Chapter Three: The Beginning and End of Peace
My mother aged forty years in the four years that I was gone. She was no longer the strong beautiful woman that stood up to my father even as he beat her or the wise mother who told me stories of Darius and Cyrus. She was bent and broken from her hard labor collecting night soil from the townsmen and carrying it far out into the fields for use as fertilizer.
I stopped my mother in the street as she carried the buckets of waste in each hand. She stared at me as if she did not know me before her mouth broke into a wide smile. She staggered towards me, her arms open as she reached to embrace me. Three wretched girls peered out from behind her, their eyes widened as they saw me. We left the night soil in the middle of the street and started a new life.
The new social standing that I gained through those six years of service had many benefits. I was given a patch of land in the outskirts of Trapezous that, though small, hilly, and poor, was more than my family ever had. At the age of sixteen, I began working the land by terracing the hills with my sisters, planting wheat interspersed with fruit trees to hold the soil. I became close friends with a neighboring farmer, an old Greek who traces his ancestors back to Korinth, and eventually married his daughter while one of my sisters married his son. I remember gazing out over my little piece of land, my young wife sitting next to me while my mother cradles my baby son in her arms, thinking that this was the life I was destined to live. But I guess it was naïve of me to think that such good things could last forever.
The lands of Hayasdan have expanded, but the number of people inhabiting its lands was small. Taxes were very high to support the richly ornamented bodyguards of governors and generals while the fertility of the land was low. There was little extra income to improve the sanitation of the cities and as result, disease and early death took the lives of many boys before they reached the age to serve in war.
The cities were being emptied of men. The fields were tended by children and the elderly while widows sat begging or selling themselves for an extra day of life. Even my once wealthy home was devastated. A series of attacks by the warriors of Pontus and an offensive campaign to take the town of Ani-Kamah had depleted the population to the point that daily life was barely functioning. Lives were now much more valuable. Reform was necessary.
The king first searched among his own people to replace the Kavakaza Sparabara.
The result was a spear unit of Hayasdan tribesmen called the Hai Nizagamartik.
The Siege of Ani-Kamah
The Attack on Karkathiokerta
However, they performed poorly in the siege of Ani-Kamah and even worse in the attack on Karkathiokerta. The King of Hayasdan needed infantry that could not only stand against the enemy, but survive to fight another day.
Eventually, he found his solution. And I was part of it.
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