“Nary a one,” Smitty agreed. “But I hear tell there are already northerners around the place, so we’re going to have to fight our way in.”
“That’s the truth,” Sergeant Joram said. “I’ve talked with pickets who bumped up against them. They’re from Roast-Beef William’s wing, but nobody knows how many of ’em are in the town.”
“Doesn’t matter how many there are,” Smitty said cheerfully. “We’ll lick ’em.”
A year earlier, a boast like that would have struck Rollant as madness. Now, he found himself nodding. He thought they could clean up a whole wing from the Army of Franklin, too.
“Come on, come on, come on!” Lieutenant Griff shouted. “Time to get moving. We can’t sit around here all day.”
Smitty sighed. “He’s right, gods dammit. It’d be nice if we could, though.”
“Wouldn’t it?” Rollant hurried forward, to take his place at the head of the company. I’ll be the one they shoot at first, he thought. That’s what standard-bearers are for. That’s why they made me a corporal.
They hadn’t gone far before splashing through a little stream that never came up past their knees. Rollant enjoyed the cool water soaking his trousers, but did call out a warning he’d made before: “Check yourselves for leeches, if you know what’s good for you.” The country wasn’t very swampy, but in this part of Detina you never could tell.
And, sure enough, a couple of men made disgusted noises. “Who’s got fire?” one of them said. They had learned not just to yank off the bloodsuckers, but to touch them with a glowing coal and make them let go.
Someone had a firesafe, and got a tiny blaze going from the glowing punk he carried in it. The smoldering tip of a twig got rid of the pests. The company pressed on.
“How far to this Jonestown place, sir?” Rollant asked Lieutenant Griff.
“Not far,” the young company commander replied. “Four or five miles.”
Rollant nodded. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” Griff answered, a courtesy he never would have given Rollant the year before. He walked along for a few paces, then said, “Do you know, Corporal, you’re not what I expected?”
He evidently meant it as a compliment. Rollant said, “Thank you, sir.”
“You’re welcome,” Griff said again. “When we gave you your corporal’s stripes-Colonel Nahath and I, I mean, and Lieutenant General George, too-we didn’t think you would be able to keep them. We expected there would be quarrels, and men refusing to obey you. But that hasn’t happened. I wonder why.”
“Maybe they see I can do the job, sir,” Rollant said. He hadn’t imagined they’d talked with Doubting George before deciding they could promote him.
“Maybe.” Griff didn’t sound convinced. “I see that you’re doing it, mind you, but convincing ordinary Detinans of anything they don’t feel like believing is like herding tigers.”
He was, without a doubt, right about that. No one knew better than blonds how stubborn Detinans could be. Rollant thought for a while, then suggested, “Maybe they see the stripes on my sleeve and not the man wearing the uniform tunic.”
“That could be,” Griff allowed. “We’ve come a long way toward turning all our men into real professional soldiers, and one mark of the professional is respect for his underofficers.”
“Don’t you worry about it, sir,” Rollant said. “I’m sure they call me a gods-damned blond son of a bitch whenever my back’s turned.”
“And what do you think about that?” the lieutenant asked.
Rollant shrugged. “Sir, if you think I never cussed an underofficer, I have to tell you you’d better think again.”
“Not many soldiers who never have, I suppose,” Griff said, and then, in an altogether different tone, “Hello! What’s this?”
This was men in blue tunics and pantaloons spread thinly across a field: northern pickets. They cried out in alarm as they caught sight of the southrons. Several of them raised crossbows to their shoulders and started shooting. Thwuck! One of the bolts, a frighteningly good shot, tore through the silk of the company standard.
“Forward!” Griff shouted. “If they won’t go by themselves, we just have to chase them away.”
Rollant held the standard on high and waved it back and forth as he advanced. It told the men where the company was supposed to go and lifted their spirits. That was why both southrons and traitors had standard-bearers. Making themselves conspicuous was why both sides had to change standard-bearers so often.
“Avram!” Rollant shouted. “Avram and freedom!” More than most, he knew what freedom meant.
More crossbow bolts whistled past him. Someone behind him let out a shriek. He couldn’t even look to see who it was. He could only go forward waving the standard. He ran clumsily, his head down, watching where he put his feet. If he fell from stepping in a hole and the standard went down, his company’s spirits would sag no less than if he got shot. He couldn’t do much about getting shot. He could, or at least he might, avoid imitating a jackass with the staggers.
The northerners didn’t put up much of a fight. In their shoes, being so badly outnumbered, he wouldn’t have been ashamed to run away, either. A few of them turned and loosed hasty shots over their shoulders. A couple of those struck home, too. But more traitors fell. Rollant watched dust puff from the back of one running man’s blue tunic as a quarrel hit him. The northerner threw his arms wide. His crossbow flew surprisingly far to one side as he let it go. He ran on for a couple of staggering steps, then fell on his face. He was still thrashing feebly when Rollant pounded past him.
Beyond another belt of trees, the enemy had earthworks waiting. The surviving pickets dove into them. More traitors appeared on the shooting steps. They gave Avram’s onrushing men a couple of crisp, thoroughly professional volleys. Bell might have spent his men like coppers, but the ones he had left still knew their business.
They knew it so well, in fact, that they knocked the southrons back on their heels and more. Men who had dashed forward suddenly dashed back. “Stand!” Lieutenant Griff shouted, his voice breaking in fury and humiliation. “Stand, gods damn you! You’ve been through worse!”
He was right-they had. At that particular moment, though, they weren’t much inclined to listen to him. Rollant had seen that before, too. They’d come up against the traitors’ trenches too soon, too unexpectedly. What they could have taken in stride had they been ready for it caught them by surprise and threw them into panic. And so they fled.
It wasn’t Griff’s company alone. That made Rollant feel a little better as he too fell back out of crossbow range from the northerners’ position. All the southrons who came up against them recoiled the same way. Officers up and down the line screamed, “Stand!” and “Hold fast, you stupid, cowardly sons of bitches!” and other such endearments, and none of them did the least bit of good.
What saved the day, oddly enough, were the traitors themselves. Seeing the southrons taken with panic, they swarmed out of their trenches and pursued, roaring like lions all the while.
“Come on!” Rollant shouted. “We can lick ’em! Now they’re up above ground, same as we are!”
He wasn’t so vain as to imagine his voice turned the tide by itself. That would have taken a man like Fighting Joseph, now fighting no more. He heard plenty of officers and underofficers and ordinary soldiers shouting the same thing in different words. But his was one of the voices raised.
And, by one of those chances the Thunderer and the Lion God might have understood but no mortal did, the southrons threw off their fear as quickly as it had seized them. They turned around and started plying the northern men with bolts. Pikemen tramped toward the foe in solid ranks. And the traitors, who had been storming forward as if this were the field by the River of Death, hesitated and then abruptly turned to flight themselves.
Now their officers howled in dismay. What had been a bid for revenge against the defeats they’d suffered closer to Marthasville a few days before turned into another disaster now. The northerners had attacked with all their old verve, but hadn’t been able to sustain it. And when fear took them, it seized them even harder than it had laid hold of the southrons.