Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king-Chapter 1076: Enemy(3)

The sun was midway through its course, pale and indifferent as it always was when the men below began to die. 𝒻𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝘯𝘰𝑣ℯ𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝘮

Below the Bastion, the League’s ranks unspooled in great, desperate maniple of eight men huddling together to carry heavy scaling ladders toward the southern stronghold.

Their first attempt on the main curtain wall had been a massacre of ego; they had marched into the open and were turned into human hedgehogs before a single rung had touched stone. Now, having supposedly learned their lesson, they directed their fury toward the stronghold. It was a more logical target, but logic offered no protection against the malice of people who were fighting to defend their home.

They began to fall and whimper long before they reached the base of the tower. It wasn’t the stone, the arrow, or the sword that claimed them first, it was the very earth they trod upon.

As they charged, the attackers held their shields high, their necks craned upward in terror of the rain from above.

And why not?

They looked to the sky for death, never realizing it was waiting beneath their soles.

Along the approach, the Fox’s men had dug thousands of trou de loup, small, shallow pits barely a meter deep, camouflaged with thin, very thin.... slats of wood and a dusting of dry earth.

The fall itself was nothing. It was the thirty-centimeter stakes of fire-hardened oak waiting at the bottom that did the work.

"My leg! Gods, my leg!" A levy screamed, when a stake had punched through the thin leather of his boot, traveling upward through the delicate bones of the foot and erupting through the top of his ankle in a spray of gristle.

The League’s infantry, mostly commoners dressed in little more than linen britches and chain-cloth over their torsos, had no protection for their limbs.

Were it the Black Stripes on thier place, their steel-sole boots would have perhaps stopped the pike from going through but of course the enemy had no such thing at their disposal.

Of course a foot was not the neck or the chest, so they would theorically survive that, but the traps were not made to kill.

Why after all kill a man, when maiming paid dividens on the long run?

Each of these men would be carried back to the League’s camp to moan through the night, consuming water, wasting bandages, and rotting the morale of every soldier who had to hear their rhythmic, high-pitched sobbing. Without the advanced salves and medicines of the Yarzat apothecaries, most would simply linger in agony until the fever of infection claimed them.

Even better when was such aid was delivered to them in the midst of the battle, as was the case for a young Oizenian soldier who had stopped his charge, dropping his shield to reach into a pit where his comrade lay impaled and thrashing.Perhaps one of his friend, perhaps an acquitance, well it did not matter.

"Hold on, Berin! I’ve got you!" he shouted, clearly knowing the person begging for his mother.

It was a heartwarming moment to be sure, clearly as worthy as the heroes of Nisus and Euryalus sung in the Aeneid.

And that was a gift the men on the walls did not refuse. For a stationary target, was all the best a Yarzat bowmen could ask when he released its arrow.

A bodkin-tipped projectile hissed through the air and took the "kindhearted" soldier squarely in the stomach. He doubled over with a wet grunt, the air leaving his lungs in a sharp puff of red mist. Before he could even register the pain, two more shafts followed in quick succession, one taking him in his shoulder blade, the other punching through his ribs to find the lung.

He lost his balance tumbling face-first into the very pit he had been trying to clear. There was a sickening crunch as his neck met the side of the hole and his face was driven onto the sharp wood alongside his friend. The other scream merged with the other’s gurgling , imparting lesson enough for the other of what mercy and kindness would get them.

They had better left all of them behind when they marched across the border.They could find no kindness in here nor warm fire that wasn’t fed with the flesh of unwelcome invaders.

"Look at them dance!" a Herculean levy screamed, his face red with the exertion of hauling a heavy stone over the edge. "Is that the Oizenian trot? Lift your feet higher, you dung-heeled cowards, you are suns not flowers!"

A shower of stones followed his words,but those came not from warm hands but wooden one. Along the walls there were small catapults designed to launch not heavy stones but a small bundle of them in hemp rope, when they came crashing down into the huddle of men they made minced meat of libs and chest.

One of those bundle had even open up as if to welcome an embrace, it snapped around the head of an Oizenian man, giving it a red hug that opened up his face into a smile that went from ear to ear.

That man’s screams rose for a beat above all other, before going still.

"Your mothers will be weeping for cripples!" a third shouted, his insult punctuated by a well-aimed arrow that took a soldier in the side.

But the mockery and the pits were merely the bloody prelude. Asag knew, as did every man who had ever survived a siege, that the screaming levies and their ladders were nothing more than a distraction, a bloody static designed to mask the real threat. The true breakthrough would not be won by men stumbling into holes, but by the colossal, groaning machines of war that were now clawing their way through.

He shifted his weight, his eyes narrowing as he focused on the largest of the towers. It loomed like a wooden titan, its massive wheels creaking with the sound of tortured iron as hundreds of unseen men strained against its base. It was a moving fortress, draped in raw, wet hides to ward off fire, inching closer with a terrifying, inexorable momentum.

In his mind, Asag could already see the coming seconds play out , he had faced them already at Aracina.

He could almost hear the heavy thud of the iron-shod bridge slamming down onto the stone of his rampart. He could see the gap it would create, a wooden tongue lashing out to disgorge a torrent of armored knights, like demonic baby coming from a rotten womb. He imagined the first wave, not shivering levies, but the League’s elite because that would be their seat, jumping onto the walkway with a roar, their blades thirsting to turn the narrow parapet into a slaughterhouse.

"Ghalrim!" Asag’s voice cut through the screaming chaos of the ramparts like a whip-crack.

Before the name had even finished echoing off the granite, his second-in-command was there. Ghalrim was a man of few words and a iron-clad heart, snapping a salute as crisp as if they were on a parade ground rather than a blood-slicked battlement.

"Orders, Legate?" he barked, his eyes tracking the swaying head of the siege tower.

Asag didn’t answer immediately. He turned his gaze toward the front-line levies, Herculeans and Yarzats whose knuckles were white around the shafts of their spears and maces. He saw the tremor in their knees as the shadow of the wooden titan fell over them. He knew that when that bridge dropped, the first thing to spill out wouldn’t be frightened peasants, but a concentrated tide of steel, the League’s knights, dismounted but clad in the finest plate gold could buy.

Ghalrim saw it too. He had survived the siege of Aracina; he knew the butcher’s bill those towers could present when filled with men who had spent their lives learning how to kill.

Asag turned to Ghalrim, his voice dropping into a low, lethal rasp. "The enemy is about to lower that tongue. When it falls, they’ll vomit their knights into our teeth. They think they’ll pin us against our own walls."

He gestured sharply to the seasoned veterans of the Third Legion, currently held in reserve behind the levies. "Have the levies bear the initial shock. Let the enemy commit their strength to the center, thinking they’ve found a soft belly. But the Third... you put them on the flanks. The moment that bridge drops and the first armored boot touches our stone, you swing in like a closing jaw. You smash their ribs while they’re focused on the front.The rest shall dead with the Tower then"

Asag stepped closer, his visor reflecting the hellish orange glow in his heart "I trust these years of peace haven’t rusted the Third’s iron?"

Ghalrim’s chest swelled, and he turned to the veterans behind him, his voice a roar that challenged the very wind. "Never, Legate! There is no legion more steadfast! There is no wall more unbreakable than the Third!"

’’Beneath the Iron?’’

’’There is hard blood’’

Along the line, the veterans shifted. Their halberds leveled with a synchronized, metallic shing, their spines straightening until they seemed as tall as the towers themselves.

They had made their name known at Aracina fighting against possible hold until the prince’s force relieved them. Not all of them had been present at the place of their namesake, but that did not matter; they may not have beheld the fight, but they were made to inherit the same flame that held the legion up even when their steel became brittle and rusted with blood.

It wasn’t a matter of duty, as much as it was of pride.