Chapter Nineteen
Howl in the Night
Gavin stood in the shelter of a wall parapet and gazed out at the flickering lights of the enemy up and down the long walls to either side of him. Archers and warriors sat crouched against the wall’s edge, as they leaned wearily back against it.
Sleep was impossible for fear of another attack. So far since the siege had begun four days ago, the West had not attempted a night assault, but that wasn’t a guarantee that they wouldn’t.
They did keep up with their barrage of the wall and the city beyond at night though. The wall was proving to be of a great surprise in terms of endurance. It was not a pretty wall like Kingdom Pass had been, but it was perhaps a more durable one because of one surprising aspect, its hasty construction.
In the great war of the past the East had sacrificed its armies and cities in order to provide time to construct this last ditch haven for their people. But there hadn’t been much time even then to build defenses. They had scavenged everything they could find to construct the wall. They tore down houses, ripped up roads, and stole bridge stones. They still didn’t have enough material so they made countless simple clay sun baked bricks, which they used to fill in and around the larger scavenged stones.
It was an act of necessity at the time only to be realized later that it had been a military breakthrough in technology. When a stone wall is hit by a projectile the stone will shatter on impact and cause fracturing deeper into the wall structure, which can endanger the integrity of the whole wall from just a single direct hit.
The clay brick however when hit directly would only be pulverized in the immediate area of the hit. The softer material absorbed the energy of the projectile so no force was carried further than the first few rows of brick and the overall wall integrity remained unchanged.
The wall had stood up to multiple halfhearted sieges over the last century and it was still holding up well to the heavy assault it was under now, but like all man-made structures it couldn’t last indefinitely.
The enemy had not restricted their assault to the wall alone, but also the city beyond, as evidenced by the constant barrage of fire bombs that had continued to sail over the walls and plummet into the burning city beyond. Half the city was on fire, while fire parties worked hard to keep the other half free of fire.
Gavin looked upon his burning kingdom with somberness. If they won it could be rebuilt that was the important thing, but lives were being lost and they were gone for forever.
“You think he will come?”
Gavin turned to see Zalisha, “I thought I told you to evacuate with the rest of the women and children to the peninsula!”
“I just couldn’t! I had to stay. Are you displeased with me?” Zalisha asked sorrowfully.
Gavin brushed her cheek with a sooty finger, “No it doesn’t really matter if you stay or leave I guess. If the wall falls there will be no safe place anywhere.”
“Then it is better if we are to all die that I be here to die by your side.”
Zalisha’s arms closed around him and Gavin held her with his own wondering what he had ever done to deserve her. The answer was nothing.
The Creator’s Word was true when it said that He gave good gifts to those who seek His name and His will in their lives. Together they watched the city as it burned.
Once proud buildings collapsing inward on themselves, as they had already been gutted by fire, adding to the growing destruction of the city.
Gavin caught movement off to his right and saw General Lasho, Lohan, Holon, and Talin quickly approaching him along the wall top, as they stayed low to avoid enemy arrows.
General Lasho and his son had proven invaluable to the defense of the city. They had devised a rolling defense strategy that floated extra troops randomly up and down the walls strengthening different areas for a period of time before moving on. It left the enemy forces with no clear understanding of where a weak spot was for sure in the wall defenses.
The party of men drew up in front of Gavin and Zalisha. General Lasho’s manner appeared urgent in demeanor.
“Sire I believe your brother has arrived with the reinforcements!”
Gavin looked out over the wall top and at the flickering lights of the enemy’s campfires and wondered at what the General had seen to make him believe Zevin was out there with an army.
“What do you mean you believe?” Gavin asked doubtfully of the General, which he immediately knew had been the wrong thing to say.
The old general straightened up painfully and spoke as if his pride had been injured severely, “I am a hundred and two years old and I have fought as a warrior since I was fourteen in an unending war for survival. Over the years I have learned to trust my instincts and my instincts tell me that there is the presence of a real army beyond that slovenly contingent of soldiers that the enemy intends to front as an army. There are serious warriors out there beyond that ring a fires. I am sure of it!”
Gavin decided on the spot to believe him, “Do you think Zevin would attack at night?”
The General appeared hesitant to answer, “I wouldn’t! I would wait till just before dawn and my impression of your brother was that he would do something likewise, but the feeling I have is one of imminent action.”
Gavin nodded and looked back out at the darkness beyond the enemy. He didn’t feel the General’s judgment about his brother was entirely accurate. His brother was just crazy enough to attack in the middle of the night.
“Prepare every available able-bodied fighting man and woman we have left for the attack General and make sure they are reminded to stay as quiet as possible until the order is given to open the gates.
The General saluted and hurried off with the others issuing hushed commands along the way.
An hour later the entire force of the Eastern Kingdom that was still able to fight stood gathered at the base of the wall’s face as quiet as a large group of people can be. What sounds they did make were drowned out by the crackling of the fires in the city beyond them. At least Gavin hope such was the case.
He stood beside Zalisha on the wall top gazing out into the darkness. An archer started to pear up and over the wall top, but Lohan smacked her back down with the flat of his sword blade and sharply hissed for everyone to stay down. And then the most curious of things happened.
There was barely a quarter of the moon in the night sky, when the darkness was pierced by the combined howls of two wolves.
They had to be the biggest baddest wolves ever and instinctively Gavin knew. The howls continued on for an unbelievable amount of time far longer than any normal wolf.
The ancient primal sound of the howls in the night froze the hearts of both Eastern and Western warriors alike. They looked fearfully around in the night somehow forgetting the weapons in their hands to consumed with the primal fear of what could be roaming in the dark of the night, to realize the absurdity of falling prey to an animal while among fellow warriors.
Gavin looked to the General Lasho beside him. “General!”
The General tore his own spellbound gaze from the night beyond the wall to look at Gavin.
“Prepare to open the gates General!”
Turning back to Zalisha he took her hands in his, “I have to leave you now, but before I go let’s pray.”
As the trailing notes of the howls waned off I smiled. I was going to have to come up with names for those two. They had seemed to adopt me and Raya in place of the pack they had lost, which I was perfectly fine with. I’d even had tinted glasses made for them too, as I had figured that they intended on tagging along. Something that Relentless was not very happy about.
A runner came hurrying up and I asked, “Are the girls in position?”
“Yes Sire! All is ready.”
“Good, it’s time Raya, it’s time!” I said glancing over at her as she sat astride of Starfire.
I leaned over and kissed her quickly, “I love you! I will forever!”
And then I rode off in front of the line. I swear my night vision was getting better than it used to be, because I could clearly see what was going on.
“Lanorians it’s time! It’s time to fight! It’s time to gain back your ancestors honor! It’s time to claim revenge! Avenge your past as we fight for the freedom of Lanoria and Assoria this night! Lanorians it’s time to unveil yourselves and kill the enemy!” I finished as I was practically standing up in the stirrups waving my sword at the enemy encampment barely a hundred yards away.
They hadn’t even posted sentries to the rear of the encampment. It sounded like I was in command of a force numbering in the tens of thousands instead of just over fifteen thousand by the mighty savage cry of war that erupted in response to my words.
I turned Relentless and charged him at the enemy encampment. Words were at an end and the time for actions had begun. The Lanorian warriors ripped off their black hooded coverings to run screaming after me towards the enemy.
One in five of the warriors were mounted, but even being mounted they didn’t draw far away from the main body of warriors, who were as swift as fleet footed deer and for good reason. If you didn’t run fast enough in Lanoria you didn’t live long enough to procreate. Only the strong and the very lucky survived.
I was sure, perhaps without proof, that the army I was privileged to lead was perhaps one of the finest in all of human history. All people know fear, but the Lanorians had lived with it daily for so long that they had learned to channel it into the energy to survive rather than to panic.
They weren’t fearless, but they were a people that controlled fear well and thus were courageous in their actions. As for the enemy even now streaming out from their tents to see what was happening I saw their looks of question turn to horror, as they allowed their fear to control them and they dropped their swords to run into the night.
To them the glowing eyed warriors must’ve looked like a swarm of demons coming out of the pits of hell itself. Come to drag them off to where they belonged.
The Lanorians, in order to aid such a fearful thought in the minds of their enemies, had splashed luminescent color all over their bodies. For years the Lanorians had crushed up trinial and blended it with other minerals to make different colored fluorescent body paints.
The raging army at my back was bedecked in every garishly bright color of the rainbow in a vivid statement of the power of color under the right application. To each other the Lanorians looked funny to behold, but to the enemy they appeared as insane monsters come out of the primal darkness of the night intent on killing and possibly devouring them.
We smashed into the enemy camp and the onslaught began. I was mindful of nothing other than the enemy targets falling before my slashing blades and Relentless’s thunderous power.
I had favored the use of the sabers over my other sword as per Thora’s instructions. It would no doubt be used later.
The fighting stretched on as cooler heads prevailed within the Western encampment and a defense was mounted, but it was a losing effort. In the first hour of fighting almost a third of their number fell in the initial chaos of the surprise of our attack from the rear and the subsequent attack from the city.
The hours of the night crept onward as a bitter fight for survival ensued in front of the city only this time it was the West that fought to escape annihilation for once.
As the sun rose the Lanorians pulled their tinted glass masks into place and fought on. The freedom of being in the daylight and the knowledge of who had taken it from them unlocked even deeper emotions and strengthened their efforts of destruction against the sorcerer’s accomplices.
The enemy army started to fracture and droves of them took off across the plains for their Western cities. We didn’t bother to follow them. We knew what awaited them.
There were four thousand girls out there armed with bows and arrows and mounted in the saddle for mobility. They could dust off a chipmunk with an arrow at forty yards and still have meat left on it to eat, because if they didn’t they would have been beaten or have starved to death in their harsh existence in the north.
The runaways would be picked off long before they reached the Western cities as the girl’s quivers were full and their fingers ached to have revenge for all the pain of their upbringing and being viewed as worthless.
I sliced my way through a pack of disoriented archers, who looked like they didn’t even know what to do in close quarters fighting. Raya was right behind me finishing off the rest of the helpless archers. Raya was speed married with unparalleled intensity and I marveled that I had come out on top in our sparing match together.
The Creator must’ve aided me in the fight because I couldn’t see how I could have won. A wounded enemy soldier on the ground behind Raya was raising his sword to slice at the back of her legs!
She would never hear my hell in the din and pandemonium of the noise of war so I drew back one of my swords to throw it like a knife, but I didn’t have to. The female alpha raced in from somewhere and literally bit the man’s arm off.
Nice wolf!
What I should’ve done was to try to elicit the support of a couple hundred of the creatures. This battle would have been over in moments!
Where was the big male?
He was back a ways and of all things he was protecting Relentless as Relentless stood over top of a wounded Lanorian warrioress.
It was an odd sight to see a wolf protecting a stallion, who in turn was protecting a fallen warrior. Stranger things have happened, but this one had to be somewhere on the list.
Just what was the ability of animals to think and reason? I didn’t know, but it was high in both these brutes. I turned back to find Raya looking at me, she’d seen it too and she shook her head slightly in disbelief at the odd couple fighting in tandem with each other.
Then Raya nodded at a particularly dense concentration of the enemy and then at me grinning as she did so. The girl was crazy, but I loved her. Back to back we twirled into the mass of the enemy hacking and slashing our way through their ranks, as if we were kids hacking off cornstalks at harvest time.
Less than an hour later the enemy broke unable to withstand either the surprise double sided attack or our intensity of will. Some forty thousand of them broke and ran for home and I gave the orders to let them go.
They were barely out of sight when the ground trembled under our feet and the horizon filled with smoke and hot ash clouds. From appearances it looked like they weren’t going to have anything to go home to. I looked around at the wreckage and carnage of the battlefield.
We had lost thousands, but they had lost tens of thousands and all of their cities as well. They were finished as a kingdom and as a people. So was the Northern Kingdom most likely given their poor leadership. Only the Eastern Kingdom would remain and the new Kingdom of Lanoria.
One thing remained to be done. Unseat the sorcerer from his position of power and tyranny over these lands once and for all. Suddenly I felt myself grabbed and lifted up into the air. It could only be Gavin or Holon. It was both of them.
I rested my hands on top of their shoulders awkwardly as they hoisted me up. Both Lanorians and Easterners alike were chanting something loud and jubilantly, but all I knew was that I was grateful that those I cared for most had come through safe. It wasn’t right for them to be giving me so much of the praise though. So many things could have gone wrong and even did go wrong along the way.
The only way this had been the success that it had been was because the Creator had wanted it so, but the crowd chanted all the louder in praise of me. Their chant came to a screeching halt though at the sound of loud horns blaring in the distance.
They turned as one to see what the disturbance was, but I already knew.
I tapped Gavin and Holon on the heads, “Let me down the battle is not yet won.”