Not enough one-legged wizards, he thought as he made his slow way out of the pavilion. If a few more sorcerers had lost limbs, they would have made sure there were better measures against these phantoms. But no such luck. He had to endure.
“I am a soldier,” he said, as if someone had doubted it. Enduring was part of what soldiers did. He hadn’t expected it to be the most important part of what he did. Life was full of surprises, some pleasant, some emphatically otherwise.
Even getting out through the tent flap wasn’t so easy as it might have been. Ducking didn’t involve just the head; it involved the whole body. And when the whole body was supported on one foot and on two crutches that wouldn’t bend no matter what… Bell counted each separate escape from the tent as a minor victory.
Getting out in the fresh air did little to refresh him: it was as hot and muggy outside as it had been within. Gray clouds came rolling in from off the Western Ocean-more rain on the way. He took advantage of the lull to peer east toward the southrons’ encampments. Hesmucet was an aggressive commander. He pushed his men up as close to their foes as they could get. It felt as if he were about to order an all-out assault along the whole line.
Lieutenant General Bell nodded in grave approval. If I commanded the Army ofFranklin, that’s how I would lead it: like a fighting man, like a tiger ready to spring. Go straight at the enemy and knock him down.
Of course, if General Hesmucet came straight at Commissioner Mountain, he might accomplish nothing more than to knock himself down. Would he realize that? Bell didn’t know. His own instinct was always to test, to probe, to attack. After all, the foe might give way.
“Sir?” someone said at his elbow. He turned his head, the only part of him that would turn readily. There stood Major Zibeon. His aide-de-camp asked, “What did Joseph the Gamecock want, sir?”
“Nothing of any consequence, Major,” Bell answered. “He warned me to stay alert against any possible attack from the southrons.”
“They’d be fools if they tried it,” Zibeon said. He had a hard face. When he smiled, the smile was hard, too, hard and predatory. “Here’s hoping they’re fools.”
“Yes, here’s hoping,” Bell said, and wondered if he meant it. If the southrons did assail Commissioner Mountain, he couldn’t see them succeeding, either. Did he want Joseph the Gamecock winning a victory? For the kingdom’s sake, he supposed he did. For his own…
Even if Joseph wins here, having him lead the Army ofFranklin can’t be good for the kingdom, Bell thought. This army would be much better off with a soldier who’s not afraid to use if for some real fighting-a soldier like, well, like me, for instance.
Major Zibeon said, “I believe, sir, we’ve got about as fine a defensive position here as I’ve ever seen. Gods damn me to the hells if I can see how the southrons will be able to go through us or around us.”
That was about the last thing Lieutenant General Bell wanted to hear. He looked down his long, thin nose at the aide-de-camp. “Really, Major?” he said. “Do you think Commissioner Mountain is as sure to hold as Proselytizers’ Rise was?”
Zibeon started to answer him, then turned red. Proselytizers’ Rise, of course, had fallen to the southrons. If it hadn’t fallen, General Hesmucet’s army wouldn’t have been able to move so deeply into Peachtree Province. Everyone had declared the northern position there was impregnable. Bell couldn’t say anything about that from firsthand knowledge, not when the healers had had him in their grip then.
At last, Zibeon said, “It wasn’t the position that went awry there, sir. It was the sorcery.”
“And who’s to say something won’t go wrong here as well?” Bell returned. “My view is, you cannot rely on a position to save you. You have to rely on the soldiers manning the position.”
“Yes, sir,” his aide-de-camp said. “And aren’t our northern men the bravest in the world?”
“They were,” Bell replied. “They were, before they spent weeks scurrying from one set of entrenchments to the next, never daring to face the enemy out in the open. Now, Major, who knows?” Zibeon pondered that, then shrugged. I haven’t convinced him, Bell thought. But he’d convinced himself. That was all that really mattered.
* * *
Rollant looked at the traitors’ field works on Commissioner Mountain with all the enthusiasm of a man with a toothache looking at a trip to the puller. “Are they really going to send us up there?” he asked.
“Why not?” Smitty said blithely. “We took Proselytizers’ Rise, so they must think we can do anything.”
They’d both been part of the mad climb to the top of Proselytizers’ Rise. They’d been part of a smashing victory there. For the life of him, Rollant couldn’t figure out how they’d done it. He had trouble seeing how they could hope to do it again, too.
“Remember when all the northerners in the world came at us near the River of Death while we were up on Merkle’s Hill?” he said. “We threw ’em back, and we didn’t have anything like what the traitors have waiting for us.”
Sergeant Joram said, “That will be enough of that. If we’re ordered to advance, we will advance, and that’s all there is to it. You’ve got no business trying to demoralize Smitty here.”
“Don’t worry about it, Sergeant,” Smitty said. “I didn’t have any morals to speak of before Rollant started talking at me.”
“If I want your foolishness, be sure I’ll ask for it,” Joram said. He made a good sergeant: he growled as nastily at Detinans as he did at blonds. And if his superiors gave an order, he would see that everybody he led obeyed it-even if it does get every last one of us killed, Rollant thought.
He asked, “Sergeant, are we going to try and drive them off those hills?”
“I don’t know,” Joram said irritably. “Nobody’s given me any special orders yet, that’s all I can tell you. And I don’t think Lieutenant Griff knows anything, either… Gods damn it, Smitty, not one single, solitary, fornicating word.”
“I didn’t say anything, Sergeant,” Smitty protested. He looked as innocent as a heavenly messenger. If Rollant hadn’t been marching beside him for a couple of years, the pose might have convinced him. As things were, he let out a snicker that almost turned into a guffaw.
But all the guffawing stopped not long afterwards, when Colonel Nahath assembled the regiment and said, “Men, we are going to go up against Commissioner Mountain tomorrow morning-not just us, mind you, but most of Doubting George’s army. We’re going to go up against it, and we’re going to take it.”
“Lion God’s claws!” somebody shouted. “Has Hesmucet lost his whole mind?”
Had a serf in Palmetto Province yelled anything like that about a Detinan-any Detinan, not just a general-he would have been sorry as long as he lived, which probably wouldn’t have been long. Rollant had escaped from serfdom a long time before, but what Detinans reckoned liberty still looked like license to him a lot of the time.
The regimental commander didn’t even get upset. He just shook his head and said, “No. The idea is, Joseph the Gamecock has to think this stretch of the line is too strong to be taken. He won’t have that many men covering it. And because he won’t, we’ll swarm up the side of the mountain and gods-damned well take it away from him.”
“Maybe we will,” Smitty said out of the side of his mouth. “Maybe a lot of us’ll come down the mountain on our backs, too.”
That also struck Rollant as pretty likely. He had no say in such things, though. All he could do was fight hard and hope the men set over him didn’t make too many idiotic mistakes. So far, at least, General Hesmucet hadn’t. But if he did, Rollant couldn’t even retreat till all his comrades were falling back, too. He wasn’t just fighting as himself. He was fighting as a blond before ordinary Detinans, and couldn’t afford to look like a coward.
He didn’t sleep much that evening. He’d had too long a look at the position Doubting George’s army would assail when the sun came up. He knew he would much sooner have defended that posit
ion. But he was going to have to attack it, and could only trust in the gods that things wouldn’t prove so bad as they seemed.
When the regiment assembled the next morning, Smitty handed him a scrap of paper. “Pin this on my back, will you?”
Other pairs of men were going through the same ritual. Rollant grimaced. “You think it’ll be that bad?” he asked.
“Don’t know,” Smitty answered. “But this way, if I fall up there, my name and where I live’ll be on my body. My folks can find out what happened to me and make the offerings to take me on to the next world. If I get real lucky, they may even ship my carcass home so my old man can light the pyre.”
“That’s the kind of luck I could do without,” Rollant said. But then, after a moment’s thought, he added, “Have you got any more paper?”
“Sure do,” Smitty said. Before long, Rollant had his name and street pinned to the back of his gray tunic, too.
“Have faith, men,” Lieutenant Griff said. “Have faith, and victory will be ours.” His voice broke a couple of times, but he was very young. He had some paper pinned to his uniform, too. How much faith has he got? Rollant wondered.
Every catapult under Doubting George’s command started bucking and hurling then. Stones and firepots rained down on the traitors’ field works. Repeating crossbows sent streams of darts at the northerners, making them keep their heads down. Horns blared all along the southrons’ line.
“Forward!” Griff shouted. Brandishing his sword, he went forward himself. He might-he did-sometimes lack for sense, but he’d shown plenty of courage since taking over the company for Captain Cephas.
“Forward!” Sergeant Joram echoed. Rollant wondered if the underofficer had the brains to be afraid. He did himself, and he was.
Up the slopes of Commissioner Mountain ran the men from the wing Lieutenant General George commanded. Rollant shouted, “King Avram and freedom!” as he had in every fight. The words still rang true. Whether they could help him win a victory here was another question.
In spite of the battering the southron engines had given their trenches, the traitors were still full of fight. Heads appeared in the entrenchments. Soldiers in blue started shooting at the advancing southrons. The northerners had catapults of their own on Commissioner Mountain. They started tearing holes in the southrons’ ranks. Had Doubting George really believed the enemy wouldn’t have enough men to defend this part of their line? If he had, he should have done a little more doubting.
“We aren’t going to make it,” Rollant said to Smitty as they drew within a hundred yards of the traitors’ works. Men were going down as if scythed. If Hesmucet felt like feeding his whole army into this sausage machine, Joseph the Gamecocks’s defenders might kill every man in it.
Smitty didn’t argue with him, which convinced him he was right-Smitty always thought the regiment could do more than it really could. All the farmer’s son said now was, “Well, we’ve got to keep trying a little longer.”
Echoing that, Lieutenant Griff shouted, “Forward!” again. He was brave. Rollant suspected he was a little bit crazy, too, to push the advance here.
A few feet away, the company standard-bearer took a crossbow quarrel in the chest. He stood there swaying for a moment, then crumpled to the ground. The banner, gold dragon on red, fell, too.
Rollant grabbed the staff before the silk of the flag could touch the ground and be deviled. If that wasn’t madness, and not a little of it, he couldn’t imagine what was. Standard-bearers were always targets. A standard-bearer charging straight at massed crossbows? A blond standard-bearer charging straight at massed crossbows? It’s a good thing I’ve got my name on the back of my uniform, he thought.
But he went forward even so, holding the company banner high. And he shouted a new war cry, one to which he’d never before felt entitled: “Detina!” If he couldn’t shout the kingdom’s name while carrying its flag, when could he?
Crossbow bolts hissed past him, some so close he could feel the breeze of their passage on his cheeks. But he wasn’t afraid. He didn’t know why, but he wasn’t. He felt exalted-not as if they couldn’t hurt him, but as if it wouldn’t matter if they did. And if that wasn’t madness, he couldn’t imagine what would be.
That mood of glorious indifference lasted till he came within perhaps twenty yards of the enemy’s entrenchments. What broke it wasn’t a bolt tearing into his flesh, but rather a hand tugging on his arm and a desperate voice crying, “Back, Rollant! We’re falling back!”
Rollant looked around like a man awakening from a fever. Sure enough, the southrons had done everything flesh and blood could do. They were streaming east down the forward slope of Commissioner Mountain, bringing their wounded with them, leaving their dead behind.
“Come on!” Smitty said urgently. “They’ll kill both of us if you wait around here.”
Exaltation drained out of Rollant like wine from a cracked cup. The dregs left behind were exhaustion and terror. He turned away from the enemy’s trenches and stumbled back toward the encampments from which they’d set out. The only thing he remembered to do was hold up the flag.
By some accident or miracle, no quarrels pierced him or Smitty before they got out of range. But when Rollant reached up to tug at his hat, he discovered one hole through the brim and one through the crown that hadn’t been there before. If I were a couple of inches taller… He didn’t want to finish that thought.
“They aren’t chasing us,” he remarked when he and Smitty had got back among their fellows.
“Why should they chase us?” Smitty answered. “They’ve whipped us. All they want to do is hold us back, and we sure aren’t going forward now.”
That was a self-evident truth. “Gods, I could use something wet,” Rollant said. He noticed the banner he was carrying had several new holes in it, too. None in me, though, he thought. Some god or another was watching out. None in me.
Sergeant Joram handed Rollant a flask. He took a big swig, thinking it held water, and almost choked to death on a mouthful of potent spirits. The stuff seared its way down to his belly. As he wheezed, Joram set a hand on his shoulder, something the sergeant had never done before. “You did good,” Joram said.
With a shrug, Rollant answered, “I hardly even knew what I was doing.”
“You’ve always fought well enough,” Joram said. “But up there on the mountain… up there you fought like-like a Detinan.”
Plainly, he knew no higher praise. Rollant wasn’t delighted with the way he’d put the praise he gave, but didn’t care to quarrel about it. “Thanks,” he said, and took another, smaller, swig from the flask. This time, he was ready for the flames in his throat.
Lieutenant Griff came up to him. “Will you carry the standard again?” he asked.
“A standard-bearer shouldn’t be a common soldier,” Rollant answered. “Will you make me a corporal?”
He waited for Griff to get angry. But the company commander only nodded. “That’s business,” he said. “Doing business is Detinan, too. I’ll go to Colonel Nahath with it. Bargain?”
If Rollant weren’t a blond, Griff would have promoted him on the spot. He was sure of that. But few blonds ever got any chance at all for promotion. He nodded and saluted. “Yes, sir. Bargain.”
* * *
Lieutenant General George looked at the reports his brigade commanders had brought him. Turning to his adjutant, he shook his head and said, “We lost a godsawful lot of men up there, and what did it get us? Not bloody much.”
“Bloody is the word, sir,” Colonel Andy agreed. “Close to three thousand soldiers with holes in them, and we didn’t hurt the traitors nearly as much.”
“That’s the rub, gods damn it,” Doubting George said. “We can afford more losses than they can, because our army’s twice the size of theirs. But we can’t afford a lot more losses than theirs, not if we don’t shift ’em an inch. And we didn’t.”
“I know, sir,” Andy said. How could you help knowing? George thought. W
e’re still where we were when we tried to takeCommissionerMountain, not somewhere on the other side of it. If we’d taken it, Joseph would have had to retreat again, and the northerners would have lost the plain behind it, and Hiltonia andEphesus to boot. Colonel Andy went on, “But General Hesmucet thought it was worth a try.”
There was no answer to that, none that would have kept George properly subordinate. He shifted his ground instead: “Since it didn’t work, we have to figure out what to do next.”
“The rain’s stopped,” Andy said. “That’s something.”
And so it was. Moving men and catapults and victuals when the roads turned into mud-bottomed creeks was just this side of impossible. Doubting George knew that was another reason Hesmucet had struck here: he’d already had men and supplies in place. But, unfortunately, so had Joseph the Gamecock.
“What can we do?” Doubting George wasn’t really asking his adjutant; he was thinking aloud. “Did I hear rightly that we got a foothold on the western bank of Snouts Stream?”
“I believe so, sir,” Andy answered.
“We’ll have to hang on to that,” George said. “We’ll have to hang on to that for dear life, as a matter of fact. If we can do with it, then the attack on Commissioner Mountain may turn out to have been worth something after all.”
“Here’s hoping.” Colonel Andy didn’t sound as if he believed it.
George set a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t fret yourself, Colonel,” he advised. “You’ve got to remember, things could be worse. I’d much rather be here than down on Merkle’s Hill with all the traitors in the world roaring for our blood. That wasn’t so very long ago, you know.” He laughed.
“What’s funny, sir?” his adjutant asked.
“Nothing, not really,” Lieutenant General George answered. Andy sent him a wounded look, but he didn’t explain. He didn’t think anyone else would find it funny, anyhow. How could he tell Andy he’d managed to talk himself out of his own doubts?
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