A Warrior's Redemption (The Warrior Kind) (41 page)

He nodded solemnly, “It will be done as ordered.”

He turned back to his command and I mounted Flin. I made my way through one of the still open avenues through the city to the higher ground beyond it. From my vantage point above and behind the city I had a front row seat to watch the battle for the city take place. I wished that I was able to be down there instead of up here, removed from the fighting. But this was the way it had to be.

I was the leader and it did no good to overly expose myself to either injury or death before it was time for such des
perate actions. I could tell myself that, but my guts ached
within me to be down there doing what I was asking others to do in my place. I contented myself with the knowledge that General Sanjo was an extremely capable leader. His warriors were the best trained in the army. They would make the price of capturing Kingdom Pass a bloody one for the enemy.

The first long ranks of the enemy cleared the summit of the walls and started down through both gaps in the wall. They fell in a shower of arrows as did the ones after them and so on, but they just kept coming getting a lit
tle farther down the slope with every minute that passed by.

Siege apparatuses that had been scavenged from the wall during the night fired their short range pay loads of rock into the undulating line of the enemy that continued to pour up and over the gaps in the broken wall. General Sanjo’s men were putting up a bitter defense at the base of our side of the wall. I couldn’t have asked for any greater effort than what they were doing, with barely seven hundred warriors, against an undulating line of thousands that continuously came pour
ing up over the top of the wall.

Our warriors were falling though. Most of them from archery fire from archers hidden within the wall of shields that kept relentlessly pressing forward over the bod
ies of their slain. General Sanjo had held them impressively at bay for almost a full hour now, but his warriors were down by half with more falling every second.

“Sound the horn for General Sanjo’s retreat!” I barked out harshly, as the bitter taste of watching good warriors die lay heavy on my soul.

They’d heard the call for retreat and I breathed a sigh of relief as I saw the General call off the defense and order a retreat through the city. They retreated down the streets of the city not bothering to put up any kind organized retreat. From the perspective of the enemy it would appear that they were routing in a panic to save their lives, when in reality I knew it burned at the heart of every warrior who was mock fleeing to do so as they would have rather stayed and fought. But they were good warriors and they had obeyed their or
ders, which was crucial.

The regimented enemy formation fell apart as they broke line to chase after our warriors screaming derisively. They forsook an orderly occupation of the city in favor of a tumultuous onrush of jubilation at being the first foreign force to successfully step foot on sacred Valley Lander soil in over five hundred years. This is what I had been counting on and had needed to hap
pen.

Thousands of the enemy poured up and over the gaps in the walls uncontested in their eagerness to claim the city believing our will to fight was broken. The enemy troops rushed heedlessly down the streets in hot pursuit of our warriors. Suddenly ranks upon ranks of the onrushing enemy were cut down in a vicious crossfire of arrows that came from archers in con
cealed hiding within buildings or perched on roof tops along the streets.

The enemy’s advance into the city temporarily halted in the face of the renewed resistance by us in the fight for the city. The decimated enemy ranks swelled full again fed by the endless streaming line of sol
diers coming through the two gaps in the wall. They marched with shields held high down the streets of the city in a formation that could only be described as a mob.

Soldiers broke from the mob into the surrounding houses and buildings in search of the pesky archers that were thin
ning their ranks down considerably. When the soldiers found them, bitter hand to hand fighting ensued, with no quarter given by either side.

An aid to General Sanjo spoke up ex
citedly from behind me, “Sir! The archers in the city are not obeying their orders to withdraw as their positions are compromised!”

“I can see that!” I replied grimly.

“Sir should I try to signal them or do something else to get their attention?”

“Do? Do nothing. Their doing everything.
They’ve made their choice. They know what’s at risk and their paying the sacr
i
fice needed to ensure a greater kill of the enemy.”

The progress of the enemy was slow, but relentless. The continued selfless resistance by the archers was keeping the enemy packed together. They got even packed closer together by the pressure from behind of more soldiers from the wall ea
ger to get in on the fighting and share in the glorious victory that had almost been achieved. They were getting
close to the barri
ers that had been erected at the ends of the streets on my side of the city.

There had to be well over a hundred thousand enemy troops pressed tightly into the city with more arriving every second. I tore my eyes from the steady progression of the enemy mob towards the outer limits of the city and looked back up to either side of the pass where the tunnel gate entrances were. I could see scores of soldiers feverishly working at removing the stones and de
bris that we had put there the night before.

“Fire the city! Start at the end near the wall and then fire the barriers just before the forward lines reach them!”

The command was re-laid and a double line of archers the length of the pass stepped close to their fires and lit their arrows and then in unison they pulled their bows up and released their fiery salvo high into the sky to streak out over the city. Catapults arranged along the entire line quick
ly launched their burdens of oil soaked bales and even entire barrels of oil into the city in close pursuit of the arrows. For several still moments, the flaming missiles arced across the darkened sky to land at the far end of the city.

A murderous uproar flared within moments of impact. The arrows touched off fireballs of licking flames as they contacted trenches that had been soaked in oil near the gaps in the wall. Barrels of oil that had been buried under the streets with only their oil soaked tops exposed ex
ploded into violent fireballs that blew hundreds of soldiers into the air, even as more fuel for the fire rained down from above.

Hungry flames raced through the interconnected houses and the alleyways that bordered the main streets. They had been filled full of easily combustible materials. More barrels of oil exploded within houses, spraying their burning wreck
age out into the packed enemy mobs trapped in the streets.

The massive mob of soldiers huddled in the cities’ main streets tried to avoid the bordering houses that were wreathed in flames.
Soldiers who had been in the houses and were now ablaze them
selves, ran screaming blindly out into the streets catching the men caught there on fire too.

The utter pandemonium only became worse when the continued fire arrows and their accompanying fuel loads landed on top of them turning even the streets into a hellish inferno. Panicked, the soldiers ran to escape the blaze by climbing over the barrier wall at the end of the city, which was set on fire moments before they reached it, making the way through it impassible. They went completely mad in their panic and tried to climb up over it, only to burn up in the attempt.

More seasoned field commanders still on the other side of the wall, having expected a stiffer fight for the city, were not put off by the noise of what they thought was the typical sounds of war issuing forth from the city side of the wall. Their answer to the perceived sounds of resistance was to push even more troops up and over the wall in an attempt to simply overwhelm the enemy. As troops cleared the gap and saw the horror unfolding within the city they had no option but to press forward, for while it looked to be death to go on, it was certain death, if they were to retreat at the hands of their own friends, as the order had been given that all desert
ers were to be killed on the spot.

The continuing pressure of troops coming over the walls left no room for those packed within the burning streets to retreat. The troops being pushed over the walls fanned out along the bottom of the wall that was still free from fire, but the smoke was dense and becoming deadly. Crazed they tore away at the stones blocking the tunnel gates.

The saying that ‘War can be hell’ could easily be applied to the scene unfolding before me. It gave me no pleasure to watch what was happening. The only relief I received was that for every one of them that died it meant that our chances of surviving this war went up. That was all I could allow myself to care about. They had asked for what they were receiving, when they had continually ignored our offers of peace. Instead they had insisted in pursuing our destruction with all the force they could muster. This was war at its basic element, an all out struggle to survive, deploying whatever tactics it took to come out the vic
tor.

General Sanjo rode up to my position, bloody, but thankfully alive. “General I think we’ve all seen enough of fire. With
draw your warriors to the Shrine of Remembrance. I will join you along the way with my men.”

General Sanjo saluted respectfully and withdrew to gather what remained of his share of the army. The bombardment of the city had ceased, as there literally, was no need for more. The city was entirely en
gulfed in flames.

No one caught within it could have survived the fiery in
ferno that gripped its ancient stones as it reduced them to ash.

General Nadero rode up beside me expectantly, “General, you will provide General Sanjo cover with your cavalry for the first several miles, until he is safely on his way to the shrine. Then according to plan you will take your forty thousand cavalry north making enough tracks as you go for a hundred thousand, after that you know what to do. I pray to the Creator that He gives your horses wings, as without your success we are all doomed I fear.”

General Nadero leaned forward in the saddle toward me, “I will be there Roric! Even if I have to run every one of our horses into the ground! I will be there!”

“I hope so, Godspeed General.”

He saluted and rode off into the quickly approaching night.

I waited until he had withdrawn before calling out, “Sound the signal for the wa
ter!”

The horns sounded once more and then off in the distance more horns sounded. Long ago two ancient rivers had carved out what today was Kingdom Pass. Each of the rivers had carved out deeper channels along the sides of the pass leaving the middle of the pass piled up with the debris of erosion. Before the wall had been built the rivers were diverted by the use of dams down alter
nate courses and they now flowed to the sea instead of through the pass.

For the past month those alternate channels had been partially blocked off and the sides of the dams had been raised to accommodate the extra build up in water. The sound of the horns would soon be reaching those gathered at the dams. The already intentionally weakened walls of the original dams would collapse as the remaining key stones were pulled free and the force of the onrushing water would do the rest. Within an hour two carefully sequenced tidal waves would rush back down their old river courses picking up de
bris as they went and smash into the city of Kingdom Pass and the wall beyond it.

Everyone was gone on our side except for the retinue of warriors from Thunder Ridge and my own friends from the arena. We sat astride our mounts on the higher ground at the head of the pass. The flood waters would pass to either side of us into the city beyond. The enemy’s pressed advance
ment into the city had stopped as the field commanders had finally realized that something was amiss with their bulrush and pick up the pieces later strategy.

The many thousands of troops still on our side of the wall that hadn’t been consumed in the fire of the city were pressed into the deeper channeled sides of the pass to either side of the city. There was no fire there and it was still possible to breathe as they were on a lower level than the rest of the city. They could not retreat back over the wall because the heat off the fire was to intense against the wall for them to pass by, so they remained huddled in the corners of the city desperately emptying the gate tunnels of the debris that
had been stacked tight into them. The drama played on and I watched a once proud city burn to the ground.

It was a sight that I would never forget, as the fires consuming the city were now backlit against the darkness of the night. They had to almost be through the debris in the tunnels by now surely. Perhaps our plan of full destruction would not be car
ried out to the fullest in this last stage of the cities’ death throws.

I heard the cracks and booms of the onrushing water then and I almost regretted, as I had with the fire, what would befall the invaders next, but the water was an unstop
pable force, even if I had wanted to renege on the plan now.

The turbulent water plumes swept by our position on either side, one of the sides being slightly ahead of the other. Both turbulent forces of nature were at least thirty feet high and carried a pay load of debris with them. There was a welcome coolness to the air as they passed, which was a relief from the cast off heat of the burning city. The onrushing tidal waters smashed through the obstructions barring its way and swept into the gathered ranks of the hysterically crying enemy, pulling some of them along in the strong current of wa
ter, even as it pulverized many of them where they stood. Those swept along sank beneath the water, as they were dragged down by their heavy armor.