Chapter 30 - the Great Tempering I
While the battle for the corridor was starting, men poured down like water and filled up the meadow at the base of the corridor. Men just like the Bears. Men that could be counted upon, to stand there and fight it out standing face to face with the enemy. No questions asked. If the high king needed them to stand and fight? They would do so. If they were expected to die? So be it, then they would die.
The Rhyshian Lords were waiting in the underbrush. Just as in the past, when the word went out that there might be a fight for the kingdom? Wild horses could not keep the Rhyshian Lords from their duty.
After all the animal husbandry being practiced upon human beings, the Lords were the end result of hundreds of years of selective breeding. The tallest, the strongest, the most agile, the highest character, the coldest blood. There was nothing better the Lords wanted than the chance to prove their mettle. A person could offer men like this a sack of pure gold, or the chance to prove how dangerous they really were? They would refuse the sack of gold each and every time.
The same as every time in the past, when the call went out? It was a simple matter of going around to every BladdenMeister. Who exactly then, are the best blade students. Who is the most nimble and the most agile… who has the coldest blood.
The men thus chosen, were proud to be selected. As far as they were concerned, this said something about them, and about their families, and about their bloodline. It said they had their kingdom's respect. Because, their kingdom came and asked for the very best, and they were offered up.
This here? This… is what we have to offer.
Far from being nervous to be in battle, these Lords could not wait. This, was the best possible use for the VinterBluden most of them had. This, is what they had been highly educated for. So that fools would not be defending the kingdom's front door. So that cowards would not be making decisions from the rear.
The Rhyshian lords were selected through, and the crop of Dark Lords picked out. Now, once the crop of Dark Lords was selected? There was only the final matter of determining who the High Lords were.
The Dark Lords, were a subgroup of the population. Now, it really doesn't matter what group of men you put together. Once you do so? There will be a pecking order. The men will find that pecking order. Who is the smartest, the strongest, the fastest, the most agile, the most nimble, the coldest blooded, the most devious, the most ruthless.
Once all the Dark Lords were together and selected and working out together, a new question emerged. Who, among all of you, do you men select to be your champions. You are all great-men. Now who among you, is the best. Which among you do you respect. Who among you, do you truly fear.
These men, were the highest honored individuals. After the Dark Lords selected their own leaders, all was done. There was nothing left, but to point at the enemy… and say "sic!"
When the time came, the Lords were most of them waiting in the underbrush. They were considered too important to be in the first charge to break the enemy formations. These men were not cannon fodder. These men were a rare breed of hard ass. These men, were the end result of as careful of animal husbandry as their people thought possible. The Rhyshians took their charge seriously. To defend their homeland, period.
The Rhyshians had already been chased out of their own homelands back in the day, at the time of the Roman vacuum. They had been chased out of their new homelands, again, when the pre-Nords they had allied with were put asunder. They had vowed, as a people, they would never run again. They would never again, be chased out of their homelands.
They would instead… stand and fight, no matter what. To the last man, woman, and child.
These were the men that were waiting in the underbrush, to be given the go ahead to move out, and join the skirmish. This was what they had been bred for, this was what they had been educated for. It was time. It was their time.
When the Lords were finally unleashed, they simply started filing out of the underbrush. One after the other. And? They simply kept coming, there was practically no end to them. They headed directly for the battle, and did not falter. In several long single files, they headed directly for the conflict. They walked through it. Any man that raised a sword or any other weapon to them? Wanted to die. They happily obliged them.
After all, they were warriors. Only those men that wished to die, would place themselves in their path. The Lords were held back, until the fall back started. Once the knot of fighting made it back to the base of the corridor? They were to enter the fight. So that just as the enemy was becoming emboldened? Their seemingly good battle fortune would suddenly take a decidedly dark turn, for the absolute worst.
Many carried two swords. Just like Wulfgar did. Because Wulfgar had trained most of them. They were eager to get to it, and once the sign was given they eagerly started pouring out into the battle. Like water being added to any recipe.
Once men like these start to fight, they simply will not quit. Until either the battle is over, or they were dead. They would freely answer anyone that chose to ask them of it, what their motto was.
"We will do it, or, we will die."
Because the Rhyshians had sent out learned men, to find foreign wisdom back in the old days. When the Rhyshians found success and a new homeland, and merged with the pre-Nords and made a new people, they did it again. As they encountered success mingling their abilities and blood with their new lands, they took that success and poured it right back into what had seemed to make them even greater. More foreign wisdom. More scrolls.
They had learned about bygone civilizations. Naturally, some of those bygone people had impressed them. With their customs, with their ways. They had known that a people had long ago lived far to the east and south, and that they had once been a mighty empire. An empire, that the Romans had been so impressed with. And after the Romans had finally overtaken them, over time, the Romans had filched all of their wisdom from these people's heritage.
What better foreign wisdom was there to pilfer, then. They got to pick and choose among what they would have for their own. The scrolls had told them what they themselves had already discovered. That wisdom and education were very important, and would carry a people far.
They learned that warriors and scholars were not to be kept separated, that it was unwise. Everyone was to be educated and given the benefit of wisdom. It benefited everyone. Farmers that knew how to reckon were more valuable, and did their job better. Merchants as well.
The warriors, were no different. Wise warriors had access to many more talents than simply to stand and be brave and be strong. That warriors, once educated, fought even better. They fought stronger, they fought wiser.
One of the most important decisions, was when to fight. When your enemy challenged you, was it a wise time to fight yet. Where will we be fighting. Is it the best possible place to choose to make a stand? You can not always choose these things, yet when you could? It was used to often great effect.
Everyone already knew from the far north-men, that a single determined man can hold a tiny bridge for a surprisingly long time if the enemy was foolish enough to keep throwing men at them, and the men are not trained well enough.
The Rhyshians took it to the next level. Why have one man hold a bridge, when you can just as well choose the place to fight, then have a whole band of men used to greater effect.
Once the enemy formations had been broken up, and the slow fall back reached finally the base of the corridor, where the terrain narrowed… that was the wisest place. The enemy, once broken up, would lose their helmet and charge in, thinking the falling back was a coming victory. It was anything but.
The enemy fell for the carefully designed ploy.
They charged freely into Wulfgar's Sausage Grinder.
The big army of outlanders they faced? Initially started laughing. Big muscular men, many wearing their signature tights and leather blade slippers. Some wore almost no armor, or fairly light armor. These men were nimble as house-cats, and wanted to be able to move.
The laughing ceased as soon as the first few men got their initial salty taste of the Dark Lord's entertainment they were itching to provide these foolish outlanders with. Men who took them so lightly.
The first waves of them, moved easily up and through the front lines, and others were coming in from the sides of the mess that had formed. With all the big-men in armor and all the heavily armored warhorses? These men on foot could advance easily up and through it all. Packs of them surrounded and backed up big-men on the heavy armored warhorses.
When the first of them encountered the enemy? A small pack of them, standing together, simply stood there. Waiting patiently. Cold blooded eyes staring out from emotionless faces. These men did not fight as the majority of the armored Big-men fought. The first men that ran up to them screaming? They simply stood there. The High Lord in the front, stepped forward. A sword in each hand. He easily whisked his strong hand's blade across the man's throat, and blood and gore spouted all over the place. He was dead before he hit the ground, and his men following him all started lunging in and back out. Smaller out-land men started falling like wheat.
Within the space of perhaps a minute, maybe two? There was simply a pile of dead outlanders forming around them. Men jumped up on top of the pile of dead men, smiling. They looked for all the world, like they were having fun. The enemy soon found out, that these men were not to be laughed at, nor taken lightly.
What would seem to be this pack of lunatic's leading champion, calmly reached down and retrieved someone's war ax that had already fallen, after re-sheathing his weak hand's sword. He calmly chopped the head off of the nearest dead body, and picked the head up and held it aloft. The knot of enemy coming for his deadly little game of king of the hill, stopped dead in their tracks.
This terrifying man, wearing of all things… what appeared to be women's dancing tights and what they thought of as girl's dancing slippers, stopped them cold with what he did next. He brought the bloody severed head, up to his own face. Smiled into the face that still wore the look of horror that the man had died with upon his visage. He rubbed his cheeks against the severed head's cheeks, then of all things to terrify his enemies? He kissed both cheeks. Then, not content with the level of respect he was already commanding, he actually quite slowly… licked the bloody head a couple of times.
He stood there holding it again aloft, so these men frozen in fear knew what they now faced. Smiling and laughing, he tossed the head at his new friend's feet. Stood there grinning. Seemingly unfazed by his entertainment. He took his empty hand, and made a grabbing motion that was all too clear to the men rooted in their spot looking up at him.
His hand had motioned… "come".
Then another larger wave of armored fools came rushing at them, and the same thing happened. They had to advance to find enemy willing to engage them. When men on horses came up trying to ride through them, they stepped aside calmly and took out the horse under the men, then dispatched the rider as the horse tumbled down. Went looking for the next man that wished so badly for his own death.
Another High Dark Lord walked out in front of his band of lunatics, and waited for the enemy to surround him from the front and his sides. His men he led were curiously okay with this, and were actually laughing.
When the enemy was about upon him? He started whirling his pair of swords around in a blur of figure-eights, and the smaller outlander men that foolishly had thought his own men were letting him die? Were being quickly slaughtered wholesale. His men were enjoying his display. He was simply showing off for his friends he lived and trained with as a young man. Some of his men were laughing, and others were cheering him on.
Another, obviously bound and determined not be outdone by some of the others? Had gutted a man twice. Now the littler outlander was screaming at his feet, as he simply placed a leather slipper-ed foot on the flailing man's war ax. He reached down, and grabbed a piece of the man's intestines that had spilled out all over the ground right in a steaming pile. He ran with it, stretching out the man's own guts in a long line. Until it hit the end, and it simply dragged the man a foot or two before it snapped.
The disemboweled man still screamed and writhed on the ground, making the most horrible high pitched screams possible. To answer his screams pitilessly? The smiling man quite calmly picked up the trail of bloody intestine. Whirled it around a couple times over his head in a long, slow arc… and flung it at the men standing rooted in horror watching this unfold.
He stood there and regarded the men that were watching. Grown armored men puking down their breastplates. Supposedly battle hardened men shaking like little children facing some monster. Because… as far as they could discern? They were facing a monster. They had all heard tales of how ruthless some of the far north-men were in battle, but nothing had prepared them for a display like this. This was as far as they were concerned, simply too far beyond any nightmare they could envision.
Their own imaginations couldn't even conceive of this sort of thing. When this man's own wolf pack came at them, they turned in horror and found there was nowhere to go. They slammed into their own men and made an even bigger mess of what was already far too gone for anything fortunate to happen.
In the constrained terrain at the base of the narrowed corridor entrance, there was simply now nowhere to run to. Everyone was packed in. These men could not be avoided. By the time their rear flank was engaged? The enemy had long since lost their heart for this battle, and there was no longer any escape.
From long before the battle plan was ever drawn up by men like Wulfgar? They had been told.
Every single outlander that was foolhardy enough to dare to try to come up the corridor? Would die. To the last man.
There would be no retreat.
There would be no surrender.
There would be no mercy.