1)

  “Hey, recruit, get your green behind over here!”

  The young man, too old to be a child yet too young to shave, followed behind the crowd of soldiers while being weighed down by the massive wooden beam on his shoulders. His bony chest heaved in and out from the intensity of his gasps that struggled in vain to collect enough air to fuel his devilish March for one more step. That was all he focused on, taking that next step.

  Life hadn’t changed much since he had been drafted into the army. His routine had been much the same, only harder. It was always fetch this or organize that. The boy didn’t complain through, showing your belly never helped.

  “Drop that over there.” The eldest soldier in the front, clad in a suit of interlocking plates, pointed at a tidy pile of around a dozen similar beams.

  The boy placed one end at the far end of the pile and carefully slid to the far side, before lowering it carefully. The older soldier nodded in approval for the first time since he had met him a month prior.

  “Recruit, you out of all this batch of new recruits have displayed a critical mind and attention to the smallest of details. When asked to perform pointlessly tedious tasks, you alone performed your work to satisfaction. As such, you have been selected for officer training as a siege engineer.” He looked very pleased to be making the offer, almost as if he was the one receiving the good news.

  “What’s an engineer?” The boy asked.

  “Ugh, it’s someone that makes siege engines.”

  “What are those?”

  “I see that you have a lot to learn. Do you wish to pursue this opportunity?”

  “Depends, does it mean that I don’t have to do whatever the soldiers tell me to do?”

  “The rank and file? Yes, they will no longer have the authority to give you orders?”

  “Will I get to eat breakfast and dinner every day?”

  “Of course! You will have access to the officer's mess, which offers three square meals. We can’t have our brightest minds unable to focus due to something as easy to solve as hunger.”

  “Then i’ll do it.”

  ....

  From then on, the boy’s daily routine changed drastically. He had been given a room all to himself with a real bed filled with feathers, he had checked, and an oil lantern to light his way in the dark. That was only the beginning, in the mess hall he was served a meal containing root vegetables, bread, and meat for every meal. Though he was warned that when he was deployed the meat would be salted and the bread would be replaced with hardtack, that didn’t faze the boy in the slightest.

  The final change was his workload. Where before, the sergeants had gone out of their way to assign him pointless tasks and kilometer after kilometer of marching drills, now his current trainer taught him how to hammer a nail and cut a straight line with a saw. Measure twice, cut once—the old man constantly warned the boy.

  The boy was fascinated by the work. For the first time, he was doing something other than fetching water and cleaning out latrines. He buried himself in the training and embraced the mysteries of carpentry and construction. His trainer seemed like the stuffy sort but he didn’t hit or even curse at the boy too hard. Soon enough, even that went away as the old man struggled to find more and more things to teach the boy.

  Two months passed this way in the old lumber camp, until one day, the old man went over to the quarter masters office to request more lumber for training the boy. The boy waited outside on the porch. The old man had helped him finish it the week prior and the scent of fresh lumber and iron nails still permeated the air. A few minutes later, the old man slammed the brand new door behind him and gave it another kick for good measure.

  “Pack your bags, it’s time for you to move on to the next phase of your training.

  2)

  “Do you have everything packed?” The old man asked the boy, not for the first time.

  “I went over the list twice. I have it all.” The boy gestured to a pack off in the corner. It appeared as if the boy had filled it with a section of chimney, it was so evenly rectangular. The boy retrieved the pack and opened it. Sure enough, it was full of supplies. Only, they were placed in the pack at strange angles and configurations to reduce the space.

  “It amazes me that you fit that all into that children’s pack.”

  “How else am I supposed to carry everything?”

  The old man looked around the empty room with side eyes, before leaning down to whisper in the boys ear.

  “You weren’t supposed to be able to carry it all. It is a hidden test for the instructors to assess your ingenuity. Most people either make do without or fashion some sort of measure to drag or wheel their supplies.”

  “Why would they do that?” The boy was baffled by such a silly test. Didn’t they just need to put everything in where it fit, he thought?

  “Because not everyone is as clever as you are and this is a good way to separate the grain from the chaff. Now, go along now. Remember to wear clean socks.”

  “Yes, yes. You’ve told me a thousand times.” The boy fought away tears as he slung the pack over his shoulders and walked out of the only home he had ever known. Little did he know that behind him, the old man had turned away to hide his own tears.

  ...

  “This way, recruit!” a burly man in a sleeveless uniform beckoned the boy over. He was standing along the road heading out of the base next to a line of wagons. He held a wooden plaque with a drawing slate framed into the center.

  The boy approached the burly man and handed over his orders. The man took them and frowned deeply at the boys pack before returning the paper to the boy.

  “Are you sure that you packed everything?”

  “Yes, it is all in here. You can inspect it if want to.”

  “Lying is an unbecoming trait in an officer.”

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Sighing, the boy placed down the pack and opened the pack right there in the road. The burly man's scowl of contempt slipped along with his jaw at the sight inside.

  “How did you fit all that in there? It looks like that stacking tower game that my children play. Is that a cabbage?” the burly man assaulted the boy with a barrage increasingly inane questions.

  “Can I get on the wagon now, sir?” The boy asked using his best military formality. He hid the eye roll behind an over-the-top salute.

  “Wha—yes, yes you can go ahead. You will have to tell me how you fit that all on there later.”

  “I’ll be happy to tell you, so long.”

  “Safe journeys.”

  ...

  The trip across the plains lasted for several days. Not much changed except for the hours upon hours of boredom from not having anything to keep one occupied. The boy quickly found things to occupy his attention from patching up the canvas cover on the wagons to making sure all the nails were properly nailed in, to collecting odd bits and bobs that others had discarded. He collected these odd ends and caringly restored them to working condition using the skills the old man had taught him during the long stretches of movement. Then he started to play.

  He grabbed a wooden beam that had broken off one of the wagons and affixed a piece of springy wood at the front. Then he took a piece of old fishing twine and tied it to one end. This was where it got tricky. The boy put the other end of the springy wood and braces it against a hoist in the wagon till it bent. He tied the other end of the twine to it before slowly releasing the pressure. Now it was time to play.

  …

  Crack!

  The sound of shattering wood spooked the horses in the lead wagon. Suddenly, every soldier had their swords out and were looking for the source of the attack. A few minutes later,a soldier reported back that an arrow had been sent through a tree.

  “How is that possible,” the caravan commander asked the soldier.

  “I don’t know sir. We don’t have any bows strong enough to send an arrow more than head deep into wood, let alone through it.”

  “Show me!”

  Just as the commander was inspecting the unusual hole in the tree, he caught something out of the corner of his eye. An engineering Corp recruit was fiddling with an odd device. He had heard about the boy, as the only recruit to ever successfully pass the test without resorting to some form of cheating.

  He approached the wagon the boy was in, just as the bow managed to finally load his mysterious invention for the second time.

  “Recruit!”

  The boy sprang to his feet and saluted the commander. “Sir!”

  “Did you make that hole?” The commander gestured to the tree.

  “Yes sir.”

  “With that?”

  “Yes sir.”

  A crafty smile crossed the older man’s lips. “Would you mind demonstrating?”

  …

  A week later, the caravan reached a large military outpost at the foot hills of a great mountain range. Evergeen forests spread out as far as the eye could see, except for several rents in the land that looked as if a giant shovel scooped the soil away. It was a fascinating sight to the boy. He had asked several other soldiers what caused the rents, but they only smirked and told him that someone would tell him when they arrived.

  The boy knew when not to push his luck and went back to fiddling with his new creation. This was the eight generation of the arrow-launcher-mabob, name pending, and he had a good feeling about it. He had figured out how load an arrow into the center of the machine and have it fire in a straight line. His first few were quite sporadic and had a tendency to either snap the arrow or veer to the side. People had learned early to clear away whenever they heard the boys telltale grunts that indicated he was pulling back the drawstring.

  The tools had helped significantly as well. They had been a gift from the commander himself. The boy had been so happy when he received them that a few tears had come out.

  “Use these for the protection of the homeland. I trust that you will know how to put them to good use.”Among the tools he had given the boy were several whittling knives, a rasp, a knife, a whetstone, a spirit level, and a few other odds and ends that helped with detail work.

  As the siege engineering recruits disembarked from the wagons, an officer in the brown uniform of the siege engineering unit beckoned them forward.

  “Gather here, gather here!”

  When everybody was assembled, he continued. “Welcome to the Bulwark. This is the most important military fortification in the entirety of the heartland, and we are it’s core. Over those mountains lie the greatest threat that humanity has ever faced, monsters of prohibitive size and savagery dwell there in large numbers. The only thing that stands between those monsters and our families are the engines of war stationed at the top of those walls.”

  The man pointed to several large constructions of wood and metal.each had a very different design but all seemed like they were designed to launch something high into the air. The man’s voice became an in distinct buzz in the back of the boy’s mind as he beheld the magnificent works.

  Whack.

  Something Impacted the back of the boys head and broke him from the trance.

  “Are you listening to a word that I say, recruit?”

  “No Sir!”

  “Really,” a cold gleam flashed in his eyes. “Then what were you paying your attention to?”

  The boy pointed to the siege engines. “Tbose, they are...beautiful.”

  The man’s shoulders loosened and he actually gave the boy an impish grin. “Indeed they are, I will forgive you this one time because you have good eyes. Speaking of which, what is that contraption that you have in your hand?”

  “This, it’s an arrow-launcher-kabob.”

  “This is a bow? Can you demonstrate how it works?” At his question, all the other recruits started backing up and slipping behind cover. One of them tried to protest, but it was too late.

  The boy had gotten fairly adept at loading his darling invention during their travels and had an arrow affixed in only a few seconds. He aimed at the wall and flicked the latch that was holding the string in place. The arrow went skidding off to the side and nearly hit the man before passing to collide into the wall with a hearty thwack. Masonry and mortar rained down from the impact, and the splinters of the arrow shot out in all directions.

  “So,” the boy asked, “what do you think?”

  3)

  The your was cut short and all of the recruits were swiftly shown to their quarters to settle in. The your guide from before turned out to be none other than the base commander himself. He handed the boys pack to a soldier to be placed in his quarters then dragged the boy down several narrow corridors until they came out on the far end of the base. The forest had been cleared out in this area and a modest lumber yard had sprung up in it’s place. Several burly men were teaming up to bring massive trunks the width of a barrel to a lumber yard out of sight but not so far as to be out of hearing.

  “Do you mind showing me that wonderful contraption?” the commander asked the boy with great respect.

  The boy was so stunned by an adult treating him with so much sincerity that he handed over the arrow-shooty-mabob with his jaw hanging wide open and his pupils dilated to the maximum.

  “Thank you.” the commander took the device to a work bench that lay off to the side. It held a variety of simple carpentry tools, but nothing on par with a real wood shop.

  “This, this is amazing. The design is so sinple, yet it contains so much power. Maybe if I widened the cross section—yes—and used a springier wood to increase the draw....” The commander’s musings quickly became unintelligible as his attention slipped inward as he dreamed of arrow-shooty-mabobs.

  The boy yanked on the commander’s sleeve. “Sir, can you help me complete it?”

  “WHAT? It isn’t completed? What else could you possibly add to this?”

  “Drawing it is hard. I want to add something to pull the string.”

  “Ahh,” the man experimented with the draw and found that he couldn’t fully draw it with just the strength of his arms. “You are quite right. This is impossible to load manually. But I believe that we can mitigate most of that problem simply by using more supple materials.”

  “What’s a supple?” the boy asked.

  “Ahh, my boy. You have much to learn.”

  ...

  For the next month, the commander personally taught the boy all about siegecraft. They went over how to build catapults, trebuchets, counterweight trebuchets, and several other inventions. During the morning and early afternoon. The boy absorbed the knowledge like a sponge and soon made miniature versions of all the bases many siege weapons. He even found a few ways to increase their efficiency, range, or accuracy while futzing about with the models.

  Durning the afternoons, the commander took him to his personal workshop to work on the latest version of the arrow-shooty-mobab. The commander had finally put his foot down after the third day and decided to name it on the spot. It was a bow with a large cross bar, so he dubbed it the crossbow. The boy fell in love with the name instantly, so the crossbow it became.

  They had made several improvements over the last month, most notably they had increased the accuracy and stability of the device trnendously. Before, the boy had simply pulled the string onto a wooden peg and placed the arrow in the middle. That had a chaotic success rate and sometimes rebounded to hit the user. To compensate for that, they had built a small curved piece of spring steel that pinched the ammunition in place just enough to keep it from wiggling while not impacting the overall function. They had also carved a groove down the center of the stock for the arrow to travel down.

  The other improvement was to the base material of the bow itself. The boy had used any wood that he could get his hands on for his prototypes, most of which were hard and unyielding in nature. While those were good traits for the stock, the bow needed to be made from a flexible and elastic wood. The commander had shown the boy how to use all the locally available woods and shown him the differences between them through use. Now the bow could be drawn by a strong man safely in a single pull.

  “What do you think of this?” the boy showed the commander a small metal contraption.

  The commander took it and inspected it closely., but was able to discern it’s purpose other than the fact that it had a hook that rotated when you pressed down on a small lever. “This is quite clever. What does it go to?”

  The boy pulled out the latest bow that he had been working on and revealed a hole that he had hollowed out in the center. He then placed the trigger mechanism inside with the lever facing downward, before hammering it into place.

  “That’s ingenious! You put the string on that hook there to hold it, then push on the lever.”

  The boy drew the bow and placed the strong on the hook, much as the commander had already guessed. Then he held on to the bottom of the stock with his index finger on the lever. When he pressed down on it, the arrow sped off and impacted the target that they had placed for testing.

  “Now, it is finally complete.” the boy grinned in triumph.

  In response to the statement, the commander stroked his chin thoughtfully and looked up at his siege engines, then at the models scattered about the shop. “No, my boy, we have only just begun.”