“No, I don’t,” Ned said. “I already told you we’re in trouble. I’d be angrier at having half my men off by Reillyburgh if I reckoned getting ’em back would have made much difference. I don’t, so I’m not. But Hard-Riding Jimmy’s outflanked us, and gods only know how much that’ll cost us in the morning.”
“Why didn’t you stop him?” Bell yelped.
“On account of I couldn’t,” Ned said bluntly. “Too many riders, too many quick-shooters.”
“You mean they’re loose? You mean you let them get loose?” Bell demanded.
“I thought I just said that.” Ned aimed a cold glower at the commanding general. “I might have had a better chance with all my men. I told you about that and told you about that, but did you want to listen? Not likely.” But then he softened a little. “Of course, like I said, I might have got licked any which way. Hard-Riding Jimmy’s got more riders than you can shake a stick at.”
“What are we going to do?” Benjamin the Heated Ham said. “If they have turned our flank, we’d be nailing ourselves to the cross giving battle tomorrow.”
“If they have turned our flank, how are we supposed to retreat?” Bell asked in turn. “Head right on past them? Do you suppose they’d be kind enough to give us a Summer Mountain, the way we did for them? I’m afraid I don’t think it’s likely.”
A poisonous silence followed. Benjamin, the only one who’d commanded a wing then, broke it by saying, “That was your fault… sir.”
“It was not!” Bell thundered.
More silence, even more poisonous. At last, Colonel Florizel said, “It’s a little too late to worry about what we did or didn’t do then. We can’t change that. We’ve still got some say over what we do or don’t do tomorrow, though.”
“That makes good sense, Colonel,” Ned of the Forest said. “Odds are we won’t pay any attention to it, but it makes good sense anyways.”
“All right. What can we do?” Bell said. “If we fall back, we fall into the southrons’ hands. Does any man here say otherwise?” He waited. No one spoke. He nodded. “Well, then, what does that leave? As far as I can see, it leaves only one thing-fighting and doing our best. Does any man here say no to that?”
His wing commanders and commander of unicorn-riders stirred, but none of them claimed he was wrong. Stephen the Pickle did say, “They’re going to pound on us in the morning, and my wing’ll get it worse than anybody else’s, on account of we’re the ones who’re flanked.”
“Do you think we would do better trying to sneak past Doubting George’s men and skulking off toward the north?” Bell asked.
The other officers stirred once more. Even so, they didn’t-couldn’t-ask to retreat. “All right, gods damn it,” Benjamin the Heated Ham said savagely. “We’ll fight ’em. I don’t think it’ll do us much good, though.”
“Nothing’s going to do us much good now,” Ned said. “We’ll have to see what sort of scraps and pieces we can save, that’s all.”
Lieutenant General Bell had demoted men for talk far less defeatist than that. Now he watched his wing commanders somberly nod. He felt like nodding himself. He felt like it, but he didn’t. He said, “We fought hard today, and we stopped most of them. We can do it again. We will do it again.”
He tried to put his own heart into his subordinate commanders. He tried-and felt himself failing. “They’re going to hammer on us tomorrow no mater how hard we fight,” Stephen the Pickle said.
“We’ll do our best. It may keep a few more of us alive,” Benjamin the Heated Ham said. He saluted and strode out of the farmhouse without so much as a by-your-leave. Ned, Stephen, and Florizel followed, leaving Lieutenant General Bell all alone.
No one had ever accused Bell of being a reflective man. There were good and cogent reasons why no one had ever leveled such a charge at him, chief among them being that he wasn’t a reflective man. Here tonight, though, he wished his officers hadn’t left so abruptly. He would rather have argued with them than had to face his own thoughts with no one for company.
He’d got what he wanted. Doubting George would have been impossible to beat-impossible even to confront-inside the works of Ramblerton. Now the southrons had come forth. They’d carried the fight to the entrenched Army of Franklin, as Bell had hoped they would. The only trouble was, they’d done a better job of it than Bell had thought they could. The way things stood, none of his subordinate commanders believed they could stand up under another day of attacks.
We can’t fall back, Bell told himself. Not even the wing commanders had argued about that. If we can’t fall back, we have to fight. If we fight, we have to find some way to win. All that seemed obvious. What didn’t seem obvious was what the way to win might be.
He snapped his fingers. He might have one throw of the dice left. He struggled to his feet again and hitched across the floor to the doorway. The runners on the porch came to attention. Bell pointed to the closest one. “Order my chief wizards here.”
“Yes, sir.” The runner hurried off into the night.
The wizards came before Bell’s temper frayed too badly. They didn’t look like happy men. Bell, anything but a happy man himself, would have been furious if they had. Without preamble, he said, “The southrons will likely hit us again tomorrow.”
“Yes, sir,” the wizards agreed: a mournful chorus.
“My wing commanders fear the soldiers won’t be able to hold them back,” Bell went on.
“Yes, sir,” the wizards chorused again.
Bell scowled at them. “If the soldiers can’t, you’ll have to,” he declared. “What can you do to beat Doubting George’s men and his mages?”
No chorus this time. No answer at all, in fact. Only silence. At last, one of the wizards replied, “Sir, I don’t know that we can do anything. Everything we’ve tried today has gone wrong. We did our best to hold back the southron unicorn-riders with our lightnings. We did our best-but the lightnings went awry.”
“Gods damn it, you’re supposed to be better than those southron mages!” Bell burst out.
“Once upon a time, we were,” the wizard said. “But the southrons have had three and a half years of war to learn what we knew going in. And Doubting George has at least one very fine mage under his command.” He shivered. “We found that out at Poor Richard, if you’ll recall.”
“I found you that failed me there,” Bell snarled. “Now I find you failing me again. What are you good for except telling me what you can’t do?”
“Sir,” the wizard said stiffly, “if we weren’t holding off a lot of what the southrons have tried to do to us, things would be worse yet.”
“How?” Bell asked. “How could they be?”
“Would you like to have gone up in flames?” the wizard asked. “Would you like to have seen a pit open under our left? One nearly did.”
“All that is easy enough for you to claim,” Bell said. “It makes you sound impressive. It even makes you sound useful, by the Thunderer’s prong. But such claims are all the better for proof.”
“Oh, you can have your proof, sir. You can have it as easily as you please,” the mage told him.
“Eh? And how do you propose to give it to me?” Bell asked.
The wizard bowed like a courtier. “Nothing easier, sir. All you have to do is send us away. Then, when the fighting starts again and the southron mages start flinging their spells, you’ll see if we’ve done your army any good.”
For a moment-for more than a moment, in fact-Lieutenant General Bell was tempted to call his bluff. He started to fling up his arms and order all the mages to be gone, to head straight for the hottest of the seven hells. He started to… but he didn’t. He growled, “You haven’t got the right attitude.”
“Generals always say such things,” the wizard replied imperturbably. “They say them until they remember they need us after all.”