by Inmon, Shawn
“I said he was likely to kill you,” Sekun-ak corrected him.
“Right, right. Of course I can show you. I will train you and three other men we choose together. Then, they will each take a group of men and train them. The best from each of their groups will train others. By summer, we will have a group that is at least semi-qualified in hand-to-hand combat.”
“What did you do to him? What stama was it that made his arms go limp.”
“No stama. Just pressure points.” Alex reached out and gripped Sekun-ak’s elbow in the same spot he had hit Tinta-ak. A look of surprise jumped onto Sekun-ak’s face and he leaped backward, flexing his hand.
“See?” Alex said. “No stama. Just pressure points. It’s not that hard to learn, although we will have to go through an accelerated course if we are going to have time to train everyone. There’s much more we need to pay attention to as well.”
“What?”
“We need to learn to act as a unit. To become a band of brothers and sisters. And we need to learn to use our shields.”
Sekun-ak squinted. “Don’t we already know how to use the shields? We hold it in front of us when they fire at us.”
Alex chuckled. “Yes, hopefully. There’s more to it, though. We’re going to form a shield wall.”
Sekun-ak let that term roll around in his head. He was familiar with both words, of course, but had never heard them used in conjunction.
“What is a shield wall?”
“Here. Grab a shield,” Alex said, doing so himself.
The shield Sekun-ak picked up fit him perfectly, but Alex felt like a child holding his father’s shield. “I’ve got to remember to have them make me a shield that fits me.”
Alex stood on a low bench, so he was approximately the same height as Sekun-ak.
“Come stand next to me and hold your shield as you normally would.” Alex was amused to see that the bench made him slightly taller than Sekun-ak, who stretched his neck a bit to close the gap. Alex placed his shield firmly up against Sekun-ak’s.
“Now, what do you see?”
“Two shields?”
“Yes, two shields, but more importantly, the beginning of a shield wall. Now, imagine a dozen men walking like this. They would be invulnerable to almost any attack.”
“Not a rain of arrows like we saw in Denta-ah. Many of those would fly over the shields and hit us.”
“You are correct. But,” Alex lifted his shield up and held it over his and Sekun-ak’s heads, “what if the warriors behind us hold their shields like this?”
The light went on for Sekun-ak. “But then we will be blind.”
“You’re right. Just as the turtle is blind but can’t be hurt when it is in its shell. We only make the complete shield wall when we are stationary and under attack. If the strong men in front brace themselves, even a wave of attackers throwing themselves at us will bounce off. Like the shields we are making, the strength of the whole is more than just the component parts.”
Sekun-ak put his fingers to his forehead, nodding simultaneously. Alex had noticed that he had begun copying some of the gestures Alex had never broken himself of.
“When we need to move, the people behind will keep their shields over our heads to protect from the rain of crossbow bolts, but we can look around our shields like this.” Alex moved his shield a few inches to the left, his head a few inches to the right, and peered through the slit between the shields.
Sekun-ak took a step back and looked at Alex with newfound respect. “I am glad you are on our side, Manta-ak.”
“We have to remember, though, that the Denta-ah have another version of me, but he is not constrained. He is spending all the days and nights while we are training, thinking up new weapons to kill us.”
“I saw you thrash Tinta-ak like he was a child. I saw the man who the Denta-ah have. He was soft and white, like a slug. I’d rather be with you. You are a hunter and a warrior.”
THE WINTEN-AH RUNNERS had done their jobs and survived their perilous journeys. More troops arrived, trickling in groups of six, ten, or a dozen.
Sekun-ak knew it would be their responsibility to feed more than double the normal Winten-ah population, so he took his hunters out day after day after day, not coming home each trip until they had meat with them.
Alex stayed behind, training the new warriors in hand-to-hand combat and other techniques they would need in the upcoming months.
Finally, Sekun-ak declared that they had enough food and that the last of the runners had returned. The people of Winten-ah who were not directly involved with making the shields went to work cutting trees, constructing lean-tos and making sleeping mattresses. The lean-tos were not as secure as sleeping above the ground in the caves, but with hundreds of armed warriors sleeping there and additional guard patrols, even the animals of Kragdon-ah stayed away.
Alex chose Sekun-ak as his second-in-command but picked the rest of his officers from the ranks of the newcomers. He wanted each tribe to have representation. They were risking the well-being of themselves and their tribe just as much as Winten-ah was.
Tinta-ak had become the best public relations man Alex could have hoped for. With each group of new arrivals, he told how he had challenged Alex and what had happened. He always mimed the end of the fight, showing his limp arms and rumbling, bumbling, tumbling exit from the fighting ring.
Alex never grew tired of watching him recreate it.
When the new arrivals saw Tinta-ak’s size and heard the story, they all decided not to challenge Alex themselves.
Alex worked tirelessly into the night training Sekun-ak, Tinta-ak and three other men. Then, the six of them each took sixty men each and ran them through their paces.
For the first few weeks, all weapons were banished. Alex had taught his lieutenants the basics of jiujitsu and the other self-defense arts he had learned in his Special Forces training.
The men grumbled about not having their weapons. Alex thought it was time for another demonstration.
He plucked one of the men at random from the ranks and tossed him a cudgel.
“Hit me with the cudgel,” Alex said.
The man reared back and threw it directly at Alex’s head. Alex was startled but managed to move his head just far enough and fast enough that it didn’t split him open like a melon. The man rushed toward him, but Alex easily stepped aside, thrust a leg out and sent him flying.
“I said, ‘Hit me with the cudgel,’ not ‘throw the damned thing at me.’”
The gathered men tittered a little.
“Now, try and hit me.” Alex picked the club up off the ground and tossed it to the man.
The warrior, again almost a foot taller, launched himself at Alex, swinging the club wildly. Alex ducked beneath the whizzing arc of the club and kicked out, hitting the pressure point at the man’s knee. He crumpled to the ground.
“Weapons,” Alex said, “only help if you know how to use them. And, if you know how to fight both with and without a weapon, you always have the advantage.” Alex helped the man up, but this time did not massage the numbness away. Instead, he let the man try to walk away. His right leg wouldn’t bear his weight and he tumbled back to the frozen ground.
The warriors bought in again.
After a month of training, Sekun-ak came to Alex and said, “We have enough shields for everyone.”
“Good. Tomorrow, have them all brought to the fields. We’ll size them up and assign each man his shield. For the rest of their training, I never want them to be more than a few feet away from them. When they eat, when they sleep, when they sit around telling lies to each other, I want them to have their shields with them.”
The men had come expecting to go to war immediately, so they had already brought their weapons of choice with them—atlatls, spears, bow and arrows, and stone hammers. Once the shields were distributed, their outfitting was nearly complete.
Alex had decided against armor, with one exception. He knew his army was going to
have to travel a long distance just to get to the battle. The more and heavier equipment they had to carry, the worse shape they would be in when they arrived. However, if Douglas Winterborne had also decided on creating a shield wall—a real possibility, based on the other weapons he was creating—then there might be a true shield wall clash.
When two shield walls ram into each other, it is a frenzied display of strength and willpower. There are three ways to win when one shield wall meets another. You can use sheer brute strength, knocking the front row of the opposing wall backward until they fall like bowling pins. You can slip a sword or spear through a gap between the shields, injuring the man behind it, which creates an opening. Or, most likely, you can hack down at exposed ankles. A warrior with a spear through their calf is not focusing on the job at hand.
So, Alex had asked that the hides that the Winten-ah had stored be cured, soaked, tanned and turned into a stiff leather. One at a time, he had his warriors go into the armory, where they were fitted with a piece of leather that ran from just below their knee to down over the top of their moccasins.
With the shield, their lower-leg armor and whatever weapons they had brought with them, the warriors were equipped.
The makeup of Alex’s Army was mostly men, but there was a smattering of women, too. Diversity in all things was popular in Kragdon-ah. Alex trained the women just as he did the men, and one woman—Senta-eh—took to his strategies so quickly that he made her one of his lieutenants, in charge of sixty other men and women.
Senta-eh was unusual, in that her hair was not the jet black of almost everyone else Alex had met. Instead, her hair was dark, but with red streaks that ran through it. Her eyes, instead of being as dark brown as other Kragdon-ah, were gray. She was a striking woman, but there was no sexual harassment in Alex’s Army. The women warriors were every bit as tough as the men and were not shy about showing it.
Alex knew time was growing short. He had met with Ganku-eh, Banda-ak, and his lieutenants, and they had decided to march on Denta-ah at the summer solstice. That would give them the maximum amount of daylight to travel each day, and they wouldn’t have to worry about cold temperatures.
Dan Hadaller had delivered the yew trees as promised and Sekun-ak and his weapons maker had managed to create a longbow with assistance from Dan. Alex picked out twenty-four warriors who had brought bow and arrows as their weapon of choice, figuring they were already familiar with the basic concepts.
Sekun-ak had only been able to produce four of the bows and a few dozen of the longer arrows so far, but that was enough to begin training.
Alex cleared out the field, which was more than two hundred yards from side to side, then took his four most promising bowmen all the way to one side.
“Don’t worry about aiming at anything. Let me just see how they fire. But, let’s do it on my command.”
The four warriors nodded, notched their longbows, and held them, muscles in their arms straining, but they held the arrows steady.
“Fire!” Alex said. He spoke in the universal language, and fire in that language actually meant fire itself, but the meaning was clear. All four bowmen released their arrows with a smooth snick.
The arrows climbed in a lovely arc and disappeared in the trees more than two hundred yards away.
“Yes!” Alex cried. “Look at them fly!”
The bowmen themselves stood watching the graceful flight of their arrows like the thing of beauty they were. They looked at each other but didn’t give a hint of their excitement. Their expressions said, ‘Of course I shot an arrow farther than anyone on Kragdon-ah ever has. I am a warrior.’
Alex, meanwhile, offered a ride on Monda-ak to each child who could retrieve one of the practice arrows. Monda-ak didn’t really mind, as he liked children, and each of those arrows took time to replace.
Alex assembled the nearly-four-hundred warriors on the same open field the next morning.
He had been working with them on marching, singing cadences his first drill instructor would have been proud of, and learning to act as a unit. For the first time, he had them wear their belted weapons, shields, and lower-leg armor. When they stood at attention, they looked like a formidable force.
Alex pulled Tinta-ak away from his unit, had six men form a shield wall, and told Tinta-ak to break it.
“I don’t want to hurt them,” Tinta-ak said, flexing his biceps. “They are not me, but we will still need their numbers, right?”
“Right. I don’t think you’re going to be able to hurt them. I think they are going to knock you down instead.”
There was a time when Tinta-ak might have scoffed at Alex, but he had learned the error of his ways.
“Shield wall!” Alex yelled.
The six warriors locked their shields together and braced themselves.
Tinta-ak pawed the ground like a bull, then launched himself across the field. He was swift for a man so big and had momentum by the time he got to the wall. He lowered his shoulder and hit it dead center.
The men he hit staggered ever so slightly, but as Alex had predicted, Tinta-ak once again ended up on his prodigious backside.
There were a few chuckles, but Alex said, “I invite any man who wants to try to break the shield wall to line up.”
To Alex’s surprise, dozens of warriors from all over Kragdon-ah lined up to try.
Alex turned to Sekun-ak. “Do you never believe your eyes?”
“We believe others have failed, but always think that we will not. That is our way.”
Alex watched, amused, then began to send the men in groups of two or three. The shield wall never budged.
“Do you see now that there is more strength in the group than there is in all the individuals?”
The combined cry of the warriors tore through the air.
Alex turned to Sekun-ak.
“We’re ready.”
Ten days before the main body of the army left, Alex selected an advanced team for a special mission. Their goal was difficult and filled with uncertainty. The possibility of death was perhaps higher than even the warriors who would follow behind them.
Alex asked for volunteers and received three-hundred and seventy-six of them—every man and woman in the Manta-ak Army, as the group had taken to calling itself.
With such a broad field to choose from, Alex conferred with his lieutenants and chose four men and a woman. Janta-ak, who Alex had kept alive on his first day in Kragdon-ah was one of them.
Alex, Janta-ak, and Malen-eh, his wife, had been close friends since that very first day. Both had nursed him through his sickness and Janta-ak had been his partner on many successful hunting expeditions.
Alex hated to send him on such a dangerous mission, but he also needed someone who he knew had a cool head and would respond well under pressure, because Alex expected a lot of pressure on this mission.
Alex briefed all of them on what their mission was, then they left immediately. Since they were a smaller group, they would travel faster and arrive days ahead of everyone else.
Alex burned to be with them—to immediately be moving, doing something, but he knew he was needed with the main group.
He laid his hand on Janta-ak’s shoulder in the universal show of affection and said, “Gunta, old friend.”
The five set off at a steady pace.
As Alex watched them disappear, he didn’t know if he would ever see any of them again.
Chapter Thirty
Janta-ak’s Journey
Janta-ak kept a fast pace—almost a steady jog—as he and the other four volunteers moved over the path to Denta-ah. Janta-ak had never been far from Winten-ah, but they still moved unerringly toward their target.
One of the other warriors who Alex had chosen was Prata-eh, from a tribe called the Nekan-ah. Nekan-ah had been friendly neighbors with both Stipa-ah and Denta-ah. With the built-in ability to locate her own home, she was also able to guide them to Denta-ah, which was only half a day’s walk further on.
&n
bsp; All five of the team members were magnificent physical specimens, but that was true of everyone in Manta-ak’s Army. This allowed them to keep up the grueling pace—even over the first mountain and its switchbacks—for most of the trip.
Alex had told them where the rest spots were that he had used when he made the trek with Yosta-ak, but Janta-ak and company did not use them. They were too far ahead of the pace Yosta-ak had set. It didn’t matter—they only rested for a few hours each night and did so by climbing trees to sleep.
On the first night, just as they settled in, they heard a slow, snuffling sound. From their perches, they looked down and saw Godat-ta. They had climbed high enough in the trees to avoid all but the best predators, but that did not include Godat-ta.
The giant bear wandered along the path, then stopped below the five warriors. All five held their breath, unwilling to make even that gentle sound.
Godat-ta stopped directly beneath them. Humans have a blunted sense of smell, but bears do not. A bear’s nose can be thousands of times more sensitive than a human’s. Godat-ta was no exception.
He sat on his haunches and looked straight up into the branches above. A bear’s vision is not as keen as its sense of smell, but it was plenty good to see the five warriors perched on the branches above.
All five knew their mission was over, if Godat-ta wished it. He could climb better than they could and a footrace—whether uphill, downhill, or on level ground—was no contest. As with everything Godat-ta saw, if he wanted to kill the warriors he could.
Godat-ta looked around curiously.
The warriors contemplated their mortality and hoped that Godat-ta was on his way home from a big meal with a full stomach and maybe some heartburn.
His black eyes gleamed in the moonlight as he looked up at them. Finally, he snuffed out a blast of air, fell back onto all fours, and meandered down the path. An inconsequential decision to the bear.
Life and death to the warriors.
Janta-ak looked at Prata-eh and the other warriors.