As the second half of the 8th century BCE crept into our calendars, the Daylamids marshalled a great army for an invasion against an old people. The Unandai had a long history in the Levant as one of its oldest, most consistent civilisations. The delta of the two rivers was theirs, and so was the Khozestan to its east. Shah Kavazh the Cautious would dare dispute that. While he gathered his forces from his satrapies, Huporujin Tur, his questionable servant, went ahead, mirroring the nickname of his shah.

The Unandai found a wild band at their borders not long after they had refused to submit to the Daylamids, and despite Huporujin’s speed, he could not prevent the gathering of the eastern Unandai themselves, who prepared to defend their lands. Huporujin encountered walled settlements instead of easy pickings, where the locals had armed themselves. Eager to acquire loot, pressured by his own vices and those of his men, he laid waste to the first two walled towns he encountered, casualties be damned. Then, however, he realised that there would not be a fertile heartland with easy pickings and no defenders, and that he would have to fight these costly battles for every bag of plunder.

The Unandai for their part were assembling in the mountain forts and towns that Huporujin Tur had broken through. Their leaders assumed that Shah Kavazh would trail after Huporujin’s host, using the damage he had caused to the Daylamid advantage, and so the Unandai knew where to be strong and where to be weak. Still, they reported a token presence along every part of their extensive border with the ever-expanding shahdom, and a modest garrison to protect the towns of the Heartlands.

Huporujin Tur could not be caught, but he could not do much more than loot farmlands and plunder villages. The wealth was holed up in towns, and his men had little interest in establishing a wheat emporium. They burned what they could, but their lust for gold drove them to attack towns again and again. Every time, the light soldiers, forced to fight on foot, had to face a few dozen defenders with every advantage except numbers on their side. The host had to leave defenders with the horses while they attacked on foot, and suffered unsustainable casualties in every battle that they fought. Eventually, a local commander assembled a force that then numbered three times Huporujin Tur’s size, and after a season of fruitless chase, his host had been reduced to a few dozen bandits with no more than they could carry. They were written off and forgotten, though Huporujin would one day make it back to the shahdom a vagabond.

Then came Shah Kavazh the Cautious. With his enormous host, he outnumbered the Unandai more than three to one. After Huporujin Tur, the Unandai had mustered a host of ten thousand men. The Daylamids had more than thirty-five thousand. There was no town or fortress on the Unandai side that could protect ten thousand men, so both sides prepared cautiously for a battle. The Unandai chose the location: an open pass with a slight incline that favoured its defenders. They were fighting for their homeland, a land that had been theirs for hundreds of years. The Daylamid soldiers just fought because they had to, either because it was their job or because they were conscripts. Sure, the priests and nobles talked about how this war was just, but so was every war that the Daylamids fought. In the end, if they lost, there would not be any serious consequences, so why risk everything?

The pass was known to the locals as Gurgenyar, and there the fate of the war was decided.

The Unandai placed their heavy infantry at the front. To them, they were the most important part of the army and they largely ignored the skirmish. The Daylamids placed their archers at the front, however, and their arrows had free reign on the Unandai’s advance, as their own archers had been put too far in the back. Inexorably the Unandai heavy infantry marched forward towards Daylamid lines and Shah Kavazh pulled his archers to the rear. He had to. The Daylamid light cavalry, skirmishers, but curiously also armed with lances, and light infantry skirmished with the heavy infantry, but they had huge shields and so marched on. As the Unandai chariots began to advance on the flanks, the Shah responded by sending forth the light cavalry to defeat the chariots.

In another world, historians could have perhaps called this the first succesful use of melee horse riding in a battle. However, faced with a screen of heavy infantry flanked by chariots, covered on either side by the ends of the pass, the Daylamid light cavalry soon regretted its decision to bring lances to the fight. In these days, they rode without any sort of stirrup or even saddles, and faced with heavy chariots, the Daylamids managed only a disorganised charge with open ranks. Men fell and the moment they made contact with the enemy, the Unandai, there was chaos. The entire command structure of the cavalry was gone in an instant, and then from behind the Unandai heavy infantry, spearman waved out on either side. It was a total rout.

Then the Daylamid heavy infantry moved forward and faced the Unandai. Outnumbered four to one, the Unandai had weathered a storm of arrows and spears to make it this far but the Daylamids were still fresh. The Unandai called on the light infantry to reinforce them, but they could not even reach the Daylamid line. Although the lack of numbers on the part of the Unandai is certainly a factor, and they definitely had a stronger conviction, it was clear that even on equal footing these men stood no chance against their Daylamid counterparts. They lacked long spears, and fought with what were mainly swords and axes, with which it was almost impossible to reach the enemy. The Unandai began to waver as so many died.

The Daylamid chariots moved in too. They were at a lower position than the enemy chariots, but they had been a little bloodied and were still outnumbered two to one. The battle was fascinating, like a relic from centuries past, but as the Daylamid horsemen were still reorganising behind the lines, it was evident that the chariot was still the best way to carry a lance into battle. The Daylamids won, eventually, but it cost both sides dearly. This battle had been won by heavy infantry.

An interesting perspective is the idea that the Unandai move to attack immediately with the heavy infantry, foregoing the traditional skirmish, is what lost them the battle. However, had they placed archers and light infantry at the forefront, the Daylamid cavalry might have actually had a chance to succeed at their tasks, so it is difficult to go into the “what-ifs” of the battle. A more important “what-if” is “what if Egypt kept its word?”.

After the Battle of Gurgenyar, the Unandai could never again muster an army as big as before. Many had been taken prisoner at the site of battle itself or in the days that followed – which was in large part due to the Daylamid light cavalry advantage. Shah Kavazh was true to his name in carefully pacifying the area he had intended to conquer, and as the locals found that they would not be pillaged or looted, they submitted with the expectation to be ruled as a satrapy where their local customs would be respected. The Shah realised that he had conquered the land, but to conquer it in the name of Akateshi justice would be a whole different matter entirely.

He expected Egypt to send an expeditionary army to the aid of the Unandai. They were allies, after all. The Satrapy of Istannah had a host waiting for them, too, to defend the shahdom if need be. The Unandai were the most anxious to wait for Egyptian help. But it did not arrive. Not even a token force.

When that became clear, the war came to an anticlimactic end.

Results:

• The Daylamids conquer their entire Conquest Target (in red)
• The Daylamids suffer a -5 penalty on their next econ review due to the significant expenses of the war and the lack of looting.
• The Unandai suffer a -15 penalty on their next econ review due to their loss of land.
• Istannah suffers a -1 penalty on their next econ review due to raising a big army and then paying them but actually nothing happened so this is just token really.
• Egypt did not send in orders.