P'unghae Hinterland, Ke Province, Sudrap Empire of Dra-pol
Up to his neck in not so very much more than three feet of Miyan Delta, Liw-Ip Inm tended dutifully to the community's deep-water rice, casting the odd jealous glance over the distant paddy where his sister supervised a buffalo plough and chewed absent-mindedly on tea leaves. She was to be married and expected soon to bear children. Inm would have to bear instead mounting discomfort and the marginal risk of crocodile attack for the immediate future. The mother of his intended had taken fright at the birthmark covering a full quarter of his face and refused to approve the match. I really am cursed.
”Inm! Supper!”
Thank the gods! Sunset approaches and the day's work is done. Inm struggled out of the water and up the flats, passing a few small salt-panning pools -abandoned as inefficient in barely brackish conditions- and the clan's large tidal fish trap. Cresting a gentle tree-lined rise a few dozen paces in from the shore he caught up with his sister and the water buffalo.
Before them, protected against tsunami and naval gunnery by that artificial berm constructed in centuries past, lay the homestead. A great circular building three stories high the K'hip Miyan combine was home to one-hundred-and-twenty-seven people in eleven families. Inm, stooped, passed through the narrow granite-framed gateway having been recognised by the girl on watch and let through a thick, iron-faced hardwood door. His sister was busy taking the herd into another -similarly fortified- enclosure just a few metres away and would soon follow, all be it for the last time before moving combines to live with her soon-to-be husband who would also be leaving his family to start anew.
A relatively small combine, K'hip Miyan had only two dining halls and each only two sittings. Today Inm was one of thirty-two residents eating at the east dining hall's second sitting and he entered a room already thick with the aroma of the evening's offerings. The young farmer smiled. Pork and twice-fried onions, one of his favourites! There was mango, too, and juice of same, but Inm was sick of the stuff and, lacking a sweet tooth, swapped with his cousin for some buffalo milk.
The sun dipped behind the tree-line and Inm, still damp from his work, wished for bed. But it was early and the community had other ideas. Rice wine to chase the evening meal! Inm's eyes watered as the ceramic jugs were uncorked, such was the strength of this stuff.
Soon the young farmer had quite forgotten his fatigue and was joyful, singing the old clan songs with his peers as the two dining halls spilled out into the central courtyard surrounding the ancestral shrine. “Ame Aep!” He slurred at a fair second cousin once removed. Far the prettiest girl in the commune -his sister not withstanding, of course!- Aep was fond of Inm but unable to regard him as a potential partner owing chiefly to his disfigurement. He really wasn't a bad looking chap if you could picture him without the sprawling stain, and he worked hard in the shallows despite being particularly short. And he could sing, which -buoyed by alcohol- he did with some gusto.
Perhaps if... but quite suddenly the revelry was interrupted by a rocket bursting over-head, not quite visible from within the courtyard but certainly heard, and spied by the girl on watch.
”Blue!” She reported the colour blasted across the dusk.
Pirates!
Intoxicated residents scrambled to their posts. Two old women hurried to the great cast-iron bell in the central shrine and struck it forcefully with hammers. Ame Aep took her infant brother to gather the other children and take them to the strong-room. Inm stumbled drunkenly to the second floor and into the outer corridor where the men and women of the duty watch were falling out of their beds and already handing-out arms. The members of the watch having taken most of the arquebuses for themselves, Inm was left with a rocket-tube, all be it a reusable iron model rather than the old and much derided bound-bamboo sort.
Even from here, on the top floor, the gunners, archers, and rocketeers could not quite see over the berm and so relied on a teenage girl, Aip-O'on Ye, ensconced in her sentinel tower with flags, kites, drums, and rockets to keep them updated on the movements of the intruders.
Runners had already been sent to inform neighbouring homesteads of the danger, scurrying in three directions to concealed 'nests' in which other distance runners of local renown bedded down each night only -this eve- to be roused by their exhausted peers bearing messages to be taken on and on in relay. A few miles in-land the runners would be replaced by riders and ponies that never seemed to fare well down here in the damp coastal lowlands.
Inm listened to the softly tapped chatter of the lookout's small-drum.
The bad spirits return.
Gristly, brutish, stupid and violent. The hairy malodorous titans with translucent skin and pots on their heads had returned to Dra-pol. They'd come once before, in the youth of Inm's great grandparents, but then over land and now over sea.
Last time, as every child of the Sudrap Empire knows, a great sickness had foreshadowed their arrival. Perhaps this time it were swallowed up by the waves. That would explain the poor catch this year! Last time they had acted crassly and taken offence to sensible traditions, and thought themselves superior to the highest of kings.
This time...
Another rocket burst. They've made land-fall!
HMS Makespeed
”Steady, boys! Fear not the savage's conjuring tricks! A star never hurt any man! Are you afraid of a little one?”
Captain Megson did a reasonably good if not entirely convincing job of concealing his own fear and confusion in the face of Sudrap signal rockets as the carrack Makespeed approached the sprawling maw of what earlier Italian adventurers had enabled Europe to know as the East's Iron River.
”Abrams! Smith! Your sections to shore with me! Iansbrook, you have command!” The Captain yelled, leaving his ship in the broadly capable hands of a sinuous little man from the Amber-Shieldian frontier as he lead ashore a landing party comprising three-quarters of Makespeed's sixty-man crew.
”Aye, lads, savages at worst, little men with pots of gold at best! I've read the Italian's diary and there are gems here like your Queen's never seen, sure enough! And a multitude in need of Christ at that! The church will thank you, too, boys!”
Illuminated by the better part of the moon and a starry sky these three boats pulled towards shore unencumbered by a tide about to reach its early-AM apex. The stroke of oarsmen was thrown considerably by the burst of Ye's second signal rocket and Megson fumbled with his hat as it fell from his ducking head only to be narrowly saved from the depths as the Captain regained his composure.
Coming ashore without challenge the Englishmen formed up on the beach in three sections of fifteen men a piece. Swords, halberds, longbows, and snaphance guns at the ready they advanced in good order towards an apparently unoccupied tree-line even as one or two pairs of eyes strained to decipher a particularly dark streak on the inky skyline.
“Bells?!”
“Quiet in the ranks!”
As the first section crested a small rise at the top of the beach a crack was heard and immediately followed by a rustling indicative of rapid movement. Someone swung about and gave fire into the dark.
“It's falling fruit, you shit!” Came some petty officer's reply as a coconut rolled by his feet, quite untroubled by shot.
At that moment all Hell broke loose. Silhouetted at the crest of this little rise, the Englishmen took fire from a hill they only now re-identified as a fortress. Some gunfire, a volley of crossbow bolts, and something unfamiliar as darts whistled by shitting fire in their wake.
“Firing lines! Bring up the gun!”
Screams, rushing sounds, crackling gunpowder, groans, bells and drums, bellowed commands, pleas for God or mother, and for a brief moment the squawking of alarmed birds.
Then the six-pounder with a wheeled carriage arrived with a team of men almost killed by the exertion of hauling it up this sandy slope and an iron ball was hurriedly loaded along with a suitable charge.
“Give fire!”
The invaders' first shot bounced off the interlaced stone foundations of the K'hip Miyan combine and made no discernible impression. A rocket-propelled dart sliced Megson's left bicep and wedged itself in a tree on the berm before exploding and showering members of the gun crew with shards of iron and bamboo, crippling two and causing not insignificant pain to four others.
“Give fire!” The Captain insisted before a second shot was sent a little higher, this time wedging briefly in the compacted earth wall of the first storey only to fall back to earth leaving a barely visible scrape on the wall of the combine.
“Steady, lads! Savages in a strong cave are still savages in a cave! Load again, and we'll have that gate yet! Think of the gems, boys!”
The Lieutenant to Megson's left gurgled and spat blood across his captain's tunic.
“What is...” Ij Ao-Him cut the English captain down with his curved short-sword and, followed by three comrades, charged into the surviving gun-crew.
OOC: Edit for Iberians disappearing. Italians substituted.
