Sentry Peak (10 page)

“People had ought to know that,” Ned said. “I’m a peaceable man, but . . .” He normally spoke in a quiet voice, so quiet one had to listen closely to him to make out what he was saying. But when his temper rose, an astonishing transformation came over him. His eyes flashed. He shouted. He cursed.

“But . . .” Colonel Biffle echoed, and let out a nervous chuckle. “When your angry
is
up, your men are a lot more afraid of you than they ever could be afraid of the graybacked lice who fight for King Avram.”

“Good,” Ned said.

They went on for a while in silence. The road they followed hardly deserved the name. It was little more than a game track. But Ned’s scouts had already traveled it from one end to the other, as they had most of the paths in the woods, and they knew just where it hit the main road leading north from Rising Rock.

After splashing through another small stream, Ned held up his hand and reined in. “Column, halt!” Colonel Biffle called from behind him, and the column did halt. Biffle asked, “What is it, sir?”

“I want to be sure the pack animals are keeping up with us all right,” Ned answered. “Pass the word back, and then send it forward to me again. We can all use a little blow till it comes.”

“Yes, sir,” Biffle said, and back the word went. In short order, it returned: the laden asses—and even a few unicorns—were where they were supposed to be.

“Fine.” Ned of the Forest nodded. “When we bump into Guildenstern’s men, we’ll need ’em. Every one of ’em’ll be worth its weight in gold, matter of fact.”

“Yes, sir,” Colonel Biffle repeated, though he didn’t sound altogether convinced. He did say, “You think of everything, don’t you, sir?”

“I’d better,” Ned answered. “We’d be in a fine way if I counted on Thraxton to do it for me, now wouldn’t we?” His regimental commander giggled—there was no other word for it—deliciously scandalized. Ned didn’t see that he’d made a joke. Thraxton wouldn’t do him any favors. Nobody except the men he led—the men who’d seen for themselves what he was worth—would ever do him any favors. He didn’t care. He expected none. “Forward!” he called, and rode on.

Forward they went. As they moved on, Ned wondered what he would do if Guildenstern’s men suddenly and unexpectedly attacked from the south. It wouldn’t happen, not if he could help it. He had scouts out not just ahead of his riders but off to the flanks as well.

But the forest between Rising Rock and Fa Layette was often thick and tangled. He liked setting ambuscades, and knew he could fall into them, too. If he did, he wanted to have a plan ready. Some men—even some soldiers of high rank—went through life perpetually surprised. Ned of the Forest had no desire to be among their number.

A scout came galloping back along the game path toward him. “Lord Ned! Lord Ned!” he called, reining in.

“What is it?” Ned leaned forward, like a hound who knew he was about to be released from his lead line. “It must be something, by the gods, or you wouldn’t ride hells-for-leather to get me word of it.”

“Something, yes, Lord Ned.” The scout nodded. He was a lean, weatherbeaten man in his early thirties: not a fellow who’d owned an estate full of serfs before the war, surely, but not one who’d take kindly to anyone who told him he couldn’t dream of acquiring such an estate one day, either. His sharp northeastern accent wasn’t much different from Ned’s own. “Herk and me, we spotted southron riders heading up the road from Rising Rock. Unless we’re daft, there’s a whole big army behind ’em.”

“Is that a fact?” Ned said softly, and the scout nodded again. Ned scratched at the edge of his neat chin beard. “They’re not moving as fast as I would have, but they’re not sitting on their hands down there, neither.” His eyes narrowed. “They didn’t spy you?”

“Lord Ned!” The scout both looked and sounded affronted. “You think me and Herk are a couple o’ city men, can’t walk across ground with grass on it without we fall over our own feet?”

“No, no.” Ned of the Forest waved in apology. “Forget I said that: the Lion God swallow up the words. To business: tell me exactly where you and Herk were at and how fast the southrons were moving. Soon as I hear that, I can reckon up where we’d do best to pay ’em a call.”

“A social call, like,” the scout said, and grinned—showing a couple of missing front teeth—when Ned nodded. The rider spoke for a couple of minutes, at one point dismounting to sketch in the dirt to make his words clearer.

Ned scratched at the edge of his beard again. “Clinging close to the west side of Sentry Peak, are they? That’s not stupid. I only wish it was. But we’ll have a harder time hitting ’em from both flanks at once this way.”

If General Guildenstern had his whole army on the move, he would outnumber Ned’s men eight or ten to one. Just for a moment, Ned wondered how he had the nerve to think about attacking the southrons from two directions at once. Then he shrugged and laughed a little.
I might have a better chance of licking ’em that way
, he thought.

But it didn’t seem practical, not with the dispositions the scout said the enemy was making. Ned abandoned the idea without remorse. “Let’s get down to business,” he said again, and started giving orders.

When the path along which his troopers were riding forked, he chose the more northerly branch. Before he found out where Guildenstern’s men were, he would have kept pressing as far south as he could. Now, though, he knew where he and his men had to be before the southrons’ scouts got there.

He reined in when the track ran into the main south-north road. A couple of hundred yards south of the junction, the trees came down close to the main road on either side. A slow, nasty grin spread over Ned’s face. The riders close enough to see it started grinning, too, and nudging one another. “He’s got something up his sleeve besides his arm,” one of them said. Everybody who heard him nodded.

Although Ned of the Forest did hear that, he hardly noticed. His mind turned like a serf woman’s spinning wheel. And then, all at once, it stopped, and he knew what he had to do. “You men!” he barked to the unicorn-riders nearest him. “Take some axes and knock down enough trees to make a barricade across the road. Quick, now—don’t sit there playing with yourselves. Get your arses moving right now!” He never cursed, except when action was near.

The troopers dismounted and fell to with a will. Chestnuts and oaks and pines came crashing down. Meanwhile, Ned shouted more orders. His voice changed timbre at the prospect of a fight. It belled forth, loud and piercing enough to stretch over a battlefield and urgent enough to make men obey first and think afterwards.

One man in eight stayed behind to hold unicorns. In most cavalry forces, it would have been one man in four. Ned wished he could do without unicorn-holders altogether. He didn’t have that many men. He needed to get all of them he could into the fight.

At his command, the troopers who’d built the barricade crouched behind it, their crossbows cocked. Along with Ned himself, more men moved into position among the trees to the west of the road. In country less wild, one of the local nobles would have had his serfs trim the trees back out of bowshot from the roadway, to make life harder for bandits. No one had bothered here: here the road was the intruder, with the trees the rightful inhabitants.

Ned had just got things arranged as he wanted them when a warbler whistled cheerily—once, twice, three times. He nodded: that was no natural bird, but a scout at the southern end of the line he’d formed. The southrons were in sight. “Pass the word along: nobody shoots till I give the order,” he said. “Anybody spoils our surprise, I’ll cut off his balls and feed ’em to my hounds.”

His men chuckled, not because they thought he was kidding but because they didn’t. And he wasn’t—at least, not when his temper was upon him. Along with the dismounted riders, he waited for the foe. The indigo uniforms in the shadows under the trees made his soldiers and him next to invisible.

The gray-clad outriders from King Avram’s army rode north up the road without so much as glancing into the forest. They were well mounted—better mounted than a lot of Ned’s men—and carried themselves with the arrogance that said they thought they could whip any number of northern men. A lot of southrons thought that way till they’d been in a couple of fights with the men who followed King Geoffrey.

When the southron scouts saw the barricade across the road, they stopped, then rode forward again. Ned of the Forest nodded to himself. He would have had his men do the same thing. If the barricade had been left behind as an annoyance by the retreating northerners, they could just haul the tree trunks off to the side of the road and free it up for the men under General Guildenstern to continue their advance.

If. When the men in gray dismounted and started walking over to the felled trees, Ned’s troopers behind them popped up and started shooting. A few riders in gray fell. Others ran back out of range or started shooting, too. And still others rode back toward the south, to bring reinforcements to get rid of what looked like a small nuisance.
Me, I aim to be a
big
nuisance
, Ned thought.

The southrons wasted no time in bringing more men north to deal with the dismounted troopers who harassed them from behind the fallen trees. Ned nodded again. It was a smart piece of work. Had those men behind the trees been the only ones who were bothering them, they would have driven off King Geoffrey’s soldiers in short order.

Ned filled his lungs and shouted one word: “Six!” Instantly, his officers and sergeants took up the cry. Every sixth soldier hidden among the trees stepped out into the open and started shooting at the southrons. Ned stepped out into the open himself. He would not order his men to do anything he wouldn’t do himself. He was a good shot with a crossbow, although he preferred the saber at closer quarters.

With crossbow quarrels suddenly smiting them from the flank as well as the front, the southrons yowled in dismay. They went down one after another. Some few of them, with more courage than sense, tried to charge Ned’s men. The charge withered like a garden in a drought. Some of the southrons drew their swords, but nobody got close enough to use one.

Again, of course, Ned’s men couldn’t slay everybody. More of the soldiers in gray ran back toward the south. “Shouldn’t we chase ’em, Lord Ned?” one of Ned of the Forest’s men asked—one who didn’t get the point. “They’ll bring all of Guildenstern’s soldiers down on our heads.”

“No, not all of ’em,” Ned said. “They’ll bring back enough to deal with what they see—and a bit more besides, in case some little thing goes wrong. So let the gods-damned sons of bitches run.” Sure enough, the heat of battle also heated his language. “They’re doing just what I reckoned they would.”

This time, he heard unicorns and footsoldiers coming before he spied them. The pounding of hooves, the drumroll of marching feet, soaked into his body through the soles of his own feet as well as through his ears. And when the southrons came into sight, he nodded to himself once more. They’d sent plenty to overwhelm what he was showing—and that he might not be showing everything never once crossed their minds.

A great shout rose from the enemies in gray when they saw Ned and his men still in line of battle out in the open, waiting for them. The unicorn-riders outdistanced the crossbowmen and pikemen who advanced with them. Ned’s crossbowmen, waiting there away from the cover of the trees, were the sort of target cavalrymen dreamt about.

Lances and sabers and iron-shod unicorn horns gleamed in the afternoon sunlight. “Bide your time, boys,” Ned said. The onrushing unicorns thundered nearer. Here and there, Ned’s men began to shoot in spite of orders. Then he shouted, “
Now!
” and all his men, both those in the open and the far larger number concealed under the trees, shot a volley at the unicorn-riders that broke their charge as if it had run headlong into a stone wall. Unicorns tumbled. Men pitched off them. Unhurt beasts fell over wounded ones. Ned’s men kept right on shooting; thanks to those pack animals, they had bolts to spare.

Cries of “Magecraft! Black magecraft!” rose from the southrons. Ned of the Forest threw back his head and laughed out loud. And General Guildenstern’s footsoldiers, seeing that the unicorns had failed but not seeing why, kept coming forward till they too took a couple of volleys from his massed dismounted force of riders.

“We’ll lick ’em all!” one of his troopers cried.

But he shook his head. “Next time, they’ll bring up enough to deal with the lot of us,” he said. “The idea is, not to stick around here to get dealt with. Back in the woods, boys. Back to the unicorns. We’ll be gone, and we’ll hit ’em again somewheres else pretty soon—doing what we want, not what they want us to.” He clapped his hands together. “That’s what this here war’s all about, ain’t it?”

“Forward!” General Guildenstern cried grandly. Horns blaring, drums thumping, the part of the army he hadn’t given to Doubting George marched out of Rising Rock, heading north toward the border with Peachtree Province. Guildenstern wished the army—or at least he—could have stayed longer. One of the blond serving girls—a serf no longer, of course, but still a servant—at the hotel had served him as delightfully as he’d ever imagined a woman doing. He sighed, then loosed another shout: “Forward! Duty calls!” He wasn’t just telling his men. He was reminding himself, too.

Having reminded himself, he used his knees and the reins to urge his unicorn forward. Its every step took him farther from the blond girl. He wished he hadn’t reminded himself of that. To keep from thinking about it, he loosed the brandy flask he wore next to his sword and swigged from it. Maybe the peaches from which the potent stuff was brewed had come from the province toward which he advanced. That was some consolation for leaving the wench behind. Some, yes. Enough?

Probably plenty of willing blond wenches up in Peachtree Province
, he thought. That notion, possibly sparked by the brandy he’d poured down, went further toward consoling him for leaving Rising Rock.

And they’ll all fall at my feet—or into my bed—once I smash up Thraxton the Braggart’s army once for all. I can do it. I
will
do it. Once I get clear of these woods, I’ll outflank him again and again, the same way I flanked him out of Rising Rock, out of Franklin altogether. He can flee or he can fight. If he flees, I throw more wood on King Geoffrey’s pyre with every mile of land I take back for King Avram. If he fights, I crush him
. Guildenstern nodded and took another nip from his flask. The sun shone down brightly, as if on him alone. The breeze smelled sweet, at least to him. Victory made a better perfume than flowers or spice.