A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor-Chapter 1156 Two Generals - Part 1
1156: Two Generals – Part 1
1156: Two Generals – Part 1
The Captain Patrick himself brought up the rear.
He’d dallied, making sure that the infantry went on ahead of him, and then he’d dragged his cavalry, with Yorick, all the way back to the rear with him so that they might hurry up the men that ran to their front.
It must have been effective enough, for it was only their strongest that needed to fear the approaching chariots, when the time finally came.
Lombard and his men reached the relative safety of Karstly, and nearly half the Patrick army had managed to go with them.
Then they turned their attention back around, to the thrashings of whips, as those Verna chariot riders furiously licked the back of their horses, drawing painful lines of blood, in an effort to get even the slightest bit more speed out of them.
“Forward,” Oliver told Yorick calmly.
He’d spared the chariots just one more glance, and he could see that despite their efforts, they were still to fall short.
Even with the added danger that they’d thrown themselves into, the armies in Patrick and in Lombard managed to see their retreat just as safely as the rest.
The chariots were forced to swarm, having missed their targets, drawing angry circles within the sand.
They might have seemed reckless enough to charge the two thousand Karstly men head on, even now that the army had been reformed, but it seemed that their recklessness did not extend that far.
Even they knew, despite their anger, that they would have no chance of beating a General head on.
Besides, General Khan himself had his hands full.
The best he’d managed to do for the encampment was reduce the amount of time that Karstly would have to rage his rampage within it.
The problem at the front, in General Blackwell, required far too much of his attention to do any more than that.
The man that had stood so ominously at the top of the central castle now had even more of a presence on the battlefield now that he had finally made it down on foot.
His castle had been torn to pieces, but one would never have guessed that he was on the losing end of the exchange, with how the Verna army tensed at his arrival.
In time with Karstly’s own attack, General Blackwell had slammed into the front.
A great bull of a man, with his tightly cut short black beard, so similar to that of General Blackthorn that some might have sworn they were brothers, if not for the slightly darker shade that General Blackthorn bore.
With his five thousand men, he’d slammed into the siege weapons, and torn apart a good number of them before General Karstly managed to summon up the troops that he needed for a response.
All Oliver managed to see what the wreckage left as a result of the attack.
Nearly half the siege weapons were left cripple, and already, General Blackwell and his men were departing.
Carefully picking their way around the perimeter of the already ruined castle.
Even with its shattering, the Verna men didn’t seem eager to follow them.
They could have quite easily rammed the rear of the retreating army – or so it would have seemed to an amateur – but General Khan did not bother.
All the Verna General managed to do was hold his equilibrium.
He was all too aware of the presence at his rear still.
If he over-committed in any one direction, then he would be bitten.
He had to force himself to be calm, despite the losses, and he restarted his protocol of locking down the battlefield, to match the changes that had occurred.
“Mm,” Karstly grunted, feeling the tension slowly fizzle out.
“It seems that is as much as we will get out of him, on this occasion.”
He refrained from looking in the direction of the Patricks, though he did not fail to note the heads of the two Rogue Commandants that they had claimed.
‘Worthy results,’ he noted.
It added a magnitude to their encampment assault that he had not dared reach for, given the speed with which the attack needed to be handled with.
It was a gain that he knew Lord Blackwell himself would not sniff at.
From there, the battlefield fell into a lull.
The men on Karstly’s side still didn’t quite know what had occurred.
They’d been engaged in their attack on the encampment before they really had time to process what was going on.
Now they just saw the retreat of Blackwell’s men, and they were left in an even greater state of confusion.
The battle was too strategic for the infantry to keep up with without due explanation.
The fact that the Verna army didn’t immediately charge after Blackwell had them stumped too.
It was as if, despite the heat of the day, the central battlefield had been frozen.
Blackwell and his men came to a halt, just beyond the ruins of the central castle, with his army divided in two to either side of it.
Karstly and his men did much the same, on the complete other end of the battlefield, hovering ominously beyond the encampment.
In response to both of them, Khan simply did not move.
Many men he might have had, but he lacked the magnitude of General needed to match both Karstly and Blackwell at once.
The best Generals that he had were already engaged in their sieges.
There was no more that he could do except allow himself the quietness.
And besides – the crushing of that central castle ought to have been victory enough.
Once more, the battlefield fell into another quiet day.
The brief period of maddening attack that the Karstly men had been allowed seemed to be all that they were due to be offered.
The sun fell, and Karstly took them back to make their own camp before the light was allowed to completely fade.
Chapter 11 – Two Generals
When they arrived upon the field of battle the next morning, even the lowest of men knew to expect a change.
The central castle had been shattered, after all, and its strategic significance was removed.
The armies couldn’t continue as they were.
The scales needed to shift, and the men needed to be redistributed towards different goals.
