Bees In The Honey

He saw the slightest glint of metal from across the valley, their signal to prepare, and offered his own quick glint in the midday sun. Sheathing his knife, Ranger Captain Grambel checked his bowstring one last time. It should have been in perfect order, he’d checked it at least four times today, but on this last inspection he saw it–the smallest of burrs attached just below the string nock. It was a little thing, and he pulled it off all the same.

His company of rangers lay amongst the trees, hidden and well prepared. Others lay clustered where the valley narrowed and their mounted foe could only march two abreast. The first vestiges of dust billowed down from the east, ushered forth by a gentle spring breeze and the haste of their enemy. Grambel watched the darkened tan clouds rise up over the trees, unease rising. The cloud was larger than expected, seemingly rising and merging with the white billowing clouds in the blue sky far above. Still, the enemy were fools for letting their movements be so easily detected. Grambel assumed they wanted to draw the Palagirans out into a pitched battle, their own form of revenge for the defeats of old. There were too few of his own men remaining to fall for such folly.

He shook the thought as little more than prebattle nerves. Three hundred bows lined the valley and two more companies of spears lay ready to close both mouths of the valley in a vicious pincer. This was a good plan. It would be enough.

A flock of birds took flight across the valley. The beat of enemy hooves drew ever closer, and Grambel felt the confident unease settling amongst his men. Some tightened their cloaks. Some gave their bows a final check as he did. Still others sat even more rigid in their perches amongst the birds and branches. He looked skyward. No vultures circled. More birds took flight to their north and south, driven to the sky by the oncoming horde. They would fill the sky before moonrise.

He sighed under his breath, forcing the last vestiges of air from his lungs. They thought they’d won a reprieve last spring. That had been a great victory on the Plains of Hilonar–Grambel remembered the mounds of dead, friend and foe alike. It was said the Taritaran’s learned ferocity by coupling with their beloved horses and herds. Grambel saw their anger and malice firsthand, a coming together of savage ferocity and animal survival. Before he witnessed it, he put little store in the stories. After, he thought they didn’t do their foe enough justice. Most of all, he remembered the screams of the defeated survivors. Their fate was sealed the day they left their mother’s wombs. Such was the way of the world. Thousands filled those fields and he felt for certain the scourge from the east would lay in wait for a few years at least. His people needed it. Fields lay overgrown and underharvested while children starved in the marble lined streets of Palagira. War and plague decimated their once proud strength. They needed to evolve, learn. They could not risk meeting the horse lords again on the open plains.

It fell to Grambel and his band to keep those who remained safe. He had no intention of letting more of the horse lords trample across their homes, and searched long for the ground of his choosing. From those few that they captured after the Plains of Hilonar, he gathered that this valley was their path, the arrow into the heart of Palagria. Grambel would be his people’s shield. Elanor lay at home, his son Malibor at her breast. They had named him despite the priest’s warnings, for doing so before he survived his first winter was inviting misfortune. He cleared his mind. He may fight for them on this day, but in the heat of battle their love might prove a dangerous distraction.

The sky darkened as billowing clouds floated closer ever so gently. Any other moment, it would have brought Grambel a sense of calm, of reprieve as the sun baked his skin and sweat coated the small of his back. Now, it made the moment all the more menacing.

Fear tugged at his collar, grating against his sun-raw flesh. Something was wrong.

They entered the valley. Thousands of beasts stampeding through the dirt and grass of the floor below. Sand and dirt obscured all as the cloud flowed into every nook and cranny within the valley Wiping the grime from his eyes, Grambel tried to signal the attack, to signal anything to his men positioned all around him.

It was useless. The dust clogged his throat. Fear gripped his heart as Grambel watched the herd of animals pass, thousands strong and every single one…unmounted.

“To Arms!” He screamed, realization striking him, stealth and caution abandoned, his throat red.

It was too late. They tracked the wrong foe.

And then their enemy was upon them, appearing as if out of the very wood of the forest. His men fell from trees pierced by arrows and spears. Screams echoed, though he could not decipher from where or from whom.

As Grambel attempted to level his bow at a hulking figure at the base of the tree besides his perch, fingers wrapped around his calf, and with a strong swift tug, he was falling.

Falling.

Leaves and branches bit against his face and his hands scrambled along the bark in a vain attempt to find purchase.

Grambel felt the smash of a branch against the back of his skull, and all went black.

***

As he stepped from the woods, Haggund, the First Horse Lord of Taritaran, returned the signal blade into the bloodstained scabbard. The scabbard’s previous owner never even sensed Haggund’s blade as it slid between his neckbones. The returned signal gave away their enemy's position, and his men did the rest of the knife work. The lack of arrows flying his way told Haggund all he needed to know about how his men fared.

They called him a fool for not meeting their enemy head on. That was his people’s way, they said. Haggund also remembered the last time his people came this way to reclaim their ancestral lands; the arrow he took to his arm kept him from the foolish slaughter of Hilonar. How had their way treated them on those fields?

Now, Palagira’s shield lay broken, and Haggund wondered if he would suffer the Palagiran’s surrender as the Palagirans once suffered his own people’s surrender.

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A/N:

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