In the end, the attack was only broken off because of a silly misunderstanding. The cavalry horses, driven off at the beginning of the engagement, stampeded off into the couch-grass and stayed there for a while; but couch-grass didn’t make good eating, being coarse and bitter, and they were getting hungry. Being used to moving together they headed back towards the camp in a herd, and when they were quite close a plains horse that had lost its rider blundered into them at the gallop and spooked them, sending them stampeding towards the light. A couple of raiders at the edge of the camp heard the thudding of hooves and assumed that it meant enemy cavalry; they raised the alarm and got out of the way, and within a few minutes the attack was over, although the Imperial army didn’t realise until a while after they’d all gone.
It was one of the heaviest defeats ever inflicted on the Imperial army; fewer than four thousand killed outright in the raid (two thousand of them officers and sergeants), but over twenty thousand wounded, most of them slashed about the head and shoulders, losing too much blood from scalp and neck wounds. It was a long time before the NCOs could find an officer fit enough to take command, since the officers dined in separate messes in grander tents, and the raiders had found them quite easily. They’d also run off or killed most of the draught horses that pulled the supply wagons, and that was what caused most of the deaths.
Given a choice between carrying supplies or carrying their friends who were too badly cut up to walk, the soldiers decided to dump most of the provisions, on the grounds that they weren’t too far from the ships and they’d have to make do until they reached them. With so many officers and NCOs dead, there was nobody to tell them otherwise; so, when the raiders came back the next day and attacked the column as it crawled back along its tracks, they met with only marginally more resistance than they had during the night. But what they did encounter was enough to persuade them against closing with the sword and the spear; instead, they held off at medium range and shot from the saddle, not the most efficient method in the short term, but extremely cost-effective as regards the casualty ratio. What was left of the imperial cavalry tried to shoo them away, but they didn’t last long; there were only a few hundred horses among nearly four thousand men, and a horse is a large target. As for the light infantry and archers, whose job it ought to have been to swat flies in these circumstances, they’d made a serious error of judgement when they assumed that leaving the camp and plunging into the darkness was a safer option than staying put. It was the tussocks of couch-grass that did for them; they stumbled and fell, with twisted ankles and sprained knees, so that by the time Sildocai found them and put a cordon of archers round them, they’d more or less ground to a halt, sprawled on the grass and unwilling or unable to go any further. Most of them died where they lay, and the rest were pruned back later the next day.
Of the fifty thousand who disembarked from the ships, fifteen thousand made it back, with Sildocai’s men coming down to the coast to see them on their way; of the other thirty-five thousand, at least half were left behind in the empty plains; Sildocai went home, the fleet sailed back to the Island, and there was, as Ispel had so acutely observed, very little to eat on the plains, if you had the misfortune not to be a goat.
Sildocai attributed his victory to a souvenir he’d picked up in the sack of Perimadeia; it was a small book, entitled The Use Of Cavalry In Extended Campaigns In Open Country, by Suidas Bessemin; one of the few City military historians ever to study in detail the campaigns of the illustrious Perimadeian cavalry commander, Bardas Maxen.
The prefect of Ap’ Escatoy heard the news from the fastest, most experienced courier in the Imperial messenger corps, who left the island twenty minutes after the first ship landed. The prefect took the news calmly; having personally seen to it that the messenger was given the fastest horse in the cavalry stables for his journey to the provincial office in Rhoezen, he called for jasmin tea and honey-cakes, sent for his advisers, and sat down for a long day and night of sensible, hard-headed planning.
Bardas Loredan heard the news from the army courier sent out by the sub-prefect of the Island three hours after the news broke there. He had to be told the story three times; then he sent everybody away and sat in the dark all night. When he finally came out, he didn’t seem unduly worried or upset; he gave orders to step up the pace of the advance and post extra scouts and pickets.
Gorgas Loredan heard the news from his man in the Shastel proctors’ office, who made sure the official courier took a detour on his way south with the commercial dispatches. After he’d seen the courier, Gorgas took the big axe, which he’d had to put a new handle on himself, and spent the morning in the woodshed, splitting logs. Then he sent out three messengers of his own; one to the Island, with lugubrious condolences and offers of assistance; a second also to the Island, accompanied by a party of fifty or so ferocious-looking men whose letters of transit identified them as trade negotiators; and a third, the best man he had left, towards Temrai’s camp at the far end of the plains.
Temrai himself heard the news from Sildocai, as the raiding party returned home at record speed, even faster than the Imperial post-coach. He said ‘How many?’ and shook his head when the figures were repeated. Then he went back to supervising the reinforcement of the inner gates, and was in a foul mood for the rest of the day.
The provincial governor heard the news on the morning of his eldest daughter’s fourteenth birthday. He immediately cancelled all the scheduled celebrations, as was only fitting in the circumstances, and wrote a long letter to the prefect of Ap’ Escatoy expressing his sympathy, his support, his unwavering confidence and his profound disgust, promising a new army of a hundred and fifty thousand infantry, sixty thousand cavalry and genuine artillery support, to be despatched within two months, and enquiring politely after a silk painting by Marjent which the prefect had promised to send him a month ago, but which didn’t seem to have arrived yet. He then wrote another letter to the office of central administration, eight weeks’ ride away in Kozin province, asking whether the prefect should be put on trial, merely replaced, or left where he was. Finally, being a kind-hearted man, he rescheduled his daughter’s birthday by having the provincial astronomer-general insert into the calendar a special non-recurring intercalary month, to be named Loss-and-Reaffirmation, starting at midnight on the day the news reached him. It was generally agreed to be a particularly elegant and thoughtful gesture, and there was some talk of making it permanent.
Gannadius heard the news at dinner the day before the ships reached the Island; a survivor of the Imperial light infantry, striking out on his own for the coast, had lost his way and strayed north, where he ran into a party of Shastel commercial messengers returning home with important news about likely developments in the spot-market price of Bustrofidon copper. Because their message was so urgent, they’d taken the risk of riding overland through the war zone, and their first instinct on seeing an Imperial soldier running up the road towards them was either to shoot him or run away. When they realised what they’d stumbled across, however, they speeded up even more (they had to leave the soldier behind, not having any spare horses) and were thus able to bring the news to the Citadel before the close of that day’s trading; an act of heroism on their part that paid dividends for the Order’s commercial arm. Gannadius himself didn’t seem unduly surprised by the news; it was almost, his colleagues at High Table whispered after he’d gone to bed, as if he’d already heard about it from somewhere else. This greatly increased their respect for and resentment of the Perimadeian scholar and suspected wizard, who carried on with his daily routine as if nothing had happened.