Even there, a knife. He’d expected to take the hardest blows because Bell had said they would fall on the right. But Bell had been mistaken. Did Florizel also think he’d been mistaken elsewhere in the campaign? The general commanding bristled. He didn’t believe that, regardless of whether anyone else did.
“Question now is, how do we pick up the pieces? If we can, I mean,” Ned of the Forest said.
“What have we got to pick up?” Stephen the Pickle asked sourly. “We left most of the pieces on the field.”
“That is not so,” Bell declared. “The Army of Franklin remains in being. It remains a fighting force.”
No one contradicted him. He found himself wishing somebody would have. The chilling silence from Ned of the Forest and the wing commanders hurt worse than any argument could have done. The officers just stood in poses of weary dismay. They didn’t bother quarreling with him. It was as if they were beyond quarreling, as if the catastrophe was too obvious to need any more quarrels.
In what was, for him, an unwontedly small voice, Lieutenant General Bell asked, “What do we do tomorrow?”
“Fall back.” Two wing commanders and Ned said the same thing at the same time. Ned added, “The southrons will be coming after us with everything they’ve got. With all those unicorn-riders and their quick-shooting crossbows and with their swarm of footsoldiers, they’ve got a lot. They’re going to want to finish us off. Unless we scoot, they’ll do it, too.”
“Can’t we stop them?” Bell said in dismay. “If we take a strong defensive position and force them to come at us-”
“They’ll roll right over us,” Benjamin the Heated Ham broke in. All the other officers nodded somber agreement.
Ned added, “That ‘pick a good place and make ’em come at us’-that’ll do for rear-guard actions. We’ll have to fight a lot of ’em, I reckon, to keep the southrons off our main body. If we can.”
More nods from the wing commanders. Stephen the Pickle said, “If we can get away, that’s a victory. That’s about as much as we can hope for, too.”
“If you men abandon the idea of victory, you condemn this army to irrelevance,” Bell said, horrified.
Benjamin the Heated Ham replied, “If you try to win a victory now, sir, you condemn this army to extinction.”
Once more, the rest of the officers in the pavilion solemnly nodded. Bell started to ask what they would do if he ordered them to attack, or even to stand and fight. He started to, but he didn’t. The answer was entirely too obvious: they would disobey him. Even he could see he was better off not giving some orders. With a long sigh, he said, “You are dismissed, gentlemen. In the morning, we will… see what we can do.”
They ducked out of the pavilion, one after another. Left all alone again, Bell eased himself down into a folding chair, then leaned his crutches against the chair’s wooden arm. “Gods damn it,” he said softly. “Gods damn it to all seven hells.”
He wished he were whole. A whole man had choices a cripple didn’t. Had he been whole, he could have hurled himself into the fighting when things went wrong. He could have killed several of Doubting George’s men on his own. He could have made them kill him. He wouldn’t have had to live through the disastrous battle, wouldn’t have had to suffer this humiliation. And, once dead, he could have looked the Thunderer and the Lion God in the eye and assured them he’d been as gallant as it was given to a mortal man to be.
Instead… here he sat, with the Army of Franklin as mutilated as he was.
He pulled out the little bottle of laudanum and stared at it. Then he pulled the stopper off with his teeth. If he gulped the whole bottle instead of his usual swig, maybe that would be enough to stop his heart. On the other hand, maybe it wouldn’t. He’d got used to ever bigger doses of the drug. He’d had to, to come even close to holding his unending pain at bay.
A small gulp sufficed him. He put the bottle back into the pouch on his belt. In a little while, some of the pain from his wounds would ease. In a little while, some of the pain from the lost battle would recede, too. Yes, laudanum was marvelous stuff.
Relief had just started to sparkle along his veins when a scryer came into the pavilion and said, “Sir, King Geoffrey would speak to you by crystal ball.”
“Would he?” Bell said grandly. “And what if I would not speak to him?”
Instead of answering that, the scryer stood there with his mouth hanging open in surprise. Maybe that was lucky for Bell. He reached for his crutches. Unfreezing, the scryer said, “I’ll tell him you’re on the way.”
“Yes, do that,” Bell said. But, as the scryer turned to go, he added, “Wait. What does the king want to talk about?”
“Why, how the fight went, sir,” the scryer replied. “What else?”
“Yes, what else?” the commanding general agreed gloomily. The laudanum hadn’t done nearly enough to shield him from what was bound to be King Geoffrey’s wrath. “Go on. Go on. Tell his Majesty I’m coming as fast as I can.”
The scryer disappeared. Lieutenant General Bell wished he could do the same. He’d led the Army of Franklin south. He’d fought hard. And he’d lost. He’d lost disastrously, in fact. Had he won, he would have been a hero. He hadn’t. He wasn’t. Instead of the credit, he would get the blame. That was how things worked.
Bell couldn’t have moved fast even if he’d wanted to. He wanted anything but. This camp seemed much too small to house the Army of Franklin. Up till tonight, it would have been. But this was what remained of the army. Bell scowled and shook his head. Wounded men groaned as healers and mages did their best to help them. A cricket too stupid to realize how cold it was let out a few lethargic chirps. An owl hooted. A unicorn whickered. Soldiers snored.
Only a few hitching steps to the scryers’ pavilion. A guard outside held the tent flap wide so Bell could go in. He could have done without the courtesy.
There was the king’s face, in one of the crystal balls. The others were mercifully dark. Bell wished this one would have been, too. As usual, folding himself so his fundament came down on a stool was an adventure, but he managed. “Your Majesty,” he said, nodding to the image in the crystal ball.
“Lieutenant General.” King Geoffrey favored him with a single curt nod. Geoffrey had a lean, almost ascetic countenance, with burning eyes, a long, thin blade of a nose, and a disconcerting beard: it grew under his chin but not on the front of it. Bell, who sported a particularly luxuriant growth of face foliage, had never understood why his sovereign chose to trim his whiskers that way.
“How may I serve you, your Majesty?” Bell asked.
“Tell me how things stand in the east,” the king replied. “Have you won the victory over the southrons our cause so badly needs?”
“Well… no. Not yet,” Bell said, looking down at the dirt under his foot.
King Geoffrey frowned. He looked unhappy even at his most cheerful. When he was unhappy, a man could watch the end of the world on his face. And he’d been a soldier, so he knew what questions to ask to determine the exact situation. “Tell me your present position,” he said crisply.
“We are… about fourteen miles north of Ramblerton,” Lieutenant General Bell replied, wishing he had the nerve to come right out and lie to his sovereign.
Geoffrey’s eyebrows leaped like startled stags. “Fourteen miles!” he burst out. “Did I hear you correctly, Lieutenant General?” He sounded as if he hoped he hadn’t-not for his own sake, but for Bell’s.
But he had. “Yes, your Majesty,” the commanding general said unhappily.
“What happened?” King Geoffrey demanded. “You lost… twelve miles of ground today?”
“More like ten miles,” Bell said. “We lost a couple of miles in yesterday’s fighting, but we took a strong defensive position at the end of it.”
Geoffrey rolled his eyes. The motion, shown in perfect miniature inside the crystal ball, seemed even more painfully scornful than it would have face to face. “Oh, yes, Lieutenant General, it must have
been a wonderfully strong defensive position.” His sarcasm flayed. “By the Thunderer’s thumbs, you probably would have run all the way up to Dothan by now if the gods-damned southrons had forced you out of a weak position.”
Bell hung his head. “We held their footsoldiers-most of them, anyhow-for quite a while,” he said. “But Hard-Riding Jimmy’s unicorn-riders got into our rear with their quick-shooting crossbows, and… and… and we broke.” There. He’d said it. He waited for the King to do or say whatever he would.
“You… broke.” Geoffrey’s voice was eerily flat.
“Yes, your Majesty. We were assailed from front, rear, and flank by an army more than twice our size. We fought hard, we fought bravely, for a very long time. But in the end… In the end, we couldn’t take the pounding any more. The men did what men will do: they tried to save themselves.”
“Assailed from front, rear, and flank by an army more than twice your size,” King Geoffrey echoed, still in that tone that showed nothing of what he was thinking. “And how, pray tell, did you manage to put the Army of Franklin in such an enviable strategic position?”
“Your Majesty!” Bell said reproachfully.
“Answer me, gods damn you!” Geoffrey screamed, loud enough to make every scryer in the tent whip his head toward the crystal ball from which that anguished cry had come. “You went south to whip Avram’s men, not to… to throw your own army down the latrine.”
“This result is not what I intended, your Majesty.”
“A man who walks in front of a runaway unicorn doesn’t intend to get gored, either, which does him no good at all,” King Geoffrey ground out. “My army, Lieutenant General Bell! Give me back my army!”
“I would like nothing better, your Majesty,” Bell whispered.
“How many men have you got left?” the king asked. “Any at all? Or is it just you and some gods-damned scryer wandering in the dark?”
“No, sir. Not just me,” Bell said with such dignity as he could muster. “After the… the initial collapse” — he had to keep hesitating- “we retired in… fairly good order. We could fight again tomorrow if we had to.” We’d get slaughtered, but we could fight.
By the way King Geoffrey’s eyebrows twitched, he was thinking the same thing. But he didn’t say anything about that. What he did say was, “You did not answer my question, Lieutenant General. How many men have you got left?”
“Sir, I have not tried to make a count,” Bell answered. “My best guess would be about half of those who went into today’s fight.”
“Half?” Geoffrey yelped painfully. “That’s even worse than I thought, and I thought I’d thought things were as bad as they could be.” Now he paused, perhaps wondering whether he’d said what he meant to say. Apparently deciding he had, he continued, “What happened to the rest of them? Shot? Speared?”
“Not… not all, your Majesty,” Bell said; the king seemed intent on embarrassing him every way he could. “Some unknown but, I fear, fairly large number of men were captured by Doubting George’s footsoldiers and unicorn-riders.”
“And probably glad to come out of it alive,” Geoffrey commented, yet more acid in his voice. “What do you aim to do now? Whatever it is, do you think it will matter? Or will the southrons smash you to pieces, come what may?”
“I don’t think so, your Majesty,” Bell said. “We still can resist.” King Geoffrey hadn’t asked him how many engines he’d lost. That was likely just as well. If the king heard that Doubting George’s men had captured more than fifty, he’d burst like a firepot, except with even more heat. And Bell couldn’t blame him, however much he wanted to. He almost blamed himself-almost, but not quite. The disaster had to be someone else’s fault. Didn’t it?
IX
Had General Guildenstern won a victory, he would have got drunk to celebrate. John the Lister was sure of it. He saw Doubting George drunk, too, but drunk on triumph rather than spirits.
“I told you so,” George cackled. “Gods damn it, I told you so. I told you, and I told Marshal Bart, too. And do you know what else? I was right, that’s what else. We didn’t just lick ’em. We fornicating wrecked ’em.”
“Yes, sir,” John said dutifully.
He would rather have won a victory under Doubting George than under Baron Logan the Black, who would have been promoted over his head. The more George carried on, though, the more John wondered if listening to the general commanding was worth the triumph.
It was. Of course it was. He couldn’t remember ever making such an astounding, amazing, fantastic advance against the traitors, and wondered if it had an analog anywhere in the War Between the Provinces. Prisoners by the thousands, their war over at last, shambling off into captivity. More northerners dead on the field, and in the long retreat north from the field. More captured catapults and repeating crossbows than he’d ever seen before.
“Wrecked ’em,” Doubting George repeated, and John the Lister could only nod. The commanding general went on, “I’m going off to the scryers’ tent. Marshal Bart and Baron Logan need to know what we’ve done today, and so does King Avram. Yes, sir, so does King Avram.” Away he went, a procession of one.
John the Lister nodded again. No one doubted Doubting George now. He’d said he needed to wait, and would win once he was done waiting. And what he’d said, he’d done. Could he have won without waiting? John still thought so, but it didn’t matter any more.
And John, still a new brigadier of the regulars, knew this victory was better for his career than any Baron Logan the Black could have won. He was George’s reliable second-in-command. He would have been Logan’s second-in-command, too, but he would have been passed over for the main prize. Now nobody could say that about him. And a good thing, too, he thought.
Colonel Nahath came up to him. After the salutes and the congratulations, Nahath said, “I’ve got a little problem I’d like to talk over with you, sir.”
“Go ahead,” John said expansively. “Nobody has big problems, not after today. What’s your little one?”
“Well, sir, one of my company commanders, Lieutenant Griff, got killed in yesterday’s fighting,” Nahath said. “Sergeant Joram took over the company and did well with it. I’d like to promote him to lieutenant.”
“Go ahead,” John repeated. “That’s your problem? We should all have such little worries.”
But Colonel Nahath shook his head. “No, sir. That’s not my problem. The problem is, I’d like to promote my standard-bearer, a corporal, into the sergeant’s slot Joram’s leaving open. He’s carried the banner well and he’s fought bravely. He should get another stripe.”
“If he’s as good as all that, go ahead and promote him, by the gods,” John the Lister said. “Why are you flabbling about it, anyway?”
“Because the corporal’s a blond, sir.”
“Oh.” Sure enough, that got John’s attention. He snapped his fingers. “I remember. This is the fellow who grabbed the flagstaff when your standard-bearer got killed over in Peachtree, isn’t it? The one you said deserved a chance to fail as a corporal.”
“Yes, sir. His name is Rollant. And he hasn’t failed as a corporal. He’s had to win a fight or two to hold the rank, which an ordinary Detinan wouldn’t have, but he’s done it. From what poor Griff told me, Rollant told him he didn’t dare lose,” the colonel from New Eborac said. “If he can do a corporal’s job, why not a sergeant’s? He’s earned the chance to fail again, but this time I don’t think he will.”
“A blond sergeant,” John the Lister said musingly. “Who would have imagined that when the war started?”
“King Avram would have, I think,” Nahath answered.
John pursed his lips. When Avram announced his intention of freeing the blond serfs from the land and from their ancient ties to their liege lords, who had taken him seriously? (Well, Grand Duke Geoffrey and the northern nobles had, but that was a different story.) People in the south hadn’t dreamt blonds could ever amount to much even if they did have the righ
t to leave the land. From a southron point of view, the war, at first, had been much more about holding Detina together than it had been about removing the serfs from bondage to the land.
But maybe Avram really had seen something in the blonds that almost everyone else missed. “You may be right, Colonel,” John said solemnly. “Yes, you may be right.”
“You don’t object if I promote this fellow, then?” Nahath asked. “I wanted to make sure before I went and did it.”
“If he’s been a good corporal, odds are he’ll make a good sergeant,” John said. “Go ahead and do it. The other thing to remember is, it likely won’t matter as much as it would have a year ago. I don’t see how the war can last a whole lot longer, not after what we’ve done the past couple of days.”
“I hope you’re right, sir. I’d like to go home, get back to the life I left when the fighting started,” Nahath said. He was a colonel of volunteers, not a regular at all. When the war ended, he would take off his gray uniform and go back to running his farm or putting up manufactories or practicing law or whatever he did.
John didn’t know what that was. He’d never asked. He would be glad to go on soldiering, even if he’d never again lead another army the size of the one he’d commanded here. He didn’t see how he could; the only enemies in his lifetime who’d truly challenged Detina were other Detinans.
He said, “I’ve seen regular officers who didn’t do their jobs as well as you do, Colonel.” He spoke the truth; Nahath was everything anyone could want as a regimental commander, though he might have been out of his depth trying to lead a brigade or a division.
Nahath touched the brim of his gray felt hat now. “I thank you very much, sir. I’ve done my best, but this isn’t my proper trade.” He looked north, toward what was left of the Army of Franklin. “What will we do tomorrow?”
“I don’t know, not for a fact. I spoke with Doubting George a little while ago, but he didn’t say,” John the Lister replied. “Still, my guess would be that we’ll go on driving them as hard as we can. I don’t think the general commanding will be content to let the traitors’ remnant get away. If we can take that army off the board altogether…”
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