The people turned their faces away uncomfortably.
Nila didn't have words, she knew that, so she dove straight to the heart of the matter.
"Why do you not fight?" She asked, her voice harsher than she expected. She sounded angry, she realized. That short girl, with her red hair, sounded as though there was fury in her voice. As though she was a voice on their shoulder, criticising them for their cowardice.
"Leave it, girl," a man complained tiredly. "We're done. There's no sense in fighting the Yarmdon. Ain't no village ever managed to fight off one of their raids. And this here force? They're the Elites.
If even the soldiers don't stand a chance, then we don't either."
There weren't any murmurs of agreement. It wasn't as though the villagers wanted to argue with her. They were not strongly on any side of the fence. They'd merely given up. The energy had left their hearts. They didn't have the strength or will left to resist anything.
"Beam is fighting there with them, for you," Nila said. There was no subtlety to her words. She didn't have the gift of a speaker. A gilded tongue was never her gift.
Again, they shifted uncomfortably at that. The same man responded. "…That boy is different."
"Why? It isn't his fight. He has no family here. It's you that should be fighting – for your women, for your children. What are you doing, giving up before then?"
"Then why aren't you there, girl?" The man spat back, nearly shouting, the rage evident on his face. "You're just as scared as the rest of us."
"I am scared!" Nila shouted at him, childish and honest. "But I'm not going to die here. I'm not going to die without fighting back."
"What use is there in fighting a fight that you're certain to lose?" An old man asked, stroking his beard.
"Because we aren't certain to lose!" That was Nila's answer. Different from Beam's own. "Until we're dead, why don't we fight? You were all so ready to cut down the Elder when he'd taken your children, but now you're all too cowardly to raise your same axes against the Yarmdon, who are going to do the same, or even worse. You know what they do to women, don't you?
Are you going to leave your wives to suffer that fate?"
They hadn't planned to. It was an unspoken agreement, that they'd partake in suicide, the moment it was too late. It was a common act for those villagers under the threat of raid. To free the women and children from the sufferings of war the moment before it fell upon them.
"If you were speaking to a Yarmdon village, girl, perhaps you would glean more support. Those savages believe that dying with a sword in hand, their Gods will reward them," the same old man said. His words were indifferent. He did not particularly care either way. He had no family left to his name, all that he cared about had long since passed on. These were merely the final moments of a dying world.
"Does Claudia not say that our struggle will be rewarded? Do we not struggle here, every winter, when the snow falls, and when the food grows scarce? We fight against the seasons, against things we really can't control – but these here, they're just men. They're men that we can beat, men that we can drive back. Even if we don't manage to kill them all, we can make them pay for taking from us."
There was real anger in Nila's voice as she said that. Make them pay.
"I could take a Yarmdon down with me," Rodrey said suddenly. He was never much of a talker, and to hear his words echo out over a vast crowd, it troubled the man as soon as he noticed it. He looked down at his feet. "All I'm saying is, can't we all? There's only 300 of them, maybe less now. Maybe just 200 after their fighting with the soldiers.
There's 200 of us. I reckon we can take one each, can't we?"
"Hah? What the fuck is with this? Rodrey of all people, trying to claim he can take a Yarmdon? Where do you get off thinking you're hot shit? If you can take one Yarmdon, I'll take two. Don't be getting full of yourself just because you're earning some coin taking orders from a girl," finally, one of the stronger men in the village spoke up.
Not out of a desire to protect the village, or even save his family. Merely out of irritation. He couldn't stomach someone weaker than him trying to reach up towards stars that even he shirked away from.
Nila smiled. They were fleeting comments from both men, more directed towards themselves than the whole crowd. But that didn't matter to her.
"A load of bollox, this…" One of Judas' men made his presence known at the edge of the crowd. "You lot don't have a clue how to fight. I'll bet you our man Judas is handling business. If I went and joined in, the whole battle would be over in a matter of minutes."
It was a cocky remark, more designed to annoy than anything else. Such was the mind of a man that had gladly slipped down the rabbit hole of crime, and dug even deeper into its darkened depths. By his eyes, those that didn't were weak. They were mere prey to be preyed upon. And prey – as they were – could never wield a strength stronger than a fox like him.
"And Beam is even stronger than Judas," Nila reminded him.
There were stirs of realization at that. Judas was a character of lore in the village. The strongest man for miles around. He was the physical embodiment of strength, his size made that obvious. With Beam, it was harder to picture that strength, given his unremarkable stature. But when compared to Judas, it made a startling comparison.
The ice was starting to break, even as waves of fear reemitted themselves. The bolder men got to talking, fuelled by their anger, by other emotions that drowned out their fear, they competed with each other in front of their wives, simple-minded even in their darkest moments.
It was the men that the women were looking to, Nila noticed. There was the faintest glimmer of hope in their eyes. It was a lack of a leader that had rendered them so infantile. The Captain had arrived with his soldiers, and he'd taken command, shooing the rest of them away from the battlefield, as though they did not have worth enough to stand on it.