ANGEL OF JUSTICE (2014 revised)

Chapter Twenty Two - Citadel

Citadel

Captain Baras, of the Citadel Guard was tired. He looked up from his post upon the citadel wall with gritty eyes to see the rising sun glint across the bay to his right in a sheet of gold. He sighed, trying to feel pleasure in the beauty before him rather than the fatigue that had seeped into his bones from another long night of being on guard. Looking along the formidable two-mile wall where torches burned low from the giant buttresses, casting flickering shadows over the twenty-seven thousand Cardinian soldiers a smile of pride crept over the officer's face.

They were all brave men, Baras knew, men loyal to the kingdom and the royal family. Every man here had a father or grandfather who had earned the honour to protect the royal family and residences of the citadel. One in twenty of those men currently stood guard while the rest tried to catch what little sleep they could. Walking to keep sleep at bay, Baras saw some of the men stir as he passed and knew their expressions mirrored his own growing concern of the enemy camped beyond the river. Pausing for a moment, he looked beyond the bridge to the river banks where the ten miles of open ground had since been converted into a sea of black tents spreading all the way back to the great forest where horses in the thousands were picketed. The sight of half a million men was enough to send shivers down the spine of the most seasoned of warriors but more arrived every hour of every day. The number of men was colossal. Baras watched as the campfires were being lit, sending funnels of grey smoke drifting up into the air to cover the early morn in a thick murky haze.

Turning and walking across the wall that could fit fifty men abreast Baras looked over the other side soaking in the calming view of the townships and buildings within the citadel two miles distant. Home to over fifty thousand civilians, it also consisted of the royal residences and the Royal Assembly where official business for the running of the citadel and city was conducted as well as the barracks and training grounds for the First Guard and Citadel Guard. Few people outside of Cardinia knew of the thousands of caverns and chambers riddled throughout the horseshoe shaped volcanic walls that surrounded the citadel that were utilised by the priests of the higher orders and civilians alike.

Baras knew that once the ward over the citadel was gone it would be left to the wives, children and the old men who lived within the citadel to hold the wall from the enemy if reinforcements did not arrive to bolster the Citadel Guard. With a prayer to the God of War, Athan, Baras asked that his sons would not suffer such a fate. Turning bitter thoughts aside, Baras gazed left to the township of Petra where his family resided, thinking of his wife and sons. His father was one of those soldiers who had served the kingdom all his life, even fighting in the Hundred Day war, twenty years ago in the border war against the Krahjan Desert tribesmen.

Baras remembered fondly the day after the Hundred Day war was won and the Desert men defeated, the Cardinian King had awarded his father a medal for outstanding bravery in a ceremony atop these very walls. Cardinians had travelled the whole kingdom to witness the award to all the heroes and the week long celebrations that had followed in their honour. Then there were the cold winter nights, with the rain pounding against the glass windows of his family's home and the lightning slashing the sky, Baras and his two older brothers would sit around the fire begging to hear father's stories of the war and its heroes.

The one he remembered most was of how the yellow garbed tribesmen would leave their distant campfires and burrow under the desert sands at night to attack the Cardinian forces with the coming dawn. The first time they attacked in this manner, many Cardinian soldiers had died. But on the second and consecutive nights, it was the desert men who were taken by surprise time and again as his father and Captain Jacob Williamson had organised small groups of men and snuck away from the border patrol in the middle of the night to come upon the desert men as they slept in the hollows of sand they had dug out as they waited for the dawn. Every night the Cardinians would hit the Desert men until eventually with the heavy losses they had all been routed and the war won.