Chapter 9 September 406 AD Cuban Archipelago-Invasion (Patreon)

            Caci looked out at the sea and watched as the Merchant Guild sailors fumbled about trying to control their new large ships. The ships were very impressive in size, being about a hundred and eighty feet long and nearly forty feet wide. Caci couldn’t tell how deep the ships’ draft were, but their top decks were at least twelve feet above the waterline. The ships looked very impressive and, in normal Merchant Guild fashion, looked expensive.

            The large Merchant Guild ships were surrounded by normal longships and the new Roman trimarans. Caci had heard about the trimarans from various people who had gone to the Far Northern Islands and returned. He was surprised the Merchant Guild had made so many in the time since they met the Romans; that said, their purpose was obvious as the trimarans docked to the large ships, and the large ships attempted to move buffalo onto the trimarans. The Merchant Guild did not trust their buffalo riders on the trimarans or the longships on the three-day journey from the mouth of the Great River to the Cuban Archipelago, so they stuffed a bunch of them onto the big ships where the buffalo could not do much damage. To Caci, it showed a lack of discipline in both the buffalo and rider, although Caci knew that to the Merchant Guild, it probably showed more efficiency, but that’s why the Merchant Guild did not own the sea.

            Although it was only supposed to take three days to reach the Cuban Archipelago from the mouth of the Great River, it took these incompetent sailors six days. Caci knew this because, with few very specific exceptions, only Cuban ships were allowed on the sea, and the Cuban ships were able to bring back word several days in advance, so the Landowners of Cuba’s main island were ready with their buffalo and Sea Wardens. As for the hundreds of other islands, it would be a few weeks before all of them heard what the Merchant Guild was attempting, and they would all view it as a green light to harass the Merchant Guild over the next few years.

            It would be foolish to claim there would be war when so little of the Merchant Guild territory was coastal. They owned the Great River, and the Cubans had no intention of losing most of their people as they tried to make it up the Great River, which significantly benefitted the defenders. To the east of the Merchant Guild were the Ocmulgee people, and to the West was the Trade Alliance. The Ocmulgee paid the Cuban Archipelago tribute, and the Trade Alliance had battle-hardened Buffalo Riders, so a full-on war with either of the three groups just wasn’t desirable. Besides, the Cuban Archipelago was far more interested in continuing their invasion of the Islands far to the northeast, and so creating another war was not in their best interest.

            That didn’t mean there wouldn’t be consequences for the Merchant Guild’s attack; it just meant the consequences would not end the Merchant Guild.

            With that in mind, Caci continued watching as the Merchant Guild struggled to unload their buffalo. Unfortunately for the Merchant Guild, their sailors had positioned both the ship and trimarans in awkward positions, which made the loading and unloading process harder. Caci was tempted to order his Sea Wardens to collect their longships hidden in nearby forests and attack them as they moved the buffalo, but he felt it would be more effective to attack at night. Albeit, the Merchant Guild ships were on high alert, watching out for Cuban longships.  

            On the Merchant Guild’s journey to the Archipelago, there had been several spats between the Cuban and Merchant Guild ships, but the liquid fire both nations now used made those unprofitable, although since the Cubans managed to sink a few of the Merchant Guild’s big ships the Cubans came out ahead, but even so the attacks were not worth it. While the ships were coming, the Cubans had no way to know where the Merchant Guild ships would go, so the Cubans were spread out across the coast, which was a good thing since the Merchant Guild sent their ships to half a dozen areas. This left the Landowners and Sea Wardens in areas without Merchant Guild ships scrambling to come and help the areas with them. That said the communication towers helped coordinate everything in hours instead of days or weeks.

            As for Caci, he, along with dozens of other landowners, were waiting on their buffalo for the merchant guild buffalo riders to be dropped off on their shores. Politically, they had to show their people that there was a good reason why the Landowners were exclusively allowed to be Buffalo Riders. They had to show their excellence, and the buffalo riders that were trying to get on the trimarans to land on their beaches were perfect to show the dominance of the Landowners, especially if they were attacked before they could get their land legs back. It was going to be very hard for the Merchant Guild buffalo riders to aim their bow when they still feel like the world was swaying when they landed on the beach.

            With that in mind, Caci, a few dozen buffalo riders, and their Sea Wardens waited. Any noncombatant was safely locked away behind the gates of their cities or towns, waiting for word from the recently built communication towers about when it would be safe to come out. While they waited, more and more Landowners were showing up with their Sea Wardens in tow; later on, some Landowners would show up on their buffalo without Sea Wardens as those men opted to come on their longships. With it taking most of the day for the Merchant Guild to disembark their buffalo, dozens upon dozens of landowners showed up to shore up Caci’s group.

            As Caci continued to watch the incompetence of the Merchant Guild sailors, who clearly had not spent time at sea, although had probably spent most of their years on the Great River, he thought the Merchant Guild should have beached their ships, it was what the Cubans did when they needed to quickly deploy men and buffalo riders at a beach landing, but the Merchant Guild were either too inexperienced to do that or  perhaps too cheap. If they were too cheap to do that, then today, they would learn the price of cheapness.

             When they finally got their act together, they managed to fill up thirty trimarans with roughly twelve buffalo apiece, with just over three hundred and sixty buffalo altogether. Caci could tell that the large ships still had a lot of buffalo, and so if they wanted to deploy their buffalo riders all at once, they should have just beached the ships and let them off. It would have been far faster than the massive waste of time moving them from the big ships to the trimarans. Although with such large ships, it would have been very difficult to get the buffalo off the ships.

            To make matters worse for the Merchant Guild buffalo riders, the trimaran sailors clearly didn’t have much experience as they kept hitting the waves incorrectly which were causing the buffalo to stumble and occasionally fall off. The more the sailors moved the more convenced Caci became that these men received all their training on a river, which is one of the benefits of owning the sea. It made it very difficult for your enemies to get experience to fight you. In this case every trimaran that was coming to the beach lost at least one buffalo, but on average they lost three. The buffalo and riders that fell had no hope of surviving as both the buffalo and riders were in armor, cloth armor with steel plates sewn in, not counting their helmets.

            What made things more difficult for the riders was that the trimarans had full sail out when they hit the beach, and the buffalo were not anchored to the boat, so when the trimarans hit the beach, the buffalo were knocked off their feet, and many of their riders were thrown from their saddles.

            Caci and the other Landowners were not about to miss this opportunity. Even though they were outnumbered a bit more than two to one, the Landowners were fresh, ready, experienced, and a unit. In contrast, the Merchant Guild buffalo riders looked like they were just grateful to be back on land, and the last thing on their mind was fighting. If they had been blooded before, then they had forgotten about it at the worst time.

            Caci and his buffalo riders fought the way buffalo riders should; they closed the distance until they were in range with their fast-fire bows and then began shooting arrows at their armored foe, breaking apart the armor the invaders were wearing. Arrows couldn’t go through armor, but arrows with carefully hardened iron could and did, crack armor over time, and considering the buffalo riders could fire thirty arrows a minute with their fast fire bows, and they had several hundred arrows in the quivers on their buffalo, that wasn’t a problem. As for the Landowners, they always kept their buffalo moving, making them a hard target to hit, so even if an arrow hit their armor, it would take dozens of more hits to break it.

            As for the Merchant Guild buffalo riders, they were in full panic mode. Some of them had injured buffalo, others had been thrown off, and their buffalo were running in panic; others were on their buffalo, but their buffalo’s feet managed to sink into the sand; only about a quarter of these men were firing back at the Cubans, but their aim was terrible as they still felt shaky from their time at sea.

            Things were so bad that the Merchant Guild buffalo riders began helping the trimaran sailors push their trimarans back into the sea, hoping to escape the onslaught of the Landowners. The Merchant Guild’s sloppy attack had already turned into a messy retreat.

            Caci and the other Landowners continued doing what they were doing. They were firing arrows into the foolish buffalo riders, who were more of a disorganized posse than a military unit. Once the steel plates on the Merchant Guild buffalo riders started breaking, Caci and his men began switching to long needle head arrows to pierce the cloth armor. It was what made fighting other buffalo riders so annoying. They had two layers of armor that required two types of arrows to break through.

            As the needle arrows began piercing the buffalo riders, they foolishly began surrendering. Clearly, these ignorant men had no idea what the Cubans did to their prisoners of war. That being said, Caci gladly sent his Sea Wardens down to accept their surrender, and so any of the buffalo riders that were not killed and did not manage to escape on the trimarans were captured by the Sea Wardens.

            The Merchant Guild fleet wasn’t finished, though, as they decided that instead of leaving, they would stay all night anchored about fifteen hundred feet offshore. They had fifteen large ships and nearly three hundred smaller ships. Clearly, the sailors felt invincible. Only those that had brought the buffalo to shore had died. With so many longships and trimarans around, they thought that the Cubans couldn’t do anything to them. They were far too used to the safety of the river of theirs. They didn’t know that the Cuban raiders always struck at night.

            Caci chuckled and mumbled to himself, “Everyone who starts a war thinks they are going to win so easily.”