The villagers muttered amongst each other and looked around uneasily.
“Second, we’ve conceived of and fully trained a force they’ve never fought against, by which I mean Winna’s warriors.”
The villagers uttered a collective gasp, understanding in a flash what had been secret but whose signs were evident if you had the key to understand them. Now they leaned forward to hear what was required of them.
“Third, we’re starting today to give the enemy something that they haven’t experienced since they began marauding—the worst weather the world has ever seen.
The assemblage was now transfixed by the idea the shaman had put forward. Knowing he had their full attention, he told the people what he wanted them to do.
“So as we perform our ritual today, I want every one of you to take the dun red stone that hangs around your head like this in your left hand. Do it now! And as we perform this ritual, squeeze the stone with all your might while you pray for rain so hard that troops can’t see through it or, if forms mud on paths or in squares, move through it. We’re not praying for the rain that nurtures crops but rain that bogs down armies and brings unease and demoralization, pestilence and melancholy. By doing this, we work magic that affects our enemy and helps our warriors.”
Ugard looked around at the villagers to make sure he still had their attention before he continued.
“Observe Wiglaff and me closely. You don’t need to understand what we are doing. Just watch and participate by squeezing your rocks. Do all this in absolute silence until we have completed our ritual and leave the square. Now we’ll retire to our hut to make our final preparations. Be patient and consider the importance of what we’ll all do today.”
After making this speech, Ugard and Wiglaff went to Onna’s hut, sat on the floor and prepared for their ritual. There their dun red stones lay on patches of soft deerskin on the ground in front of them. The two shamans picked them up by the wolf-leather thongs that ran through the holes at their centers. Simultaneously they pressed their stones to their foreheads and their lips, and then they tied the thongs around their necks so their stones rested over their sternums. They each grasped a sack of grain in their left hands and a long stone adze in their right hands. Then they rose and went through the door of the dwelling into the dawn light where their people were waiting patiently, holding their stones as they had been directed to do.
Without a word, Ugard and Wiglaff stepped into the center of the wide circle of people, where a large square area had been reserved for the ritual. Two circular portions of the square circumscribed with a long, curved pole were preserved for the shamans. Each had been sprinkled with gray flour, and at the four cardinal points on each of their circumferences clusters of feathers had been laid—eagle, raven, owl and hawk feathers. They performed their ritual, and the storm began with greater vigor than ever before.
The two shamans were revealed as if they were flashing statues in the silver light of the lightning, and the rain now came in a torrent that turned the tableau in front of the shamans into nests of floating feathers and grain against a muddy background, with a dripping adze and dripping dun red stone. The crashing thunder was deafening, and the village square and all the people assembled there were drenched, the excess waters running in channels towards the grid of irrigation channels in the long-ago harvested fields.
This time the storm clouds did not pass over, taking the lightning with them. Instead, they remained and grew black and menacing. The shamans continued to gaze at their adzes and stones as the rain became thick as a curtain, so that no one could see his hand before his face. Water ran from every hut in the village, flooding the square with the sounds of water dripping and running everywhere.
Now Ugard and Wiglaff rose, restoring the necklaces to their necks and the adzes to their right hands. With the dun red stone in his left hand, each strode back to Onna’s hut. There they were met by Onna, Winna and the other children, all drenched and dripping from the rain—and smiling because they still held their dun red stones firmly in their hands. They had participated in the ritual for the first time, and they knew something of the power that action bestowed on them all. Ugard, noticing their spirit, knew that this village would win the war against the coming enemy.
When the enemy first tried to invade the alliance, they had to march through torrential rain and mud that came up to the calf wherever they stepped. Many feet and legs were pierced by poisoned sticks and staves so their pace was slowed to a standstill, while they tried to calculate what they were up against.
The invaders couldn’t see through the rain, so they were totally surprised by the attack of Winna’s female warriors. The only signs of attack were the screams of men who had been struck in the face or neck by a poisoned spear, which was removed so that it could strike another enemy soldier.
So like a swarm of summer flies Winna’s warriors struck, stood back and struck again and again. They knew that they only needed to scratch an enemy soldier to kill him, so they did not try to penetrate far into the flesh. Only when the effects of the poison were sensed did the enemy soldiers realize that their attackers were wielding lethal weapons. In confusion the advancing army retreated, again encountering the hidden, poisoned stakes and staves. They thought they would regroup and outwait the rain, but the rain continued and, encouraged by their success, Winna’s warriors, now like a swarm of vicious hornets, pursued the enemy, attacking them on every side.
Winna changed their tactics so that they entered the thick of the enemy, so when they struck the enemy soldiers, they began hacking in all directions and killed or maimed their own forces in the blinding rain. Winna’s warriors were thus able to stand off and listen while the enemy soldiers cut each other to pieces. Winna listened carefully to determine who was giving orders and trying to calm the troops. She personally attacked those who exhibited the authority of command, and one by one the enemy leaders succumbed to poison. Finally, all Winna heard were the moans of wounded and dying soldiers, with others so demoralized that they fled through the morass in a general retreat in all directions.
Winna’s warriors did not allow the enemy to get away easily. They followed the enemy in ones and twos, and they killed all they found. Because they knew where the poisoned stakes were planted in the ground, they drove some of the enemy into those traps so that they killed themselves.
Winna also sought out the enemy’s supply bearers who carried the enemy’s food and auxiliary weapons, and her warriors killed every soldier, poisoned all the enemy’s food with Onna’s brew and seized all the enemy’s weapons. Burdened with those weapons, Winna’s warriors returned to their own village and deposited the seized weapons in Onna’s hut, where the children carried them in bundles to all the other huts so their villagers could use them.
Winna and her warriors did not sleep, but instead rearmed with many more spears for each warrior and with fresh poison on every spear’s tip. They then returned to the receding front lines of the enemy forces to seek out and destroy them wherever they could.
By now, Winna discovered, the enemy had formed up close together in a great mass, each soldier touching the next one over and the one behind so, they thought, that fratricide would be less likely. Winna saw that the enemy’s strategy gave her the advantage, in that no matter how she threw a spear, it would strike a target. So she and her warriors stood back from the enemy phalanx and hurled their spears into the throng. The enemy, thinking that they were being attacked from the inside, began hacking with their swords and spears at each other on all sides, and Winna’s warriors’ spears continued to fall within their ranks while the torrential rains continued to obscure all vision. Winna and her warriors set all the rest of their spears at angles in the soggy ground so that the enemy would be pierced by them whether they advanced or retreated. Then they stood back on all sides of the solid block of enemy forces and taunted them, before retreating to rearm and reengage.
This time Winna rearmed her forces with enemy weapons and
used Onna’s poison on their tips and blades. That way, she thought, the enemy would suspect that their own soldiers were attacking themselves. The enemy forces were where she had left them, only many among them were dead in their places. Winna could hear the enemy leaders shouting at the inside of what was essentially a ring of expanding concentric circles.
Winna disposed her warriors around the outer circle of the enemy and ordered them to hurl their spears in towards its center. Because the weapons came in from all directions and because they killed all those who were at the center of the enemy formation, the enemy suddenly had no leaders in a formation that was under heavy attack. So all order evaporated as night fell, and every enemy soldier set out on his own to survive. As they came upon each other, they fought indiscriminately. They had nowhere to sleep and nowhere to take shelter. After hurling the last of their spears, Winna and her warriors withdrew to Onna’s hut for the night.
Winna guessed that the enemy would be reinforced from the south eventually and that some of the soldiers would have survived her warriors’ attacks of the day before. She sent out scouts early in the morning to gauge the status of forces of the enemy. Her scouts reported that the enemy forces were in total disarray. The leaderless soldiers went around hacking at each other, getting speared by Winna’s traps and discovering in the body count the human cost of their operation. The scouts also reported that a new supply of food and arms had arrived from the south, and that was the opportunity Winna was waiting for.
The first thing Winna’s warriors did was plant a new set of deadly spears in the ground to block the advance of the enemy. Then with a large group of her warriors, Winna surrounded the resupply forces and killed every soldier. As before, Winna’s warriors poisoned the enemy’s food and seized all their weapons. Instead of returning immediately to their own village, they decided to use the seized weapons. They poisoned the tips of those weapons, then set out in groups of four to dispatch as many of the enemy as possible.
By the end of the morning, Winna reckoned that what was left of the enemy had been decimated and their resupply had been reduced to poisoned food. Further resupply for the enemy would inevitably come, but in the meantime, the troops would go hungry, always the worst condition for morale since the beginning of warfare. Then too, Winna had cut off any attempt for the enemy to inform their rearward forces of what was happening, so the main force would have no inkling of what was really happening to their vanguard.
In psychological terms, Winna’s victory was mixed. The advanced force of enemy soldiers was terrorized, demoralized and wandered around in total disarray; however, the main enemy force to the south was totally unaware of their brethrens’ distress. Winna ordered her warriors to set their new set of poisoned spears in the ground in the direction from which reinforcements would come. When this had been accomplished, Winna’s warriors retreated to Onna’s hut to rest and prepare for their next attack the next day.
While her troops were resting and rearming, Winna reported their progress to Ugard and Wiglaff, who had taken positions in the cavern. The men were pleased with the woman warrior’s progress and praised her for her ingenuity and innovation.
She laughed and replied, “Our victory so far as been achieved by the advantage of the rainy weather. Without the enemy having been blinded by rain and mired in mud, my warriors and I would have had to fight only at night against a mobile force on firm ground. Without the rain we could have easily lost many warriors and the battle, and the enemy would have conquered the alliance without even reaching the mountain enclave.”
Ugard said, “Your inspirational tactic was to cut off the enemy’s access to the resupply of food and arms. We’ll have to discuss how that strategy could be leveraged further, since the enemy army has to be resupplied at a great distance, and that’s always a disadvantage in war.
“In the village wars,” he continued, “the warring villages were so close to each other that resupply over long distances was never a problem. Another virtue of your strategy was to keep your troops out of harm’s way when fighting. It’s true that the blinding rain played a role, but you never asked your troops to take extraordinary risks to accomplish their mission. The only female warrior who took such risks was you yourself. I commend you for this, but let me admonish you against taking risks where you have no clear successor in the field. What if you had died?”
Winna looked down. She had no good answer for his question. Reflecting on the implications of her father’s death, the warrior woman trembled. She then thought about the larger meaning of Ugard’s statement, which raised the question of her strategy of killing the leadership of the enemy.
Ugard told Winna, “Sometimes it’s good to leave the enemy leadership intact, because that way the leader can surrender or retreat. Without leadership, the general melee offers no opportunity for an orderly abandonment of the enemy’s mission. This time, your strategy worked out well because the main force was well to the rear, and they’d make the determination to attack or withdraw.”
Winna responded, “The main force was ignorant of what happened to their advanced force.”
Ugard nodded. “In that I see another opportunity for us.”
Wiglaff echoed, “I see it too. We need to do some rapid planning to take advantage of the situation.”
The three discussed strategy until very late that night, and in the early morning Winna departed with her warriors on a new mission.
The rain continued unabated, and Winna’s forces had no trouble circumventing the enemy’s still-confused advanced force as they pressed south to rejoin their main forces, wherever they might be. Winna’s warriors stumbled upon enemy scouts and killed them, and they proceeded until they found and killed the lookouts whose purpose was to guard the main force. Winna and a small group passed through the rain to the enclosure where the leaders of the enemy forces were situated. They planted poisoned spears around the enclosure so that anyone going towards it or coming from it would be in hazard. Then Winna cut the supports that held the enclosure to the ground and withdrew to a safe distance to hear what happened next.
The enemy leaders who threw off the remnants of the enclosure and rushed forward while shouting were impaled on the spears. Those who came to help them were also impaled. Not suspecting their prey to be intelligent or resourceful enough to set the spears as Winna’s forces had, the enemy was completely dumfounded by the new development.
The leaders who survived the poisoned stakes now had to reconsider everything. While they sorted out what to do, Winna and her group discovered the location of the slave compound. This was where the villager men and women whom the enemy had taken prisoner as slaves were held.
Winna easily overcame and killed the guards around the compound, and then she set the slaves free and urged them to flee the area under the continuing cover of rain. She advised them to go south into the area that the enemy had already burned and pillaged and to set up a resistance effort there and interdict all supplies coming from the source of the enemy.
She told them, “Anyone informing on me or my warriors will be killed as if he was an enemy. I promise that I’ll take care of the invaders who’ve already penetrated to the north.”
Winna and her warriors then searched for and found the enemy’s weapons cache. They killed the guards and took as many of the weapons as they could carry with them. They then extricated themselves from the enemy encampment, and they hastened back north through the mud and rain to take care of the remaining enemy there.
They came to the place where the former resupply materials and food had been engaged and found that the poisoned food had been harvested. Continuing, they found enemy soldiers dead in the mud. Those soldiers had died from wounds and from poison. They encountered a few living enemy soldiers, whom they killed, but they discovered that all the vanguard troops of the enemy forces had succumbed. Winna left the soldiers exactly as she had found them as a sign to any reinforcements of what lay in store for them if they dared to march any farther no
rth.
Winna and her warriors returned to their village through mud and rain to deliver the weapons that they had taken from the main force and to report what they had done to Ugard and Wiglaff.
Wiglaff wondered out loud, “Will the enemy desist from fighting and withdraw?”
Ugard told him, “Much more is at stake than a paltry advance force. The enemy is executing a grand strategy, and their assessment would be that an inordinate amount of rain had produced a minor setback. They’ll be back in better weather in a larger force to pick up where they had left off before the bad weather.”
For Winna, this was a bitter lesson. “Then everything we’ve done is for naught.”
Ugard spent a lot of time explaining how an imperial venture worked.
Finally, she seemed to despair, but Ugard told her, “Brighten up. Empires run on money. When it costs too much to proceed further, the enemy will desist, and not before then.”
“So, Ugard,” Wiglaff asked, “what makes it too costly for an empire to continue to wage war?”
“That is a difficult question, son. An empire like the one we are fighting against seems to have all the riches in the world, and their fighting forces are, in effect, inexhaustible. You may kill many of them, but they’ll always put more forces in the field to replace the ones you’ve killed. You can’t possibly match their might and mass in battle. Yet they have masters who fund them, and those masters have many objectives. A few villages like ours might not much matter to them. They could leave us alone for a while, but ultimately they’ll find the means to attack when conditions favor them, and we would not stand for long before we were all either dead or enslaved. Even fighting an incessant insurgency, we can’t last forever.”
The grim reality struck them. They remained silent for a long while.
“Empires have sent some of their best people to confront enemies like us and lost them all, yet they persisted in waging war. Some empires would die if there were no wars to fight and no more villages to seize. It’s just possible for magic to work, but we’ll have to think long and hard about what that magic would be like. For now, the rain is our best weapon. It’ll continue until this phase of the enemy strategy has been broken. Then we’ll have to discover a new way to upset their plans. Of course, we don’t intend to fight the empire itself; that would be errant folly. What we want is for the enemy to stop fighting our alliance.”
The WIglaff Tales (The Wiglaff Chronicles Book 1) Page 6
