“One of the most vital skills to learn as a career soldier of any sort is to sleep. You need to be able to sleep anywhere, anytime, for however long you have time to rest, under any circumstances. It does not matter if you’re stuck in a small fort with no way out and tens of thousands of raving lunatics who want to murder you are attacking the place day and night. You WILL take your rest when you are told.

And you will wake up ready to fight some more, no matter how little or how poor your sleep was. You either do that, or you die.” - Ignaz Juro Alvarez, retired mercenary, formerly of the Free Lances mercenary Company, circa 42 FP.

“Those are… intriguing beasts, Captain Edelstein,” noted Bernd Adenauer as they rested for the night rather late that night. Reinhardt had pushed for a hard pace that would allow their convoy to reach Aldenstadt by the third night, at least a couple days before the enemy force was expected to reach there, and the councilor was surprised at the way they traveled so rapidly. “Useful, too.”

The main reason for the rapid – and somewhat punishing, as the horses that the councilor and his guards rode were still quite exhausted after the long day – pace was the beasts of burden that the Free Lances had tethered to their wagons. The beasts were not something the former nobleman was familiar with, or had seen in the Empire for that matter.

They looked like large, wooly goats, each as large as some smaller horse breeds, but with solid, muscular legs that put many larger horses to shame, with a pair of humps on their back and curly horns. The beasts somehow kept up a pace that a horse would need to canter to match even while they were pulling the wagons behind them.

More surprisingly, the odd goats somehow managed to keep that same pace even while traveling through the rougher terrain of the roads further away from Levain, which generally were less well maintained. The wagons that the mercenaries rode were clearly also modified to be able to traverse such terrain without trouble, which allowed them to keep their rapid pace regardless of the road condition.

Both Bernd and his guards had fallen back to the rear of the convoy in that stretch of road because they did not dare to travel too fast with their horses, fearing a fall or a stumble from the poor road condition. The way the goats simply rushed through the road as if it was flat land even while pulling the wagons – a team of two goats were tethered to each wagon – was something to behold.

“Ah, they are indeed. These are Nialosian Humpback Goats, native to the Nialos mountain range in Knallzog,” replied Reinhardt. “Very hardy beasts, these, and they can even climb cliffs almost as easily as they walk through flatlands. They’re pretty commonly used in Knallzog as beasts of burden, but they don’t really sell them to outsiders often.”

“How did you get your hands on so many, then?” asked the surprised councilor.

“My company is based in Knallzog after all, in a sense, councilor,” replied Reinhardt with a laugh. “Seriously though, my late aunt’s father, the first captain of the company, bought a herd of them to serve as beasts of burden for the fledgling company back then. Over the years the company grew larger, but the herd also kept increasing in size, and we allowed them to keep breeding all the way. These days we have enough of the adult goats to move the majority of our combat forces at speed like this, even.”

“Very interesting,” noted the former nobleman. “I’d normally offer to buy a small herd of them from you at this point, but I get the feeling that there’s something you left unsaid about them, isn’t there? Otherwise these would be far more commonly used everywhere.”

“Oh yeah. These things are very hardy like I mentioned. They also eat just about anything, so there’s no worry about feeding them either. Problem is, if you fail to keep the population under control, they turn into pests. Pests that would ravage the whole countryside and leave it as barren wasteland,” said Reinhardt seriously. “It’s the main reason they aren’t sold to outsiders often. Not even the dwarves wish that fate upon their enemies. We mostly keep our herd at a steady number and butcher the excess, as they also make for good eating.”

“Wouldn’t it be easy enough to just keep them under control, then?”

“Councilor, you’ve been to our camp in both Knallzog and here. I’m certain you had noticed the enclosure where we kept our goats both times? It’s the one where there were guards stationed all around it,” asked Reinhardt back, to which the former nobleman nodded. “We keep them under such strict guard because these things are bloody clever and like to try to escape all the time. It’s fine if just one escapes, but if a mating pair escapes… you might be looking at a barren mountain in say, ten years at most.”

“Surely you exaggerate?”

“Nope, apparently it happened in the past, and was the reason their sales were regulated in the first place. As such, if you do insist on buying some, I will request that you sign all the proper waivers first, so that any disaster that might happen in the future would not be part of my responsibility,” said Reinhardt with an amused shake of his head. “You’re looking at them as useful beasts of burden, but we on the other hand had to look at their history as pests that wreaked havoc on the environment.”

“I guess even pests could be useful in the right hands, then.”

“They sure are. Even the dwarves in Knallzog use them for rapid long distance transportation, though like us, they keep the herds strongly under guard to prevent escapees and wild herds forming. For that reason we mostly keep only a few males as studs and keep them under strict surveillance and guard unless we need them for mating purposes. We left those behind in Levain, of course.”