Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king

The narrow slit of his visor turned the world into a flickering horizontal ribbon of steel and mud. It had been a long age since Jarza had traded the safety of the rear for the weight of his own boots on the field, reaping bodies with his own hand.

He had feared the years spent hunched over maps and logistics would have dulled his edge, wheezing his battle-acumen into a soft, scholarly thing. Yet here he was, at fifty-one, the heavy iron mace in his hand feeling as light as it had when he was twenty.

There was no nostalgia in the realization; he was perhaps the only old man in the South who did not crave his youth. That had been his dark age, a time of hunger and namelessness. Why crave the shadows of the past when he could linger in the light of the life he had built?All old men must one dreep in slift in the bed under the roof they built.

He was a father now. A brother, an uncle, a lord. What more could a mercenary’s soul wish for than a name worth dying for?

”WEDGE!” he bellowed, his voice vibrating inside his helm like the echo between mountain.

Behind him, the men of the Fourth snapped into position.He stood at the apex, clad in heavy plate crafted specifically for his massive frame, a mountain of burnished steel. To his right his second in command, Thalien son of the Betrayer and yet cut of different cloth from his father , took his position.His eyes, visible through his visor, glowed with a flat, lifeless focus as the Oizenian infantry surged forward like a rising tide.

”Mind your surroundings and do not break the line,” Jarza muttered, the words more for his own peace of mind than the boy’s instruction. He didn’t want to see this one die. Thalien was a good lad; he reminded Jarza of Edric, and he prayed the gods would grant this one a kinder end.

That bastard was a good for nothing just acquianted with the sword better than others. ”I wouldn’t want to carry the bad news back to your mother, boy.”

”Yes, sir! Thank you, sir!” Thalien shouted a bit emberassed from the attention.

”Military leaves are coming after this butcher’s work is done,” Jarza said, his tone conversational even as the ground began to shake and the line came closer. ”Make of that what you will. Perhaps you should find a wife and put a babe in her.’’

”Is that not discouraged for the ranks, sir?”

”That’s for the common legionnaires, and for good reason, they’re too busy dying to be fathers. You’re an officer. Certain privileges are expected with the rank.” Jarza watched the enemy line close the final gap, their faces twisted in war-cries. ”Now, enough chatter!”

He brought the heavy head of his mace down onto the steel rim of his shield. The thud was a dead, hollow sound that seemed to anchor the entire formation to the earth.

”MEN!” he roared, his voice a landslide. ”The Oizenians clamor for a taste of victory! Give them the taste of the mud instead! ON ME!

FIRST BORNS?”

’’FIRST GLORY!’’

The men of the First gave a singular, throat-tearing cheer, a wall of iron following their legate straight into the teeth of hell.

The ground was a treacherous slurry of black muck and cooling blood, forcing men to hurdle the tangled corpses of destriers and knights, the grisly fruit of their earlier harvest. Beneath a sky that looked like cracked slate, the Legions of Yarzat braced for the impact.

Jarza’s formation was a wedge, designed to bite deep and fast, turning the infantry’s lack of horses into a concentrated, piercing thrust.

He raised his mace, the iron heavy with the promise of the grave. ”YARZAT!”

The apex of the wedge, spearheaded by the Legate himself, smashed into the Oizenian shield wall like a hammer hitting glass. The initial shove was a brutal, airless struggle of wood and bone, but as the Yarzat men found their footing, they went to work with their short-swords and maces.

They swung with the mechanical rhythm of the training field, but here there were no straw targets. Instead of hay and burlap, their steel found grey matter and teeth.

A spear thundered against Jarza’s shield, the vibration rattling his arm with a force he would never admit to a living soul.

He ignored the numbness, returning the favor with his mace. He shattered the shoulder of a boy who looked barely old enough to shave, then snapped his weapon upward, the iron head making a violent ”kiss” against the helmet of another, collapsing the steel into the man’s forehead.

He wasn’t twenty anymore, but he could fight and fuck as well as one.

His seed was strong.

A mace caught him in the ribs as if to punish him, the blow nearly stealing his breath. He grunted, tasting copper, but realized his plate had held.

The ribs at least didn’t give way, he realised at last when he turned the man’s chin into a red paste.

He felt no pain when he did. No lasting damage.

He shoved the thought back, and let his mind go on the strategy from that little he could see,

The Yarzat center had sheared through the Oizenian line.The wings of the wedge only now making contact while Jarza’s spearhead was already buried deep within the enemy’s ranks, piercing them like a groom claiming a reluctant bride on their wedding night.

But Jarza’s eyes, squinting through his visor, saw the truth the common soldier could not.

The Oizenians were a sea of iron, their numbers dwarfing the thin Yarzat line. For every man he struck down, three more seemed to rise from the mud to take his place. The wedge was a gambit of terror; they were outnumbered so heavily that harming the body of the enemy host was not enough. They had to destroy the mind.For that they had to break the Oizenian spirit before the weight of sheer numbers turned the tide.

”THERE IS HONOR IN THE SLAUGHTER!” Jarza roared, his mace weaving through the air with a ballerina’s deadly grace. Every ”dance” claimed a soul, every rotation of his wrist sent a man to the mud. ”KILL THEM ALL! LET THE GODS JUDGE THEIR SOULS, AND LET YOUR STEEL BE THEIR MESSENGERS!”

His men cheered, emboldened by the sight of their mountain-of-a-Legate carving a path through the Oizenian levies.

The fought went on.Something whizzled past the commander’s head. Perhaps a sword or an arrow.

Something whizzled again and followed with clinking sound from his helmet. This time it was a sword.He felt it.

To hell with that.

He gazed down at the culprit and smashed the front of his shield on him. It came right on the face. He stumbled back on the sea of men behind him. Legs pushing him down , kicking him as he uselessly tried to rise.

He fought his way through three others before he got the satisfaction of putting him down with his own hand.

He breathed out, not realising he had been keeping it in. That was foolish, especially now as he felt the first heavy tug of weariness in his joints. His lungs burned, and the mud seemed to grow stickier with every passing minute.

He may have not reminished of his youth, but he still envied the lungs he had once.

They were pushing the Oizenians back,he realised that fact well enough, but the enemy was an ocean, and even the strongest wall eventually wearies of the tide.

How cruel a battle, that numbers could do what strenght of souls could not. How unjust.How sad.

It was only a matter of time.

After all, quantity had a quality of its own.

--------------------

The battle grounded on, a relentless mill of iron and flesh reaping the bloom of a generation.

To the prince standing at the center of the storm, the passage of time had become a distorted. Minutes felt like hours; a single heartbeat of silence between the clashing of steel was an eternity of tension.

He felt like a man frantically emptying a sinking boat with a leaking bucket. He ran his few remaining reserves like a gambler playing his last coppers, patching holes in the line the moment they appeared.

He ordered a sub-centurio back to catch their breath only to throw them forward a moment later when the Oizenian threatened a breakthrough. He withheld from the center to reinforce the wilting left, robbing one part of his soul to save another.Whatever thing he patched caused an hole to go on another.

But with every shove, the bucket grew lighter, the iron rusting and giving way. The ”victories” they had won, the shattered cavalry, the broken first wave, felt increasingly like expensive luxuries they shouldn’t have afforded.

Every Oizenian corpse was replaced by two more, while every Yarzat soldier who fell was a gap that could never truly be closed.

His mind was a map of fraying threads.Each in his own time snapping away.The entire web growing weaker from that single loss.

He spoke, he gave orders, he sentenced men to their deaths with a nod, and pulled others back from the brink with a shout. He was the architect of their survival, but even the finest architect cannot build without stone.

Then came the moment the well ran dry.

He turned around to give the last. But there was no more.

”We have no more reinforcements,” His own voice sounded foreign to him , hollow, as if the words were being spoken by a ghost.

The messenger Jarza had sent, a boy with a face caked in soot and dried blood, he had probably fought like mad being sent back to beg for aid and now... he looked up at his Prince as if Alpheo had just announced the end of the sun.

There was something in those wide, trembling eyes that was more humbling than a thousand sermons on the fragility of man.

The boy saw a man who had run out of miracles.

He was no son of a god. He was human, and the world was hammering that truth into his ears with every agonizing step his lines took backward.

The push was slow at first, then inexorable, as the weight of the enemy infantry began to tell. More men died for his dream, their lives spent like the cheapest of commodities in a market that never closed.

Whispering that inexorable and dark truth, he had always known.

In war human life was the cheapest commodity.

He had given the last of the Third to bolster the Hounds’ struggling flank. He had sent half his personal guard , mounted, to bridge a breach near the left. Now, when Jarza’s desperate plea for aid reached him, Alpheo looked at his empty hands.

He had nothing left to give.

Just...nothing.

Heart drummed louder and louder.Chest becoming heavier and tighter.

He looked down at his gauntlets, stained with the mud of something he had tried to forge from nothing. The men surrounding him tried their best not to pin their anxieties upon him, but he could feel their hope leaning against him like a collapsing wall.That was the thing about heroes no?When they run out it was the end.

From the end another man on a charger rode closer. Another request for reinforcement no doubt?What was it now?Left?Right?

What hope did they have? What hope did he have? He had done his best. No one could fault him for the grit he had shown or the traps he had sprung. There was only so much he could give....

The thought crept into his mind like a cold, slick serpent, whispering of things a Prince should never hear.

A retreat.

Alpheo’s gaze drifted back toward the charred, skeletal remains of the bridge he had ordered burned. He could call the signal. The legions were disciplined; they would hear the horn and they would break, not in a rout, but in a desperate, lung-bursting sprint for the southern crossing.

It was kilometers away, but if they ran now, if they abandoned the slow and the wounded, if he sacrificed a few sacrificial rearguards to be butchered in the mud... he could escape.

He could live.

Wasn’t that the ultimate wisdom? He had built this entire principality from the dust of a mercenary’s boots.

He had climbed from the gutter to a throne. If he was alive,he could still do it; if he fell here, in the muck of the Lampis, it all ended.

History was a graveyard of ”heroic” fools, but it was written by the survivors.

Why should he be the one to stay and drown? He was just a man. Beneath the plate and the silk, his heart hammered with the same pathetic, frantic rhythm as the lowest levy. He wanted to feel the sun on his face again. He wanted to taste wine that wasn’t seasoned with ash. He wanted to live.

Give him peace and he would forever deny war. He did not want his.

The urge to turn his horse, to spur it away from the screaming iron and toward the safety of the horizon, was clawing at his insides, scouring every foolish notion of bravery that he could have entertained.

Men looked at him, watching, awaiting.

He felt the weight, the massive weight of their expectations, it felt like a noose cloosing in as he walked toward the hangman, people smiling as if thinking he could somehow fly away from the rope.

But the silence of his commanders drew his eyes back. He felt the weight of a dozen stares, fearful, pleading, or hollow. Yet, of all the eyes in the world, the gods, in their cruelest humor, directed his gaze to the only ones that mattered.

He looked at Basil.

His son stood there, a boy dressed in the trappings of a man,iron links framing a boy’s face, pale and fearful as all children were when they realised how cruel the world was.

He wasn’t looking at the enemy; he was just looking at his father. There was no judgment in the boy’s eyes, only a terrifying, absolute trust. He was waiting for the word.Some smart one,some incredible order to reiverse the situation.

He was waiting for Alpheo to be the giant the stories promised, the one he uncle made it out to be, the great man his legions spoke of.

Did he think he had some sort of plan?

From the looks of it he wasn’t the only one.

THey still believe in me, he realised.

Even now as death was reaching down for them.

In that moment,he felt a shame so profound it burned hotter than any fire,hotter than that fear. He saw himself through his son’s eyes: a man contemplating the betrayal of every soul who had bled for his name today and every other.

Spitting on the life that had died for him. Pissing on the memory of the one whose death made it all possible.

He saw the cowardice he had just tasted, and it felt like vomit in his throat. How could he tell the boy to trust in the man who would leave his own people to be slaughtered so he could skulk away in the dark?

For what? he asked himself, the thought a bitter poison.For what would he sacrifice all of that?

If he ran, every breath he took thereafter would be stolen. Every morning he woke beside his wife, he would see the unspoken accusation in the set of her jaw. Every time he looked at Basil, he would see the ghost of the boy who once believed his father was a giant.

He would live, yes, but what life would that be?

Would he withheld death if that meaning he would be a man who toiled in the mud of some foreign land, washing dirt from his hands instead of blood, bowing his head to lesser men so they might let him survive another day.

He saw the vision of what he had denied for now with clarity: a life spent as a slave to his own fear. His feet would be bare and sore from the stones of a master’s road, and though his ankles might be free, the shackles on his soul would clank with every step.

Is that what you want to be? the voice in his head hissed, dripping with a loathing that made his skin crawl. A shivering dog that outlived its pack?

Is that truly who I am?

”No,” he whispered into the wind, the word small but absolute.

No.

It was not.

This is not who I am, he realised. This is not who I want to be. I want, yes.... I always wanted to be a father, a husband, a friend.

Not a prince. Not a king. Not an emperor.Not a god

Well he wanted them but not as much as the first.

He didn’t want to wield steel and eat the sorrow he caused.Not anymore.Who would wish for something so hard?The one that craved for power, was the boy who had nothing and felt the word unjust for that.Pointing at everything and asking why that was not his.Why was he at the end of whips?Why was he starving?Why couldn’t he look up at the sky admiring their beauty, instead of laying down in the dirt with the worms for that few hours of sleep before a new hellish day would commence?

Why couldn’t he have what other had?

But now he had it all, was it a worthy exchange to see it all crashing down for what?Power?A crown?More riches?To rule over people he would never see?

What use were those now when faced with what truly mattered?

And he truly saw that truth in the eye of his blood.Framed by that innocence he adored.

A father.