EMPIRE REWRITTEN
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Book II / Chapter 23: The Fires Southward
🕑 Added 2025-07-03 23:27:18 +0000 UTCThe crusaders scoured Kumanovo for anything useful. They found little. What the Ottomans hadn’t carried off, they had destroyed. Granaries were emptied and torched; the town granary’s charred shell still smoldered, coughing up a plume of smoke. Every pantry and storehouse had been stripped bare, grain, salted meat, even root vegetables were gone.
Only a pair of infirm elders remained, coaxed from cellars by Serbian soldiers. They were too frightened to speak at first, words tumbling into prayer or silence. But eventually, the picture emerged: the Ottoman garrison had withdrawn few days earlier, forcing the town’s able-bodied men and women to march with them as porters, likely bound for some distant earthwork to the south. The rest had fled into the hills or been driven out.
That evening, the crusader leaders gathered in what had been the town hall, a sturdy stone building with a roof miraculously intact. They sat on benches hauled in from the tavern, around a table lit by a dozen tallow candles, the best they could find. The atmosphere was somber. Rain tapped on the boarded windows as if to join their council uninvited.
Palatine Garai stood, one hand resting on the pommel of his sword, rainwater darkening the leather of his cloak. “Your Majesty,” he said, voice low but steady, “Niš is now behind us. Skopje lay on our right flank, we skirted it cleanly, as planned. But our supply lines are fading fast. Scouts report nothing but burnt fields and empty granaries for miles. The Ottomans have stripped the land bare.” He paused, eyes narrowing. “If we ration strictly, we might stretch the wagons to a fortnight. No more.”
The blunt assessment settled like lead in the room. In the candlelight, faces looked gaunt. A Hungarian captain gnawed absently at a piece of stale bread, as if each crumb were a prayer. Sigismund folded his hands, tracing the ridge of an old scar along his knuckles.
“We have the town of Veles ahead,” he said, voice low. “It lies on the Vardar. Perhaps we’ll find a grain store still standing. Or a way to resupply by river, if any friendly land lies near enough.”
He knew it didn’t. But he let the hope hang.
Branković cleared his throat. “Veles is a merchant town,” he said. “In better days, its markets brimmed with river fish and Macedonian wheat.” He didn’t need to say the rest. The doubt was already in his voice.
Fruzhin gave a dry laugh. “We said the same about Kumanovo. Thought maybe the stores were hidden, or the garrison left something behind.” He shook his head. “We were wrong. Why would Veles be different?”
“Because we’ll catch them before they can destroy everything,” Hunyadi answered, a touch of fire in his voice. “If we push hard, we could reach Veles in three days. The Sultan’s men may not expect us so quickly after this.” He gestured at the bleak town around them.
Palatine Garai sipped his ale and set it down with a thud. “If we arrive half-starved and exhausted, what then?” he said. “Murad knows exactly where we are, and where we’re going. He’s drawing us in, bleeding us dry of supply, time, and strength. Sooner or later, we’ll have to decide: press on, or…” He didn’t finish. A tense silence followed. Retreat was anathema to knights on crusade, an admission of defeat. Yet Sigismund knew Garai had only voiced what others privately feared. The Emperor felt the weight of their eyes on him, waiting for direction. He was tired and for a moment, he wished he could simply close his own eyes and let someone else decide. But there was no someone else. There was only him, as it had been in so many battles before.
He drew himself up
“We do not starve yet,” he said firmly. “Nor are we lost. Veles is our next aim, and we will take it, or whatever remains of it. Beyond Veles, it’s less than a ten days’ march to Thessalonica. Our goal is near.”
He let the words settle, then added, his voice lower but sharper, “And Murad is no fool. He may burn villages to slow us, yes, but he won’t reduce everything between here and Thessalonica to ash. He knows what happens to sultans who inherit only ruins.” A few around the table exchanged glances at that.
Sigismund then met Garai’s gaze. “We press on. Murad would like nothing more than for us to withdraw now, empty-handed and shamed. We’ll not oblige him.” Garai managed a faint smile, raising his cup in acknowledgment.
Hunyadi struck his breastplate once with a mailed fist. “The Emperor speaks truth. We’ll fill our bellies one way or another, if not on grain, then on victory.” A few men thumped the table or murmured assent at the young warrior’s fire. Sigismund allowed himself a small smile; Hunyadi’s confidence was infectious, and he was glad of it, if only to buoy the others.
“Get some rest tonight, gentlemen,” Sigismund concluded, softening his tone. “Tomorrow, we ride at first light. Veles awaits.” As the council broke up, he touched Hunyadi’s arm. “Walk with me a moment, János.” The two stepped outside into the drizzle. Night had fully fallen, clouds covering the moon in a slate-dark sky. A few torches burned in the square, where sentries kept watch at the approaches. Most of the army was camped just outside the town for better grazing and to avoid crowding among the buildings.
Sigismund and Hunyadi paced slowly toward the ruined fountain. The rain beaded on their cloaks. “You spoke well in there,” Sigismund said quietly. “I need my captains determined.”
Hunyadi inclined his head. “Better they worry about battle than bread, Sire.”
“Mm.” Sigismund ran a gloved hand along the worn stone rim of the fountain. Water once flowed here, perhaps slaking the thirst of travelers in happier days. Now it was dry. “The truth is, we are indeed nearing our limits. But we must pretend otherwise a while longer.”
Hunyadi’s youthful face, in the torchlight, still carrying traces of boyishness beneath the stubble, hardened. “We can forage further afield as we go. As you mention your self my liege, the Ottomans couldn’t have picked every orchard clean, every stream of fish.” He said it as if to convince himself.
Sigismund looked at him, there was fervor in Hunyadi, and maybe a touch of the fatalistic heroism Sigismund recalled in those French lords long ago. He gripped the man’s shoulder. “Your courage does you credit. Keep it burning. The men will need it if… when the time comes.”
Hunyadi clasped the Emperor’s forearm in the soldier’s shake. “They’ll have it, Majesty. And when we face Murad, they’ll not find me lacking either.”
Sigismund managed a genuine, if weary, smile. “Of that I have no doubt.” He clasped Hunyadi’s shoulder once more, then sent him off toward his tent.
He lingered a moment in the soft rain, letting the drops cool his face. A distant rumble of thunder suggested the storm might return in force. He shivered, suddenly longing for the comfort of even a straw pallet under canvas.
As he made his way to his own tent at the edge of town, he passed knots of men huddled under makeshift shelters. A few fires glowed with the last scraps of Kumanovo’s broken furniture. The Emperor’s boots squelched through the mud between tents. He kept his hood low, not wanting the men to rise and salute in this miserable weather. The drizzle had soaked through to his shoulders and a chill settled on him. Inside his tent, a single lantern cast a dim golden circle. Sigismund waved off his squire, who hurried to offer dry cloths and wine; the Emperor just patted the boy’s shoulder and sent him to get some sleep. Alone, Sigismund sank onto a low folding camp stool, elbows on his knees. He stayed like that for a long while, staring at the lantern’s flame as it shivered with each gust that leaked through the tent flap.
In the quiet, whispered words repeated in his mind: Just like Nicopolis. He had tried for decades to banish the specter of that calamity. He had built alliances, reformed armies, fortified frontiers. He had studied the art of war more humbly, learned from past arrogance. And now, here he was, an old man deep in hostile country, supply lines fraying, enemy before and behind. Had he learned nothing after all? A bitter taste filled his mouth. Memory unspooled without mercy: the banners of France and Burgundy gleaming in 1396’s sun, proud knights riding out singing that God would deliver them. The heat and dust of the charge, the momentary elation as they routed the first Turkish lines, then the horror as Bayezid’s reserve of sipahis, fresh and disciplined, crashed into their flanks. He remembered the scream of horses, the press of bodies, and the flash of a scimitar that had carved a groove in his thigh before he even saw the attacker. Nicopolis. The word itself became a drumbeat of dread in his chest. He could still see the bloated corpses bobbing in the Danube days later as he escaped downriver on a fishing boat, the shame of survival clinging to him like algae. On these current nights, the dreams of that time still jolted him awake, knights impaled on stakes along the road, Turkish soldiers laughing as heads were piled high. He had escaped with his life and a handful of loyal men, but the flower of Western chivalry had been cut down to rot under the Bulgarian sky. All because of pride and folly, he thought, French pride, and his own folly in not reining it in.
Sigismund realized his hands were shaking slightly. He unclenched them and forced himself to sip a bit of watered wine from a skin. The sour liquid steadied him. He would not allow Nicopolis to repeat. If anything, he had perhaps overcorrected, being cautious where before he was rash. Yet here they were, far from home with danger mounting. Is caution enough, when the trap is already sprung? he wondered. The Ottomans were masterful at letting the enemy overextend, then cutting off the retreat. He had seen it too many times.
He closed his eyes and began a slow, silent recitation of a Psalm, one he often turned to when despair loomed: “Quare times, anima mea…” Why are you afraid, oh my soul? In Latin first, then quietly in German, he recited the verses about trust and deliverance. The familiar words calmed his racing heart somewhat. He remembered a winter night years after Nicopolis, when he sat by the fire in Buda Castle with friends who had survived that day. One of them, a German knight with haunted eyes, had said: “We lived to learn. Perhaps that was God’s mercy, to leave a few of us alive, so we’d not charge blindly again.” Perhaps so. And perhaps God in His inscrutable wisdom had left Sigismund alive now, past sixty and still bearing a sword, to finally set right what had gone wrong all those years ago.
By the twelfth day of the campaign, they had reached the small hills north of Veles. Scouts had returned in grim relays since dawn, each bringing fragments of the same bleak picture.
“The bridge is gone,” one had said flatly.
“The Ottomans destroyed it themselves" added another.
“Enemy cavalry spotted on the southern bank. Two dozen, maybe more. Watching. Not engaging.”
Now, from the final rise before the descent into the valley, Sigismund saw it with his own eyes. The Vardar River gleamed below, a broad silver ribbon threading through gorges and poplar-lined banks. But smoke drifted in low sheets across the water.
Up close, the damage was evident. The Veles bridge had been made of thick timbers anchored on stone pilings. The retreating Ottomans had burned or hacked away the middle spans a gap of about five paces yawned over the swirling river. Chunks of charred wood drifted along the current. Sigismund turned to his engineers and captains. “How swiftly can we make repairs?” he demanded.
Master Konrad, a German engineer with arms corded from years of building siege works, scratched his beard. “We have tools, ropes and nails, Majesty. I’d say we can rig a temporary span by evening if undisturbed.”
Sigismund himself oversaw much of the effort, riding along the bank to inspect progress. The physical labor invigorated him; shouts of “heave together!” and the rhythmic thunk of mallets on spikes lent a feeling of momentum that had been absent in the dispiriting emptiness of Kumanovo. Here, at least, was a challenge they could see and overcome directly. By late afternoon, a series of floating pontoons, actually large empty casks lashed under planks, had been guided into the gap, forming a crude but serviceable bridge section. Soldiers waded waist-deep to position them, while others held ropes taut from the near bank. When the last beam was nailed into place, a cheer went up from the engineers. Master Konrad wiped sweat from his brow and reported to Sigismund that men could cautiously cross single-file now.
“Send a vanguard to secure the opposite bank,” Sigismund ordered at once. “Lord Hunyadi, take your riders as soon as the platform can bear horses.”
Hunyadi was already astride, eyes bright. “My pleasure,” he said eagerly.
A company of Czech and Hungarian foot soldiers crossed first, step by cautious step, testing the repaired span. The bridge creaked, bobbing under their weight, but it held. They fanned out quickly, forming a perimeter amid the tall reeds and riverbank stone.
Then came Hunyadi’s turn. His light cavalry dismounted, leading their horses single-file across the floating section, a tense passage, hooves thudding on slick planks that dipped with each step. But soon they were over, dozens of riders remounting and fanning out to scout the brush and river trails beyond.
Sigismund did not cross that night; it was too late to move the entire army over before darkness, and he would not split the host in half overnight. Instead, he had the camp pitched in on both sides of the bridge. The mood among the men was notably improved. They had met an obstacle not with despair but with action, and that buoyed their confidence. By the light of many torches, additional supports and railings were added to the makeshift bridge to strengthen it for the baggage train in the morning.
Dawn of the thirteenth day saw the crusader army across the Vardar. The narrow floating bridge groaned under the wagons, but held, and by midday the entire host was on the south bank, moving into the lands beyond. The road, a crumbling strip of ancient stone, guided them deeper into the valley. This was now Ottoman territory that had been under firm control for decades; there were no cheering peasants here, only occasional shuttered cottages and the ever-present silence of abandoned fields.
As they proceeded, Branković rode up beside Sigismund. The Serbian despot looked anxious. “Majesty, this ground south of Veles… I don’t like it. Too confined. It is called Demir Kapija by the Turks, the Iron Gate. A very narrow pass lies not far off.”
Sigismund remembered the name from old reports , a place where the Vardar cut through cliffs so tight that two horsemen could scarcely ride abreast along the riverbank. A shiver went through him. “We must be cautious indeed,” he agreed.
The streets of Veles were deserted when the vanguard entered. Doors hung open, swinging faintly in the wind. Shutters banged against cracked stone. A few dogs skulked through alleys, but the people were long gone. The market square was blackened and ash-choked, with one cart overturned and half-burned, a frozen echo of flight. Along the riverside, the warehouses had been gutted, their contents either taken or torched.
By late afternoon, the entire army had passed through the ghost town. Sigismund ordered a halt just south of Veles, where the terrain widened into a flat plain ahead. Campfires were lit, watch rotations assigned, and still, no cheer rose among the men.
Just before dusk, scouts returned.
They came in small groups at first, then a larger detachment under Hunyadi’s command rode in, horses lathered and men caked with dust. Hunyadi swung down from the saddle before Sigismund’s pavilion, his expression tight.
“We found them,” he said at once.
“Where?” Sigismund asked, already rising.
“South of here, near the Demir Kapija. We climbed a bluff overlooking the valley. From the ridge, we saw the whole plain lit with fires.” Hunyadi gestured southward. “Thousands of tents, clustered tight. Cookfires, horse lines, banner stakes. Looked like a full encampment, the kind you don’t make unless you plan to hold ground. No skirmishers, Majesty. This is no screen force.”
Sigismund’s mouth tightened. “The main body?”
Hunyadi gave a grim nod. “It has to be Murad’s main force. Or at the least, the forward arm of it. Enough to meet us head-on.”
A silence settled among the gathered officers. Behind them, the Vardar whispered, and somewhere a pot clattered as a cook stirred thin broth. The march ahead loomed darker now.
Author note: Steel yourselves! This is no longer a march. It’s a reckoning.
Comments
RENAISSANSE SI
We’re close, very close!
Max Müller
Well, things are coming to a head. lets see how much of the Ottoman army is present.
Mineseikea
Can’t wait for the battle chapters.
