Part 1: Difficult Ground
Part 2

"The Sultan rides! The Sultan rides to meet his warriors!" Couriers on camelback were spreading the news throughout Wa-Iharan. Some of the city's residents were drawn to the spectacle, while others couldn't care less: a great host of Roman legionnaires was camped outside the city's walls.

What more, the Berbers knew their adversaries would not be idle for long. With the southern water reservoir deliberately sabotaged by the Sultan's men, and with the Romans being heavily dependent upon looted supplies, there would be no siege of the capital. Either the Romans would assault the city directly, or they would have to retreat entirely.

As the city's guards watched the Romans set up ballistae and onagers, a retreat did not seem likely.

Surrounded by fifty riders clad in ornately-worked steel, Sultan Igider Aït-Yufitran rode through the largest avenue in the city and toward its southern gate. The other soldiers present stood at attention, silently waiting to hear what their commander-in-chief had to say. Maybe the Sultan would spare his subjects from the violence to come and surrender Wa-Iharan to an army that had already cleaved its way through four other Berber cities.

The Sultan dismounted next ot the city's walls and ascended a stairway so his subjects could see him better.

"Fellow Imazighen. I know none can say that fortune finds us well during this dark hour, but I call upon you to think not of our present situation, but of our future. Much has already been lost to these invaders as they prey upon our cities and sell our kin into slavery, but we have survived and prospered in the face of worse circumstances. When Izem's Maghreb Union was in its infancy, it was invaded by the ancient empires of Catalonia and Liguria, and the Ligurians seized the Union's only coastlines. Never did the Aragonese anticipate that their descendants would be overwhelmed by our naval might, nor did Liguria anticipate that its heirs would build ships from forests worth of timber just to rival our fleets. Certainly they would not have anticipated that their empires would fall while ours would remain."

"And yes, I know you now wonder whether or not the only nation of the Berbers will remain intact. Remember, however, what we fight for: while my paranoid uncle acted rashly and launched an offensive against the Romans, we now fight for our homes, our families, and our culture. These Romans invade merely for profit and hegemony. Now that we fight for what is most important to us, how can we possibly lose?"

"You are discouraged by the Romans' past victories, yes, but they are not as strong as they were when they landed in Carthago--a city whose inhabitants betrayed us anyway." This statement received several nods from the growing crowd. "No, our outriders have culled the flocks of Roman soldiers every day, and the holy sun beats down upon them whenever it rises. These Romans are many, and they are clad in shining armor, but they are accustomed to lives of luxury in moderate climes. As they test themselves on more difficult ground, facing free men who will do anything in defense of their homeland, they begin to find themselves stretched to their limits."

Igider gestured in the direction of the Roman encampments. "Since the Romans are not yet aware of this fact, we will teach them. We will show them that they have met their limit here at Wa-Iharan! We will show them what happens when jackals venture into the lion's den!"

A great cheer erupted, even among the frightened residents of the city. The Sultan finished ascending the stairs and directed his gaze toward the Romans. Every legionnaire could feel the Sultan's eyes on him. Once the cheering died down, he spoke. He did not shout, nor did his tone belie anger. No, he spoke with a projected but matter-of-fact voice.

"Vos sepeliemus."

After a brief pause, and with no further words, the Sultan descended the stairs and motioned for this troops to get into their positions.

For all of their preparation, the Romans did not make the first move. Every day before the battle, Berber outriders relentlessly harassed the Romans, even shooting with stone arrowheads when they ran out of iron ones. The Berbers therefore knew the position of the Roman forces all along--six legions plus reinforcements could hardly be inconspicuous anyway--and so a large company of the Sultanate's army had followed the Romans for some time by this point. As the Romans began to tow their siege weapons in range of the capital, they were met with arrows, but not ones volleyed from inside the city's walls.

A great cloud of sand and dust rose from over the nearest hill. Had it not followed those arrows, the Romans might have assumed that they were about to contend with one of the fabled sandstorms that no man north of the Great Sea had ever witnessed. Of course, the dust was kicked up by thousands of Berber cavalry.

For the first time, the Romans saw the reflex bows of the Tuaregs and other southern nomadic tribes in action. Later accounts would reveal that, while unstrung, these cousins of recurve bows are curled in the "wrong" direction nearly into a circular shape, requiring exceptional strength and experience just to string and draw. The results on the battlefield were telling: even the most sophisticated Roman armors only sometimes withstood fire from these foreign weapons.

Camel-archers were not the only riders to enter the field, of course. Lancers in light armor targeted the relatively few Roman cavalry, while men with chainmail and heavy weapons charged the ranks of Roman infantry. Several officers and combat-equipped gentry waded into battle atop the prized Barbary horses, wearing burnous and richly-dyed tagelmusts as indicators of their status.

The Berber infantry followed soon after. Many wielded takouba, versatile blades of wide construction that served nearly as well for defense as for offense. These men, instead of marching in regimented formations toward their adversaries, charged with apparent fervor toward the Roman shield-walls. As Berber swordsmen drew near to the legionnaires, tagheda flew overhead and into the Roman formation. A second wave of swordsmen, presumably the javelin-throwers, then followed the first, who met the legionnaires as their formation was just beginning to recover. To the Berbers' credit, many of them fought the legionnaires toe-to-toe, a course of action that the barbarians of the North were often loath to choose.

The two armies fought a grueling battle in the fields outside Wa-Iharan, with soldiers atop the city's walls providing support fire with oxybeles and gastraphetes. Even as the Romans fought foreign men with foreign weapons in the open, those defending the city opened fire using what was originally Ligurian technology.

After perhaps two hours of fighting, the morale of the Berbers outside seemed to break rather suddenly. For all of their support fire, the Berber infantry and cavalry faced casualties slightly worse than those of the Romans, and apparently the Berber army officers saw this and reconsidered continued participation in the engagement. The cavalry-archers continued to keep a minimum distance from the Romans, firing as the Berber retreated, but many Berbers ran with their backs turned to the Romans and even dropped their weapons during their flight. Some footmen were trampled by allied cavalry during the what looked more like a rout than a mere retreat, and despair could even be seen among the guards manning the city's walls.

Satisfied with this outcome, and perhaps less than eager to chase Berbers through yet more desert, the legions turned now to their prize. The Romans sent scouts to keep watch for any Berbers who regained their bravery, but in the interim, they rolled ballistae and onagers forward and promptly began to fire upon the city's walls. Berber crossbowmen behind machicolations slowed the Romans' advance toward the southern gate, but eventually the invaders would force their way through.

As the gates yielded and the Romans charged in, they expected to engage with infantry immediately in front of them. Instead, rows of men bearing shields and boar spears were lined up along either side of the causeway from the ruined gateway. About a hundred feet up the road, a thick formation of spearmen, those in front with shorter boar spears and those in back with longer, Gulgean-style Mezhaltytung. The men in back must have been standing on an improvised platform, for they towered over the other soldiers present. In the distance behind this formation, the Romans could see the minarets of Faryaban temples and the battlements of the inner walls surrounding the Sultan's palace.

The legionnaires, not wanting to be flanked, pushed against the spearmen at their sides in hopes of breaking the somewhat bizarre formation. The Berbers pushed back with all their might, for no obvious purpose other than to keep the Romans in place, but their intent soon became obvious. As Romans and Berbers were locked in combat, the odd formation down the causeway suddenly cleared out, revealing two weapons resembling large onagers behind them. The siege engineers manning these new weapons let fire; instead of launching their fodder in a tall arc, however, these engines lobbed their missiles--rocks that could not be considered boulders but were plenty larger than a man's head--at a low angle and a fierce velocity. The Romans had nowhere to go, and their shield-wall--and a grievous number of legionnaires behind it--buckled under the barrage.

This only further enabled the flanking spearmen to maintain hold their positions against the legionnaires, and eventually the mangonels fired again, clearing the ground the Romans had gained since the first barrage. Not two miles away from the Sultan's seat of power, the Romans had to consider the possibility that their campaign to sever the head of the Berber empire would have to end here--for fear that the Sultan's words to them might indeed ring true.

Suddenly, Roman trumpets blew. Scouts had returned with news that a company sent westward to carve another hole in the city's defenses was met by Berbers. Either the army outside the city had regrouped, against all odds, or else reinforcements had arrived. Regardless, the Romans were clear-headed enough to know that, while they could perhaps clear the blockade inside the city and even contend with the riders outside, they would only capture the city with such heavy losses that any army could take it back from them. Electing not to pursue glory at the expense of tens of thousands of Roman lives, the legionnaires commenced a controlled retreat, leaving through the gate they had opened, fending off the riders who came from outside, and gradually making their way eastward. Though the Romans' choice was perhaps not the honorable or glorious one, even those Berbers who were fighting in defense of everything they knew grudgingly admired the Romans' rationality in the face of dire circumstances.

Though not long ago the Imazighen had thought that the sun was setting on their empire, dusk instead fell upon what would likely be known by future generations as the most ambitious military campaign in Roman history. At least, the offensive portion of the campaign finally ceased; though there had been much suffering on both sides, the Berbers would endeavor to recover the entirety of what they considered their homeland. None knew whether or not they would be successful, but the Imazighen--the Free People--were compelled by their very nature to try.