A week later, the first major attack came.

I was practicing my longsword technique with a Hylian knight who (fortunately) had handled similar weapons and was willing to impart his knowledge to me. We were in the midst of a sparring session when horn calls arose from Impa's connecting wall (which was only about a third of the way completed). The horn was accompanied by the hoarse battle-cries of our enemies. Without delay, I raced to my barrack, set down the longsword Link had given me, took up my bow and its arrow case, buckled on my broadsword, and ran out to where Dagda was grazing. Link, Nabooru, Darunia, and (to my surprise) Zelda were also gearing up for battle. Nabooru had already raised the cry for our horse archers, causing the horse pen to be swarmed with troops calling their steeds. Zelda was garbed in a coat of brass scale armor and carried a bow, with a case of gold-colored arrows that reflected the sunlight.

We rode out (or, in Darunia's case, rolled out) and made for the construction project as quickly as our mounts could carry us.

There we found the soldiers on the construction site hard-pressed to fend off a large, heavily-armed attack force of a thousand or more. I saw a number of armored Moblins in the mix, as well as a considerable number of armored skeletal warriors (Link had once referred to them as Stalfos) bearing crooked swords and large round shields. It was Zelda who fired the first shot, her arrow blazing across the space separating us from the foe like a comet. It went clean through a Moblin and took the leg off another.

In short order, the rest of our horse archers let loose in a storm of missiles that devastated the enemy ranks.

The foe caught on quickly, though, and a large contingent of them immediately abandoned the vulnerable construction team and made a mad dash for us. Several went down to our fire, but eventually they drew so near that I gave the order to fall back, which we readily did.

Only to find ourselves facing an even larger host of lighter enemy troops, mostly Bulblins and Bokoblins, small and relatively weak, but deadly in their current numbers. I shouted for one of the recruits, an older fellow who felt somehow motivated to join us, to signal for reinforcements. As he raised his horn to his lips, Darunia called to me, "I can deal with these imps! You focus on the bigger brutes!"

I nodded in return, whereupon, he curled into a tight ball and rolled swiftly across the plain, smashing into the enemy's light infantry. I caught no more than a glimpse of his devastating effect on them before pointing with my bow at the still-pursuing Moblins and Stalfos and yelling out, "Concentrate fire on their heavy infantry!"

How my force managed to hear me in that chaos, I still don't know, but they reloaded quickly and fired another punishing volley into our adversary, dropping another forty at least. The arrows from Zelda's bow proved particularly nasty, frequently taking limbs or heads off of the large-bodied enemies, sometimes even cleaving them in twain.

But the danger wasn't past yet. The pursuing heavy infantry had turned tail and run, abandoning their comrades to attack the wall construction alone, and the Bulblins and Bokoblins were all but finished when I heard an unearthly screech from above. Looking up, I saw several large, terrifying-looking birds with massive wingspans and cruelly-hooked beaks.

Apparently Zelda had seen them too. "Kargaroks!" she shouted, pointing to the incoming horrors. Our recruits looked upon this new menace with new fear. We had never yet faced an aerial attack, much less one from creatures so fearsome as these. I could see some of the men looking like they very much wanted to flee for their lives. But Link fired an arrow at one, piercing it through its long neck and bringing it down with a pained gurgle.

Taking his cue, I sent an arrow of my own at the foremost of the Kargaroks, missing it narrowly.

Encouraged, our horse archers joined in, shooting as individuals now, rather than in their old volleys. Several more of the frightful-looking birds dropped from the sky, but others swooped in low, talons poised to grab our troops from out of their saddles. Thankfully, this exposed them to more accurate fire, sometimes from point-blank range. We were able to shoot most of the Kargaroks out of the air, though, in a moment of terror, one of them managed to latch onto me and lift me out of my saddle just as I shot it through the heart; the result of that was a rather awkward landing on the grass, which would have been quite comical in different circumstances. Out of some forty of those, five managed to fly away (I counted).

Very soon, a battalion of infantry came in and aided Darunia in clearing out the last of the enemy's light infantry. The heavy infantry that hadn't pursued my horse archers were leaving the battlefield. We had beaten back the first of Ganon's dedicated attacks, and we were cheering as we marched back through the gates of the ranch.

When all of our dead were collected from the field that evening, there came the sobering fact that we ourselves had lost a good sixty fighters, mostly from among those who had been busy at the wall. It was a comparatively small number, but as heavily outnumbered as we were in this war, I knew that we could ill afford such casualties.

Still, we celebrated our victory that night, as much as some of us could, given the casualties. Many of the fallen had family or friends who had survived the attack, and many of these survivors didn't join the feasting around the large bonfires we'd built in an open area of the ranch. Some knelt by the bodies of their fallen comrades and mourned them.

One of these, I noted, was the fifteen-year-old horse archer. He was kneeling by the corpse of one of the deceased, sobbing uncontrollably. His Gerudo friend (who couldn't have been any older than seventeen years herself) knelt by him, an arm around his shoulder in consolation. As I watched curiously, she pulled him in close, letting him cry on her shoulder.

She was still with him a half-hour later, as the victory celebration was winding down and I had an excuse to watch them again. Even after seeing their relationship develop for two months, it still fascinated me how these two young people from cultures that once had been at war could carry on such a close bond.

Even as I mused on this, I saw the Gerudo hold her younger student close to her and give him a soft peck on the cheek. They sat like that for another hour, wrapped in each other's arms, at least, as far as I knew. They still were by the time I finally went to my barrack to bed down.

Zelda was already asleep in the bed next to mine, her coat of scale armor discarded at the foot of it, replaced by whatever she wore as nightclothes. Taking cover behind my own bed, I discarded my own clothes, save for my underwear, and tucked myself in, dropping off to sleep after fifteen minutes.