The Sands of Blood - Chapter Two: Acre

[Amman d Stazia]

The vanguard waved acknowledgement to a shout of command and spurred their horses into a comfortable trot.  Their scarred leader barked an order and three of the eight clapped their heels in and raced off, spreading out over a half-mile across the front of the others. Levi noted the movements with approval.  He might not have great experience fighting on land, but he understood the principles well enough.  Throwing out a cordon of scouts was no different to having a keen-eyed youngster on the mast-head.  It gave you a few minutes advance warning of any enemy movements.

He looked behind and shook his head at the sight of the main body.  Armour shone brightly in the first rays of sun.  Horses and men were unprotected, the full heat of the Arabian sun would blast them in their steel and leather armour.  Only a few had covered up with wide brimmed hats and cloaks, and fewer still had a loose blanket or trapper to shade their horse.

Apart from that, of course, the stabbing points of fire that were the reflection of sun on steel were as good as a marching band, as far as betraying their movements to an enemy was concerned...

 

[Amman d Stazia]

for a while they plodded on, Levi began to feel bored and a bit annoyed.  What was the point in this?
A column of heavily armed and armoured men (and women...) dragging themselves through the arid, rocky hills.  They would never trap or pin down the Arabs, on their light horses....

The best they could hope for would be to capture one of the little mud-forts that guarded ravine crossings, river fords or key oases.

But that would leave them exposed, deep inside hostile territory.

Ah well.  For now, it suited his 'outlaw' status to be on the move, and well away from authority.

He would just wait and see what developed....

 

[Amman d Stazia]

The day dragged.  The scouts trotted to and fro, from outcrop to ridge-crest, their horses slowly showing the strain.  After a few hours the scouts swapped with fresh men from the vanguard, and the monotony resumed.

Levi scowled haughtily under the shade of his deep hood whenever the patrol commander looked his way.  The veteran clearly had his suspicions about the unexpected attachment, but since Nightshade and Levi were festooned with war gear and their saddles hung with water-skins, he was not going to complain.

The sun hammered down on the brown slopes, and bounced in agonising white barbs from stones.  The men-at-arms were sweating freely, drops of perspiration falling from purple faces and wrists.  What cloth they wore was damp with their sweat, the metal of their equipment burned too hot to touch.  Occaisonally there would be a grunted curse as some unfortunate scrap of flesh made contact with the sun-baked steel.

Levi was uncomforably hot even with his loose cloak and hood, but he knew just how dangerous the enemy would be to them if they lowered their protection by removing helmets or mail.  The Arabs, he had learned, loved the ambush - they would ride in firing off arrows and then disappear behind a rock or sand-dune.  The light horse-bows might only penetrate mail at close range, but leather and cloth would offer little defence at even 100 paces...  So he sweated a bit, and was glad that he had at least a little shade to prevent the heat becoming intolerable.

The day dragged on.  The sun became a near-invisible white disc against the colourless sky, torturing them with ever hotter rays.  The scouts moved constantly, and always the arms were raised vertical to signal that no enemy was in sight.

The warband moved deeper and deeper into the arid wasteland that was home to their enemies.  Rocky outcrops rose ever steeper on all sides as the trail wound into hills which slowly evolved into mountains.

By late afternoon, relief from the sun came as the trail moved in and out of the shadows of the high and rocky hills.  The heat was however still oppressively stifling, the air absolutely unmoving.

The scouts moved almost sluggishly now, their strength sapped by the long hot day.  Still, though, the arms were raised to signify the all-clear from the rocky slopes above the main party...

 

[Amman d Stazia]

As the shadows lengthened Levi found himself drowsing in the saddle, and being jolted awake by his horse's movements.
The strength-sapping heat, the boredom and lack of action of any form, had lulled the entire warband into a similar lethargy.  Even the scouts barely raised a trot as their horses zig-zagged from one vantage point to another.

At one point Levi shook his head angrily, and pushed the hooded cloak off, just to have something to do.  It was almost as if the patrol had been sleep-cursed, he mused.  The scouts were visible, arms raised in the 'clear' signal, high above the track on the rocky slopes, slopes too steep for a mounted man.  The replacement scouts would need to wait until the other end of this stage before switching with the four of them...

Four of them?  Levi cast his mind back, trying to remember when they had switched from 3 outriders to 4.  Had he perhaps dozed through it?

 

[RalliX]

The Crusader company marched slowly through the arid shade of a long cliff, sweating under the now western sun, which shone a blurry red on the horizon. Joseph had 4 water jugs, two hanging by a lanyard on either side of Leaven. He managed to keep some shade for himself by resting the hood of his black cloak on the butt of his halberd, with his cloak hanging down behind the saddle, creating a black umbrella.

"This place makes we want to be somewhere damper, cooler, somewhere like home." he thought to himself.
Barely anything went on to his knowledge, so he decided to spend the free time he had reminiscing the jolly years back in Britain.

 

[Amman d Stazia]

Levi called softly to the vanguard leader.  The man turned, an irritated look on his face: It had been a long day.

"Do you have three men riding scout, or now a fourth?"  Levi jerked his head ever so slightly up the slope.

The Englishman growled something under his breath, then straightened up and addressed Levi directly.  "As all day, we are maintaining three outriders.  Show me this fourth man!"

Levi tapped his beast's rump so that he suddenly leaped forward to match the patrol commander.  As he braced himself in the stirrups, something howled in his ear.  Instinctively, he ducked and swung himself out of the saddle.  A horrid scream sounded from behind him.  Niz'ad was kicking his feet out of his stirrups, his horse thrashing in agony with four arrows in his neck and belly.

The patrol commander sighed, as if he was enjoying a relaxing ale, but it was dark blood that spilled in a flood from his lips as he slowly slid sideways in the saddle, half-a-dozen shafts protruding from his torso.  The other four men-at-arms were hit equally hard.  One horse lived, but reared so violently that the soldier was thrown from the saddle.  He landed with a sickeningly wet thump, his limbs flopping impossibly.
Two other soldiers hit the ground dead, arrows punched through their leathers in a dozen places.  The fourth rolled free from his dead mount, screaming a curse as his movement caught the arrow in his calf. 

He was no fool, and hauled his kiteshield up over himself before wriggling amongst the corpses of the horses.  Levi and Niz'ad joined him a moment later, their own shields held high.  The wounded soldier howled with sudden agony as Niz'ad, uncaring for the man's comfort, expertly if ruthlessly removed the arrow.  A fresh volley of missiles hammered into the barrier of horsemeat around them, and clattered against their shields.  One arrow nailed Levi's cloak to the dead horse behind him, and Levi was rather disheartened to see it was a long arrow, and the tip had sunk nearly two handsbreadths into the dead horse.

The enemy was close, and their bows were clearly not some feeble weapon...

Ni'zad grunted, tugged Levi's ankle, and pointed back up the valley, to where the main body ought to have been.  A great dust cloud was roiling between the steep slopes, and up the hillsides.  The low rumble of an avalanche came to them.  Levi caught a glimpse of a big rock flying freely into mid-air, and realised with a sickening lurch of his heart that their ambushers had dropped hundreds of tons of rocks from the steep hilltsides...

 

[Amman d Stazia]

Arrows rained down on them for many minutes after that, pinning them, unable to move.

Niz'ad grunted once, and Levi called out to him, but there was no response.

The other man-at-arms reached his head out from under his shield to try and spot survivors of the main body,
"****! There's nobody-"

His words were cut short by a sickening thunk-thunk-thunk, and Levi flinched as a gout of blood splattered the ground beside him.

The arrows slackened, and after a few minutes more stopped.  There came the sound of hooves on the valley floor.

Levi realised that one way or another, he was going to die - so it might as well be on his feet.  He stood, slinging his battered shield in defiant contempt of the enemy archers.  None fired though.  Coming down the valley were about thirty light horsemen, dark skinned under their robes and mail armour.  One, leading the group, wore no armour, no helmet, and carried neither sword nor shield.  Instead he bore an aura of command and authority that screamed rank and title at exceedingly high volume.

Levi addressed him in the broken Arabic he had learned on board ships,
"Well then.  I think you must win, so let the end be fast and clean."

To his surprise, the man laughed and replied in fluent, if accented, High Teutsch.

"Soldier, you are in no place to make demands.  You are the last survivor - those that are not dead in yonder rockfall, have fled to safety.  But fear not.  I am a man of honour.  It will not be said - not even in the Hell to which I send you - that Sal 'ed-Dinn denied a man his chance to fight.  You may choose one of my bodyguards here to be your death, in single combat.  If you win the first test, another will come against you, and so on until either you die, or all my host."

At these last words, he lifted both hands, Levi at first thought it was a mere Arabic gesture, but the tinkling of the setting sun on steel made him glance up - the canyon walls were packed with lightly-armed Saracen warriors.  Thousands of them.

Levi laughed.  It was the only thing to do.

隐藏

probably the end

 

[RalliX]

隐藏

It seems we are charged with finishing this tale.

Sir Joseph Artorious O'Keenan was imaginably, very very disgruntled, after all, who would've known the remnants of the war party that attacked them a few days ago would come back with a mass of reinforcements...and put an arrow in his leg, his right to be exact. Unfortunately, this wound was very deep, probably because he could feel the tip pressing against his bone, and every jolt Leaven put into taking cover, made the wound more painful as the arrow was barbed.
Still yet, Joseph put his best effort into not focusing on more than what is aforesaid, and instead focusing on getting some cover from the rain of metal, wood, and... stone... The solid walls around them quickly becoming a deafening avalanche, and the valley within a gaping death-trap.
  half a minute later
He was originally at the rear of the now scattered patrol, now he, and a few unfamiliar soldiers were separated from the others by several hundred tons of rock. Hundreds of horsemen flooded down the path, their intention plain, finish off the infidels.

One of them, riding at the front called out to the knight in the deep black cloak in English, "You will DIE where you stand crusader!"
Artorious took two long, but again painful, steps forward in defiance, and thrust his halberd upwards with his right hand, and while he did this he released a primal scream that alarmed and surprised the soldiers next to him, but then they themselves echoed it. "WRAAAAAAAHARAAAAAAA!"

So ended, a valiant knight.