“Yes, sir,” they said as one. After briefly putting their heads together to see who went to get which officer, they hurried away.
Benjamin the Heated Ham reached the farmhouse first. That didn’t surprise Bell. Benjamin commanded the center, and Bell’s headquarters lay in his part of the field. He saluted. “Good evening, sir,” he said. “We’ve weathered the first day. That’s something, anyhow.”
“That’s not all we’ll do, either,” the commanding general declared. “Let them throw themselves at our works again tomorrow. Let them bleed to death charging field fortifications.”
“Yes, sir,” Brigadier Benjamin replied. “I hope they do. It’s a pity you didn’t feel that way when we assaulted John the Lister at Poor Richard, sir.”
Before Bell could do anything more than glare, Colonel Florizel limped into the farmhouse. “Reporting as ordered, sir,” he said.
“Hello, Colonel,” Bell said discontentedly. He still wanted to replace Florizel, but surviving brigadiers were so thin on the ground in the Army of Franklin, he hadn’t been able to do it. He couldn’t complain about the way the colonel’s wing had fought today. “I congratulate you, your Excellency, for withstanding the southrons’ hardest thrusts.”
“I’m no wench, sir. They’d better not go thrusting at me,” Florizel said. Bell had seldom laughed since the wounds that mutilated him, but he did then. Benjamin the Heated Ham threw back his head and let out a long, high, shrill guffaw. Colonel Florizel went on, “Sir, I’m not sure the gods-damned southrons did strike us harder than they did anywhere else.”
“What? Don’t be silly. Of course they did,” Bell said. “Everything our spies could learn in Ramblerton plainly shows Doubting George planned to throw the main weight of his army against our right. You had the key assignment, and you did a beautiful job of carrying it out.”
“I hope so, sir,” was all Florizel said.
Again, Bell didn’t get the chance he would have liked to argue the point further. A couple of more men on unicorns rode up to the farmhouse together. Ned of the Forest and Brigadier Stephen the Pickle, who commanded the left wing of Bell’s footsoldiers, came in side by side. Ned looked grim; Stephen looked sour enough to show how he’d come by his nickname.
Without preamble, Stephen said, “We’re in trouble.”
Ned of the Forest nodded. “We’re in big trouble,” he said.
“I’m not surprised you feel that way,” Bell said. “You, sir” — he pointed at Stephen the Pickle- “you were the one whose line gave way. You were the one whose men retreated. If they’d held their ground-”
“They’d all be dead, every gods-damned one of them,” Stephen snarled. “It was a gods-damned avalanche coming down on us. You ought to sacrifice a lamb to the Lion God they didn’t go to pieces and run like hells. After what they went through today, I’d have trouble blaming ’em if they had.”
Lieutenant General Bell took another pull from his little bottle of laudanum. He hurt no worse than usual, but maybe the drug would help calm him-and he needed calming. He glared toward Ned of the Forest. “You don’t say much.”
“No, I don’t,” Ned said. “I already told you we’re in trouble. I’d be angrier at having half my men off by Reillyburgh if I reckoned getting ’em back would have made much difference. I don’t, so I’m not. But Hard-Riding Jimmy’s outflanked us, and gods only know how much that’ll cost us in the morning.”
“Why didn’t you stop him?” Bell yelped.
“On account of I couldn’t,” Ned said bluntly. “Too many riders, too many quick-shooters.”
“You mean they’re loose? You mean you let them get loose?” Bell demanded.
“I thought I just said that.” Ned aimed a cold glower at the commanding general. “I might have had a better chance with all my men. I told you about that and told you about that, but did you want to listen? Not likely.” But then he softened a little. “Of course, like I said, I might have got licked any which way. Hard-Riding Jimmy’s got more riders than you can shake a stick at.”
“What are we going to do?” Benjamin the Heated Ham said. “If they have turned our flank, we’d be nailing ourselves to the cross giving battle tomorrow.”
“If they have turned our flank, how are we supposed to retreat?” Bell asked in turn. “Head right on past them? Do you suppose they’d be kind enough to give us a Summer Mountain, the way we did for them? I’m afraid I don’t think it’s likely.”
A poisonous silence followed. Benjamin, the only one who’d commanded a wing then, broke it by saying, “That was your fault… sir.”
“It was not!” Bell thundered.
More silence, even more poisonous. At last, Colonel Florizel said, “It’s a little too late to worry about what we did or didn’t do then. We can’t change that. We’ve still got some say over what we do or don’t do tomorrow, though.”
“That makes good sense, Colonel,” Ned of the Forest said. “Odds are we won’t pay any attention to it, but it makes good sense anyways.”
“All right. What can we do?” Bell said. “If we fall back, we fall into the southrons’ hands. Does any man here say otherwise?” He waited. No one spoke. He nodded. “Well, then, what does that leave? As far as I can see, it leaves only one thing-fighting and doing our best. Does any man here say no to that?”
His wing commanders and commander of unicorn-riders stirred, but none of them claimed he was wrong. Stephen the Pickle did say, “They’re going to pound on us in the morning, and my wing’ll get it worse than anybody else’s, on account of we’re the ones who’re flanked.”
“Do you think we would do better trying to sneak past Doubting George’s men and skulking off toward the north?” Bell asked.
The other officers stirred once more. Even so, they didn’t-couldn’t-ask to retreat. “All right, gods damn it,” Benjamin the Heated Ham said savagely. “We’ll fight ’em. I don’t think it’ll do us much good, though.”
“Nothing’s going to do us much good now,” Ned said. “We’ll have to see what sort of scraps and pieces we can save, that’s all.”
Lieutenant General Bell had demoted men for talk far less defeatist than that. Now he watched his wing commanders somberly nod. He felt like nodding himself. He felt like it, but he didn’t. He said, “We fought hard today, and we stopped most of them. We can do it again. We will do it again.”
He tried to put his own heart into his subordinate commanders. He tried-and felt himself failing. “They’re going to hammer on us tomorrow no mater how hard we fight,” Stephen the Pickle said.
“We’ll do our best. It may keep a few more of us alive,” Benjamin the Heated Ham said. He saluted and strode out of the farmhouse without so much as a by-your-leave. Ned, Stephen, and Florizel followed, leaving Lieutenant General Bell all alone.
No one had ever accused Bell of being a reflective man. There were good and cogent reasons why no one had ever leveled such a charge at him, chief among them being that he wasn’t a reflective man. Here tonight, though, he wished his officers hadn’t left so abruptly. He would rather have argued with them than had to face his own thoughts with no one for company.
He’d got what he wanted. Doubting George would have been impossible to beat-impossible even to confront-inside the works of Ramblerton. Now the southrons had come forth. They’d carried the fight to the entrenched Army of Franklin, as Bell had hoped they would. The only trouble was, they’d done a better job of it than Bell had thought they could. The way things stood, none of his subordinate commanders believed they could stand up under another day of attacks.
We can’t fall back, Bell told himself. Not even the wing commanders had argued about that. If we can’t fall back, we have to fight. If we fight, we have to find some way to win. All that seemed obvious. What didn’t seem obvious was what the way to win might be.
He snapped his fingers. He might have one throw of the dice left. He struggled to his feet again and hitched across the floor to the doorway. The runners on
the porch came to attention. Bell pointed to the closest one. “Order my chief wizards here.”
“Yes, sir.” The runner hurried off into the night.
The wizards came before Bell’s temper frayed too badly. They didn’t look like happy men. Bell, anything but a happy man himself, would have been furious if they had. Without preamble, he said, “The southrons will likely hit us again tomorrow.”
“Yes, sir,” the wizards agreed: a mournful chorus.
“My wing commanders fear the soldiers won’t be able to hold them back,” Bell went on.
“Yes, sir,” the wizards chorused again.
Bell scowled at them. “If the soldiers can’t, you’ll have to,” he declared. “What can you do to beat Doubting George’s men and his mages?”
No chorus this time. No answer at all, in fact. Only silence. At last, one of the wizards replied, “Sir, I don’t know that we can do anything. Everything we’ve tried today has gone wrong. We did our best to hold back the southron unicorn-riders with our lightnings. We did our best-but the lightnings went awry.”
“Gods damn it, you’re supposed to be better than those southron mages!” Bell burst out.
“Once upon a time, we were,” the wizard said. “But the southrons have had three and a half years of war to learn what we knew going in. And Doubting George has at least one very fine mage under his command.” He shivered. “We found that out at Poor Richard, if you’ll recall.”
“I found you that failed me there,” Bell snarled. “Now I find you failing me again. What are you good for except telling me what you can’t do?”
“Sir,” the wizard said stiffly, “if we weren’t holding off a lot of what the southrons have tried to do to us, things would be worse yet.”
“How?” Bell asked. “How could they be?”
“Would you like to have gone up in flames?” the wizard asked. “Would you like to have seen a pit open under our left? One nearly did.”
“All that is easy enough for you to claim,” Bell said. “It makes you sound impressive. It even makes you sound useful, by the Thunderer’s prong. But such claims are all the better for proof.”
“Oh, you can have your proof, sir. You can have it as easily as you please,” the mage told him.
“Eh? And how do you propose to give it to me?” Bell asked.
The wizard bowed like a courtier. “Nothing easier, sir. All you have to do is send us away. Then, when the fighting starts again and the southron mages start flinging their spells, you’ll see if we’ve done your army any good.”
For a moment-for more than a moment, in fact-Lieutenant General Bell was tempted to call his bluff. He started to fling up his arms and order all the mages to be gone, to head straight for the hottest of the seven hells. He started to… but he didn’t. He growled, “You haven’t got the right attitude.”
“Generals always say such things,” the wizard replied imperturbably. “They say them until they remember they need us after all.”
“You are dismissed. You are all dismissed,” Bell said. “You are not discharged from your service to King Geoffrey. I intend to fight to the end. I intend for every man in the Army of Franklin to do the same. And if I had any women in this army, I would expect nothing different of them.”
The wizards stirred. One of them began, “As a matter of-” Another one poked him in the ribs. He subsided. The wizards saluted in ragged unison. Bell sneered. Out went the wizards, noses in the air.
“Good riddance,” Bell muttered. “Gods-damned good riddance. They can’t help me. They don’t think anybody can help me. Well, to hells with what they think. We’ll lick the southrons yet, wizards or no wizards.”
He took a large, blissful swig from the laudanum bottle. Already well drugged, he felt no particular pain except pain of the spirit. After a while, thanks to the potent medicament, he stopped caring about that. He stopped caring about anything. No matter what, tomorrow would come. Doubting George would attack, or else he wouldn’t. If he did, the Army of Franklin would fight. They would win. Or they would lose. Whatever would happen, would happen.
Oh, by the gods, laudanum was marvelous stuff!
* * *
Slowly, ever so slowly, so very slowly as to seem to be tormenting Doubting George, the sun rose over the battlefield. Black faded to gray; gray took on colors. It all happened an inch at a time, though, so that from one glance across the field to the next nothing seemed to have changed.
George was less happy than he wished he would have been after the first day’s fighting. He’d driven Bell’s men back, yes, but he hadn’t routed them as he’d hoped to do. They remained in front of him, still ready to fight some more. He hadn’t wanted that to happen. He hadn’t expected it to happen.
Yawning, Colonel Andy came up beside him. “What do we do now, sir?” George’s adjutant asked. “Do we renew the attack, or…?”
“Well, Colonel, I’ll tell you,” Doubting George began. Before he could say more, though, Hard-Riding Jimmy rode up on a hard-ridden unicorn. George waved to show just where he was. Jimmy brought his unicorn-his indubitably hard-ridden unicorn-to a halt. George nodded to him. “Hello, there. Lovely day, isn’t it?”
“For a coot, maybe,” the commander of unicorn-riders answered. Sure enough, it could have been better. No sooner had the sun risen than gray clouds rolled towards it. Along with the stinks of the battlefield, the wet-dust smell of impending rain filled George’s nostrils. Hard-Riding Jimmy went on, “Sir, have you got a spyglass?”
“On my person? No,” Doubting George replied. “Can I rustle one up if I need to? I expect I can.”
“Would you please, sir?” Hard-Riding Jimmy quivered with urgency. George hadn’t seen the like since the last time he’d watched Major Alva incanting.
More than anything else, that excited quiver convinced him not to tease Hard-Riding Jimmy-too much. He shouted for a spyglass, and got one in short order. Raising it to his eye, he said, “And where shall I train this little toy?”
“North, sir,” Jimmy said. “North past the traitors’ line.”
“They’re bent back into a kind of fishhook on their left here, I see,” George remarked. “Trying to keep us from outflanking them, no doubt. Clever.”
“No doubt.” Hard-Riding Jimmy quivered even more. “They’ve tried, but they haven’t done it. Do you see, sir? Do you see?”
Doubting George scanned with the spyglass. “I see… I see standards with the gold dragon on red.”
“Yes!” Jimmy said. “Yes! Those are my men, sir, and we’re square in the enemy’s rear. If you don’t take advantage of that, sir, it’d be… it’d be criminal, that’s what it’d be. Order us to the attack! Order your footsoldiers to the attack! We’ve got the gods-damned traitors in a vise. All we have to do is close it on them.”
“Well…” George scanned some more. He opened his other eye. Hard-Riding Jimmy looked about ready to jump out of his skin, or perhaps to throttle the commanding general. Letting him do that would have been bad for discipline. It wouldn’t have been very good for Doubting George himself, either. He lowered the spyglass and beckoned for a runner.
“Yes, sir?” the young man said.
Regretfully, George decided he’d pushed Hard-Riding Jimmy as far as he could. “Order a general attack, all along the line,” he said. The messenger saluted and dashed off. Doubting George turned to the commander of unicorn-riders. “And your men may attack, too.”
“Thank you, sir. Thank you, sir!” Hard-Riding Jimmy said. For an awkward moment, George thought Jimmy was going to kiss him. The young brigadier didn’t. He dashed back to his unicorn, adding over his shoulder, “You won’t regret this, sir. You won’t, but the traitors will.”
“That’s the idea,” George answered. He wasn’t sure his commander of unicorn-riders heard him. Jimmy roweled the unicorn with his spurs. George, a fine rider himself, wouldn’t have treated a mount so harshly. But the unicorn sprang away as if it had wings on its heels. That was the poin
t of the exercise. George signaled for another runner. When the soldier came up, George said, “Tell John the Lister to press the enemy especially hard. Between him and Jimmy, I want Bell’s left broken. Broken — have you got that?”
“Yes, sir. Broken.” By the way the messenger dashed off, he might have had Hard-Riding Jimmy on his heels.
“What do you think happens now, sir?” Colonel Andy asked.
Doubting George eyed his adjutant. “Now, Colonel,” he replied, “I think we’re going to break those traitorous sons of bitches.”
Things didn’t go quite so smoothly as he’d hoped. He’d thought John the Lister, whose force greatly outnumbered the northerners facing it, would lap around the end of their line and eat them up. But the spur their wing commander had dropped back from the end of his line to the north hampered John, so that, instead of outflanking the foe, his advancing southrons met them face to face. It was a pretty piece of tactics. George would have admired it much more if it hadn’t been aimed at him.
He shouted for the spyglass again. As he raised it to his right eye, he asked Andy, “What the hells is Bell using to try to hold off Jimmy’s unicorn-riders?”
“How do I know?” Andy replied with more than a little annoyance. “You’re the one with the gods-damned glass, and I haven’t had the chance to look through it.”
“Oh. Yes. That’s right.” Doubting George felt considerable embarrassment. Having considered it, he dismissed it. He wasn’t about to let his adjutant get his hands on the spyglass till he’d had a good long look himself.
Bell had put together some kind of a line to withstand the onslaught of Hard-Riding Jimmy’s troopers, a line with its back to the rest of the Army of Franklin. Even as George watched, more northerners slipped out of the line facing his footsoldiers and hurried north to try to stop the unicorn-riders. Doubting George cackled like a laying hen.
“What’s so funny, sir?” Andy asked irritably.
Thrusting the spyglass at him, George said, “Here. See for yourself.”
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