As the Romelians were fond of saying: if they bend the knee, help them rise. If they fight, give them steel and blood, and let them keep both.
The men could scarcely believe they were truly to fight the Arlanians, and the thought set them boiling with anticipation rather than fear. A victory meant loot. It meant gold once the capital made its inevitable surrender, and it meant slaves, and slaves meant coin once they made it to a proper town.
They would have been well enough satisfied with the tribute.After all who would it complain of easy loot?
But since the Arlanians had chosen to come out carrying steel, well. Steel they would receive, and steel they would give in return, with interest.
"Forward, men!" The officers barked their commands, voices cutting clean through the din of the marching host. "They are cowards, the lot of them! One good push and they'll crumble like dust in your hand!"
Shields locked. Boots pounded the earth in perfect rhythm, one great animal with ten thousand legs.
The battle had begun with the slowing moving lines.
"Hold the line!" another officer bellowed. "Shields up! March slow, march steady! The man who runs ahead dies ahead and we are poorer for it!"
The plan was simple to the point of insult. The enemy lacked any proper cavalry force, a crippling weakness in open country. The heavy riders, the dreaded clibanarii, needed only to wait for the right moment, then storm the field and shatter the enemy flank in a single devastating charge.
All the infantry had to do was hold and keep the enemy well-occupied.
"I'll mount your daughters while you watch from hell!" jeered one soldier, drawing laughter from the men around him.
"Brown or black, the worm ya'll all get!" another cackled.
The insults came on like weather, shouted across the shrinking ground as the Romelian ranks advanced step by measured step, steel glinting under the high sun.
Ordinarily a battle would open with an exchange of arrows and javelins, a softening before the true work began. Today was different.
Today, at the front of the Arlanian formation, stood a company the emperor himself had sworn before witnesses to destroy, which then transformed in bloody order to the lower ranks.
Then it began with the long note of a horn.
The Arlanians loosed, and the sky went dark with a storm of death. The shafts whistled down like a thousand hissing serpents, descending upon the advancing ranks without the slightest interest in who they found.
The Romelian infantry had no choice but to press forward with shields raised as the first wave found flesh. Screams tore through the line. Some men dropped instantly, clutching at their throats, their lifeblood soaking away into the dirt before they had finished falling. Others staggered on with shafts through their limbs, teeth grinding, forcing themselves another pace and another.
There was no stopping now. There had not been since the horns.
"My leg! My leg!" a soldier howled, clutching at a bleeding thigh.
"Those bastards got my shoulder!" another snarled, snapping the shaft off short and leaving the head buried where it was. He did not stop. He could not stop. The only men permitted to turn back were those too wounded to stand, and even then, if the wound proved bad enough, turning back only meant meeting the axe behind the lines. Between a slow rotting death at camp and an arrow in the gut, the men chose the arrows every time, and said so openly.
"You fuckers!" bellowed another, rage drowning out the pain as he forced his trembling legs onward. "I'll see your women impaled properly before the week's out!" He bit down hard on the inside of his cheek, using the smaller hurt to smother the larger.
And then the real rain came.
Javelins. Axes.All sharp things that tore flesh apart with a sickening ease. Unlike arrows they could not simply be swatted aside on a shield rim. Once they found their mark they stayed in it, and took the shield down with them half the time.
"Suck on this, you bastard!" a mercenary on the Arlanian side roared as his javelin punched through a soldier's chest and pinned him to the dirt like a moth to a board.
"Right in the neck, ehehehe," another cackled as his axe buried itself in a collarbone and split skin and bone apart like kindling.
"I've more impaling left in me! Come on, then! Come and have it!"
The mercenaries were no soldiers and had never pretended otherwise. They had no discipline, no polished armour and no elegant war chants passed down from anybody's grandfather. What they had instead was experience. Bloodstained, hardened, wholly ruthless experience. They killed for gold, and today there was a great deal of gold to be made, standing in neat rows and walking toward them.
By contrast the imperial infantry was little more than a gaggle of levied peasants, untrained men hauled off their fields and shoved into the ranks by lords who needed bodies and did not much mind whose.
Long lost were the traditions of the legions commanded by great men, the end of an era always proclaimed the start of the new cultures and traditions. So out where the legions and in were the levied forces of feudal nobles.
Soon enough the difference would be made plain to everyone by steel.
No more projectiles. No more distance left to cross.
The gap closed.
The Romelian soldiers braced and formed their tight wall of shields and spears, heeding the strategy their ancestors had handed down across the generations in six words: stay close to your companion, strike with the pointy end.
Metal clanged on metal, a deafening chorus as the two sides met and folded into one another. The imperial method was simplicity itself. Step forward, stab, step back. Hold the line. Keep the rhythm. Let the spears do the labour and let the enemy tire himself throwing men onto them.
But today their enemy was no ordinary foe.
Standing in the centre of that field was the Order of the Betrayed, a ruthless band who had made their fortune spilling imperial blood and who fought the empire wherever and whenever they could arrange it. They were known to offer discounts on their contract for the sheer pleasure of killing Romelians, and were known to mean it.
Which meant they knew exactly how the Romelian line worked, and exactly how to break it.
Clad in thick armour, gripping axes and heavy maces, the mercenaries sneered as they came on. Before the levies could build the space and the momentum their spear thrusts needed, the mercenaries were already inside it, chest to chest, too close for a spear to be anything but a stick.
There was no room to stab and no room to fall back. There was only chaos, and blood, and dying.
The battle dissolved into a savage melee.
The mercenaries moved like madmen let off the leash, some casting their shields aside entirely to take an axe in either hand, hacking through flesh with the bored efficiency of butchers on a long shift. The levied peasants, who had never seen real combat before this morning, crumbled beneath them, mangled and gutted and torn apart like animals caught in a mill.
For most of them it was their first battle.
For the men killing them it was simply another payday, and not an especially hard one.
"Gods help me!" a soldier screamed as his shield was ripped clean out of his grip. A blade flashed once in the sun, and then came the wet, final sound of steel meeting meat.
"Mother!" another sobbed, courage deserting him all at once, his legs shaking beneath him as warm yellow ran down his thighs and soaked into the bloodied sand.
The cries of the dying mixed with the clash of steel, the crunch of bone collapsing under mace heads, the thick squelch of axes cleaving through flesh and stopping somewhere inside it. Heads and limbs were sent flying loose as though they had been no better attached than twigs. Those knocked to the ground found no mercy waiting down there, only the trampling boots of their own comrades pressing their broken bodies into the dirt.
And yet.
For every man who fell, two more surged forward to fill the hole he left. The tide of bodies was relentless, and even the fiercest mercenaries, seasoned killers who had spent whole lifetimes carving their way through other men's armies, cannot hold back an ocean forever. No one can. The ocean does not tire.
Slowly, then not so slowly, the sheer weight of numbers began to tell.
Even as they cut men down by the dozen the mercenaries found themselves giving ground, step by bloody step. Their axes grew heavier in their hands. Their arms burned. The gaps in their ranks opened wider and stayed open longer whenever one of theirs fell.
They had slaughtered a great many.
But the enemy simply kept coming.
———-
"It would seem the battle is not going our way."
The man who said it wore royal golden armour with the emblem of the sun upon his chest, the herald of the Arlanian royal house. He surveyed the chaos below with the calm of a still lake at dawn, seemingly unmoved by the sight of his own army being pressed slowly backward across the sand. He might have been watching a play from a good seat, and finding the second act a little slow.
His skin was the colour of caramel and seemed to glow beneath the sun's rays, cutting a striking figure against that backdrop of dust and glare. His long blonde hair fell to his neck and moved in the desert wind like strands of beaten gold.
His face boasted handsome features unmarred by blemish or scar, and the prince was a pleasure to the eyes of men and women both, a fact he had never once been permitted to forget.
"May the sun bless his sons and blaze upon our enemies," he murmured, raising his eyes toward the sky, and dropped them again at once when the light proved too much even for the devout.
Though still in his early twenties, no one would say Arzalat to be a petulant boy, much less unproved nor unambitious, which was one of the many reasons he had won the loyalty of certain nobles who saw in their standings something that had to change. Considering the kingdom he stood to rule, that was no small feat. In Arlania, loyalty was a thing men rented by the season.
One of those nobles, Yamier Marza, approached his liege now. His armour glistened in the sunlight as he bent.
The prince appreciated that a great deal more than the man knew.
I need blades, he thought, watching him come. Not snakes with their fangs full of poison.
"My prince, the Betrayed are being pushed back," Marza began, concern plain in his voice. "Should we go ahead with the plan? I fear they may break if this continues much longer."
Prince Arzalat's gaze held steady as it met the older man's. He spoke only a few words, and they shook Marza to his core regardless.
"Will you uphold your oath once again, my good man?"
Marza knelt, bowing deep, his commitment evident in every line of him.
"Always, my prince. In this life and in the next."
Satisfied, Arzalat raised a hand.
"Very well. Take command of the two Azabs and flank the enemy from the right."
Then he turned at once to his left, giving his attention to another loyal retainer, Sheri Nasaah.
Nasaah was a man in his late forties, as Marza was, though where Marza kept his hair Nasaah had none at all, a lack more than compensated for by the length of his beard. His skin was caramel like his prince's, for while most of the common folk of Arlania were black in hue, the nobility ran to a lighter brown, being rather less of Arlanian blood than they were cousins to their neighbours in the Sultanate of Azania. It was the sort of thing nobody mentioned and everybody counted.
"Nasaah," the prince called, his eyes fixed upon his trusted commander. "Take one Azab and go to the support of the Betrayed. See to it that they do not break."
Without hesitation Nasaah bowed deeply and moved off at speed to carry out his orders.
The last of the Azabs held in reserve received their instructions from the prince's own mouth. Another noble was given the left, to charge in and close the jaw, and so sandwich the imperial host between two fierce attacks and let the weight of the empire work against itself.
Every man in the upper camp understood what they were truly doing. It was a bet, and a long one. If they won, Arlania might at last ascend into a golden age in which Arlanians decided for themselves how they would live. If they lost, nothing at all would change, save that all of them would be dead, which was a change of sorts to the men themselves.
Every noble who had followed Arzalat had come to see in him the one man who might change the fate of their country.
He was the one who could break their shackles and pry loose the tight fist of the empire that had held them for generations. Though of course, should he succeed, another power would rise into the space left behind: the mighty Azania, patient and smiling and never far from their coasts.
Many were willing to trade the one for the other regardless. But for the most part they felt a stronger kinship with the sultanate, sharing blood and tongue and the shape of their own faces with it, than they ever had as pawns in the hands of foreign oil drinkers who could not pronounce their names.
And after all, it was Azanian gold and Azanian support that had bought them this chance to meet the emperor in open battle at last.
Without it, the day would never have come at all.