George eyed the two battle lines. He’d never expected to have to fight back to back like this, but things in front of him still seemed to be holding pretty well in spite of the two regiments he’d pulled out of the line. The fight in the rear, on the other hand… Brigadier Absalom was right. They were going to need every man they could find to throw back the traitors.
“King Avram!” Doubting George yelled as his own blade came out of the scabbard. He didn’t look like an axe-wielding barbarian, as Absalom the Bear did, and he probably wasn’t a figure to frighten the northerners, but he did know what to do with a blade. Were that not true, he would already have died here by the River of Death.
A crossbow quarrel hissed past his head. Soldiers with crossbows didn’t care how good a swordsman he was. If they got their way, he would perish before he had the chance to use his sword. Colonel Andy would have called him a gods-damned fool for this. But Andy was near the top of Merkle’s Hill, and Doubting George was here.
“King Avram!” he shouted again, and he rushed at the closest northerner he saw. The fellow had just shot his crossbow. He started to reach for another bolt, but realized Doubting George would be upon him before he could slide it into the groove and yank back the string. A lot of crossbowmen, in King Avram’s army and King Geoffrey’s, would have run away from a fellow with a sword who pretty obviously knew how to handle it.
Not this northerner, though. The traitors would have been easier to beat were they cowards. That thought had gone through George’s mind before. Of course, since he was from Parthenia himself, he knew the mettle of the men who fought against King Avram. This fellow, now, set down his crossbow-carefully, as if he expected to use it again very soon-yanked out his shortsword, and, with a cry of, “King Geoffrey and freedom!” rushed at George as George ran toward him.
Courage the northerner had. Anything resembling sense was another matter. He wasn’t so ignorant of swordplay as a lot of southrons from the cities were, but he hadn’t learned in the hard, remorseless school that had trained Doubting George. Maybe he’d thought to overpower his foe with sheer ferocity. Whatever he’d thought, he’d made a mistake. George parried, sidestepped, thrust. The blue-clad northerner managed to beat his blade aside, but sudden doubt showed on his face. George thrust again, at his knee. The northerner sprang back. Now he looked alarmed. Bit off more than you could chew, eh? George thought. His blade flickered in front of him like a viper’s tongue.
And then, before he could finish the traitor, a crossbow quarrel slammed into the fellow’s side. The northerner shrieked and clutched at himself. George drove his sword home to finish the man. That wasn’t sporting, but he didn’t care. If his soldiers couldn’t stop the northerners here, everything would unravel.
Not far ahead of him, Absalom the Bear’s axe rose and fell, rose and fell. Somewhere or other, the broad-shouldered brigadier had actually learned to fight with the unusual weapon. He beat down enemy soldiers’ defenses and felled them as if felling trees. Before long, nobody tried to stand against him.
Nor could the northerners in Doubting George’s rear stand against his hastily improvised counterattack. He’d sent only a couple of regiments against them, but their own force was none too large. Instead of breaking through and rolling up his line, they had to draw back toward their own comrades, leaving many dead and wounded on the field and carrying off other men too badly hurt to retreat on their own.
Lieutenant General George caught up with Brigadier Absalom as the traitors sullenly fell back. Absalom plunged his axe blade into the soft ground again and again to clean it. He nodded to George. “That was a gods-damned near-run thing, sir,” he said.
“Don’t I know it!” George said fervently. “And it’s not over yet. We just stopped them here.”
“If we hadn’t stopped them here, it would be over,” Absalom the Bear observed.
That was also true. Doubting George surveyed the field. He couldn’t see so much of it from here at the bottom of Merkle’s Hill as he would have liked. After pausing to catch his breath, he asked, “Where did you learn to fight with an axe?”
“I read about it in that fellow Graustark’s historical romances,” Absalom answered, a little sheepishly. “It sounded interesting, so I found a smith who was also an antiquarian, and he trained me as well as he knew himself.”
“I’d say he knew quite a bit.” George kicked at the bloody dirt. “I wish I knew what was happening farther west. Nothing good, gods damn it.” He kicked at the dirt again.
VII
Rollant had never been so weary in all the days of his life. Now, he was yet a young man, so those days were not so many, but he had spent a lot of them laboring in the swampy indigo fields of Baron Ormerod’s estate. Ormerod was not the worst liege lord to have, and never would be as long as Thersites remained alive, but he was far from the softest, and demanded a full day’s labor from all his serfs every day. Rollant would not have cared to try to reckon up how many times he’d stumbled back to his hut at or after sundown and collapsed down onto his cot, sodden with exhaustion.
However many times it might have been, though, none of those days in the fields came close to matching this one. He’d been fighting for his life by the River of Death for two days straight. By all accounts, a good part of General Guildenstern’s army was already wrecked. He knew how close Doubting George’s wing had come to utter ruin. George had pulled his regiment and the one beside it out of the line and sent it to the rear to face a couple of northern regiments that had got round behind them. If they hadn’t driven back the traitors, he didn’t see how George’s wing could have survived, either.
But they had. And now, as the sun sank low in the direction of the Western Ocean, Rollant wiped sweat and a little blood off his forehead with the sleeve of his tunic. “That last traitor almost did for me,” he told Smitty.
The youngster from the farm outside New Eborac nodded. “But he’s dead now, and you’re not, and I expect that’s the way you want it to be,” he said. He was surely as worn as Rollant, but could still put things in a way that made everybody around him smile.
“Sure enough,” Rollant agreed. “Some of them don’t have a much better notion of what to do with a shortsword than I do-and a gods-damned good thing, too, if anybody wants to know what I think.”
Sergeant Joram said, “Don’t fall down and go to sleep yet, you two. Nobody knows for sure they won’t try and hit us one more lick.” Rollant and Smitty exchanged appalled glances. If the traitors still had fight left in them after the two days both sides had been through…
Maybe they did. Way off to Rollant’s left and rear, Thraxton the Braggart’s men began their roaring battle cry. It was taken up successively by one regiment after another, passing round to Doubting George’s front and finally to the right where Rollant stood and even beyond him to the remnants of the two regiments he and his comrades had broken, till it seemed to have got back to the point whence it started.
“Isn’t that the ugliest sound you ever heard?” Smitty said.
“Yes!” Rollant agreed fervently. As the roars from the traitors went on and on, he stood there almost shuddering, feeling to the fullest those two days of desperate battle, without sleep, without rest, without food, almost without hope.
Almost. There was, however, a space somewhere to the back of George’s battered host across which those horrible roars did not prolong themselves-a space to the southeast, leading back in the direction of Rising Rock. At last, just before the sun touched the horizon, orders came that the men were to retreat back through that space.