A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor
Chapter 1456 - 1456: The Grand Strategist - Part 2

The men fought in their tournaments as valiantly as if they were fighting on a battlefield. They fought as if the High King himself was watching them, and they were inclined to impress him and gain his favour.

'I suppose Queen Asabel is here, if there is anyone that they might impress,' he thought dryly to himself. Not out of denigration for Queen Asabel – but even with her presence, he didn't think that the men ought to have been inclined towards such a fervour. Even the monetary rewards ought not to have been enough.

There was a very real feeling that they were fighting for far more than a man's traditional glory. There was a look of fire in the majority of their eyes, as if they were determined to claim the mantle of a hero.

He'd made a comment to Karstly on the matter, just a couple of hours earlier. "They fight as if the Gods are dancing right next to them," he'd said.

The foppish General had heard the remark with a sneer, however. He didn't ever seem inclined to be brought into philosophizing at another man's invitation. He seemed a creature that only resorted to poetics when he knew it to be inappropriate and irritating for the other party. "Naturally, General. The whole kingdom is astir from the glory of our campaign. How could they not throw themselves into the fight?"

General Blackwell had grunted an acknowledgement at that. With the campaign being complete, he could feel that sentiment of change arising up from amongst the masses. The people were beginning to believe once more in the magical era of times passed, where men who were not mages seemed wizards nonetheless. Where it seemed as if even the most ordinary of men were touched by the Gods and capable of an overwhelming grandness.

"Perhaps that is the feeling then," General Blackwell reasoned. "Perhaps this is the sentiment of the soldiery when they see opportunity. Everyone has begun to dream once again."

He said that, nearly by his lonesome, on the roped corner of the melee arena, watching his officers go to war with one another. Sparks flew violently enough to interrupt him from his pondering on occasion, but he had seen so much fighting by now, he found his concentration was not what it had been on the first day of the tournament.

'An era of change,' Blackwell said to himself with a shudder. 'Now there's a frightening prospect.'

He wondered whether he was the only one in the kingdom who thought it to be such. Change invited competition, and competition invited war. As a General, his occupation was indeed war – but he preferred his battles to be well away from the wars of his home castle. If there was change to be arising in the country, then that was where the warring was to be had. He didn't want to give voice to anything too ominous, but he wondered how many people saw as he did, the very internal power structures of their country beginning to shift.

And who illustrated that fact more firmly than Oliver Patrick? For a young man of his age to have organized a tournament of that size, what could have pointed more firmly to that Time of Tigers and that era of change that had been prophesied? He felt it as firmly as he felt the deep mud coiling around his ankles. The longer he stood, the more he sank into it, and the more he forgot its scale.

It bid that he act, and do something, but there was no amount of thinking that seemed capable of shining a light in its depths. He continually came to the same decision that he'd come to many times before – that of trusting in his subordinates, and empowering the newcomers where he could. He had the sense that every soldier would need their skills to be at their sharpest for whatever was to come.

'Partly, it will be my fault as well,' Blackwell thought to himself. He knew the business with the Verna and the treaty that he'd secured – along with its time limit – all but pointed to a single case in which their world was likely to explode. He didn't dare to think that their strategic situation would return to the moderate state that it had been in before. He didn't even dare to predict how far it might go, but he knew that the Stormfront could not possibly escape all its fissures.

The crowd leaned heavily on the ropes around the edges of the arena. The peasantry in their ragged clothing, those that had travelled a distance from the neighbouring villages just for the events. It was always striking to Lord Blackwell to see the difference between some of the peasantry of those poorer villages, and the peasantry in Solgrim. He was reminded of a depth of poverty that he could hardly conceptualize, even when he looked at it dead on.

For them, the tournament was an intoxicant, like one of those Yarmdon drugs smuggled over the border. They watched with a desperateness, as if to block all the outside world out, for fear of the resumption of their circumstances.

Oliver Patrick had given them an additional hope, in allowing the peasantry their chance to compete, and a good few of them had gone a good distance, enough to do other folk of their rank proud.

It was as if, to Lord Blackwell, when he looked around at times, that a great city had suddenly sprung up out of the long grass of the plains that had been flattened for this occasion. The peasantry had brought their own tattered tents of canvas and holey-sacks, and strung them up near the edge of the forest. Then there were the tents of the soldiers, plain, for the most part, and large enough to house ten or more of them at once. And then there were the frilled coloured tents of the nobility, with their sigils sewn into them.