by Winfred Wong
“I thought you have gone home with your sister,” Warner said worriedly when he heard Galot commanding the guards to fall back outside. “Where is she?”
“Probably at home, waiting for us to come back.” Althalos reacted upon the retreat outside and scurried to the damaged back door.
“Where are you going!?” Warner asked, bandaging the slash on his right arm with a strap of his cloth. “According to the village rule, section eight, every able-bodied man between the ages of fifteen and fifty-five should be at least holding a weapon in time of emergency.”
“Who cares! I’m leaving! They’re falling back! It’s not safe to stay here any longer,” Althalos said, pushed open the door and ran away.
Knowing the clashes mainly took place at the two entrances, he scuttled west behind a row of cottages on a dry muddy ground toward the guard station. He significantly outpaced the retreating guards and kept moving until he saw the guard that he met at the station before the outbreak of the armed conflict.
“Please tell me my brother is in here.” Althalos ran to him breathlessly, hands on his knees and head down.
“Oh, you come back for your brother,” said the guard, leaning against a pillar relaxedly. “He has gone to…”
He stopped speaking suddenly when a javelin that loomed out of nowhere pierced through his head from the opposite side of the pillar, and he fell to the ground, with a shocked look on his blood-soaked face.
With thick, dark red liquid spilled all over his head, Althalos screamed out loud like the sharp-pointed iron had gone through him instead and began to shudder. Scared to death, he saw an armed bandit, who wore a ragged woolen garment that had bloodstains on it, coming toward him maliciously from the farthest pillar on his left. He tried to move, but he couldn’t lift a finger as fear brought him in a cold sweat. The only thing he could do was listening to the hasty footsteps that meant death while awaiting it.
As the bandit was getting closer and closer and his heart missed a beat, the whole world suddenly turned totally soundless in his chaotic mind, except for a clear, heartwarming voice that kept echoing inside him.
“Get inside! Now!”
The fact that someone was helping him alone ignited his spirit to survive. He didn’t even have enough time to find out whose voice was that since the bandit had already swung his sword right to his shoulder, and he reacted promptly. By a hair’s breadth, he somehow evaded that fatal blow with a speedy pace rightward. He then darted toward the door of the station, went inside and locked the door behind him.
The last ray of light faded out as the door was sealed, and the whole place became pitch-dark. Poked around in the dull, narrow hallway, he found a stack of empty weapon crates on his right and finished barricading the door with them before the bandit outside tried to break down the door with a kick.
A snapping whack on the door with a sword followed hot on the heels of the kick. The frustrated bandit kept swinging his sword at the door forcefully, trying to smash his way through. Arduously dragged all the remaining crates to reinforce the door, Althalos groped his way along the unlighted hallway and trailed his hand along the wall, blood trickling down his neck, until he hit a stone wall before him. As he moved deeper, it grew darker, but it didn’t refrain him from fumbling around in an attempt to find a place to conceal himself.
As his glance was sweeping through the room, the whacking sound ceased abruptly, and the door shattered and collapsed, fragments hitting the ground hard. Some vague lantern light passed through the opening and slightly illuminated part of the hall. Aware of the light, he reluctantly turned his trembling body to the entrance and saw the bandit glaring at him like a starving wolf staring at a frail lamb with a ravenous smirk.
Realizing his death was just around the corner drove him crazy. Aimlessly, Althalos began to madly rummage around the roomy hall that was furnished in medieval style with round timber dining tables and armless chairs three times faster, looking for an escape route, while the bandit was advancing toward him, with his sword grinding against the stone wall, making an unpleasant sound.
Getting goosebumps all over him due to that sound, Althalos left no stones unturned in his quick ferret, however, there wasn’t a back door to be found, nor a staircase that he could use. Despairingly, he grabbed a chair randomly and threw it at the bandit with every ounce of power he had, although he knew it was of no use.
“Is that all you have got?” The bandit teased him threateningly, as he airily swiped his sword at the flying chair, dividing it in two halves.
Embracing hopelessness, Althalos realized that his death was inevitable, but he just didn’t want to die like that. With tears rolling out of his eyes, he kept hurling every piece of furniture he could grab at the bandit and jinking around as swift as he could.
Irritated, the bandit rushed forward aggressively and swung his sword at him at full strength. Instinctively grabbed a chair to block the sword, Althalos managed to parry the attack, but he immediately felt lightheaded as he crashed his head against one big piece of fragment of the chair shattered by that strike, rupturing the underlying blood vessels. Feeling unbalanced, he involuntarily sat down on the ground with a feeling of dizziness when the bandit was walking up to him.
“Say goodbye to mama,” said the bandit, but stopped dramatically, with an uplifted sword right above Althalos’s head.
Right at the second the bandit was about to behead Althalos, he came to an abrupt standstill awkwardly and fell down on Althalos, as if he had a heart attack, with his back bleeding profusely.
Lying on the floor, Althalos screwed up his eyes, trying to see what happened with his blurry vision, but, as his lightheadedness intensified, he felt like he was moonwalking on the moon and passed out at the moment when he laid eye on a man.
CHAPTER TEN
* * *
With altered senses that allowed him to notice the slightest perceptible movements of enemy, Chavdar headed to the east entrance when a flock of bandits was surging toward Ayrith dispersedly with ear-splitting screams and shouts on the open grassland outside. Using fire torches to drive darkness away, they looked ferocious in the illuminated black sky as the cold steel in their hands glittered in firelight. Clanging, some of them had a full suit of armor, some had a few pieces of it and some were just wearing thin linen garments that will be pierced through by even the bluntest edge.
On the other side, the better-equipped guards had already finished establishing four tight lines of defence right in front of the gateless opening of the entrance before they came into contact with the bandits.
“Hold your position!” Galot roared at the lowering sky from the second line, swallowing his empty throat, when the face of the closest bandits loomed out of darkness. “Prepare for battle!”
Incessant jingling of shaking steel rolled across the sky as the guards were gliding their weapons out. Respiring rapidly, Warner, at the left flank of the front line, was staring at the closest bandit charging in at him. When the bandit came close and swung a sword at him, he blocked it with his spear, pushed the sword up nimbly and tilted him in the stomach, marking the commencement of the battle.
With blizzards of swords, the guards were able to ward off the first wave attack successfully, however, as the bandits kept rushing in and eventually converged on the entrance, they became slightly overwhelmed. The two opposing sides kept sweeping and knifing each others, creating a doom-laden stream of gore on a heap of carnage. Tottering and doddering on piles of limbless bodies of their friends, the guards’ front line was being pushed backward bit by bit every time a new wave of enemies charged at them. It’s only a matter of time before the intruders could rip apart their defence and annihilate them.
∫∫
Behind the blood-spattered guards, Chavdar finally arrived. He then searched all the corners around for his brother. With a three-hundred-sixty degree visual field given by his vision, he didn’t even have to open his eyes to look around while not missing a thing, though, still,
no sign of his brother was found. He didn’t want to give up, but he figured that Althalos might had just gone to somewhere safer to hide, and this thought deadened his perturbation; Then the wailing of hundreds of men from the battle caught his attention.
Although he couldn’t actually hear the yelping, he could see the sounds that kept popping up in his eyes. He also heard that two lines of guards had already been eliminated, and the outnumbered guards were being ruthlessly slaughtered despite their resilience.
It was so revulsive that the decaying flesh of dead bodies on the ground were mangled almost beyond recognition, but still, he was quite sure that his brother was safe at somewhere else because he knew the only thing he was good at was hiding. And he felt like he had the responsibility to fight alongside with his neighbors even though he knew that he was nothing more than a laughing stock in their eyes. Deep down his heart, he clearly understood that there was no point in helping these people, who had been looking down on him, but a sense of belonging to this place he considered as home prompted him to do so.
“Help…” A guard with a bad gash in his left thigh, blood trickling down, said to Chavdar in a rough tone while crawling away stiffly from the battlefield on the cobblestone, leaving a road of blood behind.
Instinctively, Chavdar rushed to the man, removed his cuisses quickly and applied direct, steady pressure at the deep, red wound with his hands.
“Just hang on,” Chavdar said, as he turned back to normal mode automatically and looked around the empty places he had just searched for help. “You’ll be ok.”
“I know I’m dying. Just take this,” the guard said weakly, coughing, took out a splendid pendant that was set with an alluring, round, emerald jewel from under his chest armor and put it in Chavdar’s hand. “Please give it to my son in Herin. It’s very important to him, please.”
Nodding, incessantly and instinctively, “Sure thing, but how am I supposed to find him?” Chavdar asked and grabbed his hand tightly.
“His name is…Rolan…” the guard said faintly, on the verge of losing consciousness due to excessive bleeding.
But, suddenly, with eyes bugged out, “Promise me you’ll bring it to him,” he continued in a strong, healthy voice as if he had revived.
“Yes, yes, sure, I will take this to your son, don’t worry,” Chavdar assured him , realizing it was the last thing he could do for this man.
“Thank you,” the guard said very vaguely, as if the last radiance of the setting sun had gone.
“May you rest in peace.” Chavdar gathered the pendant up, put it round his neck and laid the dead body down gently just before he saw another guard, who had a mole on the right chin, stumbling off the front line toward a ramshackle, abandoned, lantern-less cottage with blood seeping out from a cut on his right arm and stains all over his crumpled armor.
Out of natural reaction, he ran up to him and put that man’s arm over his shoulder.
“Let me get you inside,” Chavdar said.
“Thanks,” Warner said while being dragged forward, gaping oddly at Chavdar’s spotlessly clean leather armor, thinking that this man may be just a timid coward who avoided going into the battlefield, and, with a disdainful look, he never looked at the man who saved him. “You know what, you should go, young man, don’t waste time on me. According to the village rule, section eight, you should go.”
“Go where?” Chavdar questioned, as he pushed open the squeaking cottage’s door.
“To fight.” Warner took off his hand, entered the cottage, humming in ache, and slammed the door behind, blowing off some cobblestone on the ground.
Left outside, Chavdar pressed the emerald jewel on his neck lightly and stared absently at the closed door. With a flock of lethal vultures congregating in the star-thronged sky, he finally found something more meaningful to do than quarrelling with his brother every day and night and felt burdened for the first time in his life. He didn’t know what he could accomplish, but he knew exactly what he should do.
Bending his arm to pull the sword out of the sheath on his back, held it with two hands vertically, he visioned, gaining an all-around vision, and ran toward the battlefield without wavering.
∫∫
“Beat a retreat! Fall back!” Galot thundered and advanced forward with his bloodstained sword as it was the only way to save his men. “Back to the station!”
Executing order, the guards all fled chaotically at the same time, running for their lives, except a few of them, who had undergone intensive military training before, leaving a huge opening in the entrance. As the bandits tried to grasp the chance to swarm into the village to hunt the fleeing guards down, Galot vaulted over some dead men, stood defiantly in their way and glowered at them, yet a few of them still made it into the village successfully.
“Over my dead body!” he growled with a willingness to sacrifice his life to buy more time for his men to escape.
His vigor and intimidation did thwart the bandits for a moment, but it didn’t take them too much time to realize that it was a must-win battle for them, and they resumed forcing their way in again.
Confronting tens of hundreds of merciless barbarians, Galot and the few brave guards formed a human chain, holding each other’s arms, and prayed to their god for one last time.
“To death!” They yelled together fiercely and pointed their weapons forward as the bandits passed through the opening and charged at them disorderly.
Imperturbably, they waited for their last fight, or frankly, death, but the whole situation changed at the moment when a man abruptly dashed through the human chain and rushed toward the countless bandits alone.
“Is he the blind freak?” one of the guards asked while squinting at that brave man, who had been bashing every bandits that came close to him with hyper-fast but clumsy reactions like an inexperienced expert.
“See his green eyes? It can only be him,” another guard replied calmly when Chavdar was thrusting his swords at a bandit’s shoulder behind him precisely while dodging a stab from his blind spot with a deft bit of footwork. “Never thought that the laughing stock of the village is such a valorous fighter. He could’ve just walked away.”
Astonished by his honourable act and masterful movements, all of them lowered down their weapons unconsciously and stayed put, staring at his mesmeric fight, until they saw him took a hit in his shoulder when more and more bandits surrounded him.
“We should help him,” Galot said and held his sword up as the vultures in the sky were making some whispery bombinating sound together while scattering in all directions quickly. “Guards, advance!”
“Don’t worry, freak! We’re here for you! Just hang on!” Galot shouted when they were about to clash with the bandits again.
∫∫
Dodging simultaneous attacks from every directions completely was almost beyond the bounds of possibility even with his all-around vision, not to mention the injuries and exhaustion that were bringing his speed down. Having a hard time not to get struck down, he decided to give it all out when he perceived that a bandit was about to batter him down with a forceful sword downswing.
He parried the attack by holding his sword horizontally, tolerating the ache on his wrist, as he felt an adrenaline pump in his body, and, knowing that the vision was the only advantage he could rely on under this circumstance, he tried to expand it with his last bit of energy. He imagined more, he visioned the tiniest movements of every single bandits around him, and, miraculously, it worked; every tiny movements of the bandits became slower than usual in his perceptions. Every swings of swords, every flittering fingers, every exhaling of air were clearly discernible. He felt like time was slowing down, and he was the only one unaffected, however, the effect didn’t last long before he involuntarily switched back to normal human mode due to enervation that drained his stamina rapidly and disrupted his imagination, though he still managed to cut three bandits’ arms and render them defenceless effortlessly in that short moment.
A
nd as he snatched out his sword from a dead body, panting rapidly, the guards had already smashed through the throng of bandits, slaying and bowling everyone down in their way, and made it to his side.
“What’s the plan now?” Chavdar, suffering from a dozen of shallow wounds, asked when Galot came to him with the other guards going around them.
“Not quite sure,” Galot admitted, as he found out that they were stuck, encircled by a sea of enemies. “But I guess they’re not letting us go even if we make a proper request.”
“A proper request? Well, I think that worth a shot,” Chavdar chuckled, brandishing his sword around, and discovered that the bandits were just staring at them instead of charging in on them. “What are they waiting for?”
“Seems they’re scared of you, freak, but it’s just a matter of time before they press on and slaughter us like animals if we can’t get out of this,” Galot said and became aware of some faint galloping sound that could only be made by a horse.
“Do you hear it?” Chavdar asked as that sound grew louder, meaning that someone riding a horse was coming closer.
“Loud and clear,” Galot replied when, all of a sudden, a centaur rushed out of the mass of bandits, dashed toward Chavdar with an inhumanly fast speed and knocked him out forcefully, as if in an attempt to murder, with the pommel of a red, curved blade in his hand.
With the fall of Chavdar, the bandits suddenly had nothing to fear any more. Feeling victorious in advance, they burst out with a blaring scream and raised the fire torches up to pour the shaft of firelight on themselves before they stampeded toward the guards, slaughtered and mutilated every single one of them and every villagers in their way and set fire to the cottages, and a bloodbath ensued.
At first the cottages smouldered, then, as the temperature surged, the crackling, blazing fire spread through the rows of inflammable cottages very quickly, with ashes floating around like flakes of snow. The sweltering flame demolished the inner structure of the cottages, causing the roofs to cave in. The wisps of smoke and fumes from the debris of collapsed cottages billowed upward and outward, turning night into day and obliterating the moon, when the villagers were being rounded up and butchered like animals.
