פּצּפּצּפּצּפּצּפּצּפּצּפּצּפּצּפּצּפּצּפּצּפּצּפּצּפּצּפּצּפּצּפּצּפּצּפּצּ
Chapter Thirty-Four: Sergeant Stef ReimosHis name was Stef Reimos, a sergeant in the Grand-Legion of Manetheren, officially serving in commission for one year, but serving in capacity for ten. In those years, he had fought and he had retreated. This was a time for the latter.
They retreated—fled—across the plains towards the city of Manetheren. The Band of the Red Hand was battered and mutilated, running hard like a beaten dog. Behind them, they left thousands of their wounded and dying.
The Horde let them flee, harrying the retreating men but did not press them hard. It was a game to them now, for it was a matter of time before the thorn in the Dark One's side was crushed. Utterly crushed below the heel of Ba'alzamon, as all those who dare to stand against the inevitable.
At last the legion came against the walls of Manetheren, and there made rest and preparations for a last stand.
In sight of the glimmering white towers, Stef found some comfort, but not much. His squad was devastated. The only man left in the squad that had come with him into the North was the tyro Cordin, though no longer a tyro. Survivors of dead companies and squads united into new patchwork companies and squads, like some sort of creatures stitched out of body parts found in the cemetery.
Stef was the nominal leader of the new squad, but he was no longer the only sergeant. There was Sarge Keenan Dorik, who hailed from the now defunct 2nd Light Infantry, a bearded man of Stef's age, and an able swordsman who had been in the North for twelve rugged years. The third sergeant was Teslyk Lod, a short man scarred by frostbite, sullen and dour, from the absorbed Grand-Legion of Jara'Copan. Then there was Qid Icas, a squirrely man with eagle eyes and "Flounder" Casoc, the largest of the bunch who now had only one eye. The last was Casar Rores with his scavenged Arbalest and of course, Cordin Brogan, the tyro that had managed to survive by sheer luck and tenacious will.
It was a bad situation, and everyone knew it. They were positioned before the East Gate, with no cover and no backup. Twenty thousand survivors against perhaps two-hundred thousand. This was now a holding war. They would be fighting for time, for the last refugees to depart the city. There were no more citizens of Manetheren, only refugees. And they would fight exposed to draw the Dark Army to them, instead of allowing the Shadowspawn to circle around to feast on the fleeing refugees.
Stef and his squad were bulking the middle, the heart of the army. Exactly the place where the Horde would be concentrating their strength as well. Every single soldier knew that the center must hold.
The Trollocs rimmed the horizon, just out of catapult range. It was a sight that continued to cause Stef to shiver. He could feel the weight of their numbers pressing on them. It was psychological. Their commanders were trying to shake the men with the anticipation and dread. Then those damned drums began. Like the heartbeat of a massive monster, the rumble rolled over the men, shaking the ground, and vibrating the walls behind them. The drums hummed on until Stef's ear drums were prepared to burst. The fight would begin soon. About time.
'Who's in charge here?" A horseman shouted.
Stef raised his hand, and the horseman approached him. "We need guards for the last refugees. We need volunteers now. Skilled ones, if possible. Surgeons, farmers, trackers, the like."
Instantly, Stef immediately hated that man. Here he was perfectly fine with his life completely planned out, and this messenger threw him a loop. Now, he remembered. Zira. Here was his chance to drop the death-walk to the gallows and take up on her offer. Why did she have such a draw on him? He and she had only met but weeks. He taught her the sword, and she taught him to live again. And here he was struggling. He could do it. Turn to the messenger and say I'm your man, give a sad farewell to his squad, and hike out of that Light forsaken place. No one would begrudge him. They would do the same, right?
"Cordin." Stef clenched his fists, a fake smile glued to his face. "Get up here. It's your lucky day."
The look on the young man's face was startlement, but soon a look of relief crept onto his face, before a look of guilt washed it away. "Sir, I don't know—"
"One man isn't going to mean anything now." Stef grunted through clenched teeth. He wanted to slap the kid across the face or strangle him. Take it before I change my mind. Before I get the courage. "Go on." Those last words left a bitter taste in Stef's mouth.
"Sir! It's been an honor."
It was an impulse, but so strong, that Stef could not resist. He stopped Cordin with a bark, "Wait—wait a moment. I need a favor."
"Sir."
"I need you to give something to a friend of mine."
"The nurse, sir? Zira?"
"Who told you that?" His voice cracked, but he stifled it. "Never mind. Take this." Stef pulled off his cloak.
"Sir, I can't. I thought you said—"
"Give this to her." Stef shoved the cloak into his hands. "You know that I would die before I gave this up. And so does she. I don't want her to wait for me."
"At the medic camp?"
"Ain't no medics here, kid. They've packed up, because there's no healing tonight. She'll be with the refugees. Waiting to the last minute, if I know her damn well."
Cordin must have realized the serious situation, and seemed to be mustering the courage to dig his grave with them, but Stef cut him off, "They need you more than us. Hurry."
Stef watched him leave, and for a brief moment, imagined that their places were switched. And, then he was pulled back upon the mundane earth, and his mind weighed heavy. He silenced the regret and self-hatred, sealed it away in the darkest recesses of his mind. He could still sense it clawing at his mind and heart, but he could bear it. He could bear it enough.
And so his squad lost one. It would not be their last one lost. Not by a long shot.
Stef stared across the great divide at the gathering shadowspawn. He let calmness sink through his muscles. He had been here before. But never had they ever met such a sheer number difference. But, it was only numbers. Numbers were for the accountants and bean dockers. He was a soldier. Just do his work. That is all.
Stef took a deep breath and began his ritual. It was a ritual to clean the mind and prepare the body, but he could not stop shaking. He glanced around at the small group to find all eyes on him. The King and the generals will not be giving fancy speeches today. His squad will be looking at him. He ignored the tremors as best he could and cleared his throat
"Okay, squad. You all know the truth. There's no walking out today." As he talked, he went through his ritual, his eyes checking and double-checking and triple-checking his equipment.
One shortsword sheathed. A steel gladius. His mainstay.
"That's fine. We've got a lot of Trollocs out there. We've got a lot of darkfriends out there as well. Lots of bastards that want our head. But, this isn't about them."
On his right arm, above his stump, he bore a small dense shield, to which he tightened the straps.
"We got knocked to the ground and kicked in the teeth by the witches in Tar Valon. We rode when they called, and they're leaving us like animals for the butcher. But, this ain't about them either."
His eyes roamed his belt. There was one quarter-filled waterskin. He drank the rest of his flat water and cast the empty skin onto the ground. He would no longer need it, and it would just be useless weight.
The more he talked, the faster words poured out in a biting viciousness. "This is about us. This is about the squad. Cut open our veins and you'll find the reddest blood there is. That's what matters, not what some harlot or traitor did. Damn them."
"Damn them." Keenan echoed.
Two daggers hung on his belt. He left those alone.
He raised his voice. "We're Band of the bloody Red Hand. We're soldiers of the mountain. We're no Aes Sedai meat. They kick us in the teeth, and we'll kick them right back in the bloody codpiece."
He removed one mud-smeared hand-shovel and tossed it with the waterskin. He opened his oilskin pouch. Inside was his letter of pension and two cash notes that weren't worth the paper they were scribbled on. He threw that on the ground as well. He unclipped his blanket roll and freed his ad hoc medic kit. Everything he threw on the ground with hard force and a grimace on the face.
"They know not what they have unleashed. Show them no mercy."
"NO MERCY!" The men replied grimly.
"Give them no quarter." Stef bared his teeth.
"NO QUARTER!" They replied.
"We are soldiers of the Band of Red Hand, and this is our calling."
Each man weighed the words, their eyes nodding to Stef. Emotions burned through the air in waves. Each was a dead man, but there is nothing on this world more dangerous than such a man with nothing to lose and have suffered the worst. Tragedy, not comedy, makes the hero.
Stef's thin leather armor was tight, and his weight was gone. Just him, his weapons and his squad. He drew one dagger, smelled the oiled steel of the blade, and stared at the discarded pile in front of him. He felt lighter and freer. The ritual was done. The men were ready.
There was a hum of sudden silence that flew across the plains, so that each soldier could hear the beat of their own heart. And, then the charge-the final charge.
He was prepared. His mind was now clear and focused. But what no one could ever prepare for were the Dreadlords. Ear-rending explosions chained through the ranks. Where men stood were now replaced with smoke, shrapnels, and parts that once belonged to men. He was never prepared for it, but he weathered it like he was conditioned. He gritted his teeth and tried to close his mind against the heat and shockwaves that ripped against him, and tried to steady his attention at the approaching Trollocs.
They came at a hard roar. Deadly and fluid, the black flood coursed across the hills up towards their positions. Most of them came up the main road, but more just clambered across the rocky incline. The Band of the Red Hand had the advantage of height, but the Shadowspawn had the advantage of momentum. And the men aimed to break that momentum.
Boulders began to tumble down in an avalanche that broke through the Trolloc lines, crushing those that were caught in their paths, leaving brief streaks of emptiness that were quickly filled.
They were past the barrage of boulders and upon the first line, where the Trollocs suddenly halted. The first shadowspawn fell into the disguised pits, smashing down and blocking those behind them. Stef threw his dagger hard against the Trolloc trapped before him. It was a good shot. The blade vibrated from the Trolloc's skull as the beast collapsed.
But this only slowed down the Trollocs. Barely. They climbed over their trapped brethren and stormed the Band's lines through the deluge of arrows. There were no more tricks up the sleeves. The battle was in the soldiers' hands now.
Stef yanked his sword out and his eyes shifted into their acquirement mode. The generals had their grand strategies, but Stef and every soldier in the pits were trained and bred hard for the gritty tactics. Every single soldier here had fought in multiple engagements and survived them—not an easy task by any measure. A Trolloc is more than a match for a raw soldier. But the only raw soldiers in the Band were long dead.
Stef extended his vision around his squad's sphere. Whatever was outside the sphere was not his problem. Another squad would pick it up.
Three Trollocs charged into the sphere. In that instant, his eyes locked onto them, and his mind immediately appraised them in a second. The first Trolloc had a badly fitting chainmail that only crouched around its chest. The second was steel armored in all but his head. And the last wore only a large metal plate lashed crudely to his chest. His mind filtered through his stream of consciousness, plucking out the essentials of survival in matters of seconds.
What ran through the Trollocs' mind was simply instinct and bloodlust to kill. That had some advantages. It made them savage and fierce and nearly impervious to pain. But, against battle-tested squads that could read their weakness in a moment, they could not compensate.
Stef flashed two straight fingers. The squad flowed into action. It was a new operating procedure, but each component was battle-tested. Teslyk and Flounder took the point, both were capable and strong enough to take the first hits and block for the squad. That left Stef and Keenan with the dirty work of the strikers. They were agile and the best at the blade; they would be doing the killing. Last were Qid and Casar as flank, whose jobs were to defend the squad's back. A simple procedure, but deadly.
The three Trollocs did not know what hit them. Flounder met two Trollocs with his large frame and sword. Teslyk feinted towards the third, and kept its attention on himself. Then, the strikers blew in. Stef gutted his first, with a hard jab through the spawn's stomach, slicing easily through the iron mail. Teslyk had dispatched his targets with ease, a sword through a head and another through the back.
They were fast and efficient. But they were nowhere near done.
Now the rush was on. Instead of three, they met five. And when they laid those five down, there were ten. And then it was no longer clumps, but a continuous stream that poured against their efficient little squad.
Stef struggled to maintain his footing among the corpses sprawled around him. Sweat dripped hard from his face, running into his eyes. His mind thumped with the flood of data, so rapid and intricate that his conscious mind could not sort them fast enough. Around him, he could feel the squad moving still in tandem, but slowly falling apart. There were becoming too many targets for the points, too many targets for the strikers, and especially too many targets for the flanks.
Explosions ripped Stef from the ground, sending him sprawling. He felt a lace of pain through his shoulder as he rolled across the blade of a fallen axe, leaving a crescent of bright blood. He struggled to a stand, as he coughed through the thick smoke that enveloped the area. Sounds came at a soft roar, and he tried to shake the ringing from his head. He had lost his sword somewhere, but he drew his last dagger.
Trollocs appeared in the smoke, whipping and dissipating the smoke around them, eyes glowing white in the particulate cloud. Stef snapped his dagger at the closest one, but he was rattled by the explosion, and the knife skittered off its chainmail tunic. The Trolloc flashed its fangs and pounced.
His desperate seeking hand stumbled over a staff-like object and he pulled and swung it hard reflexively. An axehead flashed over his head and the staff-end whirled hard against the Trolloc's neck, halting it just barely in its tracks. Stef kept the halberd spinning in its momentum, skirting it low through the beast's legs, and upending the Trolloc to the dirt.
He spun the halberd to its correct end, and thrust the axehead towards the second Trolloc. Stef smashed the nose of the wolfheaded beast with the axehead. The Trolloc shook its head of the blood and lunged. Its flight was shortened suddenly by the halberd's blade tapping it hard through its skull. It fell, and brought the trapped halberd with it. Stef let go his weapon and scrambled away from the pour of Trollocs.
Around him, reinforcements from the reserves flowed in to plug the hole. Armored pikemen ran by Stef, their pikes jabbing fast against the charging Trollocs.
"Sergeant!" It was Qid with two scavenged pikes in hand. He tossed Stef a pike, and waved towards the front.
Stef held the heavy pike in his one good hand, and followed the reserves into the fray. A line of bristling points met the Trollocs' hard charges, digging hard through armor and flesh. Stef lowered his pike and grounded the back-end against the mud. A Trolloc smashed against the tip, pushed forward by its comrades behind him. Stef gritted his teeth and braced himself and the other soldiers in front of him. The two lines held each other at a grinding standstill.
But the Trollocs were building in mass and momentum, and the pikemen were beginning to slide back in the mud. Stef leaned hard against his pike until he was almost horizontal, but they gave ground against the inhuman muscle of the shadowspawns.
"The center must hold." Stef growled through his clenched teeth. Sweat chiseled trails across his face. "The center must hold."
The line buckled and trembled. Men threw themselves behind the pikemen, pressing hard against their larger opponents. Stef's boots slipped in the mud, and he caught himself on one knee.
"The center cannot fall!" A captain screamed hard.
There was a rush of metal and mud somewhere to the right. The line had broken hard. Then another collapse to the left. Stef felt the critical point. The center was fracturing beyond the point of no return. They could no longer sustain themselves as a body.
Fissures and cracks broke through, but the soldiers did not disintegrate. Instead of shattering into individual men, they broke apart into smaller clusters.
The line before Stef curled inwards, until they were just a bubble of soldiers in the way of the flood of shadowspawn bodies. Pikes lowered until they were a circle of spears that must have resembled a puffed-up spikerat.
Stef twisted his pike until the spear edge was horizontal, then jabbed at the blurred bodies of rushing Trollocs. A hard thrust in, and smooth extraction with little twisting. Pike-points cracked all around him in a disharmonic wave. Then the Trollocs were purposefully throwing themselves on the pikes, dragging the weapons down with the weight. The circle shrank on itself with each fallen man, pulling closer at each round of bitter exchange.
More detonations rend the earth, tossing Trollocs and humans alike through the air. Stef found himself lying on the ground once more with sharp rocks and fragments showering on his body.
A hand gripped his and pulled him up, and a familiar voice said, "Stef."
He stared up in shock at the new arrival, "Zira, what are you doing here?" The barely contained roar of boxed emotions flooded from its prison, threatening to wash away his mind with it. The nurse stood defiantly in the smoke, cheeks glowing red, her white dress made her glow like a divine savior fallen from the firmaments.
"Same reason you are." She shoved a bundle of red into his arms. It was his cloak, wrapped around a sword. All around him, women dove into the fray with vigor, swords and makeshift weapons in hand. Zira's own hand clenched around a sword in the way he had shown her.
"We're lost, get out!" Stef croaked, but was silenced by a hard kiss on his lips and the clip of his cloak wrapping around his neck.
"The refugees need more time. We have to give it to them. Don't stand there." She left him and charged towards the nearest Trolloc. Stef raced after her, his mind struggling to comprehend the change of fate.
The last of the squads were shattered and scattered, but the Band of Red Hand continued to resist hard. The charge of the women had slowed down the Horde's rush with an undue viciousness.
Stef had taught Zira the sword, and it was reflected in her poise and form. But, she had her own flavor. Where Stef was fast, she was nimble, and where she lacked in his force, she made up in a graceful lethality. And her elegance in dealing death blew his breath away. She had slain two Trollocs before he found himself at her side. And for a moment, it was like their spars. Both knew each others' moves so intimately, so beyond the scope of even a dedicated squad. They fought with one mind, clearing through Trollocs with simple but deadly efficiency. For the two, it was a dance so old and practiced. Trollocs dropped around them, but all that mattered was the preservation of each other.
But they could not go forever. They knew that before they began. Exhaustion ate through their muscles and devoured their strength. The ferocity of the women was blunted by the heavy weight of the opponents. Though they did not lack in courage, they had few experience fighting, and Trollocs had no problem striking them down.
But where Trollocs tread against two people, they fell. One was a young man older than his age, left by battle and sacrifice with one arm, but who still fought like ten whole men. To his side stood a woman that was born a healer, who had sworn to preserve life above all else, but now a deadly harvester of souls. In another time and in another world, they would have staked a cottage somewhere by the sea, growing old together. But in this time and this world, they lived out their lives here, burning like candles bright in passion and heat. But always in this world and the next, the hottest candles burn out the fastest.
A club smashed onto Stef's left shoulder with a crack, shattering his bones and sending him reeling onto one knee. The pain was a spiderweb of ice that blinded his eyes with a red flash. He rolled out of the way of the next hit, the pain bursting in pulses that kept him completely disoriented.
Zira stood above his fallen body, her sword the only barrier in the rush of Trollocs. A flash of black was suddenly upon them, a shadow of a shadow. The eyeless horseman met Zira in a brace of swords, arms moving in fatal grace and striking with cold malice. His sword blazed against hers, as Trollocs pressed at their backs. From the ground, Zira looked so fragile, her skinny arms against the indomitable force of the silent killer. Even in the battle, her white dress bore not a single mark, so that she seemed to glow with a radiance. But, she was the only white in the black storm, and he was now the only red. They were alone in an army of thousands, lost in a maelstrom of enemies.
It could be said that it would end before it even began. Where the flesh found that it could not keep up with the will. It was a small error, a tiny stumble in the dance. A block that was too slow, and a sword that was too quick. Zira stared down at the blood blooming across her chest. Stef was on his feet, charging the Fade, completely unarmed but utterly unafraid, his eyes burning. He was flung back like a child by arm that felt like stone, crashing through Trollocs, and rolling to a hard stop on the rocky ground. He simply laid there waiting, eyes staring at the sky. He would never forget the colors of the sky, for they were the same hue as Zira's eyes. He felt the bite of burning icicles and the sky fade away.
פּצּפּצּפּצּפּצּפּצּפּצּפּצּפּצּפּצּפּצּפּצּפּצּפּצּפּצּפּצּפּצּפּצּפּצּפּצּ