“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.