Warrior Conflict: Gallic Celts versus Iroquois Confederacy.

Author's Note:  Alternative history, natch.

The Scenario.

Hiawatha studied the bodies brought before him.  In life, they had been two young women not yet of marrying age, wearing the brightly-dyed deerskin clothing common among the Iroquois.  Now, though, they were cold and lifeless like the fish they had been gutting when they had been murdered.

A junior warrior scouting out a place for the season’s lacrosse game had found them, not far from the river where they had been cleaning fish for the midday meal.  Knowing full-well his danger, he had sprinted back to their fortified village to deliver warning of the crime to his chief.

And now he had led Hiawatha back to the place of the murder with a score of senior hunters and fighters in tow to try to figure out what had happened here.  From what he could tell a group of men – likely a war-party – had made infringement into their lands for some sort of raid, and found the women.  The barbarians had killed them mercilessly so as to prevent word of their arrival spreading among the Five Nations.

So, that was how the game was to be played.  Without mercy.  Hiawatha would be all too happy to oblige the marauders what fate they had designed for themselves by brutalizing his people.

One of his hunters shouted out to him.  Turning, Hiawatha saw that the man had found tracks of the interlopers – many tracks led out through the underbrush, crossing over a stretch of muddy ground near the river.  Bending at the news to look down at it, Hiawatha counted the individual sets of feet while two of his fellows did the same.  After a few breaths’ time he looked at the other warriors:  twenty-six tracks.  This was strange – that number would have been perfect for a native raiding party like the one that he now commanded, but these men did not move with the skill or silence so integral to Iroquois tactics.

“Whomever these men are,” Hiawatha stood and said, “if they truly are men, after the murder of our sisters, then they are not of our blood or our League.  They have intruded on our land and our fathers’ land, they have shed our blood,” here he motioned at the bloody stones, “and they have partaken of our resources.”  Several of his younger warriors outright barked at the unexpected black humor; the rest smiled grimly.  “For these crimes and more, these fools will die.”

---

Vercingetorix paused to survey the campsite his men had made.  They had cleared a space of saplings and undergrowth and were now piling stones in the corners with which to make cook-fires, with a larger spot in the middle reserved for their gear and trappings.  They had not found any wild boar as he had hoped; their drunken singing had ensured that.  Night was swiftly falling, and their food needed cooking.  They had collected many gamefowl and seen several large deer, but his men were not fleet-footed enough to catch them without bows and arrows.

So they settled with the fish that they had taken from the women they had found and killed.  Vercingetorix had not intended to kill them; but they had screamed when his scouts took them, and fearing for raising an alarm and bringing swift retribution down on them the young men had panicked and slit their throats.  Knowing now that they could not escape trouble, Vercingetorix had ordered them to make haste through the wooded terrain and to find a defensible position.  They had made well on these tasks, and now were ready for their evening meal before a night of drinking, singing, and drunken singing.

As his fellow Gauls sat down to dine on the crude stew of fish and fowl, Vercingetorix pointed out at the four unbloodied young men that he used for scouts.  “You boys are to keep first watch tonight.  It’s because of your actions that we even need to guard ourselves, I think.  You may eat what’s left when I send men to relieve you.”

The boys grimaced but did not move, either through their ignorance or waiting of further orders.  He judged it to be both, and dismissed them with an angry, cutting hand gesture.  They got lethargically to their feet and stalked off in opposite directions, each taking position at different corners of the camp.

After all of his warriors had taken their meals, Vercingetorix looked out at them from under his wizened brow and slowly intoned, “You all know why we are here.  We are here in this new land because we are tired of war.  Because we were trapped outside of the walls of Caesar by our own impatience and were scattered like the wind before the Romans.”  He sighed.  “We are the last of our kind.  We have no women or children among us – we are but a band of world-weary old men.  We wandered for a time, until we found that cave – taking shelter from a storm, we found ourselves here in this new world with naught but our wits about us.

“And when we finally found other living, breathing, human beings – and those idiots outside the fires killed them at the first sign of trouble!”  Vercingetorix’ weathered visage turned violent as he leapt to his feet and threw a fist-sized stone outside of their small border against the wilderness.

“I had hoped better of men.  Now we will await our judgment; it is out of our hands.”

---

Hiawatha froze as something heavy crashed in the underbrush ahead of his party.  He had ordered them to split up into a broad line so as to find any traps or hidden enemies in the darkness, but as of yet his fears had been unfounded.  He sniffed quietly; there were several open flames ahead burning steadily, the trees chosen to be put to such use with no particular method in mind.  Yes, he thought, they are certainly not men such as us. 

The same boy from earlier suddenly appeared behind his shoulder; Hiawatha had heard him moving for ten full seconds before he appeared.  He had to work on his technique, or he would die some day of hunger or an enemy tomahawk.  He hoped that it would not be tonight that such a fate befell the boy.

“There are four sentries set up in irregular order outside of the camp,” the scout whispered.  “They are not in communication with each other and are alone.”

Hiawatha nodded.  “This is good.  Pick three others and take them.  Make the bird-call at your own discretion.”  The boy’s face beamed in the darkness.  Despite his lack of finesse, opportunities such as this were undeniably significant to the development of a boy into a man, and a scout or hunter into a warrior.  The boy disappeared, sharpened-club in hand.

Hiawatha peered out at his fellow warriors, crouched behind their single-man shields in the darkness.  Many of them bore spears or extra throwing weapons, and took cover behind the large shields of their brethren.  Several carried strung bows with arrows already on the string.

Hiawatha himself readied his gunstock war-club, a vicious weapon made more dangerous in his hands than any other man in his group.  It was eager for the revenge-killing soon to come.

---

As their activity winded down, Vercingetorix motioned to four of his more-sober men and sent them out to relieve the sentries for the night.  He himself lay prostrate on the ground with his hands clasped over his belly.

An owl added its questioning call to the sounds of the night.  He thought nothing of it; he had heard the same sound many times that evening.

But then his fellow Gauls added their roaring shouts and cries to arms to it, destroying the melody.  Suddenly awake, alert and armed, all of his party drew up and closed shields together to see what had happened.

The relief-sentries he had sent out were fleeing back to the strongpoint from out of the darkness, cloaks billowing like wraiths behind them.  Vercingetorix’ heart sank as he saw none of the young men from earlier among them, and then leapt into his throat as darts soared out from between the trees and into the backs of his warriors.  Fortunately, they all wore mail-coats, and after some brief stumbling, continued their retreat relatively unfazed.

More arrows followed, this time aiming for the legs and heads.  Vercingetorix watched helpless as they fell, either crippled or dead depending on whether or not they had brought helmets.

Four figures wearing tall feathered helmets and baring weapons broke cover out of the trees, and fell upon his men.  He watched in terror as the two not already dead or dying were overrun and brutally hacked to pieces.

Vercingetorix shouted his rage and took up a shield, drawing his sword immediately after.  He then took off at a dead sprint for these enemies so as to kill them sooner than those around him could.

---

Hiawatha watched with detached eyes as his warriors silently took the enemy watchers.  He hated killing, with his own hands or otherwise, and would rather have made peace with the interlopers than slaughter them.  But they had taken first blood, and so would have to pay with more of the same.

But then something unexpected happened.  Relief-sentries had been sent out and had seen the killing of their fellows.  Knowing full-well that they could not have saved them, the warriors had turned back to alert their camp.

To his amazement, they wore armor that was more resilient than the Iroquois’ own that defeated the arrows of his hunters.  But like everything it had a weakness – they wore it only on the chest, and sometimes the head, so the legs and arms were vulnerable.  Seizing on this he commanded his archers to hamstring them like fleeing deer, and then to finish them off just as such.

And as his counterpart among them led his warriors in a counterattack, Hiawatha sent word up and down the line he was the axis of that they were to charge the enemy and engage them with shield and spear.

---

Vercingetorix realized only after he had skewered an enemy warrior through the stomach that he had picked up a tall spear and oblong shield as he had led the charge against the enemy, as well as the fact that he had apparently slammed one of their heavy iron helmets over his eyes in his rush to avenge his fallen companions.

The iron head of his spear, one of several that he acquired from a talented smith from far to the North, had gone right through the armor of the native man opposite him to puncture into his belly and reveal the horrors within it.  The man gasped in surprised agony and fell, taking the weapon with it.  Not allowing that, Vercingetorix hurriedly worked the weapon so that it carefully slid out of the mortal wound it had inflicted. Readjusting his grip on the now-bloody spear, he crouched down under his shield to try to make sense of the chaos around him.  An arrow glanced off of his helmet-brow, knocking him down to his knees and momentarily senseless.

Lithe enemy fighters in their wooden reed-armor danced around his maille-geared Gauls, weapons crashing and men shouting all around.  Darts whistled through the air, with the artificial, dry thumps of the foe’s arrows occasionally interrupted by expertly-thrown sling-stones that made contact with human flesh wet and painful.  A shattered tooth bounced onto the grass near the stunned Gallic king.

Using his spear as a crutch, Vercingetorix, the King of Great Warriors, stood to his feet and struck out on an instinct augmented by a lifetime of hunting and fighting.  He caught another luckless native, this time striking him high on the thigh where he knew ran a vital life-vein that would kill if ruptured.  This time, though, the enemy warrior retained wits enough to not allow the Gallic king to retain his weapon, and shattered it just above the leather-wrapped handle with a hand ax in his possession.

Vercingetorix let go of the ruined truncheon and drew his sword, destroying the throat of his enemy in the same motion to leave him to bleed to death from the wounds that he had taken.

His Gallic warriors gathered around their king, now drunk on the joy of battle rather than mead.  They fought with spear, ax, sword and shield, keeping their enemies at a relatively safe distance and allowing them to pull their wounded behind them and out of harm’s way.

Then the arrow barrage started.

What began as a trickle of precise shooting turned into a nightmare as dozens of razor-sharp darts began to fly true into the knot of Gauls, striking men in their unprotected arms and legs and necks.  One such arrow embedded itself in Vercingetorix’ shield, thrumming unnaturally as the energy it had carried dispersed over the surface and into the grounded feet of the king.

As more of his men fell victim to the darts, Vercingetorix prayed to Wotan that it would stop soon and that they could fight – and if need be, die – like men.

---

“Keep loosing arrows until you’ve run out,” Hiawatha instructed, “if we let up for a moment, they’ll destroy us to a man.”

Taking cover beneath the trees, the Iroquois warriors did just that.  Hiawatha knew that with all of their skill in arms and dexterity, his warriors could not best them in single combat.  Their armor did not allow for it; theirs was too weak and the enemy’s too strong.  He had watched in awe as a warrior’s war-club had struck at an opponent’s helmeted skull and bounced off of it harmlessly, leaving not so much as a ringing in the shouting victim’s ears.  He had never heard of any sort of armor like it that could outright defeat the strongest attacks, and yet here it was.

Wherever these strange men had come from, they were of hard stock, which much he could tell.  He had identified their leader by the weapon that he carried – a long tool not unlike a sharpened club made of the same metal as their armor.  He had seen it kill one of his warriors in less time than it took to breathe, and with less apparent effort in the user.  Hiawatha could see him now, talking hurriedly with one of his own and gesturing with his shield dramatically.

Or was he giving orders?  Hiawatha’s question was answered immediately as the Gauls rearranged themselves into a very rough square, and then stood up as one and leveled their shields.

Ignorant, brave fools, he thought.  His archers had continued to pelt them with arrows; just now one of them tore through the leggings of one of them, and through the unprotected bicep of another.

And then the front rank, the leader in the forefront, presented their shields not as protecting one man, but a linked surface covering them all.  The next rank behind them moved up and held their shield nearly horizontally over their heads, extended the impenetrable surface over them.  The third did the same, and the men on the outsides lowered theirs to cover their flanks.  Some lucky darts still flew into the shadows of the shields, but no more men fell to them. 

The block took one awkward, semi-organized step, like nothing so much as one giant clumsy turtle.  And then another, and another.  They were soon making brisk progress towards the Iroquois, who were not far from exhausting their stores of arrows.

Hiawatha turned to one of his veteran warriors and quickly told the man to take great pains to carefully circle around the Celts, following the treeline so as to take them in the rear amongst their wounded.

Before he could finish assigning warriors to that task, the Celts broke rank and charged them.

---

Vercingetorix shouted a war-cry that he had learned from his uncle, an old warrior himself that had fought against the Romans since before he was born.  He was immensely pleased that the makeshift faux-Roman formation had worked; they had had little time to drill it back at Alesia, and no time since the expulsion from his mountain-fortress and subsequent flight across the world.  But he had to give his men credit; they had learned well from that defeat, with the lessons taken from their sworn foes surviving with them until this very fateful day.

Now sufficiently near to the enemy, he bellowed for them to break rank and pursue their enemy into the forest that had so well served them.  He saw more than a few javelins take flight, though few found their mark, and an answering sporadic volley of thrown axes and daggers from the Iroquois with the same amount of luck.  So they were to make a fight of it, then.  All the better, then, so long as I die with a sword in my hand and peace in my heart, he thought. 

He crashed through the dense underbrush to find himself face to face with an enemy fighter, with the three tall feathers in his cap showing that he was of a rank not far from Vercingetorix’ own.  He carried a fiercely curved club with an extension of sharpened bone jutting out from the elbow of the curve.

The strange warrior struck out with his unique weapon, catching the rim of Vercingetorix’ shield and tearing it out of the surprised Gaul’s hands.  He let him do it, taking the opportunity to body-tackle him, sword held high in his free hand for a devastating cut.

It didn’t happen; the agile foeman spun out of his reach, leaping over a stump as though it had told him to.  The Gallic king risked a parry and following cut in an attempt at disabling his enemy, or at least slowing him down.  The trick was no good – instead of getting wounded, the Iroquois leader lashed out, catching Vercingetorix’ wrist with the weighted end of his club and causing it to flash and throb with pain, going numb and senseless.

Vercingetorix was not going to allow that to slow him down.  He struck out with a controlled swing that turned into a backcut, striking Hiawatha along the backs of his knees and bringing him down.  He dropped his weapon in the fall, and lay helpless at the mercy of the Gallic king Vercingetorix, so named as the Great King of Great Warriors in Latin, Greek, and Gaelic.  He was a warlord, a conqueror, and was expected to act accordingly.

So he thrust the tip of his sword into the soft loam of the soil not far from Hiawatha’s head, and barked a command to his warriors in the forest around them to stand down.  Answering, questioning calls came back to him, but they were all obedient.  Hiawatha reluctantly did the same as he saw now-passive Gauls filter over to their part of the forest.

Vercingetorix sat down on his heels, eyeing his counterpart with caution mixed with an entrepreneurial gleam in his bronze-colored eyes.  Then he spoke.

“Your people are obviously prosperous.  They are all healthy, wealthy, and intelligent enough to know that rubbing two sticks together makes fire.

“My little band here is all that’s left of my nation – it was swallowed by a bigger beast than I.  We are looking for a place to stay, to call our own.  I can tell enough that the men in your command are from different backgrounds – you aren’t all related by blood.

“And I want us in.  In return for your hospitality, and admittance into whatever league that you are a part of, we will show you something.”  He took off his helmet, and handed it to the wounded and wary enemy leader.

“We’ll show you what you get from rubbing two rocks together.”

Though he could not understand the foreigner’s words, Hiawatha did comprehend his meaning.  He took the helmet offered to him, and propped himself up not without a little pain on his elbow.  The overeager scout that had led him here helped him sit up and lean on a stump.

Hiawatha then took a carved wooden pipe out from his pack, and setting the iron helmet down, offered it and a pinch of tobacco to the Gallic king, his newfound ally.

The Conclusion.

Gallic Celts
-Offensive Assessment:  twenty-nine (29) of forty (40) possible points.
-Defensive Assessment:  thirty (30) of forty (40) possible points.
-Variables Assessment:  seventeen (17) of twenty (20) possible points.
~Total Composite Assessment:  seventy-six (76) of one hundred (100) possible points.

Iroquois Confederacy
-Offensive Assessment:  thirty-three (33) of forty (40) possible points.
-Defensive Assessment:  twenty-three (23) of forty (40) possible points.
-Variables Assessment:  fourteen (14) of twenty (20) possible points.
~Total Composite Assessment:  seventy (70) of one hundred (100) possible points.

Winner:  The Gallic Celts!  Their armor was the real winner here, as their unmatchable metallurgical skills and ability to learn quickly from defeats secured them a win despite the intense offensive capabilities of the Iroquois.  It's just a good thing that I didn't give them gunpowder!  Let's hear a round of applause for both warrior-cultures.