Battle · Book 5 · High Mage · Mixed
The great river battle at Gavard Crossing, where the Castali defended the Poros against a gurvani army marching on Gilmora. Minalan coordinated the warmage corps from Northbridge with Terleman; Captain Arborn's Kasari rangers screened the north bank. Sire Koucey, now scarred and possessed by Sheruel, commanded the gurvani host and parleyed under flag of truce. Prince Tavard's improvised cavalry charge broke the gurvani right flank. Tavard then accepted Koucey's chivalric surrender and let the gurvani army withdraw with its slave-coffles intact -- the worst political mistake of his early career.
The Battle of the Poros — called the Battle of Gavard Crossing at the time, the popular name borrowing the river afterward — was the great pitched engagement of the spring campaign in northern Gilmora. The strategic stake was the bridge at Gavard, the last functional crossing on the Poros, and behind it the entire Cotton Country of Gilmora.
The gurvani army was marching east out of the Penumbra under the command of Sire Koucey — or rather, under the command of the burn-scarred shell of Koucey, his body kept alive and his mind possessed by Sheruel as the Dead God's field general. Koucey had been the first human thrall taken at Boval Castle and had risen to command the gurvani host on the Cotton Front. The slave-coffles of nearly half a million Gilmoran captives moved with the army toward the Penumbra. Stopping the army meant stopping the coffles.
To force the issue, the Castali coalition had destroyed every other bridge on the Poros, leaving Gavard as the only viable crossing. Behind Gavard stood:
The gurvani army's vanguard arrived at Northbridge at dusk and immediately flew a flag of truce. Minalan and Captain Arborn crossed the plank that was the last functional remnant of Gavard Bridge to parley in the village square. The gurvani delegation was led by their priest Kagathag, with Sheruel-in-Koucey present in the background but not directly speaking, and a small pack of fell-hounds (the carnivorous mounts the gurvani had bred under the Dead God's direction).
The parley clarified the demand: free passage south for the army and its captive train. The Castali refusal clarified the rest: the bridge would not be yielded.
The gurvani made no attempt to force the bridge that night. Instead a force of two thousand goblins gathered half a mile downriver and held a strange conclave on the bank without crossing. Minalan's scouts reported no rafts, no swimmers, no foragers cutting timber. By midnight Minalan suspected (correctly) that the river-front engagement was a feint: the real campaign was elsewhere.
That elsewhere — the actual Sheruel objective — was the great Alka Alon citadel of Anthatiel, far to the north, which the Dead God's sorceries were already freezing from the Lake of Rainbows down. The Battle of the Poros was meant to draw the Castali muster into a fixed defensive position so the Anthatiel campaign could move unopposed. Minalan would not figure that out until afterward.
The gurvani host pressed the bridge at dawn, with goblin shamans on the north bank attempting to push warspells across the Poros. The Magical Corps under Terleman parried each casting. Conventional infantry held the bridge. Carmella's engineers had pre-trapped the river causeways with binding-spells against trolls. The line held.
Count Salgo, judging the timing, took the opportunity to cross the bridge and engage the gurvani in the open field beyond it — not a relief sortie but a counter-blockade, intending to keep the gurvani from using the bridge themselves at all. He was committed when Prince Tavard's mounted column blundered into the gurvani right flank from the south, having marched up the wrong road in chivalric eagerness.
Tavard, faced with the situation, did the only thing a young cavalryman knew how to do: charge. The Prince Heir's mass cavalry strike caught the gurvani right unbraced and broke it. The horde began to fold.
Then Koucey-Sheruel asked for a second parley, this time directly to Tavard rather than to Minalan. The young Prince Heir, untutored in war and steeped in chivalric romances, sat down across a roundshield from a man he believed to be a defeated noble general and discussed terms.
Koucey toasted the health of Good King Rard, accepted Tavard's personal courtesy, and surrendered the field on the conditional understanding that his army would be allowed to withdraw intact, including its slave-train.
Tavard agreed.
I suppose I should not be too angry with the Prince Heir. He was practicing warfare with the chivalric ideal in mind. He had sat across a roundshield from Sire Koucey and discussed the surrender like civilized gentlemen. After sending nearly half a million Gilmorans into the Umbra in chains as slaves and sacrifice, Koucey toasted the health of Good King Rard and took his remaining soldiers home. That's what civilized feudal lords do.
— Minalan, on the surrender
The gurvani army withdrew north under Tavard's safe-conduct, taking with it the entire slave-coffle of nearly half a million Gilmoran captives bound for the Umbran sacrificial pits. Minalan, when he learned what Tavard had done, could neither countermand the parley (it had been chivalrously witnessed) nor force the issue without breaking the political alliance with the Castali crown. The captives were lost.
The strategic post-mortem was unsparing. The Castali had won the field, broken a gurvani host with a single cavalry charge, and at the parley table had handed back nearly half a million human lives to the Dead God's priests. Tavard's public reputation as a chivalric prince was made; the private reputation Minalan and the warmagi formed of him — incompetent, ego-driven, dangerously naive — would shape the next decade of court politics.
The captive train passed into the Penumbra. Most of the half-million were sacrificed in the Umbra over the months that followed. A fraction were retained as slaves; an even smaller fraction would be freed years later in the Great Emancipation raids led by Tyndal and Rondal.
Sheruel's strategic deception worked: while the Castali muster was held in defensive position at Gavard, the gurvani-Korbal joint expedition crossed the frozen Poros further north and marched on Anthatiel. By the time Minalan understood the diversion, the Lake City was already under siege.
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