There was not a single allied soldier around Arslan.
His father, the shah, had never given him many troops to begin with. He had at least been granted the freedom to act independently, but while his father had commanded 5,000 cavalry in his first campaign, Arslan had been given only a hundred. He had told himself he would earn command of a larger army through his own exploits.
But reality had swallowed that hope. He had lost every one of his men in the chaos and flames. Half had died. The rest had scattered. His cloak was scorched, his spear was broken, and his horse was exhausted. His body ached everywhere. It felt almost strange that he was still alive.
Arslan sighed and dropped his spear. That was when a Lusitanian knight came charging at him, spear raised high.
Arslan wore a golden helmet, as befitted a prince. The knight must have seen a fine trophy. Arslan tensed and drew his sword to meet him.
After the first clash, it was not Arslan but his horse that gave out. It toppled over onto its side. Arslan rolled on the ground, sprang up, and struck down the spearhead that came thrusting at him from the saddle with a single flash of his blade.
He was stunned himself. He had not believed he could do something like that. Yet he just saved his own life.
The knight threw away the now-useless spear and drew his sword. “I’ll give you credit, whelp,” the knight spoke in slightly awkward Parsian. Parsian was the common tongue of the Continental Highway, and educated foreigners often learned it. “In another five years, you might have become a swordsman whose name was known across Pars. But unfortunately, this is where it ends for you, and for Pars. Finish your remaining lessons in hell with the rest of you heathens!”
His mocking words were followed by a violent strike. Arslan barely managed to block the descending blade, but the shock that ran from his palm up to his shoulder was anything but small. Before it faded, a second attack came. Right, left, right, left—blades flashed in an endless rhythm. Arslan parried them almost entirely on instinct and reflex alone.
Considering the disadvantage of fighting on foot against a mounted enemy, Arslan’s display was little short of a miracle. The Lusitanian knight might have begun to doubt even his own god. With an irritated shout, he suddenly wheeled his horse and drove it forward, trying to trample Arslan under its hooves.
Just then, Arslan staggered and fell. The knight was certain of victory.
But in the next instant, the horse kicked off the ground, and the knight’s throat was pierced by Arslan’s thrown sword.
Arslan sat on the ground for a while, listening only to his own breathing. Then, the sound of approaching hooves snapped him back to his senses. Turning his gaze toward it, he leaped to his feet and waved both arms desperately.
“Dariun! Dariun, over here!”
“You’re safe, Your Highness!”
The young knight in black armor leaped down from his black horse and knelt. To Arslan, he looked more reassuring than anything else in the world.
“I came under the eran’s orders to find you, Your Highness,” Dariun said.
“Thank you. Is my father safe?”
“He had the eran and the Athanatoi with him. He likely withdrew from the battlefield safely.” Dariun pushed down his own unease and added, “His Majesty the Shah was also worried about Your Highness.”
It was a lie, a necessary one to get the prince out of the battlefield. For a brief moment, the prince’s eyes—the color of a clear night sky—met his, and Dariun felt a slight hesitation inside.
“There is no point staying here any longer,” Dariun continued. “If we are to honor His Majesty’s will, we should think first about your safety.”
“I understand,” Arslan said. “But to return to the capital, we’ll have to cross the battlefield again. Even your skill may not be enough for that.”
Dariun already had a plan for that.
“We will rely on my friend Narses. He lives in seclusion in the Bashur mountains. We should take refuge with him for now and find a way back to the capital when the opportunity arises.”
Arslan tilted his head slightly. “But I heard Narses had some kind of falling-out with my father.”
“Yes,” Dariun said. “If we had won today and you went to him as a victor, he would not receive you. But fortunately, as strange as it sounds, we are nothing more than the vanquished.”
“The vanquished,” Arslan murmured dimly. “Yes… I suppose we are.”
“That is exactly why he will not refuse us. That is what my uncle meant when he called him a crank. We can rely on him.”
“But Dariun…” The boy’s voice and gaze sharpened. “There are still soldiers from our army on the battlefield. Are we going to abandon them?”
Dariun’s face grew grave. “There is nothing we can do for them now. Take revenge later, when the time comes. Only if you live can you avenge them.”
Arslan gave a quiet nod. Enjoying the story? Read on at novelping.com.
The lingering fog and the rapidly falling dusk struggled for dominance over the land. Under their cover, Arslan and Dariun slipped away from the reach of the Lusitanians and disappeared into the deep forests and ravines of the Bashur mountains.
Even if pursuers came, the trail of corpses left in the wake of Dariun’s horse should be enough to discourage them. That day, the Parsian knight in black who cut down countless famed Lusitanian warriors became, for the enemy army, a fragment of nightmare.
When the half-moon rose and lit up the stubborn mist still clinging to the plains, the battle was completely over.
Lusitanian soldiers wandered through the battlefield under the pale moonlight. Whenever they found wounded Parsian soldiers who could neither resist nor flee, they killed them one by one. Their god and their priests had commanded it. The heathens had to atone for their sin of defying the “one true god” with the most brutal of deaths. Anyone who showed mercy to them would also be judged as defying divine will and cast into hell after death. Drunk on blood, the Lusitanian soldiers slit the throats of the wounded and tore out their hearts while praising the glory of Yaldabaoth.[1]
On the sixteenth of the tenth month, year 320 of the Parsian calendar, 53,000 cavalry and 74,000 infantry died on the Plains of Atropatene. Pars lost nearly half of its national army. The victorious Lusitanian forces also lost more than 50,000 men in total, and despite having created such a favorable situation and drawn the enemy into a perfect trap, they were horrified by the scale of their own losses. Of course, all these honorable dead would be praised as martyrs to the glory of their god.
“Thanks to a fanatical king and a clergy who enjoys killing, so many men end up leaving their bones in foreign soil.”
“I see no issue with it. They go to heaven, and we get to rule this rich land. The Continental Highway, the silver mines, and the vast grain fields.” With a blood-smeared face, Baudouin laughed.
Montferrat, wearing a sullen expression, rode toward the tent of their king, Innocentius VII. The dying screams of a Parsian soldier, their heart ripped out of their chest, tore through the night. Montferrat flinched. Not long ago, in the kingdom of Maryam they had destroyed, children and even infants had been thrown into flames. Maryam was not even a land of heathens; it worshipped the same god as Lusitania, Yaldabaoth. But because it refused to recognize the king of Lusitania as head of the Church, it was branded an enemy of God.
“I still hear their screams,” Montferrat muttered. “Do you think God truly blesses those who kill infants just because they are unbelievers?”
But Baudouin was not listening. His attention was fixed on the loud roars coming from ahead, nothing like Montferrat’s gloom.
“We’ve captured the shah of Pars!”
Hundreds of Lusitanian soldiers were shouting the same words like a song.
1. Based on Yaldabaoth, sometimes spelled Jaldabaoth or Ialdabaoth, a malevolent god and demiurge according to various Gnostic sects, represented sometimes as a theriomorphic, lion-headed serpent. ↩