The Sea of Grass

by Gilbert M. Stack

  “I’d think that riding a horse with your bare legs like that would chafe your ass—not to mention rough up your family jewels,” Atta observed.

  “Everyone listen!” Marcus cut him off. “Who’s got the best eyes? I need everyone looking at Teetonka there. Tell me what you see gleaming on his chest!”

  “That’s Teetonka?” Lesser Tribune Cyrus asked, stopping only when Severus cracked him on the top of his head with his open palm. “Shut up and look! Honorius, you’ve got good eyes, do you—”

  It’s an eight pointed star,” Seneca reported. “I can see it quite clearly, although I don’t understand why. The rest of him is actually a little hazy.”

  “It’s a magic pendant,” Marcus said, “and I think it’s just like the one Kekipi wielded in the Fire Islands.”

  “Surely not,” Capitán Adán said. “How could it be the same? The Fire Islands are more than two thousand miles away.”

  “I have the broken remains of the first pendant in my baggage,” Marcus told him. “It gave him great power. This may explain why he’s suddenly able to call down the lightning. If he comes into range of sword or pilum, don’t miss the opportunity.”

  The savage shaman lowered his spear and two lines of horsemen galloped up the mound passing to either side of him. Instead of weapons, each held two severed heads out to either side of him as they guided their horses with their knees, plunging down the nearside of the mound with reckless abandon—reckless because it had not apparently occurred to any of the savages that they might be charging headlong into a trap.

  The first horse screamed and fell hard, its rider launching off its back to fly headlong into the water up ahead of him. The horse directly behind him crashed hard into the fallen animal and tumbled its own rider to the ground. The next savage tried to guide his mount in a leap to the left only to discover that that was where the pit lay that had provided the dirt for the mound. His steed hit water that was closer to ten feet deep than eighteen inches and panicked.

  Behind him on the mound, other horses found caltrops and the shrieks of rage of the shaman, Teetonka, were loud enough to be clearly heard in the inner fortress.

  “That’s my signal,” Atta announced. “We can hurt them again now.”

  He did not wait for Marcus’ orders before running to his men and his own trusted steed. Gente merchants-turned-soldiers moved the wooden doors back into position and suddenly the Gota horsemen were back in play charging around the side of the fort at the stunned savage warriors only just beginning to work their way past the field of caltrops and pits. As it turned out, severed skulls were not the ideal choice of weapon to confront the spears of skilled cavalry men.

  “It’s always gratifying to see one’s plans work out so splendidly,” Marcus noted. “But I think we’re going to see some action soon, so if each of you would rejoin your men we can prepare to give these savages a reception that the survivors will never forget.”

  Marcus’ officers ran for their posts. Had the savages done as they should have and used their thousands of men to climb the outer walls and rush the inner ones while their horsemen charged in through the gates, things might have been getting hairy about now. As it was, their flashy attempt to devastate the defenders’ morale had rebounded against them and legionnaires and Gente alike shouted triumphantly as the Gota drove the savages back toward the pits and field of caltrops.

  Men and horses screamed as the chaos mounted, but before too long, savages began to spill north off the mound and regain control of the situation. Marcus ordered a horn to be sounded, calling the Gota back and Atta, reluctantly, broke his men free of the fighting and charged back to the ramps into the fort.

  One enterprising savage who attempted to beat them up the ramps ended dead in the ditch beneath them with a legionnaire’s pilum in his gut.

  After the last horsemen returned, Gente pulled the door-turned-ramp back into the safety of the inner fort walls.

  The enraged savages did not immediately do as Marcus had hoped and throw themselves piecemeal against his prepared defenses. Instead they splashed about the flooded bailey, screaming their rage at Marcus and his men. Every couple of minutes, one would rush toward the wall to hurl one of his severed heads into the inner fortress. Severus and Cledus put a quick stop to men wasting pilum against such attacks, although Marcus, himself, gave into temptation and showed off his skill by skewering anyone who dared to come within range of him. It was a fine game but it didn’t last long enough.

  After a couple of hours of gathering their forces between the two walls, Teetonka again lifted his short spear high above his head and exhorted his warriors in their native language. After he finished, three quarters dismounted from their horses and picked up their hatchets.

  “Pilum!” Marcus ordered and the men each picked up one of the hundreds of weapons that had accompanied the caravan from Dona far to the south.

  “On my order,” Marcus shouted even as Teetonka ordered something that must have meant the same thing.

  The shaman’s spear came down and the men hurled themselves forward, splashing through the water toward the wall. Marcus waited until they were some fifty yards away before ordering the first pilum thrown.

  It was difficult to miss with such a horde running toward them.

  “Pilum!” Marcus shouted again and the men around him retrieved a second weapon.

  “As they reach the ditch, boys!” the Tribune told them. The savages couldn’t be certain how deep the ditch was and they were likely to try and hurdle it. Marcus would in their positions and he timed the next throw so that the men would be at their most helpless, leaping through the air.

  Sharp steel sliced deep into their chests and then his men were pulling their swords and there was nothing to be done but hack at the head and arms of the countless bastards trying to climb the wall and kill them.

  Commanding officers really weren’t supposed to get involved in the actual melee, but it was impossible to stay aloof under these conditions. He brought the bottom edge of his shield crashing down upon one man’s uplifted face and hacked a hand off the wrist of another attacker. Bright blood sprayed across the evening air coloring the water just as Marcus had predicted.

  Men howled on both sides of the wall as death visited the battlefield again and again and again.

  Marcus’ skin began to prickle and then to hurt as the pins-and-needles sensation overwhelmed him. The wind was blowing hard and he suddenly realized the dust had picked up, cutting down his visibility. Was Teentonka trying to hide another attack?

  Marcus stepped back and did his best to assess the battlefield. On all sides of the fort, his line was holding. Men were down but that was nothing compared to the number of dead savages. Teetonka wouldn’t be hiding another attack, he was trying to cover a withdrawal.

  Evidently, Red Vigil Honorius had just come to the same conclusion. “Don’t let them pull back, boys!” he shouted from about five hundred feet away from Marcus. “We’ve got them where we want them!”

  As if to prove his point, he leapt out off the wall into the flooded bailey directly in front of him. A dozen of his men screamed and did the same. The savages recoiled in shock and horror, and began to retreat.

  Teetonka on the mound before the gate shrieked what had to be a dozen curses and pointed his short spear directly at Honorius. Bright white lightning leapt from the tip of the weapon and burnt the sky between the shaman and the Red Vigil. Then two hundred men screamed—most of them savages—and dropped dead in the manmade lake.

  For a moment, everyone froze in horror as the after flash of the lightning continued to blink in their eyes. Then everyone pulled back hard from the site of the blast—the legionnaires and the Gente merchants instinctively pulling back from the wall while the savages fled the fort entirely.

  Teetonka continued to scream at them, going so far as to hit his own people with another bolt of lightning, but nothing could have stopped that human tide. They ran over the outer wall—easy to do from
the inside—and did not stop running until they were far out upon the arid plains.

  ****

  “We have triumphed!” Capitán Adán crowed as he joined the other officers at their meeting in the aftermath of the savages’ retreat.

  “Did you see them scurry like frightened children?” Warrior Atta asked. The two men clapped each other on the back like brothers celebrating the winning of their race horse instead of what they were—antagonistic members of a ruling class and the unhappily governed.

  “We stood strong and we triumphed!” Lesser Tribune Cyrus said, joining the celebration. Green Vigil Phanes, who’d learned to keep his head down after his initial conflicts with Marcus, added, “They came at us and then they ran away!”

  Only the experienced legionnaires, and Seneca who was carefully taking his lead from Marcus, seemed to understand the siege had not ended.

  Marcus let them congratulate each other for another minute before offering his own comments. “You all fought well and I will say as much to the troops when I address them at the end of this meeting. Warrior Atta, you and your men especially outperformed my expectations. You all handled yourselves with the skill and discipline absolutely necessary to winning this siege.”

  Atta and Adán, at least, had figured out from Marcus’ tone that the Tribune thought they were celebrating prematurely. The two legionnaires had not.

  “We did exactly what we needed to in this first battle,” Marcus continued, “exactly what all of our preparations were designed to accomplish. We sucked the enemy in and we killed him by the shitload—to quote our Gota friend here.”

  Warrior Atta smiled, but everyone else was finally on board with Marcus’ message. The first battle was won but the siege was not over.

  “Now there are two ways this might go,” Marcus told them. “One, the savages could attack again tomorrow. I find this unlikely, but possible. We did beat them badly and it will take time to reorganize themselves and rebuild their confidence for another assault.”

  “You’re sure they won’t just go away?” Green Vigil Phanes asked.

  “Yes!” Marcus made the word as decisive as he could. “Teetonka, the lightning wielding shaman, was so furious at their flight that he struck out at his own men. It’s possible that one or two tribes will run away tonight, but would you want a man that powerful coming after you and your family for the rest of time?”

  Phanes shook his head and Marcus continued. “The second way Teetonka might handle this—the way I would have handled it from the beginning—is to drain the lake while he harasses us with his magic. Now I don’t know how much strength it costs him to use his lightning, so he may settle for keeping this dust storm on top of us day in and day out, but he’ll harass us, trying to interfere with our sleep and bring down our morale.”

  “I suspect he will use the other shaman to manage his dust storm,” Seneca volunteered. “They might be the ones who raised it anyway since Teetonka didn’t seem to want the tribes to retreat.” When he saw that he had everyone’s attention, he shrugged and added. “Remember that each of those tribes probably has its own shaman. They may also be able to help him summon his thundercloud as he did when he defeated the relief force trying to reach Fort Tertium. That would not only preserve his strength, but probably make it easier for him to bring forth the lightning. It is the only reason I can think of for him to have summoned that cloud when he can obviously generate the lightning without it.”

  Marcus nodded thoughtfully, “Thank you, Magus Seneca.” He had wondered why Teetonka had bothered with the cloud. They were lucky he had lost his temper and used his magical weapon so poorly and even luckier that the shaman from the dry plains had not known what happens when lightning strikes a man standing in water. “So those are the savages’ basic options—attack now or take a couple of days to strengthen their position before coming after us again. If they choose the first option, we simply fight and hope the battle goes largely like the first one, but if they do the smart thing we have an opportunity to create a new line of defense that will greatly enhance our own chances of holding out until relief arrives.”

  “Holding out?” Lesser Tribune Cyrus asked. “You don’t see us simply defeating them if they came at the walls again?”

  Marcus wished that question had not been asked, but knew that realistically there was no way to avoid it now that it had been voiced. Best to tackle it head on. “It’s very difficult to decisively defeat a besieging army from within the siege. They control whether they attack or not, and while we can sortie out against them, we don’t have any extra troops to be making that gamble with—especially against our own prepared defenses.”

  Cyrus looked confused so Severus added, “Our walls and the lake keep us in at the same time they are keeping them out. The dust storm might conceal our movements but…” He shrugged.

  “So until circumstances change, it is unlikely that we will be leaving the inner fortress.”

  Atta started to protest.

  “Yes, yes, I know your warriors are ready and eager to sally forth again, but realistically, Warrior Atta, do you truly believe that the savages are so stupid they won’t put five hundred archers on the wall to defend their forces when they start draining Lake Defiance?”

  Atta considered that for a moment before shaking his head. “No, they’d have to be really stupid not to do that.”

  “They were over-confident this time,” Marcus agreed. “They thought that their numbers and their relatively easy victory at the Battle of the Thundercloud ensured another easy triumph here. Now they know they have to earn another win and they’ll be smarter when they come in again.”

  He raised his voice because even though the officers had gone off a little ways to hold their meeting in silence, there were many ears straining to hear what they said. “So we have to be smarter too. We have to do something else to demoralize them. And the fastest, easiest, smartest thing we can do is to build another inner wall. This way, if they come after us again in all their numbers with Teetonka’s magic helping them along, we can bleed them out like we did this time and then retreat to the new inner ring and make them realize they have to do the whole damn thing over again.”

  He glanced at Severus, silently requesting him to contribute his thoughts.

  The Black Vigil chuckled grimly. “It’s a hard thing to think you’ve almost won the battle only to learn you’ve gained nothing but a few feet of ground. I know. I’ve been there.”

  “Me too,” Black Vigil Lysander volunteered. “And if I may say, Tribune, it’s a clever plan because it won’t be as easy for them to come at us on the new inner wall. We have a lot of pilum left and if we station most of them at the inner defenses, most of the area between this wall and the new one will be a pilum killing ground. To properly attack us, they will have to take down huge sections of the—what would you call it—the middle wall. And they’ll be doing that after we’ve just killed another host of them. No one will want to bring that wall down quickly because it means the third assault against our swords and shields will be coming that much faster.”

  Marcus’ impulse to promote the man to Black Vigil had just paid an unexpected reward. The less experienced officers had already traveled from elation to disappointment and fear in this conversation, but Lysander’s words had gone a long way to restoring their confidence. “Very well said, Black Vigil,” Marcus complemented him. “We can win this siege. There’s still a lot of hard fighting ahead of us, but our defenses are strong and our men are stout and disciplined. I won’t pretend it’s not going to get tough—all sieges get tough—but I guarantee you that the coming battles look a hell of a lot worse from that side of the wall then they do from this side.”

  The officers nodded confidently, clearly onboard with Marcus’ plan.

  “Good! Now let’s go brief the men. I want the new wall well under way by morning.”

  Day Nineteen

  They Aren’t Going Away

  Five days, Marcus thought as he surve
yed the new inner wall that his men had spent the night constructing. We’ve held out five days since Lord Evorik left us to seek reinforcements. That leaves only three to eight days more before he thinks he can return with an army of Gota horsemen. We might actually be able to hold out that long. The new inner wall is going up faster than I really expected it to. If we get the whole day to work on it, it will be a serious obstacle for the savages to overcome. If we get a second day, it will be taller and stronger than our current defensive line.

  He caught sight of Alberto working hard beside the other exhausted men to erect this new defense and decided to stop and speak with him. The Gente señor had removed his breast plate and his shirt was grimed with dirt and sweat but he did not appear to be injured.

  “Señor,” Marcus greeted him. “How goes the new defensive works?”

  Alberto did not stop shoveling to speak with him. “Too slowly, Tribune, I fear that if they come again today this wall will not be ready for them.”

  “If they’re waiting for the lake to drain,” Marcus told him, “I don’t think they’ll come today. I expected them to start taking down the outer wall last night, but instead they licked their wounds. Keep working! You and your brother warriors will get the job done.”

  Alberto paused, leaning on his shovel while he tried to catch his breath. “That is good news! I do not like to think what those savages will do if they come over the walls and catch my Carmelita or little Gaspar Marcus.” He shuddered.

  “We’re not going to let that happen,” Marcus assured him. “These defenses are sound! Your family will be safe behind them.”

  Alberto drove the shovel deep into the ground and tossed another pile of earth up on the growing wall. There was something in his eye that disturbed Marcus—a desperate need to believe the Tribune was telling him the truth combined with the fear that he was not.