“They had better,” Gremio said. “If they don’t, we’ve got no chance at all.”
He waited for the regimental commander to round on him for talking like a defeatist. But Baron Florizel only nodded. His gaze kept going back toward the southrons’ entrenchments, there so far away. “We would stand a better chance if we were asked to storm almost any other position, I fear,” he said.
Gremio also nodded. Florizel had always been a man who looked for the best, hoped for the best, expected the best. If he now thought the Army of Franklin would have a hard time managing what Lieutenant General Bell required of it… Gremio was used to drawing inferences from evidence. He didn’t care for the inferences he couldn’t help drawing here.
Otho the Troll commanded the brigade of which Florizel’s regiment was a part. He came by now on foot. His broad, muscular shoulders slumped, as if he carried a sack full of rocks on his back. “No help for it,” he muttered, again and again. “No help for it at all.”
Sergeant Thisbe walked up to Gremio and spoke in a low voice: “I wish they’d send us, sir. All this waiting around and thinking about what we’ve got to try and do wears on the nerves.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” Gremio agreed. “Me, I’m scared green.”
“You, sir?” Thisbe sounded astonished. “You never show it.”
“That only proves I’m a better actor than I thought,” Gremio said. “All barristers have to act some. It’s part of the job. But I haven’t been this frightened since Thraxton the Braggart’s spell went awry at Proselytizers’ Ridge last year. That wasn’t my fault. It was the spell. I see what we’ve got to do now, and I’m terrified. No magic today. Just me.”
“I’m scared, too,” Thisbe said. “I wouldn’t admit it to anybody but you, but I am. They can massacre us, and we don’t even get to shoot back at ’em till we’re just about up to their trenches. If we get that far.”
Before Gremio could answer, bugles sounded up and down the line. Without being told to, standard-bearers stepped out in front of their companies and regiments and flourished the flags. Officers-Gremio among them-drew their swords. The bugles cried out again, this time with an order officers and underofficers echoed: “Advance!”
Advance they did, at a steady, rapid pace. Once his feet sent him toward the enemy, Gremio found a lot of his fear falling away, as if he’d left it behind where he’d waited while Patrick’s wing shook itself out into line of battle. Logically, that was madness. Every step took him closer to danger. But now he was doing something, not waiting and brooding. It helped.
His men came with him. Not a one hung back. In a way, that made him proud of them. In another way, he thought them all idiots. He thought himself an idiot, too. At some point, the men of the Army of Franklin would get close enough for the southrons to open up on them with everything they had. Every step he took brought that point closer. Who else but an idiot would deliberately march into deadly danger?
“Come on, men!” Thisbe called. “Let those bastards hear you! Let ’em know whose side the Lion God’s on!”
They roared. Southron prisoners had told Gremio that that roar was worth regiments of men on the battlefield. The soldiers who fought for King Avram had no war cry to match it. Other companies and other regiments took up the great growl of the Lion God. Soon, all of Patrick the Cleaver’s men snarled out defiance at their foes.
Gremio hoped it made the southrons afraid. He looked back over his shoulder. His comrades and he had come more than halfway from their starting point toward the enemy’s line. More than a mile. Before too much longer, the southrons’ engines would bear on them. They would have to take whatever the men in gray dished out till they got close enough for revenge.
Thisbe said it-if we get that close, he thought, and wished he hadn’t.
On came the northerners, roaring fiercely. On they came… and a firepot arced through the air toward them, smoke trailing from the oil-soaked rag that would ignite it when it hit and burst. It landed fifty yards in front of the advancing men in blue. The splash of fire was impressive, but harmed no one.
“See? They are afraid of us, if they start shooting that soon!” Thisbe said scornfully. Gremio hoped the sergeant was right, though he doubted it-both sides usually started trying their weapons beyond their true reach. Even if Thisbe was right, though, how much difference would it make in the end? Avram’s men would have plenty of chances to do more and worse.
Another catapult let fly, this one hurling a thirty-pound stone ball. Instead of sticking where it landed, it bounded toward the men from the Army of Franklin. They scrambled to get out of its way. Once, a long time before, an incautious soldier had tried to stop a bounding catapult ball with his foot. It had looked easy, and safe enough-and had cost him a broken leg for his foolishness. People knew better now.
More firepots flew. So did more stones. Some of them smashed down among the northerners. Men crushed or burning shrieked and fell. The rest closed their ranks and kept on. Up on his unicorn, Florizel brandished his sword. “Forward!” he cried.
And then the enemy’s repeating crossbows began their ratcheting clatter. Soldier after blue-clad soldier went down, some kicking, some screaming, some silent and still. Gremio watched a skirmisher out ahead of the main line take two or three staggering steps while clutching at his chest, then crumple bonelessly to the ground.
But the pits that held John the Lister’s skirmishers were very close now. Men in gray scrambled up out of those pits and ran back toward their main line. “There’s the sign, Colonel,” Gremio called. “May we shoot now?”
“Yes!” Florizel answered. “Shoot! Send all those sons of bitches to the hells and gone!”
Behind Gremio, crossbows clicked and snapped. His men, those who still stood, took vengeance on the southrons for everything they’d endured. “Kill the bastards!” they shouted, and the pickets in gray died like flies, most of them perishing long before they reached their own entrenchments.
But they’re only pickets, Gremio thought uneasily. A moment later, he once more wished he hadn’t had a thought, for all the southrons in the first row of proper earthworks leaped up onto the shooting steps, leveled their crossbows on the parapet, and delivered a volley the likes of which Gremio had never seen for sheer destructive power. Horrible screams rose all along the line of Patrick the Cleaver’s wing. Soldiers in blue toppled as if scythed.
Colonel Florizel’s unicorn might have charged headlong into a stone wall. Pierced by half a dozen quarrels, it crashed to the ground. Gremio feared for Florizel, but the regimental commander twisted free from his mount’s ruin and limped forward on his bad foot. “Bravely done, Colonel!” Gremio shouted. Florizel brandished his sword and went on.
So did Gremio. He had no idea why the gods had chosen to spare him. He knew that, had he had any sense, he would have run away. But his fear of looking bad in front of Thisbe and the ordinary soldiers of his company was worse than his fear of getting shot. By any logical standard, that was madness. Logic, though, died when battle beckoned. Fear of letting comrades down was the glue that held the Army of Franklin together-and probably all the armies on both sides.
Gremio almost stumbled over a body. The corpse wore blue, not gray: and not only blue, but also gold lace and stars and the other accouterments of rank. There lay Otho the Troll, shot once in the face, twice in the chest, and, for good measure, once in the leg. Gremio’s stomach did a slow lurch. Battles when brigadiers fell like common soldiers did not bode well for the side that lost them.
Colonel Florizel needed to know, if he didn’t already. “Colonel!” Gremio yelled. Florizel waved his sword again to show he’d heard. Gremio went on, “Brigadier Otho’s down.” That didn’t say enough. “He’s dead,” Gremio added. He couldn’t get much balder than that.