“That should just about do it, I expect,” General Bart said. “You go get yourself a good night’s sleep. We’ll start bright and early in the morning.” He nodded to show Phineas he really was finished. The mage bowed and saluted and fled. If the traitors run as fast as he does, Bart thought, we’ll win ourselves a great and famous victory tomorrow. Wouldn’t that be fine?
He thought about going back to his pavilion and getting himself a good night’s sleep-thought about it and shook his head. He wouldn’t be able to rest till the battle was decided. A yawn tried to sneak out of his throat. He stifled it unborn. He’d had practice going without sleep, and knew he could still come up with the right answers when he had to. He might take a few heartbeats longer than he would while wide awake, but the answers wouldn’t change.
A quiet voice came out of the darkness: “Is that you, sir?”
“Yes, it’s me, Colonel Horace,” Bart replied. “I have a habit of prowling the field. You’ll just have to bear with me.”
“Yes, sir,” his aide-de-camp said. “You would do better with some rest, sir.”
“I’d do better if we’d driven the traitors just the way I hoped we would,” Bart answered. “Nothing ever works out quite so smoothly as you wish it would.”
“Fighting Joseph did well in the north,” Horace said, though his tone of voice showed something less than complete delight.
Noting as much, Bart chuckled and said, “You sound like a man watching his mother-in-law fall off a cliff.”
“I’m glad he won.” Colonel Horace shook his head. “No, by the gods, if I can’t be honest with you, sir, where can I? I’m glad we won. If we had to win somewhere, though, I wish it were at the other end of the line.”
“Well, so do I,” Bart said. “But Funnel Hill doesn’t seem to be quite what Lieutenant General Hesmucet and I thought it was. He’ll have another go at it tomorrow.”
“And may the gods grant him better luck then.” Horace coughed a couple of times, plainly aware he was opening a delicate subject: “What do you plan to do here in the center tomorrow, sir?”
“I’m still trying to make up my mind about that, Colonel, if you want to know the truth,” Bart replied. “I think Lieutenant General George did about as well as could be expected yesterday, given what he was up against in Proselytizers’ Rise. Still and all, though, I am weighing in my mind a larger demonstration against the Rise tomorrow. That should give Count Thraxton something to think about.”
“Good.” In the dim red glow of the campfires, Horace’s face looked more aquiline than ever. “He doesn’t think any too well. The more he has to do it, the better our chances.”
“I don’t believe that’s quite fair,” General Bart said. “It’s not the Braggart’s wits that land him in trouble. It’s his temper.”
“You’re too kind, sir,” his aide-de-camp said. “It’s that nobody can stand him and he can’t get along with anyone, himself included.”
Bart chuckled. “I didn’t say that. I’m not necessarily going to tell you I think you’re wrong, but I didn’t say that.”
“Have you let Lieutenant General George know what you’ll require of him, sir?”
“No, not yet.” The commanding general shook his head. “I will want to talk it over with him before I give the order. If he doesn’t think such a demonstration would serve any useful purpose, we’ll probably try something else instead. He’s the one who’s been ramming his head against Proselytizers’ Rise all day. He’ll have a better notion of what will and won’t work than I do; I’m sure of that.”
“A lot of generals wouldn’t care about their underlings’ notions,” Horace observed.
“I care. I care a great deal,” Bart said. “That doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll do anything George asks me to. But I do want to listen to what he has to say before I make up my own mind. That last is the most important thing. I bear the responsibility, so I get to give the orders in the end. It’s only fair.”
“As may be, sir,” Horace said. “By a lot of people’s standards, you seem to bend over backwards to be fair.”
“I try to see things as clear as I can,” Bart said. “The way I look at it, that’s how you do a job and get a fighting chance of having it stay done.”
Colonel Horace plucked at his bushy mustache. “You may well have a point.”
“And I may well be talking through my hat, is what you’re thinking.” Bart chuckled. “Well, perhaps I am. Everyone is strange in his own way: I’m sure of that. Take me, for instance. Here I am a soldier, and I have to have my meat cooked gray, for I shudder if they bring it to me all bloody.”
“I’d noticed that,” his aide-de-camp replied. “Seems a pitiful thing to do to a poor, innocent beefsteak, but that’s your concern and no one else’s. No accounting for taste.”
“Which is what I just said, only all boiled down to a proverb.” Bart set a hand on Horace’s shoulder. “Why don’t you go get yourself some shuteye, if you’re able?” He saw Horace hesitate. “Don’t fret about me, son. I’ll sleep when I’m ready, I promise you, but not until then.”
“Very well, sir.” Horace sounded grudging and grateful at the same time. After a last crisp salute-he seemed to do nothing that wasn’t crisp-he strode off, each of his strides almost twice as long as one of Bart’s would have been.
Bart looked this way and that, his head swiveling on his neck as an owl’s might have done. Am I really by myself at last? he wondered. Can I really get a quarter of an hour to hear myself think? People have been yelling at me the whole day long. How can I hear what’s inside my own head when I’m trying to take care of everybody else?
An owl hooted, somewhere off in the trees not far away. In the distance, he heard the moans of wounded men who hadn’t been brought in yet. They didn’t distract him; he’d heard them before, and was as used to them as any man not dead of soul could be.
He paced along: one lean, medium-sized man in charge of the destinies of more soldiers than anybody this side of the gods. That it should be so struck him as strange even now, but so it was. He’d rocked Thraxton during the day, but he hadn’t broken him. That meant those soldiers were going to have to do more work tomorrow, and he was the one, the only one, who could decide what sort of work it would be.
With a sigh, he murmured, “I’d better go see Doubting George, the way I told Colonel Horace I would.”
Seeing Doubting George wasn’t what he most wanted to do. He knew the lieutenant general couldn’t care for his friendship with Hesmucet. And now Hesmucet hadn’t done what he’d set out to do-and, almost worse, Fighting Joseph had -and Bart was going to rely on George in a way he hadn’t planned to do. If George wanted to throw all that in his face, how could he stop the man?
He couldn’t. He knew it too well. But he walked toward Doubting George’s pavilion anyway. The kingdom needed what they could do together, even if they weren’t any too fond of each other while they did it. An alert sentry called out, not too loud: “Halt! Who goes? Stand and name yourself.”
“I’m General Bart,” Bart said, also quietly. “Is Lieutenant General George awake?”
“Advance and be recognized, uh, sir,” the sentry said. When he did recognize Bart, he saluted almost as precisely as Colonel Horace had. “Sorry, sir.”
“Don’t be,” Bart said. “Just answer my question, if you please.”
“I’m awake,” Doubting George said before the sentry could reply. He stepped out through the tentflap. “What can I do for you, sir?”
“I was thinking about what my whole army ought to do tomorrow, Lieutenant General,” Bart said, “and I was also thinking it might help the cause if your men here were to make a grand demonstration against Proselytizers’ Rise, as if they really intended to storm the heights.”
“If that’s what you need, that’s what we’ll do,” George said at once.
“Do you think your men could carry the Rise?” Bart asked.
Again, George spoke without hesitation: “
Sir, I don’t think there’s a chance in all the hells that they could. But if you give the order, they’ll try with everything they’ve got in ’em.”
“You’re an honest man, Lieutenant General,” Bart said. “Most officers would say, `Of course, sir. My men can do anything.’ “
“Maybe that’s true,” Doubting George replied. “And maybe, begging your pardon, that’s how we keep sticking our dicks in the meat grinder, too. Of course, the traitors have lieutenant generals and brigadiers who say the same thing, so I suppose it evens out.”
“I hope so,” Bart said. The image, when he briefly let himself think about it, made him want to clutch at himself. With a distinct effort of will, he put it out of his mind. “Now let’s get down to business, shall we? With any luck at all, we will be able to hang on to the trenches at the base of the Rise.”
“Maybe that’s true, but maybe it’s not,” George said. “We couldn’t in today’s fighting. The northerners up at the top of the Rise can shoot almost straight down at us when we’re in those trenches. Still and all, we’ll try at your command.”
When the sun rose the next morning, the spectacle Lieutenant General George’s soldiers made was as impressive as any man could have wanted. Four divisions formed in a line close to two miles wide. Flags fluttered in front of them. When horns called for them to advance, they did so in perfect step. “They’re well-drilled men,” Bart said. “Thraxton won’t dare pull any soldiers away to Funnel Hill with all that coming straight at him.”
“No, indeed, sir,” Doubting George agreed. “It’s an expensive way to use them, I’m afraid, but I don’t suppose it can be helped.”
“Look at ’em go,” Bart said. “They look as though they could roll over anything, like a great wave out on the Western Ocean.”
“They’re going to roll over those trenches, that’s certain sure,” George said. “They got into them yesterday, too, but they couldn’t stay.”
“They’re in them now,” Bart said. He scowled as the enemy atop Proselytizers’ Rise rolled stones and shot firepots and rained bolts down on the men. Then he ground out something startling and pungent, for he’d been shocked out of his usual impassivity. “Who in the seven hells ordered them to go up the Rise? They’ll be slaughtered!”
“It wasn’t me, sir,” George said, “though your orders before yesterday’s fight-”
“Never mind those,” Bart said. “As you must know, those were for use if the lightning struck, and it didn’t. I heard the commands you gave this morning, and they were just what I wanted. But if that charge fails-and what else can it do?-somebody’s going to catch it, by all the gods. Can we do anything to call them back?”
Doubting George shook his head. “Not a thing, sir, not now. It’s too late.” Bart was dreadfully afraid he was right.
* * *
Normally, night suited Count Thraxton. Fewer people were awake to demand things of him and otherwise arouse his irascibility. If only the rest of the world would leave me alone, he often thought, I would be the happiest man alive.
But he was not happy now, and the world had no intention of leaving him alone. The world, in fact, was demanding things of him, and demanding things in a loud, piercing voice. The world, or at least what seemed like all the southrons in it, had spent the whole day doing their best to destroy his army, and their best had proved alarmingly good. Sentry Peak was lost, and Thraxton had no idea how to get it back.
“We haven’t enough men,” he grumbled.
“We might have, if you hadn’t sent James of Broadpath away to hells and gone,” Cabell of Broken Ridge said, his tone sharpened by the flask of brandy in front of him on the table.
Thraxton glared at his wing commander. “I suppose you will tell me next that Wesleyton does not need retaking,” he said icily.
“I didn’t say that,” Cabell replied, and took another swig. “But if we lose here, what difference does it make whether Earl James takes Wesleyton or not? If we cannot hold our position, he won’t be able to hold his.”
“In that case, it is incumbent upon us not to lose here,” Thraxton said. “Or would you disagree with me? Would you care to comment on how the southrons drove the men of your wing from Sentry Peak?”
“I can give it to you in half a dozen words, your Grace,” Cabell of Broken Ridge snapped. “We did not have enough men. Is that plain enough?” His voice rose to a shout.
Thraxton growled something down deep in his throat. He turned away from Duke Cabell to Roast-Beef William, remarking, “Our right had no trouble holding, I will have you note.”
“Our right is anchored on Funnel Hill, sir, I will have you note.” Cabell put very little respect into Thraxton’s title. “The ground I was charged to defend, unfortunately, did not offer us any such advantages.”
Roast-Beef William coughed. In the firelight, his face looked not much ruddier than Duke Cabell’s. A sheen of dried sweat did a good job of counterfeiting grease, though. He said, “Begging your pardon, sir, but my wing didn’t have such an easy time as all that holding on to Funnel Hill. The gods-damned southrons look to have come up with a mage who’s actually good for something.”
“A showman. A mountebank,” Thraxton said contemptuously. “I saw some of his little illusions from my headquarters here. He is good for frightening children; I have no doubt of that. But for doing anything that should seriously disturb a fighting man?” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Lieutenant General, but no.”
With another cough, Roast-Beef William also shook his big head. “And I’m sorry, too, Count Thraxton, but that’s not what the mages attached to my wing say. As far as they’re concerned, he’s the nastiest son of a bitch to ever wear gray. Haven’t you got their reports?”
“I’ve had more reports than I ever want to see,” Thraxton said. “Since your wizards succeeded in neutralizing this terrible, terrible southron, I assume he couldn’t be all that devilish, and I have other things to worry about.”
“Such as what, your Grace?” Duke Cabell asked. “Such as what? What is the world coming to when the southrons assail us with sorcery and we do little or nothing to strike back? You are supposed to be a famous thaumaturge in your own right, are you not? Such talents are better seen than talked about, if anyone cares in the least for my opinion.”
Thraxton knew that people who didn’t care for him called him Thraxton the Braggart. Every once in a while, somebody like Ned of the Forest would do it to his face. Duke Cabell hadn’t, not quite, but he’d come too close-especially since, with his rank, he was immune to most of the reprisals Thraxton might use.
And, to make things worse, Roast-Beef William coughed once more and chimed in with, “If we ever needed some good, strong sorcery, now is the time.”
“I shall give you everything that is in me,” Thraxton said. “I have always given King Geoffrey everything that is in me. Our land would be better off if more folk in it could say the same.”
“A free Detinan may say anything his heart desires,” Cabell of Broken Ridge observed. “Whether it be the truth or something else, he may speak as he pleases.”
William coughed again; he was beginning to sound like a man with a bad catarrh. “Your Grace, I do not think such comments aid our cause.”
“Very well, Lieutenant General,” Cabell said. “With your commendable” -he made the word into a sneer- “grasp of matters tactical, what do you think would aid our cause? How, being badly outnumbered as we are, do we lick the southrons?”
His sarcasm stung. But he’d asked a real question, an important question, even so. Count Thraxton leaned forward, the better to hear what Roast-Beef William would say. He hoped Roast-Beef William had an answer. If he does, I’ll steal it, he thought without the slightest twinge of guilt.
But William only coughed yet again and muttered to himself. At last, impatiently, Thraxton coughed, too. Roast-Beef William said, “I’m sorry, your Grace. The only thing that occurs to me is that we might beat them with sorcery. Our manpower will
not do the job, not even with the advantage of ground we hold.”
Duke Cabell said, “That’s the first sensible thing I’ve heard in this conference.” He took another swig from his brandy flask.
“It’s the first sensible thing I’ve heard in this conference,” Thraxton said. “Certainly more than all the countless, senseless complaints I’ve had aimed at me.”
“If you like, your Grace, we can continue this discussion through our friends,” Cabell said. “Although you do not act like a gentleman, by blood you are one.”
“As you undoubtedly know, regulations prohibit an officer of lower rank from challenging his superior,” Thraxton said. “Nevertheless, however, I will be happy to give satisfaction at your convenience following the battle, if in truth that be your desire.”
He spoke with a certain gloating anticipation. Duke Cabell licked his lips, suddenly not so sure of himself. He had a reputation as a redoubtable swordsman, but so did Thraxton. And who but a fool would challenge a mage to a duel? All sorts of… interesting things might go wrong.
“Gentlemen, please!” Roast-Beef William said. “I’m sure nobody meant any offense whatsoever. We’re all just trying to lick the enemy as best we can, and we’d do well to remember that, in my opinion.”
“Quite right.” Cabell of Broken Ridge bowed to Count Thraxton. “My apologies, your Grace, and we can worry about carving each other’s livers another time.”
“Very well,” Thraxton said. “I accept your apology, your Grace.” Cabell looked unhappy; Thraxton offered no apology of his own. Doing so never crossed his mind. As usual, he didn’t think he’d done anything to cause offense. He went on, “Our colleague is probably correct. We do need magecraft as both shield and spear against the southrons. I shall have the necessary spells prepared by the time fighting resumes in the morning.”
“Can we rely on it?” Duke Cabell asked. He might not have known he was offending Count Thraxton with his question, but Thraxton was acutely aware of it.
Still, the commander of the Army of Franklin said only, “You can.”
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