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  Brigadier Absalom saluted. “If you’ll excuse me, sir, I think they can use another fighting man back there.” Instead of drawing his sword, he bent down and picked up an enormous axe lying on the ground by his boot. George had assumed some engineer dropped it after making breastworks. But Absalom the Bear swung it as lightly as if it were a saber. “King Avram!” he bellowed, and rushed toward the traitors, looking for all the world like one of the berserk sea rovers who’d terrorized the Detinans’ ancestors long before they crossed the Western Ocean.

  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.

  In profound silence and dejection, Rollant began to march. No one, not even the irrepressible Smitty, had much to say during the retreat. The only sounds were those of marching feet and the occasional groans of the wounded. Rollant clutched his shortsword-his crossbow remained slung on his back, for he’d shot his last bolt-and wondered if Thraxton’s men would try to strike them as they fell back.

  But the northerners let them go unmolested. As he stumbled along through the deepening twilight, Rollant wondered if Thraxton’s army was as badly battered as Guildenstern’s. For his own sake, for the sake of the army of which he was one weary part, he hoped so.

  “We held them.” That was Lieutenant Griff. He sounded as tired as any of the men in his company. He’d led them well enough-better than Rollant had expected him to-and he hadn’t shrunk from the worst of the fighting. If his voice broke occasionally, well, so what? He went on, “The rest of Guildenstern’s army ran away, but we held the traitors and we’re going off in good order.”

  “That’s right.” Somebody else spoke in a rumbling bass. Rollant knew who that was: Major Reuel, who’d been in charge of the regiment since Colonel Nahath went down with a bolt through his thigh. “And Lieutenant General George chose us to throw back Thraxton’s men when things looked worst. Us. Our regiment. And we did it, by the gods.”

  Rollant suspected Doubting George had chosen them more because they were handy than for any virtue inherent in them, but that was beside the point. Where so many men deserved to be embarrassed, he and his comrades could walk tall. They’d done their best.

  Smitty said, “Doubting George was the rock in the River of Death, and the traitors couldn’t get past him.”

  “Let’s give him a cheer,” Rollant said, and a few men called out, “Huzzah for Doubting George!”

  A few more men shouted out George’s name the next time, and more the next, and more still the time after that, so that soon the whole company, the whole regiment, and the whole long winding column of men were crying his name. That made Rollant walk taller, too. It made him feel much less like a soldier in a beaten army and more like one who’d done everything he possibly could.

  And then he heard a unicorn’s hooves on the dirt of the roadway. He peered through the deepening gloom, then whooped. That was Lieutenant General George on the white beast. “Huzzah!” Rollant shouted, louder than ever.

  Doubting George waved his hat. “Thanks, boys,” he said. “I don’t know what in the seven hells you’re cheering me for. You’re the ones who did the work.” He touched spurs to the unicorn and rode on.

  Rollant felt ten feet tall after that, and ready to whip Thraxton the Braggart’s whole army by himself, and Duke Edward of Arlington’s, too. He even forgot how tired he was-till the regiment finally halted in a clearing through which the road to Rising Rock ran. When Lieutenant Griff didn’t choose him as one of the pickets to watch for the northerners and try to hold them back if they attacked, he unrolled his blanket, lay down on the grass, and fell asleep at once.

  Smitty had to shake him awake the next morning. Even then, Rollant felt more like his own grandfather than himself. He ached in every bone, in every muscle. He felt as if he ached in every hair on his head. Only seeing how Smitty moved like an old man, too, made him feel a little better.

  Cookfires smoked off at one side of the clearing. Rollant dug out his mess kit and lined up with other soldiers who all looked as if they could have used more sleep. A cook who looked even tireder than the men he served spooned slop onto Rollant’s tin plate. “Thanks,” Rollant said. He ate like a wolf.

  He was chasing scraps with his spoon when the pickets came back from the north. “Thraxton’s men aren’t chasing us,” they reported. “We must’ve hurt them as bad as they hurt us.”

  “Then how come we’re going back toward Rising Rock?” Smitty wondered aloud.

  That was such a good question, Rollant wished Smitty hadn’t asked it. He did his best to answer: “They hurt us more on most of the field, but we hurt them more on Merkle’s Hill. That was too late to do the rest of the army any good, though, because it was already heading south.”

  “I suppose so,” Smitty said. “And what Doubting George had with him couldn’t lick the traitors’ whole army by itself.”

  “If he’d been in charge of our whole army…” Rollant said.

  “If unicorns had wings, we’d all carry umbrellas,” Smitty said, which made Rollant look at a courier going by on a trotting unicorn in a whole different way. In spite of everything he’d been through, his laugh was close to a giggle.

  Before long, the regiment started marching again. Easy enough to see it followed in the wake of a defeated army: it passed the wreckage war left behind. Here lay a crossbow someone had thrown away so he could flee faster, there a couple of pikes probably discarded for the same reason. Soldiers who’d already come this way had shoved a wagon with a broken axle over to the side of the road. Dead unicorns were already starting to bloat in the sun. So were the corpses of a couple of men in gray who’d died on the way south.

  Rollant heaved a rock at a raven hopping around a dead man. The big black bird let out an angry croaking caw and sprang away from the body, but not far. It would, he feared, go back all too soon.

  By the time his regiment got into Rising Rock, it was already full of soldiers. Some of them still had the panicked look of men who’d seen too much, done too much, and weren’t likely to be able to do anything more for some time. But others were busy building breastworks that faced north. Those breastworks had men behind them, men who looked ready to fight.

  “Well, Thraxton’s not going to walk right on into Rising Rock behind us,” Rollant said. “That’s something, anyhow. If he wants it, he’ll have to take it away from us.”

  “That really is something,” Smitty agreed. “I was wondered if we’d stop here at all or just keep on marching back toward Ramblerton.”

  “That’s a long way from here.” Rollant knew just how far it was, too, having marched all the way from the capital of Franklin north and west to Rising Rock.

  “Not a lot of good stopping places on the way, though,” Smitty said, which was also true.

  And there, up near those breastworks, stood General Guildenstern. The black-bearded soldier in gray tipped back his head and swigged from a flask. “Come on, you bastards! Dig!” he shouted. “Those traitor sons of bitches whipped us once, but dip me in dung if they’re going to whip us twice. Isn’t that right, boys?”

  Heads bobbed up and down as the soldiers digging paused in the labor for a moment. Then they went back to it, harder than ever. Dirt flew. Rollant said, “He’s not the worst general in the world, not even close. He takes pretty good care of his men.”

  “No, he’s not the worst, but he’s not the best, either,” Smitty said. “And I wonder how much longer he’ll have the chance to go on taking care of us. King Avram’s not going to like the way this battle turned out. For all you know, Guildenstern had his beaky old nose in the brandy flask when he should have been thinking straight.”

  “That’s so,” Rollant admitted. “Getting drunk isn’t taking care of your men, if that’s what happened. But I don’t know that it is, and neither do you. People are talking about Thraxton’s magic.”

  “People say all sorts of stupid things,” Smitty observed. “Just because they say them doesn’t make them true, though Thraxton might have magicked Guildenstern.”

  “I’m ready to believe anything when it comes to the northern nobles’ magecraft,” Rollant said. “You never lived up there. I did.” He shivered at the memory. “By the gods, I’m glad I don’t live there any more.”

  Smitty started to answer, then checked himself and stared in delight. Rollant followed his gaze. “Captain Cephas!” they both exclaimed at the same time.

  “Hello, boys.” The company commander was thin and pale, but he was on his
feet. “It’s good to be up and moving-a bit, anyhow. I hear I missed a little something.”

  “Yes, sir,” Rollant said. “Awfully good to see you again, sir. From what they were saying about your wound…” His voice trailed off.

  Cephas’ hand went to the right side of his ribcage. “I’ve still got bandages under my tunic,” he said. “But I can walk, and I think I’ll be able to fight before too long.” He sounded as if he was trying to convince himself. “I was lucky. The wound didn’t fester at all. And they threw me off my cot because so many soldiers hurt worse than I am started coming in.”

  “How’s Lieutenant Benj?” Smitty asked. Benj had been wounded in the same skirmish as Captain Cephas.

  Cephas’ face clouded. “He didn’t seem so bad when we first got hurt, but the fever took him.” He shrugged, then winced. He didn’t seem ready to swing a sword any time soon. “It’s as the gods will. That’s all I can say about it.”

  “Don’t you worry about a thing, Captain,” Smitty said with a sly smile. “I expect Corliss will take good care of you now that you’re back.”

  Rollant wanted to stick an elbow in Smitty’s ribs, but didn’t quite dare, not where Cephas could see him do it. He hadn’t brought Hagen and Corliss and their children back to the camp so the escaped serf’s wife could become the captain’s leman. On the other hand, Cephas hadn’t forced her, as northern nobles were in the habit of doing when blond girls took their fancy. That also made Rollant stay his hand, or rather, his elbow.

  Cephas smiled, too. “I’m glad she and Hagen came back safe from the fight. I’ll be glad to see her; I wouldn’t say any different.”

  I’ll bet you wouldn’t, Rollant thought. Other soldiers crowded forward to greet Captain Cephas. Even Lieutenant Griff had a grin on his face, though he would lose command of the company when Cephas was well enough to take it back. Rollant looked around for Hagen and Corliss. He didn’t see either one of them. Just as well, probably, went through his mind. Corliss might be glad to see Cephas again. He didn’t think Hagen would.