so that his head looked as though he was facing his backside.

He just collapsed in a heap at her feet like a puppet with its strings cut.

The soldier was screaming at her. Something about how they had wanted to make an example out of the fleeing prisoners. How he had wanted to teach her what a man looked like before she died.

She screamed at him. Properly went for it. Took a deep breath in and then screamed at him. Her jaw seemed to dislocate and her mouth grew into this gaping maw with teeth. I thought I could see the waves of it in the air as that sound pushed the air away from her.

He fell back from her, the force of the scream making him stumble over the trousers that he had dropped under the assault of the scream. He fell, ass first into the mud.

Your woman stopped her scream and turned to look at the dead prisoners. It seemed to me that she sobbed before she turned, and put both hands on the hilt of the sword that was still embedded in her shoulder. She walked over to the fallen soldier and pulled the sword out of herself. She did it slowly and stared into the fallen man’s eyes as she did it. It was covered in black… slime as it came. Then she tossed it at the ground at his side.

She gave another short, little scream, her face was as close to being back to normal as I thought it could go. Then she just seemed to leap into the air. The red smoke formed around her again and she vanished into the middle of it as the smoke floated up and spread out, dissipating into the air around the castle.

I didn’t wait to see what happened after that. The vengeance of men like that soldier tends to find the nearest target and I didn’t want to be caught up in that.

I think it’s a very sad story and I have since been told plenty of stories exactly like that. My heart goes out to that dead trio of prisoners that were trying to escape. My heart bleeds for the woman I love being forced to do those things. I think that… if I was able to ask her about it, away from all other influences and if she was not personally involved, I can only look at those events and imagine her saying something like “dreadfully inefficient”.

Being who she is and what she is, Ariadne has so many more tools at her disposal to kill people. I know that she could have grown claws from the ends of her hands which would have made the stabbing and the various deaths far quicker and easier. But instead, she just used her limbs and fingers. She allowed that man to strike her with a blade which, of course, did little to no lasting damage.

She is also a mage. So she could have just, say, thrown a fireball into the midst of the fleeing party and then nothing would have been said about the matter. It was as though she chose the hardest possible method to do the job.

My heart aches for her.

I still haven’t heard from Kerrass about where she might be and with every passing day, he gets further and further away from the castle.

I want to finish this small description of what life was like under the oppression of Sam in the castle by returning to Laurelen briefly, there is a continuation of the subject here so… don’t think too much of it. This was a later interview when I went back to her and was talking about something else. I mentioned the story about Ariadne killing the fleeing couple and their guardian and she nodded.

The story is not an isolated one. There are many such examples where she was clearly under orders and doing her best to make life as difficult as possible for herself to give the fleeing people as much time as possible to get away. It almost always failed but… I think she was trying.

After all of that, when things started to get dark and your brother was trying to find the balance between giving the newcomers the freedom to do all of the things that they wanted to do and that they felt as though they had the right to do, versus being able to keep the people in the fields and ont he walls working, as well as all of the crowds of people that were being fed to the rituals….

Yes, he indeed used Ariadne as his method for doing that. She moved into the clouds and the smoke around the castle and yes, it is true that that smoke had a larger than common percentage of burnt corpses in it. There were other things, the smoke from the forges and the smoke from the burning firepits that were used so that they could protect themselves from the attacks that they were always terrified of.

So yes, that is true. We just noticed, one day that this red tinge was moving through the smoke.

The scientist in me wants to know how far she could spread herself. You know? What kind of area would she be able to cover with her smoke self?

Again though, it strikes me as being a bit inefficient on her part. The woman can control, and talk to, spiders. So why is she using this method of keeping track of everyone? Some spiders are so tiny that you don’t notice them, especially in the late autumn as they web their nests enough to protect themselves from the cold. But she decided to do it that way.

I am convinced that she deliberately chose all of those things. I am certain that she found some loophole in what she had been ordered to do to make her efforts more survivable by those that were working against Sam.

What order she was able to circumvent by looking for things in her smoke form versus looking with all of her magical and physical capabilities, I don’t suppose we will know unless she comes back and we ask her. But even then, I find it would be awkward to ask.

After a while though, the red tinge of things started to come into the castle itself. I know that you talked about it. Some of it was the effects of the rituals that your brother was feeding with the lives and deaths of so many people. But some of it was Ariadne. She was the smoke in the air and, I think, the slight raspiness in the back of your throat and that itch in your nose as you breathed.

I hope that was the case because I tried to talk to her. The same soft words that I told myself about how it wasn’t our fault, that we did the best we could and that all that anyone could ask of us was that we tried. I hope that she believed it more than I did. Those words always ran hollow in my ears.

So Powers only know how they felt in hers. I have a certain amount of blood on my hands. I could have done more. I should have done more. But Ariadne?

Poor woman. Poor poor woman.

I’m going to take a short break now and hopefully get back to this later today.

Flame but I miss Ariadne.

-

Some of this section was written on the road. A couple of notable people had warned me that I had not yet visited Angraal or Angral since all of this has happened and that my absence from so important a locale has been noticed. So I mounted up, we arranged an escort and I went. It was an emotionally charged journey and I keenly missed Kerrass and Ariadne both.

I wept at many moments and I suppose that my mood affected the mood of other people so we were a dour and subdued column of travellers as we arrived. I can stand now and walk around although I still find the effort more taxing than I am comfortable with. Running and moving properly is then my next goal although I refuse to dance until I have someone worth dancing with. My tacit feeling on the matter is that I will dance with Ariadne when she returns, whenever that is going to be.

I found the area where I first met with Lord Dorme, another one of the assholes that changed my life. I went to look at the old tower where we first freed Ariande from. It is guarded now, by Imperial troops to prevent the site being misused. I stood before both of those places and I wept before I was led away. I went to Angral and I walked around the place, standing with the old part that was once the mansion of Lord Dorme where Ariadne had begun efforts to try and reclaim that piece of land from the horror that it had once been a part of.

Such an effort might never be finished now.

I went to Ariadne’s villa as well, that part of the world that the two of us had once intended to share. I did not go in. I will admit that there had been that irrational hope in my heart that the lady herself would come out to greet me. I knew that she wasn’t there, it was one of the first places that we had looked so I knew she wasn’t there. But still, my heart hoped.

The place is empty and sad now, like an old suit of armour that has been left to moulder.

I have stated that I intend to have this as one of my residences, specifically for when I am administering matters in the east of that part of the world that I still struggle to refer to as “my realm”. It was suggested that I should stay in the hall of Stone in central Angraal, but I thought that this would be offensive to the memory of the Duke and Duchess of Angraal and more importantly, it would be disrespectful to the young man who will be ascending to sit in rulership in that place.

The boy hates me and I can’t say I blame him. He is angry as his parents have been taken from him. He needs someone to blame and he can’t blame the people responsible so in turn, he blames me. I take no offence and people should take that as read.

I stood in that hall and I refused the suggestion that I should sit on the throne of stone that gives the hall its name. It occurred to me as I stood there and looked down upon it that this was the seat that Ariadne had sat in when she was making proclamations and it was also the seat that she had refused to sit in when she had returned to the rest of the world and society. I found that I just couldn’t do it.

Instead, I suggested that the boy would sit there while we discussed the matter. He is a clever lad. I didn’t ask his age because it seemed to be the kind of thing that he would find… upsetting to have his youth thrown into his face. So I didn’t want to ask again. Instead, we sat in council and I formally appointed his advisory council. They are his regency council and they all know that, he knows it but I am hoping that the illusion of that choice will give him self-respect enough that he will not become embittered.

The Bishop of Angral is heartbroken about what has happened and I think he will retire soon. But the old general who commanded the guard all the way back then when Lord Dorme tried to rebel, is still going strong. I teased him about his suggestion that he might retire and he admitted that he would, almost certainly, find retirement incredibly boring.

I stayed a week and this time I was grateful for the distraction of this particular work. I stayed in one of the guest rooms in Ariadne’s estate as it seemed wrong to move into the master bedroom and people came to me and I travelled into town where, again, I stayed in one of the guest rooms to be political.

I feel sorry for those children, but all I can do is surround them with the best tutors and the best public servants and hope that they will all turn out for the best.

And as we rode away, I still found myself turning around in the saddle to watch that place get further and further away from me and every time I did that, I hoped that I would see Ariadne walking towards me. Or approaching the camp at night.

I wept a lot during that trip and I was astonished when I found myself feeling as though I would be glad to be home.

The investigation into who it was that tried to assassinate me is still ongoing. The priest that came to see me has not yet been implicated in the attempt and has been, loudly, protesting his innocence from the accusation. It does seem, however, that one of his followers was involved and that follower is now being questioned so it will be interesting to see which way that is going to go.

There is still so much to do and every day…

Every. Single. Day.

I miss Ariadne and Kerrass and wish that they were by my side as I went through all of this. I don’t know if their presence would have made things easier. But I wonder.

-

So the rebellion was in their situation. They were digging in to defend themselves from the expected counterattack. I find this period of it all quite interesting in an admittedly kind of morbid way. The rebellion had not stalled, they were consolidating. They were waiting for the Empire to come to them.

And it is true to say that this was the most likely result. But what if it hadn’t been? The rebellion’s aims were to seek vengeance upon the treacherous Temerians and carry their rage south of the Yaruga and into Nilfgaard itself. So some of the same problems that faced anyone attempting to cross the Pontar to attack the rebels, would also happen to the rebels when they wanted to attack Temeria.

Attacking a swampland where the residents know the land better than you would not be easy apart from anything else. But the morale of the rebels was strong. They had achieved all of their objectives, securing their fortresses and their lines of defence. They had an open port for the ferrying of supplies and reinforcements and they held the strongest defensive line that geography and military engineering could manage to provide.

And as the expected Imperial attack continued to fail to emerge, the rebels increasingly expected to have the winter and the early spring to be able to dig in and prepare to meet the coming attacks.

Quoting briefly from my friend Aleksy

I swear old bean that, although it might be tainted by everything that came afterwards and what we now know was going on here at the castle and to a certain extent, back in Novigrad. I swear that it was among the happiest moments of my life.

Life was simple again. Our enemies were on the other side of the river. My friends were the men standing on either side of me, our cause was just…

Remember, I beg you, that we didn’t know what your brother was up to.

Our cause was just, we had already met our enemy on the field once and we had sent him packing. We felt strong and confident and it was easy to imagine the black ones coming over the rise on the Southern banks and wreaking themselves upon our defences like waves against the cliff face.

It felt good and… I had missed the company of warriors. Since the end of the war, I have regularly been tied up in courtrooms, murky back rooms, taverns, inns and smoky bordellos with far too much perfume in them. I have stood in castles and scowled at the walls that have been taken up by greenery that any enemy assassin could easily climb without breaking so much as a light sweat and where guards and so-called soldiers spent all their time making sure that the buckles on their armour and uniforms are particularly shiny and that their ability to march up and down in step is unparalleled for miles around.

This versus being ready. Even if we are in peacetime we never know when someone is going to attack us. Assassins, bandits, raids from the neighbours, anything. Those men should spend their time training, out on exercise, patrolling, running drills, making sure that the common folk feel safe…

Again I am so sorry old boy. What happened in your lands is not…

But guards and soldiers should be out there, leaving your people with the feeling that they are safe and secure and so that any watching attacker or potential attacker is certain that if they do anything untoward then the full wrath of your troops will fall upon them like a storm.

I had spent too much time watching parades and punishment drills and show fights, archery, sword, lance and mace demonstrations against targets, swings or dummies.

I did not know how enraged I was by all of this until the time came and I was back in the field.

There was a moment in the field. It was a cold night, this will have been after we had seen Bernier off and we were feeling as though our balls were particularly big. It was early evening and I was touring the camp that I was commanding. I was not the watch officer, nor was I on duty but I have found that leadership is not about watches or what is duty and what isn’t. I wore no armour as I was in no real danger. The enemy was far away to the point that they weren’t really in sight and if anyone could get this far into the camp without being spotted or challenged then they deserved to be able to slit my throat.

So I was walking around. I was wearing trousers and comfortable boots, I had a sword on, warm gloves and I was walking with a cloak wrapped around me. I was checking the sentries, talking with the men gathered around the campfire. I traded jokes, told stories and laughed with those men.

Someone had handed me a precious cup of tea. Soldier's tea is black, strong and foully bitter but it wakes a soul up and reminds them that they are alive. It is a precious gift, such a cup of tea as such things are luxuries among the guards. With all the weight that they have to carry, they collect the leaves in the bottoms of pouches before they pool their resources at night and produce a cauldron of the stuff that could be used to scour rust from chain-mail.

It’s the kind of thing where you hate it when you are drinking it but over time, you find that you are missing the flavour and that you long for a drink of that black, bitter tea.

I looked for a source of it when the war was over and I couldn’t find any. I intended to serve it at parties and to guests who were visiting. That way I would be able to tell the men that had really served on a campaign from those men that had only pretended to.

I was walking between campfires, my cloak was heavy and warm around my shoulders and head like a good blanket. My hand rested on my sword pommel and that added weight felt as though it was putting me into balance again. My right hand was holding onto the warm wooden cup and for some reason, I looked up at the stars and sighed in contentment.

It was true that the coming battles might see me to my death but in that moment, I was glad that the warfare had started. I had missed the joking, the camaraderie and the way that real soldiers know it when they recognise one of their own.

We were impregnable. Novigrad on our right flank. Coulthard Castle on our left. We were well supplied and provisioned out of Novigrad and more and more troops were coming in. We wanted them to come after us in the centre. We looked at our defences that became more and more impregnable by the day and we hoped and prayed that the imperials would come at our centre. We had beaten them once and we could beat them again. We were hungry for it. Do you know that feeling? That… longing to meet your enemy and to kill them.

You do don’t you old boy. Oh if only we could have fought on the same side.

We were invincible.

Then that Skelligan devil showed us the gap in our strategy didn’t he old cock.

And indeed, the Skelligan devil showed them the gap in their deployments. The devil in question is, of course, Helfdan and when asked about these events he shrugged at me and said a quote that he has repeated to everyone who asks him this same question and as a result, it is becoming famous.

“They thought like soldiers and I thought like a sailor.”

And as is so common for Helfdan, he kind of assumes that this explains everything that needs to be explained and walks off, much to the frustration of those people that don’t know him.

The short explanation is that the rebels only saw the port of Novigrad as a way to get troops and materials to the battlefront. It simply did not occur to them that the Imperial Navy would attack Novigrad by water. To be fair to them, it was late Autumn and heading closer and closer to winter storms so the assumption was a valid one.

But it was still an assumption and by now people should know how I feel about assumptions, and how much I hate it when I am forced to assume something.

From the moment that the full word of the Rebellion had been carried to the Imperial court, The Empress was being advised as to just how dangerous an offensive would be. But she was also advised that any kind of delay would cost her politically. Her courtiers were advising an attack while her generals were counselling her to wait until spring.

Both sides were right and both sides were wrong.

The delay would mean that she would look weak in the face of the rebels, but a premature military campaign would be costly…

As Count Bernier found out.

Oh some preliminary orders were sent out. The messengers and the people like Padraig, Carys and Chireadean were questioned, re-questioned and then questioned again to get as much information as possible. So the Imperial forces knew roughly the deployment that they were looking at which was all but identical to the deployment towards the end of the war. With all the problems that came with that.

To be clear, there was never a suggestion that there should be a negotiation. Ciri wanted these people done and dealt with and would say so loudly. So anyone that might have been tempted to suggest such a thing would have suffered consequences.

I have read the formal transcripts of those meetings. They are fascinating reading although there is plenty of it that can be skipped and plenty of repetition. I don’t know if they are going to be made public knowledge although I hope so. I can understand the arguments for keeping these meetings secret but the historian in me wants to know and thinks that others deserve to know.

To cut a long story short though. The Imperials knew about the fortification of the crossing. They were confident they could take that crossing but that to do so, it would cost an untold number of lives.

Their confidence was based on the fact that they had the troops. One of the things that Redanian so-called Patriots forget is that one of the factors in the fact that the Pontar was never crossed was due to the number of Nilfgaardian troops that were still engaged in Kaedwen. The current army has no such concern.

But at first, the Imperial military advisors were pessimistic. That they could cross was not in doubt. That they could then hold the bank was also not in doubt, but it was a meatgrinder. Their assessment was that after they had crossed, the rebel forces would converge from both Novigrad and Castle Coulthard. There was no clever manoeuvring to be done. It was just sending their troops onto the battlefield and expecting them to take as many rebels with them as they could before they were overwhelmed. So it would be a numbers game. Numbers and discipline.

According to the record, Helfdan sat in these meetings at Queen Cerys elbow. He is the Admiral of the Imperial Fleet but he still defers to his Queen wherever possible. He sat, quietly, and waited to be called upon.

So while the generals, courtiers and whatnot were speaking, yelling and generally carrying on over the words of their rivals, Helfdan just sat there watching the Empress politely.

It took a while for people to notice. According to the record, it took several days before someone noticed and in a fit of pique, someone demanded to know what he thought they should do.

According to the Empress and Lord Voorhis who both remember the moment with some amusement now that victory has been secured, the frustration in the air had been palpable at that point. Everyone knew what needed to be done, but neither the Empress nor anyone else wanted to order the generals into that position.

No one really expected Helfdan to have anything to add given that the entire situation was perceived as a land-based problem and Helfdan was, after all, the admiral of the navy. At most, it was assumed that he could blockade Novigrad. As was his habit, he took a moment before answering the question and when he did so, he did so calmly with little to no inflexion in his voice.

“We attack Novigrad.” He said.

There were various cries of “Nonsense,” “Impossible,” and “Ridiculous”. All of which Helfdan accepted calmly, waiting until the noise died down.

“Why is it impossible?” He asked. Lord Voorhis especially wanted to point out that Helfdan spoke as though he was genuinely curious as to what the problem was. As though he alone couldn’t see what the problem was and he wanted to banish his own stupidity.

“Because the enemy forces are between us and Novigrad.” Someone said. Yes, I know who it was but I don’t want to expose them to unfair ridicule. Tempers were hot in that room and I would guess that the man in question wasn’t thinking clearly.

Helfdan looked confused for a moment before he worked out what they were trying to tell him.

“Ah.” He nodded happily. “I mean to attack Novigrad from the sea.”

That statement and the confidence that was carried with it fell into the silence like a falling boulder.

The silence stretched.

“You have a plan? Lord Admiral?” The Empress asked.

Helfdan nodded and reached down beside him to extract a map and some plans.

“Could you not have mentioned this sooner?” Someone grumbled.

Helfdan frowned and shook his head.

“People were speaking and shouting a great deal.” He told the room. “It is rude to interrupt. I did not doubt that the Empress would call upon me in due time.”

Apparently, the meeting was adjourned for a moment while the Empress had to take a moment to get over this. Later she told the room that they could all learn from the High Admiral’s example.

Like the rebels, the Nilfgaardian generals had been thinking about the matter like land-based generals rather than thinking like a sailor. Once the gap in the rebellion’s defences had been pointed out it seemed obvious to everyone and more than one person wondered why the Emperor had not taken advantage of this gap the last time the Pontar needed to be crossed.

There is no certain answer of course, but someone did suggest that although the Emperor had the navy, he did not have the sailors with the skill necessary to get the job done. Further to this it was suggested that this was why he was in the process of invading Skellige. The theory goes that one of the things that he was going to offer the Skelligans in return for not rebelling for as long as they could, was first raiding rights of Novigrad itself.

Svein got rather quiet when I suggested that to him.

But the plan was put together rather quickly after that. Not least because, as he said, while everyone was arguing and shouting about the matter, Helfdan had been working on his plan, using the numbers and the logistics that other people were talking about. So the plan was fairly complete by the time that it was unveiled.

There was still some arguing after that because there is always arguing. At one point someone challenged the plan by arguing that no one had ever been able to take Novigrad and that people had tried before, including by sea.

I sense some bitterness from the Temerian camp.

Helfdan ignored the objection. He had told the room that this was what he was going to do and as such, he intended to do it.

However, Queen Cerys was not so Circumspect.

“If Jarl Helfdan says that he will do a thing, experience tells me that it is best to think of that thing as already being done,” she declared. “And I would thank you not to insult my betrothed in my presence again.”

There was some more shouting after this although I’m told that Helfdan fairly glowed with the confidence and good feeling showed to him by his Queen.

Later, some courtiers tried again when Helfdan and the Queen had left but the Empress had none of it.

“I have personally seen Helfdan do things at sea that others have declared impossible,” she told the offending courtier. “I have stood on his deck and watched him do things with his ship that no others would dare attempt, let alone succeed in. I share his Queen’s confidence in his abilities and his plan. If he couldn’t do it, then he would not have said that he could do it. Would that I had more people surrounding me that I could trust as well.”

Suitably chastened, the plan was put in motion.

It took time and it was this time that was perceived as the weakness of the Empress. The thought is laughable now, but at the time, some courtiers were convinced of the Empress’ weakness in this matter and it is during this period that Count Bernier took his determination to carry his sword against the rebels.

As I have said before, my record is just a small amount of the greater analysis that will be performed on the events that occurred between the Autumn Solstice and my appointment as the Duke of the Pontar. One point that has been made, that is impossible to verify, is the long-term effect of Count Bernier’s attempt.

It was hugely destructive to the Temerian and Imperial forces. It was a loss in both material and manpower and a prominent noble died and took a good amount of the nobility with him. It was also a blow to the morale of the Imperial side and massively bolstered the rebel cause. Many people indeed joined the rebels on the strength of that victory. Sam’s plan on that front was a victory.

But on the other hand, it told the rebels that the main attacks were going to come at the river and troops moved from both Coulthard Castle, but also from Novigrad itself to reinforce that position.

So why wasn’t Count Bernier involved in that level of planning?

Because Helfdan’s plan depended on secrecy.

The nightmare scenario was that Helfdan’s forces would land and take the steps to take the harbour defences of Novigrad and to free up the docks, so that the greater ships could get into the harbour and start disembarking the troops, and they would be met with overwhelming odds. Helfdan was confident but it was part of his plan that he was met with as little resistance as possible.

So there is an argument being made by those that think that Count Bernier’s treatment was harsh, that he actually helped the attack against Novigrad.

I am not in a position to judge whether such things were worth the cost.

Nilfgaardian forces embarked along with the Temerians under Lord Roche who was more experienced with street-to-street fighting and a significant number of Skelligan forces as led by Jarl Hjallmar.

It took a long time to get everything right and there was another delay until the weather was entirely to Helfdan’s satisfaction for the attack, so the sailors and the soldiers had another few nights, shivering in the holds of their ships out at sea.

So when the attack was finally called, the rage of those soldiers was properly banked into a slow-burning fury. For all I know, Helfdan had even arranged the mood of the men before the battle began.

By all accounts, the rebel garrison had no idea what hit them.

I have the following account from a dock worker. He was one of the people whose accounts I got by simple virtue of that he was one of the few people that was willing to actually talk to me. I completely understand that it is sometimes a little bit offputting to have this strange nobleman turning up to ask you questions. But I understand it. He was terrified of me and I can understand that. I was well into my time as the Duke of the Pontar by this stage so I know what I looked like and about how I was sat there with my prosthetic feet lifted up onto a stool with a beautiful Elven woman standing nearby cleaning and trimming her fingernails with a dagger.

She does it because she finds it funny. She will be really cross with me for giving the game away but it’s true.

The poor man was brought into my presence by a woman with paper-white skin, blue lips and black hair wearing a very loose robe and an odd stick tied at her waist. So the poor man was terrified and I do not blame him.

But even though he was plainly and understandably terrified, he spoke well and would at least tell me the story of what had happened.

He was the kind of man that I can imagine telling large, preposterous stories in the tavern, embellished anecdotes of the past and hypothetical issues for the future. All told with large gestures, comical facial expressions and a variety of silly voices and exaggerated accents.

If he had been born to a different set of parents, he would have made a good stage performer. But as it was, he was born in Novigrad to a fisherman and the daughter of a man that mended nets for a living. He had found himself a job on the dock fronts as a simple dockworker and he unloaded ships to make his way. He was one of the deceptively large men that you can see around the docks, often stripped to the waist with a cloth hat, walking barefoot and carrying huge sacks of something unidentifiable. That or large, heavy-looking crates that you wonder whether they should actually be carried by more than one person.

When he started to warm up to me, he described his job as being the ability to keep your patience when a man yells at you to pick those crates up and get them off the ship and place them on the dock.

“No not those crates,” he mimicked a stuffy and self-important merchant, reminding me of any number of men that I have known during my life and have met on my travels.

“No not those crates, move those ones first. No, don’t carry it like that. Put them there. No not there, slightly to the left. No… How dare you, don’t you know who I am? I will pay you three crowns to carry my crates off first. Four crowns. Well, I don’t care what the master said.”

And all the while, he would just unload or reload the boat so that the boat could make off and free up the berth for the next boat.

He was in the quiet season and was enjoying a bit more downtime to rest up and ready for the “silly season” in the spring when all the merchants and the sailors who had not managed to save up anything for the winter, or the merchants that wanted to get a jump on the season, would all come out of the woodwork and start falling over themselves to get a run on things.

He was married to the daughter of a guard who worked on the walls and my feeling about them was that they had been a young romance that had blossomed into a marriage when she got pregnant. Then that marriage had grown into a weary kind of contempt to the point where there were even suggestions that each thought that the other was seeing someone else. I never found out but I could easily believe that she occasionally made a living off the sailors when his work was slow. But the crisis in the city drove the two of them together. She was terrified that he would be killed as part of the rampaging newly named “patriots” and he was terrified that she would be taken off to be some “patriot’s” plaything.

I actually met her first. Her husband’s and her role in the retaking of the city meant that they caught the eye of a couple of people and as such, she was brought to my attention first. I got the feeling of a hard woman but she spoke of her husband with pride and I felt that it had been a pride that had been lacking previously. I might be completely making it up but I wonder if she was disappointed that she had been married to “just a dockworker” until he had shown her why she had married him in the first place.

She had little to tell me but insisted that her husband was a better speaker anyway and as such, she insisted that I should speak to him.

He was a little less clever than his wife which might have been part of the root of some of the problems but he was charming and spoke well. Unlike some of the other people that I interviewed, I liked the pair of them and I have every hope that they will be able to see the virtues in each other.

I had to paraphrase his account because his speech was full of slang and his accent was rather extreme.

Over to his account.

I always thought that the stories of the Skelligans were kind of overblown. Me da was a fisherman and I have the knack from him, or so my missus tells me. The thing is, you have to understand that when you are just waiting for the next ship to come in, you’ve got nothing else to do but sit around and wait until the master of the ship is happy and they lower the gangplank...

You can’t get the slings and stuff ready until they’re happy with it because that’s how ships and docks get damaged and as the master of the docks will tell you, when a ship is damaged and the dock is damaged then that means that other ships aren’t coming in, and if ships aren’t coming in then we’re not making any money.

So when that happens, all you have to do, all you are able to do is to sit around and wait. Because if they see you wandering off to another job you are considered lazy and you won’t be paid or used for the next job.

You can’t be an unfriendly dockworker. You have to be either friendly or a criminal. You never know who is going to remember what.

So you sit around and talk and in that environment, you have to learn to be entertaining. My Father was of the same opinion that you have to do that when you’re aboard a ship as well. You can’t be a boring sailor or the risk is that next time there’s a storm, someone might decide that they would rather have your share than you.

So I had always heard plenty of stories about the Skelligans and I had believed none of them. It always sounded… oh what’s the word… exaggerated, yes that’s it. It always sounded exaggerated.

My father would tell stories of the Skelligans to get scare me to sleep at night. It’s how he taught me not to be afraid of the dark. He would tell me that if we left the lights on then the Skelligans would be able to see their way into the harbour and then they would come to get me.

As a father myself now, I understand the trick to it. Rather than trying to convince someone that there is nothing to be afraid of, give them something to be more afraid of than the darkness.

But you hear other stories. Stories about remote towns, shrouded in mists before the cold light of dawn shows you the shadows moving out to see. About how the monster’s heads come out of the mist as the ships are rowed into the harbour and it is not until the final moment when the warriors scream and the warning bells in the town or monastery start to ring and then there’s nothing to do but to run in case the monstrous Skelligans come to get you. I have heard those stories, I might even have told some of those stories myself, of women being made into playthings to be passed around during the parties. About how children are carried off towards slavery and a life of torment. About how men are tortured and murdered in ways that make strong men go pale.

Tales are told of the Blood Eagle and worse. But always, the main tales are about how they just arrive, seemingly out of nowhere. Completely impregnable village and town defences are simply breached easily. Harbours that can only be sailed into by experienced men are breached by men… by things that could not possibly have made that harbour. So it is easier to say that they are monsters rather than men. It is easier to say that they are the possessors of monstrous, magical, sinister powers than that they are simply better than we are.

After all, we are the people of Novigrad. The Eternal Flame protects us and as such, we are safe from… whatever.

Heh.

I was put to work during the taking of Novigrad. Like all the children of Novigrad, I had been brought up to believe in the impregnable walls, the siege engines and the massive gates. I had been taught that the guards on the walls and the soldiers in the streets would keep us from harm and that the very presence of the Eternal Flame in our city meant that we couldn't be breached by monsters. There were no monsters here, it was impossible. After all, the city was beloved by the Eternal Flame was it not and the tenets of that religion tell us that we can't be attacked by monsters.

So it didn’t occur to me that there was a threat of invasion. “The only way that Novigrad has ever fallen was by politics” the old men would say and we would all nod and make agreeing noises. We were so convinced of our invulnerability that it didn’t occur to us that anything else was going to happen. Then we fell from within, didn’t we?

I never had a problem with Nilfgaard. I was in a… a whatsit…. A reserved occupation. I was actively not allowed to go to war even though I think my missus would have been happier if I did. It would have given her something to be proud of that, but I was not allowed. So when we started unloading ships with black flags on the mast, it made no difference to me and life didn’t really change. There were still assholes that tried to get away without paying me. Still, masters that thought that they were entitled to my wages and still customs agents would order me around as if they had the right.

Bastards.

No one likes a customs agent. Including the other customs agents as far as I can tell.

So the people that truly changed us, the ones that all but destroyed us were our side. The ones that tried to tell us that we were their people.

Fuck. That.

The Eternal Flame didn’t keep us safe from those monsters, did it?

They’re a bunch of bastards and all.

Sorry for saying so milord but they tax us and expect payments and what did they do? Locked themselves behind their pretty little gates and didn’t lift a finger to help those of us that were down there in the muck.

Fuck em.

There is a special place reserved in the frozen hells for those men that will take you off a job and tell you to go and do that other job first. Men that have never lifted a finger in their lives told us to stop what we were doing and go and do the other thing, only to then yell at us for not getting the first thing done in the first place.

That’s what these new pricks were like.

They acted like their shit smelled sweeter than everyone else's because they had a different fucking colour of tunic on than everyone else. But let me tell you, I’ve never met a more sadistic bunch of work-shy cretins in all my life. I don’t know who it was that taught them all how to load ships, either with goods or people but the most important stuff goes on last so that it can be the first stuff to come off. It’s not an advanced magical theory to figure that out. But the number of times that we would have to climb over goods to get the…

If only that was the worst thing that they did.

Sorry milord, it’s just… It’s harder to talk about the other stuff. The women were raped because someone said that they had had a black one. Or the kid with the black hair that made the mistake of wondering why everyone was so sad all the time if this rebellion was supposed to be so good.

I still think of that kid sometimes. They plunged a dagger into his guts and pushed him into the water for being disloyal. And then they went and found his parents, raped and flogged his mother for not bringing the kid up properly and tortured the man to death for being disloyal and teaching his children treason.

The kid was right though. Freedom is supposed to be liberating, isn’t it? I don’t even really know what that means, but I remember the feeling of being told that the war was over, that there would be no siege and that the troops of the Emperor, as was, were not going to be crossing the river and laying siege to us.

I always thought that that was what it would be like.

They talked about tyranny a lot, those new, so-called patriots. They talked about tyranny and about how the iron black boot of the South was not going to be pushing us down into the muck any more. And the only difference between me and that kid was that I had the age and the brains to know not to ask why the only people pushing me into the mud were these new people.

It wasn’t freedom for us though was it? It was freedom for them... They wanted a licence to do whatever it is that they wanted. And they didn’t like that the Black ones told them that they weren’t allowed to do it. They wanted to take what they wanted because they felt entitled to it, whether it was a woman’s virtue, a piece of food from a stall, a piece of jewellery from a dwarf or… I don’t know. They just wanted all of it without having to pay for it, or work for it and folks like that milord? You can’t trust them. You can’t and you shouldn’t.

I got a bit off track there milord. Sorry about that.

Yes, I can see that you do. There are some good ones like yourself that know how much work it is. Men that know the worth of someone else chopping their firewood for them.

I wasn’t at the docks when they attacked and it’s because of that that I survived I think. I was at home yelling at the wife at the time which was fair enough because she was yelling at me. I know that we were yelling and the kid was screaming and the baby was crying…

I can’t remember what we were arguing about now. So much of it was like that. I would be angry at her and she would be angry at me and then we would both be apologising. I mean the sex was great and everything but…

Fuck.

We were fighting when it was as though the air changed. A shift in the wind and I just… I felt it. She felt it too as she makes as much of a living off the docks as I did…

I didn’t mind that when she felt the need. I know some men do but there have been nights where she’s put more food on the table than I have and I’m not sore about it. I love my wife and she loves me and that’s the end of it.

But she got quiet and I turned towards the window. We live in a little place above a candlemaker’s shop. We both heard it at the same time I think and I looked back at her and she looked at me and we bothe moved at the same time.

I moved to the window and the doors. I made sure the shutters were shut and closed, barred and blocked the door. Then I went to nailing the shutters closed.

In the meantime, she got the kids to be quiet and was sharpening my cutlass and her cleaver. She also had a wicked sharp knife in her belt and I didn’t ask what it was for as I already knew.

Anyone in that situation that doesn’t know what the really sharp knife is for has never had to protect children from the horrors of the world.

She handed me my cutlass and then we stood facing the door ready for whatever came through it. I remember looking at my wife then and thinking that I had never seen a more beautiful woman in all my life. I told her that and she blushed.

What a fucking time for romance.

It seems that I was lucky though. One of the customs wretches knew who I was and had told some of the rebels where I lived. The morning after the battle of the harbour, after it had all gone quiet, we had a hammering on the door and a voice calling for me by name. They told me that they needed me for work and I went. My wife kissed me hard as I went out the door. I told her that I loved her when I went and as the Flame and the Prophet is my witness, I did not expect to see her again.

I did though. They put me to work. I was beaten, flogged and worked to the point where I could barely stand. Sometimes I would just fall asleep where I was or find some soft haybales or sacks to sleep on while I waited for the next shipment. Too many labourers had died in that first frenzy of blood-letting and I was doing the work of many more than just myself.

One time, my wife came to look for me. She was scared and the kids were scared. One of the men guarding us decided that he liked the look of her. I looked at the fear in my wife’s eyes and I picked up one of the swords that I was unloading and I held it in my hand. It felt wrong and heavy.

The guard asked me what I was going to do with it. I saw that a couple of them had my wife by the arms then and there were trained, armoured soldiers between her and me. And I was falling down tired.

I didn’t think about it. I put the sword to my own throat.

It is an interesting thing to know your own worth. At that moment, being one of the men that were able to unload the ships, I was worth more than the well-being of a couple of what we laughingly call soldiers.

A knight or officer of some kind ordered the men to let my wife go. I held her close and told her not to worry about me, to be safe and that I would find her when it was all over. She took the message and left. The next time that I made it home, she had taken the kids and gone.

That was a shite moment, I tell you. I look back on it now and I shudder. It still takes everything I have to let go of her in the morning when I have to go to work.

In the end, I just stayed on the docks. There was more chance of getting some food in, I had some good comrades there and at least there were people there that understood me.

So it was that I was on the docks, trying to keep the gruel that I had been given to eat in my stomach when the Skelligans came.

I remember that I felt numb. I was tired and my limbs felt rubbery. I was not as bad as some but I was worse than others. There were good days and there were bad days but that day was a moderately terrible day. I had been worse and provided I managed to get a decent amount of rest that night, I was confident that I wouldn’t be just cast aside yet.

So I was leaning against a post, trying to breathe in and out you know? Trying not to be violently sick while hoping and praying that they wouldn’t find anything else for me to do that night.

Fat chance if history served.

I was at that stage where I could probably have summoned up the energy to do something but it was in the moments between actions that had left me feeling tired and so… done with it all.

I wanted to see my wife again. I wanted to see her and hold our children and…

Well… you know.

So I was leaning there and the wind changed. I’ve seen it before, we all have. You can’t live and work at a harbour or next to the sea without having an instinct for the weather. I turned into it and I felt something, I smelled something on the wind.

“Storm’s coming.” Someone said, rather stupidly I thought. I wished I had the energy to mock him for it but I just didn’t. You always mock someone when they say something like that. I mean, who needs to tell someone something that is blindingly obvious?

All I did when we realised what was happening, I took the time to stare into the wind and enjoy the freshness that it had brought. The movement of air meant that I wasn’t just… breathing the miasma of death and the flies and the burning of…

So I looked out to see and I could feel the wind pick up. If I had the energy, I might have wondered if that wind meant that I would not have to do much work after that. It certainly had the smell of a storm and when storms like that one start to blow up, the best thing you can do is to hide from it.

I was simply wondering if the bastards were going to make me work through the storm and whether or not I would survive it. Storms can be just as deadly in the harbour as they can at sea. If you get blown off the harbour into the water, the ship can crush you and…

And….

Then the thunder rolled.

The thunder rolled but everything was still. The wind had died down but everything was still. I turned to look out to sea… It was evening, just as it was getting dark. There was no wind. My memory and my body want there to have been wind but there was no wind there. No wind at all.

What there was this rolling bank of fog coming towards us. It billowed and moved in the darkness. It seemed that there were lights amongst the fog and although it was fog, it rolled like smoke across the top of the water. There was lightning in the fog, rippling through it like a spider’s web. I just stood there and watched it as it got closer and closer, not knowing what I was looking at.

Then out of the fog came the heads of the monsters.

And they told me that the way Skelligans move was a story.

I remember laughing. Is that odd? I think it’s odd. Not the kind of thing that you imagine doing in the middle of a crisis. But I remember standing there, looking at this rolling fog bank that hid Flame knows what and I just stood there laughing. I started small and quiet, just a gentle chuckle but over time, that feeling started to grow and grow and grow until I was full-on howling with laughter, real, leaning down on my knees, gasping for breath laughter.

One of the rebels… We can call them rebels now, can’t we? One of the rebels shook me and demanded to know what I was laughing at. I couldn’t do anything, all I managed was to point to those awful, hideous figureheads coming out of that great fog bank with the lightning running through it and I couldn’t stop laughing.

“Monsters.” I told them. “Monsters.” And I laughed and laughed and laughed.

He hit me and I fell. It was only by sheer luck that I fell on the jetty rather than into the water where I might have drowned or taken in some of the horrors that live in that water…

No not monsters. Parasites and filth and… Take a mouthful of harbour water and you wish that you had only drowned.

I once saw a man shit himself to death after we dragged him out of the water.

He grabbed me by my shirt and heaved me up to look at him in his eyes and demanded again to know what was so funny.

“You can’t keep the monsters out.” I told him. “The Eternal Flame couldn’t keep the monsters out. You can’t keep the monsters out. There are always going to be monsters.”

And I laughed in his face. I must have looked like a fucking madman ready to be carted off and put in the silly house or in the hospital where they drive a spike into your brain to make it so that the madness leaks out along with whatever’s left of your brain.

But at the time, it just seemed funny to me.

“Leave him.” Another voice said and I was dropped back to the cold and slimy wood where I clutched my sides with the violence of my giggling.

“What’s happening?” My tormentor wondered.

“Skelligans.” Said the other man. “The defences will keep them out though.”

“And the three of us watched as the defences utterly failed to keep them out. They utterly failed to fire, let alone keep the coming Skelligans out.

The harbour wall, as I’m sure you know milord, is lined with siege engines. Catapults, trebuchet, ballista and every other contraption that the minds of Novigrad could concoct to keep the enemy ships out. Frighteningly accurate and they can reduce ships to the water line in seconds. Or so we are taught from a young age.

I don’t know why they didn’t fire. I just know that the two men that stood over me as the three of us watched those awful figures get closer and closer went from smugness to impatience and eventually to dread and fear as the catapults didn’t fire and the trebuchet didn’t swing. Somewhere, it came to me that a church bell was ringing and as my two tormentors ran off to find safety in numbers it seemed to me that the demons of the sea…

Meaning the Skelligan ships milord… That’s what we called them down in the harbour.

The demons of the sea seemed to leap forwards.

Now I could hear something from the ships. I could hear drums and someone was shouting in a language that I couldn’t recognise. There was shouting from further in the city and I daresay that there was some screaming as well. But for the right then and there, it seemed to me that the world was silent but for the lapping of the waves against the pilings of the jetty and a slow rhythmic sound that I later worked out to be oars dipping into the water.

I could hear that voice shouting. I knew what was happening. I knew that the oars were moving and that the sailors were driving those ships on. I even guessed that the voice was either the sounds of a man… whatever the Skelligan equivalent of a bosun is, shouting the rhythm or giving a chant as the ships came on. Or maybe it was their mages calling out the spell that made it all seem so otherworldly.

But I watched, listening to that lone voice as it echoed out across the water. I knew what was happening but it was as though my eyes and ears simply didn’t understand what I was seeing. To my eyes, it seemed as though the mist was carrying the ships forward and into the depths of the harbour.

It was like being in another world. It didn’t seem real. Bad food, not enough rest, whatever else was going on, it didn’t seem real.

The mouth of the harbour is not big but three ships came through almost next to each other. Leaving all else aside, the seamanship of being able to do that, where the currents of the sea meet the currents of the harbour. The skills involved in such an action… That alone beggars my belief. But they came through and I could finally see the men standing on the backs of those ships. Men with armour and round helms. Gold glinted in their armour and the firelight glinted off drawn weapons.

The harbour had been full of rebel ships and many of those ship masters who had more sense than I did had started to try and get their ships out of dock. But it was impossible. The tides, the currents and the weather were all on the sides of the Skelligans and those three longships struck the rebel ships and just before impact, the Skelligans roared with one voice. It was an awful sound. A terrifying sound and it seemed to echo in my ears just before the most awful sound a harbour worker can hear.

The sound of ships splintering and cracking.

That sound finally dragged me to my feet and caused me to move. No man or woman can stand or sit still in the midsts of a noise like that. That is the sound of disaster and I was up and running as fast as I could, away from danger.

I turned as I ran and I could see that more ships were coming into the harbour. Two split and went up to the harbour walls, depositing men.

Logical thought occurred to me then and I went to try and find my family.

The attack seemed to have completely taken the rebels by surprise. As well it might. Lots of people worked really hard to make sure that this was the way it all went down.

The mist and the lightning were magical effects that were cast before the ships as they got closer and close. Partially to conceal the size of the attack and partially as an intimidation factor. Before the rebels knew what they were doing or could coordinate a defence, the Skelligan warriors of the Black Boar, Clan Tuirseach, Clan An Craite and Clan Dimun were in the harbour and smashing up rebel ships and slaying rebel soldiers.

The attack was led by Helfdan himself and he was at the helm of the front of the three ships. He sailed on Lord Dreng’s ship and Svein tells me that he had never before believed that those two men were treated by Dreng’s Father as brothers.

“Some men have said that Helfdan is Dreng’s bastard brother and I have never believed that story. Never. Helfdan has obviously never tried to trade off that and Dreng has never answered to it. He scoffs and moves away. If there was any truth to that rumour I would have thought that, even back then, Dreng would have been more violent in his denials. Instead, he just laughs and moves on. And after all, the two men look nothing alike. They act nothing alike. Their manner and the way that they move are nothing alike.

“But I tell you Scribbler. I watched the pair of them at that tiller where Helfdan focused on the sailing and would occasionally say something to Dreng who would just give out orders with gestures to his sailors. I would never have believed it until I saw the pair of them sharing a tiller on the back of the ship.”

The other two ships were Captained by Red Roary of the Black Boar as it would seem that his seamanship is of similar quality and the third was led by Holger Blackhand who declared in a loud voice that he could stand aside in overall leadership in favour of Lord Helfdan given Helfdan’s emotional investment in what was happening. “But by the Gods and Goddesses together, if I am not one of the first Skelligans to sack Novigrad I’m going to murder someone.”

According to witnesses, the Imperials were appalled, but Helfdan simply smiled.

Other ships came in through the harbour gates and started to move to the attack, landing troops on either side of the harbour to clear that harbour and start to erect temporary docks for the unloading of the coming Nilfgaardian troop transports.

As to why the Harbour defences didn’t fire.

My friend the gate guard can answer for that.

It says something about Novigrad as a whole, that so many people are so used to forming resistance cells that a resistance sprang up almost immediately. I mean… I can understand a criminal underworld wanting to smuggle things here and there and be part of a black market. I may be a guard but I’m clever enough to know that a good and functioning black market is an essential pressure release for all the people that can’t get what they want from the more traditional marketplaces.

But what does it say that there have been so many times when people have felt the need to rebel and resist that we are all so good at doing it.

I was not the first person to rebel against these new so-called patriots. There were people hiding in cellars and passing messages and all kinds of things long before I got there. I had the dim feeling that I knew that the rebellion was going to fail as soon as I saw just how widespread and instant the resistance had sprung up. It didn’t have anything quite as advanced as a leader yet. But there were cells everywhere and it was founded on the stance of saving people’s lives.

We all saw it, that the rebels and the “patriots”... hah… were so blood-crazed and drunk with their own successes that it would take some time before they would be even close towards being sated. And their first priority was to get rid of “Nilfgaardian influences,” before they would start to worry about things like “civil authority” and the like. So it was absurdly easy to start building up a resistance to them. Their methods were so wide-reaching and so brutal that a resistance was inevitable, and I don’t think it honestly occurred to them that such a thing might happen. I don’t think any of them were even looking for us. Traitors and men that left their posts? Definitely, they looked for them. But for those people that were Redanian, it simply didn’t occur to them that anyone would disagree with what they were doing. So they just didn’t look for us and we could operate, all but in the open.

So at first, our efforts were to just hide and save lives. If we saw someone running, we would hide them. If we heard word that the guard was going after someone or other, we would get them out. Rescuing them was all but impossible after the guards had got hold of them, as the process from capture and arrest to trial and execution was all but instantaneous. So we were in the mode of prevention. Getting people out from under the guard’s noses and finding them somewhere to hide. The rebels, after that first wave, didn’t seem entirely sure what they were doing.

There was not yet a new governance or a new civil structure. The guards and the watch were just expected to keep doing what they were doing although they started to drift away when it became clear that the rebels just forgot to make sure that they kept paying the guards.

I talked the friend that had helped me to stay with the guard as a source of information but other than that, a few left and they were promptly caught, tried for being Nilfgaardian sympathisers and were tortured to death in the main square.

It was an awful time. Terror ruled and all the time, the rebels got more and more aggressive and drunk with it. We watched as powerful rebels would just decide to march into a house and take a bottle of wine, take a girl or a boy and rape them in the street, before tossing them aside. Because who was going to stop them?

We remembered them though. Oh yes, we did.

So we kept our heads down and worked where we could. When there was a target for us to attack, where there would actually be some benefit to those attacks. Then we would be ready. But at the start of that, if we killed a rebel then there would be more punishments in the hunt for the murderers and we would be spitting into the wind as it was.

Then one evening I got this sharp headache behind the eyes.

It was just one of those blinding flashes behind the eyes. It felt like a bright beam of sunlight had reflected off a polished piece of metal and shone into my eyes. You know how you wince and try to shield your eyes from what’s glaring at you? It was like that. Truth be told I thought nothing of it. I had other things to think about at the time. It was only later, after we started to talk about it, that we realised that a good percentage of us had had a similar little headache.

Two nights later, I had a nightmare. It was really strange. You see horrible things in my line of work and after a while, you get used to the idea that you’re going to have nightmares about the things that you see. You lose them towards the bottom of a good drink, or in the laughter of friends or my personal favourite which is driving yourself into the body of a nice, willing woman.

Nothing makes you feel quite as alive and in the moment as that.

So I was having the nightmare of watching my dark-haired lover die horribly on the block. There were some variants because of course there were some things that were different. There are always things that are different, things that could have been different or things that you could have done to make the world a better place.

In this instance, the axe blows kept ringing out like the chiming of the bell, and still, she wouldn’t die. Instead, she looked into my eyes and every scream of pain was followed by a curse towards me that I had failed her. I kind of waited through the nightmare with a kind of resignation. I knew it was a nightmare and that all I had to do was wait for it to be over.

This time though, there was an insanely beautiful woman who was watching my dream self. As I say, ridiculously beautiful with a dress that was barely there. But instead of lust, I wanted to be held by that woman as though she was my mother. Even now, although I can picture her clearly I don’t want to…

Oh, hells.

But she was peering at me in the dream before she nodded and instead, I remembered my dark-haired lover laughing and the nightmare fled before the laughter. I saw her smiling at me and I rested my head in her lap and drifted off into a far more restful sleep.

In the morning, I knew what was going to happen. As did a significant number of other rebel… sorry, resistance cells in Novigrad. We seemed to know each other and know what our task was. It was the strangest thing, to know men that I had never met and to trust them with my life. Later, we would talk and we all had the same headache a few days before and we all dreamed of the same woman, chasing our nightmares away.

My role?

I met a woman in a back alley. Large woman, had a good twenty years on me and we didn’t stop to chat. She told me she was in the laundry and handed me a bundle of the new uniforms. I handed the uniforms out to those members of the resistance cell that had taken me in when I first threw my coat away and we moved to our tasks.

Incidentally, what does it say about a cause that they think of new uniforms and who is going to wash them before they consider how to hunt people that might organise against them?

My cell’s task? We simply marched up to a section of the harbour wall and announced ourselves as the next shift. There were five men and one woman in our cell that could pass for guards. The other cell members had other tasks like preparing field hospitals and warning civilians to stay indoors.

We didn’t know why we were doing all of this. We just knew that it had to be done.

So we were greeted at the wall by the knight in charge. I did the talking as I was most experienced in dealing with this kind of self-important fuck-head. He nodded to us gratefully and told us that he was going to find some whore to fuck.

Told me everything I needed to know about himself with that one sentence.

My people got onto the wall and stood in place of the guards that left the walls and waited. Like all the others, I had no idea what was going to happen, but I knew that it was a vital part of what happened next.

Like everyone else, I watched that rolling fog bank come in, but instead of being afraid, I knew that whatever it was that was lurking in the fog, was on my side.

I very nearly cheered when those figureheads came out of the fog.

I didn’t because I was busy. As soon as I recognised those ship figureheads coming out of the fog as what I knew them to be, I knew what I had to do, and so did the people that were with me.

As I say, it didn’t occur to them that anyone might be so coordinated as to steal their uniforms. So eight of us were able to take an entire section of the wall, along with the warning beacons and siege engines that were aimed to defend the harbour mouth and warn the city in case of attack. We met up with other cells who had similar jobs and we hugged each other in true, genuine joy as we watched those first longships breach the harbour.

And then we had to fight.

It all went surprisingly easy, to tell the truth. After all, those walls are designed by the finest military engineering minds that Oxenfurt… and Novigrad have ever produced.

Or that’s what they all keep telling us anyway. It certainly worked that night. My group was eight people strong. The group next to us had six and beyond that was another nine people. So a total of twenty-three people held that wall against all of the rebels that came at us. A couple of us were archers so all that most of us had to do was to stand in the way with big-ass shields and the others were shooting and poking down with spears. We did, briefly, talk about seeing if we could arrange for some of the siege engines to fire on our enemies but as the fighting progressed, it became clear that it would be impossible to tell friend from foe in the darkness and the firelight.

The only people that we could recognise were the Skelligans and I don’t know about the enemy, but they scared the living shit out of me.

A relatively polite chap came up to our wall. All of a sudden the pressure against my shield just seemed to fall away and then this huge, hairy man was standing in front of me. Wrapped in fur he had a large, hooked axe in his hands and a shield on his back. Arrows and crossbow bolts stuck out of the shield on his back and another arrow was stuck in his shoulder that he had broken off and continued to fight with, so it can’t have gone deep.

He looked down at me. I am not a small man and it was not a small shield. I was bracing it so I was in a kind of crouch, but he looked down at me and grinned.

“Heimdall’s tits but you fought well.” He told me. “My men and I are here to relieve you.”

“Alright,” I said. “What does that mean?”

“Damned if I know,” he sniffed a bit and we moved out of the way so that the Skelligans that were lined up behind him could climb up the stairs. “But that is what I was told to tell you. I think it means you can stop worrying about it now and have a nap or whatever it is that you continental folk do when you stop fighting.”

“Have a good drink,” suggested a passing warrior who was moving a barrel.

“Have some acrobatic sex,” my new friend added.

It was one of those moments where my mouth just spoke.

“Why, are you offering?” I wondered.

He stared at me for a long moment in shock. Then he laughed and clapped me on the shoulder.

“I like you little man,” he decided. “But you’re done for now.”

“What do you mean?” It was my turn to ask the question.

He laughed again, admiring the symmetry himself. He just pointed down into the harbour.

“The black ones have come,” he told me.

I looked down into the harbour and I saw what was a second tall ship coming into the harbour. You can’t live in Novigrad and not appreciate good and skilled sailing. But it must have taken a helmsman with balls of solid rock to get one ship into that harbour full of, by now, smashed and burning boats. But one already had a dock and black armoured soldiers were swarming onto the shore.

From the distance I was, they looked like a swarm of beetles or ants swarming out of the ground and I watched as the next ship found a flat piece of dock to do the same.

All my life I had been taught to fear this sight. And now two of those childhood terrors had come true in the space of a few hours. Skelligans had raided Novigrad and now, Nilfgaardian troops were inside the walls. I remember vomiting and as I looked along the walls at my colleagues in resistance and I was not alone in that sentiment.

My new Skelligan friend clapped me on the shoulder again which nearly sent me falling off the wall into that same boiling nightmare of a battlefield.

“Relax man, we’re on your side.”

I didn’t, and I still don’t know what to make of that.

I suppose that it goes without saying that Helfdan’s plan worked perfectly. He reasoned, correctly, that there would be a resistance movement within the city. He also theorised that the resistance could be contacted magically in order to test who would be reliable and who could be trusted. That method was further implemented by members of the Imperial magical war college who implanted the instructions into the required heads. What the gate guard tells is a little unusual as in most cases, the orders were given verbally so that people could respond.

Only a few vital actions were implanted directly.

I am not sure how I feel about that bit. If a mage can order someone to attack a certain point without any kind of conscious resistance from the someone in question then that opens possibilities that I am not sure I want to think about.

Although once again, another reason that the North was defeated by the South is the driving away of all of the magical talent. Patriotic mages would have been able to protect the rebels against this particular attack and the attacks like it that were bound to have been used during the wars.

So as the fleet attacked, there were elements of that resistance that were able to take the important sites within the city so that the fleet could attack without hindrance. The Skelligans went first and then opened up the harbour for the Nilfgaardians to follow.

The careful planning and tactics of Helfdan, Lord Roche and General Maxwell of the Imperial army were met by a disorganised, at best, resistance. It did not occur to the rebels that they would be attacked from the sea. And when the attack came, the lack of a clear command structure meant that they were unable to mount a proper defence.

Aleksy provides the best analysis.

“It was a rout old boy,” he told me. “An utter disaster.”

It was not the last disaster to befall the rebellion.