across the river. Many were trapped in the village. They became slaves or died. Those who got to the other bank, we ran until our hearts were ready to burst. When we returned, nothing remained. The huts had all been destroyed, the crops burned, the animals slaughtered and dumped in the wells. It took two years to rebuild then. Two wasted years. Do you know how long it would take us to rebuild now?”
Esk kar shook his head. Two years seemed like plenty of time to replace mud huts and plant a few more crops.
“Orak is more than twice as big as it was then. Now I think it would take five years to rebuild, assuming our trade doesn’t go to another village up or down the river. Orak might never grow so great again. I cannot waste five years, Esk kar. I will not.”
Esk kar had lived among villagers long enough to understand their fears, but to complain about raiders merely wasted breath. “Nicar, bandits from the north and east have been raiding this land for generations. Nothing can be done about it. At least this time you’ll have plenty of time to prepare your… departure.”
Nicar looked out over the village again. “You’re like all the others. They all say nothing can be done. You surprise me, Esk kar. You’re supposed to be a fighting man, and yet you’re afraid to fight.”
“Watch your words, Nicar. I have fought the Alur Meriki before. But I’m not a fool. Much as I’d enjoy killing more of them, I won’t fight where there’s no hope of winning. If there were some way to hold them off, if something could be done… but they’re just too strong. You’d be better off taking your gold and leaving.”
“No. I will not run, and I will not give my hard — earned gold to the barbarians! Better to use it to try and defend Orak. I’m too old to start over again. This village is mine, and I will stay. That is, if you can defend Orak.”
“Nothing can stop the Alur Meriki.”
“Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps nothing can be done. But before we run away again, I want to know why we cannot defend ourselves against them.
I want to understand why Orak, with so many people, is so helpless. Tell me that, Esk kar.”
Nicar was right about the village. In all his travels, Esk kar had never seen a village as big. A day seldom went by without someone moving into Orak. A few even used a new word to describe it, calling it a city, the City, the biggest gathering of people ever built. A place with a real stockade made from rough — cut logs and two solid gates to deny entrance. But Eskkar knew that the palisade and gates served only to deter petty thieves or small bands of marauders, not a migration of the steppes.
Of all the raiders who plagued the land, the steppes barbarians aroused the most terror. Ruthless warriors and superb horsemen, no force could stand against them. No force ever had, at least not in Esk kar’s memory, or even in the legends of others.
“Nicar, where were the barbarians found? How far away are they?”
“Many miles across the steppes to the far north,” Nicar answered. “It will be midsummer before they reach this place. The great curve of the Tigris will force them far to the east before they can head south. But this time their path seems to point toward us. It may be more than a raiding party that comes to Orak next summer. Word of our prosperity has reached even them, so the traders tell me.”
“So we have nearly six months to prepare. Of course, raiding parties could be here sooner, Nicar, much sooner.”
The steppes people always had two or three groups of raiders oper-ating around the tribe’s center, looking for opportunities to take horses, tools, weapons, or women, and not necessarily in that order, although none would pass up a good horse to waste time on a woman. A village this size would attract them as it attracted everyone. There might even be almost as many people here as in the migrating tribe. Strange he hadn’t thought of that before.
Esk kar drained his water cup. The sharp pain behind his eyes had lessened, replaced by a dull throb. Nicar’s earlier words came back to him, and now they seemed to contain a challenge. “You want to understand why we must run, Nicar, is that it? It’s because we don’t have warriors. We have farmers, tradesmen, and a few dozen men trained to fight. The Alur Meriki can send hundreds of warriors against us. Even soldiers won’t fight against those odds.”
“If we fight them from behind our palisade…”
“The palisade will not stand. A few ropes over the top and they’ll pull it down.”
“Then we need a stronger barrier,” Nicar said, a little more forcefully.
“Could such a barrier be constructed in time?”
Esk kar glanced out over the balcony. The fence that surrounded Orak stood almost directly below him, only a dozen paces away, and he studied it as if seeing it for the first time. Not high enough, not strong enough, he knew. Orak needed a solid wall. A mud wall, if it could be built high enough and strong enough, might give the barbarians pause. But even a wall wouldn’t stop fighting men. Well, one thing at a time. They just needed something with enough resistance to make the attackers move on to easier pickings.
“I need to think about this, Nicar. What you ask may not be possible.
Give me some time. I’ll come back to you by sundown and tell you what I think.”
Nicar nodded, almost as if expecting the delay. “Come for dinner, then, after sundown. We’ll talk again.”
Esk kar bowed and left the house. He walked through the twisted lanes back to the soldiers’ compound, thinking about Nicar’s words. At the barracks he ignored the idle men standing around and went instead to the stables. He called for a horse and while the stable boys readied it, Esk kar crossed back into the lane. He approached the nearest street vendor and spent the last of his copper coins to buy some bread and cheese.
Shoving the food into his pouch, Esk kar filled a bag with water, then mounted up and rode slowly through the village. He passed through the main gate and nodded to the guard who looked at him nervously, no doubt wondering whether he’d be returning. Rumors must be spreading, fanned by the news of Ariamus’s sudden departure.
The fresh air cleared the last effects of the wine from his mind, and Esk kar gave his full attention to the spirited horse, which seemed equally glad to escape the village’s confines. He put the beast to an easy canter until he reached the top of a small hill about two miles east of the village.
From this vantage, he had an excellent view of both Orak and the river Tigris that looped behind it.
He reined in the horse and began eating the good bread and poor cheese he’d purchased, letting many different thoughts drift through his head. To his surprise, he had several ideas of what could and could not be done. Licking the last of the cheese from his fingers, he studied the village, almost as if seeing it for the first time.
Orak sat on a broad slab of hard earth and stone that forced the river to bend around it, so that the fast — flowing currents protected almost half the village from direct approach. The bedrock supporting the village had once been surrounded by marshland. As the settlement had grown, farmers had drained the marshes, growing crops and building huts on the recovered land. Dozens of canals, large and small, crisscrossed the countryside around the village, bringing water from the river to the farms.
Perhaps the land could be flooded again, leaving only one main approach to the village’s gates. In his mind’s eye, Esk kar pictured a line of archers atop a wall, standing shoulder to shoulder, launching flights of arrows into a swarm of mounted attackers beneath them. The bow, he decided. Only that weapon could make the soft dirt — eaters equal to Alur Meriki warriors, and then only if the bowmen had a wall to hide behind.
Faced with a strong wall, most of the mounted warrior’s advantages disappeared. No storm of arrows to devastate the defenders, who could then be overwhelmed and cut apart by the charging riders. Against such a wall, the Alur Meriki’s greater physical strength and skill with sword and lance would be lessened. Yes, it might work. If Orak could build the wall, the village might have a chance. Whether Orak could transform itself remained to be seen.
Orak resembled every other village Esk kar had seen. Small huts built from river mud and straw accounted for most of the dwellings, though the homes of the rich merchants and nobles tended to be much larger or two — story affairs. A fence surrounded the village, but numerous huts and tents had sprung up outside the stockade, including some that, against Nicar’s orders, butted up against the structure.
As for the villagers, they, too, were much the same as people everywhere. Most had few possessions: a cotton tunic, a wooden food bowl, perhaps a few crude tools. But the farms around Orak yielded plenty of grain, which the bakers turned into a hearty bread, the one clean smell that constantly scented the village air.
The farmers produced enough not only to feed themselves and their families, but enough extra to trade or sell in the village. That surplus filled Orak with people who didn’t need to farm to survive, merchants, traders,
