Chapter 205: The Alpine Hunts

After another hour of walking through the woods, they finally reached the edge of the great valley.

The gates were standing wide open, just as the rebel army had left them when they charged out.

As Voss led the soldiers toward the gates, the scale of what they had just conquered became painfully clear.

Standing just inside the walls, huddling together in terror, were thousands of women. There were old men leaning on wooden canes. There were countless young children clinging to their mothers’ legs, their faces dirty with ash and tears.

When they saw the Jaegers marching their defeated fathers and husbands into the fortress at gunpoint, a collective, heartbreaking wail rose up from the crowd.

"Silence!" Brandt roared. He fired a single rifle shot straight up into the sky.

The sharp thunder of the gun instantly silenced the crying crowd. The women pulled their children closer. They stared at Voss with eyes full of hatred and fear.

Voss lowered his mace. He walked slowly through the snowy streets of the fortress.

"Brandt," Voss ordered. "Take five hundred men and secure the perimeter. Put our shooters up in those wooden watchtowers. Disarm every single prisoner and lock them in the large meeting halls. Treat the women and children fairly, but do not let anyone leave the timber walls."

"Yes, General!" Brandt saluted. He shouted orders to his battalion leaders to spread the men out.

"This is a lot of people," Hans whispered. "I thought there were only a few thousand exiles. But looking at these families... there must be at least six thousand women and children here. Plus the five thousand men we just captured."

"We can handle them," Voss said, brushing some falling ash off his shoulder.

Hans pointed a finger at the shattered ice in the distance. "The lake is broken, General. The fish are gone, or they are trapped under the dead bodies. The gorge we blew up on the trail? That was probably where Reischach was hiding their winter supply wagons."

Four thousand Swabian soldiers.

Five thousand prisoners of war.

Six thousand women and children.

Fifteen thousand people trapped inside a wall at the base of a smoking mountain.

Voss slowly turned to Hans. His voice dropped into a nervous whisper.

"...when we did the fake retreat on the clearing this morning... how much of our salted pork and hard bread did the quartermasters manage to pack?"

Hans stared back at his General. His own face drained of blood.

"None, General," Hans swallowed hard. "You told us to leave the supply crates in the snow to make it look like a panicked retreat. The explosion blew all our food into the rocks... I am already starving. My belly feels like it is eating my own ribs. If we do not find some meat by tomorrow, I might actually try to bite Brandt’s leg."

Brandt, who was busy organizing patrol maps on a wooden table, did not even look up. "If you try to bite me, I will shoot you in the knee. Keep your teeth to yourself."

Though Voss usually loved their constant bickering, his mind was entirely focused on the numbers.

"We cannot just sit here and wait for King Konrad’s engineers to arrive," Voss said firmly. "If a pigeon flies out today, it takes three days to reach Augsburg. It takes Konrad two days to gather the royal diggers, and another week to march here. That is almost two weeks of waiting. We will be eating boots and pine bark by day four."

Silence filled the command hall.

You could not shoot hunger with a rifle, and you could not forge bread in a blast furnace...

"Brandt," Voss suddenly stopped pacing. "When your men locked the prisoners in the meeting halls, did you notice who was in charge of the food supplies? I need to talk to the local hunting leader. Bring him to me right now."

"Yes, General Voss," Brandt nodded. He grabbed his rifle and headed back out into the streets.

It did not take long for Brandt to return. The doors pushed open, letting in a cold gust of mountain wind and a flurry of gray ash.

Two Jaegers marched into the room. They dragged a tall, incredibly rugged man between them.

He had a wild black beard, a jagged scar across his right eye, and he wore a coat made entirely of white wolf pelts.

"General Voss," Brandt said, shoving the man to his knees in front of the stone fire pit. "This is Klemens. Reischach’s men say he was the master of the alpine hunts."

"So, you are Klemens," Voss said softly. "I will get straight to the point. My men are hungry. Your people are hungry. The food is wholly gone. I brought you here to ask you a very simple question. How can we solve this food problem?"

After hearing such words, Klemens let out a mocking laugh. He looked up at Voss with his one good eye.

"You want me to help you feed your army of murderers?" Klemens spat, struggling against the guards. "You buried us all, you arrogant Swabian! We are just waiting for the bodies to drop!"

"Listen to me!" Hans suddenly roared. He jumped out of his wooden chair and drew his hunting knife.

He stepped right up to Klemens, grabbing a handful of his black beard. "We did not force your people to ally with the Spanish Emperor! We did not ask you to shoot bolts at us in the woods! We won the battle. Now, you can either help us find meat, or I can start by roasting your leg over this fire!"

"Hans, enough," Voss ordered calmly, raising his hand.

Hans grumbled. He released the mountaineer’s beard and stepped backward, but he kept his sharp knife drawn.

"Klemens... I understand why you hate me. I really do. But let me be entirely clear. If we run out of food, my Jaegers are not going to be the first ones to starve. Your women will starve. Your children will starve. My men have the guns, which means they eat last."

Klemens’s jaw tightened. The army always eats before the prisoners.

"There has to be another hunting ground," Voss pushed gently. He recognized the shift in the hunter’s demeanor. "You know these alpine peaks better than anyone. Where is the meat, Klemens? Tell me, and I swear that your women and children will get the first full rations."

Klemens stared at the dirt floor for a long moment. He listened to the distant, low rumble of the angry mountain outside. He closed his one good eye, taking a long breath.

"There is a place," Klemens finally whispered. "But it is a graveyard."

"I do not care if it is the underworld itself," Voss smiled, standing back up. "Where is it?"

"Two days march to the north," Klemens explained. He looked up at the Swabian commander. "There is a sprawling alpine canyon we call the White Jaws. Every winter, huge herds of giant mountain boars drag themselves out of the freezing winds to mate and die in the snow. We call them the iron-tusks. Some of them weigh as much as three full-grown horses. The meat from just ten of those beasts could feed this entire fortress for a month."

"Giant boars!" Hans cheered. His eyes lit up with joy as he quickly put his knife away. "You mean giant, fat, slow mountain pigs! We can just walk up to them and shoot them in the head! We are saved!"

Brandt nodded in agreement. "A two-day march is difficult in this ash, but it is doable. If we take three hundred men, we can harvest the meat and drag it back on wooden sleds."

As Voss looked back down at the bound hunter, he noticed that Klemens was not smiling. The rugged man actually looked paler than before.

"Why did you never hunt these beasts yourself, Klemens?" Voss asked. "If they are that huge, and that close, why risk fishing on a dangerous frozen lake when you have a canyon full of meat just sitting there?"

Klemens looked intently into Voss’s eyes. "Because the iron-tusks are not the only things that go to the White Jaws in the winter," Klemens whispered. "The smell of all that dying meat attracts something else. Something that comes down from the highest glaciers. We tried to hunt there three years ago... I took forty of our best spearmen."

Klemens raised his bound hands. He pointed a finger at his own ruined eye.