“Yes, sir. That would be a heavy blow to whatever hopes the north has left.” Nahath nodded. “Good. I hoped you’d say something along those lines.” Saluting, he did a smart about-face and marched off.
Whatever he does back in New Eborac, I’ll bet he’s a success at it, John thought. Then he started to laugh. It wasn’t necessarily so. Marshal Bart, the one southron officer who’d won victory after victory even in the dark days when few others did, had failed at everything he tried away from the army. Only after he redonned his gray tunic and pantaloons did he show what he could do.
Shouts and cheers rang out not far away. John hurried over to find out what was going on. Picking his way past the campfires came Hard-Riding Jimmy. Every man who saw the young commander of unicorn-riders tried to clasp his hand or pound his back or give him a flask. By the way he swayed, he’d already swigged from quite a few flasks.
John came forward to congratulate Jimmy, too. “Well done!” he said. “Without you, we couldn’t have broken them the way we did.”
Jimmy’s answering grin was wide and foolish; yes, he’d done some celebrating before he got this far. “Thank you kindly, sir,” he said. “You didn’t do too bad yourself, by the Lion God’s holy fangs.”
“Every day another step,” John said. On a night where Hard-Riding Jimmy and even Doubting George were sounding like the great Detinan conquerors of days gone by, the men who’d subjected the blonds, he could afford to be, or at least to sound like, the voice of reason. He added, “We took a big step today.”
“None bigger,” Hard-Riding Jimmy said. “No, sir, none bigger. I’ve never seen the traitors go to pieces like this before.” He flashed that grin again. “I hope I see it some more.”
“Do you expect anything different from now on?” John asked.
Jimmy shook his head. “Not me. They’re ruined. It’d take a miracle-no, by the Thunderer’s balls, it’d take a miracle and a half — for them to rally after this. Bell’s got to be fit to be tied from what we did to him.”
“He’s still got Ned of the Forest,” John remarked, curious to see what the mention of one leading commander of unicorn-riders would do to the other.
“Ned’s a fine officer,” Hard-Riding Jimmy said with the owlish sincerity of a man who’d had a little too much to drink. “A fine officer, don’t get me wrong. But we whipped his men, and we’ll whip ’em again next time we bump into ’em, too. They’re plenty brave. Never braver-don’t get me wrong.” If he hadn’t had too much to drink, he wouldn’t have repeated the phrase. “But he hasn’t got enough troopers and he hasn’t got enough proper weapons to give us a real fight.”
“Those quick-shooting crossbows make that much difference?” John asked.
“Hells, yes! I should say so!” Hard-Riding Jimmy exclaimed. “Sir, inside of five years the ordinary crossbow will be gone from the Detinan army. Gone, I tell you! It makes a decent hunting weapon, but that’s all. With quick-shooters, we’ll sweep the blond savages off the eastern steppe like that.” He snapped his fingers, but without a sound. He tried again. This time, it worked. “That, gods damn it.”
“Well, after what you’ve done the past two days, I can’t very well tell you you don’t know your business,” John the Lister said. He clapped Hard-Riding Jimmy on the back again. Grinning still, the commander of unicorn-riders lurched off.
“Brigadier John!” a runner called. John turned and waved to show he’d heard. The messenger hurried over to him. “I’m glad I caught up with you, sir. Doubting George’s compliments, and the orders for the morning for your wing are hard pursuit. You are to take an eastern route, as best you can, and try to get ahead of the traitors. That way, with luck, we can surround them and wipe them out.”
“Hard pursuit by an eastern route,” John repeated. “I’m to get out in front of the Army of Franklin if I can. My compliments to the commanding general in return. I understand the orders, and I’ll obey them.” With another salute, the runner trotted away.
George had brought engineers forward to put more bridges across the stream that had slowed pursuit the evening before. As soon as they got near the far bank, northern snipers started shooting at them. The southrons pushed repeating crossbows up to the edge of the stream and hosed down the brush on the north bank of the stream with quarrels. They sent men in gray in there after the northerners, too. All that slowed but did not stop the sniping. Slowing it let the bridges reach the north bank and let the southrons cross with ease. After that, the snipers fell back.
Riding at the front of his column of footsoldiers, John the Lister pushed ahead as hard as the tired men would go. Every once in a while, off to the west, he got a glimpse of the remnants of the Army of Franklin, which was also moving north at something close to double time. The traitors had to be even more weary than his own men. How long could they continue that headlong withdrawal? John grinned. Not long enough, or so he hoped.
He was about to order his men to swing in on the fleeing northerners when a crossbow quarrel zipped past his head. If he could see Bell’s men, they could see him, too. And even Bell, no great general-as he’d proved again and again-could see what the southrons had in mind.
Bell’s rear guard came from Ned of the Forest’s troopers. They were, as every southron who’d ever met them had reason to know, a stubborn bunch. Here they were fighting mostly dismounted from a stand of trees that gave them good cover.
John the Lister wanted to roll over them even so. He wanted to, but discovered he couldn’t. They knocked his first attack back on its heels. Cursing, he shouted, “Deploy! We’ll flank them out, by the Lion God’s mane!”
And his men did exactly that, with some help from Hard-Riding Jimmy’s unicorn-riders. They did it, yes, but doing it took them an hour and a half. They didn’t damage Ned’s force very much, either. Instead of waiting to be surrounded and slaughtered, the northern troopers went back to their unicorns and rode off when their position grew difficult. They wouldn’t have any trouble catching up with Bell’s retreating column of footsoldiers.
They wouldn’t-but John the Lister’s men would. While the southrons were fighting that rear-guard action, the main body of their foes marched several miles. John did some more cursing. “Step it up, boys!” he called.
The soldiers tried. He’d feared he was asking more of them than flesh and blood could give. Toward evening, they came close to catching up with the northerners again. Again, though, a detachment of Ned’s troopers, this time backed up by footsoldiers in blue, delayed them long enough to let Bell’s main force get away.
“We’ll keep after them,” John declared. He wondered if they would be able to make the traitors stand and fight, though.
* * *
Ned of the Forest supposed he might have been more disgusted, but he had trouble seeing how. One thing that might have let him show more disgust would have been less to worry about. He was as busy as a one-armed juggler with the itch. The southrons knew they had the Army of Franklin on the run. For once, that didn’t satisfy them. They wanted the army dead-no, not just dead; extinct.
They were liable to get what they wanted, too. Bell had given Ned the dubious honor of commanding the rear guard against Doubting George’s onrushing army. Ned didn’t want the job. The only reason he’d taken it was that he couldn’t see anyone else who had even a chance of bringing it off.
“They’re going to hound us all the way out of Franklin, Biff,” he said at the end of the first day’s retreat.
“Yes, sir.” Colonel Biffle nodded. “Gods damn me to all the hells if I see how we can stop ’em, either.”
“Stop ’em?” Ned started. He didn’t know whether he felt more like laughing or crying. Since both would have made Colonel Biffle worry, he contented himself with a growl that could have come from the throat of a tiger in the far northern jungle. “By the Thunderer’s belly button, Biff, we’re not going to stop those stinking sons of bitches. If we can slow ’em down enough so they don’t eat all of Bell’s army,
King Geoffrey ought to pin a medal on us just for that.”
“Yes, sir,” Biffle said, and then, after a long, long pause, “If we can’t stop ’em, though, Lord Ned, the war’s as good as lost.”
Ned of the Forest only grunted in response, as he’d tried not to show pain whenever he was wounded. He didn’t think his regimental commander was wrong-which only made the words hurt worse.
“What do we do, sir?” Biffle asked. “What do we do if… if King Avram’s bastards really can lick us?”
“The best we can our ownselves,” Ned answered firmly. “They haven’t done it yet, and I aim to make it as hard for them as I can. As long as we keep fighting, we’ve got a chance. If we throw up our hands and quit, we really are licked.”
“Yes, sir.” Colonel Biffle sounded a little happier-but only a little.
When Ned of the Forest got a good look at his own troopers after their latest encounter with John the Lister’s footsoldiers, he understood why. Their heads were down; their shoulders slumped. For the first time, they looked like beaten men. They kept on, yes, but they plainly had no faith in what they were doing.
“Come on, boys,” Ned called. “We’ll hang a few more bruises on those southron bastards, and after a while they’ll give up and go home. We can do it. We always have. What’s one more time?”
A few of the unicorn-riders smiled and perked up. Most of them, though, kept that… trampled look they’d been wearing. When they compared what they heard to what they saw, they realized the two didn’t match. And what they saw, what everyone in the east who followed King Geoffrey couldn’t help seeing, was a great tide of disaster rising up to roll over them and drown them.
Captain Watson rode up to Ned. The young officer in charge of his siege engines said, “Sir, the catapults are about played out. We’ve done so much shooting with ’em, the sinew skeins are stretched to death. Our range is down, and our accuracy is worse. Where can we get more sinew?”
“Hamstring some southrons,” Ned answered.
Watson started to chuckle, but then broke off, as if unsure whether Ned was kidding. Ned wasn’t sure he was kidding, either. But he didn’t contradict when Watson said, “I can’t do that, sir.”
“Well, to the hells with me if I know where you’ll come up with any sinew,” Ned said. “Sinners, yes-sinners we’ve got swarms of. But sinew?” He shook his head. “What else can you use?”
“Next best thing is hair: long, coarse hair,” Watson answered.
“Then shave the unicorns,” Ned said at once. “Cut off their manes, trim their tails, do whatever you need to do. Start with my beast. Can troopers twist hair into skeins?”
“Uh, yes, sir. I’d think so,” Watson said dazedly. “It’s not hard to do, once you know how.”
“All right. Get started on it, then. Show ’em what they need to do. Don’t waste any time,” Ned said. “We’re going to need those engines-you can bet on that.”
Captain Watson nodded. “Oh, yes, sir. I know. I do believe I would have come up with that notion myself, but I know I wouldn’t have done it so fast.” He laughed. “After all, I didn’t do it so fast, did I?”
“Never mind,” Ned of the Forest said. “Just get on with it. Where it comes from doesn’t matter, long as you can make it work.”
“Do you know, sir, there are men-more than a few of them, too-who would want a promotion for coming up with an idea like that,” Watson said. “You don’t even seem to care.”
“I don’t, much,” Ned said. “Nobody’s going to promote me now. I’m already a lieutenant general, and King Geoffrey isn’t going to fancy up my epaulets any more. Besides, the mess we’re in now, the idea counts more than whoever had it.”
Some of his troopers didn’t care for the scheme at all. It wasn’t that they minded twisting unicorn hair into skeins for the catapults and repeating crossbows; they didn’t. But they hated the way the unicorns looked once shorn of shaggy manes and tails. In piteous tones, one of them said, “Lord Ned, those gods-damned southrons’re going to laugh at us when they see us riding such sorry beasts.”
“Too bad,” Ned answered heartlessly. “If they do laugh, Watson’ll shoot ’em out of the saddle with the hair he’s taken. That counts for more.”
Because he was who he was, he bullied them into going along with him with a minimum of fuss and feathers. That Captain Watson had trimmed his unicorn first helped. And the unicorn did look sorry after it was trimmed: more like an overgrown white rat with a horn on its nose than one of the beautiful, noble beasts that added a touch of style and old-time glory to modern battlefields, most of which, taken all in all, were anything but glorious. But if their leader was willing to go into a fight on a unicorn that looked like that, the troopers couldn’t very well cavil.
And Ned, for his part, didn’t care what his mount looked like. He felt none of what northern officers of higher blood called “the romance of the unicorn.” As far as he was concerned, a unicorn was for getting from one place to another faster than he could walk or run. He’d had plenty of mounts killed under him. If this one, shorn or not, lasted to the end of the war, he would be astonished.
Watson’s engine crews spent the wee small hours threading the roughly made skeins of unicorn hair into the engines. Their thumping and banging and clattering kept Ned awake. Those weren’t the usual noises he heard in the field, and they bothered him on account of that.
He poured honey into a cup of nasty tea the next morning, trying to make it palatable. It stayed nasty, but at least was sweeter. There not ten feet away stood Captain Watson doing the same thing. “Well, Captain?” Ned called.
“Pretty well, sir,” Watson answered, sipping from his tin cup and making an unhappy face. “How about you?”
“Hells with me,” Ned said. “How are the engines?”
“In working order,” Watson said. “Better than they were before we reskeined ’em. Thank you, sir.”
“Never mind me,” Ned told him. “Long as we can give the southrons grief.”
They got a fair amount of grief themselves later that morning, beating back an attack from some of Hard-Riding Jimmy’s troopers. The two disastrous days of fighting in front of Ramblerton had made Ned of the Forest despise the southron unicorn-riders. They would have made any normal man fear those troopers, but Ned reserved fear for the gods, and doled it out sparingly even to them.
The southrons had too many men and could put too many bolts in the air to make it any kind of fair fight. That being so, Ned didn’t try to make it one, either. Instead, he used a feigned retreat to lead the eager southrons-who did jeer at his men’s funny-looking unicorns-straight up to Captain Watson’s engines, which sat cunningly concealed at the edge of a thicket.
Watson had been right-the engines worked the way they were supposed to. A barrage of firepots and stones greeted the southrons. So did the nasty, mechanical clack-clack-clack of the repeating crossbows. Southrons tumbled out of the saddle. Unicorns crashed to the ground as if they’d run headlong into a wall. The survivors galloped away from the trap a lot faster than they’d galloped towards it.
“There’s a proper job of licking them,” Watson said, beaming.
Colonel Biffle remained gloomy. “They’ll be back, the stinking sons of bitches.”
“Oh, yes. They’ll be back,” Ned of the Forest agreed. “But they won’t be back for a while. The time they spend figuring out how they stuck their peckers in the meat grinder, our footsoldiers can use to get away. That’s what the game we’re playing is all about right now.”
“They won’t be so easy to trick next time,” Biffle said.
That was also true, without a doubt. Hard-Riding Jimmy had shown himself to be no fool. But Ned said, “Other side of the copper is, from now on they’ll look before they leap. That’ll slow them down. We want them slow. We don’t want ’em charging all over the landscape.”
Captain Watson nodded. He understood. Colonel Biffle had a harder time. He still wanted to beat the southrons
here, even if he knew how unlikely that was to change the course of the war. Ned had stopped worrying about beating them, at least in the sense he would have used for the word before setting out on this campaign. Delaying them counted as a victory, for it let the battered fragments of the Army of Franklin put more distance between themselves and Doubting George’s disgustingly numerous, revoltingly well-fed, and alarmingly well-armed soldiers.
It isn’t fair, Ned thought. It isn’t even close to fair. If we had that many men and could give them the food and gear they need…
He laughed, though it wasn’t really funny. If the north could have raised and supported armies like that, of course it would have broken away from King Avram’s rule. But it couldn’t. It couldn’t come close. And nobody had ever said war was the least bit fair, Ned included. He’d used every trick he knew, and invented several fresh tricks on the spur of the moment. Expecting the southrons not to use their advantages of wealth and manpower was like wishing for the moon. You could do it, but that didn’t mean you’d get what you wished for.
A rider came up and pointed to the northeast. “The southrons are trying to slip around our flank again, Lord Ned,” he said.
“Well, we’d better try and stop the bastards, then, eh?” Ned said.
“Yes, sir,” the messenger said, and then, “Er-how, sir?”
“You leave that to me.” Ned handled the problem with unfussy competence. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t dealt with such situations before. Detaching men from the right, he shifted them around behind the center to extend the left. General Hesmucet had made the same sort of flanking maneuver again and again for King Avram’s army in Peachtree Province the year before as Hard-Riding Jimmy was using now, and Count Joseph the Gamecock had matched it time after time.
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