Heavily armed soldiers marched on the avenues much older than the dynasty, the wheels of the baggage vehicles creaked and groaned, and the cavalry on both wings looked solemn and slowly steered their horses, like a funeral guard of honor, looking at the blood-red sky.

"What the hell are you thinking, bastard?" Maeve frowned, raised her hand to cover her mouth and nose, and couldn't help but ask.

"Demons must walk in the world." Angus replied, "What kind of person would do this?" ”

The smell of choking, the burning of corpses everywhere, like the overturning of a charcoal stove, the countless red-hot coke coals rolling to the ground, and the evidence of the existence of so many lives, left the Romans with a bloody truth: the pain of relatives is the pleasure of enemies.

"The man who is going to kill us!" To Angus's surprise, Maeve replied fiercely in the language of her distant homeland, "Don't you understand? It's a war to lose, look around us, how many people are there? Hundred? One hundred and fifty? You're on a dead end! Do you understand! And your death is of no value to anyone, anyone! ”

Through the fine chain to protect her neck, she almost cried from the bottom of her throat.

Why do you want to do this, always like this...... Deaf and blind.

"I know what's waiting in front of me, everyone here knows it." Angus tapped her heart in a magnetic voice, "But they keep going, some out of protection, some out of trust, some even just because of blind greed, and I'm different from all of them, I choose to move forward just because I can't go back." ”

I have to believe that my destiny is further away, because there is nothing behind me, and what I am after will only lead me to meet stronger enemies, much stronger than those in front of me. I had to start confronting them and use them as whetstones—I couldn't be a piece of rotten iron forever.

The southern Danube line had by now become a giant tomb, and the former Western Janissary Commander Grigory Paklenos, a Caucasian warrior who had commanded the left flank of the Imperial army at the Battle of Dilachium, had just been killed in battle at the Viliatova Pass last year, and had it not been for the Flemish mercenaries under the command of Constantine, the son of Robert Giska's brother Humpotto, the rebels would have gone straight into the Thracian hinterland.

The land has experienced so much misery, many babies have died at birth, in some places almost everyone's wife has been humiliated, and the once noble and lowly have been reduced to the same captives under the iron hooves of the steppe tribes—at such times, men and women will be judged according to their own worth, and the rich relatives, the skill of striking iron, and the kung fu in bed are all guarantees of the right to live. Only then, in front of the horse's hooves of the tribesmen, can the personal "talents" of the subjects of the empire become almost as important as their origins, and the people who are cattle and stripped of their tribe are sometimes closer to the "truth".

For the citizens of the capital who did not want to be cattle, the shadow of destruction hung over the north, the last time it was the nephew of the Norman Robert Giscard who saved the capital, but now that Constantine Hampotopoulos was in the fortress of Quiziros on the other side of the channel, against Abu Qasim of Nicaea, Andreano Komnen's miniature army was the only obstacle between the rebels and the capital.

Angus didn't receive much attention as the commander of the outpost sent by the Emperor's brother, but this appointment at least earned him the privilege of being able to see through the dark fog to see the current situation on the front line.

If the recently killed governor of the Meisembria Military District, Valazettes, the rebel prince of Pecheneg known as Varaza, is right, it is not only the Manichaean (Paulician) leader Traulos who joined Pecheneg Khan Tatuş, but also the Magyars of the deposed Hungarian king Solomon, the Cumans of the Don Polov tribe, and the northern rebels of the Danube Military District who are determined to avenge the former governor of the Danube Military District, Emperor Nikephoros Botaniates.

The speed of these enemies will not be very fast, Angus has seen the scene of the march of large armies, the Pechenegs claim to have 80,000 men, maybe there will not be so many, maybe this is indeed a great migration of peoples, in any case, they will first plunder the land between the Danube and the Old Mountain Mountains, their ranks will be full of cattle and horses, there will be countless pairs of feet trampling on the ground, the shackles of countless new slaves, as the plundering continues, the carts of these nomads will become heavier and heavier, and even full of gold and silver, and at the same time, the closer they get to the capital, This army will get hungrier and hungrier.

However, the walls of Constantinople are impregnable and unbeatable!

Those cunning steppe wolves have no illusions, the siege of such a giant fortress requires a lot of supplies, even for the entire Northern Military District, which cannot be obtained by raiding nearby wild villages, only the port of Isacia can give the enemy what they want: the storage of the Northern Military District of the Empire.

I am Angus McWuisdine, King of the Highlands, and I will make the world tremble when I hear my name as if I heard thunder.

Away from the horse, Gillick muttered to himself, in a trembling tone:

"Red apples make people pick ......"

"What are you talking nonsense again, Gillick?"

"The Cuman, he said yesterday, the red apple is the tribal name for the head, and the noblest apple will be made into a drinking vessel by the tribal khan and hung on the chariot that passes through the blood."

Speaking of the back, Gillick's teeth began to fight, he had not fought before, the last time he fought with the Normans, he fought with the lord of his banquet until the last moment, and after the collapse of the shield wall, he was still desperately guarding the flanks for Angus. But the words of the Cuman made him despair—for this people, war was a game of apple picking.

"Funny barbarians." Angus sneered, as if he could imagine the Cumans scaring Gilic, "The next time I meet him, reward him with a few more lashes for me." ”

"Aren't you afraid, sir?"

"Me? I'm just as scared as you are, just as I'm afraid of wolves when I'm alone. But we are not alone, we are participating in the war of an empire, and the barbarians you are talking about were burned in the center of the capital of this empire not long ago, along with those heretics, humbled as dogs. ”

"However, there are too many of them......"

"That's why they can't see us." Angus smiled wryly, "Let that Cuman come to my tent in the evening." ”

He remembered Robert Mallett's book "1085 Swordsmanship and Cavalry Drills", which had a sentence written on the title page:

"The essence of combat is to fight wits - C. Thomson".