As anyone might have guessed, Alpheo's plan did not receive a warm welcome.
"Hey. Jarza. Has he finally lost it? I think he has" Clio muttered, leaning toward his companion with his voice pitched just above a whisper, tapping the side of his own head with two fingers.
Jarza did not answer. He simply stared, long and hard, the way a man stares at a lunatic who has climbed onto a roof and started announcing things.
As for Alpheo, he did not so much as blink. Those stares might as well have been gusts of wind thrown against a standing stone. He had expected every one of them. He was not deaf to his own words.
"Take control of the camp? Are you serious? Out of your godsdamned mind, more like. Do you perhaps live in some other world than the rest of us?" Egil scoffed.
"I have never been saner," Alpheo replied, popping another piece of the so called bread into his mouth.
It tasted like gravel and made him want to vomit, and he chewed it anyway with the serenity of a lord at table.
"Hunger's got into your head, Alph," Egil said, shaking his own. "Here. Take mine." He extended another piece of the dry ration with a look that was neither kind nor cruel, merely tired.
When Alpheo did not so much as glance at it, Egil threw up his hands and the bread into his own mouth. "Fine. Starve, for all I care. But you listen to me. Charging in headfirst is how a man ends up swinging from a gallows."
"That's for criminals," Clio cut in with a sad smirk. "Not for slaves."
"Then we'll have our heads lopped off instead, or go to the dogs in pieces," Egil shot back. "Better? No? I thought not."
Alpheo sighed, his patience wearing through at last. "Does none of you see what it is I am talking about?"
His smile cracked and faltered. He looked from face to face, searching for something, hope or understanding or even simple curiosity, and found only blank stares looking back at him.
"Fine," he muttered under his breath, and straightened his back. "Then we shall do this the long way."
He turned to Jarza, and his eyes locked onto the older man with all the intensity of a sword tip resting at a throat.
"How long have you been a slave?"
Jarza's eyes narrowed. His voice, when it came, was sharp enough to shave with. "Four years. Three of them right here in this hellhole."
Alpheo's gaze shifted. "And you two?"
Clio and Egil exchanged an awkward glance and became suddenly, deeply interested in the floor between their feet. Before either could answer, Alpheo waved them off, a sad and knowing smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.
"No need," he said quietly. "I already know.You all came after me."
"All right, what is this?" Egil snapped, frustration boiling over the lip at last. "Some kind of speech? You think you'll rally our hearts with talk of freedom and glory? I trust you, Alph, gods know why, but I'm not throwing myself onto a bonfire without a damned good reason. If we're to move toward death regardless, then at the very least we could go on with our old plan.Better to die on our feet now, than die later on our back. This one at least might work."
For a long moment Alpheo said nothing at all. The cell was silent, save for the faint clink of chain and the distant howl of wind moving between the tents. Then, with a sigh that seemed to carry the weight of ten full years in it, he spoke.
"I have been a slave for ten years. Four of them I have spent marching with these bastards, shoulder to shoulder, eating their dust. And trust me when I tell you I would give anything at all to open their throats in their sleep and shove their cocks somewhere the sun has never once reached.I am itching to throw it all back behind me.
But a man does not survive long by being stupid." His voice darkened, and something a lifetime old came up through it. "You watch. You learn their ways, their weaknesses, their patterns. And you bide your time until the right moment comes, and then you make the right choice, once, because you only get the one."
"I have watched them," he continued. "Watched how they march, how they behave on campaign, what they do first and what they forget entirely. And I have noticed something. A flaw. A glaring one."
He paused, and let the weight of it settle over the group like the stillness before a storm breaks.
When he saw that every pair of eyes in the cell was fixed on him, he raised a single finger and pointed at his own bound hands.
"Before every battle, they do the same thing. Every time, without exception. They stuff us into cages. They bind our hands. They think us nothing more than tools to be packed away and fetched out again afterward." His gaze swept the group, daring any of them to deny it.
"And then," he went on, his voice going lower still, "they leave barely a handful of men behind to guard the camp. It's routine. It's so routine it may as well be carved into stone." His finger jabbed the air. "That is the weak spot. They almost never set anyone at all to watch over the slaves. And why in the world would they? We are bound in rope before every battle, like sacks of grain stacked out of the rain.They leave a count here, and when they come back we'll be that one without one less.
So all we have to do is take those few out first. Clean and quiet.
Because if even one of them slips away and carries word to the emperor or to one of those pompous stick in the arse lords, it is finished. Do you hear me? Finished."
He leaned forward, gesturing at the dim confines around them.
"This camp, this very place, holds everything they need to keep breathing. Food. Gold. Supplies. Horses. We burn the food and they starve in a foreign country, more busy to find supply than to go search for a party of escaped slave. We take the horses and they will not learn of our rising until it is far too late for the learning to do them any good."
Alpheo stopped and let the silence hang thick, his eyes boring into each man in turn.
"We do this," he declared, iron conviction under every word, "and freedom is ours. In our hands. Do you understand what that means?"
His gaze lingered on each of them, willing them to feel the fire in it. One by one the group swallowed nervously, throats gone dry with fear and with the faintest flicker of something else besides. What he was saying made a terrifying kind of sense. And if luck was with them, just this once, just the one time in any of their lives, then perhaps, perhaps, they could pull it off.
The mood slid back toward desperation, however, when their quiet man, who was also the one with the most years in this land, finally spoke.
"There's a problem," he said, and the words fell dark across what had briefly been light. "We're on campaign against Arlania, aye. But their betters..." He sneered the word, lip curling in open disdain. "...are as brave as rabbits and as honest as swindlers.They make their cloak of two colors, so when the winds whip they can claim both sides.
If you're hoping for a battle, Alpheo, you'll be waiting for the sky to fall in on us first. The Arlanian nobles would sooner pay bribes than fight.Even giving out their daughters as whore is favorable than marching out of their castle to meet steel by steel."
Alpheo's brow furrowed, but Jarza pressed on into the silence.
"Do you know how long it's been since anyone dared stand against Romelia? Or against Azania? Decades. Entire generations have lived and died without ever seeing a real fight.One side come in, pop a prince on the throne, take a bribe and come back five years later when their puppet is overthrown by another. If you're betting on a battle to spark this rebellion of yours, you'll be waiting another century for it, and you'll be waiting in rope."
He leaned forward, searching for the words that would carry the shape of his people to a man who had never seen them.
"The throne of Arlania isn't a seat. It's a wheel. Every lord gets his turn at the top of it, only to be crushed flat on the next rotation, and every one of them propped up by one empire or the other. The average prince rules three years, if he's fortunate. And you can't even blame them for it. Our nobility would sooner empty their coffers to bribe an invader than empty their armouries to fight one. I have lived in this place for decades, so I know exactly how it goes.
Their choice is a simple one: suck up to the empire of the hour, or pack your shit and flee before it arrives. Don't count on them staking everything on a battle. You'll only be disappointed."
Alpheo did not reply at once. He stood quite still, his expression unreadable, and let the older man's certainty sit there in the air between them.
Then, slowly, a knowing smile spread across his face, the kind that hints at secrets only the wearer has been let in on.
"I think something big is coming. I can feel it in my bones. But even if what you say is true, then what stops us from trying the old plan once the campaign ends? We will find a moment for it somewhere during the march home. We will run the risk of one of us being sold on, or of not being able to make our way back to the others, and that is a real risk and I will not pretend otherwise.
Still, if what I say is true, and battle is actually given..." His smile widened. "Then we will be ready. We will seize the moment. We will leap aboard the ship before it sails, and when we do?"
He straightened, and let his voice rise to a fiery crescendo, all of it pitched to cover the plain reality underneath: that he was speaking of a hope and nothing sturdier, and had no idea whatsoever whether any of it would come to pass.
Still. Hope made for better company than doom.
"Then we will finally win our freedom."