sprinkled with the king's tears amid splashes of blood.
The Daci Wolf King had not shed tears for a long time. Today was a day for tears. The mother of his two children, who once he had killed three men in fierce combat to possess, had journeyed to the Underworld of Zalmoxis. Zalmoxis was the Great God of her ancestors of Getae blood. She would patiently await Diurapneus there, he knew.
Dacia's warrior king, honored by all as Decebelus, 'The Heroic One', felt less valiant as he looked towards the two small children sitting on the edge of the wagon cart. Their eyes were on their prostrate mother engulfed behind ample autumn furs and crumpled embroideries, twitching sporadically in a widening pool of gore amid mottled leaves. Their eyes, too, were on their father's hooked hip dagger. Neither uttered a sound.
'Save yourselves, Wolf Brothers! Go! It's time for you to go!' Diurapneus shouted at his mounted bodyguards listing anxiously about. Their stallions frisked, jostled, and hoofed at the earth as their foaming sweat flicked around.
'The Iron People are upon us! The chase is over! Save yourselves so one day you can revenge me! Revenge me, the Daci Wolf, my brothers! By the god Zalmoxis, revenge me! Swear it by the Great God!'
The Wolf Warriors, six royal bodyguards arrayed in grimy furs and slimed leathers with hair braids greased in sheep fat dyed blue, saluted their master and cried aloud from behind faces strewn with rough-stabbed tattoos. In a single voice they proclaimed their holy oath.
'By Zalmoxis we swear!' they shouted, their tattoos stretching in lewd display.
The greater the number of tattoos, the larger number of heads they had taken in combat. The more refined their markings, the higher their status as Tarabostes aristocrats of the Getae people of Dacia.
'By the great priest Dicineus, my father, I swear it!' one of the refined horsemen bellowed.
While they shouted gruff obscenities of high honor, the riders charged down the muddy trail bravely flailing bill-hooked falx swords against malevolent forces, forest ghouls, sky demons, or the abiding presence of the omniscient Evil Eye itself.
Diurapneus searched back down the earthen track through the woodland towards distant Sarmizegethusa. Until only two days ago that rocky peak had been his capital and his fortress. Splashes of light flashed off the armor of the approaching Iron People on their chargers. Iron weaponry glinted through the forest pines. The enemy was closing in. The Daci Wolf's audacious, duplicitous, game-plan had failed. The king of the Iron People with his iron- shielded army had prevailed. Sarmizegethusa would now be bestowed as spoils by the god of war upon the Iron People victors.
'The city fort's clans of Wolf Warriors, my children, will have thrown themselves into the Night of Zalmoxis,' he announced exultant with pride. 'They will laugh heartedly at their attackers!'
He neglected to add it would be laughter laden with the maniacal exhilaration of the utterly defeated.
'Come to me, my children,' the tired warrior king called, searching his mind for an adequate response to his situation. Diurapneus was alone now with his son and daughter. The enemy horsemen would be upon them soon. Seven-year-old Prince Dromichaetes and his twin sister Princess Estia sat at the wagon's lip unmoved by their predicament. To Diurapneus all the boy's titles of honor and his future promise now seemed so futile.
Prince Dromichaetes, a Tarabostes aristocrat of the Getae Peoples, was the only son of Dacia's king of all the lands and tribes of the Daci Confederation. He was King Diurapneus's heir to the vast forests, ranges, and plains stretching from the Carpathian Mountains to the Rivers Tyros and Danube. He was of a line of warrior kings stretching back to the god Zalmoxis himself. Dromichaetes' very blood was sacred.
The three circle tattoos on his face across each cheekbone told of his stature in the eyes of the god. His blue-fatted hair told of his inborn status before his fellow warriors. His destiny was foretold to lead the Wolves' Brotherhood to glory against the Iron People' king. His destiny was to seal the attacking king's doom with the cunning of a stalking wolf.
Diurapneus wondered what to do with his two children. Kill them to avoid some cruel outrage at the hands of the Iron People? The enemy were known to use the young to satisfy their earthier appetites. Or herd the two into the forest's vastness to wander alone and die of hunger or be eaten by forest creatures? Leave them to face alone the forest's night demons, sprites, and ghouls? Or let them live to take their chances at the mercy of the enemy until Zalmoxis himself steals them to his Underworld some later day?
When the riders with their crested helmets and lances came glinting closer to view Diurapneus now knew how retreat to the Land Of Death was the most honorable path to a warrior's glory. The shame of capture and being ceremoniously strangled at Rome before the Iron People masses was not an option.
He kissed the young prince and his sister farewell, and blessed them in the name of God Zalmoxis. He leaned close to his son's ear and whispered ancient oaths. He swore the child to fulfill his princely destiny in the name of Zalmoxis by revenging his father and mother's death. He extracted an oath of honor from the wide-eyed shivering boy as his sister listened close-by. The princeling uttered the oath loudly for all the trees and leaves of the forest to hear and record forever among the swirling winds and rustling leaves of Nature.
'By the great god Zalmoxis and his sacred lineage of kings, I Dromichaetes, Prince of the Getae, swear to take revenge upon the King of the Iron People. I swear to kill his loved ones before his very eyes, just as my father's loved one has died. I seal this oath among the leaves and winds of the forest by my own sacred blood!' the little boy called aloud in a wavering voice into the wooded density around him.
'Farewell my children until we meet again before Zalmoxis himself!' the elder proclaimed with gusto.
Diurapneus grasped his bill-hooked dagger and rent at his own throat in a single slash. Streaming gore burst over the moldy bark of the fallen trunk of a forest tree trunk with the force of a stallion's piss. His body fell beside his wife, their blood soaking fallen leaves.
'Father! Father!' the princeling called again and again.
His sister buried her face into the furs enveloping the boy's bony frame.
The children had seen such sprays of scarlet many times before when the womenfolk of the Wolf Warriors tormented and slaughtered captives of the Iron People. The prisoners were trussed like sheep. They sawed off the heads of the squirming, squawking captives to offer victory sacrifice to their God.
From communal cups they would sip the warm salty blood of their enemies and lick blood-tipped fingers. They shelved the cut heads around the forest altar of the god and poured the victims' life-blood over their own faces as a food for the deity. The Wolf Warriors laughed aloud at the ironies of life and death. They danced ecstatically to the throb of tambours of human skin and the strum of stretched gut.
'The tyrant has deceived us! The coward has taken his own life!'
The lead rider of the Iron People troop, cavalry captain Tiberius Claudius Maximus of the ala II Pannoniorum auxiliaries, was angered by the king's too easy escape to his Underworld of Zalmoxis. In his mind Maximus could hear Diurapneus laughing at him from the Beyond.
He stripped the king's body of its weapons, furs, jewels, and gold medallions, severed the dead man's head with his own hooked sword, and tore off his bejeweled right arm. Each would be proof of the Dacian's destruction for the Iron King himself, Caesar Trajan, and his senior commander Hadrian.
The seven-year-old princeling probably thought the same fate would occur to his sister and himself, but he was proved wrong.
'What have we here? A royal princeling and his sister? Well that's something of value perhaps!' Maximus called to the troop of Iron People legionaries.
The two children were thrust into a wooden cage on wooden wheels intended for securing the captured Decebelus, and trundled laboriously overland to the Roman forces. It took two days to return to Trajan's encampment beneath the smoldering ruin of the fortress at stony Sarmizegethusa.
Dromichaetes and Estia were put on display to the troops. The two clung to each other secured behind the cage's sturdy timbers while the Roman soldiers in iron armor bearing iron weapons shouted harsh words at them and cast handfuls of wet animal dung at the cage.
'A sweet lad. Weedy but sturdy,' Trajan declared to his officers, 'and sufficiently young to educate in our ways. As a prince of his race a portion of his father's treasure is to be endowed to his upkeep and training. He will be a hostage ward of the State assigned to a noble family. He will blossom, and may have value in some future strategy of state. Hadrian enjoys mentoring young men. Allocate the Dacian prince to my commander.'
Trajan ignored Dromichaetes' sister, Estia, who possessed only marital value between contending communities. Yet the antagonism against the children ceased from that moment and their protection and sustenance improved greatly.
