‘Why are you out of position?’ the captain of the guards grunted from his position next to the merchant. Asander ignored him and gestured to Nikos, who held up a quieting hand to his assistant and turned his attention to the horsemen.
‘What is it?’
‘You’ve two choices, sir,’ Asander said quietly. ‘Either abandon this ruined cart and move on really, really fast, or have your guard officers pull everything into a defensive formation right now and hope like shit the gods are smiling on you today.’
The merchant’s brow folded and he sucked his lower lip. ‘Casta?’ The captain who had challenged them shrugged. ‘I have no idea what he’s on about.’
‘We’re in severe danger, sir,’ Asander hissed.
Quintillian nodded emphatically. ‘Something’s about to happen. We need to be prepared or gone, one or the other.’
‘The overactive imagination of fresh meat,’ Captain Casta grunted. ‘When you’ve been out here more than once you learn to stop jumping at shadows.’
‘I’m telling you, sir,’ Asander said, his voice little more than a whisper, ‘there’s a storm about to break. A shitstorm.’
‘Get back to your places,’ Casta snapped, gesturing angrily back towards the rear of the column.
‘Listen to the man,’ Quintillian hissed. ‘He spent years out here. He knows what he’s talking about.’
To his credit, the merchant dithered for a moment, undecided. He glanced at the two recent recruits, then at Casta for reassurance. The captain gave him a firm nod. ‘Back to your places,’ the merchant confirmed, though not in unkind tones.
‘At least send someone up to check out the tower,’ Quintillian said quickly, Asander nodding at his side.
‘What?’
‘If all is well there will be four soldiers up there with two horses in the stable, but I don’t think you’ll find any of those. I think we’ve trundled into someone’s snare.’
Casta snorted and rolled his shoulders. ‘If you’re thinking it’s horse nomads from across the border, they don’t do things like that. They just come in screaming blue murder and hit you hard and fast. This is just your imagination.’
‘Then prove me wrong,’ Quintillian snapped. ‘What else will you do, other than stand around watching the wheel get fixed?’
Casta glared at him for a moment, then grabbed a lance from one of his men and pointed it threateningly at Quintillian and Asander. ‘I’ll check it out myself. You two get back to your places. We’ll be ready to move again soon enough.’
As the captain urged his horse up the gentle, brown scrub grass incline, Nikos the merchant nodded at them and gestured for them to return to their places. The two men wheeled their horses and rode back along the line, Asander drawing his blade as he rode.
‘You’re sure?’ Quintillian murmured.
‘Absolutely. And this lot are in trouble.’
As they passed Gisalric and Danu, Asander shouted for them to get ready for trouble, and the two other friends looked around sharply, drawing their own blades. Arriving at their position, Quintillian drew his own sword and swung it experimentally a few times. In the wagon nearby, the three women who cooked for every meal and kept the stores and cooking equipment in order looked up in sharp panic.
‘What is it?’ one of them whispered.
‘Stay down beneath the wagon cover and don’t come out until you know it’s safe.’
The three women did just that, as did the teamster who drove the wagon, a fat man with a ruddy face and nervous eyes. Asander and Quintillian held their blades ready and turned to look back along the valley.
The lone figure of Casta was two thirds of the way up the valley side, making for the tower. His horse skittered this way and that as it found a patch of rock, but quickly gained turf again and was then closing on the crest. Quintillian held his breath. Somehow he knew something awful was about to happen. Casta neared the top, and from their angle the two friends could see the captain on his steed silhouetted against the blue sky as he crested.
And suddenly he was not alone.
A spear burst through Casta’s middle, and the captain toppled backward off his horse, rolling down the slope, the shaft that had claimed his life snapping and splintering as he barrelled through the scrub grass. All along the ridge, horsemen appeared in a seemingly endless line, black forbidding shapes against the blue.
‘Fuck, that’s a lot.’
Quintillian couldn’t find words to express his own thoughts, but Asander had nailed the nub of it, certainly.
Without Casta 16 professional, talented guards now protected the caravan, which consisted of 15 vehicles and perhaps 60 beasts of burden. In all his days of commanding men, Quintillian had learned time and again that a well-trained, well-motivated force with high morale could hope to take on and defeat an enemy three times their number as long as the ground was not unfavourable and the conditions roughly equal. Even a cursory glance up at the ridge told him that they were facing more than a hundred riders, who had the advantage of terrain. No commander would commit to such an action. Still, what was the alternative? Flight and abandoning the wagons and the civilians? His father had brought him up better than that. A nobleman of the empire – especially a prince – needed to be prepared to make sacrifices for the people.
‘We’re in trouble,’ Asander muttered.
‘Take as many as you can, keep your back to the wagons, don’t let them get to the civilians and make every strike count,’ Quintillian said with purpose, flexing his shoulders.
‘You were an officer,’ the scout grinned. ‘An important one, weren’t you?’
‘Do they have bows?’
Asander nodded. ‘And they’re very good with them. They can loose arrows accurately even at a gallop.’
‘Then make sure you face them head on, else your horse makes a huge target.’
They looked up. The force of horsemen was now on the move, flowing down the gentle slope like a tidal wave of black and brown death, oddly silent, but for the thunder of countless hooves.
‘Casta said they came in screaming,’ Asander murmured, ‘and that’s my experience of them too.’
‘Something’s clearly changed.’
The two men hefted their weapons and watched as the nomad horsemen swarmed down to the level ground and flooded across the valley. This was no army such as the empire fielded, or the Pelasians. Nor even like the tribes of the northern mountains. Quintillian was impressed despite himself. He had fought on the eastern border and dealt with minor vassal revolts near the Pelasian border, but he’d never had cause to fight the nomad riders. They rarely crossed the border, even in the hungrier raiding seasons and, from a grand strategic point of view, the damage they caused was too insignificant to merit full-scale military intervention. Somehow it seemed more significant from this angle.
Each rider was attired and equipped differently. They wore a dazzling array of colours, from mustard yellow to deep blue to blood red, with a thousand different browns. Some wore leather armour, boiled to hardness like steel, others lacquered wood. Some wore no armour at all, and some had full coats of leather covered with small fish-scale plates. Some even wore stolen or captured imperial armour. Many had bows either in hand or at their shoulder or in a case attached to the saddle. Some held long, straight swords, some axes with a straight blade and a heavy hammer point to the rear. Others lunged with spears, their blades variously leaf-shaped, long and tapering, or even the shape of two joined diamonds. Their hair was braided or tied at the back, or covered with hoods of fur or leather. There were just two things uniform about the force that rode down the merchant column. They were full of purpose to a man. And fear was not in evidence anywhere along the line.
‘See you on the other side, brother,’ Asander said as he braced.
‘Spears,’ shouted one the merchant teamsters nearby, and five of the lads and old men who tended the vehicles and animals were suddenly with them, facing the enemy with long spears held ready. Wi
th practised precision the servants braced themselves, stamping the spear butts into the ground as best they could and slamming their boots down atop them. Clearly there were men in this caravan who had faced horsemen before and were prepared. Indeed, all along the line, civilians stepped out and braced spears taken from unseen places among the wagons. It still wouldn’t be enough, of course. Not even close.
The arrows began to thrum and hiss through the air from the oncoming horsemen. Quintillian braced himself. Without a shield all he could really do against arrows was hope and pray. But the riders were clever, and their arrows were not aimed at the waiting guards on their horses, but at those same poor civilians with their spears. All along the valley there were agonized screams as men and children fell to the dust peppered with shafts, their spears collapsing harmlessly to the dirt. The pole-arms had represented a sparse but effective anti-cavalry measure, and in one barrage of arrows they were neutralized. Next to Quintillian the last of them fell, a boy of perhaps nine, with an arrow lodged in the notch at the base of his throat, one in his bicep and another deeply embedded in his eye. Blood sprayed from him and he barely had a chance to hiss in pain before he fell dead to the ground, the spear clattering uselessly from his hands.
Quintillian took a deep breath. A nomad with a coat of blue padded material and a skirt of interlocking metal plates was bearing down on him. His black, shining hair streamed in three tails behind him, and a strange pointed beard and moustache framed bared white teeth that shone like his eyes. His left hand held the reins of his steed and his right held a long spear in an overhand grip. Quintillian saw the man tense and shift and reacted instantly, jerking his reins to the right and neatly side-stepping his horse as the spear arced through the air, passed through the empty space where he’d been a moment earlier, and then thudded into the side of a wagon and thrummed there as it vibrated. Even as Quintillian righted himself and prepared, the man was coming again, drawing his long, straight blade and angling for the attack.
The prince’s sword met the nomad’s resulting in the spine-chilling shriek of steel scraping along steel. The rider was quick and the sword was pulled back and coming around for a second strike even as the man manoeuvred the horse expertly a pace to the left to give him better room to fight, though his companions were now coming in close behind and making it difficult. Quintillian’s sword caught the nomad’s and turned it aside once more. Again, the man was quick, bringing his blade around for a third strike. As Quintillian mirrored the manoeuvre, his left hand dipped to his belt and drew his heavy, broad dagger. This was no time for the nobility of the duel. This was a fight to the death and everything counted.
Both swords came round again and met once more. This time the nomad had the better of the angle and it was Quintillian’s blade that skittered away, but this time it was not the sword that counted. As the steel kissed and separated, his left hand came up and the dagger scored a heavy rent across the man’s sword arm. Even as the nomad brought the blade back for his next strike he realized that he had been properly injured, and his arm lost some of its strength and feeling, his sword wobbling in his grip. By the time the sword was coming around for the blow, it was barely held at all, the cut having neatly sliced through the forearm tendons. Quintillian ignored the sword coming for him, since it now held barely enough strength to pass through the air, let alone flesh and bone. His own blade lanced out in a jab this time, rather than a swing, punching deep into the surprised nomad’s chest.
The prince turned his attention to the next opponent, counting the last a dead man already. An axe swung at him and only lurching in his saddle prevented a blow that would have taken a neat slice from the top of his head. Taking advantage of the nomad’s exposed position with the heavy axe leading his arm, he arced up with his sharp blade, his sword catching the swinging arm just below the elbow. There was a thud and a moment of resistance, the crack of bone and the shearing of muscle and the axe continued in its arc, hurtling off to the turf, half an arm still connected to it. Blood pumped from the stump as the startled axeman stared at his injury in disbelief.
Quintillian’s dagger slammed into his ribs as the prince stepped his horse a pace forward and leaned in for the killing blow, his sword even now coming up to block a swing from another assailant.
Then his world fell out from under him.
Or at least, his steed did.
A spear, whether thrown or thrust in the melee, he couldn’t tell, struck the poor beast in the throat. One moment, the prince was in control, cutting and parrying, holding off the enemy, the next he had a brief vision of the spear slamming into the animal beneath him, then his vision was filled with blue sky as the horse reared in agony. And then he was in the dust, choking and scrambling, desperate to be out of the way when the horse fell. He’d seen enough cavalrymen in combat trapped under their animals to know that it was often a death sentence. He felt something slam against his back and reached around with his dagger hand. It was the wheel of the wagon. All he could see was roiling dust and countless conflicting shadows. A tremendous thud nearby signalled the landing of his dying horse and while he felt for the poor beast, he was also filled with gratitude that at least he wasn’t underneath it.
Desperate, choking and with his eyes stinging from the dust, Quintillian struggled upright, his back against the wheel, forcing himself to the world of the living. Miraculously, somehow, he had kept hold of both weapons through his fall and shuffling. As he came up from the worst of the dust cloud, he stared in horror at another nomad’s sword coming down at him, his own blade rising only just in time to turn it aside. Desperately he fought, parrying blow after blow, but two nomads were on him now. In a tiny moment of respite, he managed to lunge out with his knife hand and stab one of the riders’ horses. It was only a light flesh wound with no real damage, but it panicked the beast and sent the rider out of the fight as he fought to control his steed. Even the best horsemen in the world struggle for dominance over a wounded mount.
This bought him enough time to gain a better position against the remaining nomad. It was hopeless, though. He could see three more behind the man, and suddenly another figure thumped against him. Risking a glance, he recognized Asander, now also unhorsed, beside him, fighting for his life.
Swords danced and rang and meat was cleaved, the tearing of muscle and the shattering of bone filling his world. Quintillian roared with the desperation of the man fighting a battle that was already lost, and felt the first wound, then the second, then the third. Suddenly, as though the battle had been halted by some unheard signal, the assailants backed off. Quintillian and Asander shared a surprised and suspicious look. The dust began slowly to settle and the two men took in their surroundings with heavy hearts. The column was lost, utterly. They may well be the last two guards still fighting. For sure he could see the blue-eyed, flaxen-haired head of Gisalric bouncing along further down the caravan on the tip of a spear. Of Danu there was no sign. They seemed to be the last, he and Asander. And a semi-circle of perhaps a dozen nomads surrounded them, spears levelled.
One of them raised a bow and nocked an arrow, but one of his companions shouted at him. An argument ensued in their strange, garbled tongue. Quintillian stared in incomprehension.
‘They can’t decide whether we’re more valuable as slaves or corpses,’ Asander whispered.
‘You know their language?’
‘A bit. Don’t forget I served out here for years. I’m not sure whether I wouldn’t rather be a corpse than a slave, though. They work their slaves to death anyway.’
Quintillian nodded. ‘We go out like soldiers then, eh? For the emperor, blood and steel, eh?’
‘Blood and steel, brother,’ Asander huffed. ‘For the emperor.’
Quintillian knew it wouldn’t be much of a fight. He’d taken a small gash to his right thigh, which was gradually weakening his leg, and a cut to his left arm had left it quite numb, making his dagger largely useless now. The shoulder wound was nothing. But the next blow would
probably be lethal – he was in no position to block it properly.
All along the line nomads were ransacking the wagons, throwing out anything that was of no interest and whooping with delight when they found goods they wanted. Quintillian and Asander braced themselves and raised their blades defiantly. There was another heated discussion between three or four of the nomads, and then one nodded and pointed at the two of them, garbling something at them.
‘He wants us to put down our swords.’
‘Fat fucking chance,’ Quintillian sniffed, wiping blood from his face with his numb left arm.
Several of the horsemen raised bows nocking arrows, and Quintillian was about to yell his defiance at them when he realized the missiles were not aimed at him, but had lifted to a point above his head. He turned, frowning, to look up. The carter had risen from beneath the wagon cover, his hands held up in surrender.
‘Ah, shit.’
Moments later the three cooker women were standing too, their hands held high. Quintillian felt his heart sink. The arrows were aimed for the four figures on the wagon. The spokesman growled something else out in his native tongue, and Asander sighed. ‘He says…’
‘Yes. I can guess.’ Quintillian squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. In many ways a quick death by arrow might be better for all of them, but that was not his decision to make. Not now. A true imperial noblemen, and an officer no less, had a duty to the empire and its citizens that surpassed his own needs and wishes. With a sigh of defeat, he threw his sword to the dusty ground and raised his right arm, his left one not passing shoulder level with the aching numbness of his wound.
Asander cast down his own sword and coughed. ‘We probably only bought them periodic rape and permanent servitude instead of a quick death, you realize?’
‘Not our decision. The military can’t presume to make choices for the population,’ Quintillian hissed. ‘That’s how despots begin.’
‘You sound like a politician now,’ Asander whispered. ‘Who are you, Quintus?’
Insurgency (Tales of the Empire Book 4) Page 4