“Next question is, how do we keep Joseph the Gamecock from realizing what we’re up to?” Doubting George said.
His questions were always to the point, and all the more so when most pointed. But Hesmucet said, “I have some ideas about that, too.” He set them forth.
“What’s my part in all this?” Fighting Joseph asked when he was through-a question altogether in keeping with his temperament.
Lieutenant General George said, “None of that matters. The plan matters. I think it’s a good one.”
James the Bird’s Eye said, “I’ve started sending men down some of these roads. I don’t think the roads know where they’re going themselves.”
Hesmucet nodded. “That’s how I remember them. Even the locals get lost half the time, seems like. But we’ve got enough serfs coming in to us to keep us from getting too badly confused. And most of the traitors won’t have any better notion of where the roads go than we do. Let’s get moving.”
“You still haven’t answered my question… sir,” Fighting Joseph said. “What is my role in all this?”
“Whatever I order it to be,” Hesmucet snapped, by now out of temper. “Get your men moving along with everybody else’s.” Handsome face dark with anger, Fighting Joseph stormed away. Hesmucet nodded to James and George. Saluting, they left, too.
As they did so, Major Alva came up to Hesmucet. He too saluted, sloppily-he was a soldier because he needed to be in the chain of command, not through any innate longing for the military life. In fact, Hesmucet doubted he’d ever seen a less military man in all his life. “Can we go on with it, sir?” Alva asked anxiously. “Can we? Please?”
He sounded as eager as a child with a new toy. In truth, that was about what he was. One thing King Avram’s army did for him: it let him play with bigger, fancier toys than he would ever have got his hands on in civilian life.
“Yes, we’re going to try it,” Hesmucet answered. “Remember, the object is to make the traitors think we’re slamming our way through at Whole Mackerel.”
“Of course I remember, sir.” Alva sounded affronted that Hesmucet could think he would forget anything. And I probably am naive to think any such thing, went through Hesmucet’s mind. Whatever else this puppy is, forgetful he isn’t-especially when he does get to use his toys. Alva went on, “Funny how, at Caesar, you wanted me to mask a real attack from the enemy, where now I’m going to be doing just the opposite.”
“It’s not funny-it’s necessary,” Hesmucet said. “If we do the same thing over and over, pretty soon it won’t fool the northerners any more.”
“Oh. Right. Isn’t that interesting?” Alva blinked. He was a very clever young man. He’s certainly more clever than I am, at whatever he wants to turn his mind to, Hesmucet thought. But when he hasn’t turned his mind to something, it just isn’t there for him. He can see the magic, something I could never do in a thousand years, but he’s never thought about whys and wherefores.
He set his hand on Alva’s shoulder, feeling downright grandfatherly even though he wasn’t far past forty himself. “You tend to your business, son, and I’ll tend to mine, and between us, with a little luck, we’ll make Geoffrey’s men mighty unhappy.”
“I like that, sir,” Alva said. “You know, people really shouldn’t bind other people to the land. Who knows how many mages and artisans and such have sweated their lives away raising indigo and rice and sugar just because they happened to be born with blond hair?”
Hesmucet grunted. His own view of blonds was much less sanguine than Alva’s. “Keeping Detina one kingdom counts for a good deal, too,” he said dryly.
“Oh, yes, that, too, of course,” Alva agreed, though to him it was plainly of secondary importance. “Tomorrow morning?”
“Tomorrow morning,” Hesmucet agreed. “That will give the men a good start toward Konigsburg.”
“All right, sir.” Alva grinned a small-boy grin altogether unsuited to a major. “This should be fun!”
That evening, Hesmucet posted pickets well forward of his main line. He didn’t want the northerners to have another chance to give him a nasty surprise, as they’d almost done at Fat Mama. If Lieutenant General Bell hadn’t pulled back for no reason Hesmucet could see, he might have done a good deal of damage.
Here at Whole Mackerel, though, Joseph the Gamecock kept his men quiet inside their entrenchments. All things considered, Hesmucet didn’t blame him. He was ensconced in a solid position, as solid as the one outside Borders. Head-on assault probably wouldn’t take the place. If Hesmucet couldn’t flank the traitors out of Whole Mackerel, they’d be there a long time.
Joseph, he knew, would pay him about as much money as false King Geoffrey had in his treasury to attack head-on. He lay down on his iron-framed cot with a smile on his face. Sometimes the best way to confound a man was to give him exactly what he thought he wanted.
When morning came, Hesmucet put most of his soldiers on the miserable roads north that led to Konigsburg. Colonel Phineas and almost all the rest of the army’s mages had the job of masking that move from the northerners. Phineas wasn’t much of a mage himself, but did have a knack for getting other mages to work together.
Major Alva, by contrast, had very little ability to work with anybody else. But he was a hells of a mage. Hesmucet had less ability to work with other officers than a lot of southrons, and was uneasily aware of the fact. But he was a good general himself, which made up for a multitude of flaws.
“Are you ready?” he asked Alva. A predawn mist still lingered over the field, a bit of luck he hadn’t dared hope for.
“I sure am,” Alva replied gaily. His eyes sparkled. He was indeed as ready as small boys were for a lark.
“Begin, then,” Hesmucet said, “and let me know when I can play my part in this little show.”
“Just as you say, sir,” Alva replied, and he began to chant. He hadn’t gone far before Hesmucet could feel power start to accrete around him, as layers of nacre accumulated around grit to make a pearl. That same sort of power had gathered around Thraxton the Braggart at Proselytizers’ Rise, even if he’d botched his incantation in the end. Hesmucet had never seen any southron mage even try to control such forces.
Almost absently, Alva pointed to Hesmucet. If the commanding general hadn’t been waiting for the signal, he might have missed it. Even as things were, he needed a moment to realize the gesture wasn’t part of one of the passes Alva had been flinging around with what looked like reckless abandon.
Hesmucet turned to his trumpeters and made a peremptory gesture of his own. They blared out Advance! The handful of southron soldiers Hesmucet had kept behind outside of Whole Mackerel stormed toward the traitors’ works, as if expecting to overrun them with ease.
Major Alva made one last pass, cried out, “Let it be accomplished!” and pointed toward the northerners’ field fortifications. And suddenly, coming through that convenient mist toward the enemy were not a few soldiers but what seemed for all the world like General Hesmucet’s entire army.
To Hesmucet, the sorcerous additions to the force looked ghostly, insubstantial. Alva had assured him that, from the front, they would be indistinguishable from real soldiers except for one unfortunate detail: they weren’t actually there and couldn’t actually fight. But they certainly could cause consternation, and that suited the commanding general just fine.
If we get very, very lucky, they might even make the traitors panic, and then the real soldiers whose numbers Alva is magnifying will drive the enemy out of his trenches, Hesmucet thought. He didn’t really expect that to happen, but a general was entitled to hopes no less than any other man.
For a few heady moments, he thought those hopes would be realized. The northerners were filled with consternation when they saw what looked and sounded like an enormous army bearing down on them. The real soldiers and real catapults and repeating crossbows among the simulacra sent enough missiles toward the traitors’ works to make the whole assault seem convincing, especially
to startled soldiers not expecting any such thing.
Inside the northerners’ fieldworks, horns blared and officers and sergeants shouted in alarm. A few men did flee; Hesmucet could see them scrambling out of the entrenchments and running back toward Whole Mackerel. More, though, sent an enormous storm of crossbow bolts and stones and firepots down on the heads of the advancing southron host.
The soldiers who weren’t really there proved their worth against that vicious barrage. Since they didn’t exist, they weren’t likely to be killed by any merely material missiles. They kept right on advancing in the face of everything the traitors could do.
That apparent immortality might have brought even more fear to the foe. Instead, it ended up giving away the game. The northerners realized no mere human beings could possibly have gone through such a pounding without losing a man. And their mages were not to be despised; indeed, till Hesmucet came across Major Alva, northern mages had dominated the field.
“Counterspell!” Alva gasped. “Strong one!” He muttered charms and made desperate passes, but the northerners, once alerted to his magecraft, savagely tore at it. The advancing army of simulacra began to fade, to become one with the mist out of which they were advancing, and at last to disappear.
As soon as Hesmucet saw that begin to happen, he pulled back his real soldiers, lest the traitors swarm forth and overwhelm them. He set a hand-again, he felt grandfatherly-on Alva’s shoulder. “Don’t worry about it,” he told the young mage. “You bought us a big chunk of the morning. That’s as much as I was hoping for, and more than I expected.”
“Gods damn it, I wanted everything to be perfect,” Alva said.
Most southron mages would have been satisfied with coming close to what their commanders wanted. Hesmucet realized he had something very special in the line of sorcerer here. He patted Alva on the shoulder again. “Don’t worry, son,” he said. “Don’t you worry at all. You did just fine.”
* * *
“Come on, men,” Captain Gremio called as his company of northerners tramped almost single file along a narrow winding track somewhere north of Whole Mackerel.
“Another position abandoned,” Colonel Florizel grumbled. The regimental commander rode his unicorn. The rest of the regiment, captains included, went on foot.
Gremio didn’t contradict the colonel, not out loud. But he understood Joseph the Gamecock’s reasons for pulling out of Whole Mackerel. Again, Hesmucet was playing the outflanking game.
This country was overgrown, almost jungly. It was full of bugs, all of which, in Gremio’s biased opinion, seemed to be trying to bite him at once. He slapped and scratched and swore. His men were slapping and scratching and swearing, too, so maybe a few of the bugs did have extra time on their hands.
The soldiers splashed through a swampy stream. “Check for leeches,” Sergeant Thisbe said-parasites of a sort Gremio hadn’t thought of.
Coming up onto drier land, men did as the sergeant said. Some of them cursed and made disgusted noises when they found leeches clinging to their legs, too. “No, don’t just tear them off,” Gremio told a blue-clad trooper who was about to do just that. “The mouth stays behind when you do, and the wound will go bad.”
“That’s right, Catling,” Thisbe agreed. “Touch a smoldering twig to the head end of the leech. Then it will really let go.”
“It’ll burn me, too,” the soldier said.
“If you want to take a chance on going around with crutches like Lieutenant General Bell, do it your way,” Gremio said. “If you want to do it right, do what Thisbe and I tell you to do.”
“I’m a free Detinan, and my ideas are just as good as anybody else’s, gods damn it.” Catling yanked the leech off his leg. He poked at the wound. Sure enough, the leech’s mouth remained locked to his flesh. He looked much less happy after that.
“Try a burning twig now,” Sergeant Thisbe said. “Sometimes the mouth will still let go even after you’ve ripped away the rest of the leech.”
“He doesn’t deserve to have the mouth come loose,” Gremio said in considerable anger. “There are some people in this kingdom who think the greatest privilege the gods granted a free Detinan is the privilege of making a gods-damned fool of himself whenever it strikes his fancy. They do this-sometimes they do it over and over-and then, oftentimes, they expect the lawcourts to free them from their folly. To the seven hells with that, as far as I’m concerned. If you insist on being a fool, you bloody well ought to pay for your folly every now and again.”
“Catling’s a brave soldier,” Thisbe said. “I’d rather have him hale so he can shoot at the southrons than laid up with a bad leg.”
“You’re too kind and gentle for your own good,” Gremio said. Thisbe’s clean-shaven cheeks made his flush easy to see. Gremio kicked at the mucky ground. Calling a sergeant gentle was bound to embarrass him before the men he was supposed to lead.
“Where in the seven hells are we?” somebody asked. Considering the weather and the landscape, the question seemed more than usually apt.
Precise as always, Gremio answered, “We’re somewhere between Fort Worthless and Konigsburg. Fort Worthless is one of those places that live up to their names ninety-nine years and eleven months a century, but this is its month to shine. We’ve got to keep the stinking southrons from getting there till the army finishes pulling out of Whole Mackerel.”
“When the southrons find themselves a real wizard, you know the war isn’t what we expected when we started fighting it,” Thisbe said.
“That’s so,” Gremio agreed, “but a real wizard isn’t always just what you want. We had Thraxton the Braggart, for instance, but I’m just as well pleased he’s gone off to Nonesuch. He cost us the battle of Proselytizers’ Rise.”
“He cost us that battle a couple of different ways,” Thisbe said. “It wasn’t just that he botched the spell, though that was bad enough. But he sent James of Broadpath off to the southwest to attack Wesleyton while the southrons in Rising Rock were building up their strength. What sort of fool would do such a thing?”
“A sour one,” Gremio answered. “He’d quarreled with James-he’d quarreled with everybody, I think-and so he sent him away. Thraxton’s bad temper is why we haven’t got Ned of the Forest leading our unicorn-riders, too. We’ll end up paying a price for that along with everything else, I’d bet.”
They splashed across another stream. Turtles and frogs sitting on rocks dove into the water and frantically swam away. One luckless frog jumped almost right into a water snake’s mouth. The snake swam over and gulped. Gremio wondered uneasily if crocodiles lurked in the water, too. He hoped he and his men wouldn’t find out the hard way.
“How far is it up to Calabash Creek, sir?” Thisbe asked.
“To the seven hells with me if I know, Sergeant,” Gremio said. “I don’t know how far we’ve come-I don’t see how anybody could know how far we’ve come, considering how these roads all seem to bend back on themselves. And I don’t know how far this creek is from where we encamped. For all I do know, that miserable little rill we just crossed was it, and we’re heading straight for the southrons at Konigsburg.”
“We’d better not be,” Thisbe said.
“I don’t know why not,” Gremio said. “One thing I am sure of is that the southrons have to be as confused about all this as we are. If they’re supposed to be at Konigsburg, they’re probably somewhere else.”
“But we’re ordered to take our stand on the west bank of Calabash Creek and not let them advance on Fort Worthless.” Sergeant Thisbe sounded worried. He took orders very seriously, which made him unusual among free Detinan men. You can’t tell me what to do was one of the most common phrases in any Detinan’s mouth.
“Don’t worry about it,” Gremio said. “Sooner or later, we’ll find them, or they’ll find us, and then we’ll see what happens next.”
What he expected would happen next was for both sides to entrench as best they could in this muddy ground and then shoot crossbow qua
rrels at each other. The landscape didn’t offer room enough for big, sweeping charges. Not only that, both sides were less eager to make them than they had been earlier in the war. Big, sweeping charges left bodies strewn all over a battlefield, but rarely shifted the enemy if he’d already had time to dig in.
Colonel Florizel’s regiment found the foe before finding Calabash Creek. Startled shouts rang out ahead of Gremio’s company: “Southrons!” “Traitors!” Each side seemed equally appalled at stumbling on the other.
A crossbow bolt hissed past Gremio’s head. He had no idea whether his own men or the southrons had shot it. “Forward!” he shouted. “We have to help our friends!” He was an officer, and bore a sword instead of a crossbow. When he drew it, he knew a certain feeling of unreality. As a barrister back in Karlsburg, he hadn’t used a blade. Baron Ormerod, who’d led the company before him, had been a good man with his hands-which hadn’t kept him from stopping a bolt with his chest trying to stem the northern rout behind Proselytizers’ Rise.
“Forward!” Sergeant Thisbe’s clear voice echoed his. Forward the soldiers went. They’d never been shy about fighting-only the southrons’ numbers had kept them in their entrenchments through most of this campaign. Now they had, or might have, a good chance to meet the enemy on even terms. They rushed to take it.
The fight was even more confused than the woodland skirmishes before the battle by the River of Death. The overgrowth was thicker and lusher than it had been farther south; as soon as men took a few steps off the track, they had to navigate as much by ear as by eye. “Geoffrey!” the northerners cried. The southerners yelled, “Avram!” And both sides shouted, “Freedom!”-a good way to land anyone coming to what might be the rescue in trouble.
Gremio almost ran right into a southron. The man in gray shouted something a lot less complimentary than, “Avram!” and let fly with his crossbow. He couldn’t have stood more than five feet from Gremio, but missed anyhow. Gremio had no time even to thank the gods for his good luck. He charged at the southron, expecting the man to flee.
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