“If this New Bolt shrine isn’t worth anything, what do we do now?” Smitty asked-but quietly, so Rollant could hear and Joram couldn’t.
“We go forward,” Rollant answered. “We keep going forward till the traitors can’t stop us any more.” So far, he sounded like a sergeant himself. But then he added, “And we hope some of us are still alive when that finally happens.” Smitty walked off toward the creek for a couple of paces. Then, reluctantly, he nodded.
* * *
General Hesmucet had trouble deciding whether or not he ought to be a happy man. His soldiers had forced their way across Calabash Creek. They’d made Joseph the Gamecock pull out of Whole Mackerel. They’d cleared his men from New Bolt Shrine and Fort Worthless. They’d done a lot of hard fighting in some of the most miserable terrain anywhere in Detina. They’d been victorious almost everywhere-and what did they have to show for it?
Less than I’d like, gods damn it, Hesmucet thought. No matter how harried Joseph the Gamecock’s forces had been, his army remained in being, and remained between Hesmucet and Marthasville. Joseph was doing his job. Hesmucet peered west from the swampy wilderness he’d just spent a few weeks overrunning. Joseph the Gamecock, as usual, had more entrenchments waiting for him, some on a little knob called Cedar Hill, others farther west on a heavily wooded slope identified on his map as Commissioner Mountain. It didn’t look like much of a mountain to him, but the traitors had some perfectly good artificers who would have studied out the ground and turned it into much more than a molehill.
Rain started falling. It had been raining for most of the month. Hesmucet was sick of it. Rain worked for Joseph the Gamecock and against him. It slowed down his advance. Yes, it slowed the defenders, too, but they didn’t care. They weren’t trying to go anywhere themselves, only to keep him from getting anywhere. They had a good chance of doing it, too.
“Major Alva!” he called. “Where in the damnation has Major Alva gone and got himself off to?”
“Here I am, sir.” In a mage’s best style, Alva seemed to appear out of nowhere.
Hesmucet was less impressed than he might have been. In the rain, he couldn’t see very far anyway. He came straight to the point: “Can you make the sun come out again and dry up some of this mud?”
“Sorry, sir, but I don’t think so,” Major Alva replied.
“Why not?” Hesmucet said irritably. “Last fall, you were able to keep things foggy and misty down around Rising Rock, and that served us well.”
“Yes, sir, but it would have been pretty foggy and misty regardless of what I did,” the bright young mage said. “Here, I would be changing things, and changing them a lot, because it’s usually pretty rainy here this time of year. It’s a lot easier to ride the unicorn in the direction he’s already going, if you know what I mean.”
Hesmucet snarled-wetly. He did see what Major Alva meant, but seeing it wasn’t the same as liking it. “All right, then,” he said. “What can we do to make the traitors’ lives miserable?”
“Everyone’s life has been miserable lately, seems to me,” Alva observed.
That held more truth than Hesmucet cared to admit. “The idea is to make the enemy’s lives miserable,” he said. “That and to keep him from doing it to us.”
“Yes, sir,” Major Alva agreed. “I have to tell you, though, sir, fooling with the weather will not get you what you want. This time of year in this part of the kingdom, it is going to rain, and any wizard who tells you anything different is either lying on purpose or else a gods-damned fool.”
“All right,” Hesmucet said. One reason he was glad to have Alva around was that the mage wasn’t shy about telling him what was on his mind. Eventually, he supposed, Alva would learn tact, but it wouldn’t happen soon. “If you can’t dry things out, see if you can come up with some other way to make Joseph the Gamecock sorry we’re in the neighborhood.”
“Yes, sir.” Alva saluted and went away.
Hesmucet started to duck back into his tent. Before he could, a scryer called his name. He turned. “What is it?”
“There’s a report from Luxor, sir, on the Great River,” the scryer replied. “Sam the Sturgeon has met Ned of the Forest in a battle.”
“I’ll come,” Hesmucet said at once, and hurried to the scryers’ tent.
The face looking out of the crystal ball at him belonged to Brigadier Andrew the Smith, not to Brigadier Sam (who’d got his nickname from a pair of protruding eyes and a long, long nose). If Sam the Sturgeon wasn’t there to tell the tale in person, Hesmucet judged the news unlikely to be good. And, sure enough, the commander of the garrison at Luxor said, “Things didn’t work out as you hoped they would, sir.”
“You’d better tell me,” Hesmucet said.
“Yes, sir.” Andrew the Smith was a solid officer. “Brigadier Sam set out moving west through the southern part of Great River Province, sir, and he let his unicorn-riders get out in front of his footsoldiers. Ned of the Forest hit him near a little place called Three Dee Crossroads and defeated him in detail-smashed his army to hells and gone, if you want to know the truth.”
“Gods damn it!” Hesmucet burst out. “Sam the Sturgeon must have had three times as many men as Ned.”
“Yes, sir,” Brigadier Andrew said again. “But he didn’t get ’em into the fight, and Ned did. What’s left of Sam’s army-and it’s only bits and pieces-just came stumbling back into Luxor this morning. He was afraid Ned was hot on his heels, too.”
“To the hells with what he was afraid of,” Hesmucet growled. “I sent him out to keep Ned too busy to strike our supply line. Fat lot of good Sam does, holed up in Luxor. Ned can collect men at his leisure and strike the glideway path whenever he pleases.”
“I’m afraid you’re right, sir,” Andrew said mournfully.
“That man Ned is a demon,” Hesmucet said. “There can’t be peace by the Great River till Ned of the Forest is dead.”
“As may be, sir,” the commandant at Luxor replied. “But the son of a bitch is still here now, and in a position to make a lot of trouble.”
“We have to keep him too busy to hit the supply line,” Hesmucet said. “If Sam the Sturgeon couldn’t do the job, someone else will have to. Right this minute, Brigadier, looks like that someone else is you.”
“Yes, sir,” Andrew the Smith said-he didn’t shrink from the idea, which made Hesmucet happy. “I’ll do my best, sir. Ned will probably think he could take on anybody this side of the gods right about now, and that may make him careless. But whether it does or whether it doesn’t, you’re right-we have to keep him away from your glideway line.”
“Good man,” Hesmucet told him. “If we had more like you, we’d be in better shape.”
“Thank you kindly, sir,” Brigadier Andrew replied. “What we could really use is a couple of officers like Ned of the Forest.”
Few southrons would have said that. It was true-Hesmucet felt down in his belly how true it was-but few would have had the nerve to say it. “When the gods made Ned, they shattered the mold afterwards,” Hesmucet said, which unfortunately also seemed to be true. “I’m glad we have you on our side, Brigadier. I know you’ll give the son of a bitch all he wants, and then some more besides.”
“I told you once, I’ll do my best. I meant it,” Andrew said.
“Good.” Hesmucet turned and nodded to his scryer. The man broke the mystical attunement between the two crystal balls. The one in front of Hesmucet became no more than an inert sphere of glass; Andrew the Smith’s image vanished from it. Hesmucet gave himself the luxury of cursing for a minute or so, but then got up to leave the scryers’ tent.
“What will you do now, sir?” the scryer asked him.
It wasn’t really any of the man’s business. Still, Hesmucet judged him unlikely to go over to the traitors with the answer. He probably wouldn’t even gossip; by the nature of their work, scryers had to be discreet. And the truth wasn’t all that complicated, anyhow. “I’m going to keep right on hammering away
at Joseph the Gamecock, that’s what,” Hesmucet said. “As long as Andrew or somebody keeps Ned of the Forest busy, Joseph hasn’t got enough unicorn-riders attached to his own army to harm the glideway coming up here from Rising Rock, especially when I keep squeezing and prodding his army. So that’s what I’m going to do. You hit something long enough and hard enough and sooner or later it’ll break.”
“All right, sir. That sounds like it makes sense.” The scryer was a lieutenant by courtesy, as most mages were officers by courtesy. Having officer’s rank let him order common soldiers around, which was often convenient. What he knew about sound strategy, however, would likely have fit inside a thimble without straining things. But he was a freeborn Detinan, and reckoned his opinion as good as anyone else’s, including that of the general commanding.
“I’m so glad you approve.” Hesmucet intended it for sarcasm. The scryer took it as a compliment. He beamed at Hesmucet as the commanding general left the tent.
Once back in his own pavilion, Hesmucet summoned Doubting George, Fighting Joseph, and James the Bird’s Eye. He told his wing commanders what had happened to the luckless Sam the Sturgeon. “He had Ned outnumbered three to one, and he lost the fornicating battle?” Fighting Joseph burst out, his always ruddy face darkening further with anger. “That’s disgraceful, nothing else but.”
“It certainly is, and who would know better?” Doubting George murmured.
A considerable silence followed. At Viziersville, in the west, Fighting Joseph’s men had outnumbered those of Duke Edward of Arlington somewhere close to three to one, but Duke Edward’s Army of Southern Parthenia had won a resounding victory over the southrons nonetheless. Fighting Joseph turned red all over again, this time perhaps from embarrassment-although, from all Hesmucet had seen, he seemed nearly immune to that emotion.
At last, James the Bird’s Eye broke the silence with a sensible question: “What do we do now, sir?”
Hesmucet gave him the same sort of answer he’d given the scryer: “We’ll try to keep Ned busy over by the Great River, and we’ll keep Joseph’s unicorn-riders close to home so they can’t go after the glideway.”
James gravely considered that. In due course, he nodded. “Makes sense to me, sir,” he said. “We’ve come a long way doing what we’ve been doing. If we keep doing it and hit hard, we ought to end up in Marthasville before too long.”
“We’d better,” Lieutenant General George said. “There are grumblings down south about how long this fight is taking and how many men we’re spending to make it. I have friends who send me the news bulletins. I’m sure the rest of you have friends like that, too. What I’m not so sure of is whether they’re really friends.”
“Bloodsucking ghouls is what they are,” Fighting Joseph said. “They haven’t the ballocks to fight themselves, and so they pass their time by making the men who do fight doubt themselves.”
“It’s more complicated than that, I fear,” Doubting George said.
Fighting Joseph, by his expression, plainly didn’t believe it for a moment. Hesmucet did. He knew how weary the south was of the war against false King Geoffrey, and of its cost in both silver and blood. Victory would make that cost seem worthwhile. As long as the north held Marthasville, as long as Joseph the Gamecock’s army remained intact and in the field, the south saw no victory. If the farmers and burghers got sick of sending their sons and husbands and brothers off to die for what they saw as no good purpose, King Avram would have to recognize his rebellious cousin as his fellow sovereign. Hesmucet aimed to do everything he could to keep that from happening.
“Let’s take a crack at Cedar Hill, then,” he said. “Once we drive the traitors away from it, we’ll be in position to move against Commissioner Mountain.”
“Good enough,” James the Bird’s Eye said. Now Fighting Joseph agreed without hesitation. Whatever else you could say about the man, he wasn’t shy about going into a fight.
The only one showing any doubts was George. “It had better be good enough,” he said. “We’ll just have to do our best to make it good enough.”
When morning came, Hesmucet assembled his force and moved it west. He expected Joseph the Gamecock’s men to have solid entrenchments on the forward slopes of Cedar Hill, and so they did. In spite of a pounding from his siege engines, their lines held firm. Both sides got less use not only from engines but also from crossbows than they would have in better weather; an awful lot of bowstrings were wet. Hesmucet’s men slogged on, cleaning out one trench after another.
Toward midday, Hesmucet glanced up to one of the higher crags of Cedar Hill. There looking down at him-there looking down at his whole host-stood half a dozen northern officers in blue. They observed the men moving against them with the detachment of so many instructors at the military collegium at Annasville.
Rage ripped through Hesmucet. Unlike those cool, detached traitors, he took war personally. He spotted Brigadier Brannan, Doubting George’s commander of siege engines, who’d just wrestled some of his catapults forward. “Brannan!” he called, and pointed up toward the knot of northerners. “Can you smash a couple of those bastards for me?”
Brigadier Brannan studied the enemy officers. “A long shot, especially uphill,” he said, “but I’ve got a chance. Want me to try?”
“Yes, by the Thunderer’s balls!” Hesmucet exclaimed.
“All right.” Brannan called orders to his crew. They tightened the skeins and set a thirty-pound stone in the trough. Brannan himself squeezed the trigger. The catapult bucked and jerked and clacked. Away flew the round stone, almost faster than the eye could follow it.
* * *
“Look out!” Joseph the Gamecock shouted as the southrons’ catapult sent a stone flying toward the knot of officers he headed. Spry for a man of his years, he wasted not a heartbeat taking his own advice: he dove behind a boulder. Someone else dove on top of him. Other northerners scattered in all directions.
Joseph listened for the thud of the stone slamming into muddy dirt. Even skipping along the ground, it could be deadly dangerous. He’d heard of a foolish sergeant who’d tried to stop a rolling catapult ball with his foot-and lost the foot as a result.
The stone smacked down, alarmingly close to Joseph the Gamecock. But the sound it made wasn’t the heavy thud of rock hitting mud. It was a wetter noise, a solid smack that made the general commanding the Army of Franklin wince and curse. The southrons had aimed that stone too well. Someone in his retinue had gone down under it.
“Let me up, gods damn it,” Joseph growled to whoever had landed on him. When the officer didn’t move fast enough to suit him, Joseph lashed out with an elbow. That did the trick.
Scrambling to his feet, Joseph looked around. There stood Roast-Beef William, and there were a couple of junior officers, also upright and unscathed. But Leonidas the Priest sprawled on the ground, and plainly would never get up again. He still twitched, but that was only because his body hadn’t yet realized he was dead. When a thirty-pound flying stone hit a man square in the chest, he was unlikely to get up again. Blood soaked into the red dirt, reddening it further. Leonidas’ blood was even redder than the crimson vestments he wore.
His twitching stopped. Joseph peered down toward the southrons and their engine, wondering if they were going to send another stone his way. But they seemed satisfied to have scattered his companions and him. He wondered if they knew they’d hit anyone.
“By the gods,” Roast-Beef William said, staring at the smashed corpse of his fellow wing commander.
“Yes, by the gods,” Joseph the Gamecock agreed. “The Lion God will have himself a new servant, up there on the mountain beyond the sky.” And may Leonidas serve his favorite god better than he ever served King Geoffrey and me.
Another officer said, “I think, sir, we can withdraw from this spot without fear of dishonor.”
Joseph hadn’t thought about that. But he recognized truth when he heard it. “Yes, we’d better,” he agreed, “or else they may deci
de to send us another present. Somebody grab poor Leonidas’ legs and haul him off. He deserves to go on a proper pyre.”
They retreated farther up Cedar Hill. The southrons down below seemed satisfied with the results of their one shot. Leonidas the Priest’s body left a trail of blood as junior officers dragged him along. Joseph the Gamecock never stopped being amazed at how much blood a man’s body held.
“What do we do now, sir?” Roast-Beef William asked.
“We do what we have to do, Lieutenant General,” Joseph answered. “We appoint a new wing commander and we go on. Leonidas was a brave and pious man, but we have to go on without him.” Leonidas had also been an idiot who didn’t like taking orders, but Joseph the Gamecock didn’t dwell on that, not aloud. When a man died, you looked for the good he’d had in him. If, with the hierophant of the Lion God, you had to look a bit harder than you might with someone else… Stop that, Joseph the Gamecock told himself.
The southrons kept pounding away at Cedar Hill. Roast-Beef William said, “I’m afraid we’re going to have to fall back to Commissioner Mountain, sir.”
“I’m afraid you’re right,” Joseph said. “If General Hesmucet cares to launch a frontal attack against us there, he’s welcome to try it for all of me.”
“You don’t want to make things too easy for him, though,” Roast-Beef William protested.
“Oh, no,” Joseph agreed. “I don’t intend to do anything of the sort. But this position can be turned. I’d like to see Hesmucet try to turn our lines along Commissioner Mountain and Snouts Stream.” Even as he spoke, rain began to fall. He smiled; to him right now, rain was a friend. “I’d especially like to see Hesmucet try one of his outflanking moves in this muck.”
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