"The slaves are revolting!"
"Weapons! The slaves have weapons!"
"Soldiers! Where the fuck are the soldiers?"
"Gods have mercy on us!"
The panicked cries rang out across the camp, tangled up with the desperate shouts of the few soldiers scrambling to make sense of an uprising nobody had thought possible an hour ago.Among those shouting of course there were slaves, who as told by a certain young man, adding to the chaos the best they could chipped on their own way at the soldier's morale.
''They have got the east wint!They are slaughtering us!''
''We are dead!Gods deliver us we are dead!''
''The camp is lost!Flee! Flee for your lives!''
Chaos had the run of the place. Women fled in terror, their shrill voices pleading for a salvation that was not coming and would not have known where to find them if it were.
Alpheo stood unmoving in the middle of it for a while.
His gaze swept the camp, assessing it all with the cold detachment of an artist stepping back from the canvas to decide where the last stroke belongs.Though more of a piece of art , it was a bucket of pain thrown at a board, messy and chaotic.
Still order had to be reeled even there.
The women, wailing and scurrying for whatever cover they could find, were of no consequence whatever. They were not the obstacle. The real threat stood in the soldiers left behind to guard the camp. Scattered, outnumbered, but armed and sosmewhat trained,on both account better than whatever scour of dregs Alpheo could boast of, which counted for a great deal more than numbers in most circumstances.
Yet scattered was the word that mattered. Scattered played directly into his hands.
They could be swallowed one piece at a time, before any of them thought to gather.
He had feared, at the outset, that his fellow slaves, loosed from their chains and carrying years of torment on their backs, might dissolve at once into mindless bloodlust, raping and looting in a blind frenzy of vengeance that would see every one of them hanged by nightfall.
They had not. They had understood. The true enemy was still standing.
"With me!"
His voice boomed across the camp like a war horn. Hundreds of freed slaves came after him, bare feet thundering against the dirt, stolen weapons held high in midless euphoria.
Along the way they found soldiers. Some alone, some in pairs, some in little knots of three that were no better than pairs.
They were easy prey by the strength of mindless violence.
Panic took the guards at the first sight of that horde. Some dropped their weapons without offering any fight at all. Others turned and ran.
Not fast enough. Never fast enough.
The mob came down on them the way sharks come through a shoal.
One soldier barely had time to lift his sword before a slave tackled him flat and pinned him to the ground. His scream was lost entirely in the din as knives went into him again and again and again with the plant of thier foot, long past the point where the man had stopped being a man and become simply a sack.
Twelve more fell after him. Their deaths were not swift and were not meant to be: blades, rocks, bare hands tearing at mail to find the throats beneath it, thumbs popping eyes like grapes, each of them silenced by different degrees of pain over different lengths of time.
Whatever manner came to hand was deemed good enough, so long as they did not get up again afterward.
Their swords and lances and daggers were snatched from the dirt by their killers, and the mob grew more dangerous with every man it ate.For the more water was added to the river, the more consumed in bloodlust they became.
Bloodied hands stripped chainmail off cooling corpses. Helmets were torn loose to crown new warriors who had never worn iron in their lives.
Alpheo led them onward. The day was a long way from over.
"Half of you, to the eastern wall!" His voice rang out over the chaos. He knew well how dangerous it would be to leave this rising to the whims of carnage. They needed a victory, not a slaughter that ended with all of them dead in the sand by evening. "The rest, to the western wall! We take both sides now, while they're still deciding what's happening!"
A chorus of nods and shouts of ''Fuck the slavers!'' answered him, determination burning in every face. They had come too far to fail now. They had waded in too deep to hope for the shallows.
He took the lead toward the eastern watchtower, his steps swift and certain. They needed the high ground before the camp's defenders could rally to it, once that was done, they could very well pick off at all that remained.
Let those soldiers fortify a wall and the rebellion would end pinned beneath it.
The watchtower loomed ahead of him. Alpheo took the steps two at a time, his breath steady despite the pounding under his ribs.
Victory was within reach, and the feeling of it was exhilarating.
Still there was an old saying about men who close their hand on the prize too early.
The instant he stepped inside, death flickered at the edge of his vision threatening to bring everything down.
He got his hands up. Too late.
A dagger flashed toward his belly.
Instinct took him. He caught the man's wrist mid strike and let the blow pass , an hair width from where his guts stood.Even a nick could prove fatal, he scarcely believed that once something was nicked, there was anyone in the camp able to unnick it.
An hearbeat later the two of them slammed onto the wooden floor in a tangle of limbs and blades aimed and deflected, his own weapon spinned out of his grip after it failed to cut through the man's mail, only to clatter uselessly across the planks.
But what manner of fight could an half-starved boy put to an adult man?Soon enough the soldier snarled, his grip like a smith's vice, as he stood above Alpheo. The weight of his full body pressing him down onto the planks of the tower, draining the breath out of his lungs.
Dread scoured his belly as above him the dagger creeped steadily toward his throat. Blows rained down on him, fists slamming into his ribs and his jaw, and he was far too weak to answer any of them in kind.
Hold on. Hold on.He just had to hold.Someone would come.
Someone HAD to come.
Gritting his teeth against it, Alpheo tightened both hands on that wrist and turned the blade away by giving ground rather than taking it, because he had no strength with which to take any.
A shadow and a sudden thud was what saved his life.
The soldier jerked sideways as a boot crashed into his ribs and knocked him off his balance. A heartbeat later a dagger rammed down his chest. His eyes went wide with shock and then emptied under half a dozen more.
Alpheo gasped for air and rolled onto his feet, every muscle still locked from the struggle.
Once the job was done his rescuer stood before him: a young rebel from the looks of it, with an ugly burn twisting the skin along the left side of his face, a face that was otherwise handsome and fair. Despite the scar, his eyes burned with an unshakeable fury that Alpheo recognised at once, having carried the same thing himself for ten years.
"Thank you," he told him, and meant every letter of it while he caught his breath.
The young man shook his head. "No need," he replied, bitterness threading through the words. "Today we are one and all."
Alpheo placed him then. One of the men from his own cell. He made a careful note of the face, though it was not a face a man would easily lose track of.
Debts must be repaid. Both kinds.
Soon more rebels came pouring into the tower, skin slick with sweat, weapons gripped white knuckled. There was no time for any of them to rest.
A war cry went up as they surged out toward the walls and crashed into the soldiers making their last stand there.
The fighting atop those wooden barricades was brutal, a storm of flashing steel and gritted teeth and desperate close work.
Every one of those struggles was worthy of its own telling, and every one of them was inconsequential in the greater shape of the day.
No matter the fight all that came at the end was a long stride of twitching meat carpets paving the way to freedom.
There was no retreat offered and no mercy expected. In the confined space of the tower men fought like animals, clawing for survival. For freedom, and for the ambition to one day live a life worth the name.
With each passing minute the tide of slaves claimed more soldiers, and their bodies lay broken and lifeless, staining the sand below.
One by one the defenders went down. Some had their chests run through, eyes wide and frozen. Others were opened at the throat and spent their last breaths gurgling as the blood came up through their mouths.
Some were bludgeoned with whatever the rebels had brought with them, heavy urns and wooden clubs and discarded helmets swung by the cheek pieces, shattering skulls and caving ribs before the bodies were shoved aside to make room.
Those unlucky enough to be hurled from the walls screamed the whole way down and broke on landing. They did not die there. Their shattered legs left them writhing in the dirt, helpless, until the chaos came along and finished what the fall had started.
The watchtower became a slaughterhouse with a view.
But at last, after what felt like a lifetime, the final soldier fell, slumping against the wooden wall with a dagger buried in his throat and the remnants of a prayer on his lips.
Silence followed, stretching out and out in pure disbelief. The rebels stood among the wreckage with their chests heaving and their hands slick to the wrist.
Then, reluctantly, someone cheered. An incredulous one, half a question.
Another answered it. Then another.
And all at once the tower erupted with triumphant cries, shouts of victory ringing out across the camp, voices raw with exhaustion and elation both. They had won. They were alive. Both facts seemed equally impossible.
The hard part was behind them.
Now came the spoils, and the escape.
Now, at last, they could be free.