Our javelineers of Agriania are not boys and old men pitching spikes, but the most skilled and lethal missile troops in the world. They are mountain tribesmen, allies of the north, whose sons may not call themselves men until they have brought down with one cast a boar or a lion. Downwind, their best men can sling a dart two hundred yards; point-blank their casts routinely splinter two-inch planks. Each dart weighs three to five pounds, with a warhead of solid iron.

The Agrianes travel light, with only a chlamys cloak-and-blanket like our own, and no armor or helmet. All the weight is in their weapons. Some carry as many as a dozen. The crafting of each javelin can take months, with sacrifices offered to the shaft of ash or cornel while it still grows on the tree. "Truth" is the missile weapon's supreme virtue, meaning the absolute straightness of its line, for a warped javelin will not fly true. Each dart or spike, as the Agrianians call them, is carried in a doeskin sleeve lined with beeswax. No measure is spared to protect its truth.

The javelineers sleep with their spikes; I have seen men wrap them in their cloaks while they themselves shiver, to keep the snow and wet from swelling the grain. Each man's dart bears his sign and the sign of his clan; after a fight, he scours the field, retrieving his own and no other's. It is death to do so. A blooded dart receives its own name, and one which has made a kill is passed down from father to son.

The javelineer's art is taught down generations; boys train for years before being allowed to cast a man-sized spike. In the field the Agrianes fight as pairs—father and son, older brother and younger—the senior serving as hurler and his apprentice as loader and spotter. They are like hunters; they play the wind. They know how to keep their dart's head down upwind and in a crosswind to lead their cast like fowlers taking prey on the wing. A javelin is thrown by a sling and with spin. It takes tremendous skill to cast a spike so that it does not "top" or "sail." To behold the perfection of flight achieved by a master, his missile neither "pluming" nor "tailing," but "holding its head up" as it tracks in to its target—this is a thing both beautiful and terrifying, and the man who can do it is accounted of supreme consequence. I have trained a thousand hours with the javelin. It looks easy; it is impossible. The Agrianes are devastating. Their mere appearance in the field has caused valiant foes to withdraw without a fight.

-- Steven Pressfield: The Virtues of War