Prologue: Exodus (Part 1)

The two armies faced each other across the field, banners flapping in the breeze with a brisk snapping as the spring winds swept down from the mountains, chilling the soldiers to the skin, causing them to shudder uncomfortably. Faraway thunder sounded as dark clouds advanced from the west, blocking out the pale early morning light. Long had been the conflict between the two powers, many the battles and deaths they faced. Now the two armies came once more together, meeting on Falcorea Field, to renew their seven-year struggle with yet another sickening cycle of carnage and pain.

Seven years; had it been so short? But seven years ago the Ismaransi peoples had overrun the Erennin Kingdom’s borders, butchering, pillaging, driven by the hunger of a life spent in the frozen wastes of the north, driven south by a population far too great for the snows and pines to support. They were beaten back; their initial raids and attacks were shattered and sent reeling back across the Erennin borders. But they came back every spring, and it was no longer enough for bands of Erennin riders to guard the hamlets and villages from the marauders crossing the northern frontiers. Battles came to be fought, with large, then even larger armies, growing in numbers and deaths every year. The Erenin were ever victorious, but at high costs. For every ten thousand men only eight thousand would return from every battle. Sore was the weeping of the people as the victorious armies returned, for terrible was the fury of the Ismaransi barbarians, and long and sharp were their fearsome blades, and many were the lives ended with a mere swing of that powerful weapon.

While the greatest armies yet assembled by the two combatants faced one another year after year, all around them the kingdoms neighbouring Erennin lands fell, one by one, to the onslaught of the barbarian tide, no parley or peace being sufficient to halt the fate of enslavement and massacre by fire and sword. Of the Thirty-five Kingdoms fifteen had fallen in the ten years since the Ismaransi had crossed the distant northern mountains and boiled down the slopes in hunger and fury and wonder mixed. Now, while the surviving kingdoms sought to stem the tide of the invaders, Erennia, farthest north of those still remaining, the one kingdom with a strong army remaining, hurled the might of its soldiery at the might of the Ismaransi, it was slowly being surrounded by barbarian fires of destruction. It would not long escape the fate of the others, for its resistance was solitary among a sea of defeats across its borders. Soon, even the greatest of victories would not matter.

King Jodias saw all of this, and was sorely troubled by the imminent end of his people. The seven years of his reign had been spent in the field, leading army after army to their victorious deaths almost from the moment he ascended the throne, the appointed successor of King Armines, who had died childless. A general by training, he had seen his populous empire of a million souls dwindle by almost a third, enslaved by the barbarians and carried north into barbarian territory, or simply cut down where they stood as the raiders set fire to their villages and dashed their babies onto the walls of the burning brick-and-thatch houses. The strength of the armies would not now hold out for long—its supply of men was being bled away through battle after battle, carried away on the black horses of the Ismaransi raiders, lost as swathes of territory were depopulated, its inhabitants fleeing in mindless panic to where no eye or sense could discern, disappearing forever.

But yet, while there was yet an army, battles would still be fought. And where there were yet battles, Jodias would be would be at the forefront, standing with them through victory or defeat. Here on Falcorea Field he stood once again, in the centre of the Erennin line, in the midst of his great army of seventy thousand spearmen, ten thousand archers and ten thousand horsemen. While by far the largest proportion were Erennin, here and there a gleam of strangely designed armour or a differently tipped spearhead could be seen—contingents formed from the refugees of the conquered kingdoms, fleeing to any sanctuary they could find. Many of these were fanatics, ready to die on the field if need be, but who would never retreat once contact was joined with the enemy. These soldiers were almost immune to the fears of battle; almost all of them were veterans. After seven years of constant warfare, almost every able-bodied man past his sixteenth year of age had taken up arms in a battle. Many bore scars from multiple campaigns, the survivors of many battles. That was the way with fighting the Ismaransi; you were fast and learned to fight well, or you were dead upon first contact.

Falcorea Field sprawled as more a plain than a field. Fully three karas by eight, the Field was an ideal battlefield, its ground flat and grassy. Roughly aligned southeast-northwest, on the southeastern end stood the mass of Erennin, their footsoldiers drawn up in a massive phalanx that stretched two karas long, a huge rectangular block, solid and impenetrable. The Erennin wore bronze cuirasses lined with leather, heavily armoured with blue-painted shields bearing the national emblem, two crossed golden crescents with a silver star in between. Their helmets were of bronze, and they rose high, giving the already tall Erennin soldier a fearsome stature accentuated by the crest of feather and horsehair rising above the bronze dome of the helmet. At their sides hung sharp swords with blades as long as a forearm, in scabbards hung from their shoulders. Well-greaved they were, and in their hands they held a stout spear, two-and-a-half-pace shafts tipped with a leaf-blade of iron, sharpened to a razor edge. Some held a second spear in a sheath tied to their shields. In the centre of the phalanx, Jodias stood, among his Royal Guard, ten thousand strong. Their shields and armour, edged with gold, gleamed brighter than the others’ in the dying light of the morning, quickly being dimmed by the swiftly-advancing clouds. Behind the spearmen, the archers stood, wearing only light armour and tunics. Each carried two quivers full of arrows and a long bow that, in trained hands such as theirs, could send an iron-headed arrow over two hundred paces and pierce light armour at a hundred paces. Undoubtedly, every single spearhead, swordblade and arrowhead that the Erennin could get their hands on was coated with ravensbane or tamensdock sap or poytera juice or some deadly poison or other.

The cavalry stood just out of sight on the flanks, five thousand on either flank, their long lances raised proudly, pointing defiance at the sky. They would be armed similarly, a small round shield serving to protect their unarmed side. They wore hardened leather covered in small bronze discs for armour, relying on their speed and power to break into enemy lines. At their saddles were tied bundles of javelins. They stood in serried ranks, led by Jodias’ two brothers, Tamenor and Gerliz. The horses pawed the ground in anticipation, but in perfect communion with their masters, they moved not an inch from where they stood drawn up, in squares that could quickly form into wedges driving deep into the enemy mass.

And there, coming into view through the morning mists, from the northwest the Ismaransi advanced, and their footsteps were as thunder echoing that sounding from the rainclouds now almost directly overhead. The sky was dark, but not as dark as the churning horde of almost a million men and women marching at a thousand different speeds, clustered into groups following their leaders, their drawn swords and their readied spears aglitter like some sinister constellation. They came on with bloodlust and murder in their eyes, and the ground groaned with their passing as they trampled the new-grown spring grass flat with their myriad pairs of feet. They wore no armour; only their chiefs were rich enough to afford any. They carried no bows; they saw archery as a weapon of the coward. They carried no shield; their swords required two hands to wield. Many came half-naked, their bare chests tattooed with sigils of mystic power and invincibility. Jodias scorned those; they had not served them in their battles, and they would fail the barbarians again.

In utter contrast to the silence lines of Erennin, the barbarians were shouting, singing, ululating in their guttural language, interspresed with whistles and clicks. Their din carried across the field, the sheer volume of their numbers causing their battlecries to take physical form as waves of sound that seemed to push the Erennin backward. Passing before the host, encouraging them with shouts and screams, the chieftains of the Ismaransi rode on horses, ten of them on huge black horses half again as large as the greatest Erennin mount. Apart from those ten horses, no other cavalry was to be seen; the Ismaransi fought exclusively on foot.

Thunder soudned overhead; the storm was on them. Darkness shadowed all things into grey as the first droplets fell, the tinkling of the rain on the helmets and armour of the Erennin almost musical in nature, a song of farewell, a funeral dirge for those about to die. The solemn almost-rhythm of the rain gained in complexity and speed, until it was a constant dull ringing, soft and shimmery, expanding an aura of soft sound around the Erennin silence. Spears planted on the ground, bows held at the ready, the soldiers of the kingdom stood in unrivalled neatness and discipline as the rain traced runnels down their faces and armour.