“You do have to remember, though, attacking a position is a lot harder than defending one,” Griff went on, cheerfully oblivious to the way he’d angered Rollant. “We would have to pay the price of winkling the northerners out of their trenches.”
“Mm, yes, sir, that’s true.” Even if Rollant was annoyed with Griff, he couldn’t deny the officer made sense. “Still and all, we’ve already got a whole lot more men than the traitors do.”
“Corporal, if you want to go petition the general commanding for an immediate attack, you have my permission to do so,” Griff said.
Rollant tried to imagine himself marching into Doubting George’s headquarters and doing just that. It wasn’t that George didn’t know who he was. George did: he was the man who’d ultimately approved Rollant’s promotion to corporal up in Peachtree Province. But that made things worse, not better. It was only likely to mean he’d come down on Rollant harder than he would have otherwise.
“No, thank you, sir,” Rollant said hastily.
Lieutenant Griff nodded as if he’d expected no different response. Odds were he hadn’t. And yet… now that Rollant thought about it, more than a few Detinans would have taken Griff up on his offer. Detinans were convinced they were all just as good, all just as smart, as anybody else. To a common soldier, only a little luck separated himself from Doubting George. Why wouldn’t the commanding general want to listen to him?
I sometimes wonder what besides my hair and my blue eyes separates me from Detinans, Rollant thought. There it is. I think George knows more about fighting a war than I do, and down deep a lot of them don’t believe any such thing. Do I have good sense, or do they? His shoulders went up and down in a shrug of his own. Considering some of the things generals on both sides had done during this war, the answer wasn’t altogether clear.
“Any which way,” Griff said, “I don’t think you’ll have to wait very long.”
Rollant looked north toward the traitors’ campfires once more. Do I really want to try to storm those lines? he wondered, and nodded to himself. By the gods, I really do. To Lieutenant Griff, he said one word: “Good.”
* * *
Lieutenant General Bell stared south toward Ramblerton. The stare was hungry and frustrated, the stare of a hound eyeing a big, juicy chunk of meat hung too high for it to reach.
Here and there, Bell could see gray-clad southrons marching along the works that defended the capital of Franklin. In the distance, the enemy soldiers might have been so many gray lice crawling along the back of some huge, hairless animal. Getting rid of lice in the field was never easy. Bell knew that all too well. He’d been lousy himself, a time or two. Getting rid of the southrons in Ramblerton looked harder yet.
He’d told Ned of the Forest he wouldn’t try to storm the place. He didn’t see how he could, not when Doubting George’s men outnumbered his and had the advantage of those redoubtable redoubts. (Such things hadn’t stopped him at Poor Richard, of course, but these were in a different class altogether.) He’d expected George to try to take advantage of southron numbers and attack him, but that hadn’t happened yet. Bell was beginning to wonder if it would. Waiting seemed an anticlimax, and a squalid one at that.
His right leg itched. He settled his crutch in his armpit and reached down to scratch. Only when his good hand met nothing but air did he remember he had no right leg, though itching was the least of what it did.
For once, though, apparent sensation from his missing member didn’t appall him, didn’t send him grabbing for the tiny bottle of laudanum. Given what he’d been thinking, he’d wondered if he was lousy again. Realizing he wasn’t came as no small relief.
A messenger saluted and waited to be noticed. When Bell nodded, the man said, “Sir, Brigadier Benjamin would like to speak to you.”
“Oh, he would, would he?” Bell considered. He didn’t care to be lectured or harangued, as wing and brigade commanders had been in the habit of doing since this campaign began. On the other hand, Benjamin the Heated Ham hadn’t bothered him so much as several other officers, most of them now dead. As if Bell were a god, he inclined his head in acquiescence. “He may come forward.”
Benjamin saluted with all due courtesy. He was politeness personified when he inquired, “Sir, may I ask you a question?”
“Go ahead,” Bell replied. “I don’t necessarily know that I’ll answer it.”
“Oh, I hope you do, sir,” Benjamin said earnestly. “You see, it’s important.” He paused for dramatic effect. He’d got his nickname for bad acting, and he still lived up to it. Bell half expected him to clasp his hands together in front of his chest. He didn’t, but he did send Bell an imploring look.
“Well, ask.” Bell knew he sounded gruff. He didn’t care. He had no patience for melodrama now.
Benjamin the Heated Ham at last came to the point: “All right, sir. What I want to know is, now that we’ve come this far, what are we going to do? What can we do, facing those works?” He pointed toward Ramblerton.
Ned of the Forest had wanted to know the same thing. Have they no confidence in me? Bell wondered. As he had to Ned, he said, “We’ll wait here for Doubting George to assail our lines. When he does, we’ll beat him back.”
“Sir, if what the spies and prisoners say is true, the southrons have a hells of a lot more men than we do,” Benjamin observed.
Bell glowered. He knew that, but didn’t care to be reminded of it. He said, “Everyone keeps telling me this army doesn’t care to fight away from the protection of entrenchments. Do you claim the men will not fight even when they enjoy that protection?”
“No, sir. I never said any such thing.” Benjamin the Heated Ham backtracked in a hurry.
“What precisely did you say, then?” Bell inquired with icy courtesy.
“Sir, this army will fight like a pack of mad bastards. The men will do what you tell them to do, or they’ll die trying. If Poor Richard didn’t teach you that, nothing ever will,” Benjamin said. Bell realized that wasn’t exactly praise for his ordering the army to fight at Poor Richard, but his wing commander hurried on before he could show his displeasure: “It all depends on what you order them to do. If too many gods-damned southrons come at them, they’re not going to win regardless of whether they’re in entrenchments or not.”
“Do you believe Doubting George has that many men, Brigadier?” Lieutenant General Bell said. “I, for one, do not.”
“I don’t know for certain, sir,” Benjamin answered. “All I know for certain is, like I said, he’s got a lot more than we do.”
“Regardless of which, I still maintain the southrons are a cowardly lot,” Bell said. Now Benjamin the Heated Ham stirred, but the commanding general overrode him: “Consider, Brigadier. The southrons have outnumbered us all along, yet we have advanced about two hundred miles against them, and they have yet to dare stand against us. Whenever we have faced them in the field, we have defeated them.” Benjamin stirred again. Again, Bell refused to notice. “We whipped them at Poor Richard. They yielded not only the battlefield but also prisoners and wounded. If that doesn’t prove them cowards, I don’t know what would.”
“Sir, you weren’t up at the front at Poor Richard,” Benjamin said. “No offense to you; with your wounds, you couldn’t be. But the southrons aren’t cowards. If you don’t believe me, ask Patrick the Cleaver or For Gods’ Sake John or John of Barsoom or Provincial Prerogative or Otho the Troll or-”
“How can I ask them? They are dead. Have you a crystal ball that will reach to Mount Panamgam, beyond the fields we know?” Bell asked.
“No, sir. That’s my point. They wouldn’t be dead if the southrons were cowards. Cowards don’t kill half a dozen brigadiers in one fight.”
“If that’s your point, it’s a feeble one,” Bell said. “It wasn’t the enemy’s courage that killed our officers. It was their own. They closed with the foe, and gloriously fell in service to their kingdom.”
“Have it however you like,” Benjamin the Heated
Ham said. “But I wouldn’t be doing my duty if I didn’t warn you you’d be making a mistake by counting on the southrons to play the craven.”
“Thank you, Brigadier.” Bell sounded-and felt-anything but grateful. “You have passed on your warning. I shall bear it in mind. Now that you have performed this duty, you are dismissed.”
“Yes, sir.” Benjamin saluted and strode off, stiff-backed and proud.
Lieutenant General Bell muttered something pungent under his breath. He was sick to death of officers stalking away from him. He’d seen altogether too much of it on this campaign. Some of the brigadiers who’d neglected military courtesy had paid for their bad manners with their lives. But Ned of the Forest and Benjamin the Heated Ham were still very much around. Bell couldn’t even punish them for their insolence. After the fight at Poor Richard, the Army of Franklin had lost so many commanders, he couldn’t afford to sack any more. Things creaked bad enough as they were.
The general commanding remembered the losses. He conveniently forgot that his orders at Poor Richard had led to them. He also forgot that those orders might have had something to do with the surviving officers’ lack of confidence in him. As far as he was concerned, they had no business behaving any way but respectfully. King Geoffrey had put him in charge of the Army of Franklin, and he had every intention of leading it to glory… somehow.
He shifted his weight on his crutches. That proved a mistake-his ruined left shoulder and arm screamed at him. He took out the little bottle of laudanum, yanked the stopper with his teeth, and gulped down the drug that helped keep him going. Glory didn’t concern itself with ruined shoulders and missing legs. A man who stopped to think about the cost would never find the true magnificence of battle. Whether such a man might find victory was another question that never occurred to Bell.
Little by little, as the laudanum took hold, he floated away from his pain-wracked body. As long as that wrecked arm and missing leg didn’t torment him, he could forget all about them, just as he forgot about other inconveniences on the way to the victory that surely lay ahead.
One of those inconveniences was Doubting George’s army. He couldn’t very well attack it if it stayed in the works of Ramblerton. Oh, he could, but even he doubted that that would have a happy ending. He needed to lure that army out of those works if he was to have any chance of beating it. There he and his subordinate commanders agreed.
But how? He’d hoped simply sitting in front of the city and making his army a tempting target would suffice. Evidently not. He needed some new stratagem to make sure the southrons came forth. What, though? What could he do that he wasn’t already doing?
Suddenly, he snapped his fingers. His right hand had not forgotten its cunning-and he chuckled at the cunning his brains showed, too, despite (or perhaps, he thought, even because of) all the laudanum he had to take.
“Runner!” he called.
“Yes, sir?” the closest messenger said.
“I need to speak to Ned of the Forest just as soon as you can bring him here,” Bell replied.
“Yes, sir,” the messenger said again, but then, in a puzzled voice, “Wasn’t he here not too long ago?”
“What if he was?” Bell demanded. “I am the commanding general, and I am entitled to summon the officers of my army if I need to confer with them. Would you care to quarrel with that, Corporal?”
“Uh, no, sir,” the messenger said hastily. Bell fixed upon him the stare that had led to his being compared to the Lion God. The messenger left in a hurry.
Bell had to wait a while before Ned of the Forest returned. For one thing, the unicorn-riders camped at some little distance from the rest of the men in the Army of Franklin. For another, Bell suspected Ned of being slow to obey orders on purpose. Ned was still fuming because the general commanding had pulled back some of his riders to fight with the rest of the army at Poor Richard.
“Well, too bad for Ned,” Lieutenant General Bell said. A couple of the runners standing not far away sent him curious looks, but none of them had the nerve to ask a question. As far as Bell was concerned, that was as it should be.
In due course, Ned of the Forest did ride up. Slowly and deliberately, he dismounted from his unicorn. He made a small production of tethering the animal to a tree. Only after he’d done that did he nod to Bell. “What can I do for you… sir?” His tone and manner made it plain he tacked on the title of respect very much as an afterthought. He didn’t bother saluting.
“I have had an idea,” Bell announced.
“Have you? Congratulations,” the commander of unicorn-riders said.
“Thank you.” Only after the words were out of his mouth did Bell realized Ned might not have meant that as a compliment. He gave the other officer the same glare as he’d used against the luckless runner. Ned, though, was made of sterner stuff. He stared back, as intent on intimidating Bell as Bell was on intimidating him.
The silent, angry tableau could have lasted even longer than it did, but Ned’s unicorn tried to jerk free from the tree to which he’d tied it. It failed, but the motion distracted both men. When Ned of the Forest looked back, some of the cold fury had left his face. “What is your idea, sir?” he asked.
“I aim to send some of your unicorn-riders against Reillyburgh, to harass the southrons there and to draw Doubting George out of Ramblerton,” Bell said.
“Didn’t I tell you before, you’d better not divide your forces? Didn’t you have enough of splitting up my men when we were down at Poor Richard?” Ned said. “Look what you got there.”
“You are insubordinate,” Bell said.
“And you are a gods-damned fool,” Ned retorted. “By the Thunderer’s thumbs, you haven’t got enough men now to stretch from one bank of the Cumbersome River to the other. There’s gaps on both sides. And now you want to take soldiers away from this scrawny little army? You must be clean out of your tree.”
“Can you think of anything likelier to lure the southrons away from Ramblerton than a threat to one of their outlying garrisons?” Bell said. “We cannot fight them while they are in there. They must come forth.”
“Be careful what you ask for, on account of you’re liable to get it,” Ned of the Forest said.
“And what, pray tell, does that mean?”
“If they come out… sir, do you really reckon we can handle ’em?” Ned asked.
“Of course we can. Of course we will. Would I have come all this way if I expected my campaign to fail?”
“I don’t know anything about what you expect,” Ned answered. “All I know is, I expect you’re going to be sorry for splitting up your army the way you’re doing. You haven’t got enough men to fight Doubting George as is, let alone if you go detaching a piece of your force here and another piece there.”
“I am the commanding general,” Bell declared in a voice like frozen iron. “Obey my orders, Lieutenant General.” Ned snarled something that sounded more like a wildcat’s hiss than real words. But he did salute as he stormed off. Bell thought that meant he would obey. If it didn’t, the Army of Franklin could get probably scrape up a new commander of unicorn-riders, too. Somewhere.
* * *
“Sir?” A gray-robed mage stuck his head into Doubting George’s office and waited to be noticed.
George made him wait for quite a while. At last, though, the southrons’ commander had no choice but to acknowledge the fellow’s existence. “Yes, Lieutenant? What do you want?”
“It isn’t me, sir.” The wizard made a point of distancing himself from the message he had to deliver. “It isn’t me,” he repeated, “but Marshal Bart is on the crystal ball, and he needs to talk to you.”
“Ah, but do I need to talk to Marshal Bart?” Doubting George replied. “I wonder. I truly do wonder.”
“Sir,” the young wizard said desperately, “sir, Marshal Bart orders you to come and talk with him.”
“Oh, he does, does he?” George said. The scryer nodded. George sighed and got heavily to his fee
t. “Well, I suppose I’d better do it then, eh?”
“Yes, sir. I think that would be a very, a very good thing to do, sir.” The mage was all but babbling in his relief.
George didn’t think it would be anything of the sort. Only three men in all Detina were in a position to make him do anything he didn’t think would be very good: King Avram, General Hesmucet… and Marshal Bart. Avram had always let him alone. Hesmucet, marching toward Veldt and the Western Ocean, was otherwise occupied. Bart, off in front of Pierreville laying siege to Duke Edward of Arlington and the Army of Southern Parthenia, should have been otherwise occupied, too. But, as commander of all of Avram’s armies, he insisted on poking his nose into what should have been Doubting George’s business.
Although George made the walk to the chamber where the scryers hunched over their crystal balls as slow as he could, he did eventually get there. The lieutenant dogged his heels like a puppy. Several other scryers in the room beamed when George did at last appear.
He sat down on a stool in front of a crystal ball from whose depths Marshal Bart’s blunt, weathered features stared. “Reporting as ordered, sir,” George said blandly. “How are things over in Parthenia?”
“Tolerable,” Bart answered. “We’ve got Edward by the neck. Sooner or later, we’ll throttle him. But I don’t want to talk about Parthenia. I want to talk about Franklin, about Ramblerton.”
“You’re the marshal.” George sounded cheerier than he felt. “Whatever you want, that’s what happens.”
That was a mistake. Doubting George realized as much as soon as the words were out of his mouth-which was, of course, too late. Bart said, “I’ll tell you what I want. I want what I told you I wanted a week ago. I want you to go out there and smash the Army of Franklin.
“I intend to do exactly that, sir,” George answered. “As soon as I am ready, I will do it.”
“And just when do you expect to be ready, Lieutenant General?” Marshal Bart asked pointedly. “You’ve already dithered too long.”
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