Redcap Regimental Reunion

I was the first to arrive at the little pub in Targoviste, Transylvania. There was no way I was going to Chindia Tower without meeting up for a drink with a few old chums first. Two centuries had passed since we'd last held a reunion, and it would be good to catch up, even if it was the same-old, same-old.

Most of us trudged the civvy-street tightrope between blue-collar jobs and red-blooded folklore. None of us had intended it to happen that way, but we were soldiers. Ex-military often go where there's beer and women. Good with hands and digging, we took the crap jobs that other men hated--down pits, in quarries--basically, anywhere a fella could get killed on a daily basis. Ireland seemed a good idea for a while, along with London, and some of the lads took to mining in Pennsylvania. But it was the Irish who made a mockery of our uniforms, and poured us out of their imaginations as gnomish things. Bastards. I'm 5'9", and that's without the hat.

Seems the Irish thought a 'Redcap' quite a different thing from its original conception. It's amazing what looking though the bottom of a bottle can do when squinting at a bloody uniform. Our Wallachia colours were drab, save the hat. Oh, that hat -- not so much a 'cap' as a weapon. Impaling was a favoured punishment in 1458, during the second rule of the Prince. He liked it so much that we ran out of trees.

"I want some more sap flowing through my forest," he joked -- well, we reckoned it was a joke on account of him not having his sword drawn. "I have more mighty oaks to erect."

That was the start of our regiment. Alexander 'Bull' Putchies was called forward and told to fashion a hard helmet for our lads, with a ruddy great spike on top of it. Those Prussian fellas copied the design in 19th century Bohemia -- not that they put theirs to the same kind of use.

"Right, lads," Princey had yelled at us, once Budapest lay razed, "put your caps on and stand to attention. I wanna see 'em red, my little saplings!"

Boysie Bruwhalea got a shock when one of the Dukes trotted over to him with a fat old woman strung to his saddle. With much wriggling and wincing, the old boy proceeded to impale the lady on top of Boysie's head. We thought poor Boysie would buckle from all the extra weight and flapping, but she soon stopped thrashing about. And Boysie? Well, he found out a lot about the fairer sex that afternoon, I can tell you!

Soon, we all had new branches blossoming from our trunks. I was lucky; the lad they shoved on my spike was naught but skin and bones. Bled like there were ten of him, though. And that was the funny thing. It wasn't just our caps that were red; it was our eyes, our cheeks, our necks -- our whole heads. Our black tunics glistened, rather than coloured, but that just made our vermilion hands look odder as they dripped from soaked cuffs. After the show, Bull said it best, "When I saw that fat old girl's skirts start to shade my eyes I didn't worry about her legs thrashing, or her blood spurting. All I could think was 'I hope I don't fall over in front of His Nibs,' and I didn't! It was like I got stronger and stronger -- as if some magic made me as firm as the trees His Highness imagines."

We all knew what he meant. It was a terrifying and electrifying experience at the same time. Afterwards, you could see the change in all the other Regiments around us. "Redcaps..." they'd whisper, along with a new phrase: vampyre. Whatever they whispered, one thing was universal, all tried to be anywhere except near us.

Look at me! I thought, coming back to the present. I'm reminiscing on my own. I put my pint pot down on the peeling Formica bar top, as the pub's door swung open. In sauntered Boysie and Bull, grins unchanged by the intervening years.

They walked past a few glaring locals and leered back. Bull clapped his hoof of a hand around my neck in a friendly grip. "I should have know you'd be knocking them back like we were in Dublin, you old soak, you!"

"You'd better catch up, then," I said, and motioned for the Landlord to pile up a couple of pitchers.

He shot a look to his wife, who shrugged back. So, choosing the lesser of two evils, he kept his eyes fixed down and played the good landlord, while his lips framed a not-so-friendly warning. "I don't want trouble from you boys, you hear?"

"Oh, no trouble, Sir," Boysie sing-songed. He propped his beaten old Redcap next to the pump. Its felt was worn and ripped, and its metal spike was black with tarnish. "We're just a couple of old boys having us a bit of a reunion. In fact," he winked at me, "I guess you could say we're going to paint the town red."

(804 words)