So what was Behnam doing?
And why did he insist on delaying the inevitable?! Didn’t the man realize that Darius had a schedule to keep?
Alright, he was being ridiculous. Even Amalah knew that enemies wouldn’t be accommodating for an expecting father’s nerves. But still.
Darius stood on the edge of the cliff, absently sliding his spy glass open and closed as he thought. Behnam was a seasoned general who had seen just as many campaigns as Darius had. He had any number of victories and losses under his belt. Darius couldn’t see the other general making any careless mistakes. So what could possibly motivate him to stay within this treacherous stretch of forested highway?
Unless….
Suspicious, he opened the spy glass fully and raised it to his eye again. With the morning sun setting up a glare, it took several adjustments of his stance and the angle of the glass before he could see far enough. When he did, it took even more time to really figure out what the soldiers at the very back were doing.
When he did understand it, he started swearing viciously. “KAVEH!”
His commander scrambled from behind him, trying to run on uneven ground and loose rock. “Sir? What happened?”
Wordlessly, he handed him the glance. “The very back of the camp.”
Kaveh shot him a worried look before lifting the glass and obediently looking in that direction. For several long moments he looked before he too started swearing. “He’s re-building his siege engines!”
“Yes,” Darius confirmed darkly. “Great sands! I think it’s my fault, too. I was trying to scare him into surrendering the other day by hinting that I had this whole pass fortified. I think I gave him too much information. He knows my habits as well as I know his. If I really do have fortifications built through here, then the only prayer he has of defeating them are—”
“Siege engines,” Kaveh finished with a pained expression. He lowered the glass and handed it back to Darius.
Even as he took it, Darius felt like swearing some more. In his effort to hasten this battle along, he had in fact made things worse. In essence, he’d stabbed himself in the foot. Both feet, really. “Does he have the tools with him to re-build them?”
Kaveh rubbed at the back of his neck with an open palm, thinking hard. “Yes and no, sir. Yes, he can rebuild them. Any good team of engineers would be able to, really. But with the materials he has on hand and the limitations of the time they have to work with? They’re not going to be very high quality constructs. It takes a good month, with a full team, to build one catapult. He doesn’t have the supplies necessary to camp out here for a month while they build something full scale. But if they cut it down to a smaller size, it’s possible. Actually, it’s almost preferable. They’d fit better in the narrower sections of the pass.”
Not the answer he wanted. “So we have to come up with a way to stop him. Truly stop him, so that he doesn’t just fight us off and try it again.”
“Yes sir,” Kaveh acknowledged with a long sigh. “Any brilliant ideas?”
Darius slammed the spyglass all the way closed with a sharp shing. “Not one.”
~~~
Darius called an emergency meeting with his staff right there on the rocks, within sight of the Brindisi encampment below. Field meetings didn’t have any rank or order to them, especially on this rugged landscape, so they all found a flat section of rock to sit on and made do.
With everyone settled, he summarized the situation and ended with, “We absolutely can not afford to let him build those siege engines. If we do, it’ll wreak havoc on our forts and it will give them a higher survival rate. I need ideas, and I need them now.”
Ramin rubbed at his forehead as if already getting a headache. “The only thing that I can think of is somehow sneaking our men through the forest and then forming up into ranks at the back of the Brindisi ranks and forcing them forward.”
Darius shook his head before Ramin could even finish. “Won’t work. They outnumber us and there are no natural fortifications on the road that will help us. They’ll just mow us down with sheer numbers and we’d be back to where we started.”
“Set fire to the woods so they don’t have anything to build with?” Mihr suggested.
He grimaced. “Not the best option. It would cut down on the wood they can use, but it also costs us considerable cover. It will also give them more room to spread out and make a more lasting camp, if they wanted to stay and develop a better plan against us. But I’ll keep the idea in reserve. It might come down to that.” He prayed not, though. In this dry weather, the trees would go up like a torch and it might well burn the whole forest down before something came along to stop it. “Any other ideas?”
Silence descended as the men thought hard, their faces drawn into frowns as they tried to think of some way around this.
“Cats,” Navid said suddenly.
In this glum silence, the word seemed not only loud but absurd.
Darius drew on the little patience he had left before saying, “Navid. I know that you like to talk cryptically, but this is not the time for it. Cats?”
Navid grinned at him in a flash of white teeth. “You fought barbarians here,” he tapped his forehead with a finger, “by using cats. We need to fight here too. Brindisi already jumpy and nervous. It would be easy to scare them.”
The idea took root in Darius’s mind. Navid had a good point. Of course, the Brindisi engineers had more education than a barbarian did, so they weren’t as nearly as superstitious. No. Wait. It didn’t take superstitions to do mental warfare. “You’re right. We’re going about this the wrong way. Navid, get back down there with your best archers. These are your orders: fire at anyone that picks up a tool. Only people that handle tools.”
Kaveh let out a low whistle. “You’re going to make them terrified to build anything.”
“Would you pick up an axe if you knew that doing so would get you killed?” Darius pointed out reasonably. “I certainly wouldn’t, no matter what orders my superior officer gave me. I’d rather take whatever punishment he heaped on my head than be dead.”
“Fear is very contagious,” Mihr acknowledged slowly. “Especially in that camp. I’d wager that within a day, no man could be forced into building those siege engines.”
“I’d wager you’re right,” Darius agreed. “Navid? Get moving. In two days, I want them marching.”
~~~
From his cliff top vantage, and with the aid of the spyglass, Darius could see everything that happened at the back of the ranks. His orders to fire on anyone that picked up an axe or tool had been taken quite literally. Even if the person just intended to move it, they were fired upon. Most of them tried to hide behind shields, or had others hold up shields to form a wall of protection around them, but no one could keep that up indefinitely. Eventually, someone would slip up, and a very patient Niotanese archer would gain another kill.
Darius panned the area slowly, trying to get the full picture. The men now were shaking their heads, pointing at the woods in illustration, and were obviously refusing to pick up any tools of any sorts. Ha! Self-preservation proved to be stronger than discipline after all.
Behnam had been right—rebuilding his lost siege equipment was the only way to defeat the forts that Darius had built in the pass. But trying to do it on an open highway with enemy archers on all sides was madness. No one could pull that off. He should have retreated outright to a more open area and rebuilt everything there.
Of course, if he did, then he’d have to retrace his steps back through the Elburz Forest and I’d whittle down his army some more. Either way, he loses.
From his elbow, Tolk asked, “Is it working?”
“It’s working,” Darius assured him without ever taking his eye away from the glass. “They’re too afraid to even get close to a tool now. I’m sure their officers are threatening them with all sorts of punishments but they’re still shaking their heads no.”
“Don’t blame them,” Tolk mutte
red. “Better than being dead.”
Truly. From the edge of the glass, Darius saw a flash of an officer’s uniform. Oh, who was this? He shifted his angle slightly. “Uh-oh,” he said in delight.
“Uh-oh?”
“Behnam himself has come to straighten it out.”
Tolk pondered that for a moment. “I would think that a bad thing.”
“Normally, I would too, but the men are still shaking their heads. Even an order from that high up isn’t making a dent, huh?” Darius chuckled with evil pleasure. “He’ll have to threaten them with execution to get them to work, and that will cause more harm than good right now.”
“I would think that would work.”
“Oh, normally,” Darius assured him, lowering the glass for a second to meet his eyes. “But normally, there’s no place for a deserter to really go. Most of Brindisi is open plains, after all, it’s hard to hide in them. But here? These men can hide in the forest at any point and escape and Behnam won’t know it until the morning headcount. If they do stumble into us, the worst they’d face, after all, would be capture. And even then we’d just hold them prisoner and use them for ransom.”
Tolk regarded him suspiciously. “You’ve done this before.”
“Many times,” Darius responded with relish. “Funny how it works every time. Oops! No effect, huh?” Through the glass, Behnam gave a depressed heave of the shoulders and a circular motion with his arm. The men around him gathered up into formation and started rejoining the back of the line. “He just gave up on the siege engines,” Darius announced in satisfaction. “He’ll start coming through as soon as he gets everyone formed up. Mihr!”
“What?” Mihr called from a few feet away.
“Coming our way shortly!”
“We’re ready!” Mihr assured him.
The sun steadily climbed as both sides assumed their positions and formed into their ranks. Darius gave the signal to the trumpeter standing nearby and the man lifted the horn to his mouth and blew one long, mournful note. Especially with how it echoed through the mountain pass, it sounded almost eerie. If Darius hadn’t known better, he’d swear the sound came from a ghost wailing.
Each fort along the pass also sounded on the trumpet and with each sound the impression became more reinforced. He closed his eyes and counted each trumpet as it sounded. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine…ten? What happened to the last fort?
A higher note than the others sounded, holding on longer than any previous trumpeter had. Someone back there had a competitive spirit. But that meant that all ten were ready.
Darius looked down toward Behnam, and even though the man couldn’t see or hear him, he gave him a feral smile and said, “Come on, Behnam. You won’t get past the first two forts today. I promise you that.”
“Bresalier!”
Darius stopped in mid-step, forgetting about the breakfast plate in his hands, and turned sharply. He’d never heard Mihr sound truly worried before now and that particular note in his voice didn’t sound promising. It took a moment to spot him, as everyone in camp seemed to be milling about. Through the men that were walking back and forth along the narrow mountain trail, he saw the other man standing near the edge of the mountain, beckoning to him in an agitated motion.
Swearing, he shoved his plate into Payam’s hands and quickly strode forward, ducking in and around people as he moved. He had to shove a few people to the side in order to meet Mihr. “What’s happened?” he demanded.
“I just got a message from the tenth fortification,” Mihr said without preamble. “Two generals and a force of about fifteen hundred area heading directly for the pass.”
For a moment, it didn’t make any sense at all. He’d just passed letters with Bahram, Delshad and Omar confirming that all three were ready at the eastern line, holding the position down. So where would fifteen hundred troops and two generals come from…? A terrible foreboding gripped his heart and clawed at it.
“Which two generals?”
“Feroze and Angra.”
Darius started swearing aloud, gripping his hair with both hands hard enough to prick his scalp. His two worst enemies within the court? He thought he’d stopped them from doing anything with that formal petition signed by Queen Tresea to not let them be in command of any troops until the end of the year, but they’d obviously found a way around that. Darr take it! “Let me guess. They got their men by stopping by the eastern line and calling them out.”
“Soldiers form loyalties to particular generals,” Mihr said with a weary resignation. “You’re lucky that it was only fifteen hundred that heeded them. It means you’re more popular than we’d initially thought.”
“Don’t really care about that right now,” he gritted out between clenched teeth. Dropping his hands, he tried looking over the edge of the mountain and into the pass, but of course he couldn’t see them from here. “They’re heading straight for the pass, you said?”
“You know what they’re planning to do, don’t you?” The question was clearly rhetorical as Mihr didn’t wait for a response. “They plan to charge in here, somehow defeat twenty thousand troops, and prove you as an incapable fool.”
“They’ll get their own men slaughtered and make my job harder because I won’t have the necessary force when I really need them!” The outcome was so obvious that Darius had to wonder what sort of idiot would think this would work. Yes, the narrow confines of the pass would make it harder for Brindisi to overpower the Niotan troops but against that sort of overwhelming odds? It would just take more time.
His mind raced as he weighed different factors and rehashed his plans. “Mihr. How close can we fire on the enemy without endangering our own troops?”
Mihr thought for a moment, tugging absently at a half-grown beard as he thought. “Any closer than five ranks would be too risky.”
Five ranks in between? Closer than Darius had hoped for. That meant that the stupid men in the pass would only have to fight five ranks at a time. Alright, that evened the odds considerably. “Then do so. Buy them as much time as you can.”
Mihr’s expression went smooth, expressionless as a cold statue. “You won’t leave them to fend for themselves?”
He locked eyes with the other man. “When I have a way to save them? That would be tantamount to murder, Mihr.”
“I know.” Mihr clapped him on the shoulder and relaxed into a small smile. “I’m glad you didn’t consider it. Alright, I’ll do what I can from up here. What will you do?”
“Go down and see if I can reason with the idiots.”
~~~
Word must have travelled about what was happening below, because by the time that Darius got to his horse, he found that Tolk had already saddled it and that he and Navid were already mounted and waiting on him. He swung himself aboard without a word and started for the bottom. Of course, the pass took a good three hours to ride through—if a man was on the bottom floor. On top of the mountain like this, with all sorts of rocks, fortifications, and other impediments in the way, it took a little longer than that.
Darius had a clear view from the top of the trail as he rode and what he saw made his heart sink in his chest. The Niotan soldiers, being a smaller force and not under fire like the Brindisi troops were, had made excellent time forward and had already engaged the enemy. The only thing that prevented them from being outright slaughtered was the narrow confines of the pass on either side.
The small party reached the bottom of the mountain in a clatter of hooves against stone. Darius instantly turned and spurred Sohrab into the pass. Eager to stretch out and properly run, the stallion lengthened his stride and ran like the wind itself. He had to check the stallion several times to avoid losing everyone else. They didn’t have mounts with the same speed and strength as his. Sohrab tossed his head at this, irritated at the restraint, but obediently slowed his pace to his master’s will.
Even at this pace, it took a small eternity before he finally reached the back of the
ranks. The two generals, of course, had not engaged at the front of the line but were commanding their troops from the very back. The two men sat on horseback, watching through their glasses the actions of the front line. A nearby runner spotted his approach and alerted them with a pointing finger. They turned in their saddles to see him, both looking arrogant and smug.
Darius pulled up roughly, forcing Sohrab to skid to a stop, his back legs sliding a little on the loose gravel and dirt. Before his stallion could even properly regain his footing he demanded of the two generals, “Are you both mad? There are twenty thousand Brindisi troops bearing down on you! You can hold them off at this rate, but not for long. They will massacre you and there’s not a thing that anyone at the top of the pass can do to stop it!”
Feroze turned his horse completely so that he could face Darius more directly. He didn’t look like a man that had travelled three days to get here. His uniform was fresh and crisp, every dark hair in place, brown eyes empty of any concern. But then, it wasn’t his life that he had put on the line in this insane gamble for power. “Bresalier. I expected you. I assure you, with the narrow passage—”
“You will last the rest of this day at most, but no more,” Darius interrupted harshly. “I watched the actions from the top. You can’t see anything beyond your own men from here. You have no idea what’s coming for you.”
Angra hadn’t bothered to turn around and face anyone. In fact, he had lifted his spyglass and continued to watch the front lines, or what little he could see of it from here. “You think you’re the only general that can win when you’re greatly outmatched? We were doing so long before you came.” He lifted a white handkerchief to dab at the perspiration at his temples. A useless action, considering the heavy formal uniform coat he wore. Not even Darius, as lead general, chose to wear that thing in the field. But then, Angra had been born and raised in a raj household and everything he did and said emphasized that upbringing. He could be used as a model example for how an officer should dress—hair perfectly cut, clean shaven, uniform in pristine condition. To manage that in the field and on the front lines…Darius couldn’t imagine wasting the water or the resources to maintain such vanity.
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