The Nameless Accounts: The March through Nah'Ke'tzin (13)
Greater Nah’Ke’tzin was like no place I had ever been before. It was a forest, but it was not like Bataklik. Bataklik has its fair share of trees and vines and flowers, don't get me wrong, but nothing on the scale that Nah’Ke’tzin has.
And I do mean literally the scale. Some of those flowers were so big a whole unit could have used them for cover. One of the officers even suggested that and took his men up into one to camp among the petals.
I'll never forget their screaming. We were ordered to avoid the flora after that.
It was not an easy thing to do. Nah’Ke’tzin is Lunaria's realm, and Lunaria is the Mother Goddess of nature and the Surface mari. She protects her own. The most innocuous incidents involved large fruit or pinecones snapping off their branches to hit us in the head, or roots suddenly rising up out of nowhere to trip us as we marched.
Less innocuous were the rumors that the trees moved, and whole units would get lost when a grove of trees decided to all get up and move a few miles in a random direction when no one was looking. Some of the sailors knew how to use the stars to guide us, and we began navigating by that instead of by the landmarks. I don't know what god controls the skies, but it wasn't Lunaria. So we made it through okay.
Despite the vicious nature of the plants, we were under orders not to burn any of it. A big blur of smoke in the sky would be a dead giveaway to us and our intentions, and there was always the possibility of waking up something worse than ornery trees. Instead, we used our swords to cut narrow paths through the forest, as if the plants were living, breathing enemies. And in some ways, they were.
It was about a month until we bivouacked up in the cliffs surrounding Lesser Nah’Ke’tzin. The men were tired. I remember them being so irritated by the continuous chirping of the birds, that a pair of our best archers went around shooting down all the birds they could find so the rest of the men could get some sleep. We later took some of them and put them in a stew.
They also tried to find the noisy chirping insects and put them into a stew, but we never found more than a few. They weren't too bad, though, if you ignored the legs.
There was little time for us scouts to rest however, once the army was settled in and reinforced. I was sent out again within cycles, to circumnavigate Lesser Nah’Ke’tzin and bring back any information that I thought would be useful to the officers.
I don't remember much about that time, except that I was in a constant state of paranoia, with Rising Heath's treehouses often right over my head. Some nights, the Surface mari would pass right above me on their rope bridges, and nothing saved me from being seen except their failure to look down. Other nights I would wake up to relieve myself and find a Surfacer had passed by only yards from my camp while I was sleeping, his tracks still filling in with water from the day's rain.
I was lucky, and I returned to the camp after a week without being seen. There, there was more waiting to be had as the remaining scouts trickled in, and the commanders pieced together an attack plan from their reports. The camps rippled with barely continued enthusiasm, and it was all the officers could do to keep them breaking out in song and dance until the Surfacers came down around our ears.
At long last, the units were divvied up and sent off. Some were chosen for the strike force on Rising Heath, others for keeping the passes out of Lesser Nah’Ke’tzin sealed, and others still were to march on Greenwood--until we knew more about the humans, we would treat them as hostile.
My own unit was chosen for the assault on Sun-On-The-Lake.
