Chapter
Four
Jett was awakened by a shout; he
sat up and, with the training from being a scout for four years, instantly took
in his surroundings. He was in a tent,
there was shouting, light… Then, he was awake, he remembered everything and he
jumped into action. Grabbing his sword
he peeked through the folds of his tent entrance. He had expected to see chaos but it wasn’t
anything like that, his men were running, that was certain, but they were
running in squads, to wherever they were needed. Jett ran over to a large rock that jutted out
of the ground near his tent, he climbed up on it to see better what was
happening, mostly it was dark, but around 120 yards away, next to the opening
of the pass, there were some tents on fire. Even squinting Jett couldn’t tell
how many, there was too much glare in the darkness to tell. Jett took off running towards the flames; he
wanted to be there, leading his men if they needed it. After a minute of running Jett got to the
place that was on fire, only to find that it wasn’t really that bad, they had repelled
the attack well, they had lost maybe 30 tents, usually a tent fire was a
crushing blow, taking out over half of the men’s sleeping quarters, it was
considered one of the best surprise attacks by the best military strategists. Thinking about this Jett hadn’t realized that
the enemy was still there, and that his men were holding them off. Jett ran up and helped, it gave the men an
extra boost of moral seeing their leader fighting alongside them, risking his
life to save more of their lives. After
around five minutes the enemy had all died or had ran off.
Jett gave some orders to a few of
the squads to clean up the area, told some of the commanders to set up a heavy
watch to make sure the intruders wouldn't come back, and then took three
companies of one hundred and fifty men each with him to Dan’s camp, which he
knew would be the least prepared for this attack and would have suffered the
most losses. They jogged over to his camp, so as to conserve energy if fighting
was needed. When they arrived Dan’s forces had beaten off the enemy, but
hundreds of tents were still blazing.
They all set to work with buckets of water prepared for this purpose and
saved what they could. After three hours
they had finished with the ‘clean-up’, and Jett’s companies returned back to
base. Jett stayed up all night, helping
with whatever was needed, and running back and forth between camps and trying
to figure out how much they had lost in this attack.
Finally, when morning came, Jett
looked around; there was black smoke billowing everywhere, the sunrise looking
blood red through it casting a dark mood on the land. All was quiet, except for in the background, the
muffled sound of men talking in hushed tones and shovels constantly hitting the
ground, they were burying their dead comrades. In the end, eleven thousand men
had been killed, and fifty nine were still missing. Five thousand of those had been killed by the
fire in Dan’s camp and three thousand more had been killed in the fighting
there afterwards. This hadn't been some
simple ambush to throw them off guard, this had been the first stroke, the
first attack. Most interesting to Jett,
the casualties in his camp were only two hundred and thirty seven, a
ridiculously low number compared to the other camps. Jett would have thought that his camp would
have taken the most casualties, since they were right next to the entrance… perhaps, he reasoned, they had figured that
his would be the strongest and had sort of, skipped over it. Yes, that was probably it.
As Jett was thinking about this, he saw Keth and walked up to him, “Are
you alright?” Jett asked, “I forgot about you in the heat of battle…”
“Hah,” Keth said, “I’m fine,
slept right through everything in fact…. Quite a show your men put on though,
they were hardly even scathed!”
“Perhaps…,” said Jett, “I have
suspicions that the enemy sort of skimmed over this camp, thinking it to be
very well defended.”
“I suppose that could have
happened,” Keth said, “but I kind of doubt it.
From what your men say it seems as though they fought just as many men,
they just handled it better than the others.”
“That could be,” Jett said
skeptically, “I still doubt they faced quite as many as Dan’s camp…”
“Well, I suppose that you could
be right, and you are right sometimes… just not usually.” And with that Keth
gave Jett a wink and walked off.
Jett sighed; he never could win
with Keth. After about half an hour Naphe
and Dan showed up at Jett’s command tent to talk of strategy. With a 6th of their forced gone
they’d have to revise it a bit. Not that
any of them knew what to change; they had already had a pretty good plan. Jett suggested staying in the valley and
making the enemy come to them. Dan and
Naphe still both thought that they ought to fight them on the open plane. Jett
rolled his eyes, “Fine, what if we set up some sort of contraption that can
help us, like a make shift catapult?”
That might work, “Naphe said,
“But we don’t have materials.”
“Then what should we do Naphe?”
Jett asked.
“Well,” Naphe said, “I’m not
sure…” Jett sighed. It would be a long day.
That night they had finally
figured out what to do, they were going to strike camp in the morning, and
move. Jett passed the orders down the
line so that by morning everyone would know what was going on. Jett lie down and fell asleep almost
instantly, since he’d been awake for nearly twenty four hours.
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