Dark Tide: Book Five of the Phantom Badgers

by RW Krpoun

  Instead, the news of the raid into Apartia on the twenty-eighth of Hoffnungteil had been accompanied by a warning that his army might be ordered north to retake the city; he had taken one look at the maps and seriously doubted that the order would be issued. While it was true that Cashel and Apartia were directly linked by road, the term ‘road’ in this case meant roughly two hundred fifty miles of single-lane dirt track that boasted bridges only where it crossed the Bercer River, relying upon fords everywhere else, a track that was going to be knee-deep in mud from the frequent fall rains until it froze solid with the coming of winter. Gichin had sent a message pointing this out, along with the impossibility of moving even his light siege train across the distance in anything resembling a timely fashion, assuming that the Army of the South chose not to follow and play hammer to Apartia’s anvil.

  Despite these reasonable arguments the Grand Council’s next message had ordered him to march north no later than the first of Frosteil to re-take Apartia, secure Bohca Tatbik’s lines of communication, and hold his force in readiness to support Bohca Tatbik in the destruction of the Army of the Heartland. As a consolation, the order commended both himself and his army in their summer campaign, and gave him complete authority to take whatever steps he thought necessary to bring his army to Apartia.

  At the end of the summer campaign his well-worn army had consisted of four Goblin Lardina (one wolf-rider, three foot), one Orc Horc, ten Darkhosts, ten Eyade Ket, a Night Guards Sacred Band, and the Fourth and Twenty-Sixth Holdings. He had had four Holdings of Undead, one Dayar and three of reanimated corpses, at the war’s onset but they had not survived the summer’s fighting. He had received an additional Horc and four Felher Swarcs of roughly two thousand warriors each to replace the Undead along with individual replacements to bring his original units up to strength, and had been looking forward to taking this force onto the field of battle next spring. The problem was that the Orcs, Goblins, and Eyade had sent their loot home to the Plains a few weeks before, along with two-thirds of their veterans, who were now rich in slaves, wealth, and battle honors, refilling their units with young warriors looking for their first battle. Worse, the Felher, who were essentially mercenaries from the Mist Ridge Weehoc, or blood-line nation had just arrived and had never operated as part of a Hand Bohca before.

  To complicate his life further the nature of replacements changed. He, like all the other armies, had received veterans drawn from the Holdings and Sacred Bands remaining in the homelands and experienced Direbreed to make good his losses, sending back a veteran for every five replacements he received. Now, he had been informed, he would only receive green recruits for his Holdings and newly commissioned Sevenguard, along with freshly-Seeded Direbreed, although the tithe of veterans from his own ranks would not cease; apparently the strain of maintaining twenty-one Holdings, ten Sacred Bands, and ninety-five Darkhosts in the west had exhausted the reserves of veterans back home.

  It was a bad plan, but an order is an order and Gichin hadn’t spared himself or his staff in making preparations. Baggage was stripped to a minimum to speed their march and create a pool of replacement beasts and wains. A mini-siege train was created from the light siege train, just a fraction of a normal train’s personnel and equipment, but a force that, it was hoped, could keep up with the army as it crossed the wretched roads ahead. The remaining siege gear was burned, along with mountains of carefully stockpiled supplies that his quartermasters had been gathering for weeks. The excess siege engineers were sent back to the Plains with a small escort, two thousand slaves were put to death to reduce the drain upon the food stocks, a carefully organized order of march was circulated to every unit and now, today, Bohca Ortak was setting forth to retake Apartia.

  Gichin urged his horse forward and rode alongside a file of troops from the Fourth Holding, trying to look brave and optimistic, while feeling neither.

  It was late on the third of Frosteil, a chilly fall day, when the Badgers’ guides brought them to the farmstead that they intended to use as a base. Durek sent the Scout Section to take a look at the ford itself (which was a mile further south) while Axel supervised the Company as it moved into their quarters and the Captain met with Jean Strolz.

  Strolz was a former Ilthanian Militia Serjeant who had fought at Mancin and the First Battle of Apartia, and who was now the commander of the Sixth Invoquar, an invoquar being a term common within the Realms and used to designate a unit of irregulars of up to five hundred troops. The Sixth had two hundred forty under arms, and could rally about the same in support roles, the officers Militia trained and veterans of some of the summer’s fighting; the rest were farm folk and villagers driven from their homes by the advance of the Hand. They had been in existence as a unit for three months and had been skirmishing with Eyade patrols and ambushing Hand supply caravans for much of that time, poorly armed and only half-trained, but everyone a volunteer and a veteran of at least one skirmish.

  Strolz, a thin, bony man who easily topped Rolf by a good two inches, hardly glanced at the orders appointing Durek commander of all forces gathered at Brown Wood for the defense of the ford. “Master Dwarf, you have no idea how happy I am to see you and your troops arrive; ever since I received word that the Sixth was tasked to block the ford I’ve been in a state of panic. We aren’t much, in truth, nor am I a real leader, although we’ve bagged a few wains over the weeks. Mind you, we’ll fight like blazes so long as someone tells us when and where and comes up with a plan.”

  “I’ll need a list of your men, their arms and skills, past experience, that sort of thing.” Durek managed to disengage his hand, which Strolz had been enthusiastically pumping in time to his words. “Are there any more units heading this way?”

  “Thomas Bowden is on his way with the Third Invoquar, figure another hundred-fifty, but they’re hard lads in the Third, got quite a few longbowmen, they tangle with the Eyade on purpose, you see. Figure there ought to be a few odd bods stroll in as word goes out, but those’ll be it. The First and Fourth are south of here getting ready to harass the Hand on the road north, and the Second’s further east.”

  “How defensible is the ford?”

  “Not very, normally, but the rains have the water waist deep and fast-moving; what with the high banks it ought to be fairly good, I suppose. The bridge is down, we saw to that yesterday, burned the framework, then undermined the north bank, and took the top four feet off the bed supports. We’ll be able to put her to rights after the war, but the Hand’ll want a week to ten days to fix it, and I figure, let ‘em spend the time if they want.”

  “True, we’re playing for time. Now, first thing tomorrow, and I mean at the crack of dawn, I want all hands assembled in the field east of this farmstead....”

  Commander Gichin cursed bitterly as he watched his troops struggle up the muddy cow path the maps deemed to call a road. It was noon on the fourth of Frosteil, and they were exactly thirty-five miles from where they had planned to make their winter quarters, back before the blasted orders sending them to Apartia had arrived. They had had at least an hour’s cold rain each day since then, some days three or four hours’ worth, and the road was muddy before his wagons began rolling up it. By the time half his cartage had crossed a given point the ruts were fourteen inches of cloying mud, forcing each successive wagon’s team to labor harder to make any headway at all, which increased fodder consumption and slowed the rate of march. The infantry marched to either side of the road, which meant the formations in the last third of the column were knee deep in mud all day long, or they would be except they guided to the left or right to stay on turf that hadn’t been pounded to slurry by tens of thousands of feet, which meant that by the end of the day his rear units were as much as six hundred yards from the line of march.

  If the road and weather conditions weren't bad enough, the Bohca was surrounded by clouds of irregulars, both mounted and afoot, and to keep themselves amused while they waited for the Hand troops to struggle up to their stretch of
cow-path they dug trenches across the roadway, each four or five feet wide and running from ditch to ditch, and knee-breaker holes in the flanking fields for the infantry.

  The engineers built plank walkways to allow the wains to cross the ditches, but the ramps were only good for a couple trenches before the weight of all the iron-shod wheels wore them out, and the guerrillas dug as many as twenty ditches in a mile if the mood struck them, forcing the engineers to dismantle every structure along the road for bridging materials, every structure the bandits hadn’t burned, that is. Cutting trees so they fell across the roadway, piling rocks on the road, digging out stream banks at fords, and strewing the mud with caltrops to cripple the dray beasts were popular activities as well.

  And that was just while they waited for Bohca Ortak to reach the section of road that they had been assigned. His column, even when broken down into his baggage train and two parallel columns of infantry, was eight miles long from head to rear. Gichin had assigned the wolf-riders and one Ket to scouting ahead, one Ket to watch the rear, and four Ket to each flank, and so far they had been able to hold most of the bands of irregulars from the marching columns, but the nomads were seeing regular skirmishes and were sufficiently undisciplined themselves so as to leave exploitable gaps between units, gaps the guerrillas used to slip in close enough to fire volleys of quarrels and arrows into the marching infantry, or to pick off dray animals.

  The losses weren’t very serious as a whole but they hurt morale and cost the Bohca delays which they certainly could not afford. As it was he was going to have to hold the army in place on the sixth to afford it time to rest and pull maintenance on the transport, another day lost in the race against winter. The snows might come late in the south-central Realms, but they would come, and bring with them worse problems than mud. At least the guerrilla bands ensured that he had no real problems with desertion or straggling because the progress of the Bohcas across the Realms had been marked by systematic looting and rapine on a grand scale, leaving plenty of embittered men and women in their wake, men and women who now sought revenge in the guerilla bands on their flanks.

  For spice, his spies warned that a company of mercenaries and at least two units of Ilthanian irregulars were digging in at the ford his army would use to cross the Bercer River. Gichin had examined the map and agreed with his enemies’ estimate: the ford at Brown Wood would be the likeliest place to cross the river, but it would take more than a handful of sell-swords and peasant militia to stop him.

  More worrisome was the news that the Heartland Army had left the Royal Bridge and was marching east along the Royal Highway; if they were heading for Apartia it would doom Bohca Ortak’s mission from the start. At least the spies reported that the Army of the South was marching to the coast, planning to take the Coast Road north to Sagenhoft. Gichin doubted that Laffery would move all the way back to Apartia as it would put the Heartland’s supply situation at risk, but he still worried about it.

  Thunder rumbled overhead and the Markan-Hern sighed. That was all they needed: more rain, more mud, more cold field rations, another day with only ten miles covered, another wet, miserable night as the frosts sharpened their knives and bit ever more keenly.

  Shuket Kirpinar was wiry even by nomad standards, a battered, bow-legged man who seemed to be made entirely of old leather wrapped around stone rods, five feet of scarred, weather-worn cavalryman. He had fifty-odd summers behind him, time which had robbed him of much of his hair (a fact he hid by shaving his scalp) and half his teeth while leaving his wits and eyesight intact. He commanded a Ket assigned to Bohca Ortak’s left, west, flank. The Hand officers had been displeased with the fact that his unit was, like all the other nomad Kets, named after its commander, and instead had numbered the Eyade formations within each Bohca. Thus what the nomads called Kirpinar’s Ket was formally titled the Third Ket of Bohca Ortak.

  It didn’t matter to Kirpinar what the Hand called his unit; the Void-priests couldn’t seem to understand that a Ket was a transitory thing, temporary; even the Kani were not usually permanent formations except in the largest tribes. It was the Kias of around forty horsemen that were the heart and soul of the nomad war machine, six Nya of six men each and a command group, all drawn from the same warrior society and clan. When large raids or actions were imminent, such as this invasion, strong men raised Ket standards and waited to see who would respond; if enough Kia leaders rallied to their standard, the Ket was born and took the field; if too few came the would-be leader burned the standard and served as an ordinary soldier for that raid or campaign.

  Kirpinar had had over forty Kia rally to his banner, being well-known as a fierce warrior; he had kept thirty-one, formed into six equal Kani with an additional Kia as his personal guard, and sent the rest off to serve with lesser commanders. He had led six hundred fifty-nine warriors and sixty-eight support personnel across the Wall and into the Realms, spending the summer learning the business of screening the flanks of a infantry-based army and scouting for the same force while raping and pillaging where possible, fighting as often as they could.

  He had heard the Hand priests complain that these southern Realmsmen would not stand and fight, that all they would do was skirmish and run, and wondered what size of a battle they were used to, for the wizened Shuket had never in all his years seen fighting on such a scale. On a dozen occasions all ten Ket had been committed along with fifteen hundred wolf-riders, supported by various numbers and types of infantry, a force the nomad had never seen involved in a single battle before, much less on just one side. And whatever the Hand thought, he knew these southerners weren’t cowards, nor unskillful: he had lost nearly two hundred veterans over the months of hard riding and bitter skirmishing, no small tribute to the Realmsmens’ skill.

  Of course, there had been plenty of loot and slaves along the way, and battle honors by the arm-load, so much so that the least of his troops had had two saddlebags of portable wealth and a couple young women or boys to play with by the time they had moved into what had been promised were winter quarters. That had wrought worse damage to his command than the fighting: two hundred forty-eight of his best men had escorted wagons loaded with loot and lines of slaves back to the Plains, too rich to bother with any more fighting.

  He had replacements of course; by the time they had received the word to break camp and march north his Ket once again numbered over six hundred and fifty warriors, but most of them were bare-armed novices, young men and women looking for their first real battle, not the hardened raiders he had brought across the Wall. None of the other Ket assigned to Bohca Ortak had fared any better than his, but that was no consolation; Kirpinar was keenly aware that his unit was far from the finely-honed weapon it had been six weeks ago. It was to be expected, of course: twenty-nine Ket had moved across the Wall with the four Bohcas, and fifteen more had been formed and sent west by mid-summer along with clouds of individual replacements; small wonder that the by the fall nine out of ten replacements were untried novices.

  They had shaped up a bit on the five days the army had been marching north, having milled about with some bands of guerrillas and learned some of the broader points of screening an infantry force, but Kirpinar still harbored a sense of unease and found himself exercising greater caution than he had found necessary before.

  At least the mission before them was simple enough, and a good opportunity to blood his new recruits: last night a patrol from the Fifth Ket had discovered that a village five miles west of the line of march was not only still occupied, but actually had its normal complement of goats and sheep in the pens which encircled the small town. Accordingly, dice were rolled and the Third Ket had won the right to raid the place. The Eyade would get the slaves and portable loot the place contained, while a force from the Hand, which was still two miles behind the Ket, would herd the goats and sheep back to feed the army, and extract what dray beasts and planking the place had to offer. The Ket had set off well before dawn, arriving at a low ridge that sheltered t
he village, which Kirpinar had been told was named something that roughly translated into Figann as ‘Good Dirt’, just as the sun was peeping over the horizon.

  To the Shuket it didn’t look like much, but then permanent structures and digging up fields to plant food seemed more than a bit unhealthy to the nomad leader. The ridge was to the east of the town, which consisted of around forty buildings and sheds clustered around a meager ‘T’ shaped intersection of what passed for roads in this country, although roads held no more interest for Kirpinar than farming. The buildings were surrounded by the goat and sheep pens which were filled as promised with around two hundred beasts; from experience the Eyade guessed there to be about eighty or so inhabitants in the town. The dirt-grubbers were still in place as well, as evidenced by the pale streamers of smoke that rose from every chimney.

  A ditch encircled the village and its pens, bridged where the main north-south road crossed and where the lesser road that ran off the main road to the west passed, plus several other bridges here and there. The countryside around it was cut into squares and rectangles by walls made of the stones dug out of the ground, although Kirpinar had not been told why they bothered to dig out the rocks in the first place, and these stones were partially or fully covered with dirt, the dirt supporting hedges that were nearly six feet tall in places and very thick, making each little field a separate enclosure that, the Eyade knew from bitter experience, could be effectively defended by a handful of determined men.

  Lanes ran between the fields, little tracks just wide enough for one cart; additionally, there were narrow little ditches dug on either side of the hedge-fences to drain away water, although again Kirpinar had no idea why the water was bad. Some of the fields had the planting-grooves in them, while others were covered in grass. The Shuket had been told that the farmers only cut the grooves in some of their fields and left the others to run to grass, changing which field did what every year or so, and the nomad was willing to concede that this was likely a fact no matter how absurd it sounded-after all, a man who would spend all of his life in one place would probably do anything for some variety, no matter how absurd.