More times than Captain Gremio cared to remember, he’d seen a soldier hit square in the chest with a crossbow quarrel. Very often, the man would stagger on for a few paces and perhaps even fight a little before realizing he was dead and falling over.
Never, till now, had Gremio seen an army take a similar blow. But if, after the battle in front of Poor Richard, the Army of Franklin wasn’t a dead man walking, then Gremio had never seen any such thing. He wished he hadn’t. He wished he weren’t seeing such a thing now. But he wasn’t blind, and couldn’t make himself so. He knew what his eyes told him.
Somehow, like one of those men shot in the chest, the Army of Franklin kept lurching forward. Gremio trudged south down a muddy road, south toward Ramblerton. Since the Battle of Poor Richard, he commanded not just his company but the whole regiment. That wasn’t from any enormous virtue on his part. He was the senior captain left alive and not badly wounded, and Colonel Florizel, as the senior colonel alive and not badly wounded, was for the moment still leading the whole wing.
Commanding the regiment felt like a smaller promotion than it would have before the fight by Poor Richard, anyhow. Only a couple of companies’ worth of men were still fit for duty.
Sergeant Thisbe led Gremio’s old company. Thisbe wasn’t the only sergeant in charge of a company in the Army of Franklin, either-far from it.
“Ask you something, sir?” Thisbe said now, coming up alongside of Gremio.
“If you’re rash enough to think I know answers, go ahead,” he replied.
“If you don’t, sir, who does?” Thisbe asked. The answer to that, all too probably, was no one. Before Gremio could say as much, the underofficer went on, “Once we get down to Ramblerton, Captain, what are we going to do there?”
“Why, capture the town, of course. Storm the fortifications. Slay the southrons, and drive away the ones we don’t slay. Go sweeping south into Cloviston. We’ll see the Highlow River in a couple of weeks, don’t you think?”
That was what Lieutenant General Bell had had in mind when he left Dothan for Franklin. Maybe, if he’d crushed John the Lister at Summer Mountain instead of letting him get away, his dream might have come true. Now? It wasn’t even a bitter joke, not any more.
Sergeant Thisbe sent Gremio a reproachful look. “That isn’t even a little bit funny, sir. The way things turned out-” The underofficer stopped.
“Yes. The way things turned out.” Gremio liked that. It let them talk about what they’d just been through without really talking about it. If Thisbe had called it the catastrophe, that would have been just as true and more descriptive, but they both would have had to remember the dreadful fighting in the trenches and their failure to dislodge the southrons from around that farmhouse. Even their mages had failed. If that wasn’t catastrophe for the north, what was? But Gremio had to mention some of what had happened there, some of what had left him in charge of a regiment and Thisbe a company: “Half a dozen brigadiers dead, Sergeant. More wounded. Gods only know how many colonels and majors and captains and lieutenants.”
“And soldiers, sir. Don’t forget soldiers,” Thisbe said.
“I’m not likely to,” Gremio answered. “We lost one man in four in the fight by the River of Death. That’s what kept Thraxton the Braggart from properly besieging Rising Rock-we’d got shot to pieces. Here we’ve lost a bigger portion than that. We must have. But Lieutenant General Bell is going on.”
“Thraxton should have gone on,” Thisbe pointed out.
“Yes. We had the enemy licked, and he held back,” Gremio agreed. “Did we lick John the Lister? Bell says we did, but I doubt it. And speaking of doubting, how many more men has Doubting George got in Ramblerton? They aren’t licked. Most of them haven’t fought at all. They’re just waiting for us.”
Thisbe muttered something. It sounded like licking their chops. Gremio thought about asking, then changed his mind. He didn’t really want to know. Licking their chops seemed much too apt for comfort.
But then Thisbe spoke aloud: “Everything you said is true, sir, every word of it. So what can we do when we get to Ramblerton?”
“I don’t know, Sergeant. I just don’t know,” Gremio replied. “I don’t see anything. Lieutenant General Bell must, or we wouldn’t be going forward.”
Up till now, Gremio had always been a man who wanted to know answers. He’d wanted to learn what would happen next before it did. That way, he could try to wring the most advantage from whatever it was. Now… now he didn’t want to know. All he wanted to do was go on putting one weary foot in front of the other. As long as he did that, he was doing his duty. No one could possibly complain about him. And whatever was going to happen-would happen.
Every so often, he marched past a wrecked wagon or a twisted corpse in gray: proof the Army of Franklin had hit hard as well as being hit hard. He needed the reminders. Whenever he thought back to the Battle of Poor Richard, he remembered nothing but northerners falling all around him.
Cold, clammy mud came in between the sole and upper of both shoes now. Still, he remained luckier than a lot of his men. Some of them had managed to take shoes from the bodies of southrons during the fight. Many more, though, were barefoot.
And I’m ever so much luckier than the ones who didn’t come out of the fight. Gods damn Lieutenant General Bell. He yawned. He didn’t really want to keep marching. He wanted to sleep, with luck for weeks. As happened so often in war, what he wanted and what he got weren’t going to match.
One of those bodies by the side of the road was neither southron nor, Gremio realized, dead. It was a northern soldier who’d fallen out of the column and fallen asleep because he couldn’t take another step. Exhausted as Gremio was, he had a harder time blaming the soldier than he would have otherwise.
“Come on, men!” Thisbe’s voice and demeanor didn’t seem to have changed at all. “We can do it. We get where we’re going, we’ll rest then.”
Where are we going? Gremio wondered. Oh, toward Ramblerton-he knew that full well. But what would the Army of Franklin do when it got there? What could it do when it got there? Gremio had had no answers for Sergeant Thisbe, and he had no answers for himself, either.
Here came Colonel Florizel, now mounted on yet another new unicorn. Since his sudden promotion from regimental to wing commander, maybe he knew more of what, if anything, was in Lieutenant General Bell’s mind. Gremio waved to him and called out, “Colonel! Ask you something, sir?” I sound the way Thisbe did asking me, he thought.
“Oh, hello, Captain Gremio. Yes? What is it?” Florizel remained the picture of a northern gentleman.
“Sir, will we make Ramblerton today?”
“I don’t think so, Captain,” Florizel replied. “We are weary-I know how weary I am-and we have many walking wounded, and we got off to a late start this morning. I expect us to camp on the road when the sun goes down, and then reach the provincial capital tomorrow.”
“Thank you, sir.” Gremio supposed he really should have thanked Bell, not that he felt like it. He’d figured the commanding general would push on through the night regardless of the condition of his men. Why not? Bell had pushed ahead at Poor Richard, regardless of how many soldiers fell.
But Colonel Florizel hadn’t finished yet. “There is something I want you to attend to most particularly tonight, Captain, you and all regimental commanders in my wing.” He grimaced at that; had things gone better, neither his status nor Gremio’s would have been so exalted.
“What is it, sir?” Gremio had rarely seen Florizel so serious.
“Post plenty of pickets. Post them well south of wherever we do encamp. If the southrons sally from Ramblerton, they must not-they must not-take us unawares. They will destroy us if they do. Destroy us, do you hear me?”