Their War (3)
Thunder of hooves. Thunder of hooves.
The endless charge of the knights was finally reaching its end. As the horses began to tire, the knights at the rear gradually fell farther and farther behind. The men with the finest, fastest mounts had taken the front ranks, and now the column was stretching longer and longer by the minute.
"This won't do. We need to slow down, don't we?"
"You're right—we can't keep pace with them."
"Should we try firing the crossbows?"
While they were still deliberating, arrows began to fly from ahead.
"Arrows!"
"Raise your shields!"
THWACK-THWACK! Thud!
"Guhk—!"
They shielded their upper bodies, but the arrows came in such a deluge that some shields simply burst apart, and shafts punched straight through the steel plate guarding their vitals.
"What in God's name is this!"
"AAAGH!"
"Fall back!"
"Retreat!"
The knights fired back with their crossbows, but reloading atop a horse was no easy feat. Their mounts slowed, and they were being shot down in what was nearly a one-sided slaughter. Their only remaining hope was the foot soldiers still rushing out of the forest behind them—if the infantry could catch up, there would be shields to hide behind at last.
Fweee—boom! Boom! BUH-BOOM!
"What was that?"
"Smoke in the sky?"
Pigments packed with gunpowder, bursting in the air—a signal to the remaining eighty thousand warriors waiting far in the distance.
"I don't know what that is, but we need to link up with the main force, and fast!"
"How the hell are we supposed to do that from here?"
"Form a shield wall and withdraw to the rear! Move, now!"
And just how fast could a horse back up, really? All they could do was pray the soldiers behind them arrived quickly.
"Argh!"
"Ghk—!"
"Hihiiing!"
Horses and knights dropped helplessly one after another. Dismounting and taking cover might at least save a man's life—but a warhorse in the Middle Ages was truly expensive. These were warhorses, the most costly of their kind, each worth five to ten ordinary steeds. Better a man die than the animal beneath him.
"Khh... well, thank heaven there aren't many of the enemy."
A knight with an arrow buried in his leg, blood streaming down, spoke to the comrade beside him as he hid behind his shield.
"Terrifying. Simply terrifying."
It was his first experience of anything like this. He had seen something similar fighting the heathens of the desert, but nothing on this scale. And looking at these arrows—weren't they practically the size of crossbow bolts?
"WAAAAH!"
"The soldiers are here!"
"Raise your shields, quickly!"
A vast tide of soldiers came pouring in, joining the knights. As they raised shields to cover the horses and the men's lower bodies, the losses finally began to slow. The archers joined the line too, and the counterattack began.
"Good! Shoot—shoot now!"
But still the soldiers came streaming out of the forest, endless as the sea.
"We made it!"
"Now it's over! You heathen dogs!"
"AHAHAHA!"
The knights heaved sighs of relief. Someone with sharp eyes, however, noticed a cloud of dust rising in the far distance.
"What's that over there?"
"What?"
"There's dust rising, way off yonder."
"It's a plain, isn't it? Just the wind kicking up sand."
What an ignorant fool. Sandstorms, on open grassland. As they watched a while longer, the truth became plain: enemy reinforcements on horseback. Cavalry pouring out from both flanks of the plain.
"Ah—!"
"Enemy reinforcements on both sides!"
"Look to your flank!"
"Look ahead too, damn you!"
They needed to retreat, but the forest spewing out enemy soldiers was impossibly far away. And the open plain was the finest possible ground for cavalry. The Order's horses were already spent—there would be no escape by pursuit.
"We'll be fine, won't we?"
"Look at our numbers, man!"
"Once the horses recover, we ride out and crush them!"
As if horse recovery worked that fast. As if the enemy would simply twiddle their thumbs in the meantime.
Riding in groups of a hundred or so, the horse archers would gallop in, loose their arrows, and wheel back into the rear ranks—the fundamental tactics of Daehan's horse-archer corps, taught to the Gazar faithful long ago.
The Crusaders fired their crossbows with everything they had, but the enemy barely seemed to feel it. Just how far away were those riders shooting from?
Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat
Arrows came raining down like a hailstorm, and holding a shield up made no difference at all. With shafts flying in from three sides, an arrow in the back of the head was almost a matter of course.
"We have to run!"
"Run where?"
"Khh..."
There was nowhere to run. Enemies on three sides, and their own men sealing off the only line of retreat. Word was being relayed back and forth in a desperate hurry, but with three hundred thousand soldiers, repositioning was not something that happened in a blink.
Worse, nearly half the army had already entered the plain. It would end one of two ways: the Crusaders all dead, or Gazar's arrows running dry.
Even in the Middle Ages, battle moved astonishingly fast. Getting the armies to meet took time, true—but no matter how many men were fielded, a fight was usually over within hours, or half a day at most. The limits of stamina arrive quickly, for man and beast alike. And so the battle on the plain was wrapped up almost before it began.
All that remained on the vast plain were countless corpses, and even more countless arrows.
"Pursue every fleeing soldier."
"Yes, sir!"
"They will be taken as prisoners."
Far off, the soldiers who had just emerged from the forest were turning tail and running. How did they imagine they could outrun an army of horsemen? If they scattered in all directions, some might live. That is, if it could truly be called flight rather than retreat.
"Bind those men as well and drag them along."
Even so, a good number of knights still stood on the plain. Amid the sea of dead soldiers, they could only stand rooted in dumbstruck silence.
The Crusader force of fifty thousand knights and three hundred thousand footmen had suffered a defeat bordering on the annihilation of its knighthood, with some twenty thousand soldiers scattered to the winds. The prisoners gathered up their fallen comrades' armor and the spoils of war and hauled the loot off to nearby Moscow. Nearby Kiev, after all, had been burned to nothing.
When the twenty thousand survivors returned home and spread word of what had happened, Europe was plunged into shock.
That a hundred thousand had defeated three hundred fifty thousand was shocking enough—but the fifty-thousand-strong knightly order had been wiped out without even landing a blow. The sum total of the enemy's losses was a handful of men felled by crossbow fire.
And then there was the cruelty of it: surrender was offered, and those who refused were spared not one soul. Kiev's fate, originally punishment for beheading Gazar's envoy, was retold with every retelling into something far worse. By the time the Crusaders arrived, after all, there had been nothing left standing in Kiev at all.
"What in the world is going on..."
"They say Galicia has fallen as well, Your Majesty..."
Otto IV, who had barely clawed his way out of civil war to become King of the Germans, was at a loss. The enemy was already at his doorstep, and he had not yet recovered from his own internal conflict.
Poland and Hungary would be next—and he had no strength left to aid either of them. France and England, too, had lost far too many knights and soldiers in the last crusade.
"Why on earth do they invade all the way here? These are the people from beyond Eastern Europe, no? Far too distant for them to rule, surely. And by all accounts, it isn't even a war of conquest."
"Um..."
"Yes? Out with it, man!"
"They say that during the Second Crusade, long ago, we attacked one of their cities."
"Why?"
For a moment, Otto IV couldn't make sense of it. The Crusaders had marched—but that was the Holy Land, not some heathen city.
"Well. It's already been more than sixty years, so..."
"So?"
"As for why they attacked—they say it was to meet their God."
"What?"
What kind of nonsense was this? People nattered on about himself being the protector of the faith and whatnot, but where in the world was there any actual God to be found?
"Wh-what exactly are they proposing?"
"They say that if there is a God, or a representative of God, they will meet with them..."
"Then... the Pope?"
Otto IV racked his brain over how he might bring the Pope along. He had won his throne through a power struggle and stood in ill favor with Rome, which made the matter all the more delicate.
"I'll raise it at the coronation."
In those days, an emperor of Germany—of the Holy Roman Empire, that is—was crowned twice: once as King of the Germans, and once more as Emperor by the Pope himself. He would have to meet the Pope at least once, so he might as well bring it up then.
In the year 3672 of Daehan, with Poland and Hungary fallen in turn and the heathen army standing at the very threshold of the Holy Roman Empire, Otto IV met with Innocent III.
Having reconciled with the Pope and safely completed his coronation, he requested a private audience.
"Your Holiness, are you acquainted with this heathen army?"
"I am. I hear they have reached our very doorstep."
"Do you also know what it is they desire?"
"Was there such a thing?"
Otto alone had heard the tale, and had spoken of it to no one. How could the Pope possibly know?
"They wish to meet with the God of Christendom—or with His representative upon Earth."
Otto did not mention that the French and German Crusaders were the cause of it all. He gutted the story, leaving out the kernel entirely.
"...Heh?"
The Pope who listened could hardly have been more dumbfounded. He styled himself the representative of God, certainly—but what God were they talking about?
"Then they will simply turn back if we speak with them?"
"Yes. And so I must beg a favor of Your Holiness."
"I... see."
So he was to play the messenger of a heathen god? That was a bitter position to be in. Evade the duty and he would shoulder the blame for all that followed; step forward, and his very life would hang by a thread.
"Hoo..."
"I am in your hands, Your Holiness."
And yet, pressed so earnestly, was there truly no other way? Resolving that if death came, it came, the Pope steeled himself to go and see for himself.
"Very well."
His face as he consented was a study in conflict.
"A messenger from the Great Khan has arrived."
"Good. From where?"
"From the representative of their god, my lord."
The news they had waited for had come late, and disappointment made the regret all the sharper. All it should have taken was a single conversation—and how many thousands of lives had been scattered across the fields instead?
"They propose we meet in spring of next year, at Zara?"
"A coastal city in Hungary, it appears."
"Tell them we accept."
In the spring of 3673, Temüjin crossed Hungary by land, while the Pope made for Zara by sea.
"Fine weather here, isn't it?"
"Indeed. A pleasant place to live."
"What could people living in a place like this possibly covet, that they came seeking our lands?"
Ships were appearing in the distance—quite a considerable number of them. And then the Pope and his retinue came out to shore aboard a small boat.
The two men, close in age, had a tent pitched on the beach and sat facing one another within it.
"There was only one thing I wished to ask. For sixty years, you gave no answer. And not content with silence, you came and attacked us again—twice."
"I... fear I don't follow you...?"
Innocent had truly come to this meeting knowing nothing. When he returned home, his relationship with Otto might well collapse into open ruin.
"We, following the will of Haneul-nim, have possessed great power for more than six hundred years—and in all that time, we have not once trespassed upon our neighbors. So I ask: why did you cross into our lands?"
"What on earth are you talking about?"
Six hundred years? Innocent was astonished. What kind of dynasty endured six centuries? What the man spoke of, though, was not Daehan's history, but Gazar's.
"Sixty years ago, and again eight years past—you called them the Second Crusade and the Fourth, I'm told. Why did you attack the city where our God dwells?"
"You mean... Jerusalem?"
Heard the word "crusade," and the Pope could think of nothing but Jerusalem. What other city would there be to march on?
"Mudo. Where the dwelling of Haneul-nim stands. It is also the gateway to that divine country."
"Gahk..."
Innocent concluded that some lunatic band of Crusaders had assaulted not the Holy Land of Christendom, but the holy city of these heathens.
"Erm... I believe something has gone grievously wrong here."
"Then why did France and Germany send no answer?"
"Uh..."
Innocent was cursing Otto inwardly. Hadn't the man simply shoveled his own filth onto the Pope's lap?
"When I return, I will drag the truth out of those men myself. Would it not be possible for you to withdraw in the meantime?"
"We will turn back once we have our answer. The advance will halt in the interim."
"...Understood."
Inwardly, Innocent ground his teeth and cursed doomed France and doomed Germany with every breath he had left.