Warriors [4] Theros Ironfield

Chapter 1

The town was a tiny speck on the side of a pristine shoreline of
azure and green. A battered war barge glided slowly toward the coastline, the vessel barely under sail. It was obvious that the barge and its crew of minotaurs and human slaves had recently seen action. Only one sail remained aloft, and most of the rigging was down, tangled in masses on the decking below. The mainmast had been shattered, and its remnants lay strewn about, making life difficult for the crew.

“Port Five!”

A minotaur barked course corrections to the wheel. He stood on the forecastle, staring at the tiny dot of civilization through a spyglass. The spyglass symbolized life for the
vessel. Originally of human design—possibly from as far back as the Cataclysm—the glass was just under two feet in length, made of brass. It counter-twisted to focus the two lenses on distances as great as a mile or more.

The markings on the side were foreign to the minotaur, but he didn’t care what they said or meant. The device did what it needed to do. It magnified items in the distance, warned of the approach of either enemy or victim, and that was what the minotaur captain wanted. The price had been right, too. It had been part of the booty from a raid years ago. Everything on the barge had either been stolen in raids, or was rigged as needed while at sea.

The minotaurs were the masters of the vessel. They were the sailors and the warriors, the heart and the muscle and the brains. They did not swab decks or empty the slop buckets. The drudge work was handled by the slave contingent—humans, also taken as booty. Some slaves escaped, some slaves died while fighting or being disciplined, but that never worried the minotaurs. There would always be more humans. They bred like maggots.

The barge shuddered its way through the course correction. On deck, thirty minotaur warriors prepared for battle. Some strapped on leather armor, while others adjusted straps holding grappling ropes or scabbards containing all manner of weaponry, from Solamnic long swords to Seeker flails to elven dirks. Still others sharpened the blades of their axes or the points of their morning stars. The town ahead was unknown to the minotaur ship of war, but it was on the north coast of Nordmaar, and that made it highly likely to be a human settlement.

Slowly the barge approached land. On the shore, several humans had noticed the curious vessel, were pointing and shouting. It was not uncommon for a ship to be at sea on a day such as this, but landing before noon sun was curious, and the ship was of a strange design. It was a long barge, with a fore and aft castle rising at either end of the long, flat deck. The sails were arranged on two evenly spaced mainmasts rooted in the center of the ship. A third mast jutted out of the front at a jaunty angle. Here, the steering was adjusted, in conjunction with the huge rudder on the
aft of the ship.