Advance and Retreat

VI

Ned of the Forest had been up close to Ramblerton before. He’d never had so many men at his back as he did now. All the same, he’d never felt less cheerful about his army’s chances.

“What’s Bell going to do, Biff?” he demanded, pointing south. “What can Bell do, going up against… that?”

“Gods damn me if I know, Lord Ned,” his regimental commander replied. “Those aren’t just fieldworks. That’s real fortcraft on display there: real castles, real stone walls, engines everywhere, ditches out in front of everything so we can’t even get at it, let alone over it.”

“I know.” Ned scowled and kicked at the muddy ground under his feet. “When I joined up with the Army of Franklin, I reckoned it was pretty good-sized. I figured it could do something worth doing. But it’s just asking to kill itself if it goes up against works like those there.”

“Other side of that copper is, the Army of Franklin’s a deal smaller now than it was before it got out of Poor Richard,” Colonel Biffle said. “What the hells was Bell thinking, going at that place that way?”

“I told him I could flank the southrons out,” Ned said. “I told him and told him. He didn’t want to listen-fools never do want to listen. He stole half our men, too, the son of a bitch. He thought he could smash right on through, and look what it got him.”

“Me, I don’t much fancy the way the footsoldiers look right about now,” Biffle said. “They haven’t got a hells of a lot of spunk in ’em. If the southrons were to sally from those forts…” He didn’t go on. He didn’t need to go on.

“We’ve got to keep ’em too busy to even think of it,” Ned said. “I hope we can bring it off, I truly do.”

Colonel Biffle noticed his unhappy tones. “You… hope, sir?” he said. “As long as I can remember, you’ve made things happen. Now you just hope they do?”

Gloomily, Ned nodded. “You saw what happened when we bumped up against those southron unicorn-riders. They’ve got crossbows we can’t hope to match. Only ones we can get are the ones we take from their dead. We don’t make anything of the sort our ownselves. We ought to, but we don’t.”

“We can only use the bolts we get from dead southrons, too,” Biffle said.

“I know.” Another, even gloomier, nod from Ned. “They’re clever bastards, no two ways about it. These crossbows have a skinnier groove than the regular sort, so our standard quarrels won’t fit. Takes a sneaky son of a bitch to think of that.”

“Sure does,” Biffle agreed, and sighed. “Well, the southrons have folks like that, and that’s the truth. We could use some of our own right about now, and that’s the truth, too.”

“We could use… a lot of things right about now.” Ned of the Forest went no further. Saying anything more wouldn’t do any good. Lieutenant General Bell had courage and to spare. Asking the gods to equip him with a real working set of brains to go with it was a prayer unlikely to be answered. People had been asking for that for a long time, with no luck.

“You know what worries me most, Lord Ned?” the regimental commander said.

“Tell me.” Ned hoped it would be the same thing he worried about most himself. That way, no new worries would go on his stack.

Biffle said, “What worries me is, Bell still thinks we won the fight at Poor Richard. We advanced afterwards, and the southrons left behind a lot of their wounded, and that makes it a triumph to him. He doesn’t look at the state the army’s in.”

That came close to matching Ned’s concern about Bell, but didn’t quite. He looked toward Ramblerton’s formidable works once more. “You don’t reckon he wants to try and storm this town, do you?” Very few things had ever frightened Ned of the Forest. The idea of hurling the Army of Franklin at Ramblerton’s fortifications came closer than anything that had happened lately.

“He’d better not!” Biffle exclaimed. “If he does, you have to talk him out of it-that or bang him over the head with a rock, one.”

“I will,” Ned said grimly. “By the Lion God’s tail tuft, I don’t know how he can do anything for a little while. We’ve got a colonel commanding a wing, captains in charge of regiments, sergeants leading companies… Nobody knows what the devils he’s supposed to be doing.” He eyed the scraggly ranks of Bell’s army, then laughed a bitter laugh. “He likely figures we’re laying siege to Ramblerton.”

“I wish we were,” Biffle said. “I wish we could.”

“So do I, both way,” Ned replied. “But I know we’re not. I hope Bell does, too. I better go find out, I reckon.”

He swung up onto his unicorn and rode off to find Bell’s headquarters. The general commanding had set himself up in a farmhouse a little behind the line. As Ned rode up, Bell was talking to a young major: “You should think yourself a made man, heading up a brigade at your tender age.”

“Thank you, sir,” the junior officer said. “If it’s all the same to you, though, I wish I were still second-in-command in my old regiment. I’d know what I was doing there-and we wouldn’t have so many men above me dead.”

“We go on,” Lieutenant General Bell said. “We have to go on. What else can we do? Turn around and run back up to Dothan? Not likely!” Pride rang in his voice. When he tossed his head to show his scorn for the southrons, he caught sight of Ned of the Forest. “You may go, Major. I have business to talk with Lieutenant General Ned here.”

The major saluted and hurried away. Ned saluted, too. As usual, he wasted no time on small talk. “What are we going to do now that we’re here?” he demanded. Very much as an afterthought, he added, “Sir?”

“I aim to give John the Lister and Doubting George another whipping of the same sort as they had at Poor Richard,” Bell declared grandly.

“One more ‘whipping’ like that and you won’t have any army left yourself,” Ned said, his voice harsh and blunt.

Instead of answering right away, Bell took out his little bottle of laudanum, pulled the stopper with his teeth, and swigged. “Ahh!” he said. “That makes the world seem a better place.”

“No matter what it seems like, it isn’t,” Ned said, even more bluntly than before. “I’m going to ask you again, sir, and this time I expect a straight answer: what do you aim to do next?”

Something seemed to leach out of Bell. He tried to gather himself, to hold on to the force of will that Ned had seen failing him, and succeeded… to a degree. “Lieutenant General, I am going to make the southrons come out of their works if they intend to fight us. If they come out, things can go wrong for them. I don’t intend to storm the entrenchments around Ramblerton. I can see we would be unlikely to carry them, the men feeling as they do about attacking forts.”

Ned of the Forest considered. If he were a footsoldier, he wouldn’t have cared to try to storm Ramblerton’s fortifications, either. Who in his right mind wanted to get killed to no purpose? But Bell’s plan, if that was what it was, struck him as being about as good as anyone could want for in the Army of Franklin’s present battered state.

“All right, sir,” he said. “Don’t reckon we’ve got much hope trying anything else. But I want to warn you about something.”

“And what’s that?” Bell rumbled. “How do you have any business warning your commanding officer?”

“Somebody’d better,” Ned said. “You have to listen, too. Don’t go splitting things up. We haven’t got the men for it. We haven’t got room to make any mistakes. Not any at all. You understand what I’m saying?”

“I have led us south for two hundred miles now,” Bell replied. “I have had plenty of underlings make mistakes-and no, I am not speaking of you, so you need not take offense. I do not believe I have made any substantial blunders in this campaign.”

“You took half my men away from me when I was trying to outflank the southrons,” Ned exclaimed. “If I’d had those men, I might’ve broken through and made John the Lister fall back without any need for a fight at Poor Richard.”

“I needed those men no less than you did,” Bell said. “The battle was long and hard enough even with their aid. Without it, our arms might not have triumphed.”

“What makes you reckon they did?” Ned asked.

Bell looked at him as if he’d started speaking the language of one of the blond tribes instead of plain and simple Detinan. “We held the field when the fight was done,” the commanding general said; Ned might have been an idiot child to doubt him. “We advanced afterwards. We took charge of the wounded men the southrons abandoned in their retreat. If that is not victory, what would you call it?”

By all the rules they taught in the officers’ collegium at Annasville, Bell was right. Ned of the Forest knew about those rules, and all other formalities of the military art, only by hearsay. But he knew what he saw with his own eyes. He had no doubt at all there. “If this here is a victory… sir… then we’d better not see another one. And that’s all I’ve got to say about that.”

He saluted with as much precision as he could muster, then turned on his heel and strode away from Lieutenant General Bell. “Here, now!” the general commanding called after him. “You come back at once-at once, I say-and explain yourself. Do you say we failed to win a victory at Poor Richard? Do you? How dare you?”

Ned pretended not to hear. Bell couldn’t very well run after him, after all. As he neared his unicorn, Bell’s complaints grew fainter. He mounted and rode off. Once in the saddle, he didn’t have to listen any more.

But the army’s still stuck with Bell, he thought unhappily. Then, even more unhappily, he shrugged. If you were in charge of things now, what would you do different? he asked himself. He found no answer. Too late to worry about that. The damage had long since been done.

“Well?” Colonel Biffle asked when Ned got back among his unicorn-riders.

“Well, Biff, the good news is, we don’t have to try and take Ramblerton all by our lonesome,” Ned replied. “The bad news is-or maybe it’s good news, too; to the hells with me if I know-we wait here outside of Ramblerton till the southrons decide they’re good and ready to hit us.”

“What do we do then?” Biffle asked dubiously.

“Hope we can lick ’em,” Ned said.

“Think we can?” the regimental commander inquired, even more dubiously.

“Don’t know,” Ned of the Forest answered. “What I think is, we’d better. Are you going to tell me I’m wrong? If we’re in our trenches and they’re trying to come at us… well, we’ve maybe got some kind of chance, anyways.”

“Maybe.” Biffle didn’t sound as if he believed it. Then he shrugged. “Odds are better than us going up against those forts, I expect. Odds of anything’d be better than that.”

“Don’t I know it!” Ned said. “It could work, I suppose. If John the Lister and Doubting George figure we’ve got no fight left in us, it could work. But by the Lion God’s claws, I hate laying my hopes on the off chance that the sons of bitches I’m up against don’t know what they’re doing.”

“Why?” Colonel Biffle said. “Been plain for a goodish while now that we don’t. Why should they be any different?”

Ned laughed. Biffle’s words held altogether too much truth. “Long odds, Biff,” he said. “Long odds indeed.”

“Well, we’ve had long odds before, and licked the southrons anyways,” Biffle said. “This past summer, down in Great River Province…”

“I know. I know. And maybe we can do it again,” Ned said. “Somehow or other, we’ve got to do it again. You reckon we can?”

He waited. For a long time, Colonel Biffle stood there without saying a word. Ned of the Forest coughed, telling him he would have an answer. Reluctantly, the regimental commander replied, “You had it right, Lord Ned. We’ve got to lick ’em. Anything we’ve got to do, we will.”

“How?” Ned neither minced nor wasted words.

All he got by way of a reply this time was a shrug. He coughed again, louder. Even more reluctantly, Colonel Biffle said, “Gods damn me if I know. Maybe the southrons really will make a mistake.”

“They’d better.” Ned of the Forest sounded as if he held his regimental commander responsible for it. Both men looked toward the works in front of Ramblerton. Even at this distance, Ned could see southrons in gray moving back and forth in those works. Even at this distance, he seemed to see a whole great swarm of southrons moving back and forth. “How many of those bastards are there?” he grumbled.

“Too many,” Biffle replied, which startled another laugh out of Ned. The colonel continued, “You put any southrons-any southrons, mind you-in a province that’s sworn loyalty to good King Geoffrey and that’s too fornicating many.”

“True enough,” Ned said. “It’ll take a good deal of pounding to be rid of ’em, though.”

Now his gaze went to Captain Watson, who was attacking a broken-down dart-thrower with a hammer and a set of wrenches. The young officer in charge of Ned’s engines was as much a mechanic as a leader of fighting men, as much a mechanic as any southron. That made him all the more valuable to the northern cause. Had Geoffrey had more men like Watson loyal to him, the north would have been in better shape. Ned saw that. After a little while, though, he also saw the north would not have been the land he knew were that so. How to win, though? Try as he would, Ned could not see that.

Once again, Rollant looked out at the northern army from the security of strong fortifications. Up at Poor Richard, Bell’s men had done everything they could to overwhelm the southrons’ works. Here… Rollant turned to Smitty. “Do you suppose Bell’d be dumb enough to try and attack us again?”

“I hope so,” Smitty answered at once. “If he does, we’ll kill every last one of the bastards he’s got left. We won’t get hurt doing it, either.”

“That’s how it looks to me, too,” the blond said. “I was wondering if maybe I was wrong.”

“Not this time,” Smitty said with a grin.

Rollant glared. “Funny. You and your smart mouth. I ought to set you chopping extra firewood for that.” Even as he spoke, he knew he wouldn’t.

By Smitty’s impudent grin, he must have known the same thing. “Have mercy, your Corporalship!” he exclaimed. “I’ll be good! I really will. I won’t give you any more trouble, not ever!”

Rollant laughed. “Do you know what you remind me of?”

“No, your illustrious Corporalship, but I expect you’re going to tell me, so that’s all right.”

With a snort, Rollant said, “You remind me of a fast-talking serf trying to flimflam his way out of trouble with his liege lord. I always used to wish I could talk that way when I got in trouble on Baron Ormerod’s estate. It never used to work for me, though.”

From behind them, Sergeant Joram growled, “It shouldn’t work for this fast-talking son of a bitch, either.” Rollant and Smitty both jumped; they hadn’t heard Joram come up. The sergeant went on, “Smitty, go chop firewood. Go chop lots of it. I want to see your hands bleeding when you bring it back. Go on, get out of here.”

Smitty disappeared as if made to vanish by magecraft. He knew there were times when he could argue with Sergeant Joram and times when he couldn’t. He also knew which was which, and that this was plainly one of the latter.

Joram folded massive arms across his broad chest. He eyed Rollant. “Flimflam, is it?” he said.

“Sergeant?” Rollant asked.

“You’ve made a good underofficer,” Joram said. “Truth to tell, you’ve made a better one than anybody figured you would. But you can’t be soft on somebody just because you like him and he’s a funny fellow.”

“I haven’t meant to be soft on anybody, Sergeant,” Rollant said. By his own standards, that was true. By Joram’s, it probably wasn’t. Joram was fair. He treated everybody under him the same way-miserably.

“Maybe not,” he said now, “but I think you go too easy on Smitty, and I know the two of you were pals before you made corporal.”

“Pals?” Not for the first time, Rollant wondered about that. Could a blond and an ordinary Detinan be pals? Didn’t too much history stand in the way? Rollant still thought so. That he wasn’t quite sure any more said something about Smitty-and something about how long he’d lived in the south.

“Ask you something, Sergeant?” he said.

“Go ahead,” Joram growled.

“When are we going to get out there and smash the traitors?”

“To the hells with me if I know. Whenever Doubting George gives the order.” The sergeant leered. “When he does, I promise you’ll hear about it.”

“Yes, Sergeant. I know that. But… even when we just had the little army John the Lister led, we put the fear of the gods in Bell’s men. Now we’ve got a lot more soldiers.” Rollant waved back toward Ramblerton. “We’ve got all these extra men, but Bell doesn’t even have what he hit us with before, because we chewed him up. So now maybe we ought to do some hitting of our own.”

“It’s not up to me,” Joram said. “It’s up to Doubting George. When he tells us to march, we march. When he tells us to stay where we are, we stay. When he tells you you can complain, go ahead and complain. Until he tells you you can complain-shut up, gods damn it.”

“What do free Detinans ever do but complain?” Rollant returned. “And if I’m not a free Detinan, what am I?”

That, of course, was the question of the War Between the Provinces. If a blond wasn’t a free Detinan, what was he? Northerners insisted he was a serf, and could never be anything else. King Avram disagreed with that, and had the southrons on his side. But even Avram didn’t seem convinced blonds would become ordinary Detinans the instant the north gave up the fight.

Joram’s heavy-featured face-the gods might have made him on purpose to be a sergeant-clouded up. But he had an answer that applied to Rollant, even if it didn’t to blonds in general: “What are you? By the Thunderer’s balls, you’re a corporal-and I’m a sergeant. If I tell you to swallow your bellyaching, you’d better swallow it, on account of I’ve got the right to tell you to. Have you got that?”

“Yes, Sergeant,” Rollant said-the only answer he could give. Joram recognized his right to be a corporal. As soon as that right was recognized, as soon as a blond’s right to pick up a crossbow or a pike and go fight the northerners was recognized, everything else would follow. And if Grand Duke Geoffrey wanted to deny it and call himself king in the north… too bad for him. He had left only the Army of Southern Parthenia and the Army of Franklin. Marshal Bart had one by the throat, while the other waited here for whatever Doubting George would do to it.

“When we do whip Lieutenant General Bell, what will Geoffrey have left here in the east?” Rollant wondered aloud. “Nothing I can see.”

“That’s the idea,” Joram said. “The son of a bitch is a traitor. When he’s done losing, he ought to go up on a cross. The buzzards can peck out his eyes, for all I care. We’re going to smash those bastards, smash ’em good. Don’t you worry about that, not even a little bit. It’ll happen. Nobody knows when yet, but it will.” He thumped Rollant on the back, hard enough to stagger him, then trudged on down the trench line.

“Boy,” Smitty said, “if I gave him half that hard a time, he’d have my guts for garters.”

“And you’d deserve it, too,” Rollant said. “I thought you went off to cut firewood.”

“So did Joram,” Smitty answered. “I just went into the little jog in the trench where we ease ourselves. That’s one good thing about cold weather, anyhow-the little jog doesn’t stink the way it would in summer. Hardly any flies, either.”

“Button yours,” Rollant said.

Smitty looked down. Rollant snickered. That was the sort of joke schoolboys played on each other-not that he’d ever been a schoolboy. “Think you’re pretty gods-damned funny, don’t you?” Smitty said indignantly.

“What I think is, you’d better go cut that wood before Joram sees you’re still around,” Rollant said. “He’s right-I let you get away with all kinds of things. But he won’t, and you know it.”

Nodding gloomily, Smitty went off to do his work. Rollant looked out at the northerners’ lines again. They weren’t within crossbow range, or even within range of the stone- and dart-throwers that could outshoot any hand-held weapon. They had their own fortified positions on the hills in front of Ramblerton, a couple of miles north of Doubting George’s outworks.

All right. They’re there. Now what the hells do they do? Rollant wondered. What would I do, if I were Bell? One answer to that question immediately came to mind: I’d go somewhere high and jump off. Could Bell jump with only one leg? One more thing Rollant didn’t know. But he wouldn’t have wanted to go around leaving pieces of himself on different battlefields, as the northern general commanding had done.

Tiny as ants in the distance, blue-clad traitors went about their business. As soldiers, they weren’t much different from their southron counterparts. As men… as men, they were welcome to the hottest firepits in the seven hells, as far as Rollant was concerned. He knew they wished him the same, and would do their best to send him there. If he’d cared about what northern Detinans thought, he never would have run away from Baron Ormerod’s plantation.

Night fell early this time of year. Before long, all Rollant could see of the enemy was the light from his campfires. Over there, common soldiers were also grumbling because their underofficers made them chop firewood. One thing was different over there, though. None of the northerners’ underofficers was a blond.

Lieutenant Griff came up the line. “Everything all right, Corporal?” he asked. He spoke thickly; up at Poor Richard, a shortsword had laid one cheek open. The black stitches the healers had put in to close the wound made him look like an outlaw or a pirate instead of the mild-mannered fellow he’d seemed before. Even when they came out, he’d be scarred for the rest of his days.

“Everything’s fine, sir,” Rollant answered. “How are you?” He hadn’t expected to sound so anxious. Griff had made a better company commander than most of his men thought he would after Captain Cephas got killed. His voice still broke now and again, but he had plenty of nerve, and he looked out for his soldiers the way a good officer would.

Now he managed a mostly one-sided grin. “I’ll do,” he said. “No sign of fever in the wound-it’s healing, not festering. That was my biggest worry. I’m not what you’d call fond of soaking a rag in spirits and pressing it on the cut-”

“Ow!” Rollant said sympathetically. “Does that really do any good? Seems like a lot of hurt for not much help.”

“Some of them say it does, so I’m doing it,” Griff replied. “I asked one of them if he’d do it himself, and he showed me a clean scar and said he had done it. Not much I could say to that.”

Rollant thought of raw spirits on raw flesh. “I don’t know, sir. I think I’d almost rather have the fever.”

Lieutenant Griff shook his head. “No. That can kill. This just hurts. I’ll get through it.” Unlike a lot of Detinans, he didn’t brag or bluster about his bravery. He just displayed it. Pointing to the fires north of Ramblerton, he said, “I wish Lieutenant General George would turn us loose against the traitors.”

“I’ve been saying the same thing. Why won’t he, do you think?” Rollant asked.

Griff shrugged. “How can I say? I’m not Doubting George. I’m not going to go back into Ramblerton and ask him. Not even Colonel Nahath could get away with that. George would throw him out on his ear. Maybe he’s waiting for more men-I hear another wing may be coming from the far side of the Great River.”

“Why does he need them?” Rollant asked. “We stopped the Army of Franklin all by ourselves, and George has a lot of soldiers here who didn’t go north with John the Lister. We ought to be able to ride roughshod over the traitors.”

Smiling-again, lopsidedly-Griff said, “Well, Rollant, no one who listened to you would ever get the idea that blonds are shy about mixing it up.”

He means that for praise, Rollant reminded himself. And he’s my company commander. If I bop him over the head with something, it will only land me in trouble.

“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 feet. “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.”

“I am not dithering, sir,” George replied with dignity. “I am waiting for a couple of good brigades to come in from the far side of the Great River. As soon as they’re here, I will land on Bell like a ton of barristers.”

“I am of the opinion-and King Avram is also of the opinion-that you have enough men to do the job without these footsoldiers from beyond the Great River,” Bart said. “I want you to get on with it, George.”

“Sir, I will attack when I am ready,” Doubting George said stiffly. “Until I am sure I can do the job as it should be done, I don’t see how I can-or why I should-launch an attack.”

“Lieutenant General, if you stay in Ramblerton much longer without attacking, you put your command in jeopardy,” Marshal Bart said. “Do I make myself plain?”

“Odiously so,” George answered. “If you want to replace me, you have the right to do just that. You are the marshal, after all.”

“Confound it, George, I don’t want to replace you,” Bart said irritably. “I want you to go out there and fight and win. The longer you sit there and don’t fight, though, the worse you look, and the louder people scream for your head.”

“Tell those people to go scream about something else,” George said. “Have I ever let you down? Have I ever let the kingdom down?”

“No, but they say there’s a first time for everything. I’m beginning to wonder myself,” Bart said. “I tell you that frankly, as one soldier to another. You outnumber Bell. He is there in front of you. Go strike him.”

“You outnumber Duke Edward. He is there in front of you. Go strike him,” Doubting George said.

“You are not so funny as you may think. If you saw the works of Pierreville, you would be more sparing of your advice.”

“Sir, it could be,” George allowed. “I do not understand the situation there. I admit it. And you do not understand the situation here-only you refuse to admit it.”

“I understand that I am the commanding general of all the armies of the Kingdom of Detina,” Marshal Bart said. “I understand that I have ordered you to attack. I understand that you are not attacking. What more do I need to understand about Ramblerton?”

“That ordering me to attack when my army is not ready is about as bad a mistake as you can make… sir,” Doubting George said. “That you are flabbling over nothing. Bell will not get away, and I will whip him.”

“You are a stubborn man, Lieutenant General,” Bart said. “I warn you once more, though: you are trifling with your career.”

“I will take the chance, sir,” George replied. “Let history-and you-judge by the result.”

“If you don’t get moving before too long, history would judge me if I didn’t remove you from your command,” the marshal said. “You had better bear that in mind if you mean to sit around with a superior force.”

“You will do what you think best,” Doubting George said stolidly, not showing any of the outrage that boiled up in him at Bart’s threat. “I wish you would credit me with doing the same, though.”

“I believe you are doing what you think best,” Marshal Bart said. “But if I do not also happen to think that is the best thing to do, I would be remiss in my duty if I did not take steps to see what I want done, done.”

“You want a victory. I will give you a victory. If I don’t give you a victory, send me out to the trackless east and let me chase the blond savages along with Guildenstern and John the Hierophant.”

“I want a victory now, Lieutenant General. You have it in your power to give me what I want,” Bart said. “If you don’t give me what I want, I will get it from someone else. That is the long and short of it.” Bart turned to the scryer dealing with his end of the mystic connection between crystal balls. The scryer broke it. Bart’s image vanished from the crystal ball in front of Doubting George.

George’s scryer asked, “Do you want to send any messages of your own, sir?”

“Eh? No.” George shook his head. “Not only that, I didn’t want to hear the one I just got.”

“I don’t blame you a bit,” the scryer said. Then, remembering such conversations were supposed to be confidential, he turned red. “Not that I was paying much attention to it.”

“No, of course not.” George’s irony was strong enough to make the scryer flinch. “Just keep that convenient forgetfulness in mind when you’re talking with anybody else, eh?” The wizard nodded quick and, George thought, sincere agreement. It wasn’t so much that he had George’s interests uppermost in his mind. But he had to know the general commanding could make his life amazingly miserable if he let his mouth run away with him.

Doubting George stalked away from the room full of crystal balls. Miserable invention, he thought. They let distant commanders inflict their stupidity on someone on the spot. If the ignorant bastards off in the west actually knew what they were doing and what things were like here… He shook his head. As he’d seen, that was too much to ask for.

He went out onto the streets of Ramblerton. He hoped he wouldn’t have anyone asking him questions out there. No such luck. Colonel Andy emerged a couple of minutes later. Someone must have tipped him off that George had been summoned to talk on a crystal ball. “Well?” George’s adjutant asked.

“No, as a matter of fact, it’s not so well,” George answered. “Bart wants everything to start yesterday.”

“And if it doesn’t?” Andy asked.

“He’ll throw me out on my ear,” George answered. “Then he’ll go and pull somebody else’s strings.”

Andy scowled like an irate chipmunk. “That’s a hells of a thing for him to go and do. Fat lot of gratitude he shows for all you’ve done. If you hadn’t saved things by the River of Death, we might really be worrying about how to hold on to Cloviston now.”

“Nothing I can do about it,” Doubting George said. “Anyone who puts his faith in a superior’s gratitude is like the fellow who said he believed in no gods at all till the Thunderer hit him with a lightning bolt: you can try it, but chances are it won’t do you much good.”

He’d heard that story since he was a little boy. For the first time, he paused to wonder if it was so. From some of the things Alva had said, the wizard believed the gods were a lot less powerful than most people thought. A solid conservative, George doubted that, but the Thunderer hadn’t smitten Alva with any lightning bolts. And, if the Inward Hypothesis somehow turned out to be true, how much room did it leave for the action of the gods in the world? Less than George would have wanted, plainly.

To his relief, Colonel Andy brought him back to the mundane world of battles: “Could you make Marshal Bart happy and attack the traitors now?”

“I suppose I could,” George replied, “but we’d have more of a chance of coming away with a bloody nose if I did. When I hit them, I want to hit them with everything we can get our hands on. For that, I need those last two brigades from the east side of the Great River to get here.”

“What if Bart replaces you before they do?” Andy asked nervously.

“Why, then I suppose they send me off to hunt blonds out on the steppe. I already told Bart I’d go.” George spoke with equanimity. In fact, he doubted anything so dreadful would happen. He was a brigadier in the regulars, and he wouldn’t have lost a battle like Guildenstern or John the Hierophant. Odds were he’d just spend the rest of his career in Georgetown counting crossbow quarrels or something equally useful.

Andy… If I remember rightly, Andy is a captain of regulars, George thought. His adjutant probably would get sent to the steppe, and to one of the less prepossessing forts there. No wonder he seemed nervous.

“Don’t fret,” George told him. “If you let anything but what you need to do prey on your mind, you’re in trouble. I know what’s going on here. Marshal Bart doesn’t, regardless of whether he thinks he does.”

“But he’s the one who can give the orders,” Andy said.

“Well, yes, he can,” Doubting George admitted. “But he’d be wrong if he did.”

“By the gods!” Colonel Andy burst out. “When in the hells has that ever stopped one of our generals, or even slowed the stupid son of a bitch down?”

“Do bear in mind, Colonel, that you are presently talking to one of those stupid sons of bitches,” George said. Andy had the grace to look embarrassed, though George suspected he wasn’t, or not very. The general commanding continued, “And I don’t happen to think I’m wrong in delaying. If I did, I wouldn’t.” He listened to himself to make sure he’d said what he meant there. After a bit of thought, he decided he had.

Andy, however, still looked unhappy. “Maybe we ought to move forward now, sir. If Bell gets reinforcements-”

“Where?” George broke in, shaking his head. “What are the odds of that? Whatever he can scrape up, he’s got.”

“I don’t know where he’d get them,” Andy said petulantly. “I just think we ought to hit him as hard as we can as soon as we can.”

“And we will,” George said. “But that isn’t quite yet, in my opinion. And mine is the opinion that counts.”

“Not if Marshal Bart removes you,” his adjutant said.

“He won’t.” Doubting George sounded more confident than he felt.

“What if, while you’re waiting for your brigades, Bell comes up with a new strong wizard?” Andy asked.

“From where?” George asked again. “If the northerners have any decent mages who aren’t already wearing blue robes, you can bet your last piece of silver it’s news to Bell and Geoffrey both. Besides, even if Bell does come up with one, Alva will handle him.” He patted Andy on the shoulder. “Cheer up. Everything will be fine.”

“I doubt it,” Andy said, in exactly the tone George would have used. George found himself with no reply.

Brigadier of the regulars. The words-and what they betokened-sang within John the Lister. Up till he could use those words about himself, he’d almost dreaded the end of the War Between the Provinces. He enjoyed being a brigadier, and he thought he’d proved he did a good job at that rank. To drop down to a captain’s meager command would have been hard. To drop down to a captain’s meager pay would have been even harder.

He didn’t have to worry about that any more. He would hold brigadier’s rank till he died or retired. He wouldn’t have to go out to some steppe castle in the middle of nowhere and listen to wild wolves and wilder blonds howling outside the walls. Doubting George had said he would recommend him for promotion, and he’d kept his promise. Marshal Bart and King Avram had recognized what John did at Poor Richard. Now all the southrons had left to do was finish squashing Lieutenant General Bell and the Army of Franklin.

For some reason John couldn’t fathom, Doubting George didn’t seem to want to do that. There the traitors were, out on ridges in plain sight of Ramblerton. They didn’t even have enough men to stretch their line all the way across the neck of the loop of the Cumbersome River in which the capital of Franklin laid. As far as John the Lister could see, outflanking them and rolling them up would be the easiest thing in the world.

Why didn’t George want to move?

John knew he wasn’t the only one who had trouble finding an answer. Most of the officers inside Ramblerton kept scratching their heads, wondering what George was doing-or rather, why he wasn’t doing it. And the rumors that came out of the scryers’ hall…

Rumors like that came out all the time. More often than not, soldiers had the sense to ignore them. This time… John the Lister shook his head. How could you ignore rumors that Bart was threatening to sack Doubting George? How could you ignore rumors that Bart was threatening to leave the siege of Pierreville and come east, either taking command in Ramblerton himself or appointing George’s replacement?

You couldn’t. It was that simple. Whenever two officers-hells, whenever two soldiers-got together, the gossip started up afresh. Some people started saying John the Lister ought to take Doubting George’s place. When a colonel did it in John’s hearing, he rounded on the man. “I am not going to replace Lieutenant General George,” he growled. “I don’t think George needs replacing. Do you understand me?”

“Uh, yes, sir,” the man answered, his eyes wide with surprise.

“You’d better, Colonel,” John said. “If I hear you’ve been spouting more of this disruptive gossip, I won’t be the only one who hears about it. I hope I make myself plain enough?”

“Uh, yes, sir,” the unhappy colonel said again, and retreated faster than General Guildenstern had fallen back from the River of Death.

That wasn’t enough to satisfy John the Lister. He went and told Doubting George what had happened, though he named no names. He finished, “Sir, I don’t want you to think I’m intriguing against you.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” George replied. “Now the question is, do you want me not to think that because you’re not doing it or because you really are intriguing against me but you want to keep me in the dark?”

“What?” John the Lister needed several heartbeats to work through that. When he did, he stared at the commanding general with something approaching horror. “That’s the most twisted bit of thinking I do believe I’ve ever run into, sir.”

“Thank you,” Doubting George replied, which only flummoxed John further. George continued, “Now answer the question, if you’d be so kind.”

“Sir, I am not intriguing against you, and that is the truth,” John said stiffly. “If you don’t believe me, go fetch Major Alva and let him find out by magic.”

He didn’t fear what might happen if Doubting George did that. He’d told the general commanding the truth: he’d shown no disloyalty in word, deed, or manner. On the contrary. That didn’t mean he would have been unhappy if Marshal Bart booted George out of the command and set him in George’s place. Again, on the contrary. Ambition, he told himself, was different from disloyalty.

He didn’t care for the smile that played on what he could see of George’s lips behind the other officer’s thick beard and mustache. Still smiling that unpleasant smile, George said, “I won’t sic Major Alva on you if I think you’re scheming against me, Brigadier. I’ll just dismiss you. Have you got that?”

“Yes, sir,” John replied. “You leave me no room for, er, doubt.” Doubting George laughed out loud. John went on, “But may I ask you one different question?”

“Go right ahead.” George was the picture of northern hospitality.

“Sir, why the hells won’t you attack Bell?” John the Lister blurted.

“Why? Because the son of a bitch isn’t going anywhere, and I’m not quite ready to give him what-for yet. I want those last couple of brigades from the far side of the Great River here before I do,” George answered. “I tell this over and over to anybody who’ll listen, but nobody seems to want to. Is it so gods-damned hard to grasp?” He sounded as plaintive as a commanding general was ever likely to.

“Sir, he’s right in front of us. He’s just waiting to be hit. If we can’t whip him with what we’ve got here…”

“If we can’t, we’d be stupid to try, especially when those brigades are almost here,” Doubting George said.

“But I think we can!” John the Lister said.

“That’s nice.” George sounded placid. Whether he was… Well, now John was the doubting one. The commanding general went on, “If Marshal Bart bounces me and names you in my place, you can go charging forth just as though you’d borrowed Bell’s brains, such as they are. Meanwhile, you’d better do what I tell you. We’ll both be unhappy if you don’t, but you’ll end up unhappier. I promise you that, Brigadier.”

“Yes, sir,” John the Lister said. “If you’ll excuse me, sir…” He waited for Doubting George’s affable nod, then left George’s headquarters at something just this side of a run.

Still steaming, he hurried up the muddy, puddle-splashed streets of Ramblerton till brick buildings gave way to log huts and log huts gave way to bare-branched broad-leafed trees and brooding, dark green pines. The southrons’ line of fortifications abridged the forest along the ridges north of Ramblerton. John ascended to a sentry tower in the nearest fort. The sentry in the tower was so startled to have a brigadier appear at his elbow, he almost fell out of his observation chamber coming to attention when John did.

“Give me your spyglass,” John barked.

“Sir?” The sentry gaped.

“Give me your gods-damned spyglass,” John the Lister said again.

Numbly, the sentry handed over the long, gleaming brass tube. John raised it to his eye and swept it over the traitors’ lines. Lieutenant General Bell’s soldiers seemed to leap toward him. Mages insisted spyglasses weren’t sorcery: only a clever use of the mechanic arts. No matter what the mages said, the effect always seemed magical to John.

Now, almost as if he were standing in front of its parapets, he could see the Army of Franklin in action, and in inaction. Scrawny men in tattered blue tunics and pantaloons, many of the poor bastards barefoot, lined up in front of kettles to get their midday meals. They looked more like the survivors of some disaster than an army that probably imagined it was laying siege to Ramblerton. The earthworks they’d thrown up were very fresh and new, but they didn’t have many soldiers in them.

John scanned the northerners’ position, trying to spy out how many unicorn-riders they had with them. Fewer than he’d expected. He wondered if some of them had gone off to raid somewhere else. He wouldn’t have divided his forces in the face of an enemy that outnumbered him. What Bell would do, though, was liable to be known only unto the gods.

Back swung John’s narrow circle of vision. Suddenly, the spyglass stopped. There was some northern sentry or officer looking straight back at him out of a spyglass of his own. The traitor’s glass had stopped moving, too. Had he spotted John watching him? By way of experiment, John raised his left hand, the one that wasn’t holding the spyglass, and waved.

Sure as hells, the soldier in the Army of Franklin waved back. John laughed and lowered the spyglass. The southron sentry’s face was a mask of perplexity. “What’s so funny, sir?” he asked.

John the Lister told him. The sentry nodded. “Oh, yes, I’ve seen that son of a bitch. I don’t know that he’s ever seen me, but I’ve seen him. He’s got the very same kind of spyglass as mine.”

“Well, of course,” John said. “We all have the same kind of stuff. The traitors took whatever was in their provinces when they declared for false King Geoffrey, and they’ve been using it ever since.”

Yet even though he’d said of course to the sentry, it wasn’t something about which he’d thought much before. It was worth remembering. The two branches of the Detinan trunk had spent the past three and a half years showing each other how different they were. Yet they were without question branches from the same trunk. Even if the northerners wanted to hold on to their serfs and their great estates while manufactories and glideways spread across the south, both sides still spoke the same language, worshiped the same gods-and even used the same tactical manual for training their soldiers. Roast-Beef William, who’d written it, fought for Geoffrey these days, and had the unlucky assignment of trying to stop General Hesmucet’s march across Peachtree Province toward the Western Ocean. If he could have scraped up even a quarter as many men as Hesmucet commanded, he might have had a chance. As things were…

“As things are, he’s in just as much trouble as Bell and the gods-damned Army of Franklin,” John the Lister said.

“Who is, sir?” the sentry asked.

“Never you mind.” John descended from the observation tower as abruptly as he’d climbed to the top of it. Looking over the traitors’ position had only gone further to convince him that they were ready for the taking now. Maybe if he dragged Doubting George up here and made him look with his own eyes…

And if that doesn’t work, John thought, to the seven hells with me if I wouldn’t be tempted to take that spyglass and shove it up his… A subordinate wasn’t supposed to have such ideas about his superior. Whether John was supposed to or not, he did.

He was just coming back to the outskirts of Ramblerton when a young officer on unicornback waved to him. “Brigadier John!” the other man called. “Congratulations on your promotion in the ranks of the regulars.”

“Thank you kindly, Jimmy,” John the Lister said, and then, “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”

“Ask away,” Hard-Riding Jimmy answered. “After what we went through around Poor Richard, we’d better be able to talk to each other, eh?”

“Do you think we can whip the traitors with the men we’ve got here already?”

“Me, sir? Hells, yes! I’m within shouting distance of being able to do it all by myself,” Jimmy said. “I’ve picked up a ton of reinforcements, and they’ve all got quick-shooting crossbows. Send me around their flank and into their rear and I’ll rip ’em to shreds.”

“Would you tell that to Doubting George?” John asked eagerly.

“I already have,” the commander of unicorn-riders answered.

“And?” John said.

Hard-Riding Jimmy shrugged. “And he wants to wait a bit.”

“Why?” John the Lister asked in something not far from desperation. “Why does George want to wait, in the name of the Thunderer’s great right fist? Why does he need to wait?”

“He’s the general commanding.” Jimmy shrugged again. “Officers who’re in charge do whatever they please, no matter how silly it is.” He tipped his hat to John. “Meaning no disrespect, of course.”

“Of course.” John’s voice was sour. What had he done that Hard-Riding Jimmy thought silly? He decided not to ask. The younger man was too likely to tell him. Instead, he said, “You do agree George is making a mistake by not attacking the Army of Franklin?”

“I don’t know if it’s a mistake or not,” Jimmy said. “He says he can whip Bell whenever he pleases. Maybe he’s right; maybe he’s wrong. If he’s wrong, waiting is a mistake. If he’s right, what the hells difference does it make? I will say this much, though: if I were in charge here, I’d’ve hit the traitors a couple-three days ago. I already told you that.”

“Yes. You did. I’m glad to hear it again, though. Now, the next question is, what can we do either to get George moving or to get a commanding general who will move?”

Hard-Riding Jimmy studied him. John the Lister didn’t care for that sober scrutiny. The commander of unicorn-riders likely suspected him of wanting that command for himself. He’d told George he wouldn’t intrigue for it, and here he was, intriguing. I wouldn’t, if only George would move, he thought. At last, Hard-Riding Jimmy said, “We can’t do anything, sir. But Marshal Bart can.”