Chapter 392 — The "Great Army"

In Tansang Town, in the Leslie domain, the tall and lean Viscount Andrew climbed the city wall and looked out from its observation point toward the dock district.

The newly built dock tower stood tall on the bank of the Whitewater River, its handsome spire reflecting a dreamlike radiance in the sunlight, and below the tower a thousand sails passed over the Whitewater, boats great and small coming and going without cease like busy ants, the whole waterway a scene of unbroken bustle.

All this bustle and liveliness had begun only last year.

A cool wind blew over, and his throat, made sensitive by excessive consumption of potions, at once grew uncomfortable; Viscount Andrew Leslie could not help breaking into several violent coughs, and the steward standing beside him immediately stepped forward to drape a warm long-haired coat over his master.

The steward, newly hired less than a year ago, was a little worried: "My lord viscount, you should go back and rest."

"A little cold wind helps clear the mind for thought," Andrew said casually, his gaze withdrawn from the docks to sweep across the newly built warehouses, the mills, and the western district, and he suddenly sighed, "How fast it all is."

The steward had not caught it: "What?"

The new steward was reliable in his work and reasonably quick of mind, but his time here was after all still short, and there was a want of rapport between them; the viscount gave a small inward sigh at this, then shook his head and flung certain unpleasant memories from his mind: "Nothing. Is the messenger still waiting at the castle?"

"Yes," the steward nodded, "Count Horsman is awaiting your reply."

Viscount Andrew was silent for a moment, then asked suddenly, "Tell me, who do you think will win this war?"

"...Duke Gao Yang Cecil is not in a good position," the steward said after a brief hesitation, lowering his voice; he knew his master was close to Duke Gao Yang, but loyalty demanded that he speak his true mind now, "Even if the man himself is a legend, he has only a few thousand men, while Count Horsman has already mustered an army of tens of thousands..."

Viscount Andrew made no comment: "An 'army' of tens of thousands..."

Given the mobilization capacity of this age, and the desolate, decadent state of the Southern Frontier itself, summoning an army of tens of thousands was indeed already a remarkable figure; after all, the greatest nobles here were no higher than counts, and the private soldiers they could maintain were in the end limited.

After a few seconds' thought, Viscount Andrew glanced at his steward: "So, by your reasoning, I should answer Count Horsman's summons as quickly as possible, so as to stand on the victor's side as soon as I can."

The steward bowed his head deeply: "My suggestions are of no consequence. I am only a steward, and not yet capable enough to understand your affairs."

Andrew felt a little bored and, where the steward could not see, pursed his lips, then looked at the catapult mounts along the wall—those catapults faced the Whitewater River; a century ago the Leslie ancestors had relied on this stretch of wall facing the river to hold off bandits and deserting soldiers attacking by water, in the days shortly after the Ansu civil war had ended, when the Southern Frontier was nowhere near as safe as it was today. Now a hundred years had passed, and those catapults had been replaced several times over for rot and fragility, but they had not been put to use for a very long time.

Another cold wind blew over; the wind on the wall always seemed to sting the lungs more than anywhere else. The viscount wrapped his clothes tighter about him and coughed softly twice: "Let us go back. Count Horsman's messenger has waited long enough."

The steward fell in at once: "Yes."

"Also, find me a few more copies of that 'newspaper' the Cecil domain puts out, and materials on the noble reform bill and the land distribution law they are pushing—bring me some of all of it... I need to understand these things."

A great army was gathering in the northern region.

Apart from the twenty thousand men detached to Count Peibo, the main force of fifty thousand had, after more than ten days of movement and assembly, mostly arrived; endless tents and banners spread across the plains southwest of the Carol region, bustling like an unprecedentedly vast marketplace.

Here were gathered the troops of dozens of landed nobles from all over the Southern Frontier, from barons up to counts, every glorious and orthodox bloodline come together. Each noble brought soldiers numbering from fewer than a hundred to as many as a thousand, and each encamped according to his own scale. The great zones were first allotted by the rank of the noble to whom they owed allegiance, then within each zone a second allotment was made according to the order in which they had arrived at the gathering point, until at last there formed a jagged, hopelessly chaotic, wildly varied patchwork of camps.

Dozens of different banners fluttered above this enormous camp, and between the campsites ran winding, labyrinthine, crisscrossing paths; orderlies in every color of livery and every sort of armor, bearing every kind of flag and speaking every kind of accent, ran to and fro through this maze of a camp, bellowing orders that only their own people could make sense of (or could not), and confusion born of mistaken orders broke out from time to time—only to be swiftly put down by knights charging out with force of arms.

The gear the soldiers in the camp wore was as chaotic as their campsites—it was nothing short of a lively exhibition: from the crudest half-body leather armor to the finest full plate of steel, all were gathered here in the same place, and their ways of marking who they were differed utterly. Some relied on a surcoat bearing a device, some bound strips of different-colored cloth about their heads, some depended on the emblem on their shields, and some had no mark at all, relying purely on the soldiers from their own village to remember one another's faces. One could not help worrying that on the day this "army" disbanded and went home, some man would follow the wrong column and end up in another lord's domain—and in fact such a worry was entirely possible, and had indeed happened.

In the tales of certain bards, a story was vividly told: a soldier named Tom, who might have been a Highlander or might have been a Consco, took part in a great war, and on the triumphant return mistook his officer's face and followed another man's army all the way to some place unimaginably far from home; there in a foreign land he took a wife and had children, lived eight years, and then in a new war followed the wrong column once again and somehow stumbled back to his own homeland... This story circulated widely in the Southern Frontier and was even regarded by many knights as a symbol of the "romantic life of the battlefield."

Clad in a count's greatcloak of gold and crimson, Karlov Horsman rode his most beloved sorrel warhorse through this enormous camp, accompanied by several viscounts and barons; nearest to him was Viscount Carol, in a crisp black coat.

Count Karlov Horsman wore an easy, cheerful smile; this astonishingly vast encampment before him, and the army of fifty thousand gathered within it, had all been raised and assembled under the summons of his supreme prestige—this magnificent sight proved that the Horsman family still shone brilliantly in his hands, and this was the finest commendation he could receive as a member of that family.

"Look at this—a force of such scale, and I truly do not know what our ancient hero means to oppose it with," Count Horsman said, pointing ahead with his whip, his tone rising despite himself. "To be honest, I almost regret it now—perhaps I need not have summoned so many. Every banner here will have to be fairly allotted a share of the spoils."