Asgarth the Invincible: Chapter XX

A mighty army of literally scores of soldiers clad in gleaming armour was arrayed before the foreboding walls of Suno, the great capital of the Swadian kingdom. The city’s defenders bristled on the ramparts like the spines of an immense hedgehog made from steel, its towers and gates rising from the earth like huge cliffs of stone, banners and flags fluttered in the breeze like enormous scraps of cloth on sticks.


Asgarth surveyed the scene before him, his heroic jaw square with determination and lack of fear. “We shall storm these walls and raze this fair city to the ground, and the Swadian curs will run from our blades like lambs fleeing the deadly scythe of the shepherd,” he breathed.

The men around him quivered with fear as the attack trumpets sounded to signal the start of the assault, but Asgarth felt no fear. “Come, my loyal band of warriors,” he triumphalised. “Charge!”

They clambered as a single great mass onto the ladders they had propped against the city walls, storming up to the ramparts as men fell left and right to arrows of the defending archers and fell screaming to a horrible death below. The air was filled with the stench of blood and sweat and piss, with body parts flying everywhere in confusion, detached from their owners for the rest of time, and steel flashing in the bright sunlight as it sliced through arms and legs and faces.


But it was to no avail. The ramparts held as the attackers fell into great carrion piles below the walls, heaped bodies of men who mere hours before had laughed and joked and loved as only men can who know that the hour of their death is near. “Retreat!” cried Asgarth, his tunic claret with the blood of his foes, seeing that the situation was hopeless. He ran down the ladder and back to the siege positions, only to see that everyone in his entire warband was dead.


“This is bullshit!” screamed Asgarth with a fury that shuddered even the distant mountains, and he decided to retire from adventuring and romance and go and find a quiet teaching job in the distant land of D’Urhám instead.

FIN