“Sure does,” Biffle agreed, and sighed. “Well, the southrons have folks like that, and that’s the truth. We could use some of our own right about now, and that’s the truth, too.”
“We could use… a lot of things right about now.” Ned of the Forest went no further. Saying anything more wouldn’t do any good. Lieutenant General Bell had courage and to spare. Asking the gods to equip him with a real working set of brains to go with it was a prayer unlikely to be answered. People had been asking for that for a long time, with no luck.
“You know what worries me most, Lord Ned?” the regimental commander said.
“Tell me.” Ned hoped it would be the same thing he worried about most himself. That way, no new worries would go on his stack.
Biffle said, “What worries me is, Bell still thinks we won the fight at Poor Richard. We advanced afterwards, and the southrons left behind a lot of their wounded, and that makes it a triumph to him. He doesn’t look at the state the army’s in.”
That came close to matching Ned’s concern about Bell, but didn’t quite. He looked toward Ramblerton’s formidable works once more. “You don’t reckon he wants to try and storm this town, do you?” Very few things had ever frightened Ned of the Forest. The idea of hurling the Army of Franklin at Ramblerton’s fortifications came closer than anything that had happened lately.
“He’d better not!” Biffle exclaimed. “If he does, you have to talk him out of it-that or bang him over the head with a rock, one.”
“I will,” Ned said grimly. “By the Lion God’s tail tuft, I don’t know how he can do anything for a little while. We’ve got a colonel commanding a wing, captains in charge of regiments, sergeants leading companies… Nobody knows what the devils he’s supposed to be doing.” He eyed the scraggly ranks of Bell’s army, then laughed a bitter laugh. “He likely figures we’re laying siege to Ramblerton.”
“I wish we were,” Biffle said. “I wish we could.”
“So do I, both way,” Ned replied. “But I know we’re not. I hope Bell does, too. I better go find out, I reckon.”
He swung up onto his unicorn and rode off to find Bell’s headquarters. The general commanding had set himself up in a farmhouse a little behind the line. As Ned rode up, Bell was talking to a young major: “You should think yourself a made man, heading up a brigade at your tender age.”
“Thank you, sir,” the junior officer said. “If it’s all the same to you, though, I wish I were still second-in-command in my old regiment. I’d know what I was doing there-and we wouldn’t have so many men above me dead.”
“We go on,” Lieutenant General Bell said. “We have to go on. What else can we do? Turn around and run back up to Dothan? Not likely!” Pride rang in his voice. When he tossed his head to show his scorn for the southrons, he caught sight of Ned of the Forest. “You may go, Major. I have business to talk with Lieutenant General Ned here.”
The major saluted and hurried away. Ned saluted, too. As usual, he wasted no time on small talk. “What are we going to do now that we’re here?” he demanded. Very much as an afterthought, he added, “Sir?”
“I aim to give John the Lister and Doubting George another whipping of the same sort as they had at Poor Richard,” Bell declared grandly.
“One more ‘whipping’ like that and you won’t have any army left yourself,” Ned said, his voice harsh and blunt.
Instead of answering right away, Bell took out his little bottle of laudanum, pulled the stopper with his teeth, and swigged. “Ahh!” he said. “That makes the world seem a better place.”
“No matter what it seems like, it isn’t,” Ned said, even more bluntly than before. “I’m going to ask you again, sir, and this time I expect a straight answer: what do you aim to do next?”
Something seemed to leach out of Bell. He tried to gather himself, to hold on to the force of will that Ned had seen failing him, and succeeded… to a degree. “Lieutenant General, I am going to make the southrons come out of their works if they intend to fight us. If they come out, things can go wrong for them. I don’t intend to storm the entrenchments around Ramblerton. I can see we would be unlikely to carry them, the men feeling as they do about attacking forts.”
Ned of the Forest considered. If he were a footsoldier, he wouldn’t have cared to try to storm Ramblerton’s fortifications, either. Who in his right mind wanted to get killed to no purpose? But Bell’s plan, if that was what it was, struck him as being about as good as anyone could want for in the Army of Franklin’s present battered state.
“All right, sir,” he said. “Don’t reckon we’ve got much hope trying anything else. But I want to warn you about something.”
“And what’s that?” Bell rumbled. “How do you have any business warning your commanding officer?”
“Somebody’d better,” Ned said. “You have to listen, too. Don’t go splitting things up. We haven’t got the men for it. We haven’t got room to make any mistakes. Not any at all. You understand what I’m saying?”
“I have led us south for two hundred miles now,” Bell replied. “I have had plenty of underlings make mistakes-and no, I am not speaking of you, so you need not take offense. I do not believe I have made any substantial blunders in this campaign.”
“You took half my men away from me when I was trying to outflank the southrons,” Ned exclaimed. “If I’d had those men, I might’ve broken through and made John the Lister fall back without any need for a fight at Poor Richard.”
“I needed those men no less than you did,” Bell said. “The battle was long and hard enough even with their aid. Without it, our arms might not have triumphed.”
“What makes you reckon they did?” Ned asked.
Bell looked at him as if he’d started speaking the language of one of the blond tribes instead of plain and simple Detinan. “We held the field when the fight was done,” the commanding general said; Ned might have been an idiot child to doubt him. “We advanced afterwards. We took charge of the wounded men the southrons abandoned in their retreat. If that is not victory, what would you call it?”
By all the rules they taught in the officers’ collegium at Annasville, Bell was right. Ned of the Forest knew about those rules, and all other formalities of the military art, only by hearsay. But he knew what he saw with his own eyes. He had no doubt at all there. “If this here is a victory… sir… then we’d better not see another one. And that’s all I’ve got to say about that.”
He saluted with as much precision as he could muster, then turned on his heel and strode away from Lieutenant General Bell. “Here, now!” the general commanding called after him. “You come back at once-at once, I say-and explain yourself. Do you say we failed to win a victory at Poor Richard? Do you? How dare you?”
Ned pretended not to hear. Bell couldn’t very well run after him, after all. As he neared his unicorn, Bell’s complaints grew fainter. He mounted and rode off. Once in the saddle, he didn’t have to listen any more.
But the army’s still stuck with Bell, he thought unhappily. Then, even more unhappily, he shrugged. If you were in charge of things now, what would you do different? he asked himself. He found no answer. Too late to worry about that. The damage had long since been done.
“Well?” Colonel Biffle asked when Ned got back among his unicorn-riders.
“Well, Biff, the good news is, we don’t have to try and take Ramblerton all by our lonesome,” Ned replied. “The bad news is-or maybe it’s good news, too; to the hells with me if I know-we wait here outside of Ramblerton till the southrons decide they’re good and ready to hit us.”
“What do we do then?” Biffle asked dubiously.
“Hope we can lick ’em,” Ned said.
“Think we can?” the regimental commander inquired, even more dubiously.
“Don’t know,” Ned of the Forest answered. “What I think is, we’d better. Are you going to tell me I’m wrong? If we’re in our trenches and they’re trying to come at us… well, we’ve maybe got some kind of chance, anyways.”