“Yes, sir. I agree completely. I’ll attend to it,” Gremio promised. He eyed his longtime superior, his new wing commander, with more than a little curiosity. Impelled by it, he risked a more abstract question: “What do you think our chances are, sir?”
Florizel had been hardly less eager to charge ahead than Bell himself. Bell hadn’t learned much about restraint since taking command of the Army of Franklin. Had Florizel? Gremio waited to see.
The baron from Palmetto Province plucked at his white beard. “I think our chances are…” he began, and then rode away without finishing the sentence. That answered Gremio’s question, too.
They did camp by the side of the road, about two thirds of the way down from Poor Richard to Ramblerton. Mindful of Colonel Florizel’s orders, Gremio set an unusual number of pickets south of his regiment. That done, he wondered what he needed to take care of next. He’d commanded the regiment for less than two days now. As Florizel had, he went from one company to the next, making sure everything was in as good an order as it could be. He was sure Florizel had more to do than that: the colonel had surely kept records and talked with other regimental commanders. But no one was there to tell Gremio just what those other duties were. No one who knew was left alive and unwounded except for Florizel himself, and he was busy somewhere else.
Sergeant Thisbe had the same sort of trouble figuring out everything a company commander was supposed to do. The underofficer, though, could at least ask Gremio. After Gremio had answered the third or fourth question, he said, “You see, Sergeant? You should have let me make you a lieutenant after all. You would have known more about what you’re doing now.”
“I never wanted to be a lieutenant, and you know it… sir,” Thisbe answered. “I don’t want to do the job I’m doing, either, but I don’t see that I’ve got much choice right now.”
“I don’t see that you do, either,” Gremio said. “I’m proud to command the regiment, but this isn’t how I wanted to do it. Too many men dead. Feels as though our hopes have been shot dead, too, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, sir. I wouldn’t have said that, but it’s in my mind, too,” Thisbe replied. The underofficer looked around to make sure nobody but Gremio was in earshot. “I wish we were marching back to Dothan, not down towards Ramblerton.”
“Can’t be helped, Sergeant,” Gremio said, and Thisbe nodded. Gremio yawned. He went on, “The other thing is, we’re both bone weary. This whole army is bone weary. Things may look brighter once we get a little rest.”
“Maybe. I hope so, sir.” Thisbe still sounded dubious. “Other question is, when will we ever get a little rest? We’ll sleep tonight-we’ll sleep tonight like so many dead men-but then we’ll march again. And after that… after that, it’s Ramblerton.”
“I know. There’s no help for it, not unless we’d want to go back toward Dothan without orders or give up to the southrons the first chance we get.”
“I’m no quitter, sir,” Thisbe said. “I aim to stick as long as anybody else does, and then half an hour longer. But I wish I saw some kind of way of getting a happy ending to the story.”
“After the war-” Gremio began.
“No, sir.” The sergeant gave a shake of the head. “After the war is after the war. That’s not what I’m talking about now. I’m talking about a happy ending to this campaign and to the whole fight.”
“Oh.” Gremio shrugged. “In that case, I don’t know what to tell you.”
He did sleep like a dead man that night, and woke the next morning still feeling like one. The nasty tea the cooks brewed up pried his eyelids apart and lent him a mournful interest in life.
“Come on, men!” Thisbe called when the soldiers moved out after a meager breakfast. “We’ll go on to Ramblerton, and we’ll whip the southrons there.”
“That’s right,” Gremio said. “We’ll chase the southrons all the way down to the Highlow River. We walloped ’em at Poor Richard. By the gods, we’ll wallop ’em again.” He did a barrister’s best to mask his pessimism.
After every other fight in which he’d taken part, the men of his company-the men of the whole regiment-had always been ready for more, no matter how roughly the southrons had handled them. He’d expected them to raise a cheer now. They didn’t. They got to their feet and they marched. They didn’t complain. But something had gone out of them. Maybe it was hope.
Whatever it was, Gremio wished he could put it back into the soldiers. To be able to do that, though, he would have had to find hope, or something like it, within himself as well. Try as he would, he couldn’t.
Hope or no hope, the Army of Franklin reached Ramblerton about noon the next day. The wan sun of late autumn, low in the north behind Lieutenant General Bell’s men, sent their long shadows toward the capital of Franklin. At Bell’s orders, relayed by trumpeters and runners, his blue-clad soldiers formed a line along a ridge not far north of the city.
As soon as Gremio’s men reached their assigned place, they started digging trenches and throwing up breastworks in front of them. Bell, Gremio knew, looked down his nose at fieldworks. Gremio didn’t care. He’d seen how many lives they saved, and urged the diggers on.
While they worked, he got his own first good look at Ramblerton’s fortifications. Had he had much hope left, it would have died then.
VI
Ned of the Forest had been up close to Ramblerton before. He’d never had so many men at his back as he did now. All the same, he’d never felt less cheerful about his army’s chances.
“What’s Bell going to do, Biff?” he demanded, pointing south. “What can Bell do, going up against… that?”
“Gods damn me if I know, Lord Ned,” his regimental commander replied. “Those aren’t just fieldworks. That’s real fortcraft on display there: real castles, real stone walls, engines everywhere, ditches out in front of everything so we can’t even get at it, let alone over it.”
“I know.” Ned scowled and kicked at the muddy ground under his feet. “When I joined up with the Army of Franklin, I reckoned it was pretty good-sized. I figured it could do something worth doing. But it’s just asking to kill itself if it goes up against works like those there.”
“Other side of that copper is, the Army of Franklin’s a deal smaller now than it was before it got out of Poor Richard,” Colonel Biffle said. “What the hells was Bell thinking, going at that place that way?”
“I told him I could flank the southrons out,” Ned said. “I told him and told him. He didn’t want to listen-fools never do want to listen. He stole half our men, too, the son of a bitch. He thought he could smash right on through, and look what it got him.”
“Me, I don’t much fancy the way the footsoldiers look right about now,” Biffle said. “They haven’t got a hells of a lot of spunk in ’em. If the southrons were to sally from those forts…” He didn’t go on. He didn’t need to go on.
“We’ve got to keep ’em too busy to even think of it,” Ned said. “I hope we can bring it off, I truly do.”
Colonel Biffle noticed his unhappy tones. “You… hope, sir?” he said. “As long as I can remember, you’ve made things happen. Now you just hope they do?”
Gloomily, Ned nodded. “You saw what happened when we bumped up against those southron unicorn-riders. They’ve got crossbows we can’t hope to match. Only ones we can get are the ones we take from their dead. We don’t make anything of the sort our ownselves. We ought to, but we don’t.”
“We can only use the bolts we get from dead southrons, too,” Biffle said.
“I know.” Another, even gloomier, nod from Ned. “They’re clever bastards, no two ways about it. These crossbows have a skinnier groove than the regular sort, so our standard quarrels won’t fit. Takes a sneaky son of a bitch to think of that.”