by RW Krpoun
Command Gichin watched as the commander of the Horc deployed his troops for a second assault. Yesterday he and his staff had studied the defenses and laid out several plans; initially he had planned a night attack to take advantage of the Orc’s night-keen eyes, but a Lanthrell had infiltrated through his sentry line late in the afternoon yesterday, just one or two most likely, and slipped some kind of tasteless clear oil into the cook pots that served the Markan-Zern, the offensive spellweavers. Worse, the -Zern had invited their counterparts in the vassal contingents to dine with them, and for the last twelve hours two-thirds of the spellcasters in the Bohca had been too busy defecating to perform any offensive magic. They would live, his healers assured him, but none could safely get more than a dozen steps from a chamber pot for the next couple days.
There were enemy wizards amongst the defenders and Gichin had, on the advice of his pale, sweating, foul-smelling chief Markan-Zern, ordered his unaffected spellcasters to restrain themselves, not using spell-work unless the enemy started it first. Best to leave the matter entirely alone if the enemy was willing to do likewise, and so far they had.
The confusion created by the sickness amongst the spellcasters had caused the night attack to be canceled and of the available plans Gichin had decided to go with a methodical two-stroke assault: cripple the primitive defenses with the first blow, and break the line with the second. So far, it was working well, albeit rather costly. He should have them driven off by mid-morning, and his army across the river by nightfall, a day lost, but no help for it.
The Hound’s orders were to break the line, clear all strong points, and then hold them; the next step was to have a Ket ready in the saddle on the south bank to press through the Orcs as the defenders withdrew in order to cut up the enemy, but Gichin hesitated to incorporate that into his plan. A fifth of his nomads had been lost on this march so far and they would have considerable fighting to do ahead of them. The danger of sending a Ket after the withdrawing enemy was that there could be a trap waiting for them, and he had already had one Ket clawed to pieces on this campaign.
It wasn’t worth it, he decided. Bohca Ortak had killed well over a thousand irregulars on the march north, along with a couple dozen Lanthrell, and would kill more in the days to come. The important thing was to get his army to Apartia as quickly and as intact as he could. He would leave the Eyade to their patrolling of the flanks; should the defenders retreat out of his line of march he would be glad to see them go.
Rolf watched the Hound units form up and move forward; to his right Kroh’s ballista fired, and the big half-Orc began counting slowly. When he had reached thirty he made a chopping gesture with his hand. “Fire.” He stepped to the swivel-mounted siege crossbow and settled the stock into his shoulder as the crew of irregulars set about reloading. He waited, his finger on the trigger, as the line of dark forms advanced across the boot-torn south bank, the weak sunlight flickering along the bright steel of their weapons. As they came into the best effective range for the weapon he released the steel shaft and began winching the string back to cock, glancing over his shoulder at the crew to check their progress. “Fire when ready.”
They were good lads, the six young men in his crew; Durek had assigned those irregulars with the least melee skill to the ballista towers in an attempt to protect them, and they had pestered Rolf into giving them weapons-drill in what spare time they had had while waiting for the Hand to arrive. They were all farm boys from areas that the Hand had not yet reached, gone off the join the war in search of excitement. The Hand had advanced too fast for them to help fill the gaps in the regular Ilthanian military so they had joined the Sixth Invoquar and were seeing their first real combat this day.
They were impossible not to like, what with their enthusiasm and willingness to learn, but Rolf couldn’t help but compare them to the good-natured young men they had recruited from the indentured servants at the Grand Crossing: only one of the six still lived just seven months later, and they had spent half that time driving carts. There was a terrible arithmetic to war, Rolf knew: even if well-trained, the odds were poor that a warrior could survive his first three actions if they were hot and heavy; thereafter his chances of survival rose radically with each fight he survived. In the confusion of melee anyone could be killed, but usually the veterans came through time and again.
He slapped a bolt into place, aimed, and dropped an Orc in mid-stream. The ballista fired at the same time, the long shaft plowing through one Hound and impaling another; the crew gave a cheer and set to cranking the massive bows back to full cock. Rolf called one of the crewmen over to man the siege crossbow and picked up his own crossbow as the Hounds came out of the river at a trot, leaning into the hail of fire that was reaching out to them.
As the lead Hounds neared the defensive line the defenders used rope slings to hurl fire pots on them, the resin-tar mix sticking to the Orcs and blazing hotly, killing a few and wounding more, throwing the front ranks into confusion as Silver and Gold Platoons took up their positions between the strong points, followed by the Second Invoquar.
For a few moments it looked as if the second assault might be broken as the Orc lines wavered from the effects of the fire pots and missile fire rained into the battered ranks, but the leaders bellowed and urged and the forward thrust picked up again. With a final rush across the last few feet, the Death Hounds hurled themselves upon the strong points and the low, hedge-less walls between.
The fighting at the wall was noisy and busy, Maxmillian found, but not particularly dangerous as the wall was about waist high and covered in dirt, more to the point, it was nearly as wide as it was high, which created problems for the attackers: they could scramble over it easily enough provided no one was waiting on the other side for them to do just that. Since there were in fact defenders waiting for them, the Orcs leaned or half-lay against the wall and lashed out at the Badgers and irregulars, trying to drive them back. The defenders did likewise, leaning over the wall to strike at the Orcs, and so both sides flailed at each other without doing much harm.
The main defensive line held for several minutes while the archers and strong-point defenders took a steady toll of the Hounds, but the Orc leaders rallied their units the situation at the walls changed: covered by teams of spearmen whose longer weapons could hold the defenders back, Orcs were able to scramble over the wall and get to grips with the defenders. The first couple penetrations were overwhelmed by superior numbers, but more and more points were threatened and the defenders were quickly being spread too thin. The Hounds outnumbered the defenders by nearly three-to-one, more so since the Lanthrell were not taking part in the melee action, and their numbers began to tell. Worse, while the Badgers could match, and even exceed, the Hounds in terms of arms, armor, and expertise, the irregulars who made up the bulk of the defense were clearly lacking in all three areas.
Durek watched the struggle with an expert’s eye, seeing the first organized penetrations repulsed or wiped out, and knowing that the end had come. He had hoped to hold for several hours and chew up the Horc in the process, but obviously it wasn’t going to happen. Gesturing for the irregulars tasked with trumpet duty to sound the signal for withdrawal, a scowl twisting his beard, he began to organize for the retreat, thoroughly displeased: things could have gone a great deal better, in his opinion.
Commander Gichin watched the defenders withdraw; the Lanthrell vanished like a mist before a hot sun, and the mercenaries pulled back in compact, well-handled groups that steadily merged unit the entire company was unified. The irregulars were just that in action as well as name: some broke and ran, some fanatics stood their ground and tried to kill an Orc or two before dying, some pulled back in well-functioning units and most straggled back in two and threes; not a few were caught unprepared, surrounded, and slain before they realized that the order to withdraw had been given.
As per his orders, the Orcs contented themselves with securing the defensive line and the area immediately beyond it while two
Darkhosts advanced across the ford to push further on and secure the army’s camp site, allowing the enemy to withdraw without pursuit. It bothered Gichin to allow them to deal his army a bloody nose and then run away unchecked, but he had a larger mission before him, and the best service he could give it was to get his entire Bohca across the ford before dark. Once he was on the north bank there were no significant natural barriers between Bohca Ortak and Apartia.
He eyed the drifts of Orcish dead and wounded, and scowled; it had gone far more poorly than he had hoped. He had hoped for better, but nothing had gone the way he had intended since the orders to march north had reached him.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Commander Gichin sat at a table set out under some leafless trees in the weak winter sunlight, securely bundled against the cold, receiving reports and messages as they arrived. It was the ninth day of Schnienteil, the twelfth month in the Imperial calendar, and Apartia had been completely under his control for the better part of fifteen hours, some dozens of acres of burnt-out, wrecked buildings clogged with the bodies of the dead and dying. Bohca Ortak had arrived on the afternoon of the first, having marched up the ruined roads through the freezing rain, thickening snowfall, irregulars’ ambushes and Threll sniping, leaving a trail of battle-dead and the bodies of those slain by disease, the passage marked by bonfires of excess equipment and damaged wagons.
On the third he had mounted a frontal assault on the partially-repaired breach, which was repulsed with heavy loss; the next day three more attacks were beaten back, although all three reached the top of the wall. They had rested and Healed on the fifth despite the desperate messages from the trapped garrison at the palace compound, where the last rations had been eaten seven days before. That would, Gichin had thought at the time, teach them to put their single old-style Gate in a secondary compound instead of where it could have done them some good.
On the sixth they mounted two more attacks, the second of which carried the wall in too great of numbers to be repulse, a victory of sorts which was followed by thirty-eight hours of house-to-house fighting which proved easily as bloody as the six assaults on the wall combined. The defenders had fortified literally dozens of buildings within the city, linking them with tunnels and crawlways so that the defenders could escape when their defenses were breached and live to fight at another position; were it not for his underground-dwelling Felher who knew tunnel-fighting like their own faces the battle would have dragged on for weeks. As it was, his army was a shadow of its former strength, certainly in no condition to march west to help Bohca Tatbik face the Heartland Army at Dorog even if a garrison for Apartia could be found. At least the remnants of the former garrison had been placed under his command, gathered under the banner of the Thirty-Seventh Holding.
Markan-Ra Celot was back in the homelands, sent via Gate along some of her staff, not quite in disgrace but certainly not bound for an important position or quick promotion. Six months ago she would have been executed for the raid, which was hardly her fault, but too many Markan had fallen since then to make executions as easy to order these days as they had once been.
Just as dangerous as the gaps in the ranks of his units was the damage to his troop’s morale: he had arranged for comfortable winter quarters and plenty of supplies down south, but instead of whiling away the cold weeks counting their loot and bragging to each other his Bohca had made the hellish march north and then fought a very bloody battle just to end up the unhappy possessors of a thoroughly wrecked and looted city.
That would be someone else’s problem, however: Gichin was drafting a letter in his spare moments, a missive he planned to send to the Council of Seven in the next month or so requesting his own relief from command of the Bohca on the basis of personal exhaustion. It would crimp his career, he knew, but by this point he no longer cared. This war had taken a bad turn and he could not see it getting any better: the Army of the Heartland stood at Dorog, while the small but feisty Army of the South was dug in at Early Point, forty miles south of Sagenhoft. Dwarven engineers had been shipped into Sagenhoft even as Bohca Tatbik marched north, and during the two months the siege had been standing down had repaired some of the damage inflicted to the city’s walls. The siege experts he had brought with him were of the opinion that given the conditions Bohca Tatbik now faced, not to mention the reduction in artillery caused by the raid and normal wear and tear, there was no real hope of a significant breach being opened before spring.
The campaign in the south had been abandoned and the Council had already issued orders stripping troops from the north to give the spring push on Sagenhoft new strength, thus reducing the north Bohca to the position of merely covering the central drive’s flank. Everything would be decided at Dorog and in Sagenhoft next spring, and Gichin wanted no part of it; he was sick of the Realms and the constant marching and fighting that went on and on without any visible resolution. Tens of thousands of lives had been lost, the central Realms had been devastated and wide-spread damage had been wrought in both the north and southern regions, the very walls of Sagenhoft had been breached, and still it was not over. Gichin was soldier enough to realize that so long as Sagenhoft held the Realms were unbeaten, and that so long as the Realms weren’t beaten, they were winning.
It was time to cut his personal losses and go back home.
Commander Descente set the sheaf of reports the commander of siege operations had given him aside and leaned back in his chair, thoughtfully studying the roof of the bunker he was using as his command post. The siege experts were calling for a cessation of the artillery bombardment, citing excessive wear to the engines and cold-weather casualties amongst the crews due to the weather, and the vastly increased difficulty in supplying ammunition. Their recommendation was to set the engines into storage under heavy guard and stockpile ammunition until the thaw set in. With warmer weather and a massive stock of ammunition on hand the existing breach could be re-opened and broadened within a short period of time.
Of course, that was only the view of the siege engineers, based strictly upon their narrow field; as commander Descente had to make the final decision based upon the situation as a whole. He had been unable to replace the all Gates which had been lost, so while his army could be supplied only a portion of his losses over the last few weeks could be made good. Royal Bridge and Apartia were back under friendly control but the Heartland Army was entrenched at Dorog, and the small Army of the South was wintering at Early Point. Sagenhoft was still open to the sea, and the Harthrell ships were capable of braving the storms to bring in supplies and take out refugees. And despite the rosy reports from the new station chief inside the city subterfuge and treason were not going to get his army into the city.
The Markan-Hern studied the map hanging from a free-standing frame to his left and nodded to himself: Laffery wasn’t going to budge from Dorog; so long as he sat there Descente would have to come to him. The Army of the South was just a complication, something to force the Bohca commander to leave enough troops behind to secure his artillery while he marched east to open his lines.
There really was no viable options before him: he would stand down the artillery until spring, and as soon as the ground was dry enough he would march east while Bohca Ortak, rebuilt with troops drawn from Bohca Neft in the north, would march west. Together they would crush Laffery between them, then turn and deal with the siege and the Army of the South as well. The problem he had with the entire plan was that once again Laffery was calling the tune by placing himself in a position where the Hand had only one viable course of action.
Descente stared at the map and wished he knew what the Heartland’s commander was planning for the spring; obviously he knew that both Bohcas would be coming for him and that the defenses on Dorog’s ridge would not suffice to off-set the disparity in numbers the Heartland faced, which indicated that the bastard had yet another scheme up his sleeve.
The Markan-Hern in command of Bohca Ortak had requested his own relief as commander,
citing fatigue as the reason for his own replacement. Descente was troubled by that unexpected development; Gichin had seemed a poor choice for an army commander until the fighting started, but events proved him competent; certainly his march north to Apartia and the seizure of the city without siege gear showed him to be a commander of better than average ability. Descente suspected that Gichin had lost his belief in victory, and wanted no part of facing Laffery.
He could understand that.
Grand Marshal Laffery sat on an old stump and watched the work crews hack more defense works into the ridge despite the freezing cold. They were laboring under the direction of Dwarven engineers, the same group which had tunneled into Apartia; most of the raid force had escaped the city via the same tunnels and either Gated back to Sagenhoft or marched to Dorog. Their losses had been heavy, but they had gutted Bohca Ortak and destroyed two Holdings, a Sacred Band, and nine hundred support troops of the city’s garrison.
