Rise of the Horde

Chapter 787 - 786

The southern gate opened at the ninth hour of the sixth day, and the capital began to empty.

The first through the gate were the people whose proximity to the gate and whose awareness of the breach’s implications had combined to produce the specific urgency that flight required: the merchants of the southern market district whose shops’ inventory was portable and whose family members’ locations were known and whose calculation of the capital’s remaining defensibility had produced the answer that the calculation always produced when the answer was obvious.

The merchants loaded their carts with the goods that the carts’ capacity allowed, left the goods that the carts’ capacity did not allow, and drove through the southern gate with the specific haste of men whose professional instinct for calculating risk had been the instinct that made them successful merchants and that now made them successful refugees.

Behind the merchants came the lesser nobles. The barons of small holdings and the lords of minor estates whose positions in the kingdom’s aristocratic hierarchy placed them below the council’s tier and above the common population’s tier, the specific social elevation that provided the awareness of the kingdom’s strategic situation that common citizens did not possess and the lack of obligation to the crown’s defense that the council’s tier bore.

The lesser nobles rode in carriages and on horseback, their families’ belongings loaded in the wagons that the families’ household staffs drove, the departure conducted with the organized efficiency that aristocratic households’ management training provided.

A lesser baron named Tyrell drove his carriage through the southern gate’s arch at the twelfth hour. His wife held their infant daughter in the carriage’s interior. His two sons, eleven and thirteen, sat opposite their mother with the expressions of children who understood that the thing happening around them was the thing that the stories they had been told about wars described and that the stories’ descriptions had not included the specific quality of reality that the stories’ fiction had replaced with dramatic narrative.

"Will the king hold the capital?" the eleven-year-old asked.

Tyrell did not answer. The question’s answer was the answer that the carriage’s departure through the southern gate had already provided, and the answer’s providing had been the decision that the answer’s content had demanded.

Behind the lesser nobles came the high nobles whose loyalty to the crown was the loyalty that the political calculation of survival produced rather than the loyalty that personal conviction sustained. The Duke of Ashbourne, whose territory bordered the western provinces and whose council vote had consistently favored the military option against the orcish Horde, rode through the gate at the fourteenth hour with a cavalry escort of forty household guards and the specific expression of a nobleman whose political calculation had been correct about the military option’s viability and whose correctness had been demonstrated by the military option’s failure.

The Countess of Millhaven rode behind the Duke’s escort, her carriage bearing the heraldic insignia that three centuries of her family’s aristocratic lineage had accumulated. The countess’s face at the carriage’s window carried the expression that flight from a capital produced in the features of a woman whose family had been among the capital’s founding aristocracy and whose departure was the departure that founding aristocrats made when the thing the founding had established was falling.

* * * * *

Duke Remmington waited at the provincial boundary, thirty miles south of the capital.

The Duke’s territory occupied the kingdom’s southern approaches, the agricultural heartland that fed the capital’s population and that the Duke’s stewardship had maintained through the campaign’s disruptions with the specific efficiency that Remmington’s reputation for practical governance had established across three decades of provincial administration. The Duke was not a warrior. The Duke was an administrator whose administrative competence extended to the organization of the refugee reception that the capital’s evacuation would require and the disciplinary framework that the evacuation’s disorderly elements would necessitate.

He stood at the provincial boundary’s checkpoint with two hundred soldiers from his territorial garrison and the specific posture of a nobleman whose duties included the reception of the kingdom’s displaced population and the identification of the kingdom’s displaced obligations.

The first carriages arrived at the sixteenth hour. Remmington’s checkpoint officers processed the arrivals with the administrative precision that the Duke’s protocols demanded: names recorded, household inventories documented, destination assignments provided. The refugees were directed to the provincial towns that the Duke’s administration had designated as reception centers, the towns whose food supplies and housing capacity had been assessed and allocated in the planning that Remmington had conducted since the barbarian advance’s trajectory had suggested the capital’s eventual investment.

The Duke of Ashbourne’s carriage arrived at the checkpoint at the eighteenth hour. Remmington met the carriage personally.

"Your Grace," Remmington said.

"Duke Remmington," Ashbourne responded, from the carriage’s window. "I am relocating my household to my western estates until the capital’s security is restored."

"Your household is welcome in the southern province, Your Grace. Your person, however, requires documentation."

"Documentation."

"The crown’s edict regarding the defense obligations of the kingdom’s noble houses. The edict specifies that noble houses whose territorial obligations include the contribution of military forces to the capital’s defense are required to maintain their presence in the capital during the defense’s duration unless the crown authorizes departure. Your Grace’s departure was not authorized by the crown."

Ashbourne’s expression shifted. The shift was the shift that a nobleman’s expression produced when the nobleman’s calculation of survival encountered the administrative obstacle that a different nobleman’s interpretation of duty imposed on the calculation’s implementation.

"The capital is falling, Remmington. The walls are breached. The barbarians are in the streets. The defense’s duration is the duration of a city that is being lost."

"The defense’s duration is the duration that the king determines, Your Grace. The king has not determined that the defense’s duration has ended. The king is in the capital. The king is fighting. Your Grace is not."

"You would detain me."

"I would document your departure and its circumstances and the documentation would be available to the crown’s judicial review when the crown’s circumstances permit the review’s conduct. Your Grace is free to proceed to the western estates. The documentation proceeds with you."

Ashbourne’s carriage continued south. The documentation was noted. The administrative mechanism that Remmington represented was the mechanism that the kingdom’s institutional structure provided for the specific purpose of recording the actions that the kingdom’s members took during the kingdom’s crises, the recording that the crises’ resolution would use to distinguish between the members who had held and the members who had not.

The nobles who held did not pass through the southern gate. The Baron of Lettra, whose council votes had oscillated through the campaign’s political phases but whose personal conviction about the kingdom’s obligations to its crown had not, remained in the capital with his household guard of eighty soldiers. The baron’s family, his wife and three children, departed through the southern gate at the twelfth hour with the escort that the baron provided and the specific farewell that a nobleman gave to his family when the nobleman’s remaining presence in the place the family was leaving was the nobleman’s choice rather than the nobleman’s obligation.

"Father," his eldest daughter said, at the gate.

"Go south. Duke Remmington will receive you. The south is safe."

"Will you come?"

"When the king comes. Not before."

The daughter looked at her father. The look was the look that children gave to parents who had chosen to stay in the place that the children were leaving, the look that contained the understanding that the staying might be the last thing the parent did and the understanding’s acceptance was the farewell’s specific weight.

The baron returned to the barricade line. The defense continued. The capital bled. And the southern gate remained open for the people whose choice was flight, while the streets behind the gate held the people whose choice was the other choice.