Rise of the Horde - Chapter 678 - 677

Snowe arrived at the Meren valley’s northern entrance on the sixth day with nine thousand soldiers and the particular controlled frustration of a general who had been outmaneuvered again and who knew it and who was, despite knowing it, still not certain how to prevent it from happening in the direction he had not yet anticipated.

He stood at the valley’s mouth and looked south along the river road toward the distant position that the Verakhs’ movement, reported by his cavalry screen, had placed in the market town of Millbridge, and he thought about the geometry of the situation with the cold, systematic attention that had made him the Lord Marshal’s choice for the eastern province campaign.

The Horde was in the valley.

He was at the valley’s northern mouth.

The valley was twenty miles long and three miles wide at its widest point, the river running through it with the force that early-season snowmelt contributed, deep and fast, not fordable at any point between the northern mouth and the southern end where the valley opened into the hills.

The road along the eastern bank was the only practical route for a large force moving north or south through the valley, which meant that Khao’khen could choose to hold Millbridge and make Snowe fight down the road toward him, or withdraw southward and force Snowe to follow him deeper into the valley on a road that became progressively narrower and more difficult to supply from the north.

Either choice was a choice that the geography made in the Horde’s favor. The Horde had picked good terrain.

It always picked good terrain.

“He wants us in the valley,” Thaddeus said, standing beside Snowe at the northern mouth.

“The road narrows our front. Our numbers become less useful the narrower the road. He has eight thousand in a position that the road can only present four thousand to at maximum deployment, and the other four thousand have to wait behind the first four thousand while the first four thousand find out what the position looks like from inside it.”

“Yes.”

“So we do not go in.”

“We cannot simply not go in. He is occupying the valley’s grain market. Every day we allow the disruption to continue is a day the provisioning system loses efficiency it cannot recover until after the disruption ends. The council is already receiving reports from the market administrators about the rerouting costs. The pressure to clear the valley will come from the north regardless of what I judge to be the militarily correct response.”

Thaddeus looked at the valley road with the evaluating attention of an experienced officer assessing a disadvantageous approach. “If we go in, we go in with the force that the road can present at maximum deployment and we do not extend ourselves beyond what we can support at that width. Four thousand at the front. The remainder as reserve at the northern mouth, ready to reinforce but not committed until the engagement’s development requires it.”

“That is the conventional approach.”

“Yes.”

“He will have planned for the conventional approach.”

The silence between them had the quality of two professionals acknowledging the same constraint from different directions.

Snowe looked at the valley’s western bank, at the river that ran deep and fast along its center, at the hills that rose from the western bank’s edge toward the highland terrain beyond. “Can cavalry use the western bank?”

Thaddeus followed his gaze. “The bank is narrow. A mile south of here it narrows further, to the point where two riders abreast is the maximum. In the valley’s middle section it opens slightly. At Millbridge, the market’s loading docks run along the western bank and the bank widens to perhaps forty paces.”

“Forty paces is enough for cavalry to form if it arrives before the position can respond to it.”

“If it can get there. A mile of single-file cavalry movement along a riverbank in enemy-held territory, in a valley where the enemy’s scouts are certainly watching the western bank as closely as the eastern road.”

“Yes.” Snowe was already thinking through the preparation that would be required. “Not a charge. A positioning. Move two squadrons, four hundred riders, along the western bank during the night. Move them slowly, in small elements, one at a time, the way the Horde moved its wagons through our corridor pickets. Arrive at Millbridge before dawn. At the moment the infantry engages from the north along the road, the cavalry comes across the market docks from the west.”

* * * * *

The plan was sound in the way that Snowe’s plans were always sound, derived from patient analysis of terrain and the specific vulnerabilities that terrain created in any defensive position. Its execution required four hundred riders to move a mile along a riverbank in single file at night without alerting the surveillance network that the Horde had stationed to prevent exactly this kind of flanking approach.

The riders who were selected for the mission understood what was being asked. They were veterans of the cavalry force that had survived the campaign’s full length, soldiers whose horses had learned through repeated experience to trust their riders’ judgment over their own instincts, which was the education that made cavalry useful in conditions where instinct recommended a different direction from the one the mission required.

They began moving at the second hour past midnight.

The Verakhs found the fourth element, forty riders moving along the bank two miles south of the valley mouth, at the third hour.

The Verakh pair that located them assessed the movement’s pattern, estimated the total force’s size from the element’s equipment load, and sent their runner back to Millbridge’s position at the pace that runners used when the information they carried changed the battle that was coming.

Khao’khen received the report at the fourth hour and gave his orders in the fifteen minutes between receiving the report and the moment that acting on it became urgent.

“Pull the western dock position. Bring those warriors back to the market square. Set the fire sphere teams along the dock’s eastern edge, where they can cover the bank from cover without being in the bank’s exposure. When the cavalry crosses the docks, they cross into a fire sphere engagement at the range where fire spheres are most effective and the horses have nowhere to go except backward or into the river.”

Haguk’s riders positioned themselves south of the market town, covering the road approach from which the cavalry would need to retreat after the fire sphere engagement made the dock crossing untenable.

The battle of Millbridge, when it came at dawn, lasted three hours and ended with the Threian cavalry wet from the river they had backed their horses into to avoid the fire, and Snowe’s infantry attack along the northern road costing more than it returned in ground, because an infantry attack down a road in single file against a position backed by Roarers and fire spheres is exactly as expensive as the geography that creates the single file suggests it will be.

Snowe withdrew to the valley’s northern mouth at midday, having lost four hundred and thirty soldiers and one of his better cavalry commanders to a position he had moved all the pieces correctly to attack and had attacked and had still not taken.

The Horde held the valley. The grain road stayed closed.