“So that’s your estimate, Lord Ark? Do you think we’ll be ready to counterattack by then?”
“Yes, of course.”
Wise as Nia might have been, she wasn’t very familiar with military affairs, and so she trusted what I had to say. That trust made me so happy, and I didn’t want to betray it in any way.
“They’ll probably be able to scrape up about ten thousand troops, most of whom would be mercenaries. On our end, the brigade Count Farlon leads has about five thousand troops, a mix of knights and foot soldiers. If we put the town of Bigden to use, then we shouldn’t have any problems defending against them.”
Even though they were provincial towns, or maybe because of it, they had defensive walls that were an order of magnitude better than others. Bigden, being the central town of the province, was no exception to this, and its defenses would have no issue withstanding a siege.
Common knowledge dictated that those attacking a garrisoned force would need to have three to five times the soldiers attacking as the defenders. Things were generally stacked so favorably towards the defending side of a siege that some even stated that ten times the manpower of the defensive side was necessary for an assured victory.
What’s more, most of Sylvario’s forces would be mercenaries. While their numbers would prove formidable in a standard battle across open space, in a siege they quite honestly weren’t all that effective.
A successful siege required loyalty, tenacity, and no small amount of courage, and mercenaries lacked all three of those qualities. You might be able to taunt some of them into charging in by doubting their nerve, but not many were that simpleminded. Those types tended to not last long.
In this case, the employer would want the mercenaries they’d hired to charge in and die for them. But a mercenary would never throw their life away so carelessly, and thus there was already a fundamental disconnect between them. If the employer paid them a hefty amount, perhaps several times their usual fee, some of the more desperate ones might steel themselves for death, but from what we’d heard, Balthazar just wasn’t that good.
The only time mercenaries would do well in a siege would be if they did indeed have ten times the troops and proceeded to surround the garrison they were attacking in order to slowly chip away at its defenses. But seeing as they were also in a race against time, Balthazar wouldn’t be able to get that many people. This all meant that if things came down to a siege, we’d most likely win, but...
“If we do defend against them that way, it would take quite a toll on the civilian population, wouldn’t it?”
“That’s our big problem. If we knew things ahead of time, we might have been able to evacuate them all to Stonehunt and Diamoncut, but... That’s just not realistic.”
Nia looked troubled as she asked, and unfortunately, all I could do was nod as I confirmed her worries.
Bigden wasn’t a very large town, but it still had a population of a few thousand people. It would take a great number of men to safely and quickly evacuate that many, but since the brigade would be handling the town’s defense, there was no way that they could spare that many soldiers.
“The possibility they might not have enough men for a siege is also troubling,” I continued, getting a small nod back from Nia.
As I mentioned before, for a successful siege the attacking force would need three to five times the number of defending troops, but on the flip side of that, there were quite a number of cases where the attacker, not having enough men to do the job, wouldn’t go for a siege at all. This was especially true when most of the attackers would be mercenaries; their presence for the sake of sheer numbers made it common in such cases for the defending side to decide to attack themselves.
While mercenaries made their livelihoods out of fighting, it wasn’t as if all of them stoically devoted themselves to bettering their skills, so quality-wise they were all over the place. For instance, there might be some who would give even me a run for my money, while there could be others who made you wonder why they even joined in. Most of the latter group would most likely end up dead sooner rather than later, though.
Anyway, unless there was someone within their ranks who was particularly outstanding on the battlefield, it was a general rule that it was the weakest members of a troop that had the most influence.
Plus, since they hadn’t been trained in fighting in groups, they were probably terrible at reacting to a commander’s orders. Squads of mercenaries couldn’t pull even slightly difficult tactics; a simple “charge” could be all they could handle, leaving the defense to just stay in place and wait for the fight to come to them. So, while they could somehow overpower regular foot soldiers with their numbers, a unit on horseback could use their mobility to cause upset and deal a huge blow to their fighting power.
“From what I’ve seen of Count Farlon’s skills and his brigade’s proficiency, it would be well within our abilities to go on the offensive. But if we did, it would be high risk, high return.”
“Of course it would be,” Nia said, tone weakening.
It might’ve been obvious for me, but for a kind woman like Nia, the thought of sending the knights and soldiers out on the offensive to an undefended field battle would be heart-wrenching. As capable as she was, she was still young, so there wasn’t much that could be done about that. But she also wanted to avoid risking the safety of the town’s citizens in a siege.
“Then what could we do?”
“I’d like to set things up such that a field battle is all we’d need to demolish them.”
“‘Set things up’? What do you mean?”
Nia was shocked at my statement. In response, I gave her the most reliable-looking smile I could muster back. After all, I didn’t just see shock in her eyes, but hope as well. And I couldn’t call myself a man if I didn’t meet her expectations, now could I?
“Actually, I’ve been thinking of this plan for a while now, but...”
And that was why I told Nia about the idea that I’d been cooking up in secret.