Fallen Eagle

3rd Week of April, 1460

The ambush was unfolding well enough, Theodorus judged from his high vantage point, hidden among the trees that crowned the ridge and overlooking the narrow valley where men perished in heaps of steel and dust.

His right elbow was pinned tight to his side. The limb finally had some small measure of movement after the ruinous wound he had taken fleeing Suyren, but it was far from healed. He would have far preferred to stand in the front line alongside the men he had ordered into that killing ground, to share the danger he had bid them face. But he knew he would be no asset in the press even before the injury to his elbow.

The strategy they’d used for the battle itself was almost insultingly simple. There was only one thing binding this makeshift host together: its leadership.

Unlike a Populist rebellion, the peasants and regular warriors here had no stake in the revolt as a whole beyond their immediate lords’ demands. The mercenaries were bound only by the arrears they had yet to be paid and the vague promise of plunder.

Remove the head, and the body would follow soon enough. With the death of the two great nobles and the sundered command chain beneath them, the rebellion would vanish almost overnight. It would splinter, bleed deserters, and wither into something the Crown could manage at leisure. All they needed to do here was decapitate the army.

The main power difference between the Crown host and this rebel force lay in the number of elite troops each side could field. In a steady, even battle line, weight and numbers would grind them down. They had to contrive a blow that turned that weakness into a momentary strength, pitting their handful of hardened riders and men-at-arms against the enemy’s best in a single overwhelming strike.

For that, they needed to dictate the terms of engagement.

The entire campaign had been aimed toward that end. The northern march, the ambush of the nomad scouts, the letter he’d intercepted in Suyren… all of it had been an accumulation of small advantages to win the war of information and, with it, the right to choose where and how the battle would be fought. Now, they had pressed that advantage to its limits.

Theodorus allowed himself a small, tight smile as Sir Silvanus and his cavalry bounded up the slope toward his position. They had begun their charge from the far side of the hill, where the Doux and his brother held the other rise and drove their levies’ arrows down into the chaos of the ambush. Now he and Silvanus were to take command of the men on this side and follow suit, harrying the enemy below.

“Is it done?” Theodorus asked when the knight rode his horse up to the small knot that passed for his command.

Silvanus’s great white stallion bore a few shallow gashes along its barding, and its porcelain mane was spattered with drying blood. The stains mirrored the crimson flecks on his rider’s white cape and usually immaculate armour. For a moment, the pair looked like some avenging apparition torn out of a church fresco and dipped in blood.

Silvanus flipped up his visor. Beneath it he wore a dangerous, exultant grin. “Adanis Nomikos is dead.”

Theodorus sucked in a sharp breath. His right hand curled into a painful fist against his ruined side. He’d done it. The debt was paid, and the northern lion slain. Kyriakos’s face rose unbidden in his mind, the memory sharp as a blade.

“And the high command?” he pressed.

“Devastated,” Silvanus replied at once. He unstrapped his heavy shield and passed it to his young squire, who sprinted up the slope to receive it, looking for a heartbeat as if he meant to throw his arms around his lord and had to choke the impulse down because it would be improper. “That ramp was a thing of beauty. They stood no chance. We lost less than a tenth of our men.”

He spoke almost in appreciation of the elegant beauty of the attack. The enemy was caught unprepared, their resolve was shaken by the ambush, and their horses were unable to build speed on the incline for any countercharge. All those small disadvantages had been what made the difference, and they were the result of careful planning weeks in advance. Whatever edge the rebels might have had in armour or individual skill had been swallowed whole by surprise and terrain. Losing only a tenth in such a direct collision was expected, but paled in comparison with the damage they’d inflicted on the enemy.

“And Philemon?” Theodorus asked.

Silvanus’s grin faded. He shook his head once.

Theodorus’s jaw tightened as he looked back over the valley. Victory tasted ash-dry on his tongue. Adanis Nomikos lay dead and the rebel command shattered, yet one fox had slipped the noose.

Both men looked down at the ambush below, the levy on the slope having halted to hurl their javelins into the packed mass rather than risk a direct clash of shields.

Already, clumps of mercenaries were detaching themselves from the chaos, breaking away from the killing ground and bounding up the hill. Their discipline, and the speed with which they fixed on the ambush’s weak point, spoke to their experience. They understood that if they shattered the levy portion of the Crown’s line, the ambush would falter. The Crown understood it as well, and had prepared accordingly.

He saw men stumbling and falling into the traps carved into the hilly forest, the hidden pits breaking up the mercenary rush. Casualties were low after the initial fall, but their true value was beyond just killing enemies. They were meant to make the rebels think twice before charging into the trees again, and to turn them towards retreat along the road.

“Sound the horn,” Theodorus commanded, when he saw a few of the mercenaries push through despite the traps, angling toward the levy ranks, who were already struggling to hold against the handful that had slipped through. “Let them know the battle is decided, and that they can fall back to the secondary fortifications.” Below, mercenaries began loosing arrows at the lightly armoured levies. The casualties on their side were still low, but there was no reason to drag the fighting out. The art of winning a battle cleanly was not in piling the enemy’s corpses higher, but in keeping your own men alive. Killing more mercenaries would not improve the Principality’s position. It would only spend lives.

They had been careful, from the first sketches of the plan, to leave the way forward open to the enemy. An enemy with no escape path fought like the devil, a lesson he had used to bloody effect at the Giant’s Tear. Here, the mercenaries could still hope to survive if they drove forward, and that hope would finish the battle better than any sword stroke. Arrow fire rained down to keep them from lingering or mustering any real counterstroke, while his men had blocked the road behind them.

And when the mercenaries escaped forward, they would find there was nothing for them to plunder, no food to seize. The southern countryside had been emptied, its villages evacuated a few days prior. In the end, they would be forced to chance the wilderness and make for Genoa… or, better still, to parlay for safe conduct and ransom with the Crown.

“The wagon line held,” Silvanus said, squinting toward the north. “They beat back the initial mercenary charge.”

“With help from our missile fire, no doubt,” Theodorus replied. “We put most of our strength toward the rear for a reason.”

“We did it, brother.” Silvanus offered his left hand, and Theodorus clasped it with his own, their grip firm. For a heartbeat, the roar of battle faded to a dull hum. The Principality was safe.

A singular warcry shattered their reverie, a shrill note of bloodlust that cut through the din of steel and screams.

Both men turned as the sound rose, swelling until it was no longer a cry but a rolling roar.

At the front of the mercenary army, penned in behind the fallen tree that half-blocked the road, a commotion rippled outward. A solid block of men was pushing backward against the press, driving against the forward momentum of their own comrades as though trying to force the host to turn.

The roar swelled, more warriors taking up its cadence, turning and shoving, their formation buckling and then slowly, impossibly, beginning to twist.

A lance of pain surged up from Theodorus’s ruined elbow. Every instinct in him screamed that something was about to go terribly wrong.

“What are they…?” Theodorus breathed, the words barely more than air as a cold dread seeped through the officers around them.

Against all odds, against all reason, knowing it would cost them their lives, the rebel army was turning itself around on the narrow road. The solid mass of bodies was heaving back the way it had come, building momentum as it marched against the barricade raised at its rear - against the wagons and the two hundred men Theodorus had stationed there.

“Good God,” Sir Silvanus whispered as they watched what looked like an army of locusts surge toward that thin line of defense, intent on devouring all that stood before it.

“The enemy are ahead of us!” a pale, painted warrior yelled in broken Greek.

“It is a trap! A trap! Go back!” voices echoed all along the line, taken up in every foreign tongue the mountain warriors of Circassia knew.

Philemon stared, wide-eyed, at the display as the noise rolled toward him like a wave.

“What is happening?!” a Georgian mercenary commander roared, just as the Red Hands slammed into his men from behind, driving them, step by step, in the opposite direction. Shields crashed as the whole column buckled under the sudden, panicked pressure.

“The Greeks have placed a trap ahead of us! We cannot escape that way!” The tattooed translator strained his throat to be heard over the hiss of arrows, the jostle of bodies, and the constant wet thud of men being struck by missiles. Their formations were already fraying as the Circassian contingent shoved into them from the southern side, trying to turn the entire mass.

“What?!” The Georgian jerked his head toward the road running south. All he could see through the drifting dust and smoke was devastation: the shattered ruin of their command cluster and the enormous felled tree that blocked the view beyond like a wall.

“Beyond the tree!” the vice-leader of the Red Hands screamed, his voice cracking. “The vanguard is all dead!”

It was an utter lie. The vanguard had almost certainly already fled down the road, saving its own skin and abandoning the rest to the ambush. But with the giant trunk sprawled across the road no one could see far enough to prove otherwise, and in the chaos of battle no one had time to question it. Truth did not matter here, Philemon thought with a grimace, only what men believed in the moment.

“If we go backward, we will die!” The Georgian captain shouted. “The Greeks have raised a barricade there. We are cut off!”

The words hit them like a boulder. Philemon saw Gioseppo’s head snap around at the same time his own breath caught. For a heartbeat, the two of them shared the same stunned realization.

They had walled off the road behind as well, just to drive the mercenaries toward Kalamita? Philemon’s mind balked at it. It was as if the Doux were walking along beside him, reading his thoughts, anticipating every contingency he had so carefully laid out. He should not have known. He could not have known.

Yet somehow that bald bastard always managed to foil Philemon’s plans. Where had that barricade even come from? What manner of sorcery was this?

“We can punch through if we all mass on it!” Gioseppo cut into the argument, voice sharp. He had as much riding on this as Philemon. He needed to make it back where they’d come from.

“And die in the process. It will be a meat grinder,” the Georgian snapped back. His dark eyes were flat, weighing costs.

“Are you a coward?” the Red Hands’ leader demanded, shoving forward so they were nearly chest to chest. “The baggage train is that way! If we turn and push through, we can have all of it to plunder for ourselves.” His teeth flashed in something that was not quite a smile.

“Are you suicidal?” the Georgian scoffed. “Even if you make it past the barricade, you would still have to fight our levy contingent. They won't give it to you without a fight. And where how would you even outrun the enemy with that much baggage? You cannot hope to escape.”

“I will give it to you!” Philemon shouted, forcing the words out past the dryness in his throat. Arrows whipped close enough to make the air hum by his ear. Any one of them could end him. His right hand throbbed in time with his pulse, a burning reminder that he needed to retreat from this disaster immediately. “All of it! I will grant you safe passage through my lands. The army will follow me, the levies won’t oppose us, and my castle can serve as a bastion.”

The Georgian stared at him, blinking, as if only now recognizing him through the grime and blood. Realization dawned that Philemon had somehow survived the brutal assault that had torn apart the command cluster. If they still had a leader to rally around. An employer to pay for this venture…

He turned, looking from the blocked rear to the chaos at the front. On one side lay the promise of rich plunder if they fought back toward the baggage. On the other side stretched an uncertain grind forward, with their only reward at the end of it being survival.

He watched his men for a moment, saw the strain in their faces, the fear under the paint and sweat. He did not want to spend them like coin on a wager he could not weigh.

“I will not gamble with my men’s lives,” he said at last, voice firm.

Philemon felt his stomach drop, as though the ground had opened beneath him. He wanted to fold in on himself, to scream. They needed the companies to turn back, to smash the barricade and break the trap.

“You fool! You can become rich beyond your wildest dreams!” Gioseppo shouted, turning on the Georgian with a crazed, desperate glint Philemon had never seen in the Italian’s eyes.

“I do not care. My men-” the man began, but he never finished. The tattooed translator shot forward like a striking snake, one hand closing around the Georgian’s throat as the other drew steel. The blade flew in one smooth motion.

Everyone simply stared as the Georgian commander sagged to his knees and toppled, eyes wide and empty, blood spreading in a dark fan across the trampled dirt.

“What did you-” Gioseppo started, voice breaking.

“We have no need for cowards,” the translator said, his tone flat, almost bored, as if he had merely cut a rope instead of a man’s life.

The Georgians around them froze, faces slack with shock. Then understanding crashed in all at once. Their leader lay dead at their feet, murdered by an ally in the middle of an ambush. Rage flared like oil on a fire and they began to surge toward the Red Hands.

Philemon felt his skin go cold. This madman had just butchered their commander in cold blood, in full view of his men. If the Georgians decided to tear them apart, he would be dragged down with the rest.

“Let me make something clear,” the translator shouted, unafraid, his voice cutting through the uproar. “If you push forward, the Red Hands will personally slaughter any man who tries to flee.”

Ilnar arrived from the forest then, bloodied and grinning, his mountain warriors at his back. They assembled around the translator, hard-eyed and eager, their presence turning the threat into something tangible and lethal.

“You can turn back and have a chance at plunder, become rich beyond your wildest dreams,” the pale man continued, sweeping his gaze along the Georgian ranks, “or you can try to fight through us and through the ambush ahead, and perish.” His tattoos twisted across his skin as he spoke, dark lines stark against blood-smeared flesh, making him look like some pale demon dragged out of a nightmare. “Make your choice.”

It was lunacy. Philemon realized it with a jolt that made his injured hand throb all the more. If the army fell to fighting itself in the middle of the ambush, they would all be sitting ducks for the Crown, if they would die trampled and hacked apart by their own allies, that is. This pale devil was using greed, lies, and a threat of mutual destruction to herd hardened mercenaries into an impossible decision.

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And they had to choose quickly, or the arrows would choose for them.

“We will kill you for what you have done!” one of the Georgian sub-leaders shouted back, face twisted with fury. “But we will not die like slaughtered pigs. Turn back!”

It worked. Philemon could hardly believe it, even as he watched it unfold.

At first, only the Georgians near the front began to form up, shields locking as they braced themselves to push against the flow of the host.

“A trap!”

“The enemy are ahead of us! Turn back!”

They hurled the words at the next company, shoving forward in concert with the Circassians, forcing the men before them to stop and then slowly begin to pivot, to face back toward the rear. The cries spread from mouth to mouth, leading to confusion, shouted arguments, frantic weighing of choices, and then grim acceptance. Company after company began to turn, the host curling in on itself.

Soon there was no real choice left at all. Men were pushed and pressed until their bodies decided for them, the sheer weight of the crowd driving the entire army’s momentum backward along the road.

Some tried to break away through the trees, clawing for the relative freedom of the woods, but most of those were cut down by hidden archers or vanished into the trap-filled undergrowth, their fates unknown, shattering any hope of a quick escape.

The bulk of the mercenaries had no such luxury. They were crushed together on the narrow road, barely able to breathe, lifted and carried by the heaving press or else knocked from their feet. Those who fell vanished beneath the tide, their screams snuffed out as they were trampled into the mud by their own comrades, perishing beneath hundreds of footsteps.

All the while, arrows and bolts rained down from the flanks. The fire from the woods only grew fiercer as the enemy seemed to understand what the mercenaries meant to do and desperately tried to thin their numbers before they reached the barricade.

Men fell like flies. The crush and blind rush ruined any semblance of a proper formation to shield against the arrow fire, half-armor and gambesons only turning aside a fraction of the deadly rain. Shafts buried themselves in skulls and throats, punched through forearms raised too late, drove into unprotected bellies and armpits. Men went down shrieking, then vanished under the stampede as others tripped over their twitching bodies and were trampled in turn.

Philemon watched as greed, callousness and raw desperation fused into one vast, senseless charge, a single living mass hurling itself headlong toward death. In the distance he saw the stout line of Crown wagons arranged like a wall. And standing between it and him were the cornered mercenaries, who had no choice now but to move toward it or be crushed where they stood.

A bloodthirsty roar thundered out, a dozen languages all twisted around the same note of feral resolve. Hundreds of voices bellowed as a banner thrust itself up above the madness, swaying in the heaving press of bodies.

The silver goblet of the house of Makris flew there, stained with mud and soot, edges torn and ragged. It looked less like a noble sigil and more like a tattered challenge, a symbol of the suicidal, desperate, but vicious assault they were about to fling against the barricade.

Philemon watched the first rank of mercenaries sprint, heads down, straight into the wagons and sharpened stakes, running full tilt to their own funerals, driven by the faint, maddening hope that if they only pushed hard enough, they might actually break through.

The second charge hit hard enough to make the entire wagon line shudder, making Christos think the whole structure might sheer apart. He had left the back wagon to force his way to the front, glaive locked in a death grip, knuckles white around the haft as he planted his boots against the planks.

“Hold!” Leonidas roared.

The wave of mercenaries crashed against the barricade, and the world dissolved into brutal, choking chaos. Spears and pikes jabbed through the gaps between wagons, crenellations and murder holes hastily carved into the wooden lattice. Greek hands drove cold iron down into upturned faces, thrust into shoulders and throats as mercenaries hurled themselves at the wall.

Men clawed at the wood, tried to climb, only to be hacked and stabbed until they fell back into the press, mercenary bodies piling at the foot of the wagons. Arrows arced from the woods, slamming into the mercenaries with impunity, so many bodies pressed together that every stray shaft found a target.

The platforms atop the wagons were already crowded when Kratos, Agapios and the rest of the other companies forced their way up, cramming shoulder to shoulder with the men already braced there, adding their weight to keep the barricade from tipping. The planks groaned under the strain. Every impact from outside made the whole line rock.

“Come and get it, you fucking bastards!” Leonidas bellowed, splitting his attention between the wall and the men trying to hold it. He ripped his sword in a brutal horizontal cut that took the head off a mercenary who had managed to scramble halfway up the wagon’s side, sending the corpse tumbling back down.

Christos ducked as a ragged volley of arrows and javelins hissed in from the sea of mercenaries behind the front ranks. The shots were wild, loosed by men crushed together and barely able to draw a bowstring, but even poor aim could be deadly if only by a stroke of luck. A javelin thudded into the plank beside his knee, another buried itself in a defender’s thigh, pitching him screaming to the boards.

The sheer amount of bodies piling up was staggering, as the enemy slammed into the wagons again and again, inching them backward, threatening to topple the entire line and bury the Greeks under wood and flesh alike.

Christos carved men down left and right, the height of the platform and the raw urgency hammering through his veins lending vicious speed to his strikes. From up here his glaive had reach and angle, and still it felt woefully insufficient. No matter how many fell, more bodies pressed in to take their place. They were going to be overrun.

“Aaaagh!”

He saw Ilias, one of the old Probatofrourio veterans, take a vicious axe blow that split his guard.

“Ilias!” Leonidas roared, lunging in to cut down the mercenary who had landed the strike, his sword biting cleanly through neck and spine.

Ilias collapsed bonelessly into the crevice between two wagons, vanishing from sight as if the earth had swallowed him, and one of the men below surged up to fill the gap he left at the parapet.

Christos severed another arm reaching towards them at the elbow, hot blood spattering his greaves. He had to hold. He had to make it back. Agape was counting on him.

A glancing blow from a desperate spearhead raked along his side, and he twisted instinctively, feeling the jolt of pain without daring to look down and see how deep it had gone.

The men who had been skewering attackers through the murder holes and narrow slits suddenly began to falter. Spears were hacked apart by wild axe blows, or became lodged in the bodies outside, unable to be pulled free.

“Christos!”

Agapios’s shout snapped his head around. The older man had drawn the small dagger at his belt and drove it into the shoulder of a pale mercenary who had managed to haul himself up onto the battlements, using Christos’s moment of distraction. The blade sank in, but not deep enough to stop him. The mercenary snarled and clung on, and another man was already scrambling up behind him.

Then, as if he had simply materialized out of the chaos, a third mercenary appeared behind Agapios. A sword burst through the Greek’s midsection, the point blooming red in front of his cuirass. Agapios’s breath left him in a shocked grunt.

“NOO!” Christos raged. He swung his glaive in a savage arc, the blade shearing through the attacker’s neck and almost taking the head clean off. Both men toppled together, Agapios folding to the boards as the mercenary pitched backward into the crowd below.

More warriors churned up through the gaps in the wagons and over the broken battlements. The center position was becoming untenable, the enemy concentrating their strength there like a hammer blow.

Christos caught a glimpse of Leonidas a few wagons down, fighting like a man possessed, holding three mercenaries at bay with desperate, efficient strokes. Lazaros, another Probatofrourio soldier, threw himself between his captain and a descending axe, taking the blow full on. He fell without a sound, and Leonidas stepped over him, still swinging.

“From behind! An army is coming from behind!” someone screamed.

Christos’s blood ran cold. He risked a glance over his shoulder and saw it: another mass of bodies pouring toward their position along the road, hundreds of figures shouldering forward in a dark, seething wave.

They were trapped.

Apostolos trudged at the head of the column, if such a miserable shamble of men and mules could be called that.

The baggage train creaked and rattled along the rutted road behind him. The vanguard had long since vanished ahead around a bend, swallowed by hills and trees.

Michail rode sullenly at his side, jaw clenched, eyes fixed on the road. Neither of them had spoken much since the executions.

Hatred coiled inside him, hot and bitter. Hatred for the father who had made that choice for him. Hatred for the father whose shadow he wore like a chain.

A faint sound brushed the edge of his hearing, carried on the wind.

He frowned and tugged his horse up short. The column behind him bunched as men nearly walked into one another.

“Do you hear that?” he asked.

Michail lifted his head, listening. The sound grew clearer as they strained to hear it. It was a low, continuous roar, broken by sharper cracks and high, thin screams that did not belong on any peaceful road.

“Fighting!” Michail exclaimed.

“An ambush,” Apostolos breathed. The word seemed to suck the air out of his lungs.

His mind went blank faced with a decision, but his body snapped into motion without thinking.

“Forward! Double the pace!” he shouted, spurring his horse. “Drive the wagons on! Move!”

The peasants lurched into a stumbling jog, prodded by curses and the butt ends of spears. The baggage train was never meant to move fast, yet he forced it to.

As they crested a rise the sounds grew louder, and Apostolos felt his throat tighten. His first thought was not of the battle, the outcome or even who was behind it. It was only of his father.

He’d come to hate the crushing grip he held on his life, but as he was struck by the sudden, icy realization that his father might already lie broken in the dust, he found that he still cared for him deeply.

They hurried on, the column stretching and fraying as the weakest lagged behind. When the road bent sharply, the landscape opened in front of them and Apostolos finally saw it.

A line of heavy wagons stood across the road ahead like a crude wall, their sides bristling with men. Arrows streaked through the air. Men screamed in their death throes from beyond.

“They are surrounded,” Michail said, his face going grim. “If that is the vanguard, they might already be dead. We could still turn back.”

"I will not abandon my father,” Apostolos stated, voice so absolute in its certainty it surprised him.

He turned in the saddle, meeting the eyes of the men closest to him, peasants with dirt under their nails and fear in their faces, a few hard-eyed retainers who had ridden with the Nomikos banners for years.

“Move forward,” he called. “We charge the wagons!”

The line shifted into something that could almost be called a formation. It was ragged, uneven, full of gaps, but it was all he had.

Apostolos drew his sword, the weight of it suddenly very real in his hand.

“Forward,” he said, more quietly, to Michail at his side. “Whatever he is, he is still my father.”

Together, with the untrained peasant regiment stumbling at their backs, they drove their little column toward the storm.

“Open fire! After them!” Theodorus bellowed, spurring Boudicca forward even as the men around him hesitated.

They had settled the archers and the steadier levies with crossbows on the secondary fortifications deeper in the forest, safe behind earthworks and felled trunks. Now Theodorus was ordering them down into the teeth of the mercenary mass.

“Now!” Theodorus snapped. “We have no time!”

The sergeants took up the cry, shoving and cursing, driving the men off the platforms and down the slopes.

“Theodorus-” Silvanus began beside him.

Theodorus reached across and seized his forearm with his left hand, fingers biting at the mail.

“Array the horsemen on the road,” he said quietly.

Silvanus stilled, the realization hitting him all at once. His expression tightened, then resolved. He gave a single, sharp nod.

“Godspeed,” Silvanus said. “I will see you on the other side.”

He turned his horse toward the cavalry he had brought up the hill. “With me, men!” he shouted, not giving them time to think through what that order meant as he led them down the slope at a controlled rush. They pounded past the retreating infantry who looked confused at their departure.

At their head, a tanned man broke away and came straight to Theodorus, breath heaving.

“Commander, we have to stop them!” Nikos called as soon as he was within earshot. It spoke to his quick thinking that he already understood the situation.

“We will,” Theodorus replied. “We take the levy down to the road and wrap around them.”

He was already urging Boudicca down the forested slope, branches whipping at his legs. He understood perfectly the despair in Nikos’s eyes. Men they knew by name were on those wagons and platforms, still fighting, and about to be crushedif they did nothing.

As they hurried the levy down through the trees, Theodorus saw, across the valley, the Doux’s levies doing the same, streaming off their own heights toward the road. A sharp sense of déjà vu tugged at him. The maneuvers mirrored the Giant’s Tear Battle almost exactly, only now the scale was far greater.

Of course the Doux had reached the same conclusion. They could not allow the mercenaries to punch through, seize the baggage train, and escape, gutting the Principality’s elite infantry in the process. They were counting on that wealth. Counting on those men.

Silvanus reached the center of the muddy road, lances and spears leveled, every point aimed at the heaving back of the mercenary host.

“Charge!” Silvanus cried, raising his sword high.

The horses leapt forward. They were still tired from the first shock of the battle, lungs and flanks burning, but they had no other choice. The line surged into a full sprint.

Some of the mercenaries at the rear tried to turn, shields snapping up in a ragged attempt to face this new threat, but their effort was disjointed, men jostling and tripping in the packed road.

The cavalry smashed into the back of the rebel mass. The trained riders angled their mounts toward the edges of the mob whenever they could, striking in and then twisting away, trying not to let their horses be swallowed by the sheer weight of bodies. Even so, Theodorus could see it was a drop in a bucket. Eighty horsemen slamming into the backs of roughly six hundred hardened warriors.

“Javelins!” Theodorus shouted to the levy gathering at his command. “Into the mass!”

Men on either side of him drew back and hurled. At that range, against such a dense target, accuracy hardly mattered. The sky filled with short, heavy shafts that plunged down into the writhing body of mercenaries. Scores of them went down each minute, but it felt like they'd barely made a dent. It was low, far too low.

They had to crack something in the mercenaries’ resolve, force a rout, anything to relieve the pressure on the wagons. The barricade could not endure that pounding forever.

Mercenaries were dying at a terrible pace now, cut down by horse, javelin and arrow, yet through the gaps in the trees Theodorus could still see the wagon line shuddering under the impact. Men fought and fell atop it, silhouettes locked in combat.

He could do nothing more for them from here.

Hold, he thought, watching the barricade strain and sway. Just a little longer.

“Go to the back!” Christos bellowed, swinging his glaive in a wide arc that forced three climbing warriors to drop from the wagon’s side.

The men broke from their posts at his order and sprinted toward the rear. The moment they left, the platforms under Christos’s feet lurched, the whole structure threatening to shift as the press of bodies slammed into it again.

“HYEAAAGH!” Christos roared as he brought the glaive down in a brutal cut, maiming two warriors in a single swing. They toppled into the writhing mass below, and for a second the pressure on that section of the barricade eased.

“Ahhhhg!” Kratos drove his spear clean through another mercenary, earning a long gash for his effort, but he seemed to not notice it in the slightest. Rage burned in every line of him as he fought beside Agapios’s crumpled corpse. The lower murder holes now stood completely abandoned; the rebels had taken to piling up their dead to cover the holes, placing bodies atop each other to make a crude, bloody ramp. Men were crammed shoulder to shoulder along the upper planking instead, boots slipping in blood as they shoved ladders away, hacked at grasping hands and tried, by sheer physical presence, to keep the enemy from pouring over the top.

Two more warriors managed to haul themselves up onto the platform, their numbers surging. Christos and Kratos each met one in frantic, ugly exchanges before both attackers were hurled back down. By the time those bodies vanished into the crush, another four were already clawing for purchase. The position was being overrun.

Christos threw himself into the fighting, world narrowed to the reach of his blade and the screaming faces in front of him. Behind him, on the far side of the wagons, peasants died in droves as they tried to scramble up and over, only to meet the skeleton crews defending the rear. It was fifty men against five hundred on that end, but the peasants were half-starved and badly armed, their courage burning out as quickly as it flared.

A movement farther down the line caught his eye. A mountain of a man was dragging himself up over the battlements near Leonidas’s wagon, paint smeared thick over bulging muscles like crude war marks. He held a massive war-axe in one hand, a broad shield strapped to the other.

Leonidas turned to meet him. The two were of a different height, towering above everyone else as if champions snatched from bard tales.

The giant struck first, the war-axe whistling in a savage horizontal chop that would have split a man from hip to spine. Leonidas met it with his shield, the impact sending a shudder along the wagon and driving him back a half-step, but he answered with a short, brutal counter aimed toward the man’s exposed thigh.

The giant twisted, the blade scoring a line along hardened leather instead of flesh, and hammered his shield forward in a bash that collided with Leonidas’s own, sending him nearly flying from the battlements. The warrior brought down his axe in a vicious diagonal aimed at Leonidas’s collarbone.

Leonidas caught that blow too, but around them more mercenaries clambered onto the platform and within moments Leonidas was ringed by enemies. He fought like a cornered lion, but there were too many of them.

The painted giant raised his weapon high, both hands on the haft now, and brought it down in a savage overhand swing. Leonidas tried to twist away, but there was nowhere left to go.

The axe carved through shield and helm alike, the sound a sickening wet crunch. Leonidas’s eyes locked with Christos’s across the chaos - wide with shock, then softening into something like acceptance. He toppled backward as if time itself had slowed, falling away from Christos’s outstretched gaze.

“LEONIDAS!” Christos howled.

The mercenaries surged forward, warriors pouring onto the central cart from every side, driven by the knowledge that if they broke this one point, the road would be theirs. Every Greek on that wagon fought to the last breath, and one by one they were cut down, vanishing under the tide.

Christos, maddened, hacked down the nearest attackers in front of him, trying to carve a path toward the central cart, but a new wave of mercenaries slammed into the line, driving him back. The second wagon at the heart of their formation was hit from behind almost simultaneously, its squad overwhelmed in moments. The center of the barricade buckled.

“The middle’s gone! We need ta get off the center!” Kratos shouted, voice hoarse, as the mercenaries finally punched a ragged hole through both wagons.

“We can’t let them through!” Christos shook him off, he was going to kill every fucking bastard that lay there.

“They’re already through! Please, Christos!” Kratos pleaded with him, voice craking, desperate not to lose another friend.

Christos wanted to throw himself into the gap, to die where Leonidas had fallen, but that would do nothing now. Gritting his teeth, he hewed down two more men and then began forcing his way sideways instead, step by bloody step, his glaive clearing just enough space for Kratos and the men nearest him to follow onto the flanking carts. Behind them the central section collapsed completely, the wagons there swallowed beneath a flood of bodies.

The mercenaries, sensing their opening, drove through with single-minded fury. They poured along the road in a tight column, trampling the dead and dying underfoot, even as the rear of their formation was wrapped in a noose of steel and fletching - arrows, crossbow bolts and javelins tearing into them from the treeline, cavalry hammering in cyclic charges.

They left a veritable trail of corpses piled in their wake, their numbers hacked down to a fraction of what they had been. And yet enough of them made it through. They crashed into the ragged peasant levy that waited beyond and, together, the remnants of the mercenary host managed to stagger free down the road, fleeing the killing ground.

And with that, they were gone.

Christos found himself standing amid the wreckage of the wagon line. Bodies lay heaped on both sides of the barricade, friend and foe mingled in tangled, broken masses around a fallen titan. Blood streaked the planks beneath Christos's boots - Leonidas’s blood.

He looked down at the glaive in his hands. The weapon was streaked with gore, the blade chipped and dulled. It had never felt heavier. The weight of the metal, of everything it had done and failed to do, pressed down on his arms until he dropped it to the ground with a heavy clatter.

He fell to his knees next to Leonidas’s body and brought up his hands to his face. The tears he could no longer hold back cut clean tracks through the grime on his cheeks, spilling onto fingers already caked with dirt and blood, dripping down between them in a slow, bloody trickle.