A few northern catapults came forward, too, and flung stones and firepots at his long column. Most of the missiles missed. Every once in a while, though, one of them would take a bite out of the long file of men in gray tunics and pantaloons. The dead lay where they fell-no time to gather them up, let alone to build pyres and burn them. Soldiers with crushed limbs or with burns from a bursting firepot would go into the wagons, for healers and surgeons to do what they could.
Major Strabo said, “If their main force attacks, we are dead meat.”
“Think so, do you?” John the Lister said.
“Gods-damned right I do,” his adjutant answered. “Don’t you?”
“Well, now that you mention it, yes,” John said. “We’ve already got farther than I thought we would.”
“What’s wrong with them?” Strabo seemed almost indignant at not being annihilated. “Is our masking spell working that well?” He sounded as if he didn’t believe it.
John the Lister didn’t believe it, either. He had good, solid reasons not to believe it, too. “Can’t be, Major,” he said. “If it were, their skirmishers wouldn’t know we’re here.”
Major Strabo’s eyes slewed wildly as he watched the brisk little fight-and it was only a little fight-over on the army’s right flank. “What’s wrong with General Bell? Is he cracked? He’s at liberty to attack us whenever he pleases, and what’s he doing?”
“Nothing much.” John answered the rhetorical question. Then he asked one of his own: “Are you sorry?”
“No, sir. Or I don’t think so, sir. The only trouble is, if Bell isn’t attacking us here, I’d like to know why he isn’t. What’s he got waiting for us down the road?”
That was a good question, and anything but rhetorical. “I don’t know,” John admitted. He waved to the men in blue, most of whom still watched his army tramp past their positions. “What I do know is, he can’t have too much, because that over there has to be most of the Army of Franklin. Or will you tell me I’m wrong?”
“No, sir. Can’t do it, sir,” Strabo replied. “Hells, I didn’t think Bell had even that many men. But where’s the plug on the road? That has to be it. As soon as they force us to stop, then they’ll all swarm forward.” Again, he almost sounded as if he looked forward to it.
“I don’t know where it is. We haven’t bumped into it yet.” But even as John the Lister spoke, a unicorn-rider came galloping back toward the army. Ice raced up John’s spine. For a moment there, he’d almost known hope. Now the bad news would come, all the crueler for being late. “Well?” he barked as the rider drew near.
“The road’s clear, sir, all the way south,” the unicorn-rider said. “The traitors aren’t trying to block it, not anywhere we can find.”
“You’re joking.” John said it automatically, for no better reason than that he couldn’t believe his ears.
“No, sir.” The rider shook his head. “By the Thunderer’s lightning bolt, the way south is as empty of men as Thraxton the Braggart’s head is of sense.”
“Than which, indeed, nothing could be more empty-or should I say less full?” Major Strabo shook his head, too, and answered his own question: “No, I think not, for Thraxton the Braggart unquestionably is full of-”
“He certainly is,” John the Lister said hastily. “But that doesn’t really matter, especially since Thraxton’s not in charge of the traitors any more. What matters is, they had us all boxed in” — he waved toward the men in blue still drawn up in plain sight, the men in blue who still weren’t advancing against his own force- “they had us, and they didn’t finish the job. I don’t know how they didn’t, I don’t know why they didn’t, but they didn’t.” Most of the time, John was a serious man. Now he felt giddy, almost drunk, with relief.
“Now General Bell’s let us get away, and very soon, I think, he’ll rue the day,” Strabo declaimed.
“Has anyone ever called you a poet, Major?” John asked.
“Why, no, sir.” Major Strabo looked as modest as a walleyed man could.
“Well, I understand why,” John said. His adjutant sent him an injured look. The commanding general didn’t care. Something had gone wrong for the traitors. John didn’t know what, but he knew the only thing that mattered: he would gladly take advantage of it.
III
Lieutenant General Bell had taken what the healers politely called a heroic dose of laudanum, even by his own standards. He’d taken plenty to leave a unicorn flat on its back waving its hooves in the air, a silly smile on its face. For once, Bell felt no physical pain.
But Bell was sure all the laudanum in the world wouldn’t have sufficed to take the edge off his towering inferno of wrath. Had he had two working arms and two legs, he would have done murder against his wing and brigade commanders. As things were, he could only scorch them with his leonine eyes, wishing each and every one of them into the most agonizing firepit of the hottest hell.
“You idiots!” he roared. “You bunglers! You fools! You knaves! How could you let the gods-damned southrons escape you? How? How?” The word came out as an agonized howl. “Are you cowards or are you traitors? Those are the only two choices I see.”
His officers stirred. He didn’t think any of them would have the effrontery to answer him, but Patrick the Cleaver did: “In that case, sir, you’d better get new fletching for your sight so it’ll carry farther.”
“Oh, unicorn shit!” Bell bellowed. “I watched you botching boobies there on the field. I watched you, and what did I see? Nothing! Nothing, gods damn it! You would not close with them. None of you would, you spineless squid! The best move in my career as a soldier I was thus destined to behold come to naught. To naught! You disgrace the uniforms you infest. A half-witted dog could have led an attack that would have swept the southrons away. Would I’d had one in an officer’s uniform!”
The subordinate commanders stirred again, more angrily. A brigadier whose parents had given him the uncompromising name of Provincial Prerogative hissed, “You have no business to use us so… sir.”
“You had no business to use me so!” Bell yelled, still in a perfect transport of fury. “Did I order you to attack the retreating southrons? I did. And did you attack them? You did not. They escaped. And whose fault is that? Mine? No, by the gods. Yours!”
A very red-faced young brigadier called Hiram the Cranberry said, “You have no business calling us cowards and dogs.”
“You have no business acting like cowards and dogs,” Bell raged. “You were supposed to act like soldiers. Did you? Did you?” He was screaming again. He half hoped he would have an apoplexy and die so he could escape this mortification.
“Sir, we did the best we could,” said another brigadier, a short, squat fellow known as Otho the Troll.
“Then gods help King Geoffrey and his kingdom!” Bell said.
“You go too far, sir; you truly do,” Patrick the Cleaver said. “Indeed and it’s a sore trial to our honor.”
“Have you any? It’s news to me.” Lieutenant General Bell wished he could simply turn his back on the wing and brigade commanders. Being a cripple brought with it all sorts of humiliations, some less obvious than others.
“For gods’ sake, sir!” another brigadier burst out. That was his favorite expression; because of it, he was widely called For Gods’ Sake John. Twirling one end of his fiercely outswept mustache, he went on, “You damage your own honor, sir, when you impugn ours.”
“That’s right. That is well said,” agreed a brigadier known as Count John of Barsoom after the Peachtree Province estate where he’d grown goobers before the war. He thought very well of himself.