Chapter Seven
Ride through Hell
The night was cool and silent with only the jangle of harness and the rustling of woolen cloaks to mark the passage of the long unbroken line of horsemen exiting the city’s less populated south gate. When they were through the big doors, the doors creaked shut, as the silent convoy of horsemen disappeared into the darkness of the night.
Night sentry watchmen prayed to the God of their new found faith for the safety of their brothers and sisters, who were embarking on a mission that most saw as a death sentence. To enter the Dark Forest at night was an untold act of either bravery or stupidity, but the master of the army was to be followed wherever he went, even if it was to death’s door.
I peered over the top of the broken down wall of what had once been someone’s house. Looking out into the forest that had creeped its way up to the edge of the deserted city I felt a chill of apprehension for what lay ahead.
The forest was busy in the process of reclaiming the city grounds back into its forest lands, even now trees were rising up all throughout the deserted city.
“Zevin?”
I looked around to see Holon standing there. He indicated a large group of warriors standing within the confines of the old broken down house. I’d asked for all of the company commanders to be in attendance at this meeting before we headed into the forest.
I approached the group as the shadows began to get noticeably darker around us. In the forest it would already be as dark as night and at night it would be pitch black. I glanced at the faces of my commanders. Most of them were older than me, but that was nothing new in my life.
“I know you all have extreme reservations about this mission and in particular entering this forest, even though you haven’t spoken them. I don’t blame you for your thoughts of apprehension, but I expect you to do your best and commit to the mission fully or what little chance of success this mission has will be entirely lost!”
I paused for effect studying them. They were a hard people to read, but I think I had gotten through to them.
“When we enter this forest we are not stopping! If we are attacked we do not stop! If a horse goes down the rider gets pulled up behind another rider or left behind. If a large body of the brutes attacks we keep going on, pushing through the attack. We do not stop for any reason! Am I understood clearly on this?”
All of them nodded stoically.
“Sazen.”
I addressed a woman warrioress, who looked to be in her late 30s.
“Yes Sir?” She said respectfully, while she herself was held in nothing but respect by all the others.
She had led more successful missions than anyone else into the Dark Forest for the precious roots that everyone else needed to remain sane.
“You are to have your archer brigade spaced intermittently all along the whole column. The soldiers riding between your archers on the outside of the column will carry torches to help light up the forest. Your archers are to put an arrow into anything that moves or any flash of eyes you see in the castoff light. Tell them not to worry about sparing their arrows. We have no use for extra arrows when we reach Boratasa, if we do not reach it at all. Understood?”
“Yes Sir!” She said firmly.
“You will be in the front with me. Make sure that you have a few alternates with you at the front who know the way in case you should be lost to the brutes or through some other injury.”
She nodded approvingly being herself a very pragmatic woman.
“You all have your orders see that they are relayed to the rest of the warriors. We leave within the hour.”
They lifted their fists to me abruptly and then they were off to their individual commands within the cavalry brigade.
The soldiers may be dreading this, but what they probably didn’t know was that I was dreading this part of the mission as badly as they were. Who in their right mind wanted to go knocking about in a pitch black gloomy wet forest at night? Especially one that had brutish humans roaming through it that now lived only to feed upon their own kind.
I felt a headache forming in the back of my head. It had to be something about this place! It completely stole my peace.
Sazen rode by my side torch in hand, as we plunged into the darkness of the forest. There had once been roads through the forest in friendlier times and it was these forgotten and overgrown byways that Sazen was leading us down.
She must have the vision of an owl to see where we were going in the dark at the pace we were moving at. The column of riders was four wide and trailed out behind me through the forest like a brightly banded snake, as torches blared forth giving their light into the inky darkness of the forest.
It was easy to let a sense of dread close in around one’s soul, because that was what the forest had become, a dreadful place filled with darkness.
We’d been making our way through the forest for several hours now without mishap, but the horses were growing unsettled and only the fast pace of the column and their training as creatures of war kept them from baulking and falling out of the line. Any mounted warrior knows to trust the senses of their mounts for any hint of danger, as they would sense it before any human sense could pick up on the danger.
The beasts were near. I heard the sharp twang of a bowstring and the resulting smack of an arrow into flesh, involuntarily followed by a choked off roar of pain. More arrows were shot out into the darkness at shadowy fast moving targets or the flash of a pair of eyes in the brush. Muted roars could be heard following the arrow strikes followed by the sound of thrashing in the brush and then the sound of flesh being ripped apart.
The sounds were unnerving, when encapsulated with the darkness of the forest and the knowledge of exactly what was happening.
A horse went down back along the column squealing in fright, as it was hauled into the brush by unseen hands. Its frightened rider was snatched up by a passing warrior.
An arrow silenced the horse’s screams, as no Easterner liked to see a horse in pain, as they respected and cared for them too much to see them suffer needlessly.
Through it all we kept moving steadily through the forest. Our swift moving column seemed to puzzle the brutes as to how to stop us to get more food. Sort of like how a swift moving shoal of fish moving together in unison confuses a predator in the sea.
Light again began to trickle into the forest and it was with relief, as we picked off the brutes more easily and kept them farther back from our column. The day wore on and our horses grew tired, as were we from the constant vigil of looking out for the beasts and just the act of being within the oppressive forest environment.
The shadowy forest became dark again and our torches flared up once more, but we saw nothing of the brutes.
Where were they?
Had they given up having satiated themselves on their fallen number and the few horses they had managed to pull out of the column? I doubted it, but I hoped so.
We were fast approaching a particularly old growth section of trees ahead of us according to Sazen. Once through that we should be out of the heaviest growth of this accursed forest and within an hour we would be back out on the open plains.
We rode through the massive trunks of the old growth forest. It wasn’t as cluttered with undergrowth here as it had been in the rest of the forest due to the even more intense shade cast off by these giants of the forest we rode under. Up ahead I could see the end of the growth of the big trees giving way to a brief spattering of smaller trees, with even a few stars filtering through gaps in the canopy.
I was so focused on the fragments of bare sky up ahead that I jumped slightly as Sazen shook my arm sharply. I glanced at her and saw her eyes were wide with horror, which horrified me because I knew it would take a lot to scare her.
“Look up!” She said shrieking it out softly.
I glanced up resignedly, my soul growing burdened within me at what I saw. The massive branches of the forest giants were packed with the brutish creatures ready to jump down upon us and devour us. Hundreds of eyes flickered overtop the entire column.
I wanted to stop, but I was pushed on by the column that was under orders not to stop for any reason. I heard a shriek as someone else saw what I had and then the gloom of our situation dawned upon the whole column and it almost came to a frightful stop.
I had to do something or all would be lost, but what? The creatures had seemed mesmerized partially by our swift moving column and the blinking lights of our torches.
Light!
I could do light! I wheeled Relentless away from the head of the column and raced back down the long line of baulking riders bellowing at the top of my lungs, “Keep going! Don’t stop! Don’t you dare stop!”
Like the good warriors they were their bodies’ actions obeyed the voice of their master of war, even though their minds dwelt on the terror that was grinning madly from slobbering lips down upon them from above.
My hand reached for my sword at my waist and I pulled it free. At the contact of the handle against my palm and fingers the familiar blue veins of light began to trace up and down the blade, as the pommel stone glowed red. I had been careful not to show my sword about ever since landing on Assoria, but now seemed like a good time for its unveiling.
“In the beginning the Creator said, ‘Let there be light and there was light’!”
At my words the sword began to pulse vibrantly with color and at the conclusion of them it burst into a glowing blue flame of color too bright to directly look at.
Waves of color radiated off of the blade. I held the sword aloft and rode Relentless toward the center of the old growth forest repeating every Bible verse I knew of, not really caring what. Waves of colored smoke rolled off the sword like steam from off the surface of a warm pond on a cold morning in the autumn.
The glow of the sword completely illuminated the old growth and the brutish creatures above could be seen cowering and trying to shield their slack-jawed dumb looking faces away from the unmatched flaming intensity of the sword I held high.
The column of warriors raced by me at breakneck speed out of the grove and into the patchy forest beyond the old growth. I must even to them have been a hellish looking sight to behold.
A liquid like river of reddish purple light radiated out from the red pommel stone to travel down my arm to the rest of my body, where it veined out into a thousand highlighting lines over all of me and then down onto Relentless.
Relentless seemed to revel in his new found color. Shaking his mane about roughly he sent sprays of the color into the air, even as he stamped his hooves authoritatively upon the ground leaving sparks of color. He was a warhorse and anything that made him more intimidating he loved. He was as passionate as his grand sire before him.
Finally the end of the column raced by and out of the old growth section of the forest. Relentless reared back on his haunches and pawed at the canopy of the forest and the heavens beyond, as if daring the hungry horde to come down and face him.
I’d rather not be here when they did though and I brought him under command. After giving the scream of a stallion’s challenge Relentless brought his legs crashing back down to the forest floor and took off. Red sprays of light shot out from his hooves at impact with the ground. The entire forest seemed to shake and I groaned inwardly at how this was going to overly inflate the horse’s already overblown ego.
Relentless and I lunged after the disappearing column as I was eager to be gone from this place. It took a while to catch up, because the column was moving so fast, but it began to slow as we drew clear of the forest and moved out into the open grassland.
I rode up beside the column, headed for the front. All the torches had been extinguished and my sword and appearance were all back to normal, as my sword only softly glowed in my hand now. As I had begun to pass the rear of the column I’d heard the soldiers say something directed at me in their native language that sounded like, “Aire ey se tean cotera sho” I wondered at what it meant.
At length I reached the head of the column, the native chant following me the whole way there. I even heard Sazen say it softly under her breath, as I pulled up alongside of her at the head of the column, as we slowed our horses to a walk through the tall grass.
“What does that chant mean Sazen?”
She looked over at me and said softly, “Loosely translated it means, ‘Lead on fearless warrior we will follow’, but in our language it means much more. A better way of saying it would be, ‘We give you our lives our hopes our dreams. Care for them as you will for we trust you to lead us through the battle fray to an honorable end, whether it be in death or in life.”
I was quiet for a while and then all I could manage in response to that was, “I’m far from being fearless and having all the answers Sazen!”
She glanced over at me and smiled. She was an attractive woman, even for all the battle scars that adorned her face, “Doesn’t matter they think that you are worthy of the saying.” She said indicating the warriors behind us.
“I’ll try to live up to that, but that’s a lot to expect from anyone.”I said.
“I expect you’ll succeed very well.” Sazen said softly.
We crested a knoll and there it was sprawled out before us, Boratasa. It had to be about nine o’clock, but the city was still in full swing. The column had come to a halt behind me waiting patiently for further orders. The company commanders rode up.
“Keep the soldiers behind this knoll. Everyone is to see to the feeding and watering of their horse. Give them the provisions of grain we brought along with us and let them eat as much as they want and then everyone is to get as much sleep as they can. We move out in five hours.”
The commanders dispersed back to their companies as I continued to gaze out over the tall grass at the city glowing in the night. Memories from the past filled my mind with their imagery as I gazed at the city. I remembered the first city I had taken and burnt to the ground, when I was barely 16 years old. I had been so scared then. Was I scared now?
Not scared of the action, but yes I was still scared. Scared of the failure of disappointing these warriors and their people. Scared of leading them to their needless deaths above all else. Had this mission been a worthwhile risk? Time would tell.