A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

The fire from the oil atop the wall was at least solvable. The oil was thin enough spread that the wall of flame didn't rise too high. Even if they didn't deal with it, it would likely burn itself out soon enough without causing them too much damage. The real problem was the gate.

Even from as far down as the source of the fire was, Gadar could feel the heat burning his face viciously whenever he turned towards it.

That was something that they most certainly could not deal with. That was a fire liable to burn straight into the heart of their encampment. Talon had said it as quickly as anyone else had. He'd taken one look at the damage, and dismissed that ever-so-important defensive feature.

"The gate is as good as gone," Talon said to himself for the second time. It wasn't much of a loss, given how little it affected his true plans, but it still irritated him nonetheless to be caught off guard as well as he had been. "To think, this was the snowball of such a small-scale blunder…"

He'd known that his strategy was watertight, in the same way, he could sense it over a Battle board. Even if he couldn't envisage how the enemy might attack him, he could evaluate his position objectively, to see how easy it was to attack. If it hadn't been for the chaos caused by that girl and her arrow, Oliver Patrick's charge would never have been so effective.

He would have needed that second battleram to do something. The best he could have hoped for was to weaken the gate, not remove it entirely.

"After all these years, it seems there are still things that can upset the principles I take for granted," the General muttered, staring down at the flames. The fact that he was smiling might have seemed strange to many, but his attendants would have understood. A battle exciting enough to surprise him – he'd been searching for such a thing for nearly a decade.

"Uhm, General," Oomly said, looking at the flames. "Was this my bad?"

"No, Oomly, not this time," General Talon said.

"So uhm, what do we do?" Oomly asked. "This is bad, ain't it?"

"The same thing every man does when he's by a fire. We warm our hands, and wait for it to fade down to embers. Oliver Patrick will be forced to do the same. Have half the men from this side stand down from the wall, and send them to eat. It will be a couple of hours yet, I imagine."

It was the sort of calm rational decision that only a General with as many years of experience as Talon could so easily make. To know when to rest, and to know when to fight, it was a harder thing to learn than many up-and-coming Generals realized.

As the masked General left the wall himself in search of food, Oliver was forced to come to a similar kind of decision.

After all the excited cheering that had come from the men as a result of the blow that they'd just landed, they'd been forced into a rather difficult position. After all, there was nothing they could do until the fires faded. They couldn't charge forward with another battleram – not that they even likely needed one any more – and they couldn't attempt to assault the gate by hand either.

In short, after moving their line forward as delicately as they had, they were forced to wait.

If it had been Oliver solely in command, this was an area where he might have stumbled. He was a creature that ran on excitement, after all. With the enemy so close, and victory so tantalizing, he wouldn't have been able to stop. Even if it meant simply staring at the enemy archers for two or three hours, he would have done it, merely to have something to do.

Instead, Verdant had the foresight to propose otherwise. They'd brought two battlerams, but they'd brought three carts in total. The third cart was replete with food, and water, and even firewood.

"Stand down then, men, we will join the others," Oliver said, finally, once the cheering had died down, and it was time to make the proper decision.

The men seemed just as reluctant as he to take a step back. With the momentum in their favour, it was human instinct to want to push it, but there was little choice. By fire, they had deigned it right to take the gate, and now they had to deal with the delayed results that were often the evidence of fire.

They rejoined the main line of men, and staked their shields down. Food and water were already being passed around, and so too were a few smaller fires being set up to keep the men warm as they waited.

Oliver grinned at the ridiculousness of it all. He'd been worried about making a camp so close to the enemy, but now they'd taken it a step further, and were all but camping right under the enemy's walls.

On one side of the Macalister wall, the arrow fire continued for a time, as if they hadn't got the message. They could no doubt see the smoke coming from the Patrick forces, as they quite blatantly indulged in a late morning meal, keeping their hands nice and warm in the process.

Soon enough, though, even that arrow fire ended, as a strange sort of truce developed between the two sides. A mutual agreement seemingly had been established – until the results of the gate fire had made themselves evident, the two sides would wait. It was one of those rare situations where to do anything else would be to weaken their position.

…

…

It took nearly three hours for that fire to burn itself down to something more manageable. Those three hours for the Patrick men were like watching a grand story unfold. Every time they glanced up, the wounds to the gate would be all the stronger. For the Macalister men, it was the opposite.

The fort that their liege had built so painstakingly before his death was ravaged by an oil fire that they could do nought about.