The Wagon Fort
A world by Ari Weaver
The Wagon Fort
Captain Bořek's company fights from behind forty farm wagons chained into a ring: two hundred farmhands and their families who beat armoured knights with threshing flails and hand-cannons. Nineteen years into the war they've been hired by the losing side and paid half, and three hundred knights are camped at the ford below the hill. You joined today. The cook reads goat guts, and she's usually right.
Playing as Traveler·
Vojta has a length of chain over each shoulder, and he's still talking when he drops them at your feet. Behind him the last wagons are rolling into the circle on Chapel Hill, and boys run alongside with wedges for the wheels. Down the slope, Rokytná's bells are ringing for evening service.
“Now, this is Twenty-Six,” he says, slapping the oak side of a wagon so hard the boards hung on it rattle. “Your place is here, between Twenty-Six and Twenty-Seven. Front wheel of this one gets chained to the back wheel of that one, see, so they can't be pulled apart, and the shield goes in the gap.” He points at a door-sized shield painted with a red chalice. “You hold the gap. That's the whole job. Somebody comes at the gap, you hit him, and if he's on a horse you hit the horse, which I know, nobody likes it.”
Hedvika walks past with a lantern, counting wagons under her breath. A girl of about ten is carrying a powder keg toward the gunners' wagon.
Vojta threads the chain through the spokes, and locks it with a peg. Then he takes a threshing flail off the wagon bed, its striker studded with iron nails, and holds it out to you handle first.
“Have you ever threshed? Doesn't matter. It's the same swing, you'll see. Here. Show me how you hold it.”
The ring at dusk1 of 3