Chapter 701: Chapter 700

The final engagement in the Meren valley was the most complex battle the campaign had yet produced, the confluence of every tactical lesson the Horde had developed across eight weeks of continuous operations applied simultaneously in a single piece of terrain that Khao’khen had been studying since the day the column first arrived at Millbridge.

He had chosen the night engagement because darkness was the equalizer that his numerical disadvantage required. Twenty thousand soldiers in a valley at night had the same problem as four thousand soldiers in a valley at night: the road was the road, the river was the river, and the darkness did not care how many people were trying to use the road at the same time.

What darkness added was the specific difficulty that large formations had in maintaining their coherence when they could not see the ground their flanks were standing on, and the specific advantage that a force which had been training in this valley for weeks had over a force that was moving through it for the first time in darkness.

The singing shield wall was the stopper, holding the advance guard in place and communicating to the main body behind it that the approach was contested and the contest was directly ahead. It was not designed to hold the advance guard indefinitely.

It was designed to hold it long enough for the main body to compress into the column that the road enforced and for that compression to be at its maximum density when the valley walls on both sides stopped being quiet.

The Roarers on both ridgelines opened simultaneously at the moment that the main body’s compression reached the point that the Verakh signal fire indicated. Not rolling volleys, not the staggered suppression pattern that previous engagements had used. Everything at once. Fourteen hundred weapons on elevated positions firing into a column of twenty thousand soldiers on a road in darkness, the downward angle adding velocity to projectiles that were already lethal and the darkness preventing the column from observing the Roarer positions with enough precision to suppress them.

The sound was the sound of the world being struck by something larger than itself.

The column’s response was the response of a professional force taking fire from elevated positions in confined terrain: push forward to clear the kill zone, push backward to exit it, or lay flat and suppress. All three responses were correct in specific tactical contexts and the specific tactical context the column was in prevented all three from working simultaneously.

The forward element pushed. The backward element tried to push. The middle elements, receiving fire from both ridgelines simultaneously and unable to see clearly what the elements in front and behind them were doing, made individual decisions that produced lateral movement to the side of the road into the farmland that was not the road. Lateral movement into the farmland at night, in a valley that the Horde knew and the combined force did not, was movement into the positions that the Horde’s flanking teams had been waiting in since the combined force entered the valley.

* * * * *

The flanking engagement was where the Horde’s warriors produced the kind of fighting that no Threian formation had been trained to resist.

In the valley’s darkness, away from the road’s enforced geometry, the engagement became the kind of close, chaotic, terrain-confused fight that numbers could not fully control, where the advantage went to the side whose warriors were bigger and stronger and more comfortable with the kind of fighting that the darkness and the close terrain produced.

Orcish warriors who were not in formation in an open field were not the disorganized threat that Threian doctrine described when it discussed individual orcish combat capability.

They were specifically what they were: physically superior fighters who had been trained to use their physical superiority in the organized manner of the shield wall and who were now using it in the less organized but equally lethal manner of the individual engagement in close terrain.

“Zug zug, you rock-headed pusworm!” A Hammer Team warrior whose name in the Horde’s rolls was Thur’grenn drove into a Threian cavalry dismount with the shoulder-first entry that covered the distance between them before the cavalryman’s sword arm was fully extended, the contact too close for the sword’s length to function and too explosive for the lighter human frame to absorb without going backward. “Your horse had more sense than you! Your horse left! You stayed! Why did you stay!”

The question was not rhetorical in Thur’grenn’s mind but it was addressed to a cavalryman who was no longer in a position to answer it.

Across the valley, the engagement produced the specific music of a battle where one side was fighting at full natural capacity and genuinely enjoying it and the other side was fighting with professional courage and was being overmatched not by tactics but by the basic physics of what it meant to be a fully released orcish warrior at close range in terrain that removed the ranged weapons and the formation discipline that had been keeping the physics from being decisive.

Aldrath’s training and his officers’ competence kept the combined force from becoming a rout. Companies maintained their integrity. Officers rallied their soldiers and moved them toward the sound of their own voices and away from the sound of the things that were very large and very loud in the dark farmland on both sides of the road.

The force did not shatter. It bent, and bent further, and finally the combined force’s Lord-Commander made the same decision that Snowe had made in every previous engagement of the campaign and that was always the right decision: he ordered the withdrawal.

North. Back the way they had come. Up the road in the darkness, with the Horde’s warg cavalry emerging from the valley’s sides to press the rear in the running engagement that Haguk had been given the open mandate to conduct.

The singing resumed as the combined force withdrew. The same song. Adapted again, with new specific references, delivered with what Aldrath later described in his memoir as “unreasonable enthusiasm for the circumstances.”

He was not wrong. The circumstances were, for the warriors of the Yohan First Horde, precisely what circumstances should be. They were winning. They were fighting. They were together, in the valley where the wolf had stood for weeks, doing the thing that orcs did when the conditions allowed them to do it fully.

The night engagement in the Meren valley produced results that the following morning’s count would tabulate as twelve hundred and sixty Threian dead, nine hundred wounded. The Horde’s losses were two hundred and three dead, four hundred and eleven wounded.

The combined force withdrew from the valley’s northern mouth at the fourth hour before dawn, bloodied and reorganized and reduced, and Aldrath sent the dispatch north to the Lord Marshal before he had finished assessing his own casualties.

The dispatch contained two sentences. “The military path is closed. Authorize the diplomatic solution.”

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