Fallen Eagle

If anyone had ever asked Nikos whether he was a brave man, he would have denied it without a second's hesitation.

Hitting a bullseye from half a field away had not been courage, it had only been the result of a life lived on the edges, where your only worth was how well you could shoot a bow. Ithad been enough to impress a titan of a soldier into recommending him to high command, but it had not been born of courage.

Standing outnumbered three to one with a ragged knot of peasants against a Tatar raid had not been courage either. That had been a suicidal job he’d been dragged into by a truly brave boy who’d made him believe it was possible.

Even now, leading ill-equipped men in a head-long dash toward a serious, mean, professional army of killers was not bravery. It was desperation still.

It had been desperation all along. Desperation at living in abject poverty, cursed and beaten by both Tatars and Greeks for a heritage that was half each and claimed by neither. Desperation at the thought of staying in his clan as the lowest of the low. Desperation at dying in some backwater garrison, forgotten. Desperation to cling with both hands to the thin shred of authority he had finally wrested for himself after all these years.

He was not brave. He was desperate.

But desperation could make men do brave things.

“Forward!” he strained, throat raw. The shout was swallowed at once by the hiss of arrows, the snap of bowstrings, the thud of bolts slamming into wood and flesh, the roar of men killing and dying.

They ran along the forest, over rocks and roots, Nikos at the front of his Dekarchos as all the other sergeants were.

The enemy line ahead of them withered under the sustained hail of arrows from the wooded slope, the Crown’s few crossbows answering more slowly, their numbers limited by the limited stockpile on hand. Already, pockets of resistance were coalescing as blocks of men turned to angle their fronts toward the charges crashing down from both sides of the hill. The earlier cavalry strike had stabbed straight through the rebel vanguard, and Nikos spotted the banners of the two rebel houses dip beneath the tangle of scattered bodies that lay in the aftermath.

Despite the chaos of the ambush, the grim set to the enemy’s faces told him he could not expect them to break easily. Ahead, resistance sprouted in clumps among the companies as men clustered into rough pike and sword formations facing the attackers wherever an officer managed to get his voice heard, shields coming up, spearpoints bristling.

They were under-armoured, unprepared and increasingly isolated. But Nikos knew in his bones that going toe to toe with them would still be a butcher’s work.

Which was precisely why they were not going to fight at all.

Nikos spotted the red ribbons bright against the dun trunks, tied at careful intervals to be unmissable to the ambushers but invisible to the rebels.

“Halt!” Nikos roared, and his squad skidded to a stop just short of the nearest ribbon. He saw the order being repeated all along the treeline, and the peasant charge juddered to an untidy halt.

“Javelins, out!” he shouted.

Hands fumbled for the leather holsters they had been issued, drawing out the slim lengths stowed there. The javelins were simple things - ash shafts as long as a man’s arm and sporting narrow iron heads - but they were light enough that any untrained levy could throw them, and heavy enough that, if they struck cloth or bare flesh, they would punch through.

The short week they’d spent in Mangup had only allowed the crown to train these men on little more than the bare basics. They chose to focus much of that small time on teaching them how to draw back a spear or a javelin and loose it in something that passed for a volley, foregoing basic discipline and formation training for the march itself. The weapons they now clutched were the cheapest answer high command had found to an old problem – how to arm a crowd of frightened peasants with something passably deadly at a distance.

The squad set their throwing arms into position and waited for Nikos’s signal. Each Dekarchos loosed as a squad to concentrate the volleys as much as possible without expecting army-wide coordination, so it was the sergeants’ work to make every throw count. Nikos let them take their time, watching the line settle, shoulders rising and falling. They did not have many javelins, so in his mind, there was no sense in wasting them in a panicked, rapid fire.

“Deep breath!” Nikos called, catching the tightness in their faces and hunched backs. Men forgot the simplest things in battle so it helped to repeat the basics, even now. “Breathe out… now!”

He waited for that tiny easing in their stances, that fraction of calm.

“Fire!”

The javelins arced out from the treeline and the dozen of paces needed to close the distance to the nearest company. Many smacked and skidded off hastily raised shields, but quite a few found what gaps there were in the bare feet beneath the shield rims and in the narrow slits where one man’s shield did not quite meet his neighbour’s. Men cried out and went down, more from surprise and volume than from any real accuracy.

It was enough to make the front ranks flinch.

The mercenaries hesitated, clearly not expecting the peasants to have javelins ready. They had braced themselves for a wild charge, not for missiles thrown from a sudden halt at the forest edge.

The rebels used the thin breathing space between volleys to adjust, shields shifting and overlapping as officers bellowed to adjust their hastily made formations, using the reprieve from the lack of a charge to calmly adjust their placement. Ranks thickened, men folding inward to better present their shields to the treeline. If charging into them had been dangerous before, it was twice as suicidal now.

Not that Stathis had the slightest intention of doing so. They did not need to break the enemy, only pin it in place and let the collapse of the rebel command do the rest.

“Fire!” he sounded out, judging the timing right.

This second volley was less impressive than the first as the enemy were properly braced now, and most of the javelins simply bounced away or stuck themselves on shields.

“Re-arm your javelins! Deep breaths!” Nikos reminded his men. Another ripple of confusion ran through the soldiers facing them as they looked up from behind their shields, trying to understand why these peasants had thrown away the momentum of a charge in order to stand and pelt them ineffectually from a distance.

“There! The ones pushing forward! Fire!” Stathis jabbed a finger toward a block of men that had taken the chance to march toward the front of the rebel column, clearly trying to reach whatever remained of their fallen leadership.

All along the line, other sergeants did the same, pointing out any company that dared to move their soldiers. The leadership was relying on even the smallest chain of command to carry out more complex orders, each sergeant having been ordered on targeting their missile fire on companies that were looking to regroup, and were, thus, more vulnerable.

This was to ensure the peasants only needed to follow their immediate orders and not have to worry about anything else. The squads obeyed, angling their throws where ordered. Under the constant rain of arrows from the wooded slopes, the slower beat of crossbow bolts, and now these repeat javelin volleys raking their flanks, the advancing companies began to take real losses simply for trying to shift their ground.

The rest saw it and thought better of moving at all, turtling up in place with their shields locked, spears bristling, trading freedom of movement for the illusion of safety. This was what the Crown wanted. Their enemy was paralysed, slowly bleeding, and not inflicting damage onto their untrained levy.

Some men, however, saw the opportunity.

Pale warriors with stark geometric tattoos inked across their bare arms and faces let out sharp, cutting cries and surged for the treeline. They broke from their more cautious comrades in a wave, charging straight into the forest toward the thin levy line. They smelled the inadequacy of their foes, and hungered for blood.

War cries rippled along the enemy front as more of them followed, boots cracking branches underfoot as they plunged into the undergrowth.

Stathis did not panic. His stomach tightened, but his voice came out steady.

“Ready your javelins!” he called to his grim-faced contingent.

Every man here had not proved sharp-eyed enough for a crossbow and, thus, had been sent to this line. They were the weakest part of the army, the seam most likely to tear under pressure. If any point along the treeline received a true, full-blooded charge, the enemy would cut through the peasants like meat.

And the enemy had finally decided to test that weakness.

But the enemy didn't know that they had a secret weapon.

Halfway through the enemy charge the forest floor simply vanished beneath the leading warriors. The narrow wooden planks laid over the ditches gave way all at once, their tops camouflaged with soil, leaves and broken branches. One heartbeat they were sprinting, the next they were flailing in open air.

The enemy tumbled in shouting knots into pits as deep as a man was tall and twice as wide. While the fall itself would not have broken many bones, what waited at the bottom would.

“Ahhg!” Men screamed as they struck the upturned stakes. The sharpened poles punched through thighs, bellies, and armpits, bursting out in sprays of dark blood as weight and momentum drove them down.

Stathis could not help a sharp, grim flicker of admiration. The false floors had been built stout enough to hold the weight of a dozen men, then fail. That let the charging fools commit nearly a third of any such section along the line before the whole thing betrayed them.

Hundreds of planks had been laid across both sides of the forest, each independent of the others, so that even if the floor at the edges of the pits seemed safe, it was anything but. Only the defenders knew where it was safe to step, guided by the red ribbons.

Looking down at the hole, the enemy were not dead yet. It was Stathis's job to ensure that didn't remain that way for long.

“Fire!” Stathis commanded, seizing the moment.

The peasants hurled their javelins down into the chaos below. Shafts thudded into pinned torsos and upturned faces. Men already impaled on stakes jerked and spasmed as fresh iron found them, while those still unhurt struggled to clamber up the dirt walls, clawing at roots and at their comrades’ bodies for purchase. Some dragged themselves along the mound of the dead and dying, only to be struck and topple back, their fingers slipping on blood-slick flesh as more javelins came hissing down into the pit.

Some of the tattooed warriors had sense enough to pull back, stumbling away from the treeline with horror on their faces as the trap revealed itself. Others, impossibly, chose to push on - wild-eyed men shrieking oaths that sent spittle flying as they vaulted the collapsing floors using their comrades as flagstones, hurling themselves at the line with a kind of mad courage.

The traps had done their work, however, breaking up the solid charge into scatterings of lunatics coming in ones and twos. Even untrained peasants found steel in themselves against that. With the longer reach of their spears, they caught most of the onrushing men before they could close, impaling them on trembling ash shafts and staggering back under the weight as the bodies slid down.

One of the attackers, however, was a giant of a man dressed like a tribal chieftain from the tales, broad as two of Stathis’s levies, his face a ruined map of scars pulled into a delighted snarl.

He crashed through a gap where the line was thinnest, knocking aside spearpoints with the sweep of a massive waraxe and shouldering into the boys behind. He hit a knot of raw recruits and tore through them as if he were wading through reeds, blade rising and falling in great, economical strokes that left men clutching at opened throats severed limbs.

While the front shuddered under his onslaught, which opened a path for more men to pour through, the enemy as a whole began to shift tactics. Some of the more disciplined mercenary companies had been switching from spears to bows in the cradle of their formations, shielded by their outer edge of infantrymen. They nocked their bows in concert with the shields to loose volleys out into the woods.

“Shields up!” Stathis bellowed.

Wooden boards came up a heartbeat too late. Missiles smashed into trunks, tore through leaves and branches, or slammed into whatever gambeson or flesh they found. The trees blunted some of the force, but padded coats were a poor answer to a barbed arrow. Men grunted and spun as iron heads punched through cloth and into ribs, shoulders, thighs. A few collapsed without a sound, dropping their shields to vanish among the roots.

For a moment, the line wavered, and Stathis felt the balance of the fight begin to tilt.

Then, from the far side of the battlefield, a horn sounded.

It cut across the clash and screaming, deep and long, with a cadence every man under the Crown had been drilled to recognize. Stathis’s head snapped toward the sound though he could not see the source through the trees. Success, the enemy command was broken. Their center was gone.

Relief spread through the line of militias and their morale soared. Their job was done.

“Fall back!” he roared. “Fall back, all of you! Into the woods, now!”

The order leapt from sergeant to dekarchos to man. The levy line loosened and turned, stumbling first, then running, feet pounding on the loam as they plunged deeper into the forest. It was as far from an organized retreat as one could have, but it was the best they could do.

Behind them, enraged shouts rose as the enemy gave chase, a thin, ragged wave of warriors crashing after the fleeing peasants. A few javelins and arrows pursued them, thunking into bark or sending men sprawling with curses, but the forest that had sheltered them now became their ally in retreat, protecting them from the fire. Eventually the men ceased their charge as they realized they were being lead deeper into the woods, and the ones that doggedly pursued were summarily shot down by their archers and crossbowmen, hopelessly outmatched and outnumbered that deep in Crown held terrain.

Stathis let himself ease down from a run to a hard, gasping walk, chest heaving, ears still ringing with the horn’s call. Their line had bent but not broken. The enemy command lay in ruin somewhere beyond the trees.

Their job, for this day, was done.

“Sbrigati, bestia!” Gioseppo snapped, driving his heels into his mount’s flanks. The little horse sprang into a full gallop, hooves skimming the forest floor as they burst past the shattered command post and into the wider chaos of the ambush.

Around them, infantry were forcing their way through the trees, dark trunks flickering between shields and spearheads. Bolts and arrows hissed overhead, drawing the companies forward.

“We won’t make it!” Philemon shouted, his voice cracking as he saw the masses closing in, as if birthed by the forest itself. Waves of men bounded down the slope into the softened mercenaries still in disarray below, bracing as best they could in the narrow, muddy ground.

“Hyah!” Gioseppo snarled, wrenching the reins. The mountain pony beneath him was lithe and narrow-chested, bred for sharp turns on treacherous paths. He forced it into the shifting formations, ducking between knots of infantry and around a mercenary block that had noticed their approach.

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It was a testament to the mercenaries’ experience that they tore a gap open for them at all. In the midst of arrow-fire and general mayhem, shields lifted and spears dipped just enough to let horse and riders slip through. Philemon, jostled in the saddle behind, could not shake the fear that one of their own would fail to recognize them in time and run them through.

They burst into a pocket of strange, pale tattoed faces. The Circassian contingent was full of tall, hard-eyed men. Gioseppo angled the horse toward Ilnar’s banner only to see the madman himself already stomping toward the nearest cluster of Crown forces, massive war-axe in hand as if he meant to hack a path straight through the ambushers, utterly ignoring the general survival instinct of an ambushed force to turtle up.

They tried to press after him, but another figure shouldered into their way. It was the translator of all people, sweat-streaked tattoos marring his face.

“What happened to the command centre?!” he bellowed over the din, grabbing at Gioseppo’s stirrup.

“Decimated!” Gioseppo shot back. “We have to fall back. Everything ahead is enemy ground!” His tone made it an order rather than a report.

Philemon’s gaze had already drifted past them, drawn to the forest’s edge.

The enemy’s advance had stalled. The infantry had come on hard and then, as they reached a certain point near the treeline, the entire front simply… stopped, as if they had struck an invisible line. Confusion rippled through the mercenaries who had braced for the full impact of a heavy charge.

Instead, the soldiers at the front braced their feet and reached into bundled rolls slung across their backs. They drew out slim shafts and Philemon saw arms pull back almost in unison.

His stomach clenched.

“Javelins!” he shouted.

He threw himself off the high saddle in blind instinct, desperate not to sit outlined above the shields like an offering. He hit the ground badly. On instinct, his hands flew out to catch the fall, and the frayed, brutalized limbs gave way in an instant. Something inside his right wrist and palm buckled and parted with a wet, brittle crunch.

“HYEAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!”

The scream that tore out of him did not sound human even to his own ears.

“My lord!” Gioseppo barked. He leapt from his horse with considerably more grace and gestured sharply to the warriors. Men moved at once, shields swinging up as they formed a rough ring around Philemon. Javelins slammed into wood or clattered off iron rims. A few men toppled with stunned looks, the volley catching them unaware.

Philemon barely registered them. “AAHHHHHG!” He cradled his arm to his chest, breath coming in ragged pulls.

“What happened?” Gioseppo demanded, bending low enough to be heard.

Philemon dragged his right hand toward the light. The flesh of the palm had split along the fresh cuts, peeled back to show pale bone and slick tendon, two fingers bent at impossible angles from the very base. The whole limb shook uncontrollably, a ruined thing, split down the middle as if a two-trunked tree, fingers bending and snapping unnaturally. Philemon nearly fainted from the sight.

Gioseppo tore a strip from his sleeve, jaw clenched, eyes hard. “This is going to hurt,” he warned.

“No, plea-” Philemon began, tears streaking his face through the manic pain.

Gioseppo seized the ruined hand before he could pull it back. He forced the fingers straight with one brutal movement and bound them tight with the cloth.

“AaaaAAAAH!”

The scream that ripped out of Philemon seemed to tear his throat raw. White flooded his vision and for a few pounding heartbeats the world was nothing but sound and the dark, crushing weight of pain.

Through that haze, the men kept talking over him as if from very far away.

“We can’t break out easily like this,” the translator said, voice clipped and practical. “And going back? We’ll never make it through the whole battlefield. We’ll slaughter ourselves trying.” He frowned. “Forward makes more sense.”

“Forward there might be traps,” Gioseppo shot back. “The only ground we know is safe is the way we came.” His words tangled with the explosions of pain bursting in Philemon’s head.

“We are surrounded,” the translator insisted, gesturing sharply. “Forward is the shorter path out. If we turn back, we expose our rear. Half of us will die just trying to reach the tail of the line, and we’ll choke each other in the attempt.”

“Where is Ilnar? Why are you deciding this?” Gioseppo snapped, unwilling to be drawn into an argument with a translator when steel was ringing all around them.

The translator jerked his chin toward the treeline with a lopsided grin. The giant was already charging deeper into the forest, bellowing, war-axe in both hands, not content to huddle under the rain of missiles. “I’m the vice commander of the Red Hands,” he said with no small amount of mirth.

“Madman,” Gioseppo muttered, watching Ilnar crash into a block of ten spears and tear it apart almost by himself.

“We won’t go back,” the vice commander said calmly. “Our company marches forward.”

“No!” Philemon shouted, forcing the word out past his clenched teeth. “If we get out the way we came, we can still win this rebellion!”

“It is suicide,” the vice leader replied, shaking his head. “And win the rebellion? We are lost. This army is finished. Especially if we go back. It will be a decimation.”

“I do not care!” The mangled flesh of his right hand sent waves of agony rolling up his arm, stripping away patience, control, sense. “You do not need to know why, you miserable maggot! And it is not your place to question me! I order you to retreat!” He could imagine how he looked from an outside perspective - filthy, wild-eyed, hunched over his broken hand. A crazed vagabond barking orders at killers. He did not care in the slightest. “Die if you have to!” He snarled. “I have to make it out!”

The Circassian studied him, something cold and offended flickering behind his eyes. That, Philemon realized too late, had not been the right thing to say.

Fuck. The pain was making him reckless.

“I’ll double your payment if you escort me out,” he blurted, desperation scraping his voice despite his best efforts.

“Your words mean nothing on this battlefield,” the Circassian said. His tone was flat, almost bored. Philemon’s teeth ground together. This fucking translator and his savage barbarian lowlifes. “How would you even pay us?”

“The baggage train!” Philemon gasped. He did not have time for this. They were all about to be buried here, and this man wanted to haggle while his comrades were being cut down? It was madness. “You can have it all!”

For the first time, the man’s eyes truly lit up.

“Well,” he said slowly, “now we’re getting somewhere.” His smile unfolded, thin and nasty. And Philemon couldn’t help but wither under the gaze. Who was this man?

A loud, blaring horn cut through the forest.

It was the signal Christos and his men had been waiting for.

“Go, go, go!” Leonidas roared.

As one, five squads lunged for their assigned carts, dragging them out from their hiding places and shoving them downhill, boots tearing at the leaf-litter as they sprinted for the road with everything they had.

Christos caught a glimpse of Leonidas himself at the front of his squad, heaving at a cart’s side like any common soldier. Christos was certain that high command had told him not to be so close to the frontline, but good luck convincing that brute to stand back and watch others die. He was too stubborn for that, too proud to watch from behind. The sight tugged a brief, involuntary smile from Christos despite the knot in his gut.

Their stretch of forest floor had not been smoothed for their convenience like the main assault. There were no neat little tracks to canter through, only roots, stones, and hidden dips. The carts shuddered and jumped with every hollow and stray root, the impacts rattling up through Christos’s arms and shoulders. Every jolt felt like it would wrench his hands off the wood.

And yet he was surprised that he did not feel like his body was breaking apart from the drills two days ago.

Yesterday, they had spent almost the entire day at camp resting and doing only light foraging while they waited for the scouts to slink back through the trees with news. Muscles that had burned and trembled after the hellish afternoon had mended in the warmth of good fires, warm broths, and long sleep. The stiffness had ebbed, leaving a deep, coiled readiness in its place.

Now, at the moment of truth, dragging these damned wooden monstrosities down a treacherous incline without letting them get away from them, Christos found his legs moving almost of their own accord. It was as if his body remembered what his mind had not the strength to think about during the drills.

The brutal repetition of that single opening maneuver had carved itself into their flesh, beaten the movement into their subconscious. They no longer had to think about how to do it. Even if a man pissed himself from sheer terror, his body would still know how to keep the cart under control and what his next orders were.

Perhaps that had been why they were driven to exhaustion before yesterday.

They burst from the trees onto the packed dirt of the road.

Across the way, Christos saw the other squads hauling another ten wagons down from the opposite slope. The two streams converged at the same point on the road, roughly a hundred paces behind the tail end of the mercenary advance column.

The mercenaries wheeled around in shock, eyes widening as they realized what was happening.

The first wagon slammed into place, then the next, wooden plates grinding and snagging together as they interlocked just as the carpenters had promised they would. Men scrambled up onto their assigned platforms, kicking chocks into place, hacking through wheel pins with axes so the carts would settle and bite into the road rather than roll. Spears thrust out through gaps in the planking, bristling in a jagged hedge between stout boards and narrow murder holes.

Leonidas took his position on the central wagon and Christos climbed to the one on his right, hands still buzzing from the effort. To either side, the line extended back into the dimness of the trees. Wooden debris and rough bramble lined the edges, protecting the flanks of the wagon line. When they were done, two ranks of ten wagons stood shoulder to shoulder across the track, a crude but solid wall rammed into the heart of the column’s only escape.

The road was sealed.

Christos saw mercenaries hesitate as they understood that ahead lay only deeper enemy territory, and the way back was now blocked by a makeshift, mobile fortification that had sprouted as if from air.

Confusion rippled through them, as officers shouted over one another, men looking first up the road, then back at the wagons, weighing their chances. Christos dared hope they would stay in that uncertain line of indecision for the whole of the battle, but the professional force instead drew tight, turning as one. The whole rear of the column began to angle itself toward the thin barricade, preparing to smash it apart.

“Here they come!” Leonidas bellowed, the vein in his thick neck standing out like a rope. He turned, sweeping his gaze along the line of men hunkered behind planks and spears. “This is the moment that makes or breaks it, men!”

He jabbed a meaty finger toward the mercenary mass, spit flying as he shouted.

“We hold this fucking line and buy the time the cavalry need to gut their central command! Do not yield! Not an inch! We split their army here and now.”

His forearm rose, corded and scarred, in a brutal salute.

“Stand firm!” he roared. “Drive these bastards from our lands!”

Christos fastened his iron helmet, the rim biting briefly into his brow as he shoved it down. He shouted his own rough encouragements along the line, voice cracking against the roar building in front of them. A mass of men, iron and rage came on at a dead run, hundreds of boots thundering against the packed earth.

His breath hitched in his throat as the pressure mounted. Right then and there, their stout barricade felt like nothing more than a thin sheet of wood set against a breaking wave.

This was it, they had to hold.

The first wave hit.

The impact made the wagons shudder as the whole line of wood and iron seemed to rattle on its axles. Shields slammed into planks with a deafening crack, spears scraped and snapped, men grunted and cursed as their momentum died against the wall.

The defenders struck back.

Spears darted out through the gaps, stabbing down into the packed ranks pressed tight against the barricade. Men were skewered through necks and collarbones, one unlucky soul taking a thrust clean through the eye as he tried to scramble up the crude steps hacked into the wagon’s side. The sheer, smooth front face of the palisade meant no one could simply clamber up so instead, the attackers began to use one another, bracing themselves on shoulders and helmets, heaving comrades upward in a desperate attempt to get hands on the top. Unfortunately for them, each wagon had a pair of men stationed on its roof to sweep away anyone who managed to find purchase.

On Christos’s wagon, there was only him.

He swung his glaive in a wide, scything arc along the edge of the parapet. The blade bit into reaching hands and forearms, shearing off fingers, splitting knuckles, hacking deep grooves into flesh. Screams rose as men lost their grip and toppled backward into the crush below, where the defenders’ spears were waiting to spike them as they fell.

The weight and size of the were one too many for most others, but it fit Christos’s grip perfectly, and its form seemed to speak to him. It was as if his body knew the weapon was his alone. In just a few short weeks, he’d already progressed immensely in its use and he took advantage of it now to reap lives and limbs in equal measure.

To his left, Christos caught sight of a grim-faced Agapios, jaw set like stone as he worked his spear with brutal precision, and beyond him Kratos, grinning like a madman as he pumped death down into the mass from his vantage.

One warrior managed to hook an arm over the lip of the battlement, fingers locking around a plank. Christos turned and chopped it down unceremoniously. The glaive bit cleanly, nearly taking the limb off at the elbow. The man shrieked, but through sheer pain and fury he threw his other hand up to haul himself over.

Christos met him with a boot to the face, heel smashing into teeth. The man slipped and vanished, his scream abruptly cut off by the roar below, but another attacker used the moment to lunge up in his place.

Christos’s heart spiked. He shifted his footing, bringing the glaive around in a tight, vicious stroke. They traded blows on the narrow edge, steel clanging as death whispered to each of them.

The wood splintered beneath their boots as they went about their deadly dance until the man reeled from an uppercut that had Christos’s weight behind it. Christos swung and the blade finally slashed across the man’s chest and ribs. The mercenary toppled backward, crashing into the climbers beneath and sending another pair tumbling with him.

“We can’t hold for long!” Kratos shouted, somewhere down the line.

Arrows and bolts began to rain down from both flanks, a deadly crossfire falling on the attackers packed tight against the wagons. The missiles found easy purchase in the unshielded flanks and backs of men who could only guard one side of their bodies, and had committed fully to assaulting the makeshift palisade. Screams and curses mingled as shafts punched through leather and padded gambesons, downing scores of men with each minute of sustained fire.

They still climbed through the massacre, unyielding.

Hands clawed for the top, boots scraping against the planks, bodies piling up at the base. Christos kept cutting, each swing of the glaive another life ending in a spray of blood and a fall. His arms burned, breath ragged in his chest.

Then a hooked hand caught the haft of his weapon, yanking hard while another seized the rim of his shield. Christos felt his balance lurch, and for one sick instant, the world tilted - a sea of helmets and open mouths seemed to yaw open below, ready to swallow him whole.

Was he going to die?

Something seized the back of his cuirass and hauled him upright.

He twisted his head and saw Kratos there, grinning through blood and sweat.

“Kratos!”

“Save the thanks, ya bastard!” the boy panted, his buzzcut completely drenched in sweat. He shoved Christos toward the parapet and took a place beside him. It was as if he were a veteran and not fighting in his first large-scale battle. It wouldn’t do for Christos to be relying on him.

Christos surged back to the edge. Shoulder to shoulder now, the two of them set to work, glaive and spear flashing as they hacked and stabbed at every hand, every helmet crest that dared rise above the line.

The fight turned ugly and close in short order. What had begun as a disciplined stand behind wood and spear collapsed into knots of one-on-one clashes along the top of the barricades, while below, the lower levels still worked their spears in and out through the murder holes, skewering whatever came close enough.

“Rotate!” came the shout from behind, passed from wagon to wagon.

Christos stepped back, lungs burning, and let the fresh squad standing ready behind their wagon flow past him, taking his place along the parapet. The two rows of wagons served dual purposes.

Aside from covering both the approaches to the road to stop the mercenaries from retreating and the rebels' peasant levy from joining up with them, the men on the back wagons could be used to cycle out exhausted men to keep the barricade at full strength during this initial fighting. Both squads couldn’t join the fighting simultaneously as one dekarchos per wagon was already tight on the formation, but they could alternate between them.

Christos’s group clambered down from the wagon, boots thudding on packed earth. Every man was panting, armour streaked with blood and dust.

“We held,” Agapios said, almost disbelieving. His voice came out hoarse, like it belonged to someone else.

“Agapios,” Christos grunted, catching sight of the long, ugly gash along the old man’s forearm. Blood had soaked the sleeve from elbow to wrist.

“Nothing much,” Agapios tried to laugh it off. “Got too eager with my swings. Someone got a bit of me back.” The cut was deep, but his fingers still flexed properly. The man looked hollowed out by the fighting. It couldn’t have been easy for him to murder so many people in succession, even though they were just greedy scum invading their homeland.

Kratos went to him, jaw clenched, hands moving with surprising care as he started binding the wound with the supplies stashed at the back of the wagon. He didn’t say a word, sweat beading on his brow and dripping off his nose.

The enemy’s advance faltered as fresh defenders climbed into position and tired men were dragged out of the worst of it. For the first time since the horn call, a sliver of breathing space opened between clash and clash.

The attackers, not expecting such stubborn resistance from a handful of men behind rough planks, faltered. Orders were shouted, horns blew sharp notes, and the front ranks began to drag themselves back down the road, leaving the ground before the wagons slick and crowded with their dead and dying.

Command had packed every elite infantryman they could spare along this line. They had known this would be where the fighting turned thickest, where the enemy would throw their best men to break through. The wagons and planks might have been built by carpenters, but it was steel that would decide whether they held.

Christos leaned his glaive against the wagon side for a moment, just long enough to wipe the worst of the blood from the blade with a rag. When he looked up, he could see mercenary blocks edging back, officers waving their men into tighter defensive knots rather than yet another headlong push.

They were pulling away. Regrouping.

That had gone well, all things considered. Brutal, ugly, close, but no one in Christos’s squad had fallen and casualties all around were low. The worst of this first assault had passed, and now the enemy understood that the way back would be hard to go through. Christos’s job, in essence, had been to make them choose to go through the ambush, not turn back from it.

“Take a breath, men,” Christos said, rolling his shoulders as his chest rose and fell. He hefted the glaive again, the familiar weight grounding him as much as it tired him. “But stay sharp. We’re not done.”

The squad nodded, some slumping back against the wagon’s side, others just resting hands on knees as they dragged air into their lungs, eyes never fully leaving the road.

Then, as if summoned by his words, from the direction of the main mercenary body, a sound rolled over the battlefield.

A single warcry at first - long, raw, and vicious - cutting through the general din like a knife. Then others took it up, until it became a rolling howl.

“What in the hells…?” Christos muttered.

Kratos was on his feet in an instant, the colour draining from his face in a way Christos had never seen. The boy’s wild grin was gone, replaced by a naked, startled fear.

“Christos,” Kratos rasped, wide-eyed.

Christos pushed himself up onto the wagon’s edge and stared down the road. His breath hitched.

A wave of men was rushing toward the barricade, and not just a few companies, but what looked like the bulk of the mercenary army. The whole column had turned around and was funneling back through the choke point, shoulder to shoulder, shield to shield, charging straight at the wagons in what looked like a suicidal rush.

“What on earth…?”

His gaze snapped sideways and caught Leonidas atop the central wagon. For the first time Christos could remember, the unflappable brute’s eyes were wide, his mouth hanging open as he took in the sight bearing down on them.

The army was supposed to go through the road, marching through to Kalamita’s countryside, where they could hunt them down.

The mercenaries could hold on to hope that they could raid villages or escape through the border, keeping their lives. To turn back around was almost certain suicide.

But Christos could not deny what he saw: scores of men running through the sustained missile fire, their eyes crazed and greedy. What were they doing? They had to know that even if they broke through, the price paid would be horrendous. Was it desperation or bravery that guided them?

Christos swallowed, fingers tightening around the glaive’s shaft as he whispered a soft prayer, thinking of the girl he’d left back home. And if he’d ever get to see her again.

They were a handful of men and planks standing in the way of an unstoppable tidal wave about to slam into their flimsy gate.