Rise of the Horde

Chapter 827 - 826

The Narrow Pass received the Horde on the eighth day with the silence that the pass’s geography produced in the season that the pass’s weather provided. The silence was the silence that enclosed spaces imposed upon large formations: not the silence of absence, but the silence of compression, the way that seven thousand voices and seven thousand sets of boots and three hundred wagon wheels and the low guttural breath of Rhakaddons all became, inside the pass’s stone throat, a single unified sound that the pass’s walls absorbed and returned as something indistinguishable from quiet.

The pass was the passage between the Lag’ranna Mountains’ eastern and western ridgelines, the passage whose width accommodated the column’s formation in the compressed configuration that the passage’s dimensions required: twenty warriors abreast where the passage widened, eight warriors abreast where the passage narrowed, the column’s length extending through the passage’s full distance in the formation that the passage’s variable width dictated. The passage’s stone walls bore the marks that centuries of use had left upon them: the scoring of wagon axles, the soot of ten thousand fires made by ten thousand travelers who had sheltered in the pass’s recesses during the mountain storms that the season’s unpredictability produced.

The Horde added its own marks. The boots of seven thousand warriors pressed new impressions into the path’s softer sections. The wagon wheels cut new grooves beside the old grooves. The passage received the Horde the way the passage had received every army and every migration and every column of the desperate and the determined that the mountains’ geography had funneled through this single navigable throat: without judgment, without welcome, without anything except the indifferent accommodation that stone provided to whatever passed between its faces.

The Rhakaddons moved through the passage’s widest sections. The beasts’ three-ton mass required the width that the passage’s widest sections provided, the width that accommodated the beasts’ armored bulk and the beasts’ riders and the beasts’ instinctive reluctance to enter enclosed spaces whose dimensions the beasts’ spatial awareness assessed as insufficient for the beasts’ maneuvering requirements.

The Rhakaddons’ reluctance was not cowardice. The beasts had demonstrated, across eight months of campaign, the capacity for violence that their size and their training combined to produce. The reluctance was something more fundamental than cowardice: it was the assessment that creatures of great mass applied to spaces that their mass found constraining, the way that a river slowed before a narrow channel not from fear of the channel but from the hydraulic reality that the channel’s width and the river’s volume combined to produce.

Dhug’mhar’s mount paused at the passage’s narrowest section. The pause was the pause that the beast’s spatial assessment produced when the assessment’s result was the result that the assessment’s subject’s dimensions and the passage’s dimensions combined to generate: the passage was navigable but the navigation required the specific posture that the passage’s width demanded from a beast whose natural posture was wider than the passage’s constraint permitted. The beast exhaled through its nostrils. The exhaled breath fogged in the pass’s cool air. The fog dispersed against the stone wall beside the beast’s flank with the immediacy that the wall’s proximity produced.

"The mountain accommodates Perfection reluctantly," Dhug’mhar observed, as his mount adjusted its stance for the narrow section’s passage. "The mountain’s reluctance is understandable. Perfection’s dimensions exceed the mountain’s expectations. The mountain was carved before Perfection existed and therefore the mountain could not have anticipated the specific dimensional requirements that Perfection’s passage demands."

"Duum," Graka confirmed.

The passage took six hours. Six hours during which seven thousand warriors and three hundred wagons and the Rhakaddons and the warg cavalry and the supply train moved through the mountain passage that separated the frontier from the orcish lands. Six hours that converted the column from the column that occupied foreign territory’s southern boundary to the column that occupied home territory’s northern boundary.

Six hours during which the light that entered the pass’s northern opening diminished as the column’s depth inside the passage increased, and then grew again as the passage’s southern opening approached, the light’s return marking the transition that the warriors registered not only visually but in the particular way that the body recognized the approach of open space after confinement: the shoulders’ unconscious loosening, the breath’s unconscious deepening, the posture’s unconscious expansion toward the dimensions that the approaching openness would permit.

The exit was the exit that the passage’s southern opening provided. The opening faced south. The opening’s view was the view that the orcish lands’ northern reaches produced from the elevation that the pass’s southern opening occupied: the rolling terrain that descended from the mountains’ base toward the plains and the river valleys and the territory that the orcish people had inhabited before the Threian invasion and that the orcish people would inhabit again under the sovereignty that the treaty’s provisions established.

Khao’khen stopped at the passage’s exit.

The stop was the stop that the exit’s view produced in the chieftain whose campaign had been fought for the territory that the view encompassed. The view was the view of home. Not Yohan’s specific view. Yohan lay further south, beyond the plains and the rivers and the territory that the march’s remaining distance would traverse.

The view was the view of the orcish lands whose existence the view confirmed and whose sovereignty the campaign had secured. Behind Khao’khen, the column continued to emerge from the passage’s southern opening, warrior after warrior stepping from the pass’s stone confinement into the view that the pass’s exit provided, each warrior’s emergence accompanied by the particular stillness that the view produced in warriors who had marched eight months to stand in the position that the view required.

The view was different from the view that the chieftain had seen when the Horde had crossed the pass northward. The northward crossing’s view had been the view that purpose produced: the Threian territory ahead, the campaign’s objective ahead, the fighting ahead. The southward crossing’s view was the view that fulfillment produced: the orcish territory ahead, the campaign’s purpose achieved, the home ahead. The difference between the two views was not a difference that the views themselves contained, the geography was unchanged, the sky was unchanged, the terrain’s contours were unchanged, but a difference that the viewer’s position within the campaign’s arc produced in the viewer who observed the same geography from the two different positions that the campaign’s beginning and the campaign’s end defined.

"The orcish lands," Sakh’arran said.

"Our lands," Khao’khen said.

The distinction was the distinction that the treaty’s provisions had created between the orcish lands as they had existed before the campaign and the orcish lands as they existed after the campaign. Before the campaign, the orcish lands had been the lands that the Threian kingdom’s previous invasion had burned and that the Threian kingdom’s continued military presence at the frontier had threatened. After the campaign, the orcish lands were the lands that the treaty recognized as the orcish people’s sovereign territory, the lands whose sovereignty the frontier line’s markers guaranteed and that the Horde’s demonstrated capability enforced. The difference between the before and the after was a difference that parchment and ink and the seals of chieftains and kings had formalized, but the difference’s substance had been produced not by the parchment and the ink but by the eight months that the parchment and the ink commemorated.

Our lands. The two words that the campaign’s entire purpose compressed into the two words’ content. The two words that eight months of marching and fighting and negotiating and bleeding had produced. The two words that the Horde’s three hundred and twenty dead warriors and the Horde’s hundreds of wounded warriors and the Horde’s seven thousand surviving warriors had paid for with the payments that the campaign’s costs had demanded. The two words that Khao’khen spoke not only to Sakh’arran but to the plains below and to the dead behind and to the territory that the view encompassed and that the words now named with the name that sovereignty conferred.

Our lands.

The Horde descended from the pass into the orcish territory. The descent was the descent that the mountains’ southern gradient produced: gradual, the path’s incline easing as the elevation decreased and the terrain transitioned from the mountains’ rocky surface to the foothills’ mixed terrain to the plains’ grassland. The transition was the transition that geography produced and that the warriors’ awareness registered as the transition from the mountains’ enclosed passage to the open territory’s expansive view. The warriors’ boots found different purchase on the path’s southern surface than they had found on the path’s northern surface. The northern surface’s rock gave way to the southern surface’s packed soil and then to the southern surface’s grass, and the grass’s presence beneath the warriors’ boots communicated something that the warriors’ boots transmitted upward through the warriors’ bodies with the directness that physical sensation provided: this was the ground of home. This ground had a different quality than the ground that the campaign’s marches had covered. The difference was not a difference that measurement would have confirmed, the soil’s composition was similar, the grass’s species was similar, the elevation’s characteristics were similar, but a difference that belonging produced in the feet that had spent eight months walking ground that was not theirs.

The plains stretched south. The distance to Yohan was the distance that seven days of sustained march at the column’s pace would traverse. Seven days. The final seven days of the campaign’s march. The seven days that separated the pass’s exit from Yohan’s gate.

Seven days until the wolf reached the den.

The Horde marched south across the orcish plains. The Snarling Wolf banner caught the wind that the plains’ open terrain provided. The banner’s crimson wolf faced forward. Forward was south. South was home.

The march’s final phase commenced. The warriors’ pace was the pace that the pace’s eagerness and the pace’s discipline combined to produce: not the accelerated pace that eagerness alone would have generated, not the measured pace that discipline alone would have maintained, but the specific combination that the two forces’ intersection produced in warriors who were disciplined enough to maintain formation and eager enough to quicken the formation’s cadence by the fraction that the eagerness contributed. The fraction was small. The fraction was sufficient. The pace that the fraction produced was the pace of warriors who knew that the end was measurable, not in the unmeasurable distance of continued campaign but in the seven specific days that stood between the current position and the destination that the campaign had been fought to reach.

Seven days. Home.