Over the next few days, I prepared for the arrival of the Dwarves. Stocks of Beer were imported from the Empire and land was made available for potential workshop sites. Everything was busy as the Dwarves were typically standoffish if they felt that they weren't given their proper due and they were well known for holding, and acting upon grudges. I certainly didn't want them to feel unwelcome in Chebekov. During this time I finally received word that the Priests of Ursun would be sending over someone to meet with me to discuss the faith. Hopefully, I could meet with the Malkissons before meeting with the Priest of Ursun. It would certainly be easier on my schedule.
Beyond that, I had daily training sessions with Otabeg where he would thrash me in every spar, though I was able to keep up more and more as time wore on. I was still too defensive in our spars though, as Otabeg would punish any attempt to take the offensive harshly whenever he saw a chance to. It was after one of these spars that he finally voiced what he felt I was doing wrong.
"No. You're still too defensive. Do not wait for me to come to you, come to me. You will never defeat me sticking to defensive maneuvers and ripostes." He said.
"That's easy for you to say. Every time I try to take the offensive you take it away from me." I huffed between breaths.
"That is because you are too rigid in your footwork. Your footwork needs to flow like water. You need to move like the tides. Ebb and flow in a circular motion, so that your opponent's attacks miss you by a hair's breadth and then you can strike out with extra momentum like a crashing wave. This is the essence of Cathayan sabre fighting that my father absorbed into his own style. Right now you are still too wedded to classical Droyaska style to use it." He lectured.
"I think that you might want to teach me as if I had no foundation to build off of, my friend. I'm not sure continuing to approach this Cathayan footwork from the perspective of a Droyaska adherent will do me any good." I said, having finally gotten my second wind.
Otabeg thought on this for a moment, then nodded. "Watch me and do as I do." He said after a pause.
He then demonstrated a pattern of footwork that saw him moving in a circular motion that let him dodge strikes from several imaginary opponents. He only parried when he needed to and his cross cuts and slashes had not only the momentum of his whole body in them but the added momentum of his footwork to boot, ensuring that he could cut through an opponent even if they were wearing light armor like leather armor or a padded jack. I tried to imitate his movements but wound up needing to be corrected several times. Otabeg did this by smacking me with the flat of his training scimitar until I managed to correct my movements. Even through the padded training equipment, I could tell I was going to have bruises tomorrow. However, that was a small price to pay if I could learn this footwork. It may very well save my life someday. Over the course of a week, this continued and I got closer and closer to being passable at the new footwork with every passing training session, though Otabeg was still winning every spar.
Besides training with Otabeg and preparing for the arrival of the Dwarves, I still made time to check in with my councilors on how things were going. Andrej Bartovski let me know that the patrol of Winged Lancers I had sent him managed to run down and capture a band of suspiciously well-armed cattle thieves before they could make off with any more of his cattle herd. Under interrogation, the Band's leader admitted that they received equipment and funding from Pradeshynya. Boiled leather over padded jacks, true, but full suits of the stuff. Apparently, Lord Anton Yusupov of Pradeshynya was determined to make the brigands of the outer sections of the Blight work in his favor, equipping and funding them in exchange for a cut of their loot. Andrej was furious at this and demanded that we raise the Pulk and go to war over the sponsoring of brigandage. I was not so sure we were ready.
"I understand your concern Andrej, but you have to look at the bigger picture here. Lord Yusupov is not the Lord of the most wealthy lands. Most of his land is covered by the Blight, and what remains is part of the Crags of Shargun. He has little enough in the way of rich agricultural land to fund such an undertaking, and what mines he has in the Crags are mostly Iron and Tin, and small veins at that. Not exactly high-value commodities. He has to have gained his funding from somewhere else. If we charge in and attack him, it is likely he has a few surprises waiting for us, courtesy of whoever his patron is. I would rather that we wait until the Pulk is re-equipped and drilled enough on their new equipment that we can fight our way out of any ambushes. Beyond that, I think we need to do a little scouting to see what has been going on with our neighbors. There's no sense charging into battle blind after all." I cautioned.
"This insult cannot go unpunished, you know that!" Fumed Andrej.
"I know, but unless our Pulk has managed to fully re-equip themselves and drill on that new equipment to a reasonable standard in the last week or so, I do not see how attacking now benefits us. Captain Mikolaj, has the Pulk done so?" I asked.
The Captain of my guard frowned and said, "No my Lord, of course not. It will take more than a week to even get the requisite equipment, let alone drill them on it."
"So you see Andrej, that we are not ready to avenge you just yet. Be patient, Lord Yusupov's reckoning shall come soon enough." I replied.
Andrej frowned minutely but seemed to understand the logic behind the decision. It seemed his anger ran hot and while mine wasn't much different, Tadeusz's tended to run cold, which lent me a certain amount of facility to tamp down on my own natural inclination to get mad and do impulsive shit. Andrej unfortunately didn't have the same capability. I had to keep him sweet to the plan and the only way I could think of to do that was to promise him rewards when we finally did manage to go in and defeat Yusupov and take control of Pradeshynya.
"When we finally do act, I imagine that many of the fiefs that Lord Yusupov's vassals hold will need to be redistributed amongst more loyal Boyars and Druzhina. If you will hold off on your vengeance until we are ready to move, I will grant you an extension of your lands east to within 10 miles of the walls of Pradeshynya." I said.
That seemed to quiet Andrej down, as it was good agricultural land, not the pastureland east of the town, but also not the Crags or Blight to the South. The town itself and its immediate surroundings I planned to keep for myself, along with a slice of the Crags and Blight to exploit for minerals and peat respectively, but I planned to carve up the pastureland to the east and divvy it up amongst a number of Druzhina. The rest of the Outer Blight would take a while to pacify and would effectively be a no man's land until I could consolidate the territory and go in to purge the Blight, but the Crags had a Stanitsa and an accompanying Krepost that I could grant to Captain Mikolaj.
The rest of the meeting went smoothly enough. The Guilds were still making money from selling goods to Ostland and the Harbormaster reported no new news beyond the arrival of the trade ships that had been scheduled to come into port today. Three Ostlander, one Marienburger. That was something I would have to keep an eye on. The Westerland was due to go independent soon, the merchants already all but openly ran the city, with the Baron basically being an absentee landlord and living in Nordland with his cousin, the Elector Count. They'd eventually get tired of being the power behind the throne and scrape up enough of a bribe to get Dieter IV to grant them independence. After they did, they'd look for opportunities to exploit captive markets and unless I changed things, Erengrad and the Western Oblast was going to wind up being one of those markets. Hopefully, by the time that comes around, I'd have built up enough native industry to withstand the influx of cheap Marienburger goods that they would try to outcompete us with.
The meeting broke up soon afterward, as it seemed that I had enough money in the treasury to continue my efforts at modernizing the Pulk and developing my lands in at least a small way. Once the Dwarves got settled in, I had plans for roads to link the various settlements and stanitsas to Chebekov to better facilitate the movement of troops and goods through my territory. It didn't have to be full one paved Dwarven Roads, but at least something approaching the old Roman roads should be doable with Dwarven assistance. I was going to have to develop both my lands and the lands of Pradeshynya at least. While I had no plans to usurp my older brother and take control of Erengrad itself after my father died, if my brother died while on campaign somewhere, a distressingly likely possibility in this world, then as the spare heir, I would also need to develop Erengrad as well. Tadeusz's memories supplied at least one way that Erengrad could be improved. Its current walls were primarily timber and earth, with only the gatehouse and towers built of stone. I would upgrade that at the first opportunity if I had the chance. You couldn't be too careful about that sort of thing in Kislev. I wasn't sure why it hadn't been replaced already, it wasn't like Erengrad was lacking the money, but it would need to be replaced at some point before a Chaos Incursion could sack the city.
Right now I settled in for dinner and some light reading. I fell asleep reading an account of the Gospodar conquest of the Ungols. It read a lot like a combination of the Slavs moving out of the forests and the Mongols coming in from the steppes, which given that the Gospodars had a more Slavic Culture to them now, and that the Ungols were the ones that seemed more like Tatars, was odd to me. Of course, it could have just been an embellishment based on the fact that the chronicler writing of these deeds was one who was born 20 years after they happened and had been collecting anecdotes from the members of the Gospodar host that were still alive some 50 years after the conquest. Given the life expectancy of most modern Kislevites was only 80 years old if they didn't die from violence or disease, I was willing to bet that he had interviewed a very few extremely old men to get their accounts before they died of old age. At that age, memories tend to get a little hazy. Still, there were a few things of worth in the account. One of which was that the Gospodars of old seemed to have had hussar style light cavalry as well as heavy lancers and horse archers. They seemed to have dropped off the face of the world since then and it would probably be a good idea to bring them back as scouts and skirmishers. Hussars could go toe to toe with horse archers, and given that the Ungol Horse archers were something my Pulk had the least of, as they were almost exclusively trained in the Northern Oblast, it would let me fill a role in my Pulk that I had trouble filling currently. That decided I turned in to go to sleep. I would wake up the next morning to the news that the Malkisson Dwarves had arrived in Chebkov and that they would see me at noon.
I just hoped I had enough beer for them. Dwarves could be rather picky drinkers after all