Rise of the Horde - Chapter 676 - 675

The Horde moved before dawn on the day after the herald’s return, and it moved in a direction that the Verakh network had spent three days preparing.

Not north. Not back toward Irenmere. East, along a route through the foothills that the Verakh scouts had been mapping since the campaign crossed the frontier and that connected, after forty miles of secondary terrain, to the Meren River valley, which was the main waterway that drained the eastern province into the central kingdom and that carried, along its banks, the road that connected the provincial market towns to the northern capital.

The Meren valley was the province’s artery.

Everything that moved between the eastern province and the kingdom’s heartland moved along the Meren.

Grain wagons.

Tax records.

Military dispatches.

The courier riders who carried Snowe’s communications north.

If Valdenmarch was the gate the Horde had bypassed on the way in, the Meren valley was the vein it had not yet touched, and the kingdom’s ability to sustain a prolonged military campaign in the eastern province depended on the Meren valley functioning as it always had.

Khao’khen had explained it to the council in the terms that the council understood best. “We have demonstrated that we can fight. We have demonstrated that we can maneuver. We have demonstrated that we can hold and occupy and withdraw without burning what we leave behind. None of this has produced the result that would make the campaign worthwhile. What we have not yet demonstrated is that we can make the province stop functioning as a province. Not through destruction, which costs us the political ground we have built. Through presence. An army operating in the Meren valley is an army that grain wagons go around and courier riders avoid and supply convoys require military escorts for. The province does not stop producing. It stops delivering. And a province that cannot deliver its production to the capital is a province whose noble administrators are calling for resolution rather than continued resistance.”

Sakh’arran had noted the elegance of the concept and the difficulty of the execution. The Meren valley was forty miles east through terrain that the Threian cavalry screen was covering. The screen was the Baron of Lettra’s two thousand riders, positioned in the hill routes precisely because Snowe had anticipated the eastern option.

“The cavalry screen is a screen,” Khao’khen had said. “Screens detect. They do not stop. A screen of two thousand cavalry reports our movement to Snowe. It does not prevent our movement from completing before Snowe can redirect sufficient force to contest it. We move fast, we accept that the screen reports us, and we arrive in the valley before the report produces a response.”

This was the calculation. It was sound. It was also the kind of calculation that was sound until it encountered the specific variable that it had not accounted for.

* * * * *

The specific variable was the Baron of Lettra himself.

The baron was not a general in Snowe’s formal command structure.

He was a nobleman whose baronial forces were attached to the campaign as a supporting element and whose authority over those forces remained ultimately his own.

He had not received Snowe’s order to maintain a screening posture and avoid pitched engagement when his cavalry encountered the Horde’s movement through the hills.

He had received Snowe’s order to cover the eastern approaches, which was an order he interpreted through the lens of a man whose estate had been occupied by the force he was covering against and who found, in the encounter with the Horde’s flank column in the predawn darkness of the second morning, a circumstance that his interpretation of his orders permitted him to contest.

Two thousand cavalry hit the Horde’s eastern flank at the third hour before dawn, emerging from a streambed that the Verakh scouts had assessed as dry at this season and that the recent rains had rendered navigable for a cavalry force willing to accept wet boots.

The Horde’s flank was the 9th Warband, five hundred warriors in marching column, their formation compressed by the hill terrain into a depth that reduced their ability to respond to a mounted assault from the right with the speed that a wider formation would have permitted.

The baron’s cavalry struck them with the concentrated energy of riders who had been waiting in a streambed for three hours and who were aggrieved in a personal way that gave their charge a quality beyond the professional.

Forty warriors of the 9th Warband died in the first three minutes. The warband master, a scarred veteran named Gholla, did not panic. He gave one order, the order that Arka’garr had drilled into every warband in the Horde for exactly this kind of contact, and the 9th Warband executed it without hesitation.

They turned to face the cavalry and they locked shields.

The shield wall that assembled in the hill terrain in the darkness at the moment of a cavalry assault was not the parade-ground formation that drills produced on flat open ground.

It was the rough, improvised, gap-interrupted version that reality produced, warriors finding each other by sound and touch in the dark, shields coming up at angles that were not perfectly overlapping, baldes presenting at heights that varied by several feet across the line. It was, by the standards of Arka’garr’s training, imperfect.

It was also sufficient. The cavalry that hit a locked shield wall in darkness lost the momentum advantage that cavalry relied on in exactly the same way that water lost speed when it hit a wall rather than a stream.

The horses balked.

The riders pushed their animals forward and the animals resisted the smell of iron and the sound of impact and the darkness that prevented them from reading the ground they were being asked to cross.

The 9th Warband held. The baron’s cavalry milled at the shield line’s face in the darkness, taking Roarer fire from the warriors behind the front rank who could not advance into the cavalry but could fire over the front rank’s shields into the mass of riders and horses at close range.

The fire sphere teams, four of them in the 9th Warband’s formation, threw their weapons into the cavalry’s flanks where the burning Bufas compound produced the effect that fire always produced in a cavalry engagement: the horses stopped listening to their riders and started listening to their survival instinct, which recommended moving away from the fire rather than toward the swords.

The baron’s charge collapsed. Not the cavalry itself, which withdrew in the controlled manner of professional riders, but the momentum that had made it dangerous.

Haguk’s Warg Cavalry arrived at the seventeenth minute, having pushed hard through the parallel hill route at the first sound of contact. Four hundred and sixty warg riders hit the baron’s cavalry from the north while the 9th Warband held the south, and the baron found himself engaged from two sides in dark terrain that his horses could not read as well as the wargs could.

He withdrew. The Horde’s march resumed.

But the 9th Warband had forty dead, and the delay had cost the column two hours, and two hours at the pace the campaign was running was not nothing.