Swiss Arms 80 (Patreon)

Swiss Arms

Chapter 80

-VB-

Rudolf von Wittelsbach
Duke of Upper Bavaria

A lot of events transpired to bring him here, and he couldn’t help but wonder if God intended for any of this to happen.

Was he not a good and just ruler, unlike his politicking brother? Was this a trial to make him a better man? Was it a warning from the Lord on High that he was too hotheaded and inept in certain areas of rulership?

There were many questions, and there were many conversations he had with the local priest who always came by to help him give thanks to the Lord that he lived, even if it was because of his cowardice and not because of good fortune.

It’s been… two long months. While he had been a prisoner, he was allowed to go out to take in fresh air. However, he walked only with half a dozen of the “rangers” that the baron trusted. He learned weeks after first meeting them that they were the ones who set off that explosion of fire. They were instrumental to his defeat… and as he got to know them and their routine, he felt an inkling of respect for what they prepared for each and every day.

He couldn’t not feel respect after seeing some of the rangers fight to the bitter end against the baron every day as part of their training.

Torture, more like.

He also got to explore Fluelaberg, and felt envious once more as he saw wealth in the hands of mountain folks who should have been the poorest within the empire. Why couldn’t his people have this? Why did those guildmaster have to cause a scene like that?

Questions, questions, questions.

Some of those questions had been answered, and the greatest of those had been how he had ended up fighting the baron. While it didn’t normalize anything between them, they had an understanding that should they find who pitted them against each other, then, well, revenge would be had. That was for later. Right now, the more honest conversations they had eased his loss a little, especially once he realized that he hadn’t lost to a peasant rabble but a hardened army that had fought overwhelming odds one after another for the last two years nonstop. He was merely the latest in a long line of nobles who wanted the Compact gone and dead for one reason or another, and just like all those before him, he lost. In fact, he lost to less than a fifth of the Compact’s actual military force as the other four-fifths hadn’t even been called up or was off fighting someone else in the west.

And that… that was what stung his pride the most. It wasn’t losing but losing to someone who could have overwhelmed him in quality of troops and had strength to spare. He still remembered how his troops broke apart at the peasant spear formation. The length of the spear combined with their sturdiness and density prevented his men from approaching them while the narrow mountain passage riddled with dense alpine forest prevented flanking.

Even if the baron had not taken to the field and decimated dozens of men with his brutish cleaver, Rudolf would have lost so many to the spear and fire that he would have no option but to turn back, especially once he met the thick walls that cut off Fluela Pass and thus the only passage from the east into the Compact.

“Your Grace.”

Rudolf paused in his ruminations and turned around. Standing in front of the tall but narrow clear glass window of the room given to him for the duration of the feast and festivities, one would think that it was a humble room but he knew better.

He knew so much more now.

He saw a servant by the doorway of the room.

“What is it?” he asked not unkindly. He also knew not to throw his weight around here.

“The baron asks if you are ready to meet the guests.”

And here was the herald of his humiliation.

He let out a sigh. “... Lead me to the hall.”

He followed the servant across the cobblestone walled but wooden floored fort’s inner hallways, out of the fort itself, and to a new building next to it just outside what was once the eastern wall of the town but now a wall that separated the Center Town from the East Town.

Rudolf had also seen this town, this tiny barony, grow at a spectacular rate. Harvests had failed in many villages on either side of the Alps, and people entered the cities in hopes of finding jobs. The same was true for those within the Alps as well. While there were those who went to the imperial cities like Lindau, many alpine residents as far as Bolzano to the east came here to the barony of Fluelaberg because there were jobs here to do that they couldn’t find in other cities like Milan, Munich, and Zurich.

If they survived long enough to reach this town, that was.

I glanced around the street as the servant continue to lead him around the town.

What was once a town of maybe a thousand had swelled to over four thousand. It made this place a city by the standards of the empire, and yet, it didn’t feel like a city. It felt alien, especially when he looked at the multi-story wooden buildings jutting up from the foot of the mountains. Supposedly, they were for newcomers to the city and offered very generous staying prices. As for the men who could work, they were either asked to work in the mines or help other means to earn their keep. The women went to work in the giant workshops from where the luxurious Fluelan dyes flowed out of. However, only those trusted by the baron worked in the porcelain workshops and the furnaces.

It was in those areas that he came to respect the baron’s wife and the daughter of the Gorizia, Isabella von Fluelaberg. She organized the people and raised their loyalty to the baron. Had she been born a man, then she would have been someone Rudolf would have invested his weight in gold to get an alliance out of or pull into his camp.

But she was a beautiful woman married to the man who defeated him.

Some guys get all the luck.

---

When he finally arrived at the Feast Hall, he found himself face to face with a number of people he knew.

The first was the Baron Hans von Fluelaberg himself who stood next to him not in a domineering fashion but like an equal.

Ha! A baron and a duke? Equal?!

… But that was the reality of it. Flualaberg will soon match Munich in wealth and population while the rest of the Compact could match the Duchy of Upper Bavaria. He didn’t know all of the information, though, so he couldn’t dispute what was being portrayed.

“You are not enjoying this,” Rudolf whispered to the baron as the feast began.

“No,” he replied with a smile so genuine that it had to be fake. “I would rather be in my workshop finding new ways to make growing crops easier in these mountains.”

“... You are an odd man.”

“I know.”

The second person he met was none other than the Prince-Bishop of Friesig Emicho Wildgraf von Kyburg.

“Your Holiness,” Rudolf kissed the prince-bishop’s ring once they were far away enough from the baron in the feast.

“Your Grace,” the bishop replied. “I have come here on behalf of your brother…”

Rudolf felt hope rise up.

“... in seeing whether or not the baron is a heretic.”

And his hope died. Then suspicion set in.

His brother couldn’t have been behind all of this. Right?