Ott, Cha, and the men of Catal settled in as the shimmering moon glided among a dusting of thin clouds above the lagoon and slid toward the horizon.
As the gray cloud of dawn filtered through the darkness, announcing daybreak, Ott peered down at the beach below. It was still and silent. The breeze shifted, and Ott recoiled at the disgusting stench that wafted up from the beach. Morning light washed over the sand, and as his eyes adjusted, his face twisted more at the sight. More than half of the beach was littered with the bodies of the crowd that had gathered with Ilker to greet the people from the sea. Now their corpses lay bloated and decaying in the sand. Ott looked to the rear entrance of the city. How much more death lay within?
He looked to the lagoon and caught sight of a large body lying facedown. Though bloated and distorted, he knew it was the corpse of Ilker. The sand around his head was soaked with the rust-brown stain of dry blood. Ott’s rage simmered.
He looked back at the entrance and caught movement in the shadows. Seconds later, men in black tunics emerged from within. A small group walked into the morning light, followed by what they had raided the city for: their captives, those who would be their slaves. With wrists bound behind their backs, the captives shuffled onto the beach in a steady stream and were herded against the rocks by more raiders who poured out from behind. Most of the bound prisoners were young women and girls, with some younger boys. All looked horrified. Many wore tattered, bloody clothes, and some were completely naked. Most of them sobbed openly as they were prodded with spear shafts and moved along the wall and across the beach to the far edge of the lagoon, where they were shoved to the sand. Ott looked out to the black ships and back to the captives. They were probably all that could be carried on the ships. What had happened to the other women, and where were the surviving men? He swept his eyes over the dead bodies littering the beach. What was left of the people in the city?
The sea raiders continued flowing out onto the sand, and in a short while they were everywhere below. They milled about among the corpses, clustered along the opposing wall and crowded along the base of the wall beneath Ott. Ott searched for the leader with the braided scalp lock, the one who killed Ilker, but he didn’t spot him among so many. He would find him, but now it was time to act. He stretched his arms out to the rear and signaled the men up. He wanted them to peer over, to survey the beach, to be ready. They were not to shoot until he did.
The men shimmied up and peered over. For a long moment, they studied the beach and the black-clad men below. And then, with arrows nocked, the men turned and looked to Ott.
Ott sprang erect and pulled his bow full. Instantly, Cha and over four hundred archers appeared along the entire length of the wall with bows flexed. The raiders along the base snapped their heads back in surprise. A man started to shout as Ott loosed his arrow. The shout turned to a scream of agony as the obsidian tip shattered through the raider’s forehead. The man was dead before he hit the ground. As he crumpled, the archers of Catal released their deadly shafts. Shouts and screams of pain erupted along the entire length of the lower wall. Looking up at a slight angle, most of the men were hit in the face and chest. Ott elevated his bow and loosed his second arrow, which was followed by a second flight of shafts. The result was the same, and a rain of death poured down on the raiders.
With the men along the seawall dead, dying, or wounded, the archers nocked their arrows and looked to Ott to direct the next flight. He scanned the beach. Everywhere men were shouting and pointing up at Ott and the archers. Surprise was turning to panic and chaos. The largest group of raiders extended from the rear entrance of the city to a point midway to the lagoon, and as they stared up at the archers, panic exploded full. They shouted and scrambled around each other to get back to the entrance. Ott gauged the range, elevated his bow high, and pulled to his ear. All the archers tracked his motion and flexed their bows. As Ott loosed his arrow, over four hundred bows snapped along the length of the wall. The shafts ripped through the stark blue, and as they curved down, another flight rose behind them.
From the entrance of the city to the middle of the beach, the clustered raiders pushed, stumbled, and clamored over each other in panic as the shafts rained down in a torrent of death. As the last of the arrows fell and buried flint and obsidian points in the bodies of the men on the beach, Ott gazed over the carnage. What had moments before been a panicked mob was now a sprawl of wounded and dying men as they bled in the sand.
Ott signaled the men to continue shooting at will, and then scanned the beach for the tall leader. He was nowhere to be seen.
Everywhere on the beach men moved about in frenzied confusion and fear. Some flattened in the sand; others huddled against corpses and wounded men, while many milled about in shock with arrows protruding from their bodies. None would escape. Ott’s orders had been clear: everyone was to continue shooting until every black tunic on the beach had an arrow in it.
All along the wall, the archers split into groups of two to five men and targeted the raiders with multiple shots. There was no safe cover on the beach, and the archers were relentless. As the arrows flew and the sun climbed to midmorning, the screams and shouts faded and were replaced with only the moans of the dying. Soon they died off, and the only sound from the beach was the screeching of the seabirds along the edge of the lagoon. When no black tunics moved, the archers stood as the coppery smell of fresh blood mingled and rose with the stench of the rotting corpses.
Ott swept his eyes over the beach. It was littered with bodies. Only the captives who remained sitting at the edge of the lagoon moved as they huddled together, shaking in fear and shock. Ott broke the silence with a shout and motioned to the men to his right. It was time to split the men and move. Cha and half of the archers would remain on the wall and make sure no one escaped from the rear of the city. He and the remaining men would head to the front, where Graf and his men remained concealed along both sides of the road leading out.
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Ott set a fast pace, and the men behind him filtered around the rocks and through the trees to the plain, where they circled around to the promontory. He pulled the archers to a halt and signaled them to squat or sit so they weren’t visible from the entrance of the city. He crabbed out on the overlook and peered down along the roadway leading from the entrance and up through the narrow valley to the bluffs. It was quiet, still, and littered with the bodies of people slaughtered by the raiders as they tried to escape. The vultures had gorged themselves and returned to their roosts.
He spotted Graf and other men behind rocks and brush above and on both sides of the roadway. They were well hidden, silent, and ready. Ott’s face twisted as the breeze shifted and the stench rose in the air. He looked back at the entrance—movement. Shapes in the afternoon shadows crept inside the entrance, and a head pushed out from one side followed a moment later by another on the opposite side. Darting eyes probed the front of the entrance and the roadway leading through the bluffs and beyond. Ott stayed low.
Moments passed in silence, and then a crouching black-clad figure slid around the entrance wall and skulked to the side of the roadway. Staying low, he scanned the upper reaches on both sides of the roadway. No movement, no sounds, only the corpses and the vultures circling high above. It was clear. They could escape to whatever lay beyond the city. The man motioned to the entrance and moved forward. Any way out was better than the certain death that waited on the beach.
Two more dark figures slithered through the entrance, glared up at the embankment, and trailed off, dogging in the first man’s steps. From the opposite side of the entrance, four more men broke from the shadows, followed by several others. Soon a steady stream of black tunics flowed from both sides of the entrance and quick-stepped ahead, crouching low. Next, an entire group of men stepped from the center of the entrance. They looked at the black ribbons of men on both sides of the road and started up the center of the roadway, stepping over and around the bodies of the people they had slaughtered. Men c
ontinued pouring from the city, and soon the entire area around the entrance and up the road was crowded with men on the verge of panic, men fleeing, hoping to escape the fate others had met on the beach.
Graf peered from behind the rock and looked to the entrance. It was clearing. No more black tunics emerged.
The men who had fled first could see the promontory ahead and the open sky beyond as they cleared the bluffs. It signaled the way out of the low, narrow valley. They began scrambling through the loose, sandy soil. They would escape. Behind them, the entire area was clogged with black tunics when Graf, Yaan, Asil, Ece, and hundreds of archers stepped from cover and flexed their bows. Panic exploded as the archers of Catal loosed their arrows.
Curdling sounds of the carnage filled the air. The men closest to the promontory panicked in an eruptive surge and began stumbling and clawing their way up. A hundred or more had poured over the ridge when Ott and his men rose thirty yards in front of them, flexed their bows, and loosed a wall of flint- and obsidian-tipped shafts.
The arrow storm was even more deadly than at the beach. The fleeing men were clustered much closer together and the range was short. Within several minutes, the area ran red with the blood of the raiders. The archers stopped their onslaught only when no men remained standing along the entire roadway and the shouts and screams had turned to moans and sobs.
Ott and his group moved forward as Graf and the others pushed down from the embankments. They all headed for the city entrance. The roadway was so crammed with bodies that at times they had to walk on top of them. Any movement or sound from a black tunic was answered with a spear to the neck. They moved clumsily over the bodies, slipping in the blood and trying not to retch from the stench of so much death. As they moved through the entrance, Ott looked back up the roadway. It was silent and still apart from the vultures flapping down to their banquet. Inside the city, Ott and the others were met by people sobbing, mumbling, and shouting in hysterical relief.
In a voice choked with sobs, an old woman explained that the previous day when the people had realized what was happening, most had escaped down the beach, but many others had never made it out. Many men stayed to fight, but knives and fishing spears were no match for the strange long knives of the raiders. All of them had been killed. Ott ordered several men to bring back those who had escaped, and then ordered everyone to spread out, sweep through the city, and head for the beach.
As they moved through the city, Ott realized how right the old woman had been. At every turn and everywhere throughout the city, there were bodies, mostly men, but also many woman and children. All had been hacked and stabbed, their limbs and heads severed. Many of the women and girls lay naked. Toward the rear of the city, several older men and women wriggled out from a narrow passageway in a cluster of sheds and small buildings where they had been hiding. One of them scurried to an archer and spoke excitedly while pointing to an area by the rear entrance. The archer looked to where she was pointing and then ran to Ott. It was a warning. A group of about twenty black tunics nestled against the low wall, clutching their swords.
Ott surveyed the area around the wall. To the rear, a tower rose to a height of about two stories. A single ladder secured against the side extended to the top. The tower was used to check on fishing boats returning from the lagoon. The top would have room for no more than a few people. To Ott, it looked as though the far side of the wall would be visible from the top. He told Graf to give him enough time to get to the top of the tower and then proceed to the rear entrance. He would drive the men from behind the wall. Graf nodded, and Ott, along with Asil and Ece, made for the tower.
Behind the wall, nervous and frightful, the last of the raiders fidgeted. They had escaped the beach, but instead of heading for the front of the city, they had decided to hide until nightfall, when they would sneak onto the beach, cross to the lagoon, take a longboat back to one of the big ships, and escape to sea. Never in all their plundering and raiding had they ever been dealt as much violence and death as they were used to inflicting. Now, as they huddled against the wall, they knew fear for the first time.
Ott bounded up the ladder, followed by Asil and Ece. He swept his eyes toward the wall and clenched his jaw. The angle was not good, too far to the side. Of the twenty or more men sitting against the wall, the only visible targets were the tops of four heads and the feet and ankles of a few sitting with their legs extended. It didn’t matter. The raiders had to be driven from behind the wall.
He nocked an arrow, aimed at the closest target, and released. The arrow smashed through the man’s shaved pate with a loud thwack and exploded through the bridge of his nose. His chin plopped to his chest.
As Asil released, his target flinched. The flint tip sliced off his nose and plowed into the thigh of the man next to him. Ece’s shot tacked a foot to the ground. Screaming and shouting, the raiders sprang to their feet and clamored for the rear entrance. Graf and his men readied to shoot, but several of the old men and women, shocked and confused, wandered into the line of fire. Graf waved the bows down, and the black tunics squirted around the side of the entrance and bolted onto the beach. Arms pumping and kicking up sand, they swerved around and jumped over bodies in blind panic, heading for the edge of the lagoon and their only hope of escape.
Sitting on the rocks high atop the seawall, Cha spotted the escaping raiders and sprang to her feet. She shouted, and a second later all the archers were on their feet with arrows nocked. Grunting with exhaustion and driven by fear, the raiders twisted around and over bodies. The archers flexed bows, swung their aim ahead of the fleeing men, and loosed their shafts. The arrows shredded the sky in a long arc and sliced down in a deadly sheet that the raiders ran directly into. Shouts and screams rose and died. A second flight was not needed. With the thwack of the last shaft, all the raiders lay dead or dying in the sand. Every black tunic bristled with arrows.
Cha looked back to the entrance—more movement. She reached over her shoulder and fingered an arrow. Ott and the others stepped from the shadows of the entrance and walked out on the beach. Cha took a deep breath and watched as Ott looked up and pumped his bow above his head. With a tight smile, she signaled back and motioned the men down from the rocks to head for the front entrance.
In the bright heat of the afternoon sun, the carnage was turning to fetid stew of bloating carcasses and blood-soaked sand. The men of Catal stepped over and around the bodies and poked at the black tunics for signs of life. Any still alive met the same fate as those who had tried to escape from the front of the city: a broad spear to the back of the neck.
Ott instructed everyone to search for the body of the leader. Every head was checked, but the tall leader with the braided scalp lock was nowhere to be found.
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The sun had slipped low in the afternoon sky. Ott sat on one of the longboats, gazing out over the lagoon. The men behind him on the beach wandered among the dead retrieving their arrows and gathering the long knives from the bodies of the black tunics. He thought again of the leader, the man who had mercilessly killed Ilker and brought so much death and suffering to the people of Antakya. His body had not been found. Where was he? Had he somehow escaped to the plains? Was he still hiding in the city?
On the largest of the black ships, three sets of eyes stared back at the beach and the man sitting alone. Stretched prone and still on a high section of decking, the tall leader and two others had witnessed the destruction of their raiding party. Now they planned their escape. They had paddled out to the ship by the last light of the full moon to inspect the ships for the long return voyage. The raid had yielded valuable cargo, and they had many captives. They had wanted to make sure there was room for as many as possible. They would take all the girls and women; they were the most valuable as breeding stock for more slaves. After the women were on board, they would cram in as many of the boys as possible. They were easy to control and would adjust to life as slaves. Any men still alive would be killed. When they sailed, th
ey would leave behind a city of corpses.
The three men had finished inspecting the first and largest ship when dawn broke and the captives were herded onto the beach. The captives had been marched across the beach and forced to the sand at the edge of the lagoon when the first screams and shouts had floated out across the water. The leader of the raiders had squinted through the glare of the morning sun as all over the beach his men crumpled and slumped to the sand. He hadn’t understood what was happening until he saw the swarms of shadowy streaks raining down from the sky and spotted the hundreds of archers strung out along the entire length of the seawall. Where had they come from? Who were they? He had no answers, but he had seen clearly that they were slaughtering his men.
The three men had watched the carnage well into the afternoon as the beach became still and quiet. The leader knew many more of his men had been in the city than now lay dead on the beach. Maybe those men had escaped out the front and reached the archers on the high wall. That hope died later when archers, not black tunics, spilled out the rear entrance and picked their way over the dead to the edge of the lagoon.
Ott stared out over the lagoon as the realization hit him—the boat. The leader of the raiders had to be on one of the ships. Watching the largest ship in the middle of the lagoon, he called out to Graf and several other men while pointing to the ship. As Graf and the men walked toward Ott, he shouted an order and one of the men sprinted back toward the city.
On the black ship, the tall leader watched as the men on the beach gathered at one of the longboats and pointed out to the lagoon. They were coming. There would be no escaping in the night; they had to get out now. The tall man’s brow furrowed in thought, and he shifted his gaze to the anchor rope. It was taut and stretched toward the beach. The tide was flowing out. He raised his eyes to the strips of cloth at the top of the mast that indicated the wind direction. They bounced and fluttered in the direction of the open sea. The wind was right, and the tide and breeze were both in their favor. They could make it if they acted quickly. They would slice the anchor rope free, raise the sail as they drifted, and beat the longboat out of the lagoon. The hardest part would be setting the sail with only two other men, but it could be done. It had to be, or they would die like the others. He shouted to the men, pulled the obsidian blade from his waist, and scrambled toward the anchor rope.
The Way of the Seed_Earth Spawn of Kalpeon Page 21