Page 10 of Beds and Blades

Assume real.

Proceed accordingly.

I was committing.

I had arrived in another world.

***

The outpost had looked like a fortification from the field. Up close, it looked like something far more impressive than mere fortification.

It was not a castle. There were no towers built for aesthetics, no decorative stonework, no architectural flourishes that suggested the people who built it had been thinking about anything other than making it very difficult to get through those walls.

What it was, was substantial. Massive outer walls with the thickness of stone designed to absorb impact rather than deflect it. Arrow slits positioned with the methodical regularity of someone who had calculated fields of fire instead of considering aesthetics. Multiple interior walls created a layered defensive architecture I recognized immediately. The same logic as a Roman military camp. The same principle of forcing an attacker to fight for every inch rather than presenting a single point of failure.

Whoever had built this had been thinking about the problem correctly.

The walls themselves told the rest of the story. There were gaps in the crenellation where something had hit it.

Repeatedly.

The stonework bore the scars of sustained assault over what looked like years, and it had endured it all without apology.

Whoever was running this place had been defending it against serious force for a serious amount of time and had not been losing.

The knight called out as we approached, and the drawbridge began to lower. We crossed the moat too fast to study it properly, which made me try, anyway.

I looked.

Underwater, in the moat, lay the accumulated evidence of every assault that had failed to get past the walls above. Armor. Weapons. The scatter of things that had once belonged to people who had charged this position and failed.

And bones. A significant number of them, visible through the water.

I noticed, with immediate and deeply unwelcome recognition, that most of the skeletal remains appeared to be missing their heads.

I stared for a second, hoping additional observation would produce a less alarming conclusion. It did not.

There were skulls in the moat. The skulls were scattered across the bottom like they had landed there at speed. The rest of the skeletons were there too, but the skulls were nowhere near them.

I felt a small, involuntary tightening in my stomach.

It was one thing to study battlefields separated by two thousand years from my time, wrapped in cold academic language. It was another thing entirely to look down and realize I was crossing over the physical evidence of people who had tried to get through these gates and had failed with extraordinary finality.

Whoever had attacked this place had died here.

And whoever defended it had developed a very specific solution to the problem.

The people holding this outpost were extremely good at what they did.

I decided, immediately and without reservation, that I intended to remain on their side of the walls.

***

I noticed that roughly a third of the soldiers within the fortress were women.

Not in support roles. Women were at the wall, in armor, carrying weapons, and moving with the same capability as the men beside them. A woman near the eastern forge was running two younger men through a weapons exercise. No one else questioned it either.

These were not the gender rules I would have expected from a civilization still utilizing swords and stone walls.