Chapter 10
Odo battles on- if a struggle one against many may be termed a battle. He stands fighting astride his fallen steed, fending off legion enemies. They lunge at him with brutal swords, spears and poleaxes, or loose arrows, leering and snarling, closing in around, advancing over the rising mound of their own dead...

Just in time Asterith senses the movement on the plateau behind her. She swivels around, drawing back her bow, confronting the foremost of the Gargers, who is ready to thrust his spear. About to fire her last arrow, Asterith resolves never hence to come to this part of the borderlands, unless accompanied by at least six squadrons of royal guards.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The arrow flies, the Gaeger dies, but another one has dropped down behind her, and two other follow. Asterith draws her sword as she swings around to meet the next enemy. Her speed is unexpected, her blade cuts into the garger's shoulder before he can bring his own sword fully to bear.

A few moments before she had been playing the midwife; now Asterith finds herself fighting at close quarters with the beastly enemy; fighting for her life and that of Kreysta. Kreysta, who a moment before had been ready to crush her unnatural child under a rock, now found herself cradling the bawling baby protectively, as the growling and snorting Gargers drew closer.

Life is a struggle and ultimately it must be lost. Death conquers all. To live at all is to fight, and struggle against the odds. To be valiant is to fight for honour and love. It is to defy pain, exhaustion, sorrow, adversity and doubt, refusing to yield until the bitter end. Battered and wounded, Odo Paganus battles on against the insuperable enemy. He is sustained by the spirit of knighthood and by righteous rage.

The Gargers assail him just as relentlessly, driven by the blackest hate. They know that they are a superior species and that their superior numbers must soon overwhelm this stubborn foe; even though no single man has caused such injury to their kind in all their collective memory. Soon they will bring him down and be avenged. They will pull off his armour and mutilate his flesh. Then they will take his women, and when they are through with them they will hang his corpse in the fair prisoners' cell. It will be an additional torment- a reminder of the futility of resisting the Gargers. The putrefying body of the damsels' would-be champion will make the underworld air viler still for them. His body, that is, but not Odo's blond head, for that the Gargers will take south and hurl into Sulisas, the city of the knights. Thus they will announce to his people the fate of their bold commander.

Meanwhile one of the other Gargers who have descended upon the women throws himself from the ridge onto Asterith, wrestling her down, while his fellow reaches down for Kreysta and seizes her by the hair. The one that Asterith has wounded in the shoulder snarls and glares at her vengefully

A sword may be a thing of beauty, but it has a grim task- to rend flesh and spill blood. War is savage, the paradox is that to defend humanity a warrior must become something beastly.

Still Odo fights, performing great and grisly feats of arms, and still they come...

 

Having tumbled backwards, Asterith finds herself transfixed on the stony ground, under the stony weight of the vile Garger. The beast's mouth is now inches from hers, saliva drips from jagged teeth; the breath has a charnel reek. Before she can move the other one steps forward to pin her sword-arm down firmly with its foot. The third garger holds Kreysta by the hair.

Its pommel rests in her palm, but with her arm held down thus her sword may as well have been at the bottom of lake Gaia.