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"Forward!" Gremio shouted. "We'll push the bastards into Goober Creek!" He did
his best to roar as if the Lion God were speaking through his body.
Ferocity perhaps desperation wasn't too strong a word propelled the
northerners into and then through their foes. Some southrons fell back toward
the creek. Others simply fell, and would not rise again. For a few heady
minutes, Gremio thought his comrades might indeed throw the enemy back into
the stream and work a great slaughter on him there.
But the southrons had too many men. Those who ran away rallied when they met
fresh, unpanicked troopers coming up from the south. And the reinforcements
poured a couple of withering volleys of bolts into the oncoming northerners. A
good many of King
Geoffrey's men had slung or thrown aside their crossbows to fight with
shortswords instead. They couldn't match the southrons quarrel for quarrel, as
they had before.
"Forward!" Gremio cried yet again, and rushed toward the new and dreadfully
steady southron line. The enemy might likely would kill him, but Colonel
Florizel couldn't complain he was a coward.
The things we do for pride, he thought sourly, brandishing blood-bedaubed
blade.
He looked back over his shoulder. His men kept on following, such of them as
remained on their feet. Sergeant Thisbe trotted along only a few paces behind
him.
Gremio didn't know whether to be proud about that or sad.
You're not just getting yourself killed for no purpose, but all the best men
in the company
.
"Shoot!" a southron officer yelled. Another volley tore into the men in blue.
Gremio heard the shrieks behind him. He looked back again. What seemed like
half the men who had still been on their feet were down.
Sergeant Thisbe waved urgently. "Sir, we can't do it," he called.
"We've got to try," Gremio answered, which meant, I'm going to die before I
retreat without orders
. That was very likely a kind of madness of its own, but it was a madness most
men on a battlefield shared. Without such a madness, anyone put in danger of
his life would simply run away, and how could kings and generals hope to fight
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their wars like that?
But, before shouting, "Forward!" again, Gremio looked around for Colonel
Florizel.
If the regimental commander had already fallen, Gremio got some of his
discretion back.
He knew what he would do with it, too, for Thisbe was right: the attackers
lacked the numbers to go any farther forward.
Florizel waved a sword bloodier than Gremio's. Whatever the earl's flaws,
cowardice was not among them. "Good fighting!" he bawled.
"If you say so, your Excellency," Gremio answered.
Then Florizel scowled, not at him but at the southrons. "Gods damn it, I don't
think we can shift them," the regimental commander said.
The attack had jolted the southrons, but no more. "What are your orders, sir?"
he called to Florizel.
A man of sense, seeing no hope the attack could succeed, would have ordered
his men back. Earl Florizel said, "Let's give it one more try, on the off
chance I might be wrong." He waved his sword again. "I hate to pull back from
such a fine fray."
That stuck Gremio as madness, but what point to saying so? What he did say was
the only thing that would have satisfied the colonel: "Forward!" Forward he
went, with such men as were still able to go with him.
Two more deadly volleys from the southrons broke the charge before it came to
hand to hand. Gremio looked for Florizel, wondering if one of those crossbow
quarrels had stretched him dead in the dirt. Somehow, the regimental commander
still stood, but only a forlorn corporal's guard stood with him.
"Sir, they won't leave a one of us alive if we stay here much longer,"
Sergeant
Thisbe said urgently.
"If Florizel orders me to die here, then die here I shall," Gremio answered.
Thisbe was more practical than that, as sergeants had a way of being. If he
stayed, it was only because Gremio did: another species of madness, without a
doubt.
At last, even Florizel saw it was hopeless. He ordered the men back toward the
works from which they'd erupted. Those who could, obeyed.
* * *
Lieutenant General Bell scowled at his wing commanders. Roast-Beef William and
Alexander the Steward gave back the exhausted stares of men who had seen too
much fighting that day. Bell didn't care how battle-weary they looked. He
cared about nothing except the results of that fight.
"You failed me," he growled. "Your men failed me."
"Sir, we did everything we could," Brigadier Alexander said.
"That's the truth the whole truth and nothing but," Roast-Beef William agreed.
"The southrons were there in numbers too great for us to move them. We tried.
We did everything we could, everything we knew how to do."
"You failed me," Bell repeated. "Your men have turned craven, on account of
cowering too long in trenches. They didn't, they wouldn't, push the attack
with the spirit required to destroy the enemy."
"Sir, that is not true," William said. "They fought as bravely as any men
could fight look how many dead and wounded we left on the field."
"If they had fought bravely enough, we would have won," Bell said. "We should
have won. We didn't win. What have you got to say for yourselves?"
"Sir, if you're going to attack an army that's bigger than your own, you've
got to know the odds aren't on your side," Old Straight said.
"But I had to attack. King Geoffrey insisted on it. That's why Joseph the
Gamecock isn't commanding any more," Bell said. The misfortune that had
befallen his army couldn't possibly have been his fault. "The soldiers just
didn't put enough into it.
Otherwise, they would have won."
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"Do you want to throw away the whole army, then?" William asked.
"No! I want to drive back the southrons. We have to drive back the southrons,"
Bell said. "If we don't, they can cut the glideways to Marthasville one by one
till they hold the town in the palm of their hand."
"They're already doing it," Brigadier Alexander said. "That move to extend
their left flank means they're sitting on the glideway path to Julia. We'll
get no more supplies from the west."
"Then we have to drive them back," Bell declared. "It's as simple as that."
"Saying it's as simple as that," Roast-Beef William remarked. "Doing something
about it won't be so easy, I'm afraid. When you sent us south against Doubting
George, you didn't leave Benjamin the Heated Ham very many men. He may be able
to hold back
James the Bird's Eye but, on the other hand, he may not. He surely hasn't got
the numbers he needs to attack."
Bell took the laudanum bottle from his tunic pocket and raised it to his lips.
Maybe the drug would shield him from things he didn't care to contemplate.
Resentment in his voice, he said, "Hesmucet has no trouble attacking wherever
pleases."
he
Patiently, William answered, "Hesmucet has more men than we do, sir. It's in
the nature of things that he can do a good deal we can't."
Brigadier Alexander added, "The one thing wrong with attacks is that they're
expensive even when they succeed and a lot more expensive when they fail."
"Gods damn it, I didn't send you out there to fail," Bell said. He studied the
map.
"We have to strike a blow against their left. We have to. That will free up
the glideway line, and we're holding Marthasville on account of those lines."
"An attack would be splendid, if we had the men to do it," Roast-Beef William
said.
"But whence will you conjure them up, sir?"
"If we can't do what we'd like to do, we'll do what we have to do," Bell
replied. "You pull your men out of the fieldworks south of town, Lieutenant
General. March them north and west through Marthasville till they outflank the
end of the southrons' line, which is
which has to be unguarded, up in the air. Attack at dawn, roll them up, and
send them back in the direction from which they came." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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