Sentry Peak (17 page)

Guildenstern’s mouth twisted into a thin, bitter line. As if every word tasted bad—and every word
did
taste bad, as far as he was concerned—he said, “Maybe—just maybe—there is something to what you say. Maybe we ought to bring the wings of the army closer together.”

Brigadier Alexander’s face lit up. “Sir, I think that would be a
wonderful
idea!” he exclaimed, as if he expected to see Ned of the Forest’s unicorns rampaging through the division he commanded any minute now. “If we’re all together, the Braggart would have to come up with reinforcements before he could even think about attacking us, and where can he find them?”

“He can’t.” General Guildenstern spoke with great certainty. “There aren’t any in this part of the kingdom.”

“I’m sure you’re right, sir,” Alexander said. “And so—a united army for a united kingdom, eh?” He chuckled stagily. “King Avram would surely approve.”

“Yes.” Guildenstern had no trouble holding the enthusiasm from his voice. He didn’t particularly love King Avram. But he thoroughly despised Grand Duke Geoffrey—false King Geoffrey, these days. And he even more thoroughly despised the northern nobles who backed Geoffrey. They had everything he wanted—rank, wealth, elegance. No . . . They had almost everything he wanted. He turned to Brigadier Alexander and coughed a significant cough. “By the gods, I’m thirsty.”

“Here, sir.” Alexander took the bottle off his belt and handed it to the general.

“Thanks.” Guildenstern yanked out the stopper, took a long pull—and then spat in disgust. He all but threw the flask to the brigadier. “You’ve got your nerve, giving a thirsty man
water
.”

Alexander blushed bright red, as if he were a blond. “I—I’m sorry, sir,” he stammered. “I—I’m not fond of spirituous liquors myself, and so it never occurred to me that—”

“Dunderhead,” Guildenstern growled. The commanding general turned his back on his luckless subordinate and stalked off toward the scryers’ tent. Brigadier Alexander took a couple of steps after him, then broke off the pursuit, sure it would do no good. And in that, if in nothing else, Guildenstern thought, the brigadier was absolutely right.

I wonder if the scryers will have anything worth drinking
, Guildenstern thought as he ducked through the tent flap. He doubted it. And even if they did, odds were they wouldn’t share with him.

The bright young men sitting behind their crystal balls sprang to attention when the commanding general walked in. One of them sprang so enthusiastically, he knocked over his folding chair and then had to bend and fumble to pick it up. “What can we do for you, sir?” asked Major Carmoni, who headed the scryers’ section.

“I need to send some messages,” Guildenstern answered. “What did you think I came in for, roast pork?”

Several of the bright young men snickered. Major Carmoni said, “Yes, sir: I understand you need to send messages. To whom, sir, and what do you need to say?”

That was business. So Guildenstern took it, at any rate. He was too elevated by brandy to suppose it might be scorn. “Send one to Doubting George,” he answered, “ordering him to move toward me. And send the other to Brigadier Thom, also ordering him to move toward me. We shall concentrate our forces.” He spoke the long word in the last sentence with great care.

“Yes, sir.” Carmoni turned to the scryers. “Esrom, your crystal ball’s attuned to the ones in Lieutenant General George’s wing. And you, Edoc, you can deliver the message to Brigadier Thom’s wing.”

Both scryers nodded. One of them (Esrom? Edoc? the commanding general neither knew nor cared) turned to Guildenstern and murmured, “By your leave, sir.” He nodded. The scryers sat down and bent over their crystals. They muttered in low voices. First one crystal began to glow, then the other. The scryers passed on General Guildenstern’s orders. He heard those orders acknowledged. As the scryers looked up from the crystals, the glass globes went dull and dark again.

“It is accomplished, sir,” Major Carmoni said.

“It had bloody well better be,” Guildenstern said. “I wouldn’t put it past George to pretend he’d never got the order so he could go on after Thraxton the Braggart all by his lonesome. He’s a glory-sniffer, if you ask me.” Off he went, not quite realizing how much juicy gossip he’d just left in his wake.

He still remained imperfectly convinced that the northern traitors really were loitering here by the southern border of Peachtree Province. He wouldn’t have done it himself, which made it harder for him to believe Count Thraxton would. And the column in which he advanced, the column led by Brigadier Alexander, hadn’t been assailed the way Doubting George had—the way Doubting George said he had, at any rate. Oh, a few bushwhackers had shot crossbows at the men in gray from the underbrush, but that happened marching along any road in any northern province.

Musing this, he glumly tramped back to his own pavilion. His stride grew glummer still when he bethought himself that no one soft and young and round and friendly was waiting for him in the pavilion. He sighed and scowled and kicked at the dirt.
By all the gods, I should have brought that wench with me when we marched out of Rising Rock
, he thought.
I expected to be heading up toward Stamboul by now. Bound to be plenty of women once I get into settled country—plenty of serfs who want to be nice to King Avram’s general. But there aren’t any at all in this wilderness
.

If he couldn’t have a woman, more brandy needs must do. He didn’t know where to get his hands on a woman, but brandy—or something else just as potent, such as the amber spirits for which Franklin was famous—was never hard to come by, not in any army on either side of this civil war.

Just before General Guildenstern went into his pavilion, shouts rose from the mages’ tents not far away: “Sorcery! Magecraft! Wizardry!” The men started rushing about in the gray robes that always made them look—to Guildenstern, at least—as if they’d just come from the baths. They would run from one tent and then into another, calling out all the while.

Guildenstern’s lip curled. Mages were always running around yelling about magic, whether it was there or not. Guildenstern couldn’t sense it, which made him doubt it was there. He wanted to see mages running around yelling about cauliflowers. He rumbled laughter. With cauliflowers, at least, an ordinary human being would have some hope of telling whether or not the mages were flabbling over nothing.

Sentries saluted as Guildenstern came up to the pavilion. “Cauliflowers,” he muttered. Their eyebrows rose. But they didn’t ask questions. Asking questions wasn’t their job. Into the pavilion he strode. Sure enough, he had no trouble coming up with a bottle of brandy from which he could restore his sadly depleted flask—and from which he could restore his sadly depleted self.

He was smacking his lips over the restorative when one of the sentries stuck his head inside and said, “General Guildenstern, sir, Colonel Phineas would like to talk to you.”

“Ah, but would I like to talk to Colonel Phineas?” Guildenstern replied grandly. It wasn’t altogether a rhetorical question; his chief mage had and persisted in the unfortunate habit of telling him things he didn’t want to hear. He scowled. Phineas would also write a nasty report if he sent him away without listening to him. King Avram read reports like those. Scowling still, Guildenstern said what he had to say: “Very well. Send him in.”

In came Phineas, a round, agreeable man who looked more like a patent-medicine seller or a carnival barker than anyone’s usual idea of a mage. “Sir!” he said, clapping a dramatic hand to his forehead, “we have been probed!”

“Probed?” Guildenstern echoed. It didn’t sound pleasant; he was willing to admit that. What it did sound like was something a physician might do, not a sorcerer. “What exactly do you mean, Colonel?”

“What I say, of course,” Phineas answered. “We have been probed—quite thoroughly, too, I might add.”

“If you can’t explain yourself in plain Detinan so an ordinary human being can understand you, Colonel, perhaps you should find yourself another line of work,” Guildenstern said acidly. “Footsoldier springs to mind.”

As he’d thought it would, that got Phineas’ attention. “What I mean, sir, is that the northern mages have done everything they could to learn everything they could about our dispositions through sorcerous means. Perhaps you will criticize my style there. I am not used to being judged on my literary technique.”

“Never mind,” Guildenstern said: he’d finally found out what he needed to hear. “All right—they probed us, if that’s what you wizards call it. How much did they find out? I presume you fellows blocked them. That’s what we pay you for, anyhow.” He laughed at his own wit.

Colonel Phineas didn’t laugh. Colonel Phineas, in fact, looked about as somber as Guildenstern had ever seen him. “We did the best we could, General,” he said, his voice stiff and anxious. “We always do the best we can, as you must surely know. But, I have to admit, we were taken somewhat by surprise.”

Guildenstern didn’t like the way that sounded. By the miserable expression on his chief mage’s face, he had good reason not to like it. “How much did they learn?” he demanded. “They must have learned something, or you wouldn’t look as though a brewery wagon just ran over your favorite kitten.”

“They learned . . . perhaps a good deal, sir,” Phineas said, forcing the words out one by one. “We . . . might have detected the probe rather sooner than we did. We are still . . . not quite so good as we might wish at reacting when taken by surprise. Such things . . . don’t happen quite so often in civilian life.”

“You’ve gone and futtered things again, is what you’re telling me,” Guildenstern boomed, his rage fed both by brandy and by knowing such things had happened to southron armies far too often. “You’re telling me Thraxton the Braggart knows where every louse is on every man I command. That bloody well
is
what you’re telling me, isn’t it?”

“I don’t think it’s quite
that
bad, sir,” Colonel Phineas said. “But, considering how scattered our forces are . . .”

The commanding general took great pleasure in laughing in his face. “If that’s all you’re having puppies about, you can rest easy,” he said. “I’m already pulling them together.” Phineas blinked. That wasn’t enough for Guildenstern, who went on, “No thanks to you, gods damn you to the hells. Now get out of my sight!” Phineas fled. Guildenstern nodded. That was better. He swigged from the brandy flask again.

V

N
ed of the Forest could not have been more disgusted if he’d been invited to King Avram’s coronation.

“Why have we even got an army?” he demanded of Colonel Biffle. “What good is it if we just sit around with it and don’t use it?”

“Tell you what I heard,” Biffle said.

“Well? Go on,” Ned said. “How come General Thraxton’s being an idiot this time out?” He was willing to assume Thraxton
was
being an idiot, for one reason or another.

But Colonel Biffle shook his head. “It’s not Thraxton’s fault this time, Ned.” He held up a hasty hand. “I know the two of you don’t see eye to eye. Everybody knows that, I expect. But what I hear is, Thraxton’s flat-out ordered Leonidas the Priest to get up off his arse and go for the stinking southrons, and Leonidas just keeps sitting on his backside and won’t move for anything.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Ned allowed. “Leonidas has got himself plenty of holy where you ought to have smart, you know what I mean? But the southrons are figuring out we didn’t run for Stamboul or Marthasville. They’re starting to pull their own army together. If we don’t start taking bites out of their separate columns pretty soon, we lose the chance for good.”

“I know that, sir,” Biffle said. “But I can’t make Leonidas move, either.”

“Only thing that’d make Leonidas move is a good, swift kick in the backside,” Ned said scornfully. He raised a bristling black eyebrow. “I will be cursed if I don’t feel a little bit sorry for Thraxton, and that’s nothing I reckoned I’d ever say.”

“Won’t be so good if Guildenstern does pull his whole army together before we get the chance to hit it,” Colonel Biffle remarked. “He’s almost done it already.”

“Won’t be good at all,” Ned agreed. “Not at all, at all.” He and his men occupied the extreme left wing of Count Thraxton’s army, with Leonidas the Priest’s force on his immediate right. A slow grin spread over his face. “We’ll just have to make sure it doesn’t happen, that’s all. And I know how, too.”

“Do you?” Biffle asked. “What do you know that Count Thraxton doesn’t?”

“Oh, all sorts of things,” Ned answered, and his grin got wider. “But one of the things I know—and the one that really matters here—is how to get Leonidas moving irregardless of whether he wants to or not.”

“That’ll be good—if you can do it.” Biffle sounded dubious. He explained why: “I’ve seen you do things on the field that nobody’d believe if you just told the story. But how do you propose to make somebody else—somebody on your own side—move when he cursed well won’t?”

Instead of answering directly, Ned filled his lungs and let out a one-word shout: “Runners!”

As always, the young men who fought under him hurried to obey. “Lord Ned, sir!” they cried in a ragged chorus.

He pointed to one of them. “Go to Count Thraxton and tell him I am moving out to meet the enemy. Tell him I hope to have Leonidas the Priest moving with me on my right, but I’m going to attack with him or without him. Have you got that?”

“Sure do, Lord Ned,” the messenger said, and repeated it back.

“That’s fine. That’s right fine.” Ned of the Forest waved to him, and he hurried off. Ned pointed to another runner. “Now, Mort, you’re going to go to Leonidas the Priest. You tell him, I’m moving out to attack the southrons with him or without him. Tell him I hope he comes along for the ride, but I’m moving out whether he does or not.
And
tell him I’ve sent another runner to Count Thraxton, so Thraxton knows just exactly what I’m doing. Wouldn’t want to take Count Thraxton by surprise, no indeed.” For a moment, he sounded every bit as pious as Leonidas the Priest. “Have
you
got
that
?”

“I’ve got it, Lord Ned,” Mort replied. When he started to repeat it for the commander of unicorn-riders, he stumbled a couple of times. Ned patiently led him through it till he had it straight, then sent him off.

After dismissing the rest of the runners, Ned turned back to Colonel Biffle. “Well, sir, if that doesn’t shift Leonidas off his sacred behind, to the seven hells with me if I know what would.” Biffle clapped his hands together, as if admiring a stage performance. In a way, Ned knew he’d just delivered a performance. “What does it say about a man when you’ve got to trick him into doing what he’s supposed to do anyhow?” he asked, and answered his own question: “It says the bastard isn’t worth the paper he’s printed on, that’s what.”

“Yes, sir,” Biffle agreed. “Now—are you really going to move forward before you find out whether Leonidas will come with you?”

“You bet I am,” Ned replied without the least hesitation. Colonel Biffle looked worried. Ned set a hand on his shoulder. “Now don’t you fret about a thing, Biff. The good part of riding unicorns is that we can get out of a fight as fast and easy as we can get into one. If we run into more southrons than we can handle, and if Leonidas still hasn’t woken up, we’ll pull back again, that’s all.”

Now Biffle’s face showed relief. “That’s better, sir. That’s a hells of a lot better. We can’t lick Guildenstern all by our lonesome.”

“I wasn’t finished,” Ned said. “The other thing is, if the footsoldiers don’t follow, the Lion God won’t feast on the blood of the lamb. He’ll taste Leonidas’ blood, you see if he doesn’t.”

From any other man, that might have been a joke. Colonel Biffle didn’t act as if he thought Ned were joking, which was just as well, for Ned meant every word. Biffle said, “Don’t be hasty, sir. If the priesthood curses you, half your riders will desert.”

“Ah, but what a fine bunch of devils the other half would be,” Ned replied, now with a charming grin. “Besides, I’m hoping it won’t come to that. Let’s get mounted up, Colonel, and we’ll find out, eh?”

At his command, the trumpeters blew
advance
. The unicorns rode south and east over a little wooden bridge, their hooves drumming on the timbers. Looking back over his shoulder at the troopers who followed him, Ned of the Forest nodded to himself. He already had a pretty fine bunch of devils. The southrons had found that out on a number of fields. Now he intended to teach them another lesson.

“We’re going to find Guildenstern’s men,” he called to the unicorn-riders. “We’re going to find ’em, we’re going to smash through ’em, we’re going to get between them and Rising Rock, and we’re going to break their army all to flinders. How’s that sound, boys?”

The unicorn-riders whooped. They growled like wolves and roared like lions. For a heady moment, Ned felt as if they could beat Guildenstern’s army to flinders all by themselves.
Steady down
. He deliberately made the mental command stern. Thinking you could do more than you really could was as dangerous as not thinking you could do enough.

They hadn’t gone much more than a mile when shouts of alarm and crossbow bolts hissing through the air announced they’d found the foe—and that the foe had found them. Ned grimaced. It wasn’t an ideal place for a fight: the road ran through dense forest, in which a man couldn’t see very far. But Ned didn’t hesitate. If this was where King Avram’s men were, this was where he’d hit them.

“Dismount!” he shouted, and the trumpeters echoed his commands. “Form line of battle and forward!”

Colonel Biffle said, “Leonidas had better come after us now.” He cocked his head to one side. “Unless I’m plumb daft, we’ve run into a lot of southrons here.”

“I’d say you’re right,” Ned agreed. “Well, this here is what we came for. Ride on up the road with me a ways, Colonel, why don’t you? We’ll just see what we’ve got.” Without waiting to find out whether Biffle followed, he spurred his unicorn on.

Biffle didn’t hesitate. No man under Ned’s command hesitated when ordered to ride with him. On they went—and collided headlong with a squad of southron cavalry trotting north down the road to see what sort of force they’d just bumped into.

Ned’s saber flew into his left hand before he was consciously aware of reaching for it. Where a more prudent man would have drawn back, he howled curses and galloped toward the enemy. Their startled cries became shouts of pain when he slashed two of them out of the saddle in quick succession. His unicorn, a well-trained beast, plunged its horn into the side of another southron’s mount. The wounded animal let out a scream like a woman in torment and bucketed off, carrying its rider out of the fight.

Colonel Biffle traded swordstrokes with a southron, then slashed his shoulder to the bone. That was enough for the unicorn-riders in gray. They fled back up the road they had ridden down so confidently. But as they fled, one turned back and shot a crossbow over his shoulder.

The quarrel caught Ned of the Forest in the right upper arm. He cursed foully as blood began soaking his sleeve. It wasn’t a bad wound; he could still open and close his right hand. But he felt dizzy and weak and more than a little sick. It might not have been a bad wound, but no wound was a good one.

“You all right, Lord Ned?” Colonel Biffle asked anxiously.

“Just a scratch,” Ned answered. But his voice gave him away—he sounded woozy, even to himself. It was more than a scratch, even if the bolt had only torn a gouge in his arm rather than piercing him through and through. Angry at himself for showing weakness, he tried to make light of it: “I’m fine.”

Biffle shook his head. “You don’t look fine, sir, and you don’t sound so fine, either. Let me bind that up for you, and you take a drink of this here while I’m doing it.” Like a lot of officers, he carried a flask on his belt. He handed it to Ned.

“I don’t know. . . .” Ned was rarely irresolute, but he hesitated here. He hardly ever drank spirits, and despised drunkards with all his soul.

“It’s medicine, sir,” Colonel Biffle said firmly as he got to work on Ned’s arm. “It’ll put the heart back in you. You need it, by the gods. You’re green around the gills. Nothing to be ashamed of—any man who gets wounded looks that way.”

“All right.” Ned yielded. “Here, you’ll have to pull the stopper out.” Colonel Biffle briefly paused in his work, took the flask from Ned, and then gave it back to him. Still unhappy, Ned raised it to his lips and took a long pull. He almost spat the mouthful out into the dirt of the roadway. After he’d choked it down, he wheezed, “Gods, that’s foul! How can you stand to drink it?”

Biffle looked affronted. “Them’s prime Franklin sipping spirits, Lord Ned. You won’t find better anywhere in Detina. Take another slug. It’ll do you good.”

“It tastes nasty enough—it must be strong medicine,” Ned said, and forced himself to drink again. Flames ran down his throat. They exploded like a firepot in his belly, spreading heat all through him. The wound still hurt, but Ned felt himself once more, or at least better able to carry on. He gave the flask back to Biffle. “Thank you, Colonel. I reckon that did some good.”

“Fine,” Biffle said. “I’ve got you just about patched here, too.”

“Thank you kindly,” Ned of the Forest repeated. Thinking of firepots made him raise his voice to a battlefield shout: “Captain Watson! Come here—I want you!”

“Coming, sir!” The officer who headed Ned’s field catapults was a fresh-faced boy who couldn’t yet have twenty summers. When he’d reported to the unicorn-riders, Ned had thought some capricious fellow over in Nonesuch was playing a joke on him.

But Viscount Watson always got the dart- and stone-throwers up to the very front of the fight, and any officer who did that had little to complain of from Ned of the Forest.

Ned pointed toward the trees not all that far away, from which the southrons were still shooting at him. “I want your engines to pound those bastards. Pound them, do you hear me? They’re here in numbers, and we’ve got to shift ’em.”

“Yes, sir!” Excitement glowed on Watson’s face. “I’ll see to it, sir. You can count on me!” He went back at a gallop, shouting for his catapult crews to hustle their deadly machines forward. Ned grinned and shook his head. Like a lot of common soldiers, Watson was young enough to imagine himself immortal as a god. Ned wished he were still that young. He knew the southrons could kill him—unless he killed them first.

So did Colonel Biffle. “Sir, they’re still pushing on us. We’re going to stop more bolts if we don’t pull back a bit.”

“Right you are,” Ned said. As he and Biffle rode back toward their own line, he saw Captain Watson and the catapult crews bringing their engines forward. In minutes, stones and darts and firepots started coming down on the southrons’ heads. Ned whooped. “That’s the way to give it to ’em!”

But the southrons had engines of their own, and punished his dismounted riders with them. And they had footsoldiers in great numbers. They kept on storming forward, ready to fight. A captain called out to Ned in some alarm: “Sir, I don’t know how long we can hold ’em unless we get some more men here.”

“Do your best, gods damn it,” Ned answered. He slammed a fist—his left fist—down on his thigh. “Where in the seven hells is that low-down, no-good son of a bitch called Leonidas the Priest? If he really has turned coward on us, we’re going to have to get out of here, and I’m cursed if I want to do it. We can lick the stinking southrons, if only we get to work and do it.”

But General Guildenstern’s men came on like a gray wave of the sea, always looking to lap around the edges of Ned’s line and roll it up. At last, he couldn’t bear it any more. He spurred his unicorn back toward the rear.
If I catch Leonidas back there praying when he ought to be fighting, I
will
sacrifice him to the Lion God
, he thought.
But to the seven hells with me if I think his lion would much care to gnaw on his scrawny old carcass
.

That thought—and maybe Colonel Biffle’s spirits coursing through him, too—made him laugh out loud, his own spirits almost completely restored despite the wound. And then he took off his hat and waved it and whooped out loud: up the road marched a long column of crossbowmen in indigo tunics and pantaloons (some in gray pantaloons, taken from dead southrons). Leonidas might not have been quite so fast as Ned would have liked, but he’d got his soldiers on the move.

“Come on, boys!” Ned yelled, and pointed to the south. “We’ve got plenty of southrons up there for you to kill!” When Leonidas’ troopers cheered, they sounded like roaring lions themselves. Ned rode forward with them. Going forward, going toward the fight, was what he did best.