A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

Great snaking lines of soldiers leading to all the different scattered encampments poured into the same direction, led by the earlier set of Sergeants that had been set to corral them all towards a certain swiftness.

Oliver squinted at the sky, feeling the sun sting the side of his head. It was beginning to go well past the point of being hot. Those veils that he'd seen some of the Verna women wearing seemed like they would have offered the greatest degree of comfort.

They came to a halt some distance from the leftmost castle, but not altogether far away from the Verna encampments. Their work, and their procession, was in full view of those bound men. They watched with round eyes as the soldiers marched with shovels against their shoulders.

"HALT!" Came the command.

The Sergeants busied themselves organizing the mass of soldiers. They left a thousand in place, on that first stopping point, and Oliver was amongst them. The rest were herded like cattle, jabbed along by increasingly impatient Sergeants, and dragged towards the next hole.

They were organized into a sort of formation, those that remained. There was a distance of two paced between each man in all directions. They were organized such that they formed a long rectangle. It was the sort of formation that the Stormfront army might have adopted if they were under heavy arrow fire, and wanting to minimize casualties.

Without further instruction, the final command came. "DIG!" It was shouted.

The men looked at each other doubtfully. No one seemed to be in a particular rush to cede to that command. When one was in foreign territory, even a well-trained soldier was likely to pause, especially if it was a procedure that he hadn't been specifically trained in before.

Of course, the ordinary infantry had known to practise their digging of trenches, and of holes to embed their stakes in for the sake of fortification, but never had they been organized like this and ordered to dig for any reason in their recent memory.

"DIG!" It was shouted again, and only then did the grating sound of steel spade tips against hard sandy earth begin to ring out.

"What the pissin' hell are we doing, Captain?" Firyr said. He'd made sure to take up a spot next to Oliver, likely for the purpose of asking questions such as that.

"Digging, I suppose," Oliver said. His own men were waiting on him, and with the ripple of action beginning to pass across all thousand men, Oliver supposed that he would join them.

With spade in hand, he dug, as if he were back in the fields of Solgrim, trying to find the continuation of that long dried out iron vein that the prospector had sworn would pick up soon enough. All those hours of toil, all those long days for pitiful coin… It would have been easy to call them purposeless. And still, from the dust of the past, they once more found themselves useful.

The old efficiency that he had learned came back to Oliver within a few swings. Then he was digging, and lending all the strength of a Fourth Boundary man to it.

It surprised him the ease with which it moved. His legs tensed to lend each blow an extra bit of weight. His arms tensed with them, fighting against the motion of the legs for the lead role in the digging play. His upper back worked its way in with the rest of them soon enough, making itself known with a continuous flexion.

The pile behind Oliver grew steadily bigger and bigger. It was a rapid enough rate that Oliver had to continuously counsel himself towards slowing down. He tried to keep his eyes up, looking for that information that he had initially set out to scourge. But there was precious little of that too.

Sergeants patrolled the perimeter of their formation, and they hurled insults at whoever was slacking. Men stole whatever glances they could at each other, whenever those Sergeants weren't looking, and they breathed words to the contrary. "Slow it down, would you, you bastard. They're going to expect us all to be moving that fast. It's too hot for this rubbish."

"What do you think we're digging for?"

"Pissing hell if I know."

"Ain't a trench, is it?"

"Foundation for a new castle, that's what I reckon. As big as it is. They're looking to make a new town here, or a fort or something."

"YOU THERE, STOP YOUR TALKING! GET TO DIGGING!"

The conversation soon enough picked up elsewhere, as the Sergeants made their rounds.

"No, didn't you hear? They're getting rid of those Verna now. That's what we're doing. We've digging graves."

"Piss off. This ain't a grave. No one needs a grave this big. You could put a whole pissing town in here, the buildings and all would be swallowed up."

Oliver felt himself shudder. A grave… If that's what it was, the size would have matched. A whole town – no, it was far more than that. When he looked behind him, towards those captured Verna, he saw more people than he'd seen even in the largest towns that he'd visited. There were several cities worth there.

If they were to kill that many, the sheer workload would be… It was a gruelling thought to have, one that began to make him feel sick. He remembered back to burning the bodies with Karstly atop the Lonely Mountain. There had been a few thousand there, and they'd all been soldiers, who'd fought and died in battle, and still it had taken them all that time, and left such sour tastes in their mouth.

Did this not begin to cross a line, however? Was it not different, to kill a man with a sword in his hand, than a man bound with ropes? And what of the civilians. Or would they all have done the same if the shoe was on the other foot? Would General Khan not have bound them out of convenience, and killed them in their ropes. Was it not a matter of the victor doing what the victor must?

Still, he hardly wanted to believe it. Was this the governance that Lord Blackwell spoke of? These were now his subjects, were they not? Or was it too premature to say that? He doubted Lord Blackwell saw it that way.