“Yes, sir.” Benjamin saluted and strode off, stiff-backed and proud.
Lieutenant General Bell muttered something pungent under his breath. He was sick to death of officers stalking away from him. He’d seen altogether too much of it on this campaign. Some of the brigadiers who’d neglected military courtesy had paid for their bad manners with their lives. But Ned of the Forest and Benjamin the Heated Ham were still very much around. Bell couldn’t even punish them for their insolence. After the fight at Poor Richard, the Army of Franklin had lost so many commanders, he couldn’t afford to sack any more. Things creaked bad enough as they were.
The general commanding remembered the losses. He conveniently forgot that his orders at Poor Richard had led to them. He also forgot that those orders might have had something to do with the surviving officers’ lack of confidence in him. As far as he was concerned, they had no business behaving any way but respectfully. King Geoffrey had put him in charge of the Army of Franklin, and he had every intention of leading it to glory… somehow.
He shifted his weight on his crutches. That proved a mistake-his ruined left shoulder and arm screamed at him. He took out the little bottle of laudanum, yanked the stopper with his teeth, and gulped down the drug that helped keep him going. Glory didn’t concern itself with ruined shoulders and missing legs. A man who stopped to think about the cost would never find the true magnificence of battle. Whether such a man might find victory was another question that never occurred to Bell.
Little by little, as the laudanum took hold, he floated away from his pain-wracked body. As long as that wrecked arm and missing leg didn’t torment him, he could forget all about them, just as he forgot about other inconveniences on the way to the victory that surely lay ahead.
One of those inconveniences was Doubting George’s army. He couldn’t very well attack it if it stayed in the works of Ramblerton. Oh, he could, but even he doubted that that would have a happy ending. He needed to lure that army out of those works if he was to have any chance of beating it. There he and his subordinate commanders agreed.
But how? He’d hoped simply sitting in front of the city and making his army a tempting target would suffice. Evidently not. He needed some new stratagem to make sure the southrons came forth. What, though? What could he do that he wasn’t already doing?
Suddenly, he snapped his fingers. His right hand had not forgotten its cunning-and he chuckled at the cunning his brains showed, too, despite (or perhaps, he thought, even because of) all the laudanum he had to take.
“Runner!” he called.
“Yes, sir?” the closest messenger said.
“I need to speak to Ned of the Forest just as soon as you can bring him here,” Bell replied.
“Yes, sir,” the messenger said again, but then, in a puzzled voice, “Wasn’t he here not too long ago?”
“What if he was?” Bell demanded. “I am the commanding general, and I am entitled to summon the officers of my army if I need to confer with them. Would you care to quarrel with that, Corporal?”
“Uh, no, sir,” the messenger said hastily. Bell fixed upon him the stare that had led to his being compared to the Lion God. The messenger left in a hurry.
Bell had to wait a while before Ned of the Forest returned. For one thing, the unicorn-riders camped at some little distance from the rest of the men in the Army of Franklin. For another, Bell suspected Ned of being slow to obey orders on purpose. Ned was still fuming because the general commanding had pulled back some of his riders to fight with the rest of the army at Poor Richard.
“Well, too bad for Ned,” Lieutenant General Bell said. A couple of the runners standing not far away sent him curious looks, but none of them had the nerve to ask a question. As far as Bell was concerned, that was as it should be.
In due course, Ned of the Forest did ride up. Slowly and deliberately, he dismounted from his unicorn. He made a small production of tethering the animal to a tree. Only after he’d done that did he nod to Bell. “What can I do for you… sir?” His tone and manner made it plain he tacked on the title of respect very much as an afterthought. He didn’t bother saluting.
“I have had an idea,” Bell announced.
“Have you? Congratulations,” the commander of unicorn-riders said.
“Thank you.” Only after the words were out of his mouth did Bell realized Ned might not have meant that as a compliment. He gave the other officer the same glare as he’d used against the luckless runner. Ned, though, was made of sterner stuff. He stared back, as intent on intimidating Bell as Bell was on intimidating him.
The silent, angry tableau could have lasted even longer than it did, but Ned’s unicorn tried to jerk free from the tree to which he’d tied it. It failed, but the motion distracted both men. When Ned of the Forest looked back, some of the cold fury had left his face. “What is your idea, sir?” he asked.
“I aim to send some of your unicorn-riders against Reillyburgh, to harass the southrons there and to draw Doubting George out of Ramblerton,” Bell said.
“Didn’t I tell you before, you’d better not divide your forces? Didn’t you have enough of splitting up my men when we were down at Poor Richard?” Ned said. “Look what you got there.”
“You are insubordinate,” Bell said.
“And you are a gods-damned fool,” Ned retorted. “By the Thunderer’s thumbs, you haven’t got enough men now to stretch from one bank of the Cumbersome River to the other. There’s gaps on both sides. And now you want to take soldiers away from this scrawny little army? You must be clean out of your tree.”
“Can you think of anything likelier to lure the southrons away from Ramblerton than a threat to one of their outlying garrisons?” Bell said. “We cannot fight them while they are in there. They must come forth.”
“Be careful what you ask for, on account of you’re liable to get it,” Ned of the Forest said.
“And what, pray tell, does that mean?”
“If they come out… sir, do you really reckon we can handle ’em?” Ned asked.
“Of course we can. Of course we will. Would I have come all this way if I expected my campaign to fail?”
“I don’t know anything about what you expect,” Ned answered. “All I know is, I expect you’re going to be sorry for splitting up your army the way you’re doing. You haven’t got enough men to fight Doubting George as is, let alone if you go detaching a piece of your force here and another piece there.”
“I am the commanding general,” Bell declared in a voice like frozen iron. “Obey my orders, Lieutenant General.” Ned snarled something that sounded more like a wildcat’s hiss than real words. But he did salute as he stormed off. Bell thought that meant he would obey. If it didn’t, the Army of Franklin could get probably scrape up a new commander of unicorn-riders, too. Somewhere.
“Sir?” A gray-robed mage stuck his head into Doubting George’s office and waited to be noticed.
George made him wait for quite a while. At last, though, the southrons’ commander had no choice but to acknowledge the fellow’s existence. “Yes, Lieutenant? What do you want?”
“It isn’t me, sir.” The wizard made a point of distancing himself from the message he had to deliver. “It isn’t me,” he repeated, “but Marshal Bart is on the crystal ball, and he needs to talk to you.”
“Ah, but do I need to talk to Marshal Bart?” Doubting George replied. “I wonder. I truly do wonder.”
“Sir,” the young wizard said desperately, “sir, Marshal Bart orders you to come and talk with him.”
“Oh, he does, does he?” George said. The scryer nodded. George sighed and got heavily to his feet. “Well, I suppose I’d better do it then, eh?”
“Yes, sir. I think that would be a very, a very good thing to do, sir.” The mage was all but babbling in his relief.