Herald of Steel

Camius was the type of pragmatic person who thought it was far better to face one’s problem head-on rather than burying one’s head in the sand like an ostrich and wishing it would go away.

While for Cambyses, she found herself in a bind.

The nineteen-year-old could either accept Camius’s analysis and act accordingly and take on a huge burden of responsibility.

Or she could dismiss them as being unsubstantiated and take the easy route.

And she found herself oscillating between the two.

Now this might seem like a weird thing to ponder on as clearly the former was the safer choice.

But there were so many examples of people taking the latter route, the route where the higher authorities rejected their intelligence reports and acted on their own, both this world and Alexander’s previous world, that even just listing the names of all such events would be enough to fill a dictionary.

And this happened due to a variety of reasons, such as the leaders not trusting the source, feeling those spies were being misled or even double agents, laziness and thinking it was a lot of work, or simply suffering from plain old hubris, believing their judgment to be better than the information presented to them.

Perhaps the most famous example of this would be the leader of the Soviet Union Stalin ignoring all his intelligence networks warning him about the German attack.

Even when the Luftwaffe invaded the Soviet air space for months, Stalin bought the German explanation that those planes simply got lost.

Even when it was reported that the entire Germans army was stacking their forces by the Soviet border, Stalin only ordered that the Soviet soldiers not do anything to antagonize the Wehrmacht.

And even when a German soldier had defected to the Soviet side on the eve of the German offensive and warned the Soviets that the entire Wehrmacht was about to crash into them literally hours from now, Stalin still did not buy it.

Instead claiming that the soldier was a foreign spy sent there to sow discord between the friendly nations.

So it was really not that far-fetched to think that Cambyses would choose to dismiss Camius given that the reasons for Tibias not attacking them were much more plausible here.

And Camius might very well be just jumping to conclusions without knowing the full picture.

After all, the story could easily go like this- the Kaiser family had asked for Tibias’s help to attack the Margrave, and Perseus’s levy was for that.

So as the girl tried to come up with an answer from behind her desk, she really regretted not being able to contact the one person she wanted advice from the most-Alexander as at the moment he was still on the ship, and so was unavailable to be contacted via a messenger bird.

Cambyses felt she could really use his input here.

“Is there a chance they are attacking someone else?” She tried this alternative answer as a last-ditch attempt.

But got a shake of the head.

“Tibias has only one land neighbor-us.”

“And they will never launch an offensive across the Mad Sea during the winter. The waters around here become too turbulent around this time of the year.”

Camius gave a wry smile as he answered.

“…..” Hearing this Cambysis slightly closed her eyes to try and think, until a while later she reached a conclusion.

And that was to take Camius’s word more seriously than her own imaginary judgment.

Hence Cambyses decided to convene a council meeting the morning after to let the others know of the matter

And there a decision on how to handle the threat was soon reached before noon and it was the unanimous decision of the lords to err on the side of caution and verify Camius’s claim.

So to that effect, the following courses of action were decided to be taken

“Lord Grahtos will be in charge of sending scouts into the mouth of the Cisran hills to keep an eye out for any army.”

“While here in Zanzan, we will raise an army of 50,000 infantry and cavalry under General Menes.”

“And if we do spot the enemy, we will march out to meet them.”

Menicus the eldest council member officially announced the group’s decision.

While Cambyses seemed to prefer this alternative strategy, “Couldn’t we defend from inside the city?” 𝗻𝐨𝐯𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝗺

“Our walls are thick and strong. And we have enough food until reinforcements can arrive from the other nobles.”

This was certainly a viable strategy and appeared riskless in Cambyses’s option.

But she was shut down by the other military leaders.

“My lady, please have trust in us military veterans. We know what we are doing.” Menicus felt that hiding behind a wall was exactly what a woman would do and so curtly shot back.

‘Real men take charge and destroy the enemy in open combat, thus earning great honor and glory,’

As an old traditional military commander, Menicus certainly preferred such open and aboard tactics compared to abhorrent sieges and turtling.

While Menes, hearing Menicus’s barbed reply quickly chimed in to try and make the answer much soother for the girl, comfortingly saying,

“My lady, even if we hole ourselves inside the walls and stay safe, Tibias can then lay waste to our countryside.”

“Kill, rape, and plunder the people.”

“Will the people still follow us after that?”

“Also remember, we have all our brick-making kilns outside the city. That will surely be destroyed.”

“Where will our various construction projects go then?”

“Thus it will be prudent to defeat them before they can reach us.

Menes appeared surprisingly diplomatic in his speech.

And he was joined by Melodias, who pointed, “Mmmn, also remember that Cantagena is losing its war with Exolas because it’s always running to hide inside its walls.”

“Now it has lost all its courage to even fight Exolas on open ground.”

“We should never let that happen to us.”

With all these said, it was apparent that

the military leaders had decided to that in the case of an attack, the Tibians would be intercepted at the Cisran hills, about 100 km from Zanzan city.

Now Cambyses certainly wanted to say some more things in defense of her strategy.

But she ultimately kept them to herself.

She knew she lacked even a tenth of the prestige that Alexander did, and so it was the military leaders who decided how the campaign would be conducted.

And these men had seemingly made their decision.

And it was due to a few reasons.

There was of course actual strategic reason.

But there was the reason that in the event of a siege, their own fiefdoms which they had just begun to develop would be demolished.

They naturally were reluctant to see that.

And lastly it was because they wanted to achieve a glorious victory over Tibias and earn credit and accolades.

After all, there was little honor or achievement in successfully defending a siege as compared to winning an outright victory.

And it was only human for all the council members wanted to showcase their ability to advance their careers and peerage.

Thus the three reasons combined to produce the determined course of action.

While Cambyses hid her pout and said to herself, ‘Hmmph! If husband was here, these old coons would be simply nodding and bowing. Hateful!’

Cambyses was kind of right here.

If it had been Alexander who had made the suggestion, the other members would have certainly given it a much deeper thought.

But Alexander had earned that privilege of making the other give pause and consider what he said for a second.

And he had achieved that by showcasing his ability again and again in multiple, stacked against the odds, battles.

Something that Cambyses was yet to replicate.

Hence it was only natural for the much more experienced military commanders to ignore her.

Would you rather trust veterans with decades of experience?

Or a nineteen-year-old girl?

Besides, it was not as if Cambysees was 100 % correct either.

Because her decision was based without knowing about the torsion catapult, whose addition would have drastically changed the equation.

And so, only time would tell who was right.

All these decisions were made while Alexander was incognito because he was still making his journey across the sea, and due to a lack of space on that small piece of message paper, Cambyses had condensed everything to the main points, only letting him only know just the critical bits.

After all, she didn’t think Alexander could accurately convey a detailed battle plan through the bits of scrap paper a pigeon could carry.

“Lord, is something the matter? You seem….?” The maid Maya finally revealed a trace of emotion in her voice as she watched Alexander stand stock still like a statue, only occasionally jittering his head slightly looking at the paper.

He had been so excited to receive his wife’s message that he had read it the moment he got his hand on it and didn’t even bother to enter his room or dismiss the maid.

And it was Maya’s concerned voice at last broke Alexander out of his shock.

“It’s okay. You can leave,” Immediately then he gave this reply in a hard, robotic voice, all his joy of getting here having evaporated before he turned around without looking even once at the maid as he at once set off to find Pasha Farzah or Lady Inayah or even the Queen Mother.

It was vital that they came up with an appropriate response as soon as possible.