A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

"Good morning, my Lord," Verdant greeted him before Oliver could get too far, a fresh set of clothes held within a box in his hand. "What would you care for this morning, in terms of food? We have the fires going. It will not take long to see it heated."

"Whatever is quickest, Verdant. I don't need to be spending undue amount of time merely munching," Oliver said with a grin. "So you found the clothes before I could walk the whole camp ground as I am?"

"You realized, my Lord," Verdant said, not denying it. "Even with the circumstances being what they may, I imagine it would cause quite a few questions to be raised if a Captain continued to present himself as you are now."

"I have not wandered far, you may relax yourself. I've been simply reviewing the state of our men. The other forces have hardly caught sight of me," Oliver said.

"And do you find the state of our men to your satisfaction?" Verdant said.

"How many are injured, Verdant?" Oliver asked.

"You will be hard pressed to find a single man without an injury, my Lord," Verdant said. "However, we have been fortunate in that few have sustained anything that will hinder their combat ability for long. I would say, currently, we have twenty men that should be barred from combat for a time, until they are better rested. But within a matter of weeks, they too will see themselves healed."

Oliver nodded. Those that had been injured worse had been those that had already died. Such was the cruelty of the fighting that they had endured. Oliver knew full well that his fighting force was not at the strength of four hundred that they had come out with, and each loss stung enough that it tempted him to dwell on it.

It was only with a reminder of the length of the campaign that they would be fighting that he managed to refrain. It was natural that their numbers would begin to dwindle, especially as the fighting went on.

He took Verdant up on his offer of clothes, and changed himself with a certain haste in his tent. He'd been delivered a bowl of warm water and a cloth to see himself washed with as well. He made good use of it, until the water ran a dark red from a mixture of mud and blood.

Soon enough, he was dressed as he ought to have been. He looked every bit the refined young officer. Verdant had even sent a soldier to polish his boots. One would never have guessed that a mere fifteen minutes before he was covered in blood, and his clothes were ragged with multiple slashes across their fabric.

The food arrived shortly after, and Oliver saw to it that it was demolished in short order. It was in situations like that – the mundane, everyday tasks – when the loss of his right hand weighed on him even more heavily. He was forced to eat clumsily with his left. And that was even with the improved state of his right hand being what it was.

Without that hope of healing over the course of the next week or two, Oliver did not know what he would have done.

With his duties – if one could call them that – attended to, Oliver rose again, this time, taking his sword from his belt, making his intentions clear to all around him.

A sensible Captain might have gone to see his other officers before taking up his sword, but Oliver was as eccentric as they came. His men knew as much by now. Even if they did not know, Verdant would have told them. Seeing him arise from his tent with his sword as he had, he'd made his intentions known to them, and they would know not to bother him.

They'd seen him disappear for training more times than they could count, after all. These days, it was to be expected.

On such a mountain top, it was hard to find the perfect place to train. The choices were a bit too plentiful. The four thousand men that remained of Karstly's army did not quite fill out the mountaintop as the Verna had before them. There was still a good deal of space left over, now that the corpses had been cleared.

So too was there territory at the bottom of the mountain itself that was riddled with beauty. Streams flowed, and green trees sprouted down below. It would have made a good location for training, if Oliver had wished to brave the stares and the questions as he wandered through the army's full encampment, and past the guards that would no doubt be stationed on the perimeter.

Another time, and such things would not have bothered him, but that morning he was feeling a particular urge to see something done, and see his practice started.

In the end, there was only one place to be had on that mountain top that the rest of the men pointedly avoided. And that was the mountain of corpses that had been built up belonging to the Verna. It was a ghastly sight. No sensible man would go near it, no matter how far away from the normal folk they wished to be.

That such a pile could be left as it was seemed to be an insight into some darker aspect of Karstly's personality. He had stated that the corpses would be burned, eventually. They could not be allowed to fester. Flies were already beginning to gather around them, and they'd hardly begun to rot yet.

Still, the fact that he could reduce what once had been human life into a simple pile of flesh… It was a distance that most men would have struggled to cross. Even the soldiers themselves that had needed to tend to such a cleaning duty had not been able to hide their disgust for the grimness of the situation.

It was one thing to strike a live man down, and it was quite another to swim amongst thousands of dead men.

"Fitting," Oliver grunted, now that his feet had taken him there. That pile of lifeless dead bodies, so nameless now that they had been stripped of the life in their eyes – they all could have ended up like that if they'd been weaker. If ever there was a reason for strength, that reason was right in front of him. The strong survived, and the clever. That much was evident.