NOTICE
The guard shift at the First Battalion ended without any news, as it had been happening for as long as one could remember, that is why some sentries considered surveillance as a routine activity; however, it was necessary given the potential threat represented by the Saurians, close relatives of the gigantic and ferocious reptiles that abounded in the lowlands.
The Saurians were relatively smaller and weaker than the enormous dinosaurs, but much more intelligent than their gigantic and ferocious cousins, they moved in organized herds and explored great extensions in search of fresh meat, but they had never arrived by those latitudes… Until that day.
It was late afternoon, and during his shift, Sema, son of Por, was sitting on the watch platform, leaning his back on the thick trunk of the tree that served as support, chewing mint leaves, with his eyes lost in the horizon, pondering on the best way to flirt with Kir, Ramel’s daughter.
Kir was a beautiful young girl with long and straight brown hair, which was knotted in a single braid, leaving free a beautiful face in which shone some smiling brown eyes, the exact color that had the honey served in a new bowl according to the words of the same Sema. Kir was slender, a little taller than most of the girls of the tribe, but her forms were firm and well pronounced, which made her stand out amid her friends, who formed a noisy and happy group of weavers, who created bags, baskets, and other containers made with resistant reeds similar to wicker, which they skillfully intertwined giving shape to a great variety of objects for diverse uses.
For some time now, Sema, had been furtively crossing glances with her at lunchtime in the mornings or at communal dinners when he was not on duty, on a couple of occasions she surprised him by looking at her with the silly expression of those who are hopelessly in love and from the first time, she reciprocated with a radiant smile, which disrupted the young lanky a lot, who from the moment he was aware of being discovered, spied on her with an alert attitude, trying to divert his gaze as soon as he noticed a movement of Kir’s eyes, who in turn played with Sema pretending to be absorbed in other things, catching him several times until he could gather enough courage to smile back at her, expression which he kept for a few seconds until he ended up feeling stupid and in the middle of a confused mixture of longings, feelings and fears, he got up, advanced through the dining room towards her, but just when the girl was expecting some greeting and the respective crossing of words, he passed by, with his body rigid, blushing, with a face of shame and left the room without turning around to see her, His heart was overwhelmed with joy, fear, confusion and a mixture of feelings that made his stomach so twisted that that night he could not sleep until late in the morning, waking up at dawn tired, with his eyes slimy, a metallic, pasty taste in his mouth and entirely convinced that he was a real idiot. To top it all, that day, it was his turn to go to the Bast.
He arrived grumpy, sleepy, spending the day without being able to get out of his head the beautiful smile that Kir had given him, the warmth that he felt all over his body, and the delicious sensation that for his mind had meant discovering his beautiful eyes looking at him.
Immediately the memento, it fell him like a bowl of cold water, his stupid and cowardly attitude that had spoiled any intention of getting close to her.
These ideas came back to him again and again, and he spent half the morning thinking of all the possible ways he could have overcome the situation, if his actions or his attitude had been different, dreaming of being able to go back in time and repeat the incident, but this time acting differently, without making a fool of himself.
Precisely in these dreams was Sema that afternoon, mentally hitting herself with a rock on the head, repenting of her cowardice, and looking for a suitable excuse to be able to engage in conversation with her the next time they coincided.
He kept a soliloquy of the supposed conversation he would have if another opportunity presented itself, rehearsing even the tone of voice and the words with which he would approach her.
- Hi, you look so tonight!
- No! You’ll think I’m trying to tell you that the other nights you’ve been ugly
- Hi, are you new here?
- No, you idiot! They’ve been looking at each other for half a year
- Hello, can I sit here?
- Maybe I won’t look like a fool, but will I have the courage to tell you that?
He examined himself thoroughly and came to the conclusion that he would not have the courage to say a single damn word to her; In fact, he did not feel the courage to return and present himself at the communal table while she was present, not after what had happened. Probably, she would be laughing at him along with her friends, and the moment appeared there, he would be mocked by all present.
He was immersed in the depths of his sad existential misery, when he realized that in the distance, at the other end of the lake, some luminous points were moving in a very unnatural way towards the shore.
What was happening was that some of the Saurians of a Horde were exploring the area and had come out of the thick forest to the shore to drink and collect water for the Horde’s camp, and thanks to the combination of the position of the sun at that hour, their own location and a particular iridescence of their skins that made them shine a little and be visible from great distances Sema was able to see them.
Like a series of bright spots moving along the beach, at first he looked at them without blinking, absorbed as he was in his youthful tragedies, and did not pay due attention to them until he suddenly realized that those lights were unusual and that they looked just as they had been explained to him many times in training, so that they could only mean danger and death, the impression of having discovered a horde of saurians awakened him from his reverie.
He called his other companions to bring them up to date with the discovery.
The senior sentries confirmed that it was indeed Saurians and that they were part of a Horde; they trying to establish the size of it considering the number of carriers that looked like bright spots on the lake’s shore, estimated that the Horde was relatively small, more or less a “basket of acorns”(1) or they were so close to the beach that they did not deserve so many water collectors.
They could not really be sure of even an approximate number of members in the supposed Horde; it was known that these were usually a little more than two baskets of acorns, that is about two hundred to two hundred and fifty Saurians in total, but this particular one could be half the average size for a horde, possibly the group belonged to a Horde that had just split up(2).
Luckily the Great Lake stretched for a long distance(3) before reaching the place where they were located, and it seems that the Saurians had not the slightest idea that above the gorges, in the mountains, there were human settlements.
The only possible point of access was behind a massive layer of basalt that served as a natural wall. It could only be entered through a narrow gorge at the top of a very inaccessible slope that led to a relatively wide and deep plain lined with high natural walls across the width and a steep hill at the bottom. In the middle, a ditch had been dug, cutting the field in two sides; at the bottom of the dug, were placed some pointed trunks that intertwined to make a death trap, but besides, they had placed inside, many dry branches and wooden slits forming a very dense bed of firewood ready to burn, all this plus the platforms and other defense devices constituted the first bastion to contain a massive attack of beasts, which they called “The first Bast.”
That mountain was the first of a great range of ascending elevations crowned by a massive volcano, which showed evident signs of slow but constant activity, and the entire mountainous area had become the main settlement of human beings. About twenty-two tribes lived in the mountains, five of them were settled near the access gorge already mentioned, which they called “The Gorge.”
The tribes usually took the name of their current leader until he named a successor, died, or became incapacitated. The tribe assumed the name of their new leader, so at the time of our history, the men of the first “Bast” belonged to the tribe of Thar, the second Bast was defended by warriors from the Ummal tribe, and the third, which was the largest, had men from various tribes, from the Yor tribe, from the Kortan tribe, and from the Cayman clan.
They did not have the name of their leader because they proclaimed that they did not need leaders, and their symbol was an alligator glyph.
After the alert issued by Sema, the night fell, and part of the sentries on duty occupied their guard posts while the soda men went to bed wrapped in their skins under the trees where the towers were, some made or maintained improvised shelters for them and their companions, those who had finished their guard went to the village, which was located halfway up the mountain from Bast.
That night Sema lay down in his bed, but he could not sleep soon, despite the accumulated tiredness for being awake the previous night, the emotion of having discovered the Saurians seized him.
Especially because Lur had publicly congratulated him, setting him as an example for the other young sentries, Amidst applause and under the noisy approval of the whole group on duty, added to all this he had in his mind, the comment of his friend Dir, who said to him with a malicious smile.
- You already have something to talk about with KirThis caused a cacophonous barrage of denials mixed with nervous giggles from Sema and heartfelt laughter from Dir.
For that night, Lur chose several of the most veteran and cunning sentries by placing them in the outermost observation posts, which was more the result of paranoia than of reality since the Saurians rarely moved at night, much less in those latitudes that were colder than the dense and immense tropical forest that covered most of the habitable land.
These were extreme precautionary measures, but all agreed that they were never too much since they were Saurians.
When the first lights of the new day illuminated the mountains, the younger sentries went to relieve the older ones so that they could sleep and be rested in case of problems.
The whole day the wait was tense because they didn’t know if any scouting party would arrive at the access area. If they did, they would have to wait if they could discover the entrance to the gorge.
If they did, they would have to have all the containment measures ready, so Lur decided to send three men in the early hours of the day with their wineskins full of resin to spray the trunks of the pit in case they had to face a scout patrol.
Then they lowered two gatherers employing ropes that were held by four men each, and when they reached the ground, they ran towards the pit, untied the mouths of the skins, and spread the resin inside the cavity, to leave it ready to burn at the slightest contact with fire, in the end, arranged some trunks to facilitate the expansion of the flames and finally ran again towards the ropes, from which they were hoisted to the high zone of the gorge.
The rest of the day they spent expectantly, in silence, praying to the Giver of Light that they would never appear or pass by without discovering his existence;
In any case, the forest extended very soon after the entrance to the gorge, for after a short stretch, one reached a small beach at the edge of the lake where any passage ended and from there followed a high basaltic wall that remained stuck to the lake far beyond what could be seen with the naked eye, like a high cliff.
In the best-case scenario, if the saurians didn’t discover the entrance, they would reach the beach, and since they didn’t find anything, they would have to return to their camp and abort any advance of the Horde.
The day ended without any incident to report, and although the atmosphere was getting tenser and tenser, some came to think that the beasts would not come near the area and that the danger would go away, but Lur and the other heads of surveillance were aware that with the Saurians nothing could ever be left to chance.
That night there was no relief of guards to assure more sentries during the following day, and those on duty stayed awake under the night dew until the dawn tinted the horizon orange announcing a new day.
