Advance and Retreat

VIII

Lieutenant General Bell hadn’t just listened to the moans of wounded men on the battlefield. At Essoville in the west and at the River of Death, he’d added his own moans to the mix. Better than most of his subordinates, he knew what the wounded were going through, for he’d gone through it himself. He’d given up trying to escape the laudanum bottle. It was as much a part of him now as his ruined left arm.

All things considered, though, he was more pleased than not with the day’s fighting. He wished the Army of Franklin could have held its original line, but it hadn’t had to fall back too far. The army remained in good order. It hadn’t been routed. It had hurt Doubting George’s men as they came forth to attack. If things hadn’t gone exactly as Bell hoped, they hadn’t missed by much, either.

He levered himself off a stool and made his slow way across the pine boards flooring the shack that was, for the moment, Army of Franklin headquarters. Runners waited on the front porch, shivering against the chill of evening. They came to attention and saluted when he stuck his head out.

“Fetch me my wing commanders and my commander of unicorn-riders,” he told them. “We have to plan tomorrow’s fighting.”

“Yes, sir,” they said as one. After briefly putting their heads together to see who went to get which officer, they hurried away.

Benjamin the Heated Ham reached the farmhouse first. That didn’t surprise Bell. Benjamin commanded the center, and Bell’s headquarters lay in his part of the field. He saluted. “Good evening, sir,” he said. “We’ve weathered the first day. That’s something, anyhow.”

“That’s not all we’ll do, either,” the commanding general declared. “Let them throw themselves at our works again tomorrow. Let them bleed to death charging field fortifications.”

“Yes, sir,” Brigadier Benjamin replied. “I hope they do. It’s a pity you didn’t feel that way when we assaulted John the Lister at Poor Richard, sir.”

Before Bell could do anything more than glare, Colonel Florizel limped into the farmhouse. “Reporting as ordered, sir,” he said.

“Hello, Colonel,” Bell said discontentedly. He still wanted to replace Florizel, but surviving brigadiers were so thin on the ground in the Army of Franklin, he hadn’t been able to do it. He couldn’t complain about the way the colonel’s wing had fought today. “I congratulate you, your Excellency, for withstanding the southrons’ hardest thrusts.”

“I’m no wench, sir. They’d better not go thrusting at me,” Florizel said. Bell had seldom laughed since the wounds that mutilated him, but he did then. Benjamin the Heated Ham threw back his head and let out a long, high, shrill guffaw. Colonel Florizel went on, “Sir, I’m not sure the gods-damned southrons did strike us harder than they did anywhere else.”

“What? Don’t be silly. Of course they did,” Bell said. “Everything our spies could learn in Ramblerton plainly shows Doubting George planned to throw the main weight of his army against our right. You had the key assignment, and you did a beautiful job of carrying it out.”

“I hope so, sir,” was all Florizel said.

Again, Bell didn’t get the chance he would have liked to argue the point further. A couple of more men on unicorns rode up to the farmhouse together. Ned of the Forest and Brigadier Stephen the Pickle, who commanded the left wing of Bell’s footsoldiers, came in side by side. Ned looked grim; Stephen looked sour enough to show how he’d come by his nickname.

Without preamble, Stephen said, “We’re in trouble.”

Ned of the Forest nodded. “We’re in big trouble,” he said.

“I’m not surprised you feel that way,” Bell said. “You, sir” — he pointed at Stephen the Pickle- “you were the one whose line gave way. You were the one whose men retreated. If they’d held their ground-”

“They’d all be dead, every gods-damned one of them,” Stephen snarled. “It was a gods-damned avalanche coming down on us. You ought to sacrifice a lamb to the Lion God they didn’t go to pieces and run like hells. After what they went through today, I’d have trouble blaming ’em if they had.”

Lieutenant General Bell took another pull from his little bottle of laudanum. He hurt no worse than usual, but maybe the drug would help calm him-and he needed calming. He glared toward Ned of the Forest. “You don’t say much.”

“No, I don’t,” Ned said. “I already told you we’re in trouble. I’d be angrier at having half my men off by Reillyburgh if I reckoned getting ’em back would have made much difference. I don’t, so I’m not. But Hard-Riding Jimmy’s outflanked us, and gods only know how much that’ll cost us in the morning.”

“Why didn’t you stop him?” Bell yelped.

“On account of I couldn’t,” Ned said bluntly. “Too many riders, too many quick-shooters.”

“You mean they’re loose? You mean you let them get loose?” Bell demanded.

“I thought I just said that.” Ned aimed a cold glower at the commanding general. “I might have had a better chance with all my men. I told you about that and told you about that, but did you want to listen? Not likely.” But then he softened a little. “Of course, like I said, I might have got licked any which way. Hard-Riding Jimmy’s got more riders than you can shake a stick at.”

“What are we going to do?” Benjamin the Heated Ham said. “If they have turned our flank, we’d be nailing ourselves to the cross giving battle tomorrow.”

“If they have turned our flank, how are we supposed to retreat?” Bell asked in turn. “Head right on past them? Do you suppose they’d be kind enough to give us a Summer Mountain, the way we did for them? I’m afraid I don’t think it’s likely.”

A poisonous silence followed. Benjamin, the only one who’d commanded a wing then, broke it by saying, “That was your fault… sir.”

“It was not!” Bell thundered.

More silence, even more poisonous. At last, Colonel Florizel said, “It’s a little too late to worry about what we did or didn’t do then. We can’t change that. We’ve still got some say over what we do or don’t do tomorrow, though.”

“That makes good sense, Colonel,” Ned of the Forest said. “Odds are we won’t pay any attention to it, but it makes good sense anyways.”

“All right. What can we do?” Bell said. “If we fall back, we fall into the southrons’ hands. Does any man here say otherwise?” He waited. No one spoke. He nodded. “Well, then, what does that leave? As far as I can see, it leaves only one thing-fighting and doing our best. Does any man here say no to that?”

His wing commanders and commander of unicorn-riders stirred, but none of them claimed he was wrong. Stephen the Pickle did say, “They’re going to pound on us in the morning, and my wing’ll get it worse than anybody else’s, on account of we’re the ones who’re flanked.”

“Do you think we would do better trying to sneak past Doubting George’s men and skulking off toward the north?” Bell asked.

The other officers stirred once more. Even so, they didn’t-couldn’t-ask to retreat. “All right, gods damn it,” Benjamin the Heated Ham said savagely. “We’ll fight ’em. I don’t think it’ll do us much good, though.”

“Nothing’s going to do us much good now,” Ned said. “We’ll have to see what sort of scraps and pieces we can save, that’s all.”

Lieutenant General Bell had demoted men for talk far less defeatist than that. Now he watched his wing commanders somberly nod. He felt like nodding himself. He felt like it, but he didn’t. He said, “We fought hard today, and we stopped most of them. We can do it again. We will do it again.”

He tried to put his own heart into his subordinate commanders. He tried-and felt himself failing. “They’re going to hammer on us tomorrow no mater how hard we fight,” Stephen the Pickle said.

“We’ll do our best. It may keep a few more of us alive,” Benjamin the Heated Ham said. He saluted and strode out of the farmhouse without so much as a by-your-leave. Ned, Stephen, and Florizel followed, leaving Lieutenant General Bell all alone.

No one had ever accused Bell of being a reflective man. There were good and cogent reasons why no one had ever leveled such a charge at him, chief among them being that he wasn’t a reflective man. Here tonight, though, he wished his officers hadn’t left so abruptly. He would rather have argued with them than had to face his own thoughts with no one for company.

He’d got what he wanted. Doubting George would have been impossible to beat-impossible even to confront-inside the works of Ramblerton. Now the southrons had come forth. They’d carried the fight to the entrenched Army of Franklin, as Bell had hoped they would. The only trouble was, they’d done a better job of it than Bell had thought they could. The way things stood, none of his subordinate commanders believed they could stand up under another day of attacks.

We can’t fall back, Bell told himself. Not even the wing commanders had argued about that. If we can’t fall back, we have to fight. If we fight, we have to find some way to win. All that seemed obvious. What didn’t seem obvious was what the way to win might be.

He snapped his fingers. He might have one throw of the dice left. He struggled to his feet again and hitched across the floor to the doorway. The runners on the porch came to attention. Bell pointed to the closest one. “Order my chief wizards here.”

“Yes, sir.” The runner hurried off into the night.

The wizards came before Bell’s temper frayed too badly. They didn’t look like happy men. Bell, anything but a happy man himself, would have been furious if they had. Without preamble, he said, “The southrons will likely hit us again tomorrow.”

“Yes, sir,” the wizards agreed: a mournful chorus.

“My wing commanders fear the soldiers won’t be able to hold them back,” Bell went on.

“Yes, sir,” the wizards chorused again.

Bell scowled at them. “If the soldiers can’t, you’ll have to,” he declared. “What can you do to beat Doubting George’s men and his mages?”

No chorus this time. No answer at all, in fact. Only silence. At last, one of the wizards replied, “Sir, I don’t know that we can do anything. Everything we’ve tried today has gone wrong. We did our best to hold back the southron unicorn-riders with our lightnings. We did our best-but the lightnings went awry.”

“Gods damn it, you’re supposed to be better than those southron mages!” Bell burst out.

“Once upon a time, we were,” the wizard said. “But the southrons have had three and a half years of war to learn what we knew going in. And Doubting George has at least one very fine mage under his command.” He shivered. “We found that out at Poor Richard, if you’ll recall.”

“I found you that failed me there,” Bell snarled. “Now I find you failing me again. What are you good for except telling me what you can’t do?”

“Sir,” the wizard said stiffly, “if we weren’t holding off a lot of what the southrons have tried to do to us, things would be worse yet.”

“How?” Bell asked. “How could they be?”

“Would you like to have gone up in flames?” the wizard asked. “Would you like to have seen a pit open under our left? One nearly did.”

“All that is easy enough for you to claim,” Bell said. “It makes you sound impressive. It even makes you sound useful, by the Thunderer’s prong. But such claims are all the better for proof.”

“Oh, you can have your proof, sir. You can have it as easily as you please,” the mage told him.

“Eh? And how do you propose to give it to me?” Bell asked.

The wizard bowed like a courtier. “Nothing easier, sir. All you have to do is send us away. Then, when the fighting starts again and the southron mages start flinging their spells, you’ll see if we’ve done your army any good.”

For a moment-for more than a moment, in fact-Lieutenant General Bell was tempted to call his bluff. He started to fling up his arms and order all the mages to be gone, to head straight for the hottest of the seven hells. He started to… but he didn’t. He growled, “You haven’t got the right attitude.”

“Generals always say such things,” the wizard replied imperturbably. “They say them until they remember they need us after all.”

“You are dismissed. You are all dismissed,” Bell said. “You are not discharged from your service to King Geoffrey. I intend to fight to the end. I intend for every man in the Army of Franklin to do the same. And if I had any women in this army, I would expect nothing different of them.”

The wizards stirred. One of them began, “As a matter of-” Another one poked him in the ribs. He subsided. The wizards saluted in ragged unison. Bell sneered. Out went the wizards, noses in the air.

“Good riddance,” Bell muttered. “Gods-damned good riddance. They can’t help me. They don’t think anybody can help me. Well, to hells with what they think. We’ll lick the southrons yet, wizards or no wizards.”

He took a large, blissful swig from the laudanum bottle. Already well drugged, he felt no particular pain except pain of the spirit. After a while, thanks to the potent medicament, he stopped caring about that. He stopped caring about anything. No matter what, tomorrow would come. Doubting George would attack, or else he wouldn’t. If he did, the Army of Franklin would fight. They would win. Or they would lose. Whatever would happen, would happen.

Oh, by the gods, laudanum was marvelous stuff!

Slowly, ever so slowly, so very slowly as to seem to be tormenting Doubting George, the sun rose over the battlefield. Black faded to gray; gray took on colors. It all happened an inch at a time, though, so that from one glance across the field to the next nothing seemed to have changed.

George was less happy than he wished he would have been after the first day’s fighting. He’d driven Bell’s men back, yes, but he hadn’t routed them as he’d hoped to do. They remained in front of him, still ready to fight some more. He hadn’t wanted that to happen. He hadn’t expected it to happen.

Yawning, Colonel Andy came up beside him. “What do we do now, sir?” George’s adjutant asked. “Do we renew the attack, or…?”

“Well, Colonel, I’ll tell you,” Doubting George began. Before he could say more, though, Hard-Riding Jimmy rode up on a hard-ridden unicorn. George waved to show just where he was. Jimmy brought his unicorn-his indubitably hard-ridden unicorn-to a halt. George nodded to him. “Hello, there. Lovely day, isn’t it?”

“For a coot, maybe,” the commander of unicorn-riders answered. Sure enough, it could have been better. No sooner had the sun risen than gray clouds rolled towards it. Along with the stinks of the battlefield, the wet-dust smell of impending rain filled George’s nostrils. Hard-Riding Jimmy went on, “Sir, have you got a spyglass?”

“On my person? No,” Doubting George replied. “Can I rustle one up if I need to? I expect I can.”

“Would you please, sir?” Hard-Riding Jimmy quivered with urgency. George hadn’t seen the like since the last time he’d watched Major Alva incanting.

More than anything else, that excited quiver convinced him not to tease Hard-Riding Jimmy-too much. He shouted for a spyglass, and got one in short order. Raising it to his eye, he said, “And where shall I train this little toy?”

“North, sir,” Jimmy said. “North past the traitors’ line.”

“They’re bent back into a kind of fishhook on their left here, I see,” George remarked. “Trying to keep us from outflanking them, no doubt. Clever.”

“No doubt.” Hard-Riding Jimmy quivered even more. “They’ve tried, but they haven’t done it. Do you see, sir? Do you see?”

Doubting George scanned with the spyglass. “I see… I see standards with the gold dragon on red.”

“Yes!” Jimmy said. “Yes! Those are my men, sir, and we’re square in the enemy’s rear. If you don’t take advantage of that, sir, it’d be… it’d be criminal, that’s what it’d be. Order us to the attack! Order your footsoldiers to the attack! We’ve got the gods-damned traitors in a vise. All we have to do is close it on them.”

“Well…” George scanned some more. He opened his other eye. Hard-Riding Jimmy looked about ready to jump out of his skin, or perhaps to throttle the commanding general. Letting him do that would have been bad for discipline. It wouldn’t have been very good for Doubting George himself, either. He lowered the spyglass and beckoned for a runner.

“Yes, sir?” the young man said.

Regretfully, George decided he’d pushed Hard-Riding Jimmy as far as he could. “Order a general attack, all along the line,” he said. The messenger saluted and dashed off. Doubting George turned to the commander of unicorn-riders. “And your men may attack, too.”

“Thank you, sir. Thank you, sir!” Hard-Riding Jimmy said. For an awkward moment, George thought Jimmy was going to kiss him. The young brigadier didn’t. He dashed back to his unicorn, adding over his shoulder, “You won’t regret this, sir. You won’t, but the traitors will.”

“That’s the idea,” George answered. He wasn’t sure his commander of unicorn-riders heard him. Jimmy roweled the unicorn with his spurs. George, a fine rider himself, wouldn’t have treated a mount so harshly. But the unicorn sprang away as if it had wings on its heels. That was the point of the exercise. George signaled for another runner. When the soldier came up, George said, “Tell John the Lister to press the enemy especially hard. Between him and Jimmy, I want Bell’s left broken. Broken — have you got that?”

“Yes, sir. Broken.” By the way the messenger dashed off, he might have had Hard-Riding Jimmy on his heels.

“What do you think happens now, sir?” Colonel Andy asked.

Doubting George eyed his adjutant. “Now, Colonel,” he replied, “I think we’re going to break those traitorous sons of bitches.”

Things didn’t go quite so smoothly as he’d hoped. He’d thought John the Lister, whose force greatly outnumbered the northerners facing it, would lap around the end of their line and eat them up. But the spur their wing commander had dropped back from the end of his line to the north hampered John, so that, instead of outflanking the foe, his advancing southrons met them face to face. It was a pretty piece of tactics. George would have admired it much more if it hadn’t been aimed at him.

He shouted for the spyglass again. As he raised it to his right eye, he asked Andy, “What the hells is Bell using to try to hold off Jimmy’s unicorn-riders?”

“How do I know?” Andy replied with more than a little annoyance. “You’re the one with the gods-damned glass, and I haven’t had the chance to look through it.”

“Oh. Yes. That’s right.” Doubting George felt considerable embarrassment. Having considered it, he dismissed it. He wasn’t about to let his adjutant get his hands on the spyglass till he’d had a good long look himself.

Bell had put together some kind of a line to withstand the onslaught of Hard-Riding Jimmy’s troopers, a line with its back to the rest of the Army of Franklin. Even as George watched, more northerners slipped out of the line facing his footsoldiers and hurried north to try to stop the unicorn-riders. Doubting George cackled like a laying hen.

“What’s so funny, sir?” Andy asked irritably.

Thrusting the spyglass at him, George said, “Here. See for yourself.”

Colonel Andy swept the glass across Bell’s position. Before long, he was cackling, too. “They’re robbing the painter to pay the potter,” he said. “Pretty soon, it’ll be the piper they’re paying.”

“Yes. That did occur to me,” George said. “That surely did occur to me. They’re- Now you’re squawking. What’s going on?”

“Hard-Riding Jimmy’s men just swamped a section of that makeshift line Bell managed to cobble together,” his adjutant replied. “They’re pouring through the gap. To the hells with me if I know what Bell can do to stop ’em.”

“As a matter of fact, he’s doing about as well as he can, considering what he’s up against,” Doubting George said. “He’s in worse shape than we were on Merkle’s Hill, there by the River of Death. We outnumber him worse than the traitors outnumbered us then. I didn’t think he’d even be able to slow down Hard-Riding Jimmy’s troopers, but he did.”

“And a whole fat lot of good it did him.” Andy pointed. He looked like nothing so much as an excited chipmunk sitting up at the mouth of its burrow. “Look, sir! Just look at that! Now the line he’s holding against our footsoldiers is starting to break up, too! And there go our men, right on through.”

“I told Marshal Bart I could whip Bell,” George said. “I told him so-and I was right, by the Thunderer’s great right hand.”

“Yes, sir.” His adjutant’s voice held awe. “I thought we could beat them, too, but I never thought we’d manage-this.”

“I told Bart I would wait till I was ready, and then I’d hit hard,” George replied. “I did what I said I was going to do-no more, no less-and this is what we got. I don’t know about you, Colonel, but I’ve seen men do more and get less.” Even as he spoke, another chunk of Bell’s line dissolved and disappeared like a lump of sugar in hot tea.

Colonel Andy also noted that. He said, “Sir, for this victory I don’t see how they can help promoting you to lieutenant general of the regulars.”

“Do you know what, Colonel?” Doubting George said. “As a matter of fact, I don’t care if you know or not, since I’m going to tell you. And what I’m going to tell you is, I don’t give a good gods-damn. They should have made me a lieutenant general of the regulars for what I did by the River of Death. They didn’t do it then, and I have a hells of a time caring now.”

A column of muddy, disheveled northern prisoners came stumbling by, the hale helping the wounded along. Grinning soldiers in gray carrying crossbows and pikes herded the captives toward the south. One of the northerners, spotting Doubting George called, “By the gods, General, why didn’t you go and drop an anvil on us, too?”

“What’s that?” George boomed. “What’s that you say? Don’t you think I already went and did it?” The northerner didn’t answer. He just lowered his head and trudged on into captivity.

Before long, more prisoners followed that first column. This time, one of the guards called out to Doubting George: “We’re capturing a hells of a lot of their catapults, too, sir.”

“Good. Good. I like to hear that.” The commanding general turned back to his adjutant. “Let’s see Baron Logan the Black come one inch-one gods-damned inch, do you hear me? — past Cloviston now. By the Lion God’s claws, I swear I’ll clap him in irons if he has the gall to try it.”

“Yes, sir!” Colonel Andy said enthusiastically. “We don’t need anybody but you here in the east.”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” Doubting George said. “Having a good many thousands of soldiers who know what they’re doing makes my life a lot easier.”

No sooner had those words crossed his lips when a messenger came tearing back to him, shouting, “Sir! Sir! The enemy’s breaking up and running. What do we do, sir?”

Somehow, being confronted by one of his soldiers who didn’t know what he was supposed to do bothered George not in the least, not when the man brought news like that. The general commanding answered, “Chase the sons of bitches! Chase ’em hard. Don’t slow down for anything. Don’t let ’em regroup. Keep pushing ’em till you run the legs right off ’em. Have you got that?”

“Yes, sir. We are to pursue vigorously.” Saluting, the messenger dashed back toward the north.

“Pursue vigorously.” The words tasted bad in George’s mouth. The man had squeezed all the juice from the order. But he’d got it right, or right enough.

More prisoners came back. Each time a new column stumbled and staggered past, the guards wore bigger smiles. They understood what was happening, how the battle was going. “We’ve got ’em whipped!” one of them shouted to Doubting George. “They can take provincial prerogative and put it on the pyre, because it’s dead.”

Some of the captured northerners still had spirit left. They jeered and hooted and called out false King Geoffrey’s name. More, though, tramped along with their heads down, glum and dejected and weary. One fellow said, “To the hells with provincial prerogative. Fill my belly full and you can have King Avram, for all of me.”

Doubting George hadn’t heard that very often. He hoped he would hear more of it. Colonel Andy said, “Sir, I really think we’ve broken them.” He sounded as if he couldn’t believe it.

That irritated George. “You don’t need to seem so surprised, Colonel. Did you think this war would go on forever?”

Andy looked startled. “Do you know, sir, I think I almost did.”

“Well, by the gods, it won’t,” George declared. “It is going to end, and we are going to help end it. We are going to take the Army of Franklin and grind it to dust. And when we do, what does Geoffrey, that son of a bitch, have left east of the mountains? Not bloody much, that’s what.”

Even as he spoke, another stretch of Bell’s line, assailed from the front and both flanks, collapsed into a chaos of men running away as fast as they could go or throwing down crossbows and pikes, throwing up their hands, and surrendering. The northern soldiers had done everything a general could reasonably ask of his men. They had, very likely, done more than a general could reasonably ask of his men. In asking a small number of weary, hungry soldiers to beat more than twice as many well-fed, well-rested, well-armed ones, though, Lieutenant General Bell had wanted altogether too much. Now he was-or rather, his men were-paying the price for his asking that of them.

Colonel Andy watched that stretch of line go to pieces, too. “This is… this is what victory feels like, isn’t it? I don’t mean victory in a battle. I mean… victory.” He sounded disbelieving, but he said the word.

Doubting George nodded. “That’s what I’ve been telling you, Colonel. That’s what I’ve been telling anybody who’d listen. Up till now, nobody’s much felt like listening. Not Bart, by the Thunderer’s beard. Some people you’ve just got to show. We’ll, we’ve shown ’em, all right.”

“We have. We really have.” Yes, Andy sounded dazed.

Having shown the world, Doubting George wanted to see for himself, too. He shouted for his unicorn. When an orderly brought it, he swung up into the saddle and rode north so he could see it for himself.

“What will you do if an enemy attacks you, sir?” Colonel Andy called after him.

“What’ll I do? I’ll kill the bastard,” George answered. His adjutant stared. Doubting George laughed. Didn’t victory make the world seem fine?

Back when Rollant was a serf, he’d had to harvest rice and indigo on Baron Ormerod’s estate in Palmetto Province. Every year, the job looked enormous, far too large for the serfs on the estate to finish in time. Pitching in to do it only strengthened that feeling. But then, one day, you realized it was almost done. Usually, you realized that with something approaching astonishment. Where had all the work gone?

Rollant had something of the same feeling now. Where had all the war gone? No one in his regiment despised the northerners more than he did. No one had better reason to despise them, though some of the other blonds had reasons just as good. But, however much he loathed the traitors, he’d always known them as men who fought hard. Had anyone anywhere ever fought better for a worse cause? He didn’t think so.

Yesterday, Bell’s men had gone right on fighting hard. Yes, the southrons had driven them back, but they hadn’t had an easy time of it. The Army of Franklin had retreated to this second ridge line in good order, and they’d seemed ready enough to offer battle again today.

And the northerners had even fought hard in the early hours of the morning, though they’d had footsoldiers coming at them from the south while Hard-Riding Jimmy’s unicorn-riders pressed them from the north. Before too long, though, they seemed to realize they simply did not have the men to hold off all their foes. Here, being unable to hold off all their foes meant about the same thing as being unable to hold off any of those foes. They seemed to realize that, too. The Army of Franklin’s battle was lost, lost irretrievably.

Once Bell’s men figured that out, once it sank in, they did something Rollant had never seen them do before: they went to pieces. Rollant had northerners surrender to him without even complaining about yielding to a blond. Others, instead of taking a shot they were all too likely to make at a standard-bearer, threw away their crossbows and ran.

That didn’t always do them any good. Rollant and his comrades pursued, and pursued hard. Not only that, Hard-Riding Jimmy’s troopers still lay between the northerners and escape. Some of Bell’s men surrendered to them. Others never got the chance. Troopers with quick-shooting crossbows put a lot of bolts in the air. More than a few of them struck home.

“Keep on! Keep on, gods damn it!” Colonel Nahath shouted, his voice cracking with excitement. “Push ’em hard! Keep pushing! Drive ’em! We’ve got ’em where we want ’em! Now we finish ’em off!”

In all his time in King Avram’s army, Rollant had never heard orders like that. No one on the southron side had ever had an excuse for giving orders like that. Now people did-they had that excuse and made the most of it.

“Come on!” Sergeant Joram bellowed. “They haven’t got much fight left in ’em. Let’s kick ’em while they’re down. The harder we pile on this time, the easier the next battle gets-if there is a next battle.”

If there is a next battle. No, Rollant hadn’t heard anything like that before, either. But he didn’t think Joram was wrong. Waving the company standard, he charged past blue-uniformed northerners crumpled in death, past blue-uniformed northerners writhing in the torment of their wounds, and past blue-uniformed northerners throwing up their hands and hoping they could yield before someone killed them.

Here and there, by ones and twos and small groups, some few of Bell’s soldiers still showed fight. But even when a whole company held together under a stubborn officer, how long could it hold back the southrons? Not long, as Rollant and his comrades proved again and again and again. Even the bravest northern soldiers found that, when attacked from three sides at once, as they were repeatedly, they could fall back or die. Those were the only choices they had. They could not stem the southron tide.

“Keep after ’em!” Sergeant Joram yelled. “Don’t let ’em get away!” One more order whose like Rollant had never heard. He liked it. Joram looked around. “Where’s the company standard?”

“Here, Sergeant!” Rollant waved the banner.

“Good. That’s good.” Joram looked around again. “Come on, you lugs! Don’t get lazy on me now, gods damn it!”

They didn’t. They tasted triumph as surely as the northerners tasted disaster. This was what they’d waited for ever since they’d joined King Avram’s army. Many of them, no doubt, had wondered if it would ever come. Rollant knew he had. Now that it was here at last, they intended to make the most of it.

Waving the standard, Rollant trotted past a pair of repeating crossbows the men of the Army of Franklin had abandoned in their desperate retreat. He eyed the engines with the respect they deserved. How many southrons had they slain? Now his own side would use them against their former owners. He’d never understood the phrase poetic justice. Suddenly, he did.

The soldiers of the Army of Franklin were falling back to the west and then to the north, trying to wriggle out of the trap whose jaws were Doubting George’s footsoldiers and Hard-Riding Jimmy’s unicorn-riders with their quick-shooting crossbows. Some of the traitors got away. More didn’t, or so it seemed to Rollant.

However much the southrons pushed, their officers never seemed satisfied. Colonel Nahath kept right on shouting for the men of his regiment to press the pursuit. Joram, a company commander now but still not an officer, did the same for his soldiers. Rollant, not an officer and certain never to become one, did his share of shouting, too. Why not? The stripes on his sleeve gave him the right.

His regiment, along with the rest of John the Lister’s wing, followed Bell’s men west and north. Although Rollant would never make an officer, he could see what John wanted: to bring the Army of Franklin to battle one last time, to roll over it, and to wipe it off the face of the earth. If they could make the northerners stop and fight, they would wipe them off the face of the earth. Rollant could see that, too.

Much as John wanted it, it didn’t quite happen. There was a time in the middle of the afternoon when Rollant thought it would. One of the southrons’ columns was moving faster than the shattered force of traitors it pursued. If it could swing in, hit Bell’s men from the flank while the rest of the southrons assailed them from the rear…

Rollant always believed the southrons waited a little too long to try. Before they could, a regiment of Ned of the Forest’s unicorn-riders pitched into the head of that flanking column. The unicorn-riders couldn’t hope to beat the southrons. But they could slow them down, and they did. Meanwhile, the remnant of the Army of Franklin got over a bridge across a rain-swollen stream. The southrons, once they drove off Ned’s men, looked for another bridge or, that failing, a ford. They didn’t find one.

Southron soldiers around Rollant cursed furiously when their comrades came up short. No less than he, they understood what a successful attack then would have meant. “War’ll go on a while longer now,” Smitty said in disgust.

“I’m afraid so,” Rollant agreed. “But it’s going our way. By the gods, it really is. How far do you suppose we’ve come today?”

“Hells with me if I know.” Smitty looked back toward Ramblerton. Rollant had no idea what good that did; several rows of ridges hid the town from sight. But maybe it helped Smitty make whatever arcane calculations he required, for he went on, “Has to be six, eight miles, easy.”

Rollant thought it over, then nodded. “Yes, that feels about right. My feet are that tired, I’d say.”

“Not just my gods-damned feet-all of me. What I wouldn’t give for a nice, soft featherbed and a nice, soft… girl to keep me company there.”

He’d probably been on the point of saying blond girl when he remembered Rollant was a blond himself. Blond women had a reputation for being easy even among southrons who’d never seen a blond, woman or man, in all their lives. Rollant knew why his people had that reputation: Detinans in the north, especially but not only nobles, took blond women whenever they wanted to. If the women already had husbands… well, so what? Either they could keep their mouths shut or they could end up dead-and so could those husbands. Blonds died easily in the north. No one asked a lot of questions when they did.

“I’ll take the featherbed. You can have the girl,” Rollant said. “If this miserable war really is somewhere close to getting done, I’ll go home to my wife before too long. I hope so, by the gods. I miss her.”

“You could grab whatever you find, the way most married men do out in the field,” Smitty said. “She’d never know.”

“I would,” Rollant answered. Smitty shrugged and scratched his head. Rollant’s fidelity to Norina never failed to bemuse him.

“Forward!” Sergeant Joram yelled. His voice was raw and hoarse from all the shouting he’d done the past couple of days. He pointed to the bridge Bell’s men had used to get over the stream. “If we can cross there ourselves, we’ll keep the heat on those northern sons of bitches. They don’t have much in front of the bridge, and they’ve been running all day. They’ll run some more if we push ’em. We can do it. King Avram!”

“Avram!” Rollant shouted. “Avram and freedom!” He didn’t know whether the men from the Army of Franklin would run. He didn’t much care, either. If they tried to make a stand, the southrons would roll over them. Only as he trotted toward the soldiers in blue did he blink. Even yesterday morning, he wouldn’t have assumed victory would come so easy.

Run the northerners did. They ran like rabbits, in fact, before the southrons even got within crossbow range. They scampered over the bridge to jeers from John the Lister’s soldiers: “Cowards!” “Yellow-bellies!” “Come back here and take your whipping, you nasty, naughty little boys!”

That last, shouted out by Smitty, made Rollant laugh so hard he got a stitch in his side and had to slow down. He was still short of the bridge when lightning crashed down on it and set it ablaze. The northerners hadn’t had much luck smiting southron soldiers with thunderbolts. But nothing, no spell, seemed to keep them from calling down lightning on a place where no soldiers stood.

Balked, Rollant and the rest of the southrons stared from the southern branch of the stream at the escaping northern soldiers. A few northerners took shots at them before retreating. Most didn’t bother. They’d had enough.

“Engineers!” Colonel Nahath shouted and waved. “We need pontoons here! By the gods, we need ’em fast, too. The traitors are getting away.”

The engineers did eventually come forward. They did eventually bridge the stream. By then, though, more than an hour of precious daylight on one of the shortest days of the year had been lost. The soldiers who would go after the Army of Franklin understood as much, too. Even though the pursuit would have taken them into new danger, they cursed and fumed at the delay. They knew a shattering victory when they saw one, and they wanted to finish off Bell’s army and crush it altogether.

It didn’t quite happen. Bell and Ned left behind crossbowmen and unicorn-riders who fought a series of stubborn rear-guard actions and kept the southrons from overwhelming what was left of the Army of Franklin. As twilight spread over the land, Rollant realized his comrades and he weren’t-quite-going to destroy the Army of Franklin that day.

A lone unicorn-rider came up to Sergeant Joram’s company. For a moment, Rollant thought the fellow was a messenger. Then he took a longer look and joined the cheers ringing out: it was Doubting George himself.

“Gods damn it to hells, boys,” the commanding general said, waving his hat at the southron soldiers, “didn’t I tell you we’d lick ’em? Didn’t I tell you?”

“Yes, sir!” Rollant roared along with everybody else.

“And we’ll finish the job, too,” George said. “I aim to run the legs right off the traitors. Any of ’em who get away from us’ll be some of the fastest men nobody’s crucified yet. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes, sir!” the men cried, even more excitedly than before.

Doubting George rode past them, as if he intended to capture singlehanded not only Bell but also all the men the enemy general still commanded. Rollant turned to Smitty, who stood not far away. “You know something?”

“What’s that, your Corporalship, sir?” Smitty asked.

“George was the rock in the River of Death, but he’s the hammer at Ramblerton.”

“The Hammer.” Smitty paused, tasting the words. “You’re right, by the Thunderer’s lightning bolt.”

“I don’t want to stop here tonight,” Rollant said. “I want to go on, the way Doubting George went on. I want to stomp the traitors into the ground. I want them beaten, gods damn it. How about you, Smitty?”

“Me?” Smitty shrugged. “Right now, what I want is supper.”

Thus reminded of the flesh and blood of which he was made, Rollant realized he wanted supper, too. In fact, he was ravenous. He remembered gulping down a hasty breakfast. Had he had anything after that? He didn’t think so, and he’d come a long way since then.

A cook handed him a hard cracker and a chunk of raw, dripping meat. He roasted the gobbet on a stick over a fire without asking what it was. Beef? Dead donkey? Unicorn? He didn’t much care, not right now. It helped fill the hole in his belly. Next to that, nothing else mattered.

Picking his teeth with a twig, Smitty gave his own opinion of what supper had been: “I don’t know for sure, mind you, but I think I just ate Great-Aunt Hilda.”

“That’s disgusting!” Rollant exclaimed.

“I didn’t know you’d met the old battle-axe,” Smitty answered. Rollant grimaced. Blithely, Smitty continued, “We should’ve turned Great-Aunt Hilda loose against the traitors. She’d’ve nagged ’em back into the kingdom in about five minutes, tops.”

“You’re ridiculous,” Rollant said, “and I’m sure your Great-Aunt Hilda is, too. After all, she’s related to you. But the way things are going, I think we can handle the traitors without her.” Smitty didn’t argue. Evidently he thought so, too.

Marching down to Ramblerton, Captain Gremio had thought of the Army of Franklin as a dead man walking. On the second day of the battle in front of the town, the dead man stopped walking. He fell over.

That was true only in the metaphorical sense. Literally speaking, the Army of Franklin, or those parts of it that managed to escape Doubting George’s men, spent most of that second day in headlong retreat. Only when night fell at last could the survivors begin to take stock and figure out how enormous the disaster truly was.

But that came later. When the second day of fighting started, Gremio, whose regiment remained on the far right of Lieutenant General Bell’s line, again thought the southrons weren’t pushing so hard as they might. Every attack they made, his men and the rest of Colonel Florizel’s wing pushed back without much trouble.

Sergeant Thisbe said, “I don’t much care what Bell thinks, sir. It doesn’t look to me like Doubting George is putting all his weight into the fight here.”

“I’d say you’re right, Sergeant,” Gremio replied. “I wish you were wrong, but I’d say you’re right. Which makes me wonder… If he’s not putting his weight into the fight here, where is he putting it?”

He got his answer within an hour. A horde of northern soldiers came running over from the left, with southrons on their heels and even in their midst. “Surrounded!” the men from the Army of Franklin cried. “Footsoldiers!” some of them yelled. “Unicorn-riders!” others shouted. “Trapped! Outflanked!” They all seemed pretty sure about that.

From behind them came other shouts, the kind Gremio least wanted to hear: “King Avram!” “Freedom!” “Hurrah for Doubting George!”

“What do we do, sir?” Thisbe asked urgently. The underofficer commanding a company didn’t sound afraid. Gremio never remembered hearing Thisbe sound afraid. But Gremio could hardly blame the sergeant for that urgency.

He also wished he had a better response than, “Try to hold them back. What else can we do?”

“Them who?” Thisbe said. “Them the enemy, or them our own men?”

That was another excellent question. Gremio had no idea whether anything could stop the retreat-he didn’t want to think rout — sweeping down on his regiment. “You soldiers!” he shouted, doing his best. “Get into line with us. Face the southrons! Maybe we can stop them.”

A few of the retreating-he didn’t want to think fleeing, either-soldiers obeyed him. He pulled some of his own men out of the south-facing trenches to join them. But more men from the Army of Franklin kept right on going. They’d had all the war they wanted. And the southrons who hadn’t been pushing hard now saw their foes in disarray and stepped things up.

More and more shouts of “Avram! King Avram!” came from what had been the left but was rapidly turning into another front. More and more crossbow quarrels came from that direction, too. The southrons were putting more bolts in the air than Gremio would have imagined possible from their numbers. Then he realized that when people talked about the quick-shooting crossbows the southron unicorn-riders used, they weren’t joking.

He also realized his makeshift line facing east wasn’t going to hold. At almost the same time, he realized what had been the real line, the line facing south, was liable not to hold, either.

“Captain, they’re going to break through!” Sergeant Thisbe exclaimed in dismay. What was obvious to Gremio was also obvious to other people, then.

“Hold fast! By the gods, men hold fast!” Colonel Florizel shouted, diligently whipping a dead unicorn: the soldiers on the right weren’t going to stop the southrons even if they died in place to the last man. But Florizel made more sense when he went on, “They’ll just shoot you down from behind if you run away.”

“Pikemen!” Gremio yelled, looking around for some. “We need more pikemen to hold the enemy off our crossbows!”

Not far away, another officer was roaring, “Crossbowmen! Gods damn it, where can I get some crossbowmen? The southrons are shooting down my pikemen, and I can’t answer back!”

Not enough crossbowmen, Gremio thought glumly. Not enough pikemen, either. We can put them together and have not enough of both-which is about what the north has everywhere these days. Even so, he sent a runner to the officer who commanded pikemen. They did join forces… just as the southrons rolled down on them.

And they did prove not to have enough of both. More than a little to Gremio’s surprise, they beat back the southrons’ first charge, leaving dead and wounded men lying in front of their improvised line. The pikemen did vicious work against the southrons who leaped down among them, while the crossbowmen shot down Avram’s gray-clad soldiers in droves.

Gremio was proud of the detachment he’d patched together-proud for about five minutes. Then a mournful cry rose from his left: “We’re flanked!” As if to underscore that, crossbow quarrels zipped up the line, cutting down one northerner after another. The southrons there on the left whooped with glee. They knew what they’d done.

So did Gremio. He looked around, wondering if making a stand here and selling his regiment as dearly as he could would let the rest of the Army of Franklin escape. He was willing to sacrifice the men, but only for something worthwhile.

He didn’t see the point, not here, not now. Even Colonel Florizel had stopped shouting about holding fast. Florizel was a stubborn man, but he wasn’t altogether an idiot. “Retreat!” Gremio shouted. He didn’t like it, but he didn’t like getting destroyed, either. “Fall back! Form a new line as you can!”

If you can, he should have said. A lot of his men had already started falling back without permission. Once they got it, they fell back faster. The Army of Franklin had some order left as the southrons drove its remnants north, but only some. Gremio had heard of routs before. Up till now, he’d never been part of one. Today, he was. He felt like a man staggered after a blow to the head with a club.

Because his regiment, along with the rest of Colonel Florizel’s wing, kept more cohesion than the rest of the Army of Franklin, he went on trying to form new lines and hold back the southrons while the rest of Bell’s men pelted off toward the north. Sometimes the enemy disrupted his efforts before they were well begun. Sometimes he did manage to hold them off for a while. But then, as they had before, Doubting George’s soldiers would outflank the line he’d pieced together. Then it was retreat again, retreat or stand and be massacred.

One of his men asked, “Why have the gods turned their backs on us, Captain?” He sounded not far from despair.

Gremio felt not far from despair himself, and had no time for anyone else’s. “Ask a priest,” he snapped. “Maybe he’d know, or tell you he knows. All I know is, we’ve still got to try to come out of this in one piece.”

The soldier sent him a wounded look. He had no time for those, either. Too many men were really wounded; their groans filled his ears. He looked back over his shoulders. A couple of hundred yards to the rear stood a woodlot, the trees bare-branched and skeletal now that winter was at hand. He didn’t much care about the branches. The trunks? The trunks were a different story.

Pointing to the trees, he said, “We’ll get in among them and use the trunks for cover. We haven’t got time to dig trenches, and the tree trunks will be better than nothing. When the southrons get close, we’ll give ’em a volley they’ll remember for a long time.”

His men did, too. The southrons recoiled, as much from surprise-here were northerners still showing fight-as because of the damage the volley did. But the surprise didn’t last long. Neither did the recoil. The men in gray started sliding around the woodlot to the east and west. They also brought engines forward with what was, to Gremio, truly damnable speed.

Firepots flew through the air. Some of them smashed on bare ground. Those were harmless, or near enough. But the ones that hit trees set them afire. Before long, the whole woodlot would burn. Not only that, Gremio saw the southrons’ outflanking move.

“Fall back!” he yelled once more, coughing from the lungful of smoke he’d inhaled.

“Fall back!” Sergeant Thisbe echoed. “We’ll make another stand soon. They can’t drive us like this forever.” Gremio wondered why not. What was going to stop the southrons? Not the Army of Franklin, not by what had happened today. But Thisbe had never been one to give up a fight as long as one last crossbow quarrel remained in the quiver.

Before long, Gremio began to wonder whether that last bolt was gone. Doubting George’s men were pressing him from the front and both flanks, and they’d got so far ahead of his regiment that even retreat would be like running the gauntlet. He thought about throwing aside his officer’s sword and raising his hands in the air. The war would be over for him, and he would have lived through it.

But he knew Thisbe wouldn’t surrender; Thisbe, of all people, would think it impossible, and had good reasons to think so. Gremio couldn’t stand to give up while the sergeant was watching. And then, quite suddenly, he didn’t have to. A detachment of Ned of the Forest’s unicorn-riders came galloping up from the east and pitched into the southrons assailing Gremio’s flank. The men in gray, taken by surprise, scattered in wild disorder. Had they had any notion Ned’s riders were close by, they surely would have put up a better fight. As things were? No.

“Thank you kindly, Colonel,” Gremio called to the rider who looked to be in charge of the detachment.

“You’re welcome,” the other officer answered, touching the brim of his hat. “Nice to know not quite everything’s gone to hells in a handbasket, isn’t it?”

“Not quite is about the size of it, I’m afraid,” Gremio said. “Do you knew where, or even if, the army is going to make some real stand?”

The colonel of unicorn-riders shook his head. “Sorry, Captain. Wish I did.”

“Colonel Biffle! Colonel Biffle, sir!” A rider hurried up to the officer, and reined in. He pointed off to the west. “More footsoldiers in trouble over there, sir.”

With a weary sigh, Colonel Biffle nodded. “Well, let’s see if we can’t get ’em out of it, then.” He tipped his hat to Gremio again. “Nice talking with you, Captain. Sorry I can’t stay longer. Good luck.” He rode off, followed by his men.

Colonel Florizel limped over to Gremio. “Still here, I see.”

“Same to you, sir,” Gremio replied.

“Oh, yes. Still here.” Florizel shrugged wearily. “For how much longer, though, who knows? They’ve whipped us right and proper this time.”

“Yes, sir.” Gremio admitted what he could hardly deny. “How do we go on after… this? How can we go on after… this?”

“I have no idea,” Florizel answered. “All I know is, nobody’s ordered me to throw down my sword. Till someone does, I’m still in the fight. Until King Geoffrey has to give up, if he ever does, he’s still in the fight. So we’ve got to keep grinding away, see what happens next, and hope it’s something good.”

He’s a simple man, Gremio thought, not for the first time. Here, though, Florizel’s simplicity amounted to strength. The wing commander didn’t worry about what he couldn’t help. He kept his mind on his own job, and did that as well as he could. Anything else? Anything else was-simply-beyond his ken, and he didn’t dwell on it. Gremio wished he could ignore the world falling to pieces around him as well as his superior managed the trick.

“If we can use a couple of more rear-guard actions to get some separation between our main force-” Florizel began.

“You mean, the biggest mob of soldiers running away,” Gremio broke in.

Florizel only nodded. He didn’t even bother quarreling about the way Gremio put it. “If we can get some separation,” he went on, “we can salvage something from the ruins, anyhow: an army that can keep Doubting George from marching all the way through Dothan to Shell Bay the way Hesmucet’s marching through Peachtree.”

“Maybe,” Gremio said, though he wasn’t sure the Army of Franklin could have done that even before the southrons smashed it to bits. It certainly would have had a better chance then; he couldn’t deny that, either.

“Gods damn it, we’re free Detinans,” Florizel said, as if Gremio had claimed they were blond serfs. “I’d sooner die on my feet than live on my knees.”

“Yes, sir,” Gremio said. “But I’d sooner live on my feet, if I possibly can.”

Florizel considered that. By the startled look on his face, it hadn’t occurred to him up till now. After more than a little thought, he nodded. “Yes, that would be best, wouldn’t it? It would if we could manage it, I mean. I don’t know how we’re going to.”

“We have to get away from the southrons.” Gremio preferred not to mention that only a little while before he’d almost surrendered to Doubting George’s men. Florizel didn’t need to know that. It hadn’t happened, and now-maybe-it wouldn’t. Gremio dared hope, anyhow.

But even if they did get back up to Dothan or Great River Province, what could they do then? Precious little, not after the losses they’d taken. For years, the Army of Franklin had been the heart of King Geoffrey’s power here in the east. Now it was broken, and so was that power. How could it be revived? Could it be revived? Gremio didn’t know. He shook his head. No, that wasn’t true. He did know. He just didn’t care to think about what he knew.

For as long as Lieutenant General Bell could, he looked on the second day’s fighting in front of Ramblerton much as he had on the first day’s: the southrons had pushed his men hard, but he’d held his lines together even if he had had to give some ground.

The night before, though, his wing commanders and Ned of the Forest had agreed with him, or at least not disagreed too loudly. None of them had quarreled with his intention of inviting the second day of battle. None of them had seen any better choices available to the Army of Franklin. Tonight, though… tonight, the wing commanders and Ned didn’t wait to be summoned. They sought Bell out in the pavilion he’d run up when he couldn’t find a farmhouse as night fell.

One word came from all the officers: disaster. “Sir, my wing was attacked from front, rear, and flank all at the same time,” Stephen the Pickle said. “Those gods-damned southron unicorn-riders with their quick-shooting crossbows…” He shuddered. “We didn’t break, not in any ordinary sense of the word. They tore us to shreds. Not much of what was the left is left.”

“Or of the center,” Benjamin the Heated Ham said. “The southrons tore us to pieces, too, from the front and then from the flank when the left retreated.” He nodded to Stephen. “Seeing what happened to it, I don’t know how it could have done anything but retreat.”

Bell turned to Florizel. “And you, Colonel? What have you got to say?” He’d expected the least from Florizel. He’d got the most. A fair part of Florizel’s wing remained in good fighting trim-or as good as any in the Army of Franklin.

“Well, sir,” Florizel answered, “we thought the hardest blows would fall on us, and I’d say we got the softest. That’s why we’re not in such dreadful shape-compared to the other wings, I mean.”

Even there, a knife. He’d expected to take the hardest blows because Bell had said they would fall on the right. But Bell had been mistaken. Did Florizel also think he’d been mistaken elsewhere in the campaign? The general commanding bristled. He didn’t believe that, regardless of whether anyone else did.

“Question now is, how do we pick up the pieces? If we can, I mean,” Ned of the Forest said.

“What have we got to pick up?” Stephen the Pickle asked sourly. “We left most of the pieces on the field.”

“That is not so,” Bell declared. “The Army of Franklin remains in being. It remains a fighting force.”

No one contradicted him. He found himself wishing somebody would have. The chilling silence from Ned of the Forest and the wing commanders hurt worse than any argument could have done. The officers just stood in poses of weary dismay. They didn’t bother quarreling with him. It was as if they were beyond quarreling, as if the catastrophe was too obvious to need any more quarrels.

In what was, for him, an unwontedly small voice, Lieutenant General Bell asked, “What do we do tomorrow?”

“Fall back.” Two wing commanders and Ned said the same thing at the same time. Ned added, “The southrons will be coming after us with everything they’ve got. With all those unicorn-riders and their quick-shooting crossbows and with their swarm of footsoldiers, they’ve got a lot. They’re going to want to finish us off. Unless we scoot, they’ll do it, too.”

“Can’t we stop them?” Bell said in dismay. “If we take a strong defensive position and force them to come at us-”

“They’ll roll right over us,” Benjamin the Heated Ham broke in. All the other officers nodded somber agreement.

Ned added, “That ‘pick a good place and make ’em come at us’-that’ll do for rear-guard actions. We’ll have to fight a lot of ’em, I reckon, to keep the southrons off our main body. If we can.”

More nods from the wing commanders. Stephen the Pickle said, “If we can get away, that’s a victory. That’s about as much as we can hope for, too.”

“If you men abandon the idea of victory, you condemn this army to irrelevance,” Bell said, horrified.

Benjamin the Heated Ham replied, “If you try to win a victory now, sir, you condemn this army to extinction.”

Once more, the rest of the officers in the pavilion solemnly nodded. Bell started to ask what they would do if he ordered them to attack, or even to stand and fight. He started to, but he didn’t. The answer was entirely too obvious: they would disobey him. Even he could see he was better off not giving some orders. With a long sigh, he said, “You are dismissed, gentlemen. In the morning, we will… see what we can do.”

They ducked out of the pavilion, one after another. Left all alone again, Bell eased himself down into a folding chair, then leaned his crutches against the chair’s wooden arm. “Gods damn it,” he said softly. “Gods damn it to all seven hells.”

He wished he were whole. A whole man had choices a cripple didn’t. Had he been whole, he could have hurled himself into the fighting when things went wrong. He could have killed several of Doubting George’s men on his own. He could have made them kill him. He wouldn’t have had to live through the disastrous battle, wouldn’t have had to suffer this humiliation. And, once dead, he could have looked the Thunderer and the Lion God in the eye and assured them he’d been as gallant as it was given to a mortal man to be.

Instead… here he sat, with the Army of Franklin as mutilated as he was.

He pulled out the little bottle of laudanum and stared at it. Then he pulled the stopper off with his teeth. If he gulped the whole bottle instead of his usual swig, maybe that would be enough to stop his heart. On the other hand, maybe it wouldn’t. He’d got used to ever bigger doses of the drug. He’d had to, to come even close to holding his unending pain at bay.

A small gulp sufficed him. He put the bottle back into the pouch on his belt. In a little while, some of the pain from his wounds would ease. In a little while, some of the pain from the lost battle would recede, too. Yes, laudanum was marvelous stuff.

Relief had just started to sparkle along his veins when a scryer came into the pavilion and said, “Sir, King Geoffrey would speak to you by crystal ball.”

“Would he?” Bell said grandly. “And what if I would not speak to him?”

Instead of answering that, the scryer stood there with his mouth hanging open in surprise. Maybe that was lucky for Bell. He reached for his crutches. Unfreezing, the scryer said, “I’ll tell him you’re on the way.”

“Yes, do that,” Bell said. But, as the scryer turned to go, he added, “Wait. What does the king want to talk about?”

“Why, how the fight went, sir,” the scryer replied. “What else?”

“Yes, what else?” the commanding general agreed gloomily. The laudanum hadn’t done nearly enough to shield him from what was bound to be King Geoffrey’s wrath. “Go on. Go on. Tell his Majesty I’m coming as fast as I can.”

The scryer disappeared. Lieutenant General Bell wished he could do the same. He’d led the Army of Franklin south. He’d fought hard. And he’d lost. He’d lost disastrously, in fact. Had he won, he would have been a hero. He hadn’t. He wasn’t. Instead of the credit, he would get the blame. That was how things worked.

Bell couldn’t have moved fast even if he’d wanted to. He wanted anything but. This camp seemed much too small to house the Army of Franklin. Up till tonight, it would have been. But this was what remained of the army. Bell scowled and shook his head. Wounded men groaned as healers and mages did their best to help them. A cricket too stupid to realize how cold it was let out a few lethargic chirps. An owl hooted. A unicorn whickered. Soldiers snored.

Only a few hitching steps to the scryers’ pavilion. A guard outside held the tent flap wide so Bell could go in. He could have done without the courtesy.

There was the king’s face, in one of the crystal balls. The others were mercifully dark. Bell wished this one would have been, too. As usual, folding himself so his fundament came down on a stool was an adventure, but he managed. “Your Majesty,” he said, nodding to the image in the crystal ball.

“Lieutenant General.” King Geoffrey favored him with a single curt nod. Geoffrey had a lean, almost ascetic countenance, with burning eyes, a long, thin blade of a nose, and a disconcerting beard: it grew under his chin but not on the front of it. Bell, who sported a particularly luxuriant growth of face foliage, had never understood why his sovereign chose to trim his whiskers that way.

“How may I serve you, your Majesty?” Bell asked.

“Tell me how things stand in the east,” the king replied. “Have you won the victory over the southrons our cause so badly needs?”

“Well… no. Not yet,” Bell said, looking down at the dirt under his foot.

King Geoffrey frowned. He looked unhappy even at his most cheerful. When he was unhappy, a man could watch the end of the world on his face. And he’d been a soldier, so he knew what questions to ask to determine the exact situation. “Tell me your present position,” he said crisply.

“We are… about fourteen miles north of Ramblerton,” Lieutenant General Bell replied, wishing he had the nerve to come right out and lie to his sovereign.

Geoffrey’s eyebrows leaped like startled stags. “Fourteen miles!” he burst out. “Did I hear you correctly, Lieutenant General?” He sounded as if he hoped he hadn’t-not for his own sake, but for Bell’s.

But he had. “Yes, your Majesty,” the commanding general said unhappily.

“What happened?” King Geoffrey demanded. “You lost… twelve miles of ground today?”

“More like ten miles,” Bell said. “We lost a couple of miles in yesterday’s fighting, but we took a strong defensive position at the end of it.”

Geoffrey rolled his eyes. The motion, shown in perfect miniature inside the crystal ball, seemed even more painfully scornful than it would have face to face. “Oh, yes, Lieutenant General, it must have been a wonderfully strong defensive position.” His sarcasm flayed. “By the Thunderer’s thumbs, you probably would have run all the way up to Dothan by now if the gods-damned southrons had forced you out of a weak position.”

Bell hung his head. “We held their footsoldiers-most of them, anyhow-for quite a while,” he said. “But Hard-Riding Jimmy’s unicorn-riders got into our rear with their quick-shooting crossbows, and… and… and we broke.” There. He’d said it. He waited for the King to do or say whatever he would.

“You… broke.” Geoffrey’s voice was eerily flat.

“Yes, your Majesty. We were assailed from front, rear, and flank by an army more than twice our size. We fought hard, we fought bravely, for a very long time. But in the end… In the end, we couldn’t take the pounding any more. The men did what men will do: they tried to save themselves.”

“Assailed from front, rear, and flank by an army more than twice your size,” King Geoffrey echoed, still in that tone that showed nothing of what he was thinking. “And how, pray tell, did you manage to put the Army of Franklin in such an enviable strategic position?”

“Your Majesty!” Bell said reproachfully.

“Answer me, gods damn you!” Geoffrey screamed, loud enough to make every scryer in the tent whip his head toward the crystal ball from which that anguished cry had come. “You went south to whip Avram’s men, not to… to throw your own army down the latrine.”

“This result is not what I intended, your Majesty.”

“A man who walks in front of a runaway unicorn doesn’t intend to get gored, either, which does him no good at all,” King Geoffrey ground out. “My army, Lieutenant General Bell! Give me back my army!”

“I would like nothing better, your Majesty,” Bell whispered.

“How many men have you got left?” the king asked. “Any at all? Or is it just you and some gods-damned scryer wandering in the dark?”

“No, sir. Not just me,” Bell said with such dignity as he could muster. “After the… the initial collapse” — he had to keep hesitating- “we retired in… fairly good order. We could fight again tomorrow if we had to.” We’d get slaughtered, but we could fight.

By the way King Geoffrey’s eyebrows twitched, he was thinking the same thing. But he didn’t say anything about that. What he did say was, “You did not answer my question, Lieutenant General. How many men have you got left?”

“Sir, I have not tried to make a count,” Bell answered. “My best guess would be about half of those who went into today’s fight.”

“Half?” Geoffrey yelped painfully. “That’s even worse than I thought, and I thought I’d thought things were as bad as they could be.” Now he paused, perhaps wondering whether he’d said what he meant to say. Apparently deciding he had, he continued, “What happened to the rest of them? Shot? Speared?”

“Not… not all, your Majesty,” Bell said; the king seemed intent on embarrassing him every way he could. “Some unknown but, I fear, fairly large number of men were captured by Doubting George’s footsoldiers and unicorn-riders.”

“And probably glad to come out of it alive,” Geoffrey commented, yet more acid in his voice. “What do you aim to do now? Whatever it is, do you think it will matter? Or will the southrons smash you to pieces, come what may?”

“I don’t think so, your Majesty,” Bell said. “We still can resist.” King Geoffrey hadn’t asked him how many engines he’d lost. That was likely just as well. If the king heard that Doubting George’s men had captured more than fifty, he’d burst like a firepot, except with even more heat. And Bell couldn’t blame him, however much he wanted to. He almost blamed himself-almost, but not quite. The disaster had to be someone else’s fault. Didn’t it?