A wave of bone-deep fatigue swept over Mira as she scratched at the wound on her right forearm, breaking the newly formed scab. A trickle of fresh blood ran down her arm and dripped to the forest floor, the tiny splashes of crimson merging into the myriad shades of brown amongst the fallen leaves. The wound was shallow but painful, not debilitating but only one of a dozen others she had taken in the preceding hours. She sighed and allowed her shoulders to sink as she rested her elbows on her knees and removed her helm. Her long, fine hair was dark with sweat and fell limply onto her neck, so she pulled a leather cord from her pouch and tied it back carelessly. Long days in the saddle and a night without rest had left her drawn and pale, with dark haloes surrounding her eyes, purple and black like old bruises. A glancing blow from a spiked mace had torn a tattered rent in the chainmail on her left side and sliced into the leather beneath leaving a mangled scrap hanging loose that jingled merrily as she moved. Dried blood, some of it hers, had formed a brownish crust in a dozen places, and coated most of her right leg, mingling there with mud, sweat and rainwater.
Tutting, Mira set her helm aside and pulled a small knife from her belt, using its sharp tip to pry idly at the rotting log she was sitting on. Bits of green moss and crumbling bark dropped silently to settle amidst the detritus of fallen twigs and leaves that lay like a carpet around the trees. Autumn was now well-established in the Drevenwood, the weather was quickly turning colder, but the ground had yet to freeze. Streams and rivulets of snowmelt from further north still ran hither and thither across the wooded slopes, following old channels and carving new ones. A short distance away, Mira’s soldiers were watering the horses in one such stream and she could hear their panting breaths between gulps. The horses were near exhausted too, she knew, and could not maintain this pace for much longer. The soldiers themselves were in little better shape, unsurprising after a day and a night of running and fighting, constantly on the alert, seeing danger in every shadow.
Mira’s knife jarred as she hit a particularly sturdy knot in the wood and she cursed, far more loudly than was warranted. She felt rather than saw the soldiers’ heads turning towards her and waved a hand dismissively before spitting on the ground in disgust. The soldiers went back to their work, understanding of her impulsive outburst. Constant tension had stretched everyone’s nerves near to breaking point, and tempers were short throughout the troop.
“Fucking Baimoi aren’t going to give in easy.” Sergeant Teja’s bass rumble interrupted her brooding. Teja was in his early thirties, twice Mira’s age, and had more than a decade’s military experience, dwarfing her meagre tally.
“Very well, sergeant. We’ll chance an hour here before moving on. Try and rotate the sentries if you can, see that everyone gets some rest.”
“Get some rest yourself, you look half dead.”
Most officers would have regarded the sergeant’s remark as insubordinate and reprimanded him accordingly, but Mira was unconcerned with her soldiers’ manners, only that they could fight, and Teja was a demon in battle. He fought using a customised bardiche, a broad-headed axe with a long handle, somewhere between a battle-axe and a poleaxe. The weapon’s head was an uneven crescent, extending three or four inches down the haft in a sharp curve, but sweeping out to a full ten inches in length above. With Teja’s considerable weight behind it and swung with the full force of his broad shoulders and bulging biceps, the bardiche could chop through anything lighter than full plate armour and even put a serious dent in that. Mira had once seen him behead three charging warriors with a single powerful sweep – a feat that required a remarkable combination of timing, reflexes and that most valuable of a soldier’s skills, luck. She wondered how he saw her, but quickly answered her own question: an experienced soldier, he resented taking orders from a junior officer, fresh from the College of War and with no experience at all to speak of.
The captain of their troop had died the previous day, in the first enemy attack. The Baimoi might have targeted him specifically, aiming to take out their commander. Alternatively, he might simply have been unlucky. Either way, a flying javelin had pierced his cheek as he turned his head to shout his orders to the troop. Thrown from ground level, the barbed point was angled upward on impact and plunged through his brain before bursting out of the right side of his skull. He was killed instantly and tumbled him from his saddle before his last words had faded from the air. Their First Lieutenant had died in the ensuing melee, her life snatched away by a Baimoi axe, along with most of her chest. The axeman had died a moment later, stabbed in both sides by Rutik spears but it was too late for the lieutenant. Despite having no practical command experience, Mira now found herself promoted to the senior officer in command of a troop of light cavalry, lost in unfriendly territory and running for their lives. A part of her delighted in the opportunity to prove her worth but another, more insidious part questioned and doubted her ability. She was their leader by default, but it remained to be seen whether the soldiers would follow where she led.
Even had there been the time to spare, Mira would not have shed a tear for either of her superiors. Upon arriving at the Rutik outpost, she had found a Captain well past his prime who treated this, his last posting before retirement, as a task to be endured with as little exertion as possible. A second Lieutenant, fresh-faced and innocent, was an additional complication he neither wanted nor needed. For her part, his Lieutenant had her eyes firmly upon promotion, seeing herself as the natural successor to the command of the troop. Mira was potentially a competitor, and the other Lieutenant was keen to make sure that she remembered her place. The common soldiers of the troop were bored and neglected but comfortable with their Captain’s lethargy since it meant less work and less danger for them too. Even now they watched Mira sullenly and whispered amongst themselves as she passed, almost daring her to call them out or issue a command.
In all, including the officers, the troop had lost eight in the fighting so far and their three scouts had never returned, leaving Mira to assume that they were dead or dying somewhere out in the woods. That left them with a headcount of just nineteen soldiers, seventeen in any shape to fight, and twenty-three horses. In a fair fight, Mira would bet on her fellow Rutik over almost any opponent, but they were wildly outnumbered, and the enemy ranks were swelling all the time. Teja had come through it all with hardly a scratch however and showed no sign of strain. That, to Mira, was far more valuable than stiff and formal respect for rank.
“Dismissed sergeant,” she replied, more formally than she had intended but Teja nodded and turned to relay her orders to the troops. Mira returned to picking at the log but the brief interlude with the sergeant had focused her mind on the present and she dismissed the obvious hostility of her soldiers in favour of more pressing concerns. Once they got back to safety, there would be time enough to make friends, or at the least instil some discipline. And if they never got back? Well, in that case, she too would be lying dead on the forest floor somewhere, and all the enemies she had ever made would no longer bother her in the slightest.
The Baimoi were a large and warlike tribe that had abandoned their homelands far to the north and embarked on the long, perilous journey through the Drevenwood to reach the land of Asfáleia. The geography of the land was such that the mountains and rivers formed a natural funnel out of the western woods and into Rutik territory. In truth, it was more of a migration than an invasion – great, trailing caravans of men, women, and children, heavily laden mules, and carefully shepherded livestock. This was not the first of such migrations, nor was it likely to be the last, for it seemed the north held an inexhaustible supply of peoples. Those lands were a patchwork of rival tribes, all constantly at war with one another. Borders and boundaries shifted and changed as one tribe or another got the upper hand for a while, then shifted back a year, a month, or even just a week later. Every so often a smaller tribe would get pushed out altogether and would decide to travel south in search of new lands and plunder.
When those smaller parties arrived, the Rutik would talk, bribe, or coerce them into service as foot soldiers in one of the Kingdom’s numerous wars. New arrivals would either be turned against the next tribe in line to invade or else attached as auxiliaries to one of the Rutik armies fighting the Achaeans. Unfortunately for the Baimoi, they were too proud to be persuaded and far too numerous to be paid off or intimidated into anything. Interrogated captives had told the Rutik of a great battle with some foreign empire in the east. That empire had expanded their territory, pushing the tribes to the west, and creating a far larger exodus than would normally have occurred. The Baimoi caravans were well-supplied and heavily defended and that left only one option: the Baimoi would die so that the Rutik could continue to thrive. It was, Mira felt, the way of things. and a task the Northern Army had performed before and would inevitably perform again in the future.
In another unfortunate turn of fate, the Baimoi had proven both more stubborn and more determined than anticipated and what was planned to be a quick, punitive, action had dragged out for three long years and become a war of attrition and slow, grinding slaughter. The Baimoi would filter out of the woods in small groups, attacking and killing Rutik patrols and looting caravans before fading away, back into the trees. Every so often their raids would become intolerable, and the Rutik commanders would order a large-scale sweep, hundreds or sometimes thousands of soldiers filing into the woods to kill anyone they found. The Baimoi would respond by meeting the Rutik head-on, and the mulchy ground of the Drevenwood would be fertilised with the dead of both sides. Eventually, the Rutik would triumph, their superior equipment and organisation strengthening their hand. The Baimoi would retreat deeper into the woods to lick their wounds and the Rutik would return to quarters, happy with a job well done but within weeks the Baimoi would launch a raid or two, and the whole cycle would begin again.
Summer was the season of war in the north, and things had already quietened down considerably when orders came down the line for Mira’s troop to ride three days into the Drevenwood before coming around in a wide curve and returning to camp. It was a scouting mission, designed to get the lie of the land before the winter snow and ice arrived in force and their Captain had not been best pleased with the assignment, nor the prospect of spending a week in the cold, damp woods. There was always the possibility of meeting the enemy, of course, but a troop of thirty Rutik light cavalry was still a force to be reckoned with and it was unlikely that the Baimoi would be present in sufficient numbers to hazard an attack. If they were, Mira was confident she and her comrades could fight their way out.
Each of her soldiers carried a long spear and a falchion, relatively short in length, with a straight edge and distinctive curve at the point. They wore green tunics under chainmail vests, steel barbutes protected their heads and each horse had a circular shield slung on its flank, crafted from solid poplar wood, covered with leather, and embossed with the black wolf’s head of the Kingdom of the Rutik. She had been so proud of them as they rode out of camp that morning, with the bright spring sun glinting off their polished armour. They were less pristine now, their armour scratched and dented, some carrying hurriedly dressed wounds, others having lost a helm or shield. All of them were coated in dried blood and dirt. Unsure of their true mettle, Mira worried that they might have little taste for further action. She felt a little guilty for even thinking that her fellow Rutik might run from a fight but in the circumstances, it would be difficult to blame them if they did.
Mira’s spear was leaning against a tree nearby, within easy reach should the alarm be sounded. As a Second Lieutenant, she was issued with a breastplate but otherwise attired identically to her soldiers. Even at that, the breastplate was plain and unadorned since she represented the lowest rank of a commissioned officer. She had eschewed the standard falchion in favour of a heavier longsword, however, which had convinced her of its worth once more during the first chaotic attack of the Baimoi, the previous day. A shout from the trees, followed by a short, sharp scream snapped her attention back to the present. Firmly suppressing her exhaustion, she grabbed her helm and jumped to her feet, to see a contingent of Baimoi burst from the cover of a large thicket that had grown up around the trunks of a few mighty old beech trees. The edge of the thicket was about thirty yards from where she sat and even as she bellowed orders to her soldiers, the Baimoi were almost upon them. At that moment, a second band of enemies emerged from the trees to their rear, equally close and just as numerous, and the air was filled with war cries, arrows and thrown spears.
Still shouting, Mira took up her spear, flung it at the nearest enemy and pulled her sword free of its scabbard. Had they been facing Achaeans or another force of Rutik she would have held on to the spear since a sword is less effective against heavy armour, but the Baimoi wore leather vests, thick padded jerkins or nothing at all and her blade would be equally effective against all three.
“Form up around the horses. Defensive lines, now!”
A short distance away, Sergeant Teja echoed her orders and the Rutik soldiers responded without hesitation. They divided quickly and efficiently into two lines, one to either side of their mounts, spears resting on the rims of their shields, and preparing to repel their attackers. A corner of Mira’s mind was pleased to note that whatever resentment they harboured against her, her soldiers knew their business. She suspected that was down to the first lieutenant’s influence, rather than the captain’s but either way, in the face of an enemy assault, it was a reassuring discovery.
The Baimoi were screaming now, charging in two disorderly masses, rage and bloodlust overcoming what little discipline they possessed. Truth be told, it was a terrifying sight, but Mira was nothing if not pragmatic – there was nowhere to run and nowhere to hide, so no matter how numerous or frightening the enemy, there was nothing else to do but fight. Her shield was still strapped to her horse, too far away to reach easily. The strap of her helm was hanging loose, the brass buckle slapping against her neck as she moved but it was too late to do anything about it. Taking a two-handed grip on her longsword, she assumed a fighting stance and prepared to do battle.
“Hold the lines! Hold the lines and kill the fuckers!” All around her the Rutik soldiers roared their defiance. “Rutik! Rutik!”
