“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.”
His aide-de-camp pondered that, then shook his head, rejecting the idea. Hesmucet laughed quietly to himself. Major Milo came from a family with noble blood, and naturally looked on war as a noble pursuit. Hesmucet had a different view: to him, war was what you needed to do when the fellow with whom you were arguing wouldn’t listen to reason. You hit him, and you kept on hitting him till, sooner or later, he fell over. Once he went down, he wouldn’t argue any more.
Several asses had been put out to graze among the unicorns. Hesmucet pointed their way. “What’s that in aid of?” he wondered aloud. “They’re supposed to be kept off by themselves.”
“Shall I find out, sir? I see some of our men nearby there,” Major Milo said. He might be prissy, but he was conscientious.
And Hesmucet had had his bump of curiosity tickled. “Yes, why don’t you?” he said, and rode off to one side of the track so his men could keep moving while he waited. Milo trotted his unicorn over to the soldiers watching the foraging beasts, spoke briefly with them, and then came back toward Hesmucet. To the general’s surprise, his aide-de-camp wore a grin. “What’s so funny?” Hesmucet called.
“Well, sir, it seems those asses are unicorns, in a manner of speaking.” Sure as hells, Major Milo was grinning.
“They sure look like asses to me.” Hesmucet was a man for whom what he saw, and only what he saw, was real.
But now Milo laughed out loud. “Oh, but sir, those asses are brevet unicorns. They broke loose from their wagons during the last fight, and they helped panic Geoffrey’s men, so they’ve been promoted for the duration.”
“I see.” Hesmucet laughed, too. “I quite like that, Major. Already more brevets in this war than you can shake a gods-damned stick at.”
Detina’s regular army, its professional army, was tiny. Through most of the kingdom’s history, its main role had been to subdue the wild blond tribes in the far east. But now both King Avram and Grand Duke Geoffrey had recruited vast hosts to enforce their vision of what Detina ought to be. A man who’d been a captain in the regular army might command a division these days. He’d be breveted a brigadier or even a lieutenant general.
But, unless his sovereign chose to confirm that rank among the regulars, he’d go back to being a captain when the war finally ended, if it ever did, with only a captain’s pay and only a captain’s prospects, and very likely with all his chances for glory behind him forever. Hesmucet knew a good many human asses breveted up beyond their proper rank, so why not the kind that went on four legs as well? Who could guess what sort of unicorns they’d make?
“Well, I hope they enjoy their privileges,” he said, and used the reins and the pressure of his knees to urge his own veritable unicorn forward to the head of his army. Major Milo stuck close by his side. There ahead lay the pontoon bridge Bill the Bald had stretched across the river. The unicorns’ hooves thudded on it. Shading his eyes with his hand, Hesmucet could see Rising Rock ahead.
“There’ll be a great wailing and gnashing of teeth among the traitors when they find out we’re here,” he said.
His aide-de-camp nodded. “They haven’t been able to keep reinforcements out, and they haven’t been able to keep supplies out, either. I think they’re going to be sorry before very long.”
“So do I,” Hesmucet agreed. But then he checked himself. “Of course, General Guildenstern no doubt thought the same cursed thing. Still, General Bart will have a lot more to throw at the northerners than Guildenstern did-and he’ll do a better job with what he’s got, too, unless I miss my guess.”
As if to underscore his words, the troopers he led began marching over the bridge that led toward Rising Rock. Their footfalls were a dull thunder-Hesmucet glanced up to the sky, thinking of the might of the Thunderer-that went on and on and on. No traitors were about to hear that sound, but it would have brought only dismay to them if they had.