Sentry Peak (18 page)

A crossbow quarrel slashed the bushes behind which Rollant hid. He flattened himself even lower to the ground. He wished he could burrow his way down into it, like a mole or a gopher. Something—a shape in blue?—moved out there among the trees. He shot at it, then set another bolt in the groove to his crossbow and yanked back the bowstring as fast as he could. He had no idea whether he’d hit the enemy soldier. He wasn’t altogether sure there had been an enemy soldier. The only thing he was sure of was that he dared not take a chance.

Smitty crouched behind an oak not far away. “How many traitors are there, anyway?” he asked, reloading his own crossbow.

“I don’t know,” Rollant answered. “All I know is, there are too many of them, and they all seem to be coming right at us.”

This was different from the savage little skirmish his company had fought a few days before. Now all of Lieutenant General George’s soldiers were in line together—and all of them, by the racket that came from both east and west of Rollant, were being pressed hard. The traitors roared like lions when they came forward, as if to say they were the true children of the Lion God.

The sound made the hair prickle up on the back of Rollant’s neck. The Detinans had roared when they smashed the blond kingdoms of the north, too, back in the days not long after they crossed the Western Ocean and came to this land. Iron and unicorns and catapults and magic had had more to do with their triumphs than the roaring, but no blond to this day could hear it without wanting to flinch.

They won’t capture me
, Rollant thought.
I won’t let them capture me
. If they let him live, they would haul him back to Ormerod’s estate in chains.
I should have killed him. I had the chance
. He shook his head. He knew he was lucky his former liege lord hadn’t killed him.

Somewhere not far away, the din rose to a peak—and then started coming from farther south than it had. Smitty and Rollant both cursed. “They’ve broken through, Thunderer blast them,” Smitty said. Then he said a worse word: “Again.”

“What do we do?” Rollant looked nervously in that direction.

“Hang on here till we’re ordered back,” Smitty answered. “What else can we do?”

Rollant shrugged.
Hang on here till the traitors flank us out and roll over us
, went through his mind. He couldn’t say that. An ordinary Detinan trooper might have, but he couldn’t. He didn’t think Smitty would start going on about cowardly blonds, but he wasn’t altogether sure. And he was altogether sure some of the other Detinans in the squad would go on about exactly that.

“Hold your places, men!” That was Lieutenant Griff, still in command of the company. His voice was high and anxious. Had Captain Cephas been there, the identical order from his lips would have heartened the men. After Griff gave it, plenty of Detinans started looking back toward the rear, to make sure their line of retreat remained open. Rollant wasn’t ashamed to do the same.

Great stones and firepots started landing close by. A stone that hit a tree could knock it flat, and the soldier beside it, too. “Curse the traitors!” Smitty howled. “They’ve found a road to move their engines forward.”

In country like this, engines could move forward only on roads. Hauling them through the woods was a nightmare Rollant didn’t want to contemplate. He had other things he didn’t want to contemplate, too. “Where are
our
engines hiding?” he asked.

“They’re back there—somewhere.” That was Sergeant Joram, pointing back toward the rear. “You wouldn’t expect the fellows who run them to come up here and mix it with the traitors, would you? They might get their fancy uniforms soiled.”

That was unfair: catapult crews fought hard. But none of them seemed close by right now, when the company needed them. And Joram’s sarcasm did more to steady the men who heard it than Lieutenant Griff’s worried command to stand fast.
Why isn’t Joram an officer?
Rollant wondered.

Then he cheered like a man possessed, and so did the soldiers close by, for Doubting George’s army
did
have some engines hidden up a tunic sleeve. Stones smashed down on the enemy soldiers pushing forward against Rollant’s company. A bolt from a dart-thrower transfixed two men at once as they ran forward. A firepot landed on them a moment later, giving them a pyre before they were quite dead.

“See how you like it!” Rollant shouted. Another crossbow quarrel tore leaves from the bushes behind which he lay.

“Don’t be stupid,” Sergeant Joram said. “Just do your job. Everybody does his job, everything will turn out fine.” He sounded calm and confident and certain. By sounding that way, he made Rollant feel guilty. Captain Cephas had had the same gift, but who could say when—or if—Cephas would return to the company?

No sooner had Rollant started reflecting on how calm he felt than a storm of crossbow bolts came, not from ahead of him, but from off to the left. The traitors gave forth with their roaring battle cry.

“Flanked!” Half a dozen men shouted the same thing at the same time. Rollant wasn’t the least bit ashamed to be one of them. He scrambled away from the bushes, trying to find a couple of trees that would protect him from the left and from the front at the same time. It wasn’t easy. It was, in fact, next to impossible—trees didn’t grow so conveniently close together.

“Fall back!” Lieutenant Griff commanded. “They’ve broken through on this line. We’ll have to try to hold them on the next one.”

The men had hesitated to obey his order to stand. They didn’t hesitate to retreat. Rollant wondered if they could hold Thraxton the Braggart’s army on the next line. He wondered if they could hold it anywhere.

More arrows tore at them from the flank as they dropped back to look for a line they could hold. Lieutenant Griff did a good job of keeping them moving and fighting at the same time. Rollant admitted as much to himself later; while the retreat was going on, he just hoped to make it to some kind of safety before Thraxton’s men overwhelmed not only the company but the whole regiment—and possibly the whole brigade.

He was part of the group Griff had ordered to keep shooting to the front no matter what happened. Having a clear sense of what to do helped him do it. He would shoot a bolt or two from whatever cover he could find, reload, and scurry back behind another tree or bush or rock to do the same thing over again. If an enemy quarrel slammed into him from the left . . . then the group commanded to hold off the traitors on the flank weren’t doing their job. That was their worry, not his—except indirectly, of course.

“King Avram!” he shouted as he loosed a bolt at a fellow in an indigo tunic. The northerner went down, whether hit or merely alarmed Rollant didn’t know. He hoped he’d put that bolt right between the northerner’s eyes—and he hoped it was Baron Ormerod. He knew perfectly well that that was too much to hope for. He’d had one chance at his old liege lord. How likely were the gods to give him two?

“Avram and justice!” somebody else yelled, not far away. The traitors could roar as much as they liked, but they weren’t the only soldiers on this part of the field.

When Rollant burst out of the woods and into a good-sized clearing, he blinked in surprise—and in no little alarm. How were he and his comrades supposed to take cover crossing open ground like that? Then he saw the engines lined up almost hub to hub in the clearing. They were—they had to be—the ones that had punished the northerners before things went wrong on the flank.

Rollant’s company weren’t the only men bursting into that clearing. The soldiers in northern blue didn’t just roar when they burst into it. They howled and whooped with delight and rushed at the engines. Capturing catapults was every footsoldier’s dream.

Chains clattered as they went ratcheting over five-sided gears. The dart-throwers that were like concentrated essence of crossbowmen sprayed streams of death into the men who called Grand Duke Geoffrey their king. The traitors went down as if scythed. But men among the catapult crews fell, too: and not only men, but also the unicorns that moved the engines. Some of the traitors had got close enough for their crossbows to reach their foes.

And then stones and firepots started landing among the siege engines in the clearing. Rollant cursed. Whoever was in charge of the traitors’ catapults was doing a very smart job indeed of pushing them to the forefront of the fighting.

“We’ve got to pull out!” one of Avram’s officers shouted as a stone smashed a dart-thrower flat. That made Rollant curse again, but he could see the sense of it. The engines were up against more than they could handle here. If they stayed, they would either be wrecked or overrun and lost.

Harnessing unicorns to the catapults was but the work of a moment. Off they went, those that could go. Soldiers pulling ropes hauled a couple of them away, doing the work of beasts already slain. And the crews set fire to a couple of machines too badly damaged to take away but not so wrecked that Geoffrey’s men couldn’t get some use from them.

“Form skirmish line!” Lieutenant Griff shouted. “We have to give them time to get away!”

Militarily, the order made perfect sense. In the red balance sheet of war, catapults counted for more than a battered company’s worth of footsoldiers. That made standing— actually, dropping to one knee—out in the open no less lonely for Rollant.

He muttered prayers to the Lion God and the Thunderer. And, although he didn’t pray to them, he hoped the old gods of his people were keeping an eye on him, too. Those old gods weren’t very strong, not when measured against the ones the Detinans worshiped. The blonds had seen that, again and again. But the Detinans’ gods didn’t seem to be paying much attention to Rollant right now. Maybe the deities his people had known in days gone by would remember him when the strong gods forgot.

Here came more northerners, out into the clearing. “Give them a volley!” Griff said. “Don’t shoot till you hear my orders. Load your crossbows . . . Aim . . . Shoot!”

Rollant squeezed the trigger. His crossbow bucked against his shoulder. All around him, bowstrings twanged. Quarrels hissed through the air. Several blue-clad soldiers fell. “Die, traitors!” Rollant shouted, reloading as fast as he could.

“Steady, men,” Lieutenant Griff called. He was steadier himself than Rollant had thought he could be—certainly steadier than he had been when the battle erupted. “Make every shot count,” he urged. “We can lick them.”

Did he really believe that? Rollant didn’t, not for an instant, not while the company was standing out here in the open, trying to hold back the gods only knew how many of Thraxton’s men. But Griff sounded as if he believed it, whether he did or not. And that by itself got more from the men than they would have given to a man with panic in his voice.

A couple of soldiers not far from Rollant went down, one with a bolt in the leg, the other shrieking and clutching at his belly. But then, although quarrels kept whizzing past the men in the company and digging into the dirt not far from their feet, none struck home for a startlingly long time. That was more than luck. That was . . . Behind Rollant, somebody said, “A mage!”

Rollant turned his head. Sure enough, a fellow in a gray robe stood busily incanting perhaps fifty yards behind the company’s skirmish line. “I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Smitty said. “A wizard who’s really good for something. Who would’ve thunk it?”

“As long as he can keep the bolts from biting, he’s worth his weight in gold,” Rollant answered. “And as long as he can keep us safe like this,
we’re
worth a brigade.”

“That’s the truth,” Smitty said. “Do you suppose he can keep mosquitoes from biting, too? If he could do that, he’d be worth twice his weight in gold, easy.”

Before Rollant could come up with a response to that bit of absurdity, the mage let out a harsh cry, loud even through the din of battle. Rollant looked back over his shoulder again. The wizard was staggering, as if pummeled by invisible fists. He rallied, straightened, but then grabbed at his throat. Someone might have been strangling him, except that nobody stood anywhere close by. The northern wizards had found the mage. With another groan, he fell. His feet drummed against the ground. He did not rise.

An instant later, a crossbow bolt struck home with a meaty slap. A man only a few paces from Rollant howled. Whatever immunity the company had enjoyed died with the sorcerer in gray.

A runner dashed up to Lieutenant Griff through the hail of quarrels. Griff listened and nodded. The runner pelted away. Griff called, “Fall back, men! We’ve done our duty here. The gods-damned traitors won’t take those engines. And George’s whole wing is falling back on Merkle’s Hill. We’ll make our stand on the high ground there.”

“Where’s Merkle’s Hill?” Rollant asked. Smitty only shrugged. So did Sergeant Joram. Rollant hoped Griff knew where he was going. The lieutenant was right about one thing: the catapults had escaped Thraxton’s men.
Now I have to get away from them myself
, Rollant thought. He didn’t run to the far edge of the clearing, but his quickstep was fine, free, and fancy. And he didn’t get there first, or anything close to it.

His company—indeed, his regiment—were not the only men retreating toward Merkle’s Hill. The traitors had treated Doubting George’s wing of General Guildenstern’s army very roughly indeed. Thraxton’s soldiers kept pushing forward, too, roaring like lions all the while.

“We have to hold them, men.” Rollant looked around, and there stood Lieutenant General George. The wing commander had his sword out; blood stained the blade. “We have to hold them,” Doubting George repeated. “If they get through us or past us, we haven’t just lost the battle. We’ve lost this whole army, because they’ll be sitting on the road back to Rising Rock. So hold fast and fight hard.”

George had a habit of telling the truth. This once, Rollant could have done without it.

“Hold fast, men!” Lieutenant General George was getting tired of saying it. He hoped his soldiers weren’t getting tired of hearing it. If they stopped holding, if they lost heart and ran, the army was ruined. He hadn’t been lying when he warned them of that. He wished he had.