Part 1

The world was noise and death.

Ghonimewi had been roused by the noise. Calls to arms, battle cries in familiar and unfamiliar voices, and the screams of the dying. He was not one of the village’s warriors, but he had peeked from his door to see the battle anyway. To call it a battle was laughable. The village’s best warriors, arrayed with clubs and spears, could scarcely even engage an enemy raining them with uncountable arrows. Coward’s combat. The attackers had come not to make war, but to make death.

He was clearly not the only one who saw as such. Menekobo, patriarch of their clan, had turned to shout to the village, rather than to the warriors dying around him.

“Take the children and flee!”

He repeated his command, struggling to be heard above the din of combat. For a time, Ghonimewi was frozen. It was not the first time the village had weathered a raid, but he had never imagined that a patriarch would consider a battle lost. This was sacred ground, protected by their ancestors. Theirs by right of birth and blood. To flee would be a betrayal of their parents and grandparents, and theirs before them, all who lived in this place and communed with its spirits.

Yet, as he continued to look upon the battle, where more warriors whose faces he tried desperately not to recognize as they fell to dogs and arrows, he realized what Menekobo had. To remain would be to die. They could stay, and the children would be the last generation to live on this land, the fates of their souls uncertain should the attackers neglect the proper rites. Or they could flee, and those children could live. They would be the first generation to have abandoned the village and their ancestors, but in a choice between a life in disgrace and an ignoble death, the children deserved to live.

While he remained frozen, those who had remained terrified in their homes were already fleeing to the woods. Perhaps they were running to the boats, or maybe they were simply running, but he could see them dragging children and carrying babes of nursing age. Flashing in the moonlight, he saw some few arrows fired by cowards give the children chase, but it seemed they were too far to hit. The attackers were arrayed to the west, and the children and their mothers had fled east. The distance had saved their lives.

Menekobo was repeating his shouted command. He could not afford to look and see if he was heard or obeyed, simply shout into the night. Then, abruptly and in the middle of a command, the shouts stopped. Menekobo, patriarch of the village, had fallen, an arrow sprouting from his neck.

Ghonimewi too should flee for the wood. He was no fighter, and all he could do here was die. He had no children to shepherd, but he could help with the boats. Yet, and take him for a fool, he ran into the village center instead.Arrows thudded around him. He stumbled over the dark corpse of a dog – one of the village’s, not bred for war and felled by the arrows sprouting from its back – only to catch himself and keep running. Eyes now at his feet, he cleared the next, this dog clearly not one of theirs; a spear sprouting from its neck the clear cause of death.

Perhaps the spirits of the village still offered him some grace, for he made it to the patriarch’s longhouse free of arrows and unharried by hounds. Scanning the dark room quickly, he seized the urns in the shrine and, clutching them to his chest, fled for the door in the back. It was not right or proper to desecrate the shrine like this, but these were not right or proper times. The others had brought the children, and he would bring the village. He could not bring the spirits, those ancestors who had made this land home, but with these ashes the link would not be severed. They could entreat others to guide and protect them, wherever they ended up, and that would at least be something.

Perhaps, he thought as he fled into the dark, the sounds of dying growing fainter behind him, he could coax back the soul of Menekobo, to protect those he had ordered to flee the village in time. Then, at least, his legacy would be more than one of shame and defeat.

A force, 108 strong, attacks a moderately sized Zonowōdjon village on the isthmus. But moderately sized for the Zonowōdjon means nothing to the Arhada, who already live in cities. The attacking force outnumbers the entire village, including the children, the shrine tenders, the venerable matriarchs, and all others who do not fight. And those who fight do so with spears against arrows.

The village falls, and those who are able flee east to the boats concealed there by the river. In several days time, they will reach a nearby village, one founded not long ago by some family of theirs and some of a yet more distant village. They will find a home there, for a time, but this is not to be the last time the Arhada come for the lands of the Zonowōdjon. As stories spread, some Zonowōdjon sharpen their spears, while others live under a pall of fear. If the Arhada bring their full might, the only choice will be to flee south and east.