Nauca on the hunt.
CHAPTER 3 – ONE WORLD CRUMBLES
11:04 (Caucasus Time)
Sunday, March 10, 66 B.C.E.
Boreal forest, eastern shores of the Borysthenes (Dniepr) River
North of Lake Meotis (Sea of Azov)
Caucasus
‘’Come on, Tamat, pull!’’
Both encouraged and guided by Nauca, her horse took a few steps forward, pulling up at the same time the carcass of the freshly killed deer via ropes passed over tree branches and tied to the deer’s hind legs. Once the dead animal was vertical and off the snow-covered ground, Nauca tied her horse’s bridle to a tree, so that it would not move, then went to the carcass and took out her hunting knife. Cutting first the jugular of the deer in order to bleed it dry, she then started to cut around the anus of the deer and sliced the belly open in order to gut the animal. Removing the internal organs and putting aside the edible parts, like the liver, the kidneys and the heart, took her only a few minutes of quick but careful work. At nearly fourteen, Nauca was by now a truly experienced hunter and trapper and could cut up a carcass as well as a professional butcher. The present March temperature, which was at about freezing point, was going to help her by preserving the meat from the deer until she could go back to her family’s campsite. Nauca was quite satisfied with her two-day hunting trip, having bagged up to now a fox, three rabbits and this deer. She had already cut off and scrapped the furs from the fox and the rabbits, plus had eaten the meat from one rabbit for supper last evening. Now, with this deer, she was going to be able to bring back to her family a large skin that could be used to make a set of warm clothes, plus enough meat for all for at least three good meals.
Nauca took the time to eat quickly some pieces of smoked and dried meat which were part of her trip’s provisions, then loaded the deer carcass on top of her second horse, Minad, which she used as a baggage horse, and put the harvested organs, wrapped in large leaves, inside her saddlebags. With Minad’s bridles tied via a rope to the pommel of her saddle, Nauca then urged Tamat forward, making it trot southward through the boreal forest in which she had been doing her hunting. She was already imagining the satisfied smiles from her parents when they would see the deer carcass and the furs, thus was in very good spirits as she started the six-kilometer trek through the forest.
It was close to four in the afternoon, with about one hour and a half of sunlight remaining, when she approached the limits of the forest, from which her family’s camp was situated some 300 meters beyond, in the middle of a grassy plain covered by a thin snow layer. Seeing a column of smoke coming from the direction of her family’s camp, Nauca stopped briefly her horse, both surprised and confused: the smoke was too thick to come from a simple campfire. Furthermore, she could now distinguish two close but separate columns of smoke. Her happiness at arriving at her camp quickly changing into concern, Nauca urged Tamat into a fast trot among the last trees of the forest, emerging in the open after another minute. The sight that greeted her then made her heart sank: the two yurts of her family and that of Irganos were finishing to burn, while a number of bodies lay around them in the snow. Also, the herd of horses belonging to the two families was nowhere to be seen.
‘’No! NOOO!’’
Pushing her horse to a gallop, Nauca rode towards her family’s tent, or rather what was left of it, and stopped her horse next to the nearest body. Jumping out of her saddle, she quickly knelt beside the body, which lay face down in the snow, and turned it around. Tears filled her eyes when she recognized the dead face of her brother Galatus. After a few seconds of grieving over the dead teenage boy, Nauca got up on her feet and, walking around like a zombie, went in succession to each of the bodies, her mind numb with grief. From the arrows sticking out of the bodies of her father, uncle and two male cousins, it was obvious what had happened here: a band of marauders had attacked the camp, killed the two families and gone off with the families’ horses and with everything of value after putting on fire the two yurts. As for the bodies of her mother, sister and female cousin, they were partially or totally naked, with each of them having been stabbed in the heart or having their throat cut. What had happened to them before they had died was not difficult to guess. Nauca also found the bodies of three men she didn’t know, something that made her smirk with some satisfaction: at least her family and that of Irganos had not gone down without a fight. That the surviving marauders had merely abandoned the bodies of their own dead comrades, without even taking the time to bury them, told Nauca that they had to be a particularly violent and cruel group: to not bury or burn a comrade and leave his body to be devoured by wolves was considered by most Sarmatians as a despicable act. The surviving marauders had however taken the time to strip their dead comrades of their armor and weapons, showing by that the true level of their greed.
Sitting on one of the cut pieces of tree trunks used as stools around the family’s campfire, Nauca let out freely her sadness and pain, crying for a long moment for her dead family and relatives. Then came despair and uncertainty: despair for having just lost everybody dear to her; uncertainty about what she would do next. Her first thought was to either bury or burn the bodies of her family and those of Irganos and his family. However, a look at the Sun, now quite low over the horizon, decided her to do otherwise: if she took care of the bodies of her family now, she would greatly diminish her chances of tracking down their murderers and make them pay for their cruel deeds. With the herd of horses the marauders had taken with them as loot, their tracks would be easy to follow, especially with the present layer of snow on the ground. Deciding to take care of her dead family later, after tracking and finding the marauders, Nauca did a quick prayer over her dead family, then got back on her horse, her mind now fixed on a single thing: to find and kill those responsible for this. As she was urging her horse forward, Nauca noticed a bit late that one of the two small carts which had served to carry the dismantled yurts of the two families was missing. That brought a mean smile on her face: the marauders had probably piled their various loot on the missing cart and had brought it with them. That meant that tracking them would now be even easier for her to do. With Minad still following Tamat at the end of a rope, Nauca accelerated her horse to an amble, following the large collection of hoof prints and cart wheel tracks visible in the snow. With the cart to slow them down, plus having to keep control of a herd of eighteen horses, the marauders could not go very fast. With luck, Nauca hoped to catch up to them by nightfall, as they stopped for the night.
18:47 (Caucasus Time)
Hilly area with dispersed trees and long grass
Nightfall had come before Nauca could catch up with the bandits, but she now had no difficulty about locating them: a full moon had risen and there was also the light of their campfire, visible beyond the small gentle knoll Nauca was now climbing, still on her horse. There were still trees, mostly firs and pines, around her but in a much less dense pattern than when in the forest she had just gone through. As soon as she came within direct line of sight of the bandits’ campfire, she stopped her horse and focused her eyes as best she could, helped by her phenomenal visual acuity. In the distance, some 300 meters ahead, she could see Irganos’ cart, parked near a tree, plus a large group of horses busy eating the prairie grass around them. She also could see men busy either constructing summary lean-to shelters among a group of trees or cooking something on a fairly large campfire. On first look, she could count some eight men visible. She made a grimace at that: eight armed men was a lot to take on for a single girl. She was going to have to use all her cunning and hunting experience in order to defeat them, preferably one at a time. Examining the grounds around her, Nauca saw that a line of knolls and low hills formed a sort of long, curved gully that would bring her relatively close to the bandits’ camp, and this while staying out of sight. She jumped at once on that opportunity and redirected her horse down towards that gully, careful not to make noises.
Some fifteen minutes later, she was tying her two horses to a tree growing in the gully, behind a knoll situated between her and the bandits. Taking the time to put on her scale mail armored vest and her helmet and arming herself with her bow, sword, battle-axe and dagger, Nauca then cautiously climbed the knoll at a crouch. Once near the top, she went on her hands and knees and crawled forward slowly until she could see directly the bandits’ camp and their fire. The eight marauders she could see seemed to have finished eating their evening meal and were dispersing towards their four lean-to shelters built within a patch of trees, leaving two men on sentry duty next to the fire. That agreed well with Nauca’s plan, which was to sneak on them and kill them, one at a time as much as possible. She still could well lose that fight and get killed in the process, but she didn’t really care or worry about that: the important thing for her now was to avenge her family by killing as many of those bandits as she could. A few minutes later, as Nauca was still observing the camp from atop the knoll, she saw one of the two men sitting around the fire get up and start to walk towards a clump of trees opposite from where the bandits had built their shelters. Nauca quickly understood that the man was probably going into the trees in order to relieve himself. Grabbing at once that opportunity, she ran down the slope of the knoll at a crouch, heading for the same clump of trees as the bandit. Being closer to it, she arrived first, then slowed down to a cautious walk, approaching the spot where she had seen the bandit enter the woods. A human soft growl from behind a tree made Nauca deviate in that direction, while she became even more cautious. Slowly and quietly drawing out her sword, she continued her approach until she could see the bandit. The man actually had his trousers down around his ankles and was leaning his back against the trunk of a pine, in the classic crouching pause of someone defecating. A ferocious smile forming on her face, Nauca quietly covered the last five steps separating her from the bandit, approaching from behind him. As the man was about finished, Nauca’s arms came out around the tree, with her left hand clamping itself under the bandit’s chin and pulling up, forcefully closing his mouth and preventing him from yelling an alarm. Her right arm, holding her sword, then made a slashing motion from left to right against the man’s throat. The razor-sharp high-carbon steel blade easily slit wide open the bandit’s throat and both jugulars. The man stopped convulsing after a few seconds, with Nauca then letting the dead bandit drop on top of his own feces. Quickly wiping her blade on the man’s tunic and then sheeting it back in its scabbard, Nauca grabbed her bow and a couple of arrows and cautiously walked at a crouch among the trees, stopping behind a pine, where she had an unobstructed view of the bandits’ camp. There was still one man sitting around the fire, while the others were now lying inside their shelters, being either asleep or about to fall asleep. Deciding that this was her best chance to kill the bandits with the minimum of risks, Nauca decided to quietly kill the single man left on sentry duty before going to kill the sleeping ones. That however was going to need some very accurate shooting on her part if she didn’t want to see that sentry having time to shout the alarm. Thankfully, the light from the fire gave her ample illumination for her shot, while the distance of forty meters was a short one for such an archer as she was. Taking careful aim, Nauca pulled the string of her composite bow to the maximum, then let go her arrow. Her shot proved true, with the arrow piercing the man’s right eye and penetrating into his brain, killing him instantly. The bandit, who had been sitting on a sort of bundle, fell forward on his face without a scream or whimper.
Knowing that time was now as important as silence, Nauca retraced her steps among the trees, emerging at the back of the clump of pines and firs and then turning towards the patch of woods where the bandits’ shelters were. Gambling on the probability that the remaining bandits were now asleep and less able to hear her, she went to a cautious run, covering the distance between the two clumps of trees in less than a minute. Once inside the woods again, she slowed down to a cautious walk and headed towards the shelters, careful not to step on branches and making them snap. At the same time she put her bow and arrow back inside her ‘gorytos’ quiver and grabbed instead both her battle-axe and her sword. Now ready for about any kind of close-combat encounter, she approached from behind the nearest lean-to, a rudimentary but quick and easy-to-build type of shelter. It was built by first fixing horizontally a small tree trunk between two standing trees at a height of about one meter and then lining one side with thin trunks and branches to form a sloping roof over the surface meant for sleeping. A layer of fir branches covering that ground surface would then provide some thermal insulation by reflecting the body heat of the occupants. One could also add a wind-breaker wall made of branches parallel to the open side of the lean-to or even add a small fire in the space between the two. It was actually a kind of shelter that Nauca often used during her hunting trips, so she was quite familiar with its setup. As she got close to the first lean-to, she saw that the bandits had piled their armor and weapons on one side, outside of their shelter. Four javelins were part of those weapons. Mentally recording their exact location for possible future use, Nauca took a last step and cautiously looked inside the lean-to. She saw the heads of two sleeping men, covered up to their chins by a bear skin. One man was sleeping on his back, while the other one was sleeping on his right side, curved into a fetal position. Thinking for a moment in order to decide on her attack move, Nauca then very silently moved to the front of the lean-to and knelt near the heads of the two sleeping men. Concentrating on her next moves, she raised her sword at the vertical, tip down, and positioned it just over the throat of the man sleeping on his back. With her battle-axe ready in her left hand, she gave the sleeping man a hateful look before plunging her sword with all her strength into his throat, sinking her blade in until it hit and partially severed the man’s spine at the level of the neck. With her blade still in the bandit’s throat, she then raised her left arm and delivered a hacking blow on the side of the neck of the man sleeping on his right side. Neither men had a chance to shout or scream and both died with no more than weak whimpers or growls, with a second axe blow severing the head of the second man.
Feeling exhilaration at this early success but still conscious that there were still four bandits alive nearby, Nauca got back up on her feet, then stood still for a moment, all her senses awake to the maximum. Thankfully, the remaining bandits were still seemingly oblivious to her presence, so she walked silently to the next lean-to, again finding two men asleep inside. Repeating her previous tactic, she stabbed one man in the throat with her sword and hacked the head of the other with her battle-axe. However, the second man managed to push a short cry of pain before dying under her second axe blow. That was apparently enough to wake up at least one of the two men sleeping in the third lean-to, some five meters away. That bandit started rising from his mattress of branches and grabbed his sword, which he had left near his side, while shouting out in a Sarmatian dialect that Nauca recognized as being Tanaite.
‘’ALARM! THERE IS AN INTRUDER IN OUR CAMP!’’
‘’I’ll give you one intruder, you bastard!’’ said to herself Nauca while dropping her sword and axe and grabbing her bow, along with two arrows. The man was barely out of the lean-to and about to charge her with his sword held high when Nauca’s first arrow swished through the air and burrowed itself in his chest, right over the heart’s location. Opening wide his eyes in both surprise and horror, the bandit then fell forward on his face, dead before he could touch the ground. The second bandit sleeping in that lean-to had even less luck, being shot through his opened mouth before he could fully rise from his couch. Quickly placing a third arrow on her bow, Nauca then anxiously scanned the night around her, her heart beating fast, looking for any other possible bandit. Thankfully there were none and she soon could relax a bit, slowly letting the string of her bow return to resting position. Switching again to her sword and axe, Nauca then methodically checked each bandit, making sure that they were dead. Once that was done, she looked up at the night sky and pushed a savage scream, celebrating her victory.
‘’THANK YOU, GREAT LADY AMEZAN{11}, FOR LETTING ME AVENGE MY FAMILY!’’
Letting the adrenaline level in her bloodstream go down gradually, Nauca then thought about what she would do next. The first move was obvious: to go get her two horses waiting for her in the gully on the other side of the knoll. Then, she would have to decide what she would take back with her before returning to her family campsite, so that she could properly take care of her dead relatives. Keeping her sword in her right hand, just in case, Nauca quickly ran up and down the knoll, returning with Tamat and Minad within five minutes. Tying her two horses to a tree near the fire, she spent the next hour or so collecting the bandits’ weapons, pieces of armor, purses, jewels and various other possessions, piling them in a number of separate lots next to the fire. She also went to inspect the cart stolen from Irganos, finding it half full with items looted in her family campsite by the bandits. Tears came back to Nauca’s eyes when she saw in the lot the silver necklace she had gifted to her mother on her return from her first ever trip to Tanais. Taking it from the pouch in which she had found it, Nauca kissed the necklace.
‘’You are now avenged, Mother. Soon, you will also be able to rest properly in death, along with the rest of our family, I promise you that.’’
She finally decided to pile in the cart everything she had collected in the bandit’s camp, then used the horse that had belonged to her father, tying it to the cart so that it could pull it. Next, she used the ropes and lassos found in the bandits’ equipment to tie to the cart and between them the 31 horses dispersed around the fire. With the cart’s horse itself linked by a rope to her horse, like Minad was, Nauca then urged Tamat forward: she wanted to get away from this place as quickly as possible despite the obscurity. It was still possible that part of this group of bandits would have temporarily split away to go loot another location. If ever such a group showed back up here, Nauca certainly didn’t want to be still around then.
The trip back to the family campsite was quite slow, due to the cart and all the extra horses she had with her, and she arrived there only in mid-morning, having ridden all night. Anger flared in her when she saw that a group of five wolves had started eating two of the corpses.
‘’SHOO! GO AWAY, YOU VULTURES! LEAVE OUR DEAD IN PEACE!’’
For good measure, she grabbed her bow and shot the pack leader, who was now growling threateningly while facing her from sixty meters away. The Alpha wolf, its skull penetrated by her arrow, dropped dead, prompting the other wolves into beating a hasty retreat. With a fresh arrow on her bow, in case the wolves returned, Nauca dismounted close to what had been her family campfire and looked around with sadness at the frozen corpses. Everything that she had known up to now in her young life was now gone for good, swept away in a wave of cruel violence. The worst part for her was that such acts of looting and killing were a fact of life among the nomad tribes of the region and were even praised as glorious feats by many. Her father, along with his brother Irganos, had grown tired of such senseless violence and had decided to live apart from other groups, precisely to avoid having to participate in such looting expeditions. That they had themselves fallen victims to such violence only added to the bitterness felt by Nauca. Pushing a sigh and storing back her bow in her gorytos, she then started the grim task of forming on top of the cold campfire a pile with the bodies of her family and of her relatives, intent on piling wood over it afterward in order to build a funeral pyre and burn the bodies. She however dragged away the bodies of the three bandits killed during the attack, leaving them to be eaten by the wolves: the bastards didn’t deserve better.
