Tatros opened his eyes, feeling awful. There had been a time when he could wrestle and drink all night and be agile as a buck during the rut in the morning. Those days were gone. Tatros couldn’t be sure how old he was; his father had been non-committal when a young Tatros had asked, but he had to be in his mid-thirties by now. In the sar’s army, that made him a seasoned veteran. In the early morning, it just made him an old man with a tense back.
At least I did not piss myself, Tatros thought, feeling the pressure of his bladder. As long as his body woke him in time, he refused to consider himself an elder.
Careful not to disturb the sleeping men around him, Tatros climbed to his feet, the pounding in his head punishing every movement.
“Where are you going?” a sleepy voice asked from somewhere next to him.
Making his way to the low tent entrance, Tatros didn’t turn around. “Just taking a piss. Go back to sleep. It is still dark.”
A grunt was all the response he got.
Ducking through the tent flap, Tatros looked around. The vast camp of the Saggabian army stretching out in all directions was still asleep. In the east, beyond the besieged city of Riadnos, vast mountains still hid the light of dawn.
Scratching his chest, he wandered through the rows of tents. Here and there he greeted the warriors huddled around firepits. Born in Helcenaea across the ocean, he enjoyed the milder climate here at the northern tip of the continent. But most of the army was made up of Saggabian farmers, used to the hot and dry weather of the south. While even there nights could become rather cold, the men were unaccustomed to the winds coming in from the sea.
“You are up early,” a voice said.
Tatros glanced over his shoulder and searched his foggy mind for the name of the Saggabian warrior joining his side. “Too much wine.”
The man shook his head, his black beard scratching against the fabric of his tunic. “You won big yesterday. I watched the last two matches. How many did you throw?”
“Five out of five,” Tatros said, pride creeping into his voice. He might be getting older, but there was barely a man in the army that could throw him in a fair match. Yesterday’s competition had won his tent; four amphoras of Helcenaean wine probably plundered in one of the abandoned farms. Almost all the inhabitants of the area had retreated behind the walls of their city to await the sar’s inevitable assault.
Not so inevitable anymore, Tatros thought.
“Any new?” he asked. He didn’t have to be more specific. For the last two days, the camp had only known one topic.
The warrior turned his head left and right before leaning in a bit closer. “I have a friend who came with the last supply train. He heard that the Assanaten have gathered an army to march on Saggab. Maybe Assanadon wants to take the city while the sar and his army are up here in the north.”
Tatros frowned. “They say Saggab has the highest walls in the world. Even the Assanaten would need month to take the city. We would have enough time to march back south and smash them against the walls.” Not that he was eager for that battle. It was said that Assanadon kept his warriors under arms all year round, never sending them home to tend the fields. If that was true, it meant the Assanaten army consisted entirely of veterans. The thought alone made Tatros’ stomach clench.
“The gods only know what is going on,” the warrior said, loosening his tunic in front of one of the latrine pits. “But those men sure looked spooked when they left here.”
Instead of answering, Tatros fumbled with the belt that held his own tunic together. A moment later, the painful pressure that had woken him early was replaced by sweet relief.
As he listened to last night’s wine disappearing in the black hole in front of him, he thought back on the sar’s sudden departure two days ago. There had been no warning or explanation. Sar Nasser-Umabona had taken all his cavalry and a large part of the senior leadership and left the valley to ride south. A few hours later, two-thirds of his bodyguard and some of the army’s most experienced units had marched after him.
“You have to ask yourself, what could be so urgent that the sar would leave his family behind while taking most of his best men?” Tatros asked, turning away from the latrine.
Restoring his tunic, the warrior followed him. “It could also be a raid by one of the nomad tribes. If they threaten the Golden Road, that endangers our supply line.”
Tatros nodded. “I hope it is just that.”
Many of the horse nomads were ferocious fighters, but they usually avoided direct confrontations with larger armies. Their mobility allowed them to recede back into the steppes and desert that had birthed them without the danger of the marching armies of the great cities ever catching up to them.
“If it is the nomads, the sar will drive them off and be back in a month or three,” Tatros said. “Until then, we will just sit here and watch Riadnos eat through its food storages.”
For a while, the two men walked next to each other, each in his own thoughts. As so often in the past couple of months, Tatros mind was on the spoils waiting for them behind the besieged city’s walls. Whatever was happening down south was far away and didn’t matter to him. His fight was here. And so is my prize, he thought, looking over to Riadnos’ dark silhouette in the distance.
Life as a mercenary had been good to Tatros, but he had been close to meeting the ferryman more than once and knew sooner or later the gods would lose interest in him. Before fortune turned against him, he wanted to settle down and maybe find a woman. The plunder that waited behind Riadnos’ walls would allow him to afford that.
“Does it bother you?” the warrior suddenly asked. “Fighting other Helcenaean, I mean.” He waved in the vague direction of the city.
Tatros scratched his head. It was true, Riadnos was an old Helcenaean colony. But why would he care about that? He had come from the homeland and wasn’t even from the same city that the legendary Riadna had hailed from.
A sudden thought struck him. Is this one testing my loyalty? Maybe the remaining army leadership was nervous. The sar’s sudden departure had unsettled the men, and new rumors were springing up all the time. Fighting men were a superstitious lot at the best of times, and it didn’t take much to unsettle them.
Tatros flashed the warrior he had never met before his most winning smile. “You know, there are probably half as many Helcenaean fighters in this army as there are behind those walls, and most are from across the sea. Unless you lead them against their home city, they will follow you happily.”
“As long as they are paid,” the warrior said, returning the smile in the dark.
“Of course.”
The two men chuckled.
“I am Bel,” the warrior said, extending his hand. “Bel of Saggab.”
“Tatros,” Tatros said, gripping the other man’s forearm. Bel had a good grip.
“I am looking forward to fighting beside you, Tatros,” Bel said, turning away. “But I do not think that will happen anytime soon. It looks like the anax of Riadnos lost his currage after we took the seawall from him.”
That was when the horns began to blare. A moment later, distant screaming joined them.
Bel stared openmouthed in the direction of the increasing noise. “What is going on?”
“That is the gods’ vicious sense of humor,” Tatros said, his voice sounding calmer than he felt.
“What?”
Taros pointed into the darkness. “Riadnos is here.”
“A night attack? Impossible.” Bel’s expression showed his disbelief. “The sentries would have noticed their approach.”
“Yes, well, it is their valley after all,” Tatros said, turning away. “I must go and find my weapons.”
A heavy hand dropped on his shoulder. “No, come with me.”
Tatros suppressed the impulse to slap the hand away. He still didn’t know who he was dealing with. “Look, Bel, if the Riadnian managed to close in on the camp without us noticing, our archers are going to be next to useless. This is going to be a bloodbath. You better find yourself a weapon.”
Or a rock to crawl under, he added in his mind. That was what he intended to do anyway.
Their army was big. Even with the sar taking many of their elites with him, no empire could field more men than Saggab. But half of them were equipped as bowmen. In battle, their arrows would blacken the skies. Here, in the dark of night, surprised and pressed together in a crowded camp, they might all be cut down like grain.
The hand on Tatros shoulder tightened its grip. “I am Bel of Saggab. Bel the Shield Piercer, chief of ten in the sar’s bodyguard, and you will come with me.”
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And so Tatros followed Bel through the waking camp, running past countless men crawling blurry eyed from their blankets. What else could he do? Besides being a member of Nasser-Umabona’s bodyguard, if Bel really was the Shield Piercer, one of only a handful of named warriors in the army, he wasn’t somebody Tatros wanted to cross.
As they came closer to the camp’s center, things around them became more organized. Chiefs and seasoned veterans were pushing warriors around, brining order into the chaos.
The sar’s absence shows, Tatros though, watching many heads turn back and forth between the direction of the fighting and the cliff wall at the west side of the camp. There lay the narrow gap the army had paid a high price to open. It was the only access to the valley, and its widest sections were not broader than maybe fifteen men standing shoulder to shoulder. If we get routed, that will become a deathtrap.
“Who goes there?” A guard challenged them.
“It is Bel,” his comrade said. “Let him through.”
They had reached the section of the camp with the large, luxurious tents. Tatros had never even been close to this area, guarded day and night by the sar’s bodyguard. The people living here were so far removed from common man like him, he would only ever see them from a distance. These were the highest leaders of the army and civil officials. And of course, the sar’s family. Several of Nasser-Umabona’s wives and concubines and even their children had accompanied him on this campaign. All of these people and their servants formed a camp within the camp.
“Stay close to me,” Bel said over his shoulder.
“Sure.”
“Out of the way,” somebody up front shouted, and both men jumped aside as a group of almost twenty warriors, led by a man clad in equipment Tatros could never hope to afford, ran by.
Bel took his arm and gestured for him to follow. “Come this way.”
They left the main road and hurried through the narrow gaps between the tents. Twice more guards challenged them, but each time Bel just stated his name, and they were waved along.
Eventually they reached a tent near the center square of the camp. At first Tatros thought it was guarded, but as they came closer, the figure standing in front of the entrance turned out to be a woman, wearing the garb of a palace servant.
“Bel?” she called out to them.
“It is me,” Bel said. “How is she?”
The woman shook her head. “Sleeping. The birth was hard on her, the poor thing. Who is that?”
“Tatros.” Bel waved him forward. “He is Helcenaean.”
“I can see that,” the woman said. “Why did you bring him here? Can he understand us?”
“I speak the Old Tongue,” Tatros said. Having spent more of his life as a mercenary for one or another city along the Golden Road than in his homeland, he was fluent in several of the dialects of that old language of some long dead empire that everybody on this continent seemed to speak. It helped in negotiating pay or even switching sides mid-battle if fortune turned against his employer.
Bel opened his mouth to answer the woman when the shouting in the distance suddenly changed and the horn signals became more frantic.
“What is going on?”
“Maybe the Riadnian broke through somewhere,” Bel said, sounding unsure.
“Have you ever been on a route?” Tatros asked, trying to focus on the noise of the fighting that didn’t seem so distant anymore.
“Impossible,” Bel snapped.
“Because I have,” Tatros continued, ignoring the warrior’s disbelieve. “More than once. And this is what it feels like right before your wing of the battleline notices that the other one has turned and run.”
He managed to jump aside just in time to evade a horse, galloping past, heading for the central square.
Tatros pointed at the riders back. “That one is bringing the bad news.”
In the light of the guard’s torches, they could see the rider reaching the square, jumping from his horse, and hurrying into the largest tent. Moments later, a dozen men streamed from the tent, shouting orders while dispersing in all directions.
Bel turned away from the chaotic scene; his face turned into a grim mask. “We must go.”
“Atissa cannot travel,” the woman said. “She has just given birth.”
“I will try to find a wagon, then,” Bel said.
Tatros could hear a note of desperation in the other man’s voice, and for the first time he became aware of how young Bel still was. A named warrior he might be, but looking closer, he couldn’t be older than twenty and two. Maybe even younger.
“Forget the wagon,” he said. “You will not find any horses. The sar took most of them, and the rest will already have been grabbed by men running for their lives.”
As he spoke, the noise around them grew louder. Panicked shouting, screams of pain as men fell in the dark, and the stomping of hundreds of men running.
“Then I shall carry her,” Bel said. “Come!”
His tone leaving no room to argue, the other two followed him into the tent.
“Atissa, you must wake up,” he said, gently shaking the woman lying on the bed in the middle of the tent. “Help me with here. Tatros, you take my spear. It is there in the corner.”
Tatros turned to look for the weapon before thinking better of it. “Let me carry her, and you take the spear.”
Bel looked up angrily, but Tatros raised his hands. “I was never handy with the spear, but I do have a strong back. So, you guard us, Shield Piercer.”
“The Helcenaean is right, Bel,” the servant said.
For a heartbeat, the Saggabian warrior looked like he wanted to argue, but then he rose. “Sar Nasser-Umabona gave Atissa into my charge. If you drop her, if you try to run away, I will kill you.”
“I believe you,” Tatros said quickly. And he did, not having missed the fervor in the young man’s eyes.
It took them longer than he would have liked to load the young girl on his back. Completely exhausted, she was barely conscious enough to collaborate with their efforts.
“Giving birth took all her strength,” the servant said.
“No wonder,” Tatros murmured, carefully standing up with the burden on his back. “She weighs almost nothing. How old is she? Sixteen?”
“Fourteen,” the woman said, stepping to a small crib next to the bed and carefully retrieving a baby. “You are not screaming, are you? No, you are a brave one. Just like your mother.”
“Leave everything else,” Bel said. “We find what we need once we are save.”
Taros took position behind him at the tent entrance. He had to lean slightly forward to balance the girl’s unconscious body. “Head south. Down to the shore.”
Bel frowned at him.
“By now, half the army might be fleeing west,” Tatros said. “The gap through the mountains is narrow, and that is before they reach the seawall’s gate. Dozens will get trampled even before the Riadnian strike their rear.”
“You hope to find a boat?” the servant asked.
“Or sneak along the shore,” Tatros said.
Lead by Bel, they left the tent behind and hurried south. This time nobody challenged them; the armed men were too busy to usher the camp's inhabitants east toward the gap leading out of the valley.
Tatros couldn’t help but respect the discipline and loyalty of the sar’s bodyguard. With panic spreading all around them, there was a constant mental pressure to drop everything and run to save your own skin.
Every so often Bel’s head turned, his eyes following the stream of people heading in the other direction. Tatros could see his doubt.
“Man is like an animal,” he said, just loud enough for the warrior to hear. “We want to follow the herd, especially when we are afraid.”
And today that instinct will drive thousands into a trap, he added in his mind. Unless somebody managed to rally enough troops to drive the Riadnian back long enough to reorganize the army, the enemy’s spears would bring in a bloody harvest.
He clenched his teeth. Having marched for the sar for years, he had a lot of friends in this camp. Only the gods knew how many he would see again after tonight.
Bell raised his fist, bringing their small procession to a halt behind a horseless wagon. They were crossing into the regular camp, and the chaos around them was increasing. Warriors, some alone, others in groups, were crossing their path in a constant stream. Then screams erupted up ahead, and the sound of fighting and dying joined the noise of the fleeing army.
How are they already here? Tatros wondered. Peering past Bel, he could see glimpses of painted Helcenaean shields between the tents. How could the Riadnian have already pushed this deep?
“These bastards,” Bel said. “They must have landed a second force on the beach to flank us.”
A hundred paces to their left, the night became alight as tents went up in flames. Enemy warriors ran around, holding torches to the dry fabric, while their comrades engaged the Saggabian defenders.
Something inside Tatros winced, thinking how much loot was burning in front of him. The thought brought another realization.
“They are trying to spread panic,” he said intently. “Maybe that is our chance.”
Bel looked over his shoulder. “What do you mean?”
“Riadnos does not have enough men to pincer the army,” Tatros said, a picture forming in his mind as he spoke. “They probably hit us from the west with every warrior their could muster while sending just two or three ships worth of men to attack us from the south to cause panic.”
“You think…” Bel interrupted himself, watching the scene ahead. “We could rally our men here and throw them back.” Seeing the Helcenaean right in front of him had roused his blood.
Not liking what he was hearing, Tatros opened his mouth to argue, but the servant woman spoke up first.
“Remember your duty, Shield Piercer,” she whispered. “The sar charged you with protecting his child and its mother. You cannot abandon them in the middle of a battlefield.”
Bel stiffened, looking torn between his desire to jump into the battle and protecting his charge. Finally, he shook his head. “Very well. We will use the smoke as cover to sneak out of here. If they see us, I will open us a path.” He turned around once more to look into Tatros eyes. “Should I fall, these two are your responsibility. I charge you to return them safely to our sar.”
Tatros nodded. “I understand.” What else could he have said? That he intended to run for it at the first opportunity?
Maybe this will be alright, he thought, not believing it for a moment. Nasser-Umabona will surely give me a great reward if I bring him his concubine and child.
“Follow me.” Bel stood and led them into the smoke of the burning camp.
They only made it twenty paces before running into a group of Riadnian warriors covered in soot. Bel the Shield Piercer rushed them with a battle cry, and that was the last they saw of him.
Tatros turned right and jumped through the remains of a burning tent. And then he just ran.
Around him, the world had turned into smoke, fire, and chaos. All around him, men were running and fighting. Some of the Saggabian seemed to have turned to looting their own camp. He saw a group of men in the rags of farmer conscribes beating a chief of ten to death, who tried to organize them.
A part of Tatros envied them the opportunity, but he had been a fighting man for long enough to know when to look for spoils and when to run for your life.
A couple of times he stumbled, almost losing his burden. But he was strong, and the girl was light, and somehow he kept going.
It wasn’t until his feet sank into the sand of the thin shoreline that he stopped and tried to orientate himself. His eyes were burning, and he could barely see anything.
“Where now?” a voice asked from behind him.
Tatros squinted back. Somehow the servant woman had managed to stay on his heels.
“I do not know,” he said. “I can barely see.”
“Wait here,” the woman said. A moment later he heard the splashing of water, and then a cloth roughly wiped the soot from his eyes.
As his sight cleared, Tatros noticed that the first rays of sunlight reached over the eastern mountains. Behind them, thick clouds obscured the view of the burning camp, but they could still hear the noise of the Riadnian slaughtering the sar’s army. What caught his attention were half a dozen boats of different sizes that had been pulled on the beach less than a hundred paces away. In the morning sun, they looked abandoned; the enemy didn’t have men to spare to leave behind guards.
“There,” Tatros said, pointing with his head. “That is our way out.”
“You know how to steer a ship?”
In the light of the morning sun, Tatros studied his companion for the first time. Of average size for a Saggabian woman, she seemed to be in her late twenties or early thirties. It was hard to tell with soot and grime covering her from head to toe. In her arms, she cradled the small bundle that contained the child.
A waterskin would be of more use, Taros thought, spitting out a black blob.
“One of the small ones, sure,” he said, starting to walk in the direction of the ships. “Did the babe make it?”
Hurring to keep up with him, the woman unwrapped the child’s head and pinched its cheek. A heartbeat later, the newborn’s cries filled the air.
The woman smiled, satisfied. “She is a strong one.”
“We will see,” Tatros said, unconvinced. Few babes survived their first year, and this one’s chances were worse than most.