Fallen Eagle-Chapter 22: Die Fighting

The volley was not a sound, but a texture - a sharp, ripping tear in the fabric of the morning. Thirty arrows arcing as one was a strangely soothing balm to Theodorus’s spirit, the perfect execution of a thousand variables. The bait, a half-dozen of Kerasia’s bravest women feigning a panicked scramble, had worked to perfection. The raiders, drunk on the promise of easy prey, had surged into the clearing. Their leader had tried to rein them in, but it was too late. They were deep inside the kill box, and the trap had been sprung.
The first volley struck not as a clean kill, but as a catalyst for chaos. Arrows thudded into horseflesh with a wet, percussive sound, turning the disciplined charge into a maelstrom of screaming animals and tumbling men. A stallion, its flank pierced, went down in a shrieking, rolling heap, crushing its rider. Another bolted sideways, eyes white with terror, slamming into its neighbor and sending both horses and men sprawling into the mud. The front rank of the Tatar charge dissolved into a tangled, kicking wreck of broken limbs and panicked whinnies.
Theodorus watched the carnage with the cold appraisal of a physician studying a wound. He saw not just chaos, but opportunity. Contrary to the myths of steel-clad knights, these men of the steppe were built for speed, not absorption. Their armor was a practical patchwork of hardened leather and horn lamellar, effective against a glancing blow but useless against a direct, piercing strike. Iron was a rare luxury on the plains, and their horses, the very source of their power, were almost entirely unarmored. He saw a handful of riders on mounts draped in padded leather - beys, clan nobles, high-value targets whose deaths would sow the most discord. But for now, the greater prize was the sea of exposed horseflesh.
“Aim for the mounts!” Theodorus bellowed, his voice cutting cleanly through the din. “Second volley, fire!” He signalled from the central barricade, and another thirty arrows ripped through the air. If the first volley was herald, the second volley was a massacre. The raiders, their charge broken and their ranks thrown into disarray, had instinctively spread out, bringing them closer to the flanking barricades. It was a fatal mistake. Another dozen horses screamed and fell, their riders pitched into the mud, becoming helpless, floundering targets.
Arrows began to fly back from the Tatar lines, but they were wild, panicked shots. The horsemen, fighting to control their terrified mounts, could not aim with their customary deadly precision. Their arrows glanced off the thick oak shields or thudded harmlessly into the earthworks and sharpened logs of the barricades. A quick scan of his own line confirmed it: not a single man down. But the Tatars, for all their losses, were not broken. Amidst the chaos, a heavily armored figure, his stallion one of the few still untouched, roared a command. He was a rallying point, a center of gravity in the swirling storm. The scattered riders began to converge on him, their panic giving way to a grim, disciplined fury. As one, the surviving mass of horsemen wheeled to the right, their target no longer the fortified center, but the weaker barricade on the eastern flank.
The pit of Theodorus’s stomach dropped out. They had not routed. The easy, shocking victory he had hoped for had evaporated. The real battle was just beginning.
Nur Devlet’s world imploded into a storm of screaming horses and the wet thud of arrows finding flesh. Men dropped around him, not just from the enemy’s fire, but from the sheer, panicked chaos of their own broken charge. His personal guard, led by Mustafa, formed a protective ring around him, their armored stallions and iron lamellar a stark contrast to the lightly protected warriors now being slaughtered.
“Out of my way! I do not need your protection!” he bellowed, his voice incandescent with a rage that burned hotter than the sun. He shoved a guard’s horse aside with his own. “Let me see the battlefield!”
They saw their leader’s savage expression and reluctantly parted ways. He’d been tricked. These cunning Greeks had set up an ambush in the middle of nowhere and taken advantage of his greed in the most masterful of ways. These battlements hadn’t sprouted here from one day to another. This had been all part of some sick, convoluted plan.
The smoke signals, the fortified hamlets, the eerily empty village, the obvious wagon trail - it was a breadcrumb path, and he, blinded by arrogance, had followed it like a fool. They’d even broken a fucking wheel axle and had some women pretend to be retreating in panic. All to screen these fortifications from them to the last second.
Think, Nur, think.
Now was not the time to panic like the useless idiots around him were doing.
“My Kalga! Seit is fleeing!” Mustafa shouted. Nur glanced back to see the prince of the Bozkurt clan wheel his polished stallion around, his dozen riders following him in a clean, cowardly retreat from the kill box.
“Leave him!” Nur roared, his mind honed with singleminded focus on extracting himself from this predicament. Seit’s judgment would come, but only after Nur had clawed his way out of this disaster.
A ragged volley of arrows flew from the Tatar lines, but they were useless, skittering off the oaken shields and timber walls of the barricades. The Greeks were dug in, protected by cover and high ground, their archers firing from stationary platforms. Nur’s men were expert shots, but not even they could land a killing blow from the back of a panicked, bucking horse at a foe they couldn’t see. This was not a battle; it was an execution. They had to change the terms of the fight.
“RIDERS!” Nur’s voice was a thunderclap that cut through the chaos. “TO ME! WE CHARGE THE INFIDELS!” He leveled his saber, not at the strong central position, but at the smaller, less manned barricade to the east. It was closer to the river—a potential escape route his mind registered with cold, pragmatic shame. But he would not run. Not yet. He could still salvage this.
Mustafa understood instantly, his own voice joining the call. “Arm your sabers! We will break them!”
The scattered, terrified remnants of the çapul found a new focal point, a new purpose. They wheeled their horses, their panicked flight transforming into a focused, vengeful wave of steel, and charged.
Orestis watched the wave of terror and steel surge toward them, his world narrowing to that familiar, sharp point where life met death. They were severely outmatched both in numbers and in quality; there was no question about it. They could only place their trust in the advantage of the wooden fortifications and the arrow fire to bridge that gap.
The only solace was the extra men the captain had stationed in each of the flanking fortifications. Following the notice that the raiding party was a hundred-strong, the Captain had made a bold adjustment, stripping the main redoubt of its best men to bolster the flanks. By all intents and purposes, the main fortification was completely unmanned besides the archers and the Kerasia volunteers. It was smoke and mirrors, meant to funnel the raiders straight to here, in this two-tiered fortress of green timber, where fifteen of the garrison’s militia manned the lower deck and protected the ten archers stationed on the upper parapet.
It was their stand to make. The abatis of sharpened trees surrounding the fortress would mean the raiders couldn’t flank it and, most importantly, couldn’t run to the woods without plowing through them. A small ditch would lighten the blow of the cavalry charge, but the men would have to hold against the sheer, crushing weight of the numbers the nomads had brought to bear.
The nomads could chance a flight through the woods. But they didn’t know the territory, and Leonidas and his men would make sure to down as many of the bastards as they could while they did. Their trail would be easy to follow with wounded soldiers carried by panicked and flagging horses.
The Tatar war cries were a familiar music, a sound Orestis had known in a dozen skirmishes on the northern plains. His Pentarchos was by his side, all bunched up around their leader, Ilias. Fillipos spat into the ground beside them. “Damn fools are looking to impale themselves on us. Fuck my life. Should have stayed sick in that cozy cot upstairs.” Of course fate had dictated that the bastard would end up in Orestis’s unit, he could not seem to get rid of the pest. The captain had joined together all the men recovering from the bloody flux into one Pentarchos, so in hindsight, it should have been no surprise.
“O-Orestis, Sir. What d-do we do?” At least that meant that the boy, Stefanos, had ended up in his unit. He had thought it was a good thing. That he could watch over him. Now, watching the coming furious tide approaching them, he wasn’t so sure anymore.
The horde was closing, the ground trembling under their hooves. A few breaths left. Stefanos was shaking so hard his spear rattled against his shield. Orestis was scared too, he’d be lying if he wasn’t. But fear was a luxury he couldn’t afford to show the boy.
“We hold boy, lean on me and we’ll be just fine.” He forced a confident smile he didn’t feel, but one that did the trick in calming Stefanos down. The boy looked more composed now, his nervous twitching gone.
“Hah, If I had a penny-” Fillipos began what was no doubt some nasty remark. One which Orestis silenced with a dark look.
A cold, thunderous snarl erupted from their right.
“BRACE YOURSELVES!” Sergeant Leonidas roared, his voice a hammer blow against their panic. “FIRST RANK, DO NOT FUCKING WAVER!”
A ragged, desperate cry answered from the recruits, a defiant scream hurled back at the charging nomads. Orestis took a deep breath. He’d make it. He had to.
The wave crashed.
It was not a clean impact but a splintering, chaotic cataclysm. Horses, maddened with pain, threw themselves on the sharpened stakes dug into the ditch to break their charge, their screams tearing through the air. Riders were pitched from their saddles, their bodies slamming into the wall of spears like sacks of meat. The first to reach the men were met by a hedge of spear points. There was a wet, squelching sound as the lightly armored bodies were skewered, their own momentum driving them onto the waiting steel.
The press of bodies was thunderous. The recruits groaned, their arms trembling with effort and their knees bending under the force of the charge. The second rank of men threw their weight against the first, their grunts of exertion lost in the din. Leonidas was in the thick of it, his spear a piston of death. He drove the point through the ribs of a bald, screaming madman, but the Tatar kept coming, clawing at the spear shaft, his eyes burning with a fanatic’s fire.
A flash of movement to his right, and another spearhead erupted from the man’s throat. Georgios, the big recruit, stared, his face slack with horror at the geyser of blood and viscera. Leonidas roared, shoving the corpse off his spear. “DON’T FUCKING DAWDLE! HOLD THE LINE!”
The second wave of nomads came on the heels of the first, using the mangled bodies of their own dead as a gruesome foothold to scramble up the ditch. The recruits, rattled by the visceral, up-close reality of combat, began to thrust their spears mindlessly.
“Hold the wall, you fools! Trust the archers!” Illias struggled to impose order on the chaos, cursing the green recruits adjacent to him back into line. The narrow battlefield choked the nomads’ numbers, and the archers on the upper parapet rained a steady, lethal fire on the press of bodies below. But the Tatars were not stupid. A new group broke from the main assault, scrambling over the abatis at the sides of the structure, clawing their way up the timbers to get at the exposed archers.
“They’re closest to us! We have to stop them!” Orestis yelled. If the enemy got to the archers, they were finished. He saw them - two nomads, light on their feet, scrambling over the bodies of their own dead to get at the far edge of the barricade. And standing there, his face a white mask of terror, was Stefanos.
“I’ve got it!” Stefanos’s voice cracked, his movements erratic as he realized he was the one on the flank of the formation the nomads were targeting.
“No, boy! Leave the fighting to us!” Orestis tried to muscle his way to the left, hoping to take Stefanos’s place.
“I’ve got it!” The boy’s voice was a high, cracking thing, a child’s cry in a slaughterhouse. He thrust his spear over the top of his shield, a clumsy, telegraphed move the first nomad sidestepped with contemptuous ease.
“No, boy! Fall back! Let the line hold!” Orestis tried to shove his way down the rank; to put his own body between the boy and the wolves, but the press was too great. The sheer, crushing weight of the assault pinned him against the rough timber of the barricade, forcing him to fight the enemies directly in front of him.
“HOLD THE DAMN FORMATION!” Leonidas bellowed from somewhere down the line, his voice a sledgehammer of pure desperation. “They get through, we all die!”
Stefanos missed a second, wild thrust, leaving himself wide open. The Tatar’s saber flashed, a silver arc that carved a deep, bloody furrow along the boy’s side. A sharp gasp of pain escaped Stefanos’s lips, but before he could even register the wound, the second nomad was on him. The curved blade came down in a brutal, chopping blow. Stefanos brought his shield up, but too slow, too low. The steel bit deep into his upper arm, shearing through leather, muscle, and bone with a wet, sickening crunch.
A raw sickening scream tore itself from Stefanos’s throat.
With a roar of pure, paternal fury, Orestis finally reached them. He met the first nomad just as the man raised his saber for the killing blow. Orestis’s axe was a blur, the heavy blade cleaving through the man’s skull with a sound like a melon splitting open. But the second attacker, seeing the gap, vaulted over the barricade and into their ranks.
Orestis ignored him, dropping to his knees beside the crumpled form of Stefanos, who had collapsed in a dead faint. Just as he reached for the boy, a shadow fell over them. A third Tatar, having flanked them amidst the chaos, stood over them, his saber raised, a predator’s grin on his face.
There was no time. Orestis could only throw his body over Stefanos, bracing for the inevitable. The blow never landed. A figure slammed into the nomad from the side, a shield smashing into the man’s face with a sound of breaking bone. Filippos. The cynical, foul-mouthed veteran stood over the stunned Tatar, his own spear driving down in a single, efficient thrust.
“Get the boy out of here, you fool!” Filippos snarled, wrenching his spear free and turning to face the next wave.
Orestis didn’t need to be told twice. He scooped Stefanos’s limp body into his arms and scrambled toward the base of the barricade. In the sheltered wedge between the timber wall and the thorny abatis, the captain had ordered the construction of a small alcove for the wounded. In it, half a dozen leather tourniquets lay ready on a bloody strip of linen. He laid Stefanos down, his hands working with frantic precision, cinching the leather tight above the ruined arm, twisting the wooden rod until the torrent of blood slowed to a sluggish ooze. He wedged the boy into the relative safety of the corner and, without a second thought, grabbed a fallen spear and turned back to the fight.
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He reappeared on the line beside Filippos just as the veteran shoved another attacker back into the ditch.
“I thought you’d have the sense to run, you sentimental moron! What did I almost get myself killed for?” Filippos barked, not taking his eyes off the enemy.
“And let you have the bragging rights that you saved my life for the rest of my days?” Orestis grunted, setting his spear. A grim, humorless smile touched his lips. “I couldn’t live with the shame.” Besides, there was nowhere to run. To flee now, with Stefanos bleeding out, would be a death sentence for them both.
Filippos let out a short, sharp bark of a laugh, the sound almost lost in the screaming chaos of the wall.
“Don’t let them fucking get up!” Leonidas sidestepped a vicious saber swing from a scarred, ponytailed nomad. He feinted high with his spear, then drove the flat of his shield into the man’s face. There was a wet crunch of breaking bone, and the man vanished over the side, his scream lost in the din below. Leonidas grabbed a nearby recruit and shoved him into the gap. “Push them off!”
He strode toward the side being overrun, his spear now a clumsy burden in the tight space. He hurled it down into the ditch, a spinning javelin that found a home in some unfortunate’s gut, and ripped his shortsword from its sheath. He caught the first climber as he tried to crest the top, a vicious slash below the knee severed a tendon, and any hopes the man had of reaching the archers. The man shrieked and tumbled back down, but three more surged over the edge, their curved blades flashing as they overwhelmed a hapless militia.
“Fuck my life,” Leonidas snarled, sidestepping the falling recruit, his guts spilling onto the earth. The three nomads were on him in an instant, a whirlwind of steel in the claustrophobic space. He slammed his shield into the first, using the impact to create a half-second of space, and drove his shortsword under the man’s arm, twisting the blade. As the first Tatar crumpled, the second swept low. Leonidas stumbled back, the saber scoring a deep gash along his thigh. He grunted, kicked the man’s feet out from under him, and raised his sword for the killing blow.
He never saw the third one. A searing, white-hot agony erupted in his side. The world tilted. He’d thrown himself sideways at the last instant, turning a fatal thrust into a deep, debilitating wound. The bearded Tatar wrenched his blade free and raised it again, the saber arcing in a deadly curve for his neck.
Shit. This is it.
“SERGEANT!” A roar of pure, desperate energy erupted from Georgios. The clumsy recruit who’d been on the receiving end of many of Leonidas’s dressing downs slammed into the nomad like a runaway ox cart. The two men, locked in a brutal embrace, flew from the rampart and crashed into the thorny tangle of the abatis below.
“Georgios!” a few of the men cried out.
“FOCUS ON WHAT’S FUCKING IN FRONT OF YOU!” Leonidas bellowed, forcing himself to his feet, one hand clamped over the bleeding wound in his side. “REGROUP! FORM UP!”
“They’re on the upper floor!”
The shout from the parapet above was punctuated by a wet thud as an archer crashed onto the planks behind the shield wall, his throat open like a ghastly smile. The recruits flinched, their line wavering as they tried to form a defense against the next wave of screaming nomads.
“EYES FORWARD!” Leonidas’s voice was a raw, ragged thing, shredded by pain and effort. He gritted his teeth against the fire in his side. They had to hold. They had to trust the hunters above could deal with the few who’d managed to scale the timbers.
“They’re coming from behind as well!” The new shout from above was a death knell. Every head in the shield wall, despite their training, instinctively turned.
“EYES FORWARD, DAMN YOU!” Leonidas bellowed, even as his own mind reeled.
How?
The thorny abatis was a dense, impassable thicket. How had they been encircled?
“Sergeant!” It was Ilias, his usual calm shattered, his eyes wide and frantic. “What do we do?!”
Leonidas looked at the terrified faces of his men, at the unending tide of enemies before them, and felt a strange, cold calm settle in his soul. “We hold, Ilias,” he said, his voice a dead, flat finality. “We hold so the Captain can make them pay.”
The fighting that followed was a brutal affair, especially considering the fact that the men knew they were likely doomed. When a man had nothing left to lose, he found a strength he didn’t know he had. And the recruits bloodied themselves on nomad blood, giving as good as they were getting and standing tall together. Leonidas couldn’t have been prouder of them.
Then, the sounds of struggle from the upper floor ceased. A sudden, terrible silence fell. Had the archers been overrun? A massive figure appeared at the edge of the parapet above them, silhouetted against the grey sky. It launched itself down, landing with a bone-jarring crash that made the entire structure groan. Leonidas and Ilias spun to face him, raising their shields, their bodies tensed for a final, hopeless stand. They would die, but they would die fighting.
Courage wasn’t a word Christos used to describe himself. He wasn’t brave; he was stubborn. He wasn’t charging into a slaughter out of heroism, but because he was too damn pig-headed to break a promise.
He’d promised the men he would be here, and so that was reason enough for him to charge headfirst into the fire, or in this case, the slaughter.
He reached the base of the fortifications just as a cry echoed from the archers above. “They’re on the upper floor!”
Shit.
If the archers fell, it was over. The thought gave his climb a new, frantic urgency. His heavy frame was a curse, each pull on the rough-hewn ladder an agony for his aching muscles.
I swear to God,
he grunted to himself,
if I live through this, I’m getting in shape.
He heaved himself up the last few rungs, his meaty hand grabbing the edge of the parapet. He nearly collided with a panicked hunter scrambling to get down. The man froze, his eyes wide, gaping at Christos like a landed fish.
“They’re coming from behind as well!” the hunter shrieked, slipping and staggering out of view. Christos used the opening to haul his bulk onto the roof and took in the scene.
The upper parapet was a slaughterhouse. The hunters, skilled in the quiet patience of the forest, were utterly lost in the close-quarters savagery of melee. They fumbled with hunting knives, their movements clumsy and slow. Two nomads, their faces contorted in feral grins, moved among them like foxes in a rabbit den, their sabers a blur of lethal efficiency. One hunter went down, his wide and disbelieving of the sabre that had speared him through. Another staggered back, clutching a belly wound. Christos didn’t hesitate. He was not a polished soldier, but he was a brawler, and this was a brawl.
“Get back!” he roared, shoving a panicked archer aside. He gripped his billhook, the only weapon he hadn’t left in the village wagon; its familiar weight was a comfort in this chaos. A Tatar turned on him, saber raised. Christos didn’t try to parry; he swung the heavy weapon in a low, vicious arc, the hook catching the man’s ankle. The nomad went down with a surprised grunt, and Christos brought the axe-like blade down on his exposed neck. He turned just as the second Tatar lunged. A hunter, finding a sliver of courage, threw a skinning knife that embedded itself in the nomad’s leather flank, a minor wound that was all Christos needed. He hooked the man’s shield, yanking him off balance, and drove the sharpened point of the billhook deep into his gut.
Gasping, his body a screaming chorus of new and old pains, Christos staggered to the edge of the parapet and looked down. The scene below was desperate. Leonidas and his men were a tiny, battered island of shields in a sea of enemies. But the sea was losing its tide. The Tatar assault was flagging, their movements sluggish with exhaustion and loss. And then he saw it. Emerging from the trees on both sides of the valley, silent and disciplined, were two more Greek shield walls, their spears bristling, perfectly positioned to crush the raiders in a pincer.
Christos promptly finished surveying the scene and dropped to the lower level with a satisfying thud. Sergeant Leonidas and Ilias spun around, their faces grim, their bodies braced for death. Watching the sergeant’s jaw drop, his eyes widening in utter, slack-jawed shock, was worth every agonizing bruise. Christos knew the moment was precious. He grinned, tasting blood and triumph.
“Never fear,” he said, his voice a theatrical rasp. “For Christos is here.”
A raw, disbelieving bark of laughter erupted from one of the recruits, and the suffocating tension shattered. Leonidas fought back a grin, the expression looking utterly alien on his battered face. He kicked a fallen shield and a spear toward Christos. “You’re late,” he growled.
“Better late than never,” Christos shot back, scooping up the gear, feeling wittier than he had any right to be.
“Don’t get comfortable,” Nikos grunted, his eyes still fixed on the enemy. “They’re not done yet.”
“Oh, I think they are,” Christos said, a knowing calm in his voice.
“What do you mean?” Leonidas demanded.
As if in answer, two volleys of arrows ripped through the air, not from their own parapet, but from the trees on the flanks. They tore into the packed ranks of the nomads from both sides, sowing a fresh wave of agony and panic. From above, the surviving hunters added their own deadly fire.
“I meant that,” Christos said, his smirk now one of pure, unadulterated satisfaction.
“I would wipe that ugly look off your face if I weren’t so happy right now,” Leonidas said. He turned, his voice a triumphant roar that rose above the screams of the dying. “GIVE IT TO THEM! THE CAPTAIN IS HERE! VICTORY IS NIGH!”
The impact from three sides was more than the raiders could bear. Their formation didn’t just break; it disintegrated. A panicked, disorganized mob turned and fled back down the path from which they came. A wild, victorious cry tore from the throats of the defenders as Theodorus’s main force emerged from the woods to give chase. The men on the barricade collapsed against the blood-slicked timbers, their legs trembling, their voices raw with the sheer, impossible joy of survival. They’d survived.
The gravity of the situation crashed through Nur Devlet’s rage. “God fucking damnit!” he roared, the sound swallowed by the din of battle. The assault had failed. The Greeks hadn’t broken; they were closing in, a three-headed serpent of shields and spears, firing into his men’s exposed backs. The situation was untenable. They had to leave.
“Sound the retreat!” he spat, the words tasting like venom and shame.
What was left of the çapul scrambled to disengage. Men whose horses had been killed in the volleys clambered onto the backs of their comrades’ mounts, a chaotic, desperate flight. They skirted the two advancing Greek shield walls, their only path of escape the same narrow trail that had led them into this slaughterhouse. Nur and his personal guard formed the rearguard, their armored bodies a final, desperate shield for the fleeing men.
A volley of arrows hissed from the barricade, and two of his blood-brothers fell from their saddles in a tangle of limbs, their bodies summarily trampled by the panicked horses behind them. A raw, guttural bellow of pure grief and fury tore from Nur’s throat. He started to wheel his horse around.
“We have to leave! Now!” Mustafa’s face was a mask of agony as he bodily forced his own horse into Nur’s path, blocking him.
They galloped down the muddy trail, the sounds of battle fading behind them, replaced by the pounding of their own hearts. They had been bloodied, humiliated, but they would survive. He rounded the final bend, and even the thought of survival turned to ash. Massive oak trees, freshly felled, lay across the path, their thick branches forming an impenetrable barrier. The Greeks had planned for this. They had men hidden, waiting to block their escape path.
A raw, animalistic scream of pure frustration tore from Nur’s throat. Behind them, the steady, rhythmic tramp of the Greek shield walls grew louder, an approaching drumbeat of doom. They were done for.
He drew his saber, his face a mask of suicidal resolve. “They want a fight? We will give them one! We will die here, but we will take every last one of them with us! To me!”
“No!” Mustafa grabbed his reins, his voice a desperate plea. “My Kalga, to die here is pointless! The Khanate needs you! Your life is worth more than this!”
“My life is forfeit after this humiliation! I will not die fleeing from battle like a coward!” He tore Mustafa’s hands from his reins with an iron grip.
Some of the other men, seeing the trap closing, had already made their choice. A handful broke from the main group, spurring their horses directly into the tangled, dark woods, choosing the uncertain peril of the forest over the certain death of the kill box. Nur watched the flight inspire the rest of his men to leave as well, and with them, the last of his authority crumbled.
Mustafa yelled “Nur!” and he knew he had no choice. With so few men, they could not even accomplish a glorious last charge. With a final, hate-filled glare at the advancing Greeks, he followed them into the trees.
They crashed through the undergrowth, branches whipping at their faces, arrows hissing past them from the pursuing Greek archers. Suddenly, the horse beside him gave a high, piercing shriek. Mustafa’s stallion, struck by an arrow in its unarmored flank, stumbled on a gnarled root and went down in a catastrophic, tumbling heap.
“MUSTAFA!” Nur screamed, his voice cracking, but the momentum of the retreat carried him onward. He looked back for a fraction of a second and saw his friend, his most loyal warrior, being swarmed by the advancing Greek spearmen. Then the forest swallowed the scene. Nur Devlet turned his face forward, tears of rage and shame freezing on his cheeks, and fled. Leaving his greatest friend and companion behind to die.
Theodorus screamed out of the top of his lungs, his teenage voice inevitably cracking with the strain of the emotions roiling in his head.
“After them! Don’t let them escape!” They’d done it. It had been an effort to order the men and archers to come out of the battlements and into the open field, but the flanking maneuver had stopped a certain rout from the right side battlement. “Jog, don’t sprint! In formation!” He struggled to keep order.
To his surprise, a second shield wall was already moving, emerging from the barricade on the right flank to join his pursuit. At its head was Nikos, a confident smile growing on his tanned expression. He fell into step beside Theodorus, flanked by the quiet Pothos. “Sorry we’re late, Captain,” Nikos said, his breath coming in easy, practiced bursts. “Couldn’t let you have all the fun, now, could we?”
A sharp, genuine bark of laughter escaped Theodorus. He had Nikos to thank for this. The canny veteran had seen the rout begin and had known, instinctively, to press the advantage. Theodorus’s own plan had been to leave the escape path open, to encourage flight over a desperate, cornered-animal defense.
“Good work, Stratiotes,” Theodorus said, the words a rare and sincere praise. “Now, move out! They will not escape unpunished!”
“If they think they can run back the way they came,” Nikos replied, his smile turning sinister, “They’re in for a rude awakening.”
Theodorus nodded. As they raced after the fleeing nomads, he could hear it - the distant, splintering crash of timber. The foresters he had hidden along the trail had done their work. The Tatars would find their only clear path of retreat blocked, forcing them either to turn and fight a hopeless battle, or to risk the treacherous, unfamiliar woods.
They caught up to the routed army at the mouth of the trail. The Tatars had reined in, their horses milling in confusion before the newly impassable wall of felled trees. Panic turned their retreat into a chaotic scramble. Theodorus raised his arm. “Archers! Volley!”
Twenty arrows hissed through the air. The nomads, bunched together and with their backs exposed, were a perfect target. A dozen more riders and horses went down in a screaming, kicking heap. “Shield wall! Advance!”
The Tatars, seeing the trap closing, broke completely, spurring their exhausted mounts into the dark woods. A few more fell to a second volley as they fled. Theodorus sent his men, bolstered by the determined Kerasia volunteers, crashing into the trees after them. Taking the dazed survivors alive and killing or maiming those trying to escape.
As the last of the fleeing nomads vanished into the deep woods. A profound, unnatural silence fell over the valley, broken only by the whimpering of wounded horses and the low groans of men. The adrenaline drained away, leaving a hollow, buzzing exhaustion in its wake. The soldiers of Probatofrourio stood amidst the carnage, leaning on their spears, their chests heaving. They looked from the bodies of their enemies to the faces of their comrades, a slow, dawning disbelief in their eyes.
Christos, his face streaked with sweat and grime, stared at a fallen Tatar, his spear still slick with the man’s blood. “We did it,” he said, the words a fragile, wondrous thing in the sudden quiet. “By the Saints… we won.”
Leonidas came to stand beside him, placing a heavy, grounding hand on his shoulder. He looked out over the battlefield, at the impossible victory they had seized. “Aye, lad,” he said, his own voice thick with an emotion he couldn’t name. “We did.”
That quiet affirmation was a spark in a tinderbox. A nearby recruit, overhearing, let out a ragged, tentative cheer. Another answered him, louder this time. The sound built, swelling from a murmur to a cry to a raw, deafening roar that echoed off the valley walls, a single, unified voice of triumph. “WE WON! WE WON!”
The chant shifted, the men turning as one, their faces alight with a fierce, unwavering loyalty. They were no longer a collection of militias and disgraced soldiers. They were an army. His army. “WE DID IT! WE’RE SAFE! FOR THE PRINCE! FOR THEODORO!”
Before Theodorus could react, he was seized by a dozen hands and hoisted into the air. He landed on their shoulders, a slight, battered, and utterly astonished commander held aloft by the very men he had forged into a weapon. From his perch, he saw them all: the grim, tear-streaked faces of his men, who’d bled and fought and held against all odds. They had done it. They had actually won.