One group of six men made the shallows and, banding together, used a pair of wicker shields and their spears to push onto shore. Ten Olossi militiamen closed in a disciplined group to confront them, trying to drive them back. Menard had crafted a long pole with a thickly knotted rope fastening a club to one end, and driven bits of jagged metal into the club. Coming up on the flank of the militia, he hefted the flail and, grunting, swung it. The club crashed down twice on enemy shields, which shuddered but did not splinter. Again the old man raised the flail, but this time as he stretched, an arrow caught him in the belly and a javelin’s bite drove him back. He fell, tried to raise himself, and collapsed. With a scream of rage, one of the village lads hoisted the flail and waded forward, club swinging so wildly that the Olossi militia men cried out both in warning and in laughter as the lad broke apart the enemy.

“Heya!” the youth next to Joss leaped back, abandoning his neat pile of stones.

Joss spun to face a man splashing up out of the shallows. Joss stabbed with his short sword, wrenched it free, and waded in as a second man lunged at him. He knocked aside a spear thrust and cut him down, and leaped back to realize he had just killed two men.

This was butcher’s work. Reeves were never meant to chop and hack like ordinands.

“Marshal! Your back!”

Spinning, he faced one of the enemy, who had axe raised; the man slumped, toppling forward and bringing Joss down with him. He squirmed out as the man twitched, to find Sengel grinning at him as he offered a hand up.

“Hu! That was close!”

Six rafts had been released into the waters, and the stragglers, their arrows spent and their comrades dead, dove into the water to swim back to the far shore. A single raft floated downstream, spinning away in the night as arrows vanished harmlessly into the river behind it.

Above the eastern woodland, the Basket Moon rose.

Anji trotted out to Joss, streaks and splashes of blood revealing he’d done his share of fighting. “Thirty of the enemy accounted for, and more lost in the river, I expect. We lost one man in the river, another three in the fighting on shore, and have five wounded. But we’ve delayed them.”

Joss wiped his brow. “I need a drink,” he said, looking at the bodies littering the shore. Villagers were already cutting their throats to make sure they were dead, stripping anything of value, and then dragging the bodies into the river.

“Now we wait for the strike force?” Joss asked.

Anji nodded. “Now we wait.”