The King’s army won the engagement at Tallow Creek, and the winning did not feel like winning.

The barbarian column that had bypassed the Snowe dominion was moving south through the agricultural belt in the loose formation that highland march doctrine produced, the column’s discipline relaxed by three days of uncontested movement through countryside whose garrison towns had surrendered without fighting after the thundermakers’ first volley demonstrated that the towns’ stone walls could not withstand the bombardment.

The king’s scouts reported the barbarian column’s position at dawn. Fairfax identified the opportunity: the column was strung out along three miles of provincial road, its rearguard separated from its main body by the distance that the supply wagons’ slower pace created, the separation producing the gap that a striking force could exploit.

"The rearguard," Fairfax said, pointing at the map. "Three thousand warriors guarding the supply wagons. Separated from the main body by approximately one mile. If we hit the rearguard before the main body can turn and reinforce, we destroy the supply wagons and force the barbarians to halt their advance until resupply arrives from the mountain routes."

"How many soldiers?" the king asked.

"Eight thousand. Fast. Light equipment. We abandon the thundermakers because the thundermakers’ transport slows the column to the speed that prevents surprise. Boomsticks and swords. We hit the rearguard at dawn, destroy the supply wagons, and withdraw before the main body arrives."

The king approved. Eight thousand soldiers moved through the night, their march silent, their boomsticks loaded with the charges that the army’s dwindling stockpile provided for one engagement.

* * * * *

The assault hit the rearguard at the fifth hour before dawn.

Eight thousand soldiers emerging from the tree line on the rearguard’s eastern flank, boomsticks firing in the rolling volley that the Threian military’s training prescribed, the balls tearing into the rearguard’s formation at the range where the surprise’s proximity made accuracy irrelevant because the targets were everywhere.

A barbarian warrior at the rearguard’s perimeter turned at the sound of the first volley and took a ball in the throat, the dwarven gorget deflecting the ball’s trajectory upward into the jaw, the impact shattering the lower face beneath the helmet’s rim. He fell sideways into the warrior beside him, blood spraying across the dwarven armor in the arc that arterial wounds produced at the throat’s proximity to the heart’s pumping pressure.

"Forward! Take the wagons!" The Threian officer’s command sent the assault force into the rearguard’s formation at the run, the surprise’s momentum carrying the attack through the rearguard’s initial confusion and into the supply wagons that the rearguard existed to protect.

The supply wagons burned. Threian soldiers with incendiary weapons that the Threian military had adopted after observing the Horde’s use of such weapons, threw the incendiaries into the wagons’ contents. Thundermaker ammunition detonated. Boomstick powder flared. The wagons’ wooden frames caught fire and the fire spread from wagon to wagon in the chain reaction that stored ammunition produced when the storage was on fire.

The barbarian main body turned.

Fourteen thousand warriors, hearing the explosions and seeing the smoke from the rearguard’s position, reversed their march and moved toward the sound of the engagement with the speed that highland warriors produced when the thing behind them was under attack. 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ𝑤𝑒𝑏𝑛𝘰𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝒸𝑜𝘮

The king’s eight thousand engaged the arriving main body at the seventh hour. The engagement was an engagement that a smaller force produced against a larger force when the smaller force had achieved surprise but the surprise’s advantage was expiring with each minute that the larger force’s arrival consumed.

The fighting was close, confused, and vicious. Boomsticks fired at ten paces. Hand axes found neck gaps and arm joints. Threian soldiers and barbarian warriors grappled in the mud that the morning’s dew and the battle’s blood had produced, the close combat the specific kind that trained soldiers hated and highland warriors preferred because the highland warriors’ physical conditioning and close-combat traditions gave them the advantage at the range where boomsticks became clubs and swords became the only weapons that mattered.

A Threian sergeant drove his sword into a barbarian’s side, the blade finding the gap between the breastplate’s lower edge and the barbarian’s belt, the point entering the abdomen at the angle that the gap’s geometry permitted. The barbarian grabbed the sergeant’s arm with both hands and headbutted him, the dwarven helmet’s rim catching the sergeant across the bridge of the nose, blood erupting from the shattered cartilage. The sergeant’s grip on his sword loosened. The barbarian pulled the sword from his own body and used it to slash the sergeant across the forearm, the Threian’s own blade opening the flesh that the Threian’s own hand had been gripping.

The king ordered withdrawal at the ninth hour. The supply wagons were destroyed. The rearguard was shattered. The objective was achieved.

The withdrawal cost fourteen hundred dead. The barbarians’ losses in the rearguard were approximately two thousand, plus the supply wagons’ contents.

"Victory," Fairfax said, at the evening’s assessment.

"Victory at fourteen hundred dead against a force we ambushed from surprise," the king said. "Victory that destroyed their supply wagons but not their army. Victory that delays their advance by three days until the next dwarven supply delivery arrives through the mountain routes. Victory that consumed nine percent of our remaining boomstick ammunition."

"But victory," Fairfax said.

"But victory," the king agreed. The word carried the specific weight of a monarch who was winning battles at the cost of the resources that made future battles possible, the pyrrhic mathematics that defined every engagement of a campaign fought with finite ammunition against an enemy with infinite supply.

The king’s soldiers fought with the specific motivation that soldiers produced when the fight was the first victory the campaign had given them and the victory’s continuation depended on the fight’s intensity. Bayonets found gaps in dwarven armor. Swords struck at the joints that close combat exposed. Boomstick butts became clubs when the ammunition was expended, the wooden stocks cracking against dwarven helmets with the impact that desperation produced when desperation was channeled through trained arms.

A Threian corporal fought three barbarians simultaneously at the edge of a burning wagon, his boomstick empty, his sword in his right hand and a barbarian’s dropped hand axe in his left. The sword caught the first barbarian across the forearm, the blade biting through the leather beneath the gauntlet’s edge. The hand axe caught the second barbarian in the knee, the joint buckling under the impact. The third barbarian’s boomstick fired at point-blank range and the ball struck the corporal’s breastplate and the breastplate held but the corporal was thrown backward into the burning wagon’s wheel, the heat searing through his cloak and into his back.

He stood. He fought. He killed the third barbarian with the hand axe that he had taken from an enemy and that he used as the specific tool that the moment’s close-range combat required. He killed the barbarian with a blow to the throat that the hand axe’s weight and the corporal’s desperation combined to make decisive.

Then he fell, the burns on his back and the exhaustion of the engagement combining to produce the collapse that the body produced when it had given everything it had and the everything was not enough to sustain standing.

The battle continued around him. Other soldiers fought and fell and fought again. The wagons burned. The barbarian main body arrived. The king’s eight thousand soldiers fought fourteen thousand barbarians in the open and the fighting was the fighting that close combat between equal weapons produced: expensive, brutal, and decided by the quality that the fighting’s intensity demanded from the fighters.