Wishing, as usual, did him very little good. All he could do was trot forward, roaring at the top of his lungs and urging his men on. The sooner they closed with the southrons, the sooner the engines wouldn’t matter any more. And the enemy didn’t have enough engines to stop the charge cold-he gauged such things with the practiced eye of a man who’d gone toward a good many strongly held positions.
Now he was close enough to see individual southron soldiers-and they were close enough to start shooting at his comrades and him. A few of them had yellow hair under their gray caps. Was one of them Rollant, his runaway serf? I should have killed him, back there near the River of Death.
A few field engines had come along with the northerners’ hastily mustered force. A stone landed among the southrons, and suddenly there was a gap, three men wide, in their line. More soldiers in baggy gray pantaloons strode forward to fill it.
With a buzz like that from the wings of an angry hummingbird, a crossbow quarrel zipped past his head. They started shooting, too, shooting as they advanced. The waiting southrons were bound to be more accurate, but some of the bolts from the advancing northerners struck home, too. A gray-clad soldier threw up his hands and pitched over backwards.
Ormerod yanked his sword from its scabbard. Before long, this work would be hand to hand. “King Geoffrey!” he yelled, and let out another roar.
“King Avram!” the southrons shouted. That only made Ormerod more furious. That they should want to be ruled by someone who would twist the ancient laws and customs of Detina all out of shape was bad enough in and of itself. That they should want to force Avram’s rule on the part of Detina which wanted nothing to do with him was much, much worse, at least to Ormerod’s eyes.
“Provincial prerogative!” he cried.
“Freedom!” the southrons yelled back.
“How is it freedom when you want to take my gods-damned serfs off my gods-damned land?” Ormerod demanded. He didn’t get an answer to that, or at least not a carefully reasoned one. His regiment and the southrons collided, and the argument between them went on at a level much more basic than words.
He stabbed a southron in the shoulder. The fellow howled like a wolf and twisted away, blood darkening his tunic. The men of Ormerod’s regiment and the southrons pounded away at one another with shortswords and with crossbows swung club-fashion. They kicked and bit and punched and wrestled and cursed one another as they grappled.
“Come on, boys!” Ormerod yelled. “We can do it!”
But more southrons, some armed with crossbows, others with pikes, came up to help hold back King Geoffrey’s men. More northerners came forward, too, but not so many: for one thing, the southrons seemed to have more men on the spot, and, for another, their engines did a better job of hindering the advance of the northern reinforcements.
Back and forth the fight swayed. If the northerners could drive their foes back to and over the pontoon bridge, the southrons’ supply route to the east would break once more. If not… Ormerod preferred not to think about if not. All he thought of was the man just ahead of him and, after that son of a bitch fell to his sword, the next closest southron. He stormed past the body of the soldier he’d just slain, shouting, “King Geoffrey! Provincial prerogative forever!”
Then, to his horrified dismay, a new shout rose off to the flank: “Unicorn-riders! Southron unicorn-riders!”
His men and the men close by all howled in alarm. A compact group of soldiers had little trouble holding unicorns at bay, but the beasts and the warriors aboard them could be dangerous to men in loose order, especially when those men were already fighting for their lives. He saw a couple of men in Geoffrey’s blue break off their struggle with the southrons and speed toward the rear.
“No!” he cried. “Stand your ground! It’s your best chance!”
But they would not listen to him. And they were the first of many. Before long, it wasn’t a matter of driving the southrons back over their pontoon bridge. Rather, the struggle was to keep the enemy from turning victory into rout.
Cursing, Ormerod had to fall back or risk getting cut off from his comrades and captured or killed. He shook his fist toward the east, toward the unicorn-riders who’d ruined his side’s chance for a win. A moment later, he was cursing even louder and more sulfurously.
“Stand!” he shouted. “Stand, gods damn you! Those aren’t unicorns! Those are a bunch of wagon-hauling asses, and you’re a bunch of stupid asses for letting them panic you like this! Stand!”
His men, King Geoffrey’s men, would no more stand their ground than they’d listen to him. They thought they knew what had happened, and they weren’t about to let facts bother them when their minds were made up. They streamed back toward Sentry Peak.
Ormerod kept on cursing, which did him no good whatever. And then, hating himself, hating his men, and hating the asses most of all, he joined the retreat. “We’ve got trouble here,” he growled to Lieutenant Gremio. He wished Gremio would have argued, but the other officer only nodded.
There were times when Lieutenant General Hesmucet wondered why his parents had named him after the blond chieftain who’d fought the Detinans so ferociously during the War of 1218. When he was a boy, he’d had endless fights because of his name. Now that he was grown to be a man, he found it more useful than otherwise: people remembered him on account of it.
And he aimed to be remembered. He looked back at the long column of men in King Avram’s gray he led. They’d started out from their base by the Great River when news of the disaster north of Rising Rock reached them. Now, at last, after much travel by glideway and a good deal of marching, they’d come east to Rising Rock to help General Bart defend the place against the traitors and drive them out of Franklin and back into Peachtree Province.
Hesmucet took one hand off the reins of his unicorn and scratched his close-cropped dark beard. Even after two and a half years of war, he found the idea that the northerners were traitors to the Kingdom of Detina strange. When Geoffrey declared himself king in Avram’s despite, Hesmucet had been provost at a military collegium up in the north. His friends there had tried to persuade him to fight for Geoffrey, but he hadn’t been able to bear the thought of tearing the kingdom apart like a chicken wing. He’d gone south once more to take service with Avram, and none of the northerners had tried to stand in his way.
His aide-de-camp rode up to him and said, “Sir, we’re coming up to the battlefield by Brownsville Ferry.”
“Yes, I can see that for myself, Major Milo; thank you,” Hesmucet said. “I didn’t think those bodies scattered over the ground had got there by themselves.”
Major Milo flinched a little. Anyone who dealt with Hesmucet had to deal with his sharp tongue. “It was a noble victory,” the aide-de-camp said. “Two noble victories, in fact.”
Hesmucet shrugged. “It was a battle. Battles are hells on earth, nothing else but. We may need to fight them, but we don’t need to love them.”
Milo said, “If you don’t mind my saying so, sir, that strikes me as an… unusual attitude for a soldier.”
“I don’t mind your saying so-why should I?” Hesmucet replied with another shrug. “But I know the kind of business I’m in. Do you think a garbage hauler expects to stay clean as he goes about his job?”
Milo must have thought he’d gone too far. His voice was stiff as he said, “We don’t haul garbage, sir.”
“No, indeed.” Lieutenant General Hesmucet waved at the field, and at the twisted, bloated, stinking corpses lying on it. The motion disturbed a few ravens close by. They flew up into the air with indignant croaking squawks. “We don’t haul garbage, Major. We make it.”