Preface

It was fall, and we were fleeing from the horse barbarians ... again. The we being most of our small farming village. Some of the younger men had remained behind to try to slow the barbarians down and to allow the rest of us to escape to the forest and the mountains.

My name is Nikshith, which means sharpness, and I was the current headman of our village. Though not the oldest, I was the elder most able to lead and direct our people. The other elders were too infirm to do that. As we continued to flee, I looked back and was sure that those who had remained behind were either dead by now or slaves of the barbarians, as I could see the smoke rising from where our village was located. It was apparent that it was already on fire and with it our supplies for the winter, what the raiders hadn’t stolen that is.

Some called them Huns, Tartars, Mongols, or even Magyar. It made no difference. They were all the same -- horsemen and raiders. They stole our food, our women, and made slaves of any fit men that they captured. The old and the very young were either killed or left to starve. We had already lost some of our older and infirm people who were unable to keep up. Some of the young had stayed with a grandparent or elder to help them. I could only hope that their elder relative could convince them to leave them and return to the rest of us.

Even I was now having trouble keeping up with the pace being set by the younger people. When I was a young man, it wouldn’t have been a problem, but now at 75, I was slower and not used to prolonged marches. I had been a man-at-arms in the Germanic lands when I was a young man for five years before returning to my homeland and my village to return to farming. I still had the sword from those years and remembered my training. If I couldn’t keep up with the rest of the villagers, perhaps I could slow down the raiders some so the others had a better chance of escaping. My wife was long gone, and my two sons had run off a few years ago, and we’d had no word from them since. There would be few to miss me.

It wasn’t long before I needed to stop and rest. I had already fallen behind the others, as they proceeded at their fastest pace. Looking around, I picked and moved to a reasonably easy position to defend and would wait for the raiders there. Perhaps, I could take out a few of them before I was killed, as I knew that I had little chance of surviving.

It was some time later when I detected the approach of some of the raiders. There were at least a dozen of them, all on horseback. Because of the terrain, they would need to pass through the area I had chosen to defend. I felt that I had a good chance of removing a couple of them for sure, as they were concentrating on the trail that our people had left in their hurry to escape and not watching the terrain.

I waited until the two men in the lead were nearly on top of me before leaping out of concealment and thrust my sword into the body of one and then cut into the right leg and horse of the second one. My sword had been kept sharp and I nearly removed the second man’s lower leg, but his horse panicked on being cut also and knocked me down. The swords of those following the first two found me then, and I never got up.