Homians 9. By Hardie Hardiewh@aol.com The male army is massacred by the Amazon girls. "Black flag, or no black flag, I'm telling you, Sir, that there's an Amazon force blocking the exit of the pass." Herculum, the Homian leader was both puzzled and angry. He'd been so confident that his army would be unopposed that he'd deliberately taken his men through the potentially dangerous pass in order to get to Amazonia as quickly as possible while the `civil war' there was still raging. He'd even taken the precaution of sending a patrol along the rim of the pass to signal at intervals, with a black flag, that the pass was clear. He wasn't to know that the `civil war' was a ruse to lure him into the very action he'd taken. Nor did he realise that his patrol had been ambushed by a party of Amazons, and the only survivor had been forced by the girls to make the signals which encouraged him to advance. Now he had his army of five thousand male warriors strung out along a narrow gorge with an unexpected force of women confronting them. "This is ridiculous!" he raged. "I want those blasted females cleared out of my way...." Herculum was cut off in mid sentence as another messenger arrived from the advance guard. "Princess Lida has been in contact, Sir," he reported. "She says to tell you that if we put down our weapons, and..," he gulped as he saw the rage rising in the face of his Commanding Officer, "..and take off our tunics and march naked to the head of the pass, she will spare our lives." "Weapon! Naked!" sputtered Herculum, bursting with fury. "A bunch of women telling me..How many are there?" he asked, controlling himself with some effort. "It's difficult to say, Sir," answered the messenger. "The valley floor slopes upwards quite steeply before it flattens out at the top, so we can't see very well. But it looks like they're in two ranks of about fifty women in each rank." "Fifty! Fifty women, holding up five thousand men!" roared Herculum. "Tell your officer to get the advance guard to clear these preposterous females out of our way! GO!" Carolian, the advance guard commander, carefully lined up his men. Two hundred prime male warriors were at his disposal, and he was prepared to use them all to clear the pass. Four ranks of fifty men, the maximum number he could use across the narrow valley, awaited his command. He looked fifty yards up the pass at the waiting young women. They wore short, white, cotton skirts which reached to mid thigh, leather sandals which laced up around their calf muscles and white halter tops which were tied very tightly to flatten their breasts as much as possible to allow efficient archery. Their hair was tied back from their faces in neat pony tails and they looked extremely attractive. Carolian didn't expect much resistance from girls who looked very much like his own sweet, obliging girl friend back home. `One charge should do the trick,' he thought. He was quite sure the women would throw down their weapons and flee as soon as they saw the might of the male force advancing towards them. He was wrong! The Homian commander marched his men forward, up the slope at a steady, relentless pace, waiting for the girls to cave in as the male warriors drew ever closer. He raised his sword, and was about to signal the charge, when the Amazons struck. There was a sound like the flight of a million angry bees, then two arrows took Carolian in the chest. Too late, the Homians realised their plight. As the first rank of female archers released their arrows, so they knelt down and the rank behind them fired and knelt down, then the other three ranks which had been concealed by the terrain, released their arrows in turn. Then the front rank fired again, and the others, rank by rank, one after the other filling the air with speeding death. Deadly female arrows thudded into muscular male bodies. The Homian soldiers perished where they stood, in neat, orderly rows, awaiting the order to charge which never came. Dead, dying and wounded men sprawled with military precision on the valley floor. The ranks of female archers parted and a hundred swordswomen dashed forward. The Amazons went over the advance guard like a tide of death, finishing off the dying and slaughtering the wounded unmercifully. Herculum had made his way forward, hoping to see the end of female resistance, and now he stood with mouth agape as his advance guard was decimated by the girl warriors. Not only that, more female warriors were pouring into the valley in a fast, orderly manner which was full of menace. The swordwomen stopped a few yards beyond the line of dead men and five hundred archers moved through their ranks and took up positions in front of them, still moving forward. More female infantry brought up the rear, rank after rank. Two thousand purposeful female warriors, bent on the complete destruction of their male enemies. Herculum screamed at his officers to form up their troops. The army was scattered along the valley floor in relaxed, disorganised groups, waiting to be told what to do by officers who had mostly gone ahead to see the advance guard clear the girls out of the way. The men had no idea what had happened, and already clouds of arrows were flying with terrible effect into the ragged groups of the forward male battalions, as the girls stopped, fired, then advanced again, with the speed and efficiency that only years of training and practice could instil. Princess Lida, in command of the Amazon advance, directed fire into the Homian's own regiment of archers, strung out along the right flank of the Homian army, then sent a hundred swordswomen in to finish off the bowmen, and remove the Homian firepower. Most of the men had been sitting down, resting, their bows unstrung, their arrows tied together in their quivers so that they didn't rattle around irritatingly during the march. Now, as they hastily tried to make ready their weapons, the girls struck. Volleys of arrows flew with demonic precision into the mighty torsos of the Homian archers. The men died as they frantically tried to re-string their bows and untie their arrows, their bodies sprawling along the valley floor, fingers clutching weapons they'd never used. Those who survived had no time to bring their weapons to bear. A hundred Amazon girl warriors tore into them, swords flashing, thrusting into male flesh, cutting the helpless bowmen down with ruthless skill and slaying the men where they stood. Three hundred Homian archers perished in a matter of minutes. The few survivors fled from the deadly young female killers, most of them leaving their bows and arrows behind for the girls to salvage. The rest of the male army was also crumbling under the girls' assault. While the majority of the Amazon archers fired as quickly as possible into the mass of the male soldiers, the best markswomen, who had been placed in concealed positions up the sides of the gorge, took careful aim and picked off the officers. Herculum himself, easily recognisable in his General's cloak, was spared on the orders of the Amazon Queen. He was the biggest and strongest of the Homians, but the Amazon commander believed that he was also one of the most stupid, and she was quite happy to leave him alive to lead his men to total destruction. And he made a fatal mistake. Seeing his officers shot down around him, the Homian leader ran back with the intention of rallying as many of his troops as possible by himself. His soldiers, however, didn't realise this. They could hear the screams of dying and wounded men. They could see the remains of the right flank of their army streaming backwards in full flight and the men of the forward units going down under a hail of arrows. Now it looked as if their General was running away! The nearest soldiers panicked, and also fled, causing a domino effect which saw the whole male army fleeing along the valley floor, running for their lives from the girl soldiers of the Amazon army. Relentlessly, the girls pursued the fleeing men. The panic stricken Homians soon jammed the narrow pass as they desperately tried to escape from the female warriors. The press of men slowed down the retreat so that the elated Amazon archers could easily keep pace, firing volley after volley into the mass of male soldiers, leaving a trail of death along the valley floor. Behind the advancing Amazon army came a force of young, pre-teen girls. They salvaged the arrows from the bodies of the Homian dead and passed them to runners who raced through the ranks of infantry to feed the archers, so that a continuous supply of arrows reached the front line. >From the rims of the gorge, parties of young, teenage, pre-warrior girls watched in awe, as they saw the results of the Amazon attack, and watched the mass of the male army retreating in confusion, leaving piles of dead men behind them. When the retreating soldiers entered the narrowest part of the gorge, directly below the girls waiting on the rims, the rim party leader blew a loud blast on her horn. At the given signal, squads of girls on both sides of the gorge released the piles of rocks they'd perched on hurdles at the edge of the cliffs. An avalanche of stones hurtled down the almost vertical slopes, dislodging tons of rocks and boulders and carrying them in a huge irresistible tide to crash into the valley floor. The men underneath had no chance. Hundreds of Homians were buried under tons of rock as the trap was sprung by the teenage girls above. As the dust cleared, the girls could see that the pass was completely blocked by a mass of boulders, thirty feet high and forty yards long. Their job on the rim was done. Now they had to get to the valley floor and wait. In the event of any Homians escaping over the rock barrier, these young girls would be there to see that they got no further! .......... The Homian retreat came to a halt as thousands of bewildered, terrified men milled around in the bottleneck of the pass, unable to go forward, and with an army of female killers remorselessly pressing them from behind. "We must rally the men," Calium, a Homian officer shouted at Herculum. "Get them into order. We must make a stand." And Herculum did his best. He ran amongst his men, calming them down, sending them to Calium, and other officers, who were forming companies as quickly as they could in the middle of the confusion. Lida's archers were using the men at the rear of the Homian retreat for target practise. Unable to move either forwards or backwards, the unfortunate warriors were sitting ducks for the Amazon girls, and the men were slain by the hundred. However, the arrows being used could not now be easily retrieved, as all the victims were between the two armies. Lida signalled most of her archers to cease fire while Company Commanders quickly took stock of the supply situation. They noted that there were only about two thousand arrows left in reserve, so Lida quickly redistributed her weapons. While the leading rank of fifty archers kept up a steady, but much slower rate of fire, half the force of five hundred archers were sent to the rear, and their arrows distributed amongst the remaining girls. These were quickly formed into four ranks of fifty behind the front rank, and each archer supplied with six arrows. The remaining arrows going to the front rank. A runner reported the situation to the Queen. Then, through the piles of male bodies, and out of the melee, came the hastily formed ranks of Calium's forces. Queen Heta had foreseen this situation. She knew that when they found the pass blocked, the Homians would have no alternative but to try to break out of the trap by fighting a way through the Amazon army. She had arranged her forces accordingly. Now she would see whether her tactics would work or not! Although hundreds of Homians had been slain by the Amazon girls, they still outnumbered their female adversaries, and it was a formidable force which faced the women soldiers; a force consisting of almost three thousand large, powerful, muscular male warriors, desperate to escape from the trap in which they were caught. Luckily for the girls, size and strength were about all the Homians had to their advantage. Many of them had abandoned their weapons when they fled. And, apart from a few surviving officers, they were leaderless. The best of the Homian Officer Corps had already been slaughtered by an Amazon raiding party (see Homians 1), and their replacements were of poor quality, untrained and inexperienced. Most of those replacements had also been picked out and killed by the skilful Amazon archers, and those who were left had no idea how to cope with the terrible situation they were in. Instead of using subtle tactics to draw the Amazon's fire and deplete the women's supply of arrows, the Homians reverted to simplicity. They charged. Showing the discipline of well trained, experienced warriors, Lida's girls waited calmly for her signal. Then, with the first wave of men only thirty yards away, they fired. Men fell in mid stride. Other tripped over the fallen bodies. The carnage in the narrow valley was horrendous as the van of the Homian army perished. And the charge slowed to a plod, then stopped, as Amazon arrows struck down the male soldiers with deadly efficiency. As the archers ran out of arrows, they dropped to the rear and were replaced by ranks of infantry. The first two ranks consisted of the strongest of the Amazon warriors. Each woman carried a ten foot long spear as well as the sword strapped to her waist. Following them were the light infantry, girls armed only with the short stabbing swords they could use so well. Keeping their lines, shoulder to shoulder, the girls advanced, into the piles of male dead. Then, accelerating into a charge of their own, the girls tore straight into the main body of Homian troops. Trained to perfection, the Amazons used their spears with devastating effect. The girl in the front rank thrust at her adversary. If the man managed to knock her spear aside, then the girl in the second rank, thrusting between her comrades with a slightly longer spear, took him in the throat or chest. Each Homian was, in effect, being attacked by two Amazons, girls whom the men couldn't reach to strike down with their swords because of the length of the girls' spears. Male strength was no match for female skill as man faced woman in combat and perished at her hands. Blood flowed as the tall, powerfully built male warriors fell before the nubile young viragos who slew them unmercifully. Then, as the Homians were gradually pushed back, the pre-teen girls collected up the arrows from the dead and wounded men. Other young girls, under the supervision of elderly women too old to fight in the army, carried on the slaughter. When the girls found a man still alive, they knelt down, held their helpless victim by the hair and slit callously his throat with the sharp little daggers each girl carried in her tunic belt. Dozens of mighty male warriors perished at the hands of tiny nine and ten year-old girls as the female army pressed relentlessly forwards. When her archers were ready to take part once more, Lida formed them up behind the infantry. She signalled her trumpeter, who blew one loud blast, followed by two short ones. This alerted the infantry who stopped advancing and retreated a few paces. Then, on the next blast of the horn, the infantry soldiers dropped to the ground. The leading ranks of Homians were suddenly confronted with serried ranks of archers, their bows drawn, ready to fire. Then the arrows flew. Men went down in droves as the girls fired into them at point blank range. Herculum, had been working well, encouraging his men, trying to organise resistance to the female juggernaut. Now that he didn't have to think too much, he was showing himself to be good, courageous leader, and Lida recognised this. She tapped her best archer on the shoulder and pointed out her target. The girl took careful aim and fired. The arrow took Herculum clean through the throat. He dropped his sword, brought both hands up in a fruitless effort to clear the fatal shaft, then sank to his knees and toppled over, dead before his massive frame hit the ground. This was the final blow to the male army. Those in the front ranks who had escaped the first swarm of arrows threw down their weapons and held their arms up in surrender. But there was no escape. The Amazons gave no quarter. These men had come to Amazon lands to rape, pillage and enslave their female captives. It was the Amazon Queen's intention that not one single man would return to tell the tale. The archers kept firing until their arrows ran out once more. Then the infantry advanced as before. Huge, muscular, male warriors, wide-eyed with shock and terror, begged to be spared, but were cut down with disdain by the slender girl soldiers. Those who resisted, powerfully built men, towering over the girls who fought them, perished where they stood, scarcely able to believe that it was shapely young women whose spears were slicing into their tough, male bodies and killing them so easily. Crazed with fear, the surviving men tried to climb the barrier of rocks. Many were injured as the loose rocks were dislodged and rocks and men fell onto the climbers below. Many were picked off by the Amazon girl archers as they became easy targets on the rock face. Most were slaughtered by the Amazon infantry before they could put a foot on the rock wall. But some made it across. The teenage, pre-warrior girls waited for them round a bend in the pass. As the men, trembling with relief at escaping the slaughter, came into their killing ground, the girls attacked. Most of the Homians had abandoned their weapons so as to make their escape across the rocks easier to accomplish, and now they paid the penalty. Slender young girls, eager to attain warrior status, charged into the escaping male soldiers with female ferocity. Armed with light swords, the nimble, agile girls hacked at legs thighs and groins, bringing down their huge, muscular adversaries and slaying the terrified men with savage joy. Not all of the men were killed immediately, because the younger girls were still fascinated by the male anatomy. A dozen Homians were taken prisoner and made to strip in front of their girl captors. One of the older girls gave a demonstration. "Watch his cock," she said, using her silky, female fingers on his lower abdomen and under his balls. The girls squirmed with delight as they watched the man's cock stiffen into a huge erection of pulsating masculinity. "Pleasure or pain?" the girl asked her fascinated audience. "Pain!" they shouted. The girl moved closer to her quivering victim. His vast, heavily muscled frame towered over the slight figure of the fourteen year-old girl. She reached up and stroked his bulging biceps. "Poor baby," she crooned, gazing up at him with large, sorrowful eyes. "They want me to hurt you. Isn't that sad?" Then, tightening her grip on the huge man's arms, she drove her knee up between his muscular thighs and smashed it into his tautened balls. With a piercing, cry of unmitigated pain, the massive male warrior collapsed in agony at the feet of the shapely little tomboy. The Amazons cheered. They loved seeing a mighty, Herculean, male warrior brought down by a slip of a girl. Even as he writhed in anguish, the girl went to work on him again. Her fingers caressed and stroked around his damaged balls, and he soon lay spread-eagled, on his back, with the girl sitting astride him. Leaning back while she held him with her lustrous eyes, her hand fastened around the shaft of the Homian's erection and began to move up and down. "Now for the pleasure, you lucky boy," she said. In no time at all, the man's huge body tensed under the girl's administrations. Then, with an almighty shudder, his limbs spasmed and he came in great, heaving spurts, much to the Amazon girls' delight. "Pain and pleasure," said the girl, "but now, like all enemies of the Amazons, you must die." She locked her tiny hands around the man's thick neck and pressed down on his adam's apple. Other young girls held the mighty male's muscle laden limbs. Then the slender little girl choked the massive male to death. While the teenagers tortured their male captives on one side of the rock barrier, on the other side of the barrier, the main Amazon army mopped up. Carefully, the girls moved among the piles of male bodies, finishing off the wounded and collecting weapons. Every corpse was stripped naked so that (according to Amazon belief) the dead warriors would have nothing with which to exchange for their passage across the river to the Underworld heaven. Paradise was for Amazons only! When they had finished, the female soldiers formed up and marched back to the head of the pass. There they turned round so that they could look down the valley floor. It was an awesome sight. As far as the eye could see, the ground was totally covered with a carpet of naked male bodies. These beautiful specimens of muscular masculinity now lay frozen in death, slaughtered to a man by the girls who looked down on them. The Homian threat to Amazonia was no more.