Giant’s Grove is a collection of fourteen beech trees found on a small island in a branch of the Shdulus River. Though the decidedly unsuitable number is confounding to the shamans, something I confess I found rather amusing, there can be no doubt this is a holy site. These trees are true giants, with trunks of such vast circumference that it takes thirty men or more with arms linked to encircle them. They reach up into the sky higher than any tree, or indeed any structure, I have previously witnessed, including the towers of the imperial palace in Crisremon. I estimate the tallest of the fourteen, known simply as ‘the giant one’ reaches well over one hundred meters at its full height. This is easily more than double the height of even a large beech tree found elsewhere. The trees possess a supreme age to match their size. Though the shamans have no proper count, they were absolutely certain the trees had been fully grown long before the Kharal arrived in Shdustu, which would make them well over a thousand years old.

Divine essence is well established as inducing giantism in animals, so why not plants? The question that I found most curious is whether these trees represented a natural channel of power or the products of ancient wizardry. I lend my view toward the former explanation, simply because I struggle to imagine why any wizard would undertake to produce oversized trees. The little island the grove occupied was sustained by the trees themselves. Huge networks of roots held soil and earth in place even in the face of mighty floods, allowing it to endure the countless shifts and churns of the great river. Such a site made for an obvious landmark to lend its name to the battle to come.

The route to Varu-Tavur marched along a river terrace on the eastern side of the Shdulus River. Scoured by flooding, this rise widened out to form a modest plain with sufficient solid ground for armies to engage to the east of the grove. Not, it should be noted, ground that was either dry or flat. It was sufficiently elevated to avoid inundation but represented a pock-marked mass of mud and puddles covered in shrubs and briars with the only open space secured due to the rooting actions of boars. As miserable as this was, it represented the only point where masses of soldiers could engage each other prior to the very edge of Varu-Tavur itself. If they hoped to make a stand, the Rutar would need to fight here. Doubtless they would have preferred to avoid such an engagement at all, and simply harassed the enemy into oblivion, but Ynayal was too cunning and his men too desperate to be turned back by pinpricks of arrow fire in the night. Battle was inevitable.

It was not a wide passage. Even at the best point, no more than two hundred and fifty soldiers could form a line abreast. Both sides recognized this and, in planning for battle, drew up deep formations intended to batter at each other one line after another. Ynayal organized his forces into five blocks of one thousand men apiece. He had no cavalry, his troops having slaughtered and eaten any horses they encountered rather than preserving them as mounts, and those under his command were a motley assembly of mercenaries, armed caravaneers, bandits, and rogue Nikkad. Their leader’s skill is controlling his mixture of disparate units was clear based simply on how he arranged their order. Former mercenaries, a mixture of pikemen and sword and shield heavy fighters, filled up the first thousand, while deadly Nikkad street fighters, more than willing to poison their own allies, made up the rear block. Archers and unreliable irregulars filled up the middle sections, ready to bear down with the weight of numbers.

This arrangement seemed to me simple but likely to be very effective. The Rutar, by contrast, presented very differently. Ludun-Mulun placed his archers in front in a block eight ranks deep, with the shield bearers behind them and the halberdiers at the rear. Though I lack military training it appeared a foolish arrangement even to novice eyes. The Rutar archers were surely doomed to waste their arrows against the shielded mercenaries and condemned to waste lives miserably as they retreated through the packed ranks of their allies. Yet the Rutar assembled under these orders, according to signals beat out on heavy drums in a form favored by the swamp dwellers, without complaint and much confidence.

I was positioned with a good view of this engagement, one achieved by the expedient of climbing up into the branches of one of the giant beeches. This allowed me to watch everything as it unfolded.

Ynayal mustered his soldiers beneath a banner featuring a black wolf’s head, a most suitable symbol for a rebellious prince in Shdustu. The Rutar fought beneath a banner featuring a thick bundle of reeds, a restrained but practical symbol well-representative of their defense of their homes. It was, at the start, a remarkably drab battlefield. The brown mud blurred together with the earthen tones of the hardened leather armor most of the soldiers wore as armor or the thick furs of their robes they retained even in combat for warmth. Some of the Rutar wore armbands that added splashes of orange, and some of the Nikkad at the rear wore pink or purple headscarves, and here and there bits of glimmering bronze or silver could be glimpsed shining off polished blades or helmets. Nevertheless, it was a brown-on-brown array soon to be stained black with blood. Nor was it a sunny day, but instead an overcast spring sky of the kind that might threaten rain but never release it. Suitable weather for what was to come, a battle featuring neither honor nor glory, only a vigorously bloody mess.

Seeing the mass of archers in the front of the Rutar formation, vulnerable and too deep to draw support from the heavy infantry behind them, it seemed the Ynayal suspected some manner of stratagem. He held his men back for over an hour at the edge of bow range, until it was nearly noon, while shouting insults, in the hopes of luring the archers to attack. This failed, both because the Rutar drummers worked hard to drown out the shouting, and because most of the defenders could not understand a word of the largely Nikkad insults directed at them. By noon, Ynayal decided to take the initiative. He shifted a line of crossbowmen forward and directed them to fire at the Rutar archers from a distance beyond the ability of the heavy bows of the marsh dwellers to fire back effectively.

This was, I believe, a wise move, and the battle might well have played out very differently if Ynayal had possessed more than one hundred and fifty crossbowmen with a deeply depleted stockpile of bolts. Crossbowmen, though common in Sanid Empire armies and those of many other states, are rare in Shdustu, in no small part because the Kharal hate such weapons and preferentially target their wielders. The Rutar archers, facing this barrage, dropped down into the mud and laid flat. They placed their hardened hats before them, using these as improvised shields, and simply endured the attack. After no more than a handful of minutes, the crossbowmen ran out of bolts. Though this attack inflicted some injuries and no doubt left many of the archers shaken and worried, they were far from broken when the mercenary lines charged forward at the conclusion of the barrage.

In response to this assault, which they had surely awaited all morning, the Rutar archers stood, put their hats back on, and pelted their opponents with arrows. This archery attack was directed not only at the armored mercenaries in the front ranks but used arcing fire to strike the far less well protected irregulars in the middle. It was a quite ferocious barrage and did considerable damage, though the mercenaries at the forefront absorbed most of the blows upon armor and shields. It also had the effect, perhaps more important, of drawing all three of the middle blocks charging forward toward the enemy.

The Rutar archers could not possibly stand against such an attack, being both outnumbered and unsuited to melee combat. They made no attempt to do so. Instead, the archers parted their lines like a wave and dispersed freely into the surrounding swamp and shallows, wading and running as fast as they could, completely without cohesion. It was not a spontaneous flight, but a clearly planned maneuver, for the ranks peeled away in order, allowing even the archers in the center to escape before the advancing mercenaries reached them. With furious splashes, they vanished into the marsh, beyond the reach of their foes.

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At first, I thought this plan madness. Certainly, the archers had inflicted injury upon their opponents, especially those in the middle ranks who left many bodies behind as they advanced, but they were leaving their allies to face an assault from a force several times their number, a situation that seemed hopeless.

My mistake was that I observed the battle from above, and at a distance, not as one of Ynayal’s adherents in the midst of it all. Those men went from having an enemy before them peppering them with deadly shafts to one that had turned and fled. Though the lead ranks of the mercenaries charged the shieldwall that lay before them now that the archers were gone, the irregulars could not easily see this force through the backs of the block of their allies. Instead, they saw the enemy fleeing out to the sides. In such circumstances, amid the chaos of blood and death and the rage of conflict, the animal lying in the base of the mind takes control. Nothing Ynayal could have ordered, if indeed he gave any orders, could have stopped the middle ranks, a full three thousand inexperienced and undisciplined troops, from giving chase. The splashing redoubled as thousands of men, the balance of the forces engaged, simply ran out into the swamp.

Ludun-Mulun might have unleashed his halberdiers at that moment and reaped a fearful harvest of the disordered foe, but he held fast. Instead, heavily armored men with broad shields met in the center in a brutal clash of thrust and shove as the lines buckled and shifted with each force seeking to cut and smash its way through the other. Both sides, being of roughly equal number, were initially evenly matched, but following a few sharp minutes of desperate struggle it was the mercenary line that crumpled and gave way. As to why, I cannot say exactly. My mind turned first to conditioning as an answer. The Rutar veterans had been at home all winter and were well fed. They had marched only a few days. Their enemies, in comparison, had faced months of privation that surely left them weary and depleted, unable to hold once the initial rush of battle strength faded.

The leader of Ynayal’s mercenaries must have been an officer of some capability. The mercenary line, despite being comprised of several dozen disparate groups, initially disengaged in good order, holding fast in the face of the potent clubs of the Rutar. Doubtless this leader hoped to fall back behind the Nikkad force to his rear, still completely unharmed, and then rally thereafter. However, it was at this moment that Ludun-Mulum sent his halberdiers forward into the marsh to flank the enemy. The mercenary forces, cobbled together from many sources as they were, could not maintain cohesion to face threats from multiple directions. Seeing enemies on all sides, they broke apart into their original companies. Some turtled in place to fight to the end, others attempted to scatter. All were soon overwhelmed by the powerful blows of Rutar warriors.

While their allies battled on, severely disadvantaged, the Nikkad at the rear, who held greater numbers than that of the Rutar still on the field, did nothing. They could have come forward and launched knives and darts even without engaging blade to blade, but this did not happen. Ludun-Mulun was able to have his men obliterate the mercenary holdouts and reform his line in full view of this enemy without any opposition.

For some time, the two forces stood in the mud staring at each other. This stretched on and on, until hours passed. The clouds rolled by slowly overhead. The shamans moved out onto the field to treat the Rutar wounded, and I was left in my perch surrounded by a mere handful of observers. It grew quite cold, and many soldiers on both sides took to shuffling back and forth to retain such warmth as they could. For a time, I thought both sides would simply wait until sunset, with no resolution to be found, but then the archers began to return.

They streamed back in dribs and drabs, small groups of men coming from the south, bearing refilled quivers and wearing clothes dried at hidden fires. This, then, was the secret of Rutar warfare, their willing utilization of their mastery of the marshes. Hidden encampments with fuel stockpiles allowed soldiers soaked and shivering from flight to dry off and regain warmth even as though who dared to follow them froze and collapsed in the soaking damp, slain not by weapons, but by the damp alone. Ynayal’s irregulars disintegrated in the reeds, dying to freezing streams, chilled mud, and clinging vines. At the same time, the Rutar reformed and rearmed. A full thousand archers returned to support the infantry before the sun had set. With an hour of light remaining, archers in line behind his shields, Ludun-Mulun ordered his warriors forward to bombard the Nikkad line.

Tired, cold, and now outnumbered nearly two to one, the Nikkad did something I never expected to see. They surrendered. The reason I consider this unexpected is that the prospects awaiting any captives were utterly horrid. Slavery was surely the fate to which all prisoners would be condemned. The Rutar keep few slaves of their own, their simple society has little place for them, but they will readily trade prisoners to Kharal and Nikkad leaders who send them to work in the mines. That is a miserable fate, and one that leads to a death no less certain than flight through the marshes, simply slower. I did not believe that one as charismatic and capable as Ynayal would ever give in without fighting. As it happened, he had not done so. The Nikkad soldier who surrendered was named Navassay. It was later discovered that Ynayal had positioned himself among the mercenary line, stiffening the spine of his troops by leading them from the front. He perished in the initial clash of infantry, a shield spike driven into his gut in the opening moments of the fight. Such is the randomness of mass conflict, a single strike deciding the fate of thousands. His head was not found until well after nightfall.

Ludun-Mulun’s confidence in holding large numbers of captives increased upon learning of Ynayal’s death. He had the Nikkad and such irregulars and mercenaries as were recovered from the swamps alive bound and disarmed before bringing them back to the main encampment. The Rutar thoroughly plundered the baggage of their enemy, for though they had little food, they carried much treasure and thousands of metal weapons and armor pieces of great value to the Rutar. The plan was to spend the next several days scouring the swamp to recover the gear of those claimed by the cold. Many were most eager to undertake this. A single iron spearhead could be reforged into an axe or hammer and instantly become the best tool owned by a Rutar family, and this easily explained their avarice.

Though losses among the infantry core had been substantial, and some archers had been caught and slain during the withdrawal, the total Rutar dead amounted to only some three hundred. Considering that enemy losses were likely over ten times that figure the battle was accounted a great victory. A reasonable assessment by any standard, and the celebration that evening was considerable, with the soldiers drinking deeply of any intoxicant available. Endless loud songs were shared around the campfires, mixed in with lamentations for the fallen. Death in the heroic defense of one’s home is still death, and the shamans worked late into the night conducting funerals and preparing bodies for sinking into nearby lakes and pools. Such somber duties did not reduce the joyous fireside songs much, though grim-faced Rutar stalked the lines of captives in search of those who had slain their kinsmen and some scores were settled in the darkness.

Though this was not my first time seeing it, observing the aftermath of battle is never a pleasant affair. To be merely an observer, tied to neither side, is of some assistance. Though my sympathies lay with the Rutar, I could never be considered one of them. I made such efforts as I could to be of aid and offered to record the names of the fallen on behalf of the shamans. They rebuffed this offer, though it seemed the sentiment was appreciated. Unable to sleep afterwards, I worked late in the night by candlelight to record an initial report regarding the engagement.