Chapter 1197: Losses(1)
With another day of rest and a fresh change of bandages, the Prince of Yarzat returned to the labor of ruling.
His ear throbbed with the same violence of a hammer clashing against a bell.
Under any other circumstance, he would have called for willow-bark tea to dull the fire, but Jarza had not been exaggerating when he described the carnage of the medical tents.More like under-sold it.
The battle had been a glutton; the stores of bark were exhausted, and all that remained in the apothecary’s chests were small, precious vials of opium. Alpheo had refused them. There would be some that would die in pain so that he could dull the pain in his ear, otherwise.
Besides, a man cannot steer a state through a storm while his mind is adrift in poppy. Even now that they were out of the thick of it, it would not be appropriate.
So, he endured the burning.He endured the pain, diluiting it with the self-pride of a man that made an hard choice when the easier road was at hand. He was not an hard man, he always regarded himself as soft.
As such he of course regretted that choice an hour into the day.But still he did not steer to another course.
It was a miserable way to start the morrow and unfortunately, the world seemed determined to ensure it didn’t improve. It was late morning when Jarza entered the tent, carrying a bundle of papers that felt, to Alpheo’s eyes, like a stack of death warrants.
And worse, they were exactly that.
"This... this is..." Alpheo trailed off, his voice caught in his throat.
"As I said," Jarza replied. The twitch in the corner of his mouth betrayed the storm raging beneath his soldier’s stoicism. "We suffered grievous casualties. We were hard-pressed from the first horn, and by midday, the press was so thick we couldn’t swap the lines. Not that we had any fresh lines to swap in. We were stretched to the point of snapping."
Jarza sank into a chair, his face seemingly carved from old, weathered oak. He looked as though he had aged a decade in a matter of days. He buried his face in his hands, the metal of his gauntlets clinking softly.
"Weaver have mercy," he whispered. "I knew it would be like this. I wasn’t blind as we advanced; I saw the sea of bodies we left in our wake. But this? More than half our effective strength?"
His sad, bloodshot eyes met the prince’s. It was a cruel irony: they had snatched a miraculous victory from the jaws of defeat, yet they could not find the breath to rejoice. The fruit of victory was ripe, but it tasted of copper and ash as they took their first bite.
Alpheo’s gaze dropped back to the tally. No matter how many times he blinked, the ink did not change. And the stone that settled deep in his guts staid there.
First Legion: 42 dead, 110 heavily wounded.
Third Legion: 12 dead, 33 heavily wounded.
Fourth Legion: 43 dead, 29 heavily wounded.
The Hounds: 30 dead, 65 heavily wounded.
A relentless parade of loss. It was one thing to convince oneself that death was inevitable, to look at a mountain of nameless enemy corpses, be them soldier or civilians, and see them as mere pebbles on the road to greatness. It was quite another to read the tally of the men that he knew for a fact he owed everything he was and had.
Among those names were veterans of ten years of campaigning, men who had bled at the Bleeding Plains and stood firm during the Battle of the Two Eagles. They had survived the impossible, only to have their lives snuffed out by the collective greed of the League and the singular ambition of a Prince who dreamed of holding the world in his palm.
They were the teeth in the great gears of war, ordered in their chaos, horrific in their duty.Nothing but the spare changes of a long-standing bill.
Alpheo tried to rationalize it. He told himself this was their trade, their chosen life. He told himself that because he had stood in the mud and bled alongside them, he had earned the right to speak.
But deep down, beneath the armor and the titles, he knew that if there was one thing he loved in this back-water, sun-scorched principality besides his own kin, it was his bloodydamn Legions.
How many warlords, he wondered, had sat in a tent just like this one, staring at a list of the dead? Did their hearts grow tender with the weight of it? Or did they harden themselves with the psychosis of a self-induced myth, inventing grand destinies to justify the evil they had brought upon their own men?
Did they even care?
"We will bring the Legions back to full strength the moment this war ends," Alpheo muttered, offering the only scrap of solace he could find for his friend.
Men were fragile things, destined to become ash and memory, but the idea of a Legion was eternal. The flesh was weak, but the soul of the First, the Third, the Fourth, that spirit remained unyielding. Men could be replaced, but the standard they bled for could not.
"It was the hardest road we have ever walked," Alpheo continued, his voice regaining a sliver of its princely iron. "And as much as it pains me to admit, the path to victory is paved with bodies. Ours was built entirely uphill.
Their sacrifice bought the very air we are breathing right now; we must bow our heads to that truth. We will mourn them, Jarza. In time. But we cannot go soft now and dishonor the way they died. We have won the battle, but the war is yet hungry."
Jarza moved his hands away from his face, looking at Alpheo with a hollow, uncomprehending stare. The silence between them grew heavy, punctuated only by the distant sound of the camp.
"Isn’t it over?" Jarza asked.
All the exhaustion a human soul could muster choked his voice. Like every man standing outside looting the dead, every soldier screaming in a bed of blood-soaked linens, and every veteran drifting in an opium-induced haze, Jarza had earned the right to be tired. He had earned the right to stop.
But Alpheo looked at him and felt the cold, unwanted weight of his own duty. It was his task to spurn them, to drive them even further into the dark. They had bought this field with the lives of brothers; they could not squander the purchase by standing still. He no longer trusted inaction.
Inaction was the rot that allowed enemies to regrow their teeth.
"Not yet," Alpheo said, his fingers twitching toward the edge of a scroll. "The war is not yet over."
Nor will it be anytime soon, not the real one.
He cleared the tallies of the dead from the table, sweeping them aside to make room for the map of Ozenia. He pinned the corners down with heavy stones, the vellum curling as it revealed the great plains and rolling river hills of the land that had been a thorn in his side for a decade.
Jarza leaned in, his eyes instinctively scanning the map for the targets that had become viable now that the enemy was routed.
His mind went to the logical, the measured, the safe. He saw Nonium, Aragustaven, Duresa, and Diroli, cities they could besiege, fortified prizes they could seize to ensure their supply lines were secure for future campaign deeper in lands, and so that they had something to show for the slaughter besides a heap of graves and the right to exist that they had bought with those.
But that was Jarza’s limitation. He was a master of the possible, a man who sought a fair return on a bloody investment. He could not allow himself to dream beyond the next fortification.
He could not dream of taking a risk.
He was a reliable man.
But he was not a gambler.
Alpheo’s gaze drifted past the border fortresses, past the hubs and the granaries. His eyes settled on the heart of the Oizenian map, the center of the rot. They had smashed the head of the snake with a heavy club; the beast was thrashing, blinded and broken in the mud. Now, while the world was still reeling from the shock of the Fox’s bite, Alpheo intended to do more than take a city.
He intended to cut the mangled head clean off, so that it would never regrow....
"Four days," Alpheo said, the resolution in his voice leaving no room for debate. "In four days, we raise the standards and march. We leave the wounded here under a skeleton guard and move the able-bodied ahead while the Oizenians are still vomiting up their own terror."
Jarza straightened, his brow furrowing as he did the grim math of their remaining strength. "And the Kakunians? Do you count the Bull’s men among our numbers? I don’t know if they have the stomach for another dance so soon after that butchery. We bore the brunt of the center, aye, but their flanks weren’t exactly a stroll through a meadow."
"They will march if I can convince one man," Alpheo replied, his gaze fixed on the map.
"And do you think you can? Now that the field is won, I doubt Merelao has the patience for a long, grueling siege.Those are dull affairs and our Kakunian is a man of quick pleasures.
He strikes me as a man who prefers the fire of the fray to the slow rot of a trench."
"Desires maketh the man ," Alpheo answered simply.
’’Doesn’t the saying goes, desires don’t make the man?’’
’’In this case they do.’’ A thin smile touched his lips as the prince said so, one that didn’t reach his tired eyes. Jarza assumed the march wrongly , thinking it , about walls and gates, about lines of supplies and future campaigns.
He didn’t yet realize that Alpheo had no intention of letting the enemy catch their breath behind stone.
"Oh, and one more thing," the Prince added, his voice dropping an octave. "Send Aron to me."
Jarza paused at the tent flap, looking back with a questioning stare. "Aron? For what purpose?"
Alpheo didn’t look up. He merely let his finger rest on the heart of the Oizenian map, the pressure of his touch making the vellum groan.
"What else? I have a world of wrongs to set right."
