A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

"Yarmdon…" The guard said bitterly. "If only you had not stretched our numbers so thin, merchant, I would not need to be wasting my time here, watching over you."

"Then go, you fool. Why are you wasting your manpower on us?" Greeves said, his usual tact gone. Days upon days of the most extreme stresses had frayed his nerves, to the point where he even dared speak to a member of the Serving Class as he did.

The soldier tightened his grip around his spear, and eyed the entrance to the tent, seeing people rushing around. But no one came to relieve him from duty. No orders came his way. A soldier knew that orders were to be followed until the very end. Until they were nullified.

He put his back to the merchant, not even gracing him with a response, and merely held his position, as he guarded the tent, and waited.

Loriel held her head in her hands as she wept. She'd been weeping for hours. Greeves spared her an exhausted look. The other women around them were in similarly miserable states. The whole room radiated fear and desperation.

They knew now that the camp was almost certainly under attack, but they could not even run from it. It seemed a pathetic run of events, by Greeves' eyes. All these years, he'd moved so carefully, he'd kept his escape routes open. And now, when he most needed it, when the attack finally came, he was surrounded by nothing but women.

His loyal guard Judas had been taken from him, forced into duty. Greeves had no doubt that the man was getting on well enough, but that was of no use to him. Not in his moment of strife.

There was a dagger on Greeves' hip. As the panic built up, and the fear began to grow, the back of the soldier's neck as he stood guard was starting to look awfully undefended. If it was a choice between braving a confrontation with a man like that, or a horde of Yarmdon, Greeves was quite sure which he'd choose.

"Damn it…" He murmured to himself, as he clenched his fists helplessly in the dark.

"No monsters still," Lombard noted, as he looked towards the north. "I might take a gamble, gentlemen. I wonder if you will indulge me?"

"You're not thinking of abandoning the northern front, are you?" Tolsey asked nervously.

"Well… For now, I think it would be sensible. Something has clearly interrupted the monsters. They've been spawning wave after wave for days now, but for the past twenty minutes, we've had utter silence. I cannot even sense their presence, can you, Vice-Captain?"

Tolsey shook his head. "But what if the Yarmdon attack through the north instead?"

"Then we will pray that the monsters arrive to make fools of them. Though it would not be beyond us to rearrange our troops mid-battle. We have the boy, after all. He doesn't carry the burden of command, but he has our power. He'd be able to shift himself according to whatever the battlefield asks of us," Lombard said.

Tolsey looked at Beam. "But… He's been at it all day. And then leading the search into that Elder's residence as well. Are you not exhausted?"

Beam shook his head. "I'm fine."

That statement was more in regard to his energy. He didn't feel the need to sleep, at the very least. There was a dull ache in his muscles, and a sort of fog that hung over his head, but all of that was overrun by the adrenaline that pounded through him.

He could feel the tensions of battle begin to build. The hairs raised on the back of his neck in anticipation. Even if he wanted to, he wouldn't have been able to rest.

"Then we will move," Lombard said with approval.

Beam could not fathom how the man managed to stay so level. The sudden arrival of the enemy had barely shaken him at all.

"Soldiers – we move eastwards," Lombard said, barking an order to the other soldiers that had been waiting anxiously around them. "Gather your arrows and torches, and prepare to receive the first wave of attack."

Hearing such a command, with no explanation behind it, Beam thought that the soldiers might hesitate. By their eyes, after all, they were leaving the monster-ridden northern front well and truly open. But the men did not even look surprised. In fact, if anything, Beam could have sworn it was relief that he saw on their faces.

They moved to fulfil the order with haste, retrieving their weaponry, as they too began to flood eastwards, towards that ever-approaching sea of torches.

The soldiers lying in wait could almost make out the enemy now. They seemed a scrappy rabble, even from a distance.

They did not march in step with each other, as these men had been trained to do. Instead, they strolled casually across the battlefield, each step their own, and each step filled with the same amount of grim determination.

They were large men, those Yarmdon raiders, just as the entire continent knew them to be. The men favoured beards heavily, with nearly half of them sporting one so thick that it made its way down to their upper chest.

Unlike their enemy though, amongst the Yarmdon, they even allowed some women to fight. But those women looked no less fearsome than the men. Their tattooed faces were grim and determined.

There was not a single shred of fear amongst them, as they marched forward under the command of their great leader, Earl Grom of the Summer Pastures.

He was a man so large that he would have made even Judas look small. He marched in the centre of his army of men, with a comfortable smile alighting his face, and his hands on his hips.

A heavy two-handed battleaxe was strapped to his back, and with the fur boots and coat that he wore, he looked the very image of the northern barbarian that the men of the Stormfront had learned to fear.

"What a load of piss," one of his lieutenants spat. He had two of them under his command. "We'll burn through that mess in fifteen minutes. I thought these Southerners were meant to have some bite to them."