by RW Krpoun
Gripping the windlass’ handle with both hands, the Duchess began to laboriously crank the weapon back to full cock.
Markan Arcont stood on the captured wall of the Black Line, breathing through a vinegar-soaked handkerchief against the stench of dead Direbreed as he watched the battle. Things were not working out very well so far: the screen of Direbreed and Orcs had served to weaken the enemy line while soaking up the worst of the missile fire, and the winged beasts had broken the defenders as promised, but the enemy had reacted too quickly to the thrust; reserves must have been on the way before the first Holding reached the wall.
The Sixth Cohort was keeping his force hemmed in to the north, and the Gap itself limited his southern expansion, which held his breakthrough to a frontage of a few hundred yards, and no matter how strong your force, you could only put so many men in such a limited area; currently he was attacking with the Thirty-Third Holding while the other two waited and took causalities from the enemy artillery. He had sent a request to use the winged beasts to silence the enemy’s war engines, and the creatures had cut the volume of fire by half, but after two passes they had withdrawn, leaving Arcont only modestly better off.
They had taken the crest once, only to be driven back by a desperate counter-charge; they were nearly there again, but the cost was staggering: the Thirty-Third had lost nearly half its troops, and would soon have to be reinforced in order to cover its frontage.
The Hand warrior-priest watched his troops struggle forward a step at a time, leaving behind a carpet of dead and wounded as they pushed the enemy back, and willed them to move faster.
Blisters formed, burst, ripped away, and bled as she cranked the windlass time and time again, but Eithne refused to be deterred, adding her own small tally to the bloody accounting of the battle.
Such was her focus that she knew nothing of the Lasharian Royal Foot Guards’ frantic climb up the east slope, their desperate piecemeal assault into the Hand line where it met the north defensive wall, with the Grand Marshal of the Army of the Heartlands on foot at their head, or the wild bloody fighting that followed.
The Sixteenth Holding was fully committed to the drive to the crest and the immediate portion of the north wall on its left flank, while the First Band, Seventeenth Holding contained the defenders along the rest of the north wall and the survivors of the Thirty-Third Holding were staggering back down the ridge in groups and clumps, dragging some of their many wounded with them. His troops were on the crest, still facing terrible resistance and taking a savage pounding, as Arcont fed the Second Band, Seventeenth Holding into the fight to defray the losses the Sixteenth was taking; things were taking too long, and their losses were utterly appalling, but the enemy had bled himself white trying to hold the village-fort, and once his troops started down the reverse slope there would be no stopping them.
Then suddenly his line was struck where it met the north wall and broken; the Third Band, Seventeenth Holding was hurled into the breach but the enemy, battered Lasharian infantry, were numerous, easily a thousand men attacking in some disorganization but with considerable enthusiasm, and the Band could not hold.
It was at such moments that the distinction between good commanders and great are made, when the battle hangs in the balance and the fate of units are at stake; Arcont never hesitated, ordering the Fourth Band, Seventeenth Holding to join the Third in a blocking position while the commanders of the remaining six Bands were ordered to conduct a fighting withdrawal back down the ridge. The Markan gave the orders with a resigned anger that did not cloud his judgment: the gamble had fallen in the enemy’s favor and now all that remained for him was to extract his units in as good of order as could be managed.
Chapter Forty
The Hand forces had withdrawn after the assault on Dorog was broken, and for the next two hours both armies reformed and reorganized. The Heartland Army gathered on the ridge, less the Lanthrell and Imperial cavalry squadrons; the latter were on watch towards the east to ensure that the remnants of Bohca Ortak did not try to rejoin the fight while the former were sniping at the Eyade and wolf-riders screening to the north and south. Grand Marshal Laffery sat on the tower overlooking Dorog as the reports on his various units came in, watching the Hand units reform and the re-Seeding of those Breedstones which the enemy had recovered; by the end of the two hours he guessed that well over two thousand Direbreed had returned to the ranks with new bodies and old memories.
The sight of the enemy’s troops being magically reborn was not nearly as depressing as the reports that he was being given, for while they had wrecked Bohca Ortak, the Heartland Army had taken greater damage than ever before: the First Legion could field only seven battle-worthy cohorts out of the original ten and the Thirty-Seventh only had four cohorts battle-ready, with one cohort, its Fourth, having been wiped out nearly to the last man. The Eighth and Eleventh could muster nine each, while the Sixth could field eight, and none of the cohorts had anywhere near their full complement.
The Gold Army’s foot were badly battered, but still able to fight, as were the Ithanian and Kordian Foot Guards; the Lasharian Royal Foot Guards, however, were gutted, along with the Navian Marines and the Harthrell landing force. The Sagenhoftian field force could muster only two of its cohorts, the third and their Lifeguards Squadron having been pounded to pieces in the fighting in Dorog. The Dwarves were still game despite having taken serious losses. Duke Radet could still field enough heavy cavalry to make his presence felt; all in all, the Grand Marshal was confident that he could hold the ridge against Bohca Tatbik indefinitely, insofar as military strength was concerned.
“Sir, the commanders have gathered as you have requested,” an aide murmured discreetly. Laffery sighed and rose, feeling the years and wounds pressing down upon him, all the more so for the fighting he had seen earlier. It was going to be hard to face Nicholas: the king’s only remaining son by his first wife had been killed in the fifth charge against Bohca Ortak. That the monarch would not blame Lafferywas of no comfort whatsoever.
The Duchess of Sagenhoft was leaning against the rail staring out at the enemy formations, wearing dirty trousers and tunic in mourning black, a sword at her side and her palms thickly bandaged; the Grand Marshal recalled being told that she had survived a kidnap attempt and had been besieged on this very tower during the attack, wearing the skin off her palms on the crank of a siege crossbow. She was guarded by six battered Lifeguards, the half-dozen warriors heavily marked by the fighting they had seen earlier.
“Your troops have fought well today, your Grace,” he paused by the young noblewoman. “Especially in the defense of Dorog. My compliments.”
“My husband led the cohort which fought here.”
“Very well done.” He pointedly looked at her bandaged hands. “I trust you will refrain from any further personal combat, your Grace?”
She flushed, half-embarrassed, half proud. “Yes, Grand Marshal. I will leave the fighting to the soldiers.”
“It’s best that way. I hope to stay out of the fighting, myself.”
“I didn’t plan on getting stuck into the fighting in the first place,” Eithne muttered as she watched the Grand Marshal descend the battered, blood-stained stairs. Sighing, she glanced down at the windrows of corpses that still littered the interior of the village-fort and the ridge slopes, and shuddered, averting her eyes. At least they had cleared away the bodies from the tower, especially Jeremy’s and the two Lifeguards who had died defending her, and moved all the wounded to the aid stations; for the rest of her days she would be haunted by the memory of the chorus of agony had had risen from the warriors of both sides whose broken bodies still clung to life.
She was tired and sore and heartily sick of the whole business; she had almost been abducted by a Hand spy, Jeremy had died before she told him of what his reward would have been, and Colgan had been wounded, although not badly, and a lot of the men and women she had brought from Sagenhoft were dead or maimed and it still wasn’t over, it w
asn’t even noon yet and it seemed like years since dawn. Thousands of lives had ended in the spaces of a few score minutes and within the space of a few dozen acres; just thinking about it made her head hurt.
She wished she hadn’t thrown all the bottles of brandy down onto the enemy.
Grand Commander Descente had been extremely busy for the last two hours as he reassembled his battered army and took stock of his situation with an eye to further operations. On the positive side, the defensive barriers on the western slopes of the ridge had been wrecked or dismantled by his engineers, which vastly reduced the positions’ survivability, and the Heartland Army had been very battered.
On the reverse side, Bohca Tatbik had taken a beating as well: the Horcs had been mauled, reduced to an average of nine hundred effective warriors each and the Darkhosts had suffered worse. Eleven Minions had been killed in the fighting, along with the bulk of the twenty entourages, and he had only one wyvern and a dozen harpies left that were fit to fly. The Thirty-Third Holding had been completely wrecked in the assault on Dorog; he had sent the unit standard and records back via Gate along with a token cadre, and used the survivors to fill the gaps in the Sixteenth Holding’s ranks.
He still had eight Holdings which had not seen combat, along with three Sacred Bands, nearly eighteen thousand fresh troops, plus two more Holdings which were battered but unbowed. The surviving Orcs had regained their fighting spirits, and both the Eyade and Goblin wolf-riders were still willing, if a bit battered; while only a fraction of the fighting strength he had had just this morning, it was still a respectable force. The key would be the Direbreed: he had had seventy Darkhosts at the onset of the fighting, and had committed them all to the attack before the fight had ended; thousands had been killed, with the losses especially heavy amongst the leaders. About half of the Breedstones had been recovered from the field and every minute saw more and more re-Seeded, but Direbreed were children of Chaos, and tough to hold within disciplined ranks at the best of times; with their unit structures ruined for the moment most of his surviving Direbreed were an undisciplined mob of only limited use. So far they had managed to reassemble twenty Darkhosts, with five more in the process of reorganizing. Give him a couple more hours and he would have forty, and if he waited until tomorrow they could recover most of the Breedstones under the cover of darkness and reform sixty or so.
There was no hope of help from Bohca Ortak: Kansa had sent a detailed report that had ruled out any assistance from that quarter. He was trying to reassemble the army in their night camps but it was difficult going: the surviving Goblins and Felher had packed it in completely, gathering up their goods and heading home once they had disengaged from the enemy. There had been considerable desertion from amongst the surviving Direbreed as well since the enemy had retained control of the field, which meant that nine-tenths of the Breedstones of the fallen had been lost; Kansa had reported that he would be able to field about four thousand Direbreed, less than half of what Bohca Ortak had had at the start of the battle. None of the Nightguards had survived the battle, and of the four Holdings only the Fourth remained as a unit; Kansa had reformed the survivors of the other three into the Twenty-Sixth, and sent the standards of the Thirty-Fifth and Forty-Fifth back via Gate. The Eyade had remained loyal, for the most part, although numerous individuals headed home; with a little reorganization Kansa should be able to field six out of the ten Ket his army had once had, plus the Ket from Bohca Tatbik Descente had sent with him. The Orcs had stayed, loyal as bricks, but that was a fairly moot point as they numbered less than two thousand effectives, retreat being a command that many had chosen to ignore.
Bohca Ortak was finished for days as a fighting force, but Kansa would have it whipped into good enough shape to defend its camps by nightfall; given a week and some replacements which were already on their way from the Plains the army would be ready to take the field again, and that the most important consideration in figuring his next move: time. He still had to reopen his land route to the Plains before he could resume the siege of Sagenhoft.
He heard the startled shouts and looked up from hastily-written estimates of their remaining stores of missile weapons and artillery ammunition to see what the noise was all about. It took him a moment as he had instinctively checked the army’s flanks and rear, expecting some sort of Lanthrell mischief at work, but there was no trouble on the picket lines. Looking forward to the ridge, he froze, and blinked carefully, not believing his eyes. He stared in wonder for long seconds, ignoring the excited staff officers and unit commanders who clustered around him shouting questions and suggestions. Twice he closed his eyes and breathed deeply to ensure that he had not slipped into a fatigue-induced stupor, but each time his re-opened eyes showed him the same scene.
The Army of the Heartland was descending the west slopes of Dorog Ridge; Grand Marshal Laffery was quitting his defensive position and coming out to do battle in the open. The man who had duped and deceived Descente so many times was throwing away a tremendous tactical advantage and coming down to fight on equal terms.
It was a miracle.
“This is going to be a bloodbath,” Nicholas I tipped back his flask and tossed off a shot of brandy.
“This entire day has been one endless bloodbath,” Laffery accepted the proffered flask and took a drink. “And it’s only half over. By the by, Nicholas, about your boy: I’m sorry, old friend.”
The monarch waved impatiently. “Time for that later; he was a good son, not too bright, but a good boy and a fine soldier. The Eight know I’ve sent plenty of other men’s sons to their deaths today, and more will fall before the day is over. For that, you or I might not see the sun set. I didn’t expect him to see the end of this war, in all truth: he liked the fighting far too much. The poor bugger got my first wife’s looks and my brains, he would be alive if it had been the other way around.”
Laffery nodded silently.
“So, are we marching to victory or just another delay?” Nicholas asked, glancing about to ensure that the staff and aides were out of earshot.
“So far we’ve done very little today but delay,” the Grand Marshal also glanced about. “Time and blood are on our side: the longer this war takes, and the more troops they ship west, the greater the strain upon their nerves. If we can wreck both these Bohcas today, regardless of our fates, then there is a good chance that the Council will write off the war as a lost affair and recall the survivors. If we can wreck both Bohcas while leaving the Heartland Army still in the field, then the Hand will truly be beaten.”
“Coming off the ridge is a terrific risk.”
“Everything we’ve done had been a terrific risk, and this no worse than most. If we stay on the ridge the Direbreed will be re-Seeded and the enemy force restored to a large degree; the Direbreed are, after all, their mainstay. Strike now, before the full strength is re-Seeded, and more importantly, before the beast-warriors are forced back into their unit structures, and the odds are vastly leveled.” Once again, the Grand Marshal glanced around to ensure that they were not being overheard. “Besides, we hadn’t planned for such intensive combat; the charnel trenches dug before the battle won’t hold all the humanoid dead, much less the wolves and horses; if we try to stay on this ridge plague will break out within days. The Hand will realize this within hours so we’ll have to bring them to battle quickly in any case.”
“Well, it’s what they’ve been looking for since they crossed the Wall: for us to stand and fight until the matter is settled, not withdraw when the position turns bad. Once they have their battle, do you suppose they’ll be happy with it?”
“I hope not.”
The Grand Marshal found Duke Radet organizing his remaining horsemen behind the right wing; the battered nobleman sketched a salute and finished issuing a series of instructions to his staff before urging his horse over to the waiting commander. Radet, Laffery noticed, had acquired a replacement helm somewhere, a plain full-face helm that did not match the rest of his finely l
acquered suit, or rather, what was a finely lacquered suit under the blood, dust, and battle-scars; the plain helm rested on his saddle while the Duke issued his orders.
“How fares the cavalry?” Laffery asked as aides and staff bustled about.
“Well enough, I’ve nearly a thousand men left able to ride,” the Duke stroked his neat mustache with one hand and waved the other to indicate his milling formations. “Everyone’s tired but still full of fight.” He shook his head. “You know, when I learned this business of horsemanship we held my uncle in great awe as he had participated in over twenty-five full-division charges, three in a single day. We’ve mounted six so far today, and I’ve made eighteen others since this war has begun, more than I’ve made in my life before I came to the Realms.”
“And I need several more from you before the day is over,” Laffery smiled at the Arturian.
“And you’ll have them.” The Duke jerked his chin towards the shifting lines of Bohca Tatbik. “As will they; let us hope it is not what they are expecting.”
The two armies took up position on the flat ground before the ridge; The Heartland Army deployed with the First and Sixth Legions on the left, the three Arturian divisions in the center, and the Eighth and Eleventh Legions on the right, with Duke Radet’s horse on the ridge’s lower slope just past the right wing; the Kordian and Ithanian Foot Guards and the Dwarves were held in reserve along with two Sagenhoftian cohorts, while the Thirty-Seventh Legion, the Lasharian Foot Guards, the rest of the Sagenhoft troops, Navian Marines, and Harthrell landing force manned the White Lines, the latter forces too badly battered to take the field.
Having watched the enemy deploy and noting that it was markedly stronger on the right, Descente deployed his army accordingly, putting the bulk of his forces on his right, facing the Heartland’s left. His own left consisted of a mass of Direbreed which had not yet reformed into Darkhosts; nearly all were incorporated into Fists, but without higher organization they were useless in an attack. They numbered in excess of twenty thousand individuals so they ought to serve as a barrier, if nothing else; the three worst-hit Horcs were moved into position behind them to give the left wing some backbone, and three Ket watched that flank. Seven Horc and the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Holdings made up the center, while the right wing consisted of twenty Darkhosts and four Human Holdings, the Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, and Fourteenth. Three Eyade Ket watched the right flank and three more secured the rear and the baggage train; in reserve were the three Sacred Bands, three Holdings (First, Second, Third), four Ket, and all eight Lardina of wolf-riders. The remaining Minions were distributed amongst the Darkhosts, and the reserves were slightly off-center, favoring the right wing where the heaviest blow was to be made.
