Lieutenant Griff still led the regiment; Captain Cephas wasn’t fit to march or fight. Griff pointed ahead, toward the Franklin River. “That’s Brownsville Ferry, where we’re going,” he called to the company. He actually sounded as if he knew what he was talking about. “We’ve got more men coming, I hear. Between them and us, we’ll drive the traitors back and open up a proper supply route.”
“Why didn’t he tell us all that before we started marching?” Rollant asked.
“He probably didn’t know himself,” Smitty answered. “How much you want to bet somebody briefed him while we were on the road here?”
Rollant thought about it. It didn’t take much thought. He nodded. “That sounds right.” As the company commander had, he pointed. “Look at those big wooden boxy things floating in the river.”
“Those are the pontoons.” Smitty’s voice cracked with excitement. “And see? We’ve got the wizards in place to do what needs doing with ’em. By the gods, that didn’t always happen when General Guildenstern was in charge of things.”
Sure enough, the mages on this bank of the Franklin were busy incanting-and the northerners on the far bank of the river didn’t seem to have any sorcerers in place to challenge their spells. Under their wizardry, the pontoons formed a line straight across the Franklin River. More mages-and some down-to-earth, unmagical artificers, too-spiked planks on the pontoons to form a makeshift bridge. The blue-clad traitors did have a few soldiers in place on the far side of the river. They started shooting at the artificers as soon as they got within range. They hit some of them, too, but not enough to keep the bridge from getting finished. Rollant whooped, even though that completed bridge meant he was going into danger. He wasn’t the only one cheering, either-far from it.
Trumpets blared. Gray-clad soldiers swarmed onto the bridge and charged toward the enemy: unicorn-riders first, then pikemen, then crossbowmen like Rollant and his comrades. “We are to drive back the enemy wherever we find him,” Lieutenant Griff said grandly.
Rollant set a quarrel in the groove of his crossbow and cocked the weapon. The rest of the soldiers in his company did the same. They couldn’t do much in the way of driving unless they could shoot. More and more of King Avram’s men flooded over the bridge. By now, the sun had risen. Rollant saw the men who followed King Geoffrey running away, some of them pausing every now and then to shoot at his comrades and him. It wasn’t that they weren’t brave; he knew too well that they were. But General Bart’s sudden, strong move to seize this river crossing had caught them by surprise, and they didn’t have enough troopers close by to stop it.
Then his own feet were thudding on the timbers of the pontoon bridge. “King Avram!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. “King Avram and freedom!”
He didn’t hear anyone yelling for King Geoffrey and provincial prerogative. His boots squelched in the mud on the far riverbank. He looked around wildly for somebody to kill.
But there weren’t that many northerners around. The men who’d gone over the pontoon bridge ahead of Rollant had killed some of them, while others had run away, seeing themselves so outnumbered. Rollant shot at one traitor who’d decided to run a little later than his comrades. His bolt caught the enemy soldier right in the seat of the pantaloons. The fellow let out a howl Rollant could clearly hear and ran faster than ever, one hand clapped to the wound.
“Nice shot!” Smitty said, laughing. “He’ll remember you every time he sits down for the next year.” He waved to Sergeant Joram. “Put it in the report, Sergeant-Trooper Rollant has made himself a pain in the arse to the enemy.”
“What are you talking about?” Joram demanded-he hadn’t seen the shot. Smitty explained. The sergeant condescended to chuckle. “All right, that’s not bad. But our job is to kill the whoresons, not just stick pins in their backsides.”
All Rollant said was, “Yes, Sergeant.” He wanted to kill the traitors, too. He didn’t want to kill them because they were traitors, or because they were trying to tear the kingdom to pieces. All that was for ordinary Detinans. He wanted to kill them because one of their number had used him like a beast of burden till he was a grown man and able to run away, because uncounted thousands of them used other blonds the same way (and used their women worse), because almost every Detinan in the north wished he were a liege lord and able to use blonds so. If that wasn’t reason enough to want the traitors dead, Rollant was cursed if he knew what would be.
“Soldiers coming!” somebody called. “Coming out of the east!”
Rollant wasted no more time worrying about reasons to want to kill the enemy. The most basic reason was simplicity itself: if he didn’t kill northerners, one of them would be delighted to kill him. He put a new quarrel in his crossbow with frantic haste, then yanked back the string to cock the weapon.
Smitty had sensibly found shelter behind a low stone fence. Rollant got down behind the fence with him. Crouching on one knee, he peered over the fence in the direction of the rising sun. Sure enough, there came the cloud of dust that bespoke marching men.
It was a large cloud. “A lot of those bastards heading this way,” Smitty said.
“I know,” Rollant answered. “Well, we wondered where they were. Now we know. They want us, they’ll have to pay for us.”
“That’s right,” Smitty said. “They made us charge fences, back there in front of Rising Rock. Now we’ll see how well they like it, gods damn them.”
Rollant nodded. One of the things soldiers in this war quickly learned was how much protection mattered. A man behind a solid stone wall could stand off several out in the open-provided an engine or a wizard didn’t knock down the wall. That, unfortunately, happened, too.
And then, to his surprise, Rollant heard cheers from King Avram’s soldiers farther east. Some of the cheers had words attached to them. And those words were among the most welcome he’d ever heard: “They’re ours!”
When he heard those words, he cheered, too. He cheered, yes, but he didn’t show himself, not yet. When Detinans fought Detinans, one army looked all too much like another. Men had killed their own generals before, and you were just as dead with a friend’s bolt through you as with a foe’s.
But then somebody yelled, “Those are Fighting Joseph’s men, come to help us hold the supply line against Geoffrey’s traitors.”
At that, Rollant did get to his feet. If people could see who led the newcomers, he was willing to believe they followed King Avram. Then he saw the general himself, and did some yelling of his own: “There’s Fighting Joseph!”
A lot of men were yelling Fighting Joseph’s name, and he waved to the ordinary soldiers. He was an extraordinarily handsome man, with ruddy features and a piercing glance. Back in the west, he’d promised to lead his army straight to Nonesuch. If he had, people wondered if his next move would have been to overthrow King Avram and seize the throne for himself. They’d stopped wondering in a hurry, when Duke Edward of Arlington used half as many men as Fighting Joseph led to whip him soundly at Viziersville. He still made a good division commander, though.
“Hello, boys!” he called now from the back of the fine unicorn he rode. “We’re here, and there’s plenty more coming along after us. Your days on short commons are done, and once you’ve filled your bellies, we’ll throw the traitors out of here and boot them back to Peachtree Province once and for all.”
Everybody cheered. Rollant shouted himself hoarse. Smitty threw his hat in the air-and then recovered it in a hurry, before Sergeant Joram could growl at him for going without it. As he put it back on his head, he said, “It may not be so easy. Geoffrey’s men’ll try and knock us out of here, you wait and see if they don’t.”
IX
“Those sons of bitches!” Major Thersites shouted in a perfect transport of rage. “Those idiotic, gods-damned sons of bitches! What in the hells have we got generals for in the first place, if they can’t keep things like that from happening?”