A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor-Chapter 1135 The Next Patrol - Part 6
1135: The Next Patrol – Part 6
1135: The Next Patrol – Part 6
Karstly could feel it – that odd sensation of chaos that arose when improbabilities were allowed to be stacked together.
This was no Battle board, no matter what strategist tried to reduce it to such.
This was a place where, on the tiniest spark, a giant bonfire could be built.
The most careful of strategies would be torn apart, and numbers would be made to look irrelevant.
It was on that spark that he knew Blackwell to have bet, based on the state of his defence.
He hadn’t put up a carefully measured wall of things.
He seemed to have quite well allowed the destruction of his walls to take place.
That was the battle plan of man that had attempted to do things carefully.
It was the movements of a man quite well on the edge.
He shifted his saddle, feeling his weight move along with the stirring of his horse.
He patted the beast’s sweat flank, and he hushed it, trying to calm his own heart with the same pats.
This was the moment that Karstly had been waiting for since he rode out to start the campaign.
No, before that even.
He’d longed for it for years.
Karstly had a belief.
He wouldn’t have dared say it aloud, for he would have been mocked in the Stormfront.
It was the sort of belief that only a genius could dare to give voice to, even if it was only in the quiet of his mind.
That belief stirred within him seeing the battlefield properly.
Traditional strategy, of the theoretical kind, taught in the Academy and the like – he believed it to have the most fatal of weaknesses.
That weakness was based on its flammability, on that spark to create the bonfire that Blackwell seemed to reach for.
But Karstly’s own understanding went beyond that.
He didn’t believe that the battlefield was governed by numbers, by flat lines, or the formations that they saw before him.
He thought there was something else.
This careful undercurrent, a steady rhythm like a piece of music.
He saw in a battlefield a story to be told, and he wanted to prove that with his own hands.
It was an almost narcissistic notion, but he wished to see it done anyway.
To prove to himself, and his enemies, that all their years of study were in folly.
That they’d chased a false ideal.
It was the source of the madness that occasionally sat behind his eyes – for a man to believe in something that the entirety of a country and its academia were aligned against.
Indeed, that was a maddening thing to be a part of, but Karstly surrendered himself to the thought regardless.
He let the madness take over his eyes, as he and his men rested, and he bid forth the best of himself that he could muster.
He wanted recklessness to take over, and genius.
All that he wasn’t allowed to show upon that noble face of his, he wanted to let loose on this battlefield, and he wanted to paint the most compelling of pictures, and tell the most overwhelming of stories.
He almost wanted to ride out there and then, as the feeling arose up in his stomach with more enthusiasm than any woman could have hoped to get out of him.
But he held himself back.
He had to chain his madness, until the bridges were properly built.
Now, and only now, did he look at his soldiers properly.
He saw in them the colours that he would paint the battlefield with.
He saw the Blackthorn Captains that he had been blessed with, and their Colonels.
Their serious faces, so disciplined and so ready to do war for whatever master had earned their respect.
They were good tools indeed, he knew.
His eyes passed Oliver Patrick’s as well, and he saw the boy staring forward, looking at the battlefield as if he was about to be swallowed by it.
He’d intended to only give him a cursory glance, for the words of his order had been right on the tip of his tongue.
That order paused itself.
To be taken in by another man’s eyes, it seemed an embarrassing thing to admit, but for Oliver Parick, he supposed, there would be some forgiveness.
His were not the eyes of an ordinary man after all.
Looking at him, Karstly saw a youth almost as reckless as he.
Gold and purple circled within his stormy irises, telling a tale of mysteries that begged to be solved.
Karstly grunted, finally managing to pull his gaze away.
As long as Oliver presented some fragment of his usual chaoticness, then Karstly would not be likely to complain.
It was those fragments of chaos that he coveted most highly in his men – though his wants came at a cost.
His were dual expectations.
He wanted both the utmost in discipline and the utmost in individualism.
Samuel would have pointed out that he was a rather demanding General.
“Drink it in, gentlemen,” Karstly said at last.
“That there is the battlefield that we are to be a part of, and that is the battlefield that we are going to overturn.”
As to how they would overturn it, not a single one of those men likely had a thought.
They saw the tens of thousands, nearing a hundred thousand, and they saw the fractured castles that they had by way of defence, and they couldn’t imagine how it was that a mere two thousand men would be able to cause such a stirring change.
That, however, was a problem for Karstly to solve, not for them.
“If you are quite ready, we will make our involvement known,” Karstly said.
He seemed to see that the men had caught their breaths.
There was no more resting to be done when the air felt so thin from the pressure.
They could hardly rest when they could hear the continual thuds of giant boulders landing, as well as the bolts from the ballistas either.
He took them out of the shade, and down onto the plains where the dust was already beginning to stir from all the movement of all those men.
