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.”