A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

By sundown, the other men of Karstly's forces had seen their jobs done as well. The fires burned with the bodies of the dead, and that thick, dreadful smoke streamed down from the mountain. The flames fought back the darkness, as they ate away at flesh, rendering what had been so strong and filled with life just the day before, into something that was now no more than ash.

It was war, and it was the nature of a soldier to slay his foes, but there were few that saw it through to the very end. Oftentimes, it wouldn't fall to the soldier to clean the field of his dead. That was a job for the enemy. Some soldiers – the Patrick men included – had managed to go their entire careers without carting bodies off the battlefield.

Even amongst those veteran men that had needed to do such things, few had ever needed to do it on the scale that they had atop that flat-topped mountain. Those that had real experience to compare it to grimaced even harder than those that were new to it, and convinced themselves that it was a mere part of war.

Even General Karstly himself had found hesitation in administering the orders. Still, it needed to be done. They might have rolled those bodies off the mountain and into the forest, and the job would have been quicker for it. But a fire was the basest form of respect that they could issue for the fallen foes, even when they needed to get the job done so quickly.

"You look glum, my Lord," Samuel commented, as Karstly watched those flames flicker.

"Many lives, Samuel," Karstly said. "I wonder if they know truly what a slaughter we have committed? We have walked the thin line of convention with admirable pretense, but an honourable General would not have proceeded like that. Those men would have surrendered if we'd given them the chance. We slaughtered them, and now we burn them as if we're processing meat."

It was rare that Karstly spoke with such sullenness – at least, it was rare that he said such thoughts aloud. In the quietness of his own company, Samuel had often glimpsed Karstly's more reserved moods, but rarely did the General ever speak such thoughts aloud to him.

"It needed to be done, my Lord," Samuel said. "Strategically, you have made no faults."

"I am well aware," Karstly said, clenching a fist. "I am well aware, and yet it still eats at me."

He turned away, hiding the lone tear that had fallen down his cheek. "How goes the defenses, Samuel?"

"Slow, as might be expected," Samuel said. "Most of our manpower today has been dedicated to dealing with the bodies. In the days to come, progress shall be quicker. We are not in a position of any particular danger because of it, regardless. We know that there are no Verna men in the area, and General Phalem's defenses are still in good enough condition for us to make use of them."

"The likelihood of us being attacked for the duration of this war is indeed slim," Karstly said. "But you think too small, attendant of mine. You are considering how we might hold against a large force with the entirety of our men still at bay."

Samuel paused, his eyes widening. "My Lord, you can't mean…?"

"Greed, Samuel," Karstly said, smiling, despite the tear that was still wet on his cheek. "We will be greedy, and make more out of this mountain than even Blackwell and Khan envisioned for it. We will form our detachment, and we will begin harrying the enemy, even without giving up what we already have."

…

…

Come the evening, Oliver found the time to practice with his sword again. He swung it in the emptiness of a corner of the mountain, now that the men had ceased their building of defenses for the day.

He could hear loud conversation off in the distance, as they were allowed to share drink with their evening meals. It was Karstly's way of permitting the men to relax, even if it was likely to only be for a day.

The sword sliced through the air with his left hand, whilst Oliver forced the fingers of his right hand to continue to move. Every little twitch that he got out of them brought pain, but the fact that he could move them at all was a blessing that he was determined to make the fullest use of. He pushed himself in three different ways.

With his left hand, with his right hand, and with his mind, as he grasped for new solutions to the problems that had been revealed in their battling.

"Khan stopped me dead," Oliver said, returning to the most obvious of the problems. His skill as a Sword had carried him through all his battles, and Khan had made it look redundant on the scale of the battles that he was now made to fight.

Of course, he had his solution to that. He'd already settled on it. It was to break through the Fourth Boundary, and to strengthen his blade once more, pursuing the ideal of the Sword, just as Dominus had.

The battle with Amion had revealed a different path to victory, however. There were indeed ways to exert influence without being physically present at the front himself. There were ways to cook the soup of strategy, so that he would only arrive when his sword would fall the swiftest and with the most deadly of motions.

Still, when he thought about those two things together, his mind could not get away from the problem of Command, as elusive as it ever was. No one had managed to give him a proper answer for it. The fact that they had a name for the phenomena at all seemed a miracle when one viewed the strength of the explanations that he'd been offered on it.

To him, it seemed as tenuous a term as battlefield flow – something that every strategist and warrior could acknowledge to exist, even without speaking its name aloud, but they couldn't begin to describe how it worked. They'd built their understanding through interaction, rather than study.