And now as promised a special triple lenght chapter for reaching page 100 of this thread !
Vultures’ keep, Armenian kingdom, Caucasus mountains, April 248
Mynasian was tired, Mynasian was terrified, Mynasian was fighting. He and a hundred other soldiers were on the walls, alongside some three hundred civilians who had seeked refuge inside the powerful walls of the city. Luckily the Scythians had not yet had the opportunity to go around the wall and this meant supplies could still be gathered and reinforcements hoped for.
Two young boys had been sent with urgent messages calling for the prompt sending of reinforcements, but Mynasian knew chances of reinforcements to arrive on time were slim. Not only because they were based a few days away, and would take a few days to assemble anyway before they could walk to the succours of the fortress. But he also knew that this invasion was probably not isolated, the other fortresses were probably also being besieged and calling for help, if they had not yet fallen.
Luckily the Scythians had been spotted early enough that the garrisons of the watch towers had had time to ride their horses back to the main keep, doubling the standing garrison. As they had arrived they had been sent to bed to sleep before taking the night vigil, a smart move by the commander that had allowed them to be fresh when time had come to repulse an hasty night assault by the plain dwellers.
A number of peasants had also been able to reach the safety of the walls, the rest being mostly hunted for sport by young warriors looking for easy blood : many had seen the heads of their friends paraded by arrogant scythians in front of the wall, at least until a well aimed ballista shoot had decapitated a cocky young barbarian.
All knew that there would be no pity, no chance of survival if such wild beasts breached the walls. This gave a fire to everyone defending the fortress that kept them moving despite the tiredness. It was now the second day of the siege, and the fourth assault.
After the first night attack led by a small party of courageous men using a rope to climb the wall, the enemy had tried to approach the gate with a large trunk which they intended to use as a ram against the wooden doors. They had soon left under the heavy arrow and ballista fire shot from the towers and walls, not without leaving a number of men dead behind them. The roofed parapet of the crenelated wall and the good design of the towers’ embrasures meant that the defenders were well protected from enemy fire while the Scythians had to walk through difficult and naked ground before reaching the fortress.
Yet the attempt had made the commander of the fortress curse : it was not the Scythian way to attack in this manner, something was not right. His instincts were proved correct during the third assault when the Scythians attacked using shields made of silk on a light frame to deflect the defenders’ arrows. Multiple layers of silk were an efficient way to protect oneself and the shields were well adapted to the Scythians way of living, being light and easy to put together or dismantle for travelling. It also did not need huge amounts of rare wood…
That assault had come to the foot of the walls and of the gate, but here too the barbarians had been repelled thanks to boiling water thrown on the attackers through the pergolae : the machiculations allowed to drop many sorts of contents on top of the attacker, and the water was good to either make the enemy shields too heavy or to scald any exposed flesh…
But more than the shields what had proved the commander’s hunch was the presence in the Scythian command group of five horsemen who could only be Parthian cataphractoi. The attack was visibly part of a larger plan, and that was bad news for the defenders because it meant reinforcements were probably not forthcoming…
Now the fourth attack was incoming, differing from the previous ones by the fact that the Scythians had built large ladders that would allow them to climb the walls and overwhelm their foes. Walking under the protection of silk shields, the ladder-carriers progressed slowly but rather safely toward the wall : only the ballistae managed to do any damages. A lucky hit had even broken one of the ladders, but a dozen more were still incoming…
Gritting his teeths, Mynasian touched once more the hilt of his sword to get some comfort from the weapons’ presence. His first weapon however would be a piece of wood designed to push the ladder from the wall, preferably with a few Scythians on it so that in their fall they may crush some of their fellows. Near him two other men were similarly equipped while two others carried maces and axes. Together they were responsible for the defense of a dozen meters of walls…
The attackers were clearly not scythians horsemen. Were they slaves ? In any case they did not wear the traditional scythian clothes, nor were they Parthians. In fact they did not look like any man Mynasian had ever seen : their skin did not have the right tone, it seemed yellowish, and their face was strange.
They were courageous, or maybe just too fearful of their masters because they kept going on, despite the losses from the ballistae and the occasional arrow… Finally they arrived at the wall, struggling to raise their ladders. A group a bit further had laid its ladder too low and they were now struggling to push it closer to the wall to gain the necessary reach. Another was clearly too short for its task… But the one in Mynasian’s section was of the right size and place at the right spot and half a dozen men were already starting the climb, a knife in the mouth and a sword in one hand…
Pushing his stick against the top rung of the ladder, the young man tried to push the weight off the wall and cause it to fall. Two of his fellow defenders helped him, but unfortunately they could not give the ladder enough momentum, their tool was too short ! Still a man was unbalanced and fell off on two of his comrades, the group collapsing in a tangle of arms and legs.
Already a head was appearing on the parapet, only to be crushed by the mace of a defender, the leather cap used as a helmet by the assaillant no protection from the heavy iron head of the weapon. That man too fell backward, taking the next in line with him in his fall, although this time the falling men did not crush any comrade.
Using his stick as a kind of headless spear, Mynasian tried to unbalance another man, who jumped on the parapet instead, only to meet the point of a sword which carried through his leather jerkin, spraying blood and causing for a foul smell to rise. Yet already another man was at the head of the ladder…
Slowly the press became too much the for the few defenders, and the strange men managed to get on the parapet, a small pocket that had to be crushed at all price. Six men then arrived, led by the commander himself, to help Mynasian and the men with him contain the barbarians. One of the original defender was on the ground, dead, being trampled under the feets of the fighters, while another one had left the fight, his face cut by a blade, one eye pierced, intense pain making him schriek and unable to keep on fighting…
The main chance of the defender was that they were better armored than their opponents, wearing either chain or scale mail, but while it protected them from hits that disabled their enemies it was also heavy and tiring. Still they did not seem to feel the weight on their shoulders and arms as they kept wielding their swords, axes and maces…
Suddenly a small gate leading into the next tower opened and let four other defenders rush the back of the enemy. Throwing themselves in the melee, they managed to reach the ladder where one of them killed another assaillant before using his axe to split a number of rungs, exposing himself to deadly arrows but managing to cause enough damage for the hastily built ladder to break. Yet the courageous man would not enjoy the success for, pierced by at least a dozen arrows, he fell forward, taking three men with him on his way down where his bones were crushed by the impact with the rocky ground.
Still his action had turned the small battle on the parapet and now the surviving barbarians were being killed, six of them dying at the price of another defender dead and one too wounded to fight. Still the assault was not finished, two other ladders had managed to disgorge enough soldiers to make a small foothold in the fortress, so six of the exhausted defenders, including Mynasian, rushed to the next spot.
Here too the fighting was ferocious, and Mynasian knew that some of the sights would give him nightmares for a long time if he survived long enough to sleep… A man’s teeths went flying tanks to a well placed sword slash that also cut through his jaw, while another fell inside the courtyard of the fortress after a mace hit him in the knee, his flight down to heart seeming never to end until the sickening sound of broken bones resounded, unheard in the din of battle, as he touched the ground.
Finally the last enemy on the walls was killed, and the fighting was over, at least for the day. The price paid had been high, twelve soldiers and twenty civilians had been killed, four soldiers and fifteen civilians being too wounded to fight. At this rate they would be able to repel one or two more such assaults before succumbing, and it was not the losses they had caused to their foes, around a hundred men, that would stop them, for there were thousands of them...
Illustration from a Xth century manuscript of the "Historia Caucasiana" by the famed historian Lucius Aenius of Trapezon