#I can probably repurpose the old word for “ten” into the new word for “thirty-six”

[strixcattus]

Why be shackled to base 10? Base 12 is neat. Base 6 is also neat, and uses fewer digits. There's an obvious winner here given that the syllabary is going to have, like, uhhhhhhhhh fiftyish

[the-onceandfuture-king]

War || Self-Para || Past

A commotion in the courtyard had stirred him first as the heavy gates clunked and groaned apart, amplified by the quiet of the night. Voices called, mail clattered and booted feet echoed in running place around the stone walls of the castle. Arthur stared at the ceiling and let out a sigh. Torches flickered in the midnight air. It was not worth waiting for the sound of shoes to reach his chambers, he thought as he slipped from the comfort of his bed and the warmth of his new wife, and silently pulled on his trousers. Something had been brewing for months, though he kept his concerns quiet for the sake of a moment of marital bliss. For a normal life. Even as he moved about his room, ready to make an exit, he did not want to stir her from the dream that had carried their hands and their hearts in their time together. Everything would be fine, the illusion would not shatter and he’d be back in bed before the birds began to sing. He tied his laces and left one last gentle peck on Guinevere’s forehead, before stepping out into the corridor and greeting the soldiers racing toward his room with a weary smile.

Only a handful of men occupied the seats in the hall, half dressed and bleary eyed, some likely still drunk from the night’s charades. For all but Merlin of course who had never looked fresher in all his life and, as he learned later, had been sat in that very spot, expectantly nursing a cup of hot water for over an hour before the commotion had started. The cause of said commotion sat beside him, cheeks raw from panicked tears, his hands black and swollen, and a streak of blood crusted to his left side as the druid rambled on about purely irrelevant matters. It was easy to forget, he thought as he crouched beside the boy - for that was all he truly was - how young much of his warbands were. Though he let none of his tired thoughts penetrate the morning air, as the boy spoke with a quiver of leagues of armoured men marching south, of how they’d captured him and a score of other scouts, of how they had killed all that weren’t useful and sent him off with a message, after smashing his hands with a rock so he could not even hold a spear for the coming battle. Arthur gazed at the damage and imagined he might not ever hold a spear again.

“They said you- you have to renounce your,” the young man swallowed and kept his eyes in his lap, “your wife-”

“Whore was the actual term,” Merlin interjected with his usual thin, unreadable smile. He was always the perfectionist, in love with the details, though often Arthur wondered if he liked to say things as they were to stir all kinds of emotions in his fellow men - whether for his own pleasure or to incite a driving passion in their hearts, he couldn’t quite decide.

“Or they’d,” he licked his lips as he continued, “sweep through you like a plague.”

Arthur closed his eyes, fingers finding his chin and scratching their way through the stubble, as a deep sigh pressed at his chest.

“How many warriors were with them?”

“About…” He stared at the ceiling. “Two hundred, that I saw.”

“Probably more.”

Sagramor leaned on the table and yawned. “With that many men, I’d say they’ll be with us in four days. Six at best.”

“Send word to the closest kingdoms,” Arthur rose to his feet and rubbed his brow. “Ask for aid, if they can provide it.”

One of the older men stirred from the end of the table and shook his head, lips finding the rim of his cup. “Don’t bother,” he said, throwing a cautionary glance at the messenger. “No one will.”

“Call for aid.”

The scoff that followed echoed around the hall, so even men who had been half asleep were alive with the sudden thickness in the air. “This is your doing,” the old man growled. At one point, he had been right hand to the previous High King and though his status had long since dissolved, he still held himself with that same air. In the earliest years of Arthur’s rule, even, he’d taken pleasure in striking the young king and it seemed now he was large enough to strike back, he prefered to assault with cutting remarks. “You think a good ruler would risk their men because you decided to break the rules? This is what happens when you insult powerful kingdoms for a commoner. If it were me, I’d send you to meet them by yourself. Then you’d be able to see what piss good love does for kings and we’d all get the fun of watching you shit yourself before they hack you to pieces.”

For a moment the hall was silent, eyes stared, things that fell were forgotten. The only thing that breathed was the wind.

“If one has nothing nice to say, one best say nothing at all. Did your mother never teach you that?” Arthur stepped forward and the adviser rose to meet him. He hadn’t stood eye to eye with the man in a very long time and while he’d grown considerably since then, the old bastard still made his hands tremble like a boy. He swallowed the feeling. “At basest, if it must be unkind, I would much prefer it constructive. In the even that I did - go out alone and shit myself, that is - do you not imagine that any of you,” he gestured around them, gaze meeting men as it passed, “would be next in line to have your head removed? They would see the the throne kingless and sweep in to steal it for themselves. So please,” he snatched the cup of mead from his fat ancient fingers and slammed it on the table, “I would like you sober and thinking of ways this might actually work.”

The advisor twitched a moment as though he was going to strike him again. It took all Arthur’s will not to instinctively flinch. But, slowly, he sank back into his seat.

“We have nearly one hundred men, one hundred and ten if we scrape the very bottom of the barrel - that is conscripts so new they lack even a knight to guide them. I do not want to ask our neighbours for help, I also am under no illusion that they will. But we must at least try,” he continued, addressing the entire room, some of whom had obviously been hoping for a brawl with all the life that had suddenly appeared in their cheeks.

“We can’t meet them here. Why not call conscripts from the town closest to where we fight? Bump our numbers up by thirty at least.”

Arthur shook his head. “This is not their war. I very much doubt they care who sits on the throne so long as they do not take their sheep. But I suppose it would do no harm to be aware of the town and even friendly with it, in the event we should need food or shelter.” He motioned the messenger over with a tilt of his head. “Where did your camp meet them?”

The lean figure bent over the table and frowned. It was an enormous, wooden thing, circular with a map of the entire land on it, ranging from the very tip of Dumonia in the south to Gododdin in the north. Urther had commissioned it for pride and grandeur, he suspected. But much of the ornate flourishes had been worn away by time and bored fingers, and Arthur had decided to repurpose what had once been a very ornate dinner table. The edges had been carved deeper, past the border of swirls to show even some of the Saxon lands. Town names were engraved in their places and gold fittings melted down for the treasury. Sagramor had said he’d never seen a better war table in all his life.

The boy offered a lost glance between the King and the table.

“We are here,” Arthur pointed to a spot in the lower half of the map. “Those are the Beacons, Powys starts there, Gwent here.”

For a moment, the young man hesitated and then stretched himself over the board so his toes barely touched the ground, and tapped with one swollen hand at a spot in the centre east.

Sagramor leaned forward and hummed. “They’ll be going through the valley then. That might be a good place to catch them. If we’re careful they might not march us into the ground and they’ll be trapped if aid does come.”

Arthur frowned for a moment as he tried to piece together a solution. There was one there, he could almost taste it. “How many horses do we have? Twenty?”

“More or less.”

He rubbed his eyes and smiled. There was something about making the best from the worst that made his chest flutter with an odd kind of joy. Perhaps it was excitement, or maybe even hope. But he found the corners of his lips pressing with enthusiasm. “Why wait for help to cut them off? If we spread evenly, we could do it ourselves.” He hopped onto the table and placed himself over the markings of the mountains. “With a hundred men, we could send a solid fraction to cut them off to the south. Forty or fifty say, enough to build a strong shield wall, possibly two or three men thick, but also enough for them to think it an easy win. Send a score of archers into the hills on the east and the west sides with a band of our quickest men. I imagine they would like to be through the valley by nightfall, but if we arrange obstacles we could certainly slow them and with any luck, attack as the sun begins to set. They’ll be at a disadvantage at night in unfamiliar lands and to the men in the hills. Saving arrows until the shield walls clash will certainly come as a surprise, perhaps ever scarper some of the men.” He nibbled his lips as he stared at the image beneath his feet. “I will lead the horses east around the hills and to the northern end of the valley. When their army begins to fail or they begin to push the faction to the south into submission, whichever comes sooner, signal me and I will bring my horses round to trample them from the rear.”

A quiet hum filled the courtroom. Hushed voices danced the air. Whether or not it agreed with him, however, was unclear. 

“Sounds an awful lot like you’re trying to get us killed,” Kay replied with a smirk, slumping on the table and picking at the carving beneath his fingers. Even as a boy, he’d never much cared for life or death, so long as it came with a punch of excitement and, as he got older, a dash of honour. But, as his brotherly duty, he also liked to pick holes in everything Arthur did. He didn’t play into the illusion that Arthur was any better now than he had been as a child and liked to make that blatantly obvious to everyone around them. “What’s in it for me?”

The king tried to stifle his sigh and gazed, eyebrow raised, at his elder brother. “You do not get ploughed down, two to one, by an army we are completely unprepared for. We have all these resources, why not use them?”

The knight picked at something in his teeth. “And if they turn their shield wall to face your horses?”

Arthur pinched his lips together. It had been a passing concern, though he’d preferred not to air it. It didn’t take a genius to know that a horse would not charge a well formed line. At best, they’d stop blank before the mass of spears and you’d have holes poked in you. At worst, they’d jump and tumble and you would be down a horse and completely surrounded. “That is a problem for me to solve if and when it occurs.”

Kay laughed and shrugged a shoulder. “Very kingly. I’m game.” He gave the wood a solid pat and rose back straight. “Can we go back to bed now?”

Arthur’s fingers drummed against his chest and his eyes searched for faces in the crowd.

“Bedivere, your twenty best archers. Sagramor-“

“The sharpest I can find.”

“By noon. I want them out, setting traps, laying obstacles in a day’s time. Everyone else,” he raised his head to the crowd, “Prepare your men for war. Have them well fed, well armed and enthusiastic. This is not the Saxons, this is not the same. These are men that look and think like us. Remind them of that.” He hopped down from the table, letting out a low breath and motioning them away. “Rest yourselves well tonight. We are most certainly going to need it.”

In the songs that followed, they said he’d jumped to the table with an almighty roar that shook the whole of Britain, so even Powysian force were woken by trembles in their sleep; they said the king had commanded an army of fifty bright braves souls against a wave of four hundred; they said soldiers had descended from the sky like glittering angels.

Most of it was wrong, of course, though no man denied the acclaim. But despite the fantasy, that night they had glowed, as the moonlight sparkled off shields and spears and polished leather. They had fought from the ground, descended from the hills, stormed through on stallions, white cloaks folding in the wind, light rippling through the masses.

And they had won.

That time.

But as with any miracle, it came with a price.