Marching Through Peachtree

V

Once again, your Majesty, our forces have been orderedto make an inglorious retreat, Lieutenant General Bell wrote in yet another of his secret letters to King Geoffrey. Once again, we have taken heavy losses trying to hold a position that could not be held, this time including that heroic and pious soldier, Leonidas the Priest. Once again, the spirits of the men suffer because they always fall back and are never permitted to advance against the foe. How long, your Majesty, can this go on?

Bell examined that, wondering if it was too strong. He decided to leave it in. The king needed to know what was going on up here. If I don’t tell him the truth, who will? Bell thought.

“Commissioner Mountain,” he muttered under his breath. Who would have imagined General Hesmucet could have pushed the Army of Franklin back so far so fast? Who would have imagined Joseph the Gamecock would fall back so far so fast? Bell thought. That was what it came down to. “Disgraceful,” Bell said, again quietly. He wished he could shout.

Reaching for the bottle of laudanum he always carried, he yanked out the cork and drank. Then he sat in his folding chair and waited for relief. He needed ever larger draughts to get it, and got less no matter how much he took.

If he looked back over his shoulder, he could practically see Marthasville. Camp rumor said Count Thraxton had come there to take a long look at the way Joseph the Gamecock was fighting the southrons. Bell didn’t like the rumor. He was the one who was supposed to be informing King Geoffrey of how things were going. He had no great use for Thraxton the Braggart; the man had made a hash of the fighting by Rising Rock. Bell had been flat on his back then, still recovering from the amputation of his leg. He remembered the jouncing agony he’d gone through in the retreat from Proselytizers’ Rise up into Peachtree Province. Thraxton had botched the battle, no two ways about it.

But Thraxton was also Geoffrey’s friend. If the king decided to remove Joseph from his command, would he give that command back to Thraxton? Bell shook his leonine head. “That would be madness,” he rumbled. “Every man jack and every officer in this army knows of Thraxton’s blunders. The command should go elsewhere.”

He knew exactly where the command should go. He’d left hints in his letters to King Geoffrey. Maybe I should stop hinting and come right out and speak my mind, he thought. After all, the safety of the kingdom depends on it.

Voices outside his pavilion-voices, and then one of his sentries stuck his head inside and said, “Sir, General Joseph is here to see you.”

“Joseph? Here to see me?” Even with the gentle cloud of laudanum between himself and the world, Lieutenant General Bell knew his superior must not spy the letter to King Geoffrey. He swept it out of sight beneath some other papers, then nodded. “I am always pleased to see him.” That was a lie, of course, but a politic lie.

When Joseph the Gamecock ducked his way through the tent flap, he looked more pleased with himself and with the world as a whole than was his wont. “Let the southrons come,” he said. “Yes, by the gods, let them come! They’ll bloody their noses on our line, and they can’t outflank it.”

“You have said this before, your Grace,” Bell replied. “You have also proved mistaken before.”

“Not this time,” Joseph said. “As long as the rains keep coming, General Hesmucet will have a devils of a time moving men and supplies for them, and we’ve got solid sets of entrenchments running twenty miles north up Snouts Stream. I don’t think they can do it.”

“And when shall we attack them?” Bell inquired.

Joseph the Gamecock gave him a sour look. “I am in no hurry to make such an effort-and, if you will recall, the last time I tried to persuade you to send your whole wing forward, you broke out in a case of jimjams.”

“The enemy had engines on our flank. To advance would have been to give him a perfect chance to massacre us,” Bell insisted.

“You are the only one who ever saw those engines-and that includes the southrons,” Joseph said.

“I was there. You were not. Had you been there, you would have seen them, too. But you do not seem to consider your place to be at the fore.”

They’d called each other cowards now. They both glared, in perfect mutual loathing. Joseph the Gamecock said, “I have been glad to discover you will at least fight on the defensive.”

“Sir, I find your manner offensive,” Bell replied.

“I had hoped to find yours offensive, but no such luck,” Joseph said. “Still, so long as we fight hard here, the southrons will get no closer to Marthasville. And that is the point of the exercise.”

“That may be one point of the exercise, sir, but it’s not the only point,” Bell said. “The other thing we have to do is drive the southrons from our land, drive them back where they belong-and send them off with their tails between their legs, so they’ll know better than to trouble us again.”

“Good luck if you should ever be in the position to try, Lieutenant General,” Joseph the Gamecock said. “I don’t think it can be done now, not with things as they are. If some miracle-worker were to appear with crossbows that would shoot twice as far and ten times as fast as the usual weapons, we might whip King Avram’s men back to their kennel, but what are the odds of that? Without it, we have to try to make the foe sicken of the war. That’s my view, at any rate.”

“I know, sir,” Bell said sourly. “You never tire of stating it.”

“That’s because-although you may find it hard to believe-I have officers who don’t want to hear it,” Joseph the Gamecock replied. “I’m certain you of all people find that incredible.”

“Heh,” Bell said, unwilling to show Joseph he had the slightest idea what the general commanding was talking about now.

“You are holding an important part of this line, Lieutenant General,” Joseph told him. “I expect you to do just that: to hold, I mean. If a breakthrough occurs on the stretch of line where you command, you will find that I do not take the matter lightly. You have already failed more often than you should. Shall I comment further, or do I make myself plain?”

“Libelously so, sir,” Bell said.

Joseph the Gamecock clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Libel must be committed to writing, as anyone of your temperament should have learned by now. Slander is oral. And you must always remember that proof of truth is the best defense against either. Good day, Lieutenant General.” He left Bell’s pavilion seeming even more pleased with himself than he had been when he came in.

Bell muttered something decidedly slanderous. By Joseph’s standards, he’d done a good deal of libeling, too. He cared not a fig for Joseph’s standards; the only ones that mattered to him were his own. Taking the letter he’d been working on from its place of concealment, he finished it, sealed it, and sent it off to Nonesuch in the same clandestine way as he’d despatched the others.

Sooner or later, King Geoffrey will have to listen, he thought. Gods grant it won’t be too late.

He wished he were in command of the Army of Franklin. He would get it moving south again. How could Geoffrey hope to establish a kingdom when the southrons sat on half the land he claimed? The Army of Franklin hadn’t seen the province of Franklin for months. If I were in charge, I’d head straight for Ramblerton and set the province free.

For now, though, Bell had to fight under another man’s orders. And Joseph had warned him he was being watched. Bell didn’t think King Geoffrey would acquiesce in his dismissal, but didn’t care to take the chance, especially not with Thraxton the Braggart close at hand. Nothing unfortunate would or could happen while Thraxton was on watch.

Grudgingly, Bell admitted to himself that, for a defensive position, the one anchored by Commissioner Mountain and Snouts Stream was solid. The southrons would have a hells of a time breaking through it. But Joseph had already abandoned other strong defensive positions. Bell didn’t dwell on the fact that he and poor Leonidas had talked Joseph into abandoning the one by Fat Mama. He seldom dwelt on the past, unless it was to his advantage.

After another gulp of laudanum, Bell seized his crutches and levered himself to his foot. Even with the drug, working a crutch under his left arm hurt like broken glass, like fire, like knives. The healers swore the festering in his stump had burned itself out, but he could still feel that not everything was right in there. He doubted it ever would be.

For that matter, he could still feel his whole right leg, though the part of it he still owned stopped not much farther down than his prong hung. Sometimes it was just there, as real as flesh till he tried to put weight on it. Sometimes the part that was missing hurt even worse than the part that remained. Those were the bad times, for even laudanum had trouble dulling the phantom pain. The healers said there was no cure for that but time. He’d even asked the mages if there were any spells to exorcise the ghosts of absent body parts. To his disappointment, they’d told him no.

Not enough one-legged wizards, he thought as he made his slow way out of the pavilion. If a few more sorcerers had lost limbs, they would have made sure there were better measures against these phantoms. But no such luck. He had to endure.

“I am a soldier,” he said, as if someone had doubted it. Enduring was part of what soldiers did. He hadn’t expected it to be the most important part of what he did. Life was full of surprises, some pleasant, some emphatically otherwise.

Even getting out through the tent flap wasn’t so easy as it might have been. Ducking didn’t involve just the head; it involved the whole body. And when the whole body was supported on one foot and on two crutches that wouldn’t bend no matter what… Bell counted each separate escape from the tent as a minor victory.

Getting out in the fresh air did little to refresh him: it was as hot and muggy outside as it had been within. Gray clouds came rolling in from off the Western Ocean-more rain on the way. He took advantage of the lull to peer east toward the southrons’ encampments. Hesmucet was an aggressive commander. He pushed his men up as close to their foes as they could get. It felt as if he were about to order an all-out assault along the whole line.

Lieutenant General Bell nodded in grave approval. If I commanded the Army ofFranklin, that’s how I would lead it: like a fighting man, like a tiger ready to spring. Go straight at the enemy and knock him down.

Of course, if General Hesmucet came straight at Commissioner Mountain, he might accomplish nothing more than to knock himself down. Would he realize that? Bell didn’t know. His own instinct was always to test, to probe, to attack. After all, the foe might give way.

“Sir?” someone said at his elbow. He turned his head, the only part of him that would turn readily. There stood Major Zibeon. His aide-de-camp asked, “What did Joseph the Gamecock want, sir?”

“Nothing of any consequence, Major,” Bell answered. “He warned me to stay alert against any possible attack from the southrons.”

“They’d be fools if they tried it,” Zibeon said. He had a hard face. When he smiled, the smile was hard, too, hard and predatory. “Here’s hoping they’re fools.”

“Yes, here’s hoping,” Bell said, and wondered if he meant it. If the southrons did assail Commissioner Mountain, he couldn’t see them succeeding, either. Did he want Joseph the Gamecock winning a victory? For the kingdom’s sake, he supposed he did. For his own…

Even if Joseph wins here, having him lead the Army ofFranklin can’t be good for the kingdom, Bell thought. This army would be much better off with a soldier who’s not afraid to use if for some real fighting-a soldier like, well, like me, for instance.

Major Zibeon said, “I believe, sir, we’ve got about as fine a defensive position here as I’ve ever seen. Gods damn me to the hells if I can see how the southrons will be able to go through us or around us.”

That was about the last thing Lieutenant General Bell wanted to hear. He looked down his long, thin nose at the aide-de-camp. “Really, Major?” he said. “Do you think Commissioner Mountain is as sure to hold as Proselytizers’ Rise was?”

Zibeon started to answer him, then turned red. Proselytizers’ Rise, of course, had fallen to the southrons. If it hadn’t fallen, General Hesmucet’s army wouldn’t have been able to move so deeply into Peachtree Province. Everyone had declared the northern position there was impregnable. Bell couldn’t say anything about that from firsthand knowledge, not when the healers had had him in their grip then.

At last, Zibeon said, “It wasn’t the position that went awry there, sir. It was the sorcery.”

“And who’s to say something won’t go wrong here as well?” Bell returned. “My view is, you cannot rely on a position to save you. You have to rely on the soldiers manning the position.”

“Yes, sir,” his aide-de-camp said. “And aren’t our northern men the bravest in the world?”

“They were,” Bell replied. “They were, before they spent weeks scurrying from one set of entrenchments to the next, never daring to face the enemy out in the open. Now, Major, who knows?” Zibeon pondered that, then shrugged. I haven’t convinced him, Bell thought. But he’d convinced himself. That was all that really mattered.

Rollant looked at the traitors’ field works on Commissioner Mountain with all the enthusiasm of a man with a toothache looking at a trip to the puller. “Are they really going to send us up there?” he asked.

“Why not?” Smitty said blithely. “We took Proselytizers’ Rise, so they must think we can do anything.”

They’d both been part of the mad climb to the top of Proselytizers’ Rise. They’d been part of a smashing victory there. For the life of him, Rollant couldn’t figure out how they’d done it. He had trouble seeing how they could hope to do it again, too.

“Remember when all the northerners in the world came at us near the River of Death while we were up on Merkle’s Hill?” he said. “We threw ’em back, and we didn’t have anything like what the traitors have waiting for us.”

Sergeant Joram said, “That will be enough of that. If we’re ordered to advance, we will advance, and that’s all there is to it. You’ve got no business trying to demoralize Smitty here.”

“Don’t worry about it, Sergeant,” Smitty said. “I didn’t have any morals to speak of before Rollant started talking at me.”

“If I want your foolishness, be sure I’ll ask for it,” Joram said. He made a good sergeant: he growled as nastily at Detinans as he did at blonds. And if his superiors gave an order, he would see that everybody he led obeyed it-even if it does get every last one of us killed, Rollant thought.

He asked, “Sergeant, are we going to try and drive them off those hills?”

“I don’t know,” Joram said irritably. “Nobody’s given me any special orders yet, that’s all I can tell you. And I don’t think Lieutenant Griff knows anything, either… Gods damn it, Smitty, not one single, solitary, fornicating word.”

“I didn’t say anything, Sergeant,” Smitty protested. He looked as innocent as a heavenly messenger. If Rollant hadn’t been marching beside him for a couple of years, the pose might have convinced him. As things were, he let out a snicker that almost turned into a guffaw.

But all the guffawing stopped not long afterwards, when Colonel Nahath assembled the regiment and said, “Men, we are going to go up against Commissioner Mountain tomorrow morning-not just us, mind you, but most of Doubting George’s army. We’re going to go up against it, and we’re going to take it.”

“Lion God’s claws!” somebody shouted. “Has Hesmucet lost his whole mind?”

Had a serf in Palmetto Province yelled anything like that about a Detinan-any Detinan, not just a general-he would have been sorry as long as he lived, which probably wouldn’t have been long. Rollant had escaped from serfdom a long time before, but what Detinans reckoned liberty still looked like license to him a lot of the time.

The regimental commander didn’t even get upset. He just shook his head and said, “No. The idea is, Joseph the Gamecock has to think this stretch of the line is too strong to be taken. He won’t have that many men covering it. And because he won’t, we’ll swarm up the side of the mountain and gods-damned well take it away from him.”

“Maybe we will,” Smitty said out of the side of his mouth. “Maybe a lot of us’ll come down the mountain on our backs, too.”

That also struck Rollant as pretty likely. He had no say in such things, though. All he could do was fight hard and hope the men set over him didn’t make too many idiotic mistakes. So far, at least, General Hesmucet hadn’t. But if he did, Rollant couldn’t even retreat till all his comrades were falling back, too. He wasn’t just fighting as himself. He was fighting as a blond before ordinary Detinans, and couldn’t afford to look like a coward.

He didn’t sleep much that evening. He’d had too long a look at the position Doubting George’s army would assail when the sun came up. He knew he would much sooner have defended that position. But he was going to have to attack it, and could only trust in the gods that things wouldn’t prove so bad as they seemed.

When the regiment assembled the next morning, Smitty handed him a scrap of paper. “Pin this on my back, will you?”

Other pairs of men were going through the same ritual. Rollant grimaced. “You think it’ll be that bad?” he asked.

“Don’t know,” Smitty answered. “But this way, if I fall up there, my name and where I live’ll be on my body. My folks can find out what happened to me and make the offerings to take me on to the next world. If I get real lucky, they may even ship my carcass home so my old man can light the pyre.”

“That’s the kind of luck I could do without,” Rollant said. But then, after a moment’s thought, he added, “Have you got any more paper?”

“Sure do,” Smitty said. Before long, Rollant had his name and street pinned to the back of his gray tunic, too.

“Have faith, men,” Lieutenant Griff said. “Have faith, and victory will be ours.” His voice broke a couple of times, but he was very young. He had some paper pinned to his uniform, too. How much faith has he got? Rollant wondered.

Every catapult under Doubting George’s command started bucking and hurling then. Stones and firepots rained down on the traitors’ field works. Repeating crossbows sent streams of darts at the northerners, making them keep their heads down. Horns blared all along the southrons’ line.

“Forward!” Griff shouted. Brandishing his sword, he went forward himself. He might-he did-sometimes lack for sense, but he’d shown plenty of courage since taking over the company for Captain Cephas.

“Forward!” Sergeant Joram echoed. Rollant wondered if the underofficer had the brains to be afraid. He did himself, and he was.

Up the slopes of Commissioner Mountain ran the men from the wing Lieutenant General George commanded. Rollant shouted, “King Avram and freedom!” as he had in every fight. The words still rang true. Whether they could help him win a victory here was another question.

In spite of the battering the southron engines had given their trenches, the traitors were still full of fight. Heads appeared in the entrenchments. Soldiers in blue started shooting at the advancing southrons. The northerners had catapults of their own on Commissioner Mountain. They started tearing holes in the southrons’ ranks. Had Doubting George really believed the enemy wouldn’t have enough men to defend this part of their line? If he had, he should have done a little more doubting.

“We aren’t going to make it,” Rollant said to Smitty as they drew within a hundred yards of the traitors’ works. Men were going down as if scythed. If Hesmucet felt like feeding his whole army into this sausage machine, Joseph the Gamecocks’s defenders might kill every man in it.

Smitty didn’t argue with him, which convinced him he was right-Smitty always thought the regiment could do more than it really could. All the farmer’s son said now was, “Well, we’ve got to keep trying a little longer.”

Echoing that, Lieutenant Griff shouted, “Forward!” again. He was brave. Rollant suspected he was a little bit crazy, too, to push the advance here.

A few feet away, the company standard-bearer took a crossbow quarrel in the chest. He stood there swaying for a moment, then crumpled to the ground. The banner, gold dragon on red, fell, too.

Rollant grabbed the staff before the silk of the flag could touch the ground and be deviled. If that wasn’t madness, and not a little of it, he couldn’t imagine what was. Standard-bearers were always targets. A standard-bearer charging straight at massed crossbows? A blond standard-bearer charging straight at massed crossbows? It’s a good thing I’ve got my name on the back of my uniform, he thought.

But he went forward even so, holding the company banner high. And he shouted a new war cry, one to which he’d never before felt entitled: “Detina!” If he couldn’t shout the kingdom’s name while carrying its flag, when could he?

Crossbow bolts hissed past him, some so close he could feel the breeze of their passage on his cheeks. But he wasn’t afraid. He didn’t know why, but he wasn’t. He felt exalted-not as if they couldn’t hurt him, but as if it wouldn’t matter if they did. And if that wasn’t madness, he couldn’t imagine what would be.

That mood of glorious indifference lasted till he came within perhaps twenty yards of the enemy’s entrenchments. What broke it wasn’t a bolt tearing into his flesh, but rather a hand tugging on his arm and a desperate voice crying, “Back, Rollant! We’re falling back!”

Rollant looked around like a man awakening from a fever. Sure enough, the southrons had done everything flesh and blood could do. They were streaming east down the forward slope of Commissioner Mountain, bringing their wounded with them, leaving their dead behind.

“Come on!” Smitty said urgently. “They’ll kill both of us if you wait around here.”

Exaltation drained out of Rollant like wine from a cracked cup. The dregs left behind were exhaustion and terror. He turned away from the enemy’s trenches and stumbled back toward the encampments from which they’d set out. The only thing he remembered to do was hold up the flag.

By some accident or miracle, no quarrels pierced him or Smitty before they got out of range. But when Rollant reached up to tug at his hat, he discovered one hole through the brim and one through the crown that hadn’t been there before. If I were a couple of inches taller… He didn’t want to finish that thought.

“They aren’t chasing us,” he remarked when he and Smitty had got back among their fellows.

“Why should they chase us?” Smitty answered. “They’ve whipped us. All they want to do is hold us back, and we sure aren’t going forward now.”

That was a self-evident truth. “Gods, I could use something wet,” Rollant said. He noticed the banner he was carrying had several new holes in it, too. None in me, though, he thought. Some god or another was watching out. None in me.

Sergeant Joram handed Rollant a flask. He took a big swig, thinking it held water, and almost choked to death on a mouthful of potent spirits. The stuff seared its way down to his belly. As he wheezed, Joram set a hand on his shoulder, something the sergeant had never done before. “You did good,” Joram said.

With a shrug, Rollant answered, “I hardly even knew what I was doing.”

“You’ve always fought well enough,” Joram said. “But up there on the mountain… up there you fought like-like a Detinan.”

Plainly, he knew no higher praise. Rollant wasn’t delighted with the way he’d put the praise he gave, but didn’t care to quarrel about it. “Thanks,” he said, and took another, smaller, swig from the flask. This time, he was ready for the flames in his throat.

Lieutenant Griff came up to him. “Will you carry the standard again?” he asked.

“A standard-bearer shouldn’t be a common soldier,” Rollant answered. “Will you make me a corporal?”

He waited for Griff to get angry. But the company commander only nodded. “That’s business,” he said. “Doing business is Detinan, too. I’ll go to Colonel Nahath with it. Bargain?”

If Rollant weren’t a blond, Griff would have promoted him on the spot. He was sure of that. But few blonds ever got any chance at all for promotion. He nodded and saluted. “Yes, sir. Bargain.”

Lieutenant General George looked at the reports his brigade commanders had brought him. Turning to his adjutant, he shook his head and said, “We lost a godsawful lot of men up there, and what did it get us? Not bloody much.”

“Bloody is the word, sir,” Colonel Andy agreed. “Close to three thousand soldiers with holes in them, and we didn’t hurt the traitors nearly as much.”

“That’s the rub, gods damn it,” Doubting George said. “We can afford more losses than they can, because our army’s twice the size of theirs. But we can’t afford a lot more losses than theirs, not if we don’t shift ’em an inch. And we didn’t.”

“I know, sir,” Andy said. How could you help knowing? George thought. We’re still where we were when we tried to takeCommissionerMountain, not somewhere on the other side of it. If we’d taken it, Joseph would have had to retreat again, and the northerners would have lost the plain behind it, and Hiltonia andEphesus to boot. Colonel Andy went on, “But General Hesmucet thought it was worth a try.”

There was no answer to that, none that would have kept George properly subordinate. He shifted his ground instead: “Since it didn’t work, we have to figure out what to do next.”

“The rain’s stopped,” Andy said. “That’s something.”

And so it was. Moving men and catapults and victuals when the roads turned into mud-bottomed creeks was just this side of impossible. Doubting George knew that was another reason Hesmucet had struck here: he’d already had men and supplies in place. But, unfortunately, so had Joseph the Gamecock.

“What can we do?” Doubting George wasn’t really asking his adjutant; he was thinking aloud. “Did I hear rightly that we got a foothold on the western bank of Snouts Stream?”

“I believe so, sir,” Andy answered.

“We’ll have to hang on to that,” George said. “We’ll have to hang on to that for dear life, as a matter of fact. If we can do with it, then the attack on Commissioner Mountain may turn out to have been worth something after all.”

“Here’s hoping.” Colonel Andy didn’t sound as if he believed it.

George set a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t fret yourself, Colonel,” he advised. “You’ve got to remember, things could be worse. I’d much rather be here than down on Merkle’s Hill with all the traitors in the world roaring for our blood. That wasn’t so very long ago, you know.” He laughed.

“What’s funny, sir?” his adjutant asked.

“Nothing, not really,” Lieutenant General George answered. Andy sent him a wounded look, but he didn’t explain. He didn’t think anyone else would find it funny, anyhow. How could he tell Andy he’d managed to talk himself out of his own doubts?

The sun beat down on him. He took off his hat and fanned himself with it, doing his best to fight the muggy summer heat of Peachtree Province. He’d always thought Parthenia had vile summer weather-and, as a matter of fact, it did. But Peachtree Province was worse.

What there was of the breeze came out of the west. When George inhaled, he wrinkled his nose. He knew what that stench came from: unburned southron bodies, still lying in front of the works on Commissioner Mountain they hadn’t been able to take. “If the enemy won’t make them a pyre,” he said, “the least they could do would be to get them under the ground.”

“Bury them, the way the blonds used to do with their dead before we taught ’em better?” Colonel Andy’s lip curled with distaste. “I don’t know about that, sir. Do you really think the gods would accept it?”

“Better than leaving dead men on the field to bloat and stink, wouldn’t you say?” Doubting George asked.

Again, his adjutant remained unconvinced. “Burying’s unnatural. Fire purifies the soul.”

“I-” George stopped and coughed. If he said he doubted that, he would find himself in a theological argument with Andy. He had neither the time nor the energy for any such thing. Besides, in the general run of things, he didn’t doubt it. If he fell in battle, he wanted to be burned. But even burial struck him as preferable to being ignored by everyone save the carrion birds.

Andy looked toward the south. “Here comes General Hesmucet, sir.”

Hesmucet reined his unicorn to a halt. As Doubting George stiffened to attention, he reflected that the general commanding rode more like a tradesman than a noble. Then he laughed at himself again. That was true, but it would have counted against Hesmucet much more heavily in the blood-conscious north than in the south, where what a man could do mattered more than who his grandfather was. This is the side you chose, George thought. Make the best of it.

After descending from the unicorn and tying it to a tree, Hesmucet said, “If the weather holds, we’ll be able to do some more against the bastards.”

“That’s true, sir,” George agreed. “Do we have a bridgehead on the west bank of Snouts Stream? I’ve heard it, but I want to make sure it’s so before I go out and celebrate.”

“It’s so,” Hesmucet answered. “Now we have to figure out how to make the most of it-and how to keep the traitors from wrecking it before we can.”

“The more we press them, the likelier they are to break,” George observed. “If we can slip some unicorn-riders over to the far side of that stream and turn them loose, that might give Joseph something new to think about.”

“Well, so it might,” the commanding general allowed. He called for a runner, then told him, “Fetch Marble Bill here. If we’re going to talk about unicorn-riders, we might as well have their commander listening.”

He probably would have come up with that for himself, Doubting George thought. He’s a solid general. No matter how he tried to hide it, even from himself, not being in command hurt.

Brigadier William-more commonly Marble Bill, because of a pale complexion and a nearly expressionless face-was not a brilliant commander of unicorn-riders. The traitors had a couple of those: Jeb the Beauty, who served Duke Edward of Arlington so well in Parthenia, and grim Ned of the Forest here in the east. But Marble Bill was a competent commander of unicorn-riders. After some of the unfortunate officers who’d led southron unicorns into battle, competence was not to be despised.

Hesmucet said, “Doubting George here had himself a notion.” He didn’t try to take credit for it himself, as a lot of high-ranking officers might have done. After spelling it out for Marble Bill, he asked, “What do you think? Can we do it?”

“I don’t know for certain.” The brigadier’s voice gave away no more than his face did. After a moment, he went on, “Finding out might be worthwhile, though. I probably ought to take my riders across Snouts Stream by night, to keep the enemy from knowing they’re there till they start moving.”

Definitely competent, George thought. Hesmucet said, “I’ll have Major Alva lay down a confusion spell for you, if you like.”

To George’s surprise, Marble Bill shook his head. “No, thanks,” he said. “The traitors will be looking for magecraft, I expect. Even if they can’t pierce it, knowing it’s there will put them on the alert.”

Very definitely competent, Doubting George thought. He asked, “Can you move a couple of regiments over tonight?”

“Yes, sir,” was all Marble Bill said in reply to that. A lot of officers-both General Guildenstern and Fighting Joseph leaped into George’s mind-were given to boasting and bluster. Hearing one give a simple, matter-of-fact answer was refreshing. As if thinking of Fighting Joseph were enough to conjure him up, he strolled over and nodded casually to Hesmucet and George in turn.

“Then do it,” Hesmucet said with the air of a man coming to a decision. He turned to George and to Fighting Joseph. “I’ll want more soldiers from both of you to help build up the bridgehead.”

“You’ll have them,” George said, imitating Marble Bill’s brevity.

Fighting Joseph, by contrast, struck a pose. “My brave men are always at your service, sir, and at the service of the kingdom,” he declared.

He meant it. George was sure he meant it. As far as Fighting Joseph was concerned, he selflessly served Detina. As far as any outsider was concerned, Fighting Joseph worried first about himself, and grabbing more power and glory for himself, and about everything else afterwards… long afterwards. It seemed painfully obvious to everyone who served with him and tried to command him.

“I’m so glad to hear it,” Hesmucet replied now.

“Tell me what to do, and I shall do it.” Fighting Joseph struck another pose. George fought down a strong urge to retch.

“All right,” Hesmucet said. “This is what you’ll do, then-you’ll move in support of Lieutenant General George’s men and-”

“You want me to do what?” Fighting Joseph demanded indignantly. His ruddy face got ruddier, till it almost reached the high color of Roast-Beef William’s. “You want me to move in subordination to another wing commander?”

“Lieutenant General George has more men, and more men in the vicinity, than you do.” Hesmucet spoke in reasonable tones. “To me, that means he should be the one with the main responsibility and you the one with the secondary responsibility.”

Fighting Joseph rolled his eyes up to the heavens. “By the Thunderer’s shaggy beard, how many more such insults must I endure?”

“I don’t see that you’ve endured any,” George told him. “If our positions were reversed, I’d certainly subordinate myself to you.”

“No one understands me,” Fighting Joseph groaned, as if he were an avant-garde artist-or perhaps a six-year-old in a temper. He stormed away from his fellow generals. George wondered if spanking his backside would do any good. Unfortunately, he had his doubts.

General Hesmucet sighed. “He is brave,” he said, and he might have been reminding himself as well as the officers with him. “He is brave,” he repeated, “but he’s also gods-damned difficult. One of these days…” He kicked up some dirt with his right boot, as if kicking the obstreperous Joseph out of the army.

But, as Doubting George knew, Hesmucet couldn’t simply dismiss Fighting Joseph. Joseph’s seniority entitled him to high rank somewhere: if not here, then somewhere farther west. Hesmucet might not want him here, but King Avram didn’t want him anywhere closer to Georgetown. In that contest, Hesmucet was bound to lose.

The general commanding sighed again. “You gentlemen know what I want from you now. George, if Fighting Joseph positively disobeys my command, I want to hear about it.”

“Yes, sir,” George said. If Fighting Joseph gave Hesmucet enough spikes to crucify him, the general commanding would, no doubt, shed nary a tear. George himself wasn’t enamored of working alongside Fighting Joseph, and wouldn’t have been brokenhearted to see him go, either.

“Brigadier William,” Hesmucet said, and Marble Bill stiffened to attention. Hesmucet went on, “Remember, if we can get your unicorn-riders either through the traitors’ line at Snouts Stream or around the end of it, Joseph the Gamecock will have to pull back. That will give us Hiltonia, and Ephesus, too.”

Saluting, Marble Bill said, “You know I’ll do everything I can, sir.”

“Good.” Hesmucet nodded. “Up till now, from what the prisoners say, our friend Joseph the Gamecock has kept morale up in the Army of Franklin by making his retreats out to be strategy: he tells his men he’s luring us deeper and deeper into Peachtree to destroy us. If he loses Hiltonia, if there’s only the Hoocheecoochee River between us and Marthasville, that story will start wearing thin.”

“I understand what you want of me, sir,” Marble Bill said. Hesmucet looked to Doubting George, too, and doubtless would have looked to Fighting Joseph were he still there. Doubting George nodded.

“All right then,” Hesmucet said. “Dismissed.” He got back onto his unicorn and rode away.

George told Colonel Andy, “Draft orders to set our regiments in motion, as General Hesmucet requires.”

“Yes, sir,” his adjutant replied. “Ah, sir, is Fighting Joseph really going to support us?” He looked around to make sure no one but George was in earshot before adding, “My guess is, he’ll support us like a commercial traveler skipping out on a farmer’s daughter after he’s put a baby in her belly.”

“Heh,” George said. “Don’t I wish you were wrong?” A field-grade officer approached him. George nodded a greeting. “Hello, Colonel Nahath. What can I do for you today?” He had a warm regard for the regimental commander. Back in the desperate fighting by the River of Death, Nahath’s New Eboracers had fought back to back when the traitors tried a flank attack on Merkle’s Hill that came much too close to working.

“I have a question for you, Lieutenant General,” Nahath replied. “You have a name for being a fair man, so I’m particularly interested in what you have to say.”

“Well, you’ve flattered me and you’ve intrigued me,” Doubting George said. “Now you’d better ask your question, don’t you think?”

“Yes, sir,” Nahath said. “I have a man in my regiment-in Lieutenant Griff’s company-who, up on Commissioner Mountain, took the company standard when the standard-bearer was hit, who brought it forward through everything the traitors could shoot at him, and who was the last man to leave the field. My question is, should I promote him to corporal?”

“Lion God’s claws, Colonel, if you promoted him to lieutenant you’d get no argument from me,” George said. “Why do you even feel you need to ask?”

“He’s a blond, sir,” Nahath replied. “Fellow named Rollant, escaped serf from Palmetto Province.”

“Oh.” George kicked at the mud under his right boot. Every so often, his being a northerner by birth would up and bite him. That a blond might do such a thing had never crossed his mind. He plucked at his beard as he thought. At last, he asked, “If you did promote him, would the men obey him?”

“I don’t know, sir,” Colonel Nahath said. “That would be one of the things I’d have to find out. I know I don’t need your permission, precisely: there are other blond underofficers, though not a great many. But I did want your view on the matter before I acted.”

“I appreciate that.” Doubting George plucked at his beard again. At last, with a sigh, he said, “Promote him, Colonel. See what happens. If he does the job, well and good. If not… he deserves the chance to fail, wouldn’t you say? I rather think he will, but he does deserve a chance.”

“Deserves the chance to fail,” Nahath echoed. “That’s well put, sir. All right, then. I’ll do it, and we’ll see how it goes.”

“Seems only fair,” George said. “After all, it’s not as if he’s an officer, or anything of the sort.”

“There is a blond officer, you know,” Nahath said. Doubting George and Colonel Andy both exclaimed in astonishment, but the New Eboracer nodded. “By the gods, gentlemen, there is: he’s a major among the healers in the west.”

“What will the kingdom be like if King Avram turns blonds into Detinans?” Colonel Andy asked.

“It will be different,” George said. “It will be very different. Of that, there can be no doubt. But I will say this, and of it there can also be no doubt: Detina will be one kingdom. And that is how the gods intended it to be, and to remain.” His adjutant and Colonel Nahath both nodded.

Colonel Florizel said, “A great pity Leonidas the Priest got killed. We were lucky to have a wing commander on such good terms with the gods.”

“If you say so, sir,” Captain Gremio replied. He wouldn’t argue with the leader of his regiment, but his own view of the situation was that a wing commander with an actual functioning brain would be a pleasant novelty. Piety, to him, went only so far as a military virtue.

Florizel gave what was probably intended for an indulgent chuckle. “Ah, you barristers,” he said. “A lot of freethinkers among you.”

“I believe in the gods, your Excellency,” Gremio protested. “There are days, I admit, when I have trouble believing the gods believe in me.”

As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he knew he should have left them unsaid. The first sentence was fine. Not even Florizel could complain about that. The second… No, he should have thought it and kept his mouth shut. “The gods believe,” the regimental commander said firmly. “And they have ways of showing people exactly what they believe.” He eyed Gremio, as if to say the gods were likely to believe he’d made a jackass of himself.

At the moment, he believed that, too. Muttering excuses under his breath, he walked down the trench line, in theory to see how the men of his company were positioned but in fact to get away from Colonel Florizel. After he’d made good his escape, he started really doing what he’d pretended to do when he left. Florizel’s regiment had the bad luck to be holding the stretch of line where the southrons had forced their way across Snouts Stream. That meant his men, along with everyone else in the regiment, had to stay especially alert, lest the enemy come swarming at them in great numbers.

Cautiously, Gremio stuck his head up above the parapet and peered east toward the southrons’ bridgehead. A hundred yards away, a southron officer’s head popped up above his parapet at the same time. Each man saw the motion from the other. Both men ducked. A moment later, feeling foolish, Gremio looked up again. So did the southron. Gremio waved: he despised southrons in general, but had nothing against specific southrons in particular. After a brief hesitation, the enemy officer waved back.

He must feel the same about me as I feel about him, Gremio thought. It was an odd notion. More often than not, southrons were simply the enemy to him. How could they be human beings? They were fighting him and everything he held dear. Every once in a while, in spite of everything, one of them insisted on reminding Gremio of his humanity.

In the end, though, how much did that matter? Not a great deal. If he comes at me, I’m going to try to kill him regardless of what I think about him. Battlefield reality could be very simple.

A little farther east, behind the southrons’ entrenchments, they’d thrown a couple of bridges across Snouts Stream. Gremio didn’t like that at all. It meant Hesmucet’s men could reinforce their bridgehead whenever they pleased. He wondered where Joseph the Gamecock would find reinforcements in case the northerners needed more men in a hurry. He didn’t know. He hoped Joseph did.

“Anything unusual, sir?” Sergeant Thisbe asked him.

“Nothing much,” he answered. “A southron and I were playing peekaboo with each other for a little bit, you might say.”

“Peekaboo?” Thisbe echoed.

Gremio mimed sticking his head up, looking, ducking down, and then looking again. The sergeant laughed. “Peekaboo,” Gremio repeated. “That bastard in gray was doing just the same thing.”

“All right.” But Thisbe’s smile slipped. “Do you think we can throw the southrons back across the stream?”

“No,” Gremio said bluntly. “We’ve tried a couple of times, and paid the price for it. The ball’s in their court now. We’re just going to have to hold them back as best we can. We ought to be able to do that.”

“Oh, too bad,” Thisbe said. “I thought the same thing myself, and I was hoping you would tell me I was wrong.”

“I wish I could,” Gremio answered. He had the feeling that Colonel Florizel still believed they could throw the southrons back. That worried him; if the colonel, or those above him, tried to act on that belief, a lot of good northern men were going to end up dead-and, worse yet, dead for no good purpose. Gremio himself, he knew, might easily end up among their number. He disapproved of that idea with all his orderly soul. He was, to some degree, willing to die for his kingdom, but only if his death would actually do the kingdom some good. Dying in a fight foredoomed from the start struck him as wasteful.

Thisbe said, “I wish the southrons hadn’t got this bridgehead.”

“So do I,” Gremio replied. “We were all so pleased when we threw them back from Commissioner Mountain. And we should have been-that thrust would have killed us had it gone home. But this bridgehead…” He scowled. “It’s like an ulcer, or a wound that festers instead of getting better. We can die from this, too, even if it takes longer.”

“That’s how my father died,” Thisbe said quietly. “He laid his leg open with an axe, and it never healed up the right way no matter how the healers and the mages tried to fix it. The flesh just melted off him, and after a while he couldn’t live any more.”

“Things like that happen,” Gremio agreed. “My mother and father are well, gods be praised, or they were last time I heard from them, but I know you can’t count on anything. If I didn’t know that beforehand, this gods-damned war would have taught me plenty.”

“Yes, sir,” Thisbe said. “If I were the southron general, I’d either try to find a way through with those men already on this side of Snouts Stream, or else I’d use them to keep us busy here while I did my mischief somewhere else.”

“Sergeant, you ought to be an officer,” Gremio said with unfeigned admiration. “That’s as neat a summing-up as I could do in a lawcourt, and how much do you want to bet that the people set over us haven’t got their thoughts together half so straight?”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Thisbe replied. “What I do know is, I don’t want to be an officer.” He wagged a finger at Gremio. “I really and truly mean that, sir. You’ve got a `let’s promote somebody to lieutenant’ look in your eye, and I won’t take the post even if you try to give it to me.”

Gremio could hardly help believing Thisbe’s sincerity. “But why?” he asked, perplexed. “The company would be better for it. You know as well as I do that there’s a lieutenant’s slot open. You could do the job. You could do it better than anyone I can think of.”

“I don’t want it,” Thisbe declared. “I’ve got enough things to worry about being a sergeant. Being a lieutenant would just complicate my life to the hells and gone. All I ever wanted to do was be a soldier. You’re not hardly a soldier when you’re an officer-no offense to you, sir.”

What he said held some truth. Officers worried more about paperwork even than sergeants, while common soldiers didn’t have to worry about it at all (a good thing, too, since so many of them lacked their letters). But Thisbe capably handled the paperwork he had. More shouldn’t faze him. Something else lay behind his refusal, but Gremio couldn’t see what. He tried wheedling: “You’d make more money.”

“I don’t care.” Now the sergeant was visibly getting angry. “I don’t want it, sir, and that’s flat.”

“All right. All right.” Gremio made a placating gesture. One thing years in the lawcourts had taught him was when to back off. For whatever reasons, Thisbe really didn’t want to become an officer. That puzzled Gremio, who was always in the habit of grabbing for whatever came his way. However puzzled he was, though, he could see he wouldn’t change the sergeant’s mind.

Later that day, as he’d feared, the southrons started bringing more men-some footsoldiers, others unicorn-riders like the ones who’d come in under cover of darkness the night before-into their bridgehead on the west bank of Snouts Stream. They also started bringing catapults over the bridges spanning the stream. Colonel Florizel ordered the regiment up to full alert. The other regiments in Alexander the Steward’s wing also put more men up on the shooting steps of their trenches.

“Can we do anything more than that, sir?” Gremio asked Florizel. By we he didn’t mean the regiment, but the Army of Franklin as a whole. “Can we bring more men up to this part of the line? Can we bring more engines here? The gods-damned southrons will pound us flat unless we can hit back.”

He waited for Colonel Florizel to get angry. He’d long since seen the regimental commander would have preferred a different sort of man as company commander: a noble, a serfholder, all the things Gremio wasn’t and wished he were. But Florizel sighed and said, “I’ve been screaming for that, Captain. It’s done no good. We’re stretched as thin as can be. To strengthen this stretch means weakening ourselves somewhere else. We have nothing to spare.”

“The southrons do,” Gremio said.

“I know,” Florizel replied.

Then the war is lost, Gremio thought. If they can stretch us till we break and stay unbroken themselves, the war is lost beyond repair. He didn’t want to dwell on that. In fact, he refused to dwell on it. He said, “We’d better weaken ourselves somewhere else, sir, or they’re going to tear a hole right through this stretch of line.”

“I’m not going to argue with you, because I think you’re right,” Colonel Florizel said, which did little to make Gremio feel any better.

But reinforcements did come in, pulled from the far north. That meant Hesmucet’s line began to overlap that of Joseph the Gamecock, but it couldn’t be helped. A rupture here and Joseph’s line would be shattered. Gremio could see that. The southrons could see it. And, for something of a wonder, so could Joseph the Gamecock himself.

The storm broke a couple of days later. It wasn’t a real storm like the ones that had done so much to delay the southrons before and after the battle of Commissioner Mountain: the weather, while hot and muggy as usual, was also bright and clear. The engines Hesmucet’s men had brought forward started pounding the northern line. Stones thudded home. Firepots burst, spilling gouts of flame into the entrenchments. Men shrieked when those flames bit. Repeating crossbows sent streams of quarrels skimming low above the trenches’ parapets.

Despite the storm of missiles, Gremio shouted, “Up! Up and fight! If we stay hidden, the southrons will just walk right over us.”

“Listen to the captain,” Sergeant Thisbe said. “He knows what he’s talking about.”

Not least because Gremio and Thisbe wasted no time getting up on the shooting steps themselves, their men followed them. And if I’d stayed down in the trench, they would have skulked, too, Gremio thought. This business of commanding is a curious one indeed.

Bowstrings twanged. Bolts whizzed toward the oncoming southrons. Some of the men in gray fell. Others shot back. Gremio drew his sword and brandished it. Much good that will do, he thought, but did it anyhow. A crossbow quarrel clanged off the blade. He felt the impact all the way up his arm to his shoulder.

One of the northerners’ repeating crossbows began hosing darts at the southrons rushing across open ground. Men went down like grain before the scythe. But others, brave even if they did serve King Avram, kept coming. Some of them, shouting Avram’s name and, “Freedom!” leaped down into the trenches to try to force their way through and past King Geoffrey’s soldiers.

In that close combat, Captain Gremio’s sword was good for something. The blade, nicked where the bolt had hit, soon had blood on it. Men strained and cursed and smote and screamed and bled and died. And, because the fight was province against province, sometimes brother against brother, each side understood every word its enemies said.

When the southrons started crying, “Fall back!” Captain Gremio not only understood but grinned in something reasonably like triumph. “Yes, you’d better fall back!” he yelled. “Provincial prerogative forever!”

“By the Thunderer’s beard, sir, we stopped them,” said Sergeant Thisbe, who wore no beard of his own.

“They didn’t bring enough men forward,” Gremio agreed. “I rather thought they would make a better fight of it.”

Thisbe panted. He had a cut above one eye and another on his arm, but neither seemed in the least serious. “I’m not sorry they didn’t, sir, and that’s the truth.” After a moment, he added, “You handled that sword of yours mighty well.”

“Thank you,” Gremio said. He wasn’t used to such praise, and didn’t think he deserved it-which didn’t stop him from enjoying it when it came.

Out in the open land between the northerners’ trenches and those of the foe, a southron let out a shriek-somebody’d shot him when he went out to pick up a wounded comrade. Other southrons shouted, “Shame!” and, “No fair!” Men making pickup, like men answering calls of nature, were usually reckoned improper targets.

“Life isn’t fair,” Thisbe said.

“Of course not,” Gremio answered. “If it were, the southrons’ army wouldn’t be twice the size of ours.” And no one would need barristers, either, he thought. But he didn’t say that aloud.

King Geoffrey’s men celebrated their victory at the enemy bridgehead till the late afternoon. That was when word came of the breakthrough the southron unicorn-riders had made at the far northern end of the line Joseph the Gamecock had been defending. Victory or no victory, Gremio’s company, along with the rest of the northerners, abandoned the trenches they’d just held and retreated to the north once more.

Joseph the Gamecock had the nerve to be proud of himself. Of all the disgrace and embarrassment attached to the retreat from Commissioner Mountain, that galled Lieutenant General Bell more than anything else. As they rode north, Joseph turned to him and said, “We haven’t left them anything they can use, not a single, solitary thing. One of the cleanest escapes ever, if I do say so myself.”

“Huzzah,” Bell said sourly. “How many more retreats can we make before we go clean past Marthasville?”

That got home. Joseph flushed and scowled. He said, “I still intend to hold Marthasville. Holding Marthasville is the point of this campaign.”

“Really?” Bell raised an eyebrow. “I hadn’t noticed that it had any point at all, except perhaps giving ground. In the name of the gods, when do we get to fight back instead of running away?”

“Lieutenant General, you are grossly insubordinate,” Joseph the Gamecock snapped.

“If I am, sir”-Bell larded the commanding general’s title of respect with as much scorn as he could pack into it- “I’d say it’s about time somebody was. Now we’ve gone and lost Hiltonia and Ephesus, too, and how are we going to hold the line of the Hoocheecoochee River against the southrons? We have to hold it, wouldn’t you say, seeing as it’s the last line in front of Marthasville?”

He’d hoped to whip Joseph into a greater anger than that which already gripped him. Maybe the general commanding would do something unforgivable. Considering how little faith King Geoffrey had in Joseph the Gamecock, it might not take much.

But Joseph, instead of igniting, smiled a smile so superior, it made Lieutenant General Bell’s own temper kindle. “How will we hold the line of the Hoocheecoochee?” Joseph echoed. “I’ll tell you how: with some of the finest field works ever made, that’s how. I’ve had serfs digging for weeks. If you’d been paying attention, even a little, I daresay you might have found out. But that would be too much to hope for, wouldn’t it?”

Bell glared blackly. And he had a comeback ready: “Field works, is it? How many lines of field works have the southrons already turned? I’ve lost track of just how many, but there isn’t one they haven’t turned. I know that for a fact.”

“Sooner or later, they may push us back over the river,” Joseph the Gamecock allowed. “But we also have good positions on the other side.”

“How lucky for us,” Bell said, acid in his voice. “And what happens when the southrons flank us out of those, too?”

Joseph the Gamecock exhaled in exasperation. “They won’t, by the gods. We can hold the line of the Hoocheecoochee, and we will.” He didn’t wait for Bell’s next contradiction, but spurred his unicorn forward and away.

Although Lieutenant General Bell could have ridden in pursuit of the commanding general, he didn’t. For one thing, riding fast hurt even more than riding at a regular pace. For another, Joseph knew his opinions quite well enough already. And, for a third, Bell didn’t want to give too much away. If Joseph the Gamecock got a little more suspicious of him…

Well, how much difference would it make? How much was left to save here in Peachtree Province? Did the northerners have enough of an army here to save it? Of course we do, Bell thought, provided we have a man in charge who’s not afraid to use it.

When the army started filing into the trenches covering the approaches to the Hoocheecoochee and the bridges over it, Bell discovered, to his surprise and not a little to his dismay, that Joseph the Gamecock had known whereof he spoke. The field fortifications in front of the river were formidable, and wouldn’t be easy to force. Marthasville and the vital glideway routes east that ran through it remained protected.

But for how much longer? Bell wondered. What will go wrong? Something always has. We’ve been retreating for two months now. We can’t fall back much farther, because we’ve nowhere to fall back to.

While he scowled and fumed, Major Zibeon found him a farmhouse behind the line in which he could make his headquarters. His aide-de-camp said, “Sorry it isn’t anything fancier, sir.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Bell answered. “Help me down from this beast, if you’d be so kind.” His head buzzed with laudanum; riding was hard on him. Zibeon undid the ties that kept him on the unicorn and steadied him while he positioned his crutches. “Thank you kindly,” Bell said, though the pain of the crutch in his left armpit was hardly less than he’d known while riding. Plant, swing forward; plant, swing forward. He made his way into the farmhouse.

The farmer had already fled north, for which Bell was duly grateful; he didn’t feel like having to be sociable. A couple of serfs’ huts stood by the main house. Maybe the fellow who’d lived here had been a petty baronet, or maybe he’d just been a yeoman who’d come into the land to which the serfs were attached. The huts stood dark and empty now, with no naked blond children playing around them. The serfs had fled, too, though odds were they hadn’t fled north.

“Is everything to your liking, sir?” Major Zibeon asked after he went inside.

“If everything were to my liking, Major, we’d be fighting a good many miles south of this place,” Bell answered. His aide-de-camp grunted and gave him a reproachful look. He relented: “Seeing as we are here, this house will do well enough.”

“Thank you, sir,” Zibeon said. “That is what I had in mind-as I think you knew well enough.”

Few men were bold enough to reproach Lieutenant General Bell to his face. Joseph the Gamecock did it, but that hardly counted. Zibeon had the nerve to speak his mind. Because he did, Bell treated him with more respect than he would have otherwise. “Well, maybe I did,” he admitted.

From up in the trenches, someone shouted, “Here comes the head of the southron army, out of the hills we just left.”

“We should never have left them,” Bell muttered, more to himself than to anybody else. Then, grudgingly, he spoke aloud: “I’d better go out and have a look, don’t you think, Major?”

“Might be a good idea, sir,” his aide-de-camp replied. Zibeon softened that; Bell could tell. What it meant in plain Detinan was, You’d have to be an idiot if you didn’t. Bell made his slow, painful way out of the farmhouse once more and, shading his eyes with the palm of his hand, peered south.

Sure enough, the reddish dust hanging in the air above the hills was the sign of an army on the march. Through the dust came sparkles of sunlight on spearpoints and metal-shod unicorn horns. Bell wished for more rain, which would have laid the dust and slowed the southrons’ movements. Now, though, the sun blazed down on the Army of Franklin as fiercely as if the Sun God were angry at the north.

How can we win, if even the gods turn against us? Bell thought. But he shook his big, leonine head. The gods surely fought for King Geoffrey. How could it be otherwise, when they’d subjected and bound the blonds’ gods just as the Detinans themselves had subjected the natives of this land and bound them to the soil?

Pointing, Major Zibeon said, “Looks like the stinking southrons are going into line of battle.”

“They always tap at our lines, thinking we’ll run,” Bell said. “It’s because we do run when Joseph the Gamecock tells us to. They take us for cowards, may they suffer in the seven hells for all eternity.”

“We’ll make a few of them suffer now, unless I’m wrong,” Zibeon said. “They can’t hope to shift us when we’re in earthworks and they’re not.”

“Earthworks make men cowards,” Bell declared. He was far from the only general on either side to sing that song, but sang it louder and more stridently than most. “If this were my army, we would come out and fight. We wouldn’t shelter behind walls of mud, the way we do now.”

Up came the southrons. They shot a few bolts at the men in the trenches. Joseph the Gamecock’s men shot back. A few southrons fell. The rest drew back. They wouldn’t press home attacks against earthworks, either. Cowards, Bell thought. Nothing but cowards.

Major Zibeon’s thoughts were going down a different glideway line. He asked, “How are we going to keep the southrons from reaching the Hoocheecoochee at a point beyond our lines? If they manage that, we’re in trouble.”

There, for once, Bell felt some sympathy with Joseph the Gamecock. “Patrols of unicorn-riders,” he answered. He approved of such patrols. They were aggressive, and anything aggressive met with his approval.

But Zibeon said, “Patrols of unicorn-riders are all very well, sir, but gods damn me if I think Brigadier Spinner’s the right man to lead our mounted men. I wish we had Ned of the Forest here.”

“Everyone wishes for Ned of the Forest,” Bell told him. “There’s only one of the man, though, and he’s over by the Great River. Spinner is capable enough.”

“The southrons can afford to get by with men who are capable enough,” his aide-de-camp said. “They have room to make their mistakes good. If we make a mistake, they’ll land on us with both feet. What we need is a genuine, for-true genius of an officer leading unicorn-riders. We only had two in all the north: Jeb the Beauty, who was over in Parthenia-”

“And who, I hear, got killed not long ago,” Bell broke in with a sigh. “It’s a hard war, and it’s not getting any easier.”

“Jeb the Beauty, who’s dead,” Zibeon agreed, “and Ned of the Forest. We need him here, at the point of decision, not off running a sideshow in the east.”

“He and Count Thraxton had a row, as I recall. That’s what got him transferred,” Bell said. “I don’t know all the details; that wasn’t long after I turned lopsided.” He waggled his stump a little, even though it hurt. If he could laugh at his own mutilations, no one else would have the nerve to laugh at them.

Zibeon’s bushy eyebrows climbed almost to his hairline. “A row? You might just say so, sir. If what people say is true, Ned came out and said he would challenge Thraxton, except he didn’t suppose Thraxton was enough of a man to accept it.”

From what Bell had seen before his wound by the River of Death, Count Thraxton, whatever else one said about him, was a proud and touchy fellow. His own eyebrows rose. “And the count let that go by without taking the challenge and without punishing Ned of the Forest?”

“He did indeed,” Zibeon said solemnly. “I have seen Ned of the Forest in a temper, sir. He’s not a man anyone at all would care to take lightly.”

Zibeon was a pretty hard case himself, and not easily impressed. If he found Ned formidable, formidable Ned was. Even so… “How could Count Thraxton possibly live down the disgrace?”

“What disgrace, sir?” the aide-de-camp replied. “Thraxton is King Geoffrey’s friend, as you must know. When was the last time you heard of a king’s friend who disgraced himself to the point of making people notice?”

That bit of cynicism made Bell’s face twist with pain which, for once, wasn’t physical. Zibeon had the right of it there, sure enough. If Geoffrey decides Joseph the Gamecock must go-no, when he decides it, for he surely will-won’t he replace him with his friend? And if he does, what becomes of me?

He began to regret his own letters. Yes, he’d had weakening Joseph’s position in mind. But he hadn’t intended to strengthen anyone’s but his own. Could he serve under Count Thraxton if the warrior mage returned to command? Everyone, not just Ned of the Forest, had trouble serving under Thraxton the Braggart.

Can I write letters of a different tone? Bell wondered. After a moment’s thought, he shook his head. Too late now, gods damn it.

All he could do now was fight as well as he could and hope Joseph the Gamecock wouldn’t suffer some irremediable disaster while Count Thraxton was down here on his watching brief. He would have fought hard anyhow, for his pride’s sake, and for his kingdom’s sake, too. So he told himself, at any rate. But now he also had solid personal reasons.

Zibeon said, “Maybe this will work out all right, sir. We do have a good position to defend.”

“So we do,” Bell said. He couldn’t afford to malign Joseph, he realized, not even to his aide-de-camp, not for the time being.

“Of course, I have to hope we’ll get the chance to defend it,” Major Zibeon added.

“How not?” Bell asked in real, obvious perplexity.

“Outflanking. We were talking about this, sir.” Zibeon spoke with what sounded like exaggerated patience.

“My gods-damned shoulder is hurting again,” Bell mumbled. And it always did. But he was such a straight-ahead fighter, he’d already forgotten Hesmucet didn’t have to be. He took a big swig of laudanum. “There. I’ll think better now,” he declared. Zibeon said not a word.