Prolouge
The Northern Frontier, c. 4689 A.O.

“It’s been quiet, hasn’t it?” Murad peered cautiously into the hilly forest ahead of them. The dark trees revealed nothing, hiding anyone and anything. He knew all too well how suddenly the Parthians could sneak out of those woods and ambush the Ottoman armies. “A bit too quiet, if you ask me.”

“Why would you think that?” Abraham asked, snorting. “We’ve crushed the Parthians time and time again. Perhaps they’ve finally learned their lesson and are staying beyond The Veil, like they ought to be, and we’ll never hear from them again.”

Murad continued to scan the woods for something, anything that would hide a large force of Parthians. Nothing, it seemed, should hide a force sufficient to destroy the camp. He hoped. Only ten thousand archers stationed this far north, and who knew how many Parthians? “I doubt that,” he said, shaking his head. “North of the Veil is only the Black Forest. How would you like to stay there, knowing there are rich, bountiful lands just a few hundred miles to the south? Wouldn’t you head for the frontier, hoping to sneak into the Empire?”

Abraham grunted. “They’re all craven fools. They wouldn’t dare come south. They’ll know we can wipe the floor with them.” He patted the quiver that lay beside him. “Our bows have stopped them time and time again. Remember the last encounter we had? Only ten thousand of us, the elite of the elite corps of archers. They had, what, forty thousand, all in all? And we crushed them, tore them, grinding their remains into the ground.”

Murad shivered. The Battle of Qar Pass was not one he remembered fondly. He anxiously run a hand over his arm. It still tingled. Under the leather jerkin that he wore, he knew, was a deep scar that still looked almost like a fresh gash, still after three months. A present from a Parthian axeman who had just caught him with the tip of it. An inch further forward, and he wouldn’t have had an arm anymore, and perhaps lost his life from infection.

“You forget,” he said significantly. “There were two battles that day. Qar Pass and Nogai Pass. We were lucky. Qar Pass might’ve been a victory, but what about Nogai Pass?”

Abraham looked a bit confused for a moment. “So what? The Parthians overrun that group of raw recruits from Istanbul. It wasn’t surprising.”

“They weren’t raw recruits anymore. They had training. They had faced Parthians before. There were ten thousand of them, Abe. Ten thousand. And what good were they? Overrun in short time by a group of under twenty thousand Parthians. We were outflanked after our victory, had to regroup, and after three days of heavy fighting, finally defeated them. We’re now ten thousand weaker because of–”

Suddenly he broke off, and his head shot up. He had heard a twig snap. It shouldn’t have worried him, but he was, after all, in the midst of the Veil. He chuckled. “I’m jumping at shadows, aren’t I? Now where was–” Without warning, startled shouts came from the south of the encampment. Turning around, his eyes widened at the scene. A massive conflagration engulfed the southern end of the camp, brilliant flames licking deeper and deeper into the encampment with each passing moment. Small figures could be seen standing out against the flames, fighting the fire, tossing buckets of dirt atop it. But to no avail. The fire continued.

Shouting grew and grew, until nearly everyone in the camp seemed to be shouting at the top of their lungs. Thousands of figures raced towards the fire. Abraham leapt to join them, but Murad called, “Wait!”

“Are you a maniac!?” Abraham yelled at him. “The camp’s going to bloody burn as we sit here doing nothing!”

“Two more men aren’t going to help, you fool! We have to maintain our posts! The sentries can just leave!” he screamed over the din.

“The Parthians aren’t going to attack, they haven’t for the past few days! We have to go fight the fire, not stop some imaginary–”

Abraham’s words were cut off in a gurgle. Frothy blood poured out of his nose and nostrils, and an arrow blossomed from his chest, the shaft protruding into the air as he tumbled bonelessly to the dirt, sprawling.

“Oh ****,” Murad muttered, turning to the north. His eyes widened at the sight that greeted him.

A vast horde of Parthians poured from every nook and cranny imaginable, shouting wildly and chanting in some strange language that sounded vaguely like his own but distinctly different. Wielding battleaxes, spears, pikes, and swords, they came on like a vast wave of the ocean. In comparison the camp defenses seemed small as a few twigs put together.

Fumbling wildly for his bow, he grabbed it and the quiver, setting them on the rampart. He had already drawn one from the quiver and nocked it to the bowstring even as he shouted, “Parthians! All men to the northern ramparts!”

Other cries similar to his sounded throughout the camp, and, to his dismay, from every side. The Parthians were coming from ever possible angle, and the men of the Elite Archery corps would be hard pressed to resist.

Then all thoughts of analyzing the strategic aspect of the battle fled from his mind, replaced by naked fear. Other men rushed up to join him, some still in their smallclothes as they ran. Each was ready in an instant, and arrows began to fly in great clouds.

The Parthians fell in great masses as the arrows landed among them, tumbling head over heels as arrows impacted them time and time again, tearing out great chunks of flesh and spilling great masses of blood over the fields. He himself loosed arrow after arrow, his fingers numb with fear yet still drawing the bowstring mechanically, as they tumbled onward to slaughter some poor, ignorant savage. Murad could see them falling as nearly every arrow seemed to hit its mark, yet somehow, unbelievably, the Parthians continued to come.

The horde charged full tilt, reaching the ramparts in an astonishingly short period of time. He groped for his short sword and pulled it from his belt with shaking hands as the barbarians came on. He was ready for them. Or he thought he was, at any rate.

The Parthians clambered over the parapet of the rampart with shocking swiftness, some of them seemingly deliberately impaling themselves on the wooden stakes that protruded from the rampart, their comrades climbing over the dead bodies and leaping down to land among the startled archers.

His sword held at the ready, he slashed at the first one to land in front of him. The blade flashed in the light of the fire behind him, dancing in to slit the throat of the oncoming warrior, red blood spurting at him, the tang of iron in the air. Relentlessly, they pressed on, another one landing lightly on his feet before Murad.

He continued the dance of the fight, parrying the strokes the barbarian sent after him and returning them, only to see them blocked by the sword the man carried. It seemed this man was better than the one that had preceded him. Stubbornly he held onto his position tenuously, but he was pushed back no matter how hard he resisted, along with the entire line of the archers.

More barbarians, he could see, were landing behind the ones that already fought, the sheer mass of them pouring over the rampart like the Ancient Flood. His blade darted in to gut the barbarian that faced him, and the man went tumbling to the ground, only to be replaced by the man that came behind him.

How long could it last? His thoughts raced through his mind of how he had fought to the last, how surely the gods would not let him die for all of his valor, when he heard a solid thunk, and felt his rib crack. He looked down and through the narrowing tunnels of his vision he saw a thrown axe planted in his chest.

He could no longer hear his heart humping, he realized. There would be no one who knew what had happened to him. No one to tell Deniz how he had fought for her, fought for the Empire. No one to tell his son. He would die, un remembered, his body to lie stone cold and dead on the frozen cold dirt of the Veil. He would die, and the Empire’s northlands were left wide open as the last defense of the Veil fell.

Blackness enveloped him.

Looks promising, I'll be checking back for more updates.

Interesting. I still am wondering, though, if this will involve Hinduist Arabs. ;)

Nope. Arabs aren't in this game. ;)

Chapter I: Snow
The Northern Frontier, c. 4781 A.O.

Gods. Snow. The bastard child of water. Why did they have to inflict it upon us?

“Gods **** it,” Mehemet muttered as his foot broke through the thin frozen crust of the snow and sank deep into the soft layer beneath. Awkwardly, he pulled himself out of the snow, and came out with his leg covered in it. Muttering more curses, he bent over and brushed it off with his gloved hands. The drifts this far north could get deeper than fifty feet, it was said, especially in the areas not covered by the thick black forest. There it was nice, actually, the massive canopy of branches holding up what seemed to be tons of snow, creating a hollow cavern, which, though rather dark, was still dry and very warm. Southerners never realized snow kept the warmth in almost as well as clothing.

At this thought he grimaced. He was, after all, a southerner himself, a native of Kafa. They DID get snow there, especially in the hills to the north, there they got maybe a foot of snow at most among those forested rises. But more than that was unheard of, and in the city itself, it just got cold, with maybe an inch of snow occasionally. It was the breadbasket of the Empire, or would be, once they had gotten rid of the Indians.

The news was that they were doing that, in fact, amazing as it seemed to him. The Indians had seemed far away even when living in Kafa, a border city. Here, the thoughts should barely even occur to him. But of course, they did. After all, the news had been coming for at least a month now that a war was on. Some silly problem with border disputes had made the Empire declare war. No matter, he had realized they were planning it ever since the massive garrison moved in, full of horsemen. Horsemen were not defensive, everyone knew that, even if they did use bows.

Meanwhile, back to reality, he thought with a wry grin, as the wooden palisade of the camp came into view.

“Halt, stranger, and identify yourself!” a voice called from inside the encampment. He chuckled to himself. Must be a raw recruit. There was a definite frightened edge to his voice.

“Colonel Mehmet!” he called.

“Uh, yes sir. I’ll let you in right away.”

The man hastened to the small gate. The door creaked as it opened. He shuddered. Not that much help against the Parthians, god help them. The young soldier looked at him closer, and looked away immediately.

Mehmet frowned. He knew he did not look in the best of shapes. The massive scar right in front of his ear was slowly healing, but the physicians said it would take a while longer, though he was fit for regular duty.

Sighing, he followed the young boy through the gatehouse, a narrow earthen tunnel with wooden planks over his head, narrow slits in them. It sometimes gave him not a small amount of claustrophobia, walking through here, as the tiny doorway could barely hold a single man on a horse going through it. Not a bad thing, that. It slowed down Parthian raids.

If there were any Parthians anymore.

He looked around, and spotted the young Brigadier in charge of the camp, Yavuz. “Ho, sir!” He shouted, snapping to attention. The general returned the salute stiffly.

“Is there any news, sir?” He knew he looked worried, but who could blame him? He had family on the border.

The Brigadier grinned. A handsome man, whose near perfect face was only slightly marred by a large whitish scar the slashed across one cheek.

“There certainly is. The latest raven from the South brought the news. They’ve taken Calcutta.”

Mehmet raised his eyebrows. That was certainly surprising. Calucutta was the first major city India had inside the border, to take it after only a couple of months was impressive.

“That’s good news, sir.”

“Indeed it is,” the soldier said, clapping Mehmet on the back so hard he felt he might stumble. “They say the Empire’s armies trapped the enemy Indians so quickly that they had barely set out from camp before we poured arrows into all of their flanks. Their advancing through the Shield now, they say, an army of thirty thousand swordsmen with 70 trebuchets. Another 20 thousand are near Madras, though that force lost most of its cavalry screen in the Battle of Kashmir Pass.”

Mehmet smiled inwardly. For some reason the Brigadier could scarcely believe that he remembered anything at all. The Battle of the Kashmir Pass had been in by the end of the first month of the war. But Madras! Madras would be a real prize. It was the first major Indian city over the Shield, and once that major mountain range was secured...

“That’s definitely good news, sir.”

“Yes it is. I just wish I could be there to help.” the Brigadier said, sighing.

Mehmet believed him. The Brigadier seemed almost bored up here, much of the time. No, Bored wasn’t quite the right word. Tense, like a serpent looking for something to strike.

He himself was fairly annoyed, too, that their brigade had not been transferred to the Southern Frontier.

“Well sir, I suppose someone has to guard against the Parthians.”

“Parthians!? Pah.” The Brigadier spit on the ground. “When was the last time you saw a Parthian, hmm? Have you seen a single Parthian recently? They’re all dead, and thank the gods for that, as well. These woods can swallow up what’s left of them and I’ll cheer.”

Mehmet shook his head, though. “Sir, you forget,” he said quietly. “Who gave you this scar? Who gave me this scar?” he asked, pointing to the side of his head. “It wasn’t a training sword, I guarantee you that. Who can ever say they are completely gone?”

The Brigadier had an unreadable look on his face. “We killed them all. We had to have.”

He laughed in the young general’s face, and walked away.

Great story! Please continue!