More nods from the wing commanders. Stephen the Pickle said, “If we can get away, that’s a victory. That’s about as much as we can hope for, too.”
“If you men abandon the idea of victory, you condemn this army to irrelevance,” Bell said, horrified.
Benjamin the Heated Ham replied, “If you try to win a victory now, sir, you condemn this army to extinction.”
Once more, the rest of the officers in the pavilion solemnly nodded. Bell started to ask what they would do if he ordered them to attack, or even to stand and fight. He started to, but he didn’t. The answer was entirely too obvious: they would disobey him. Even he could see he was better off not giving some orders. With a long sigh, he said, “You are dismissed, gentlemen. In the morning, we will… see what we can do.”
They ducked out of the pavilion, one after another. Left all alone again, Bell eased himself down into a folding chair, then leaned his crutches against the chair’s wooden arm. “Gods damn it,” he said softly. “Gods damn it to all seven hells.”
He wished he were whole. A whole man had choices a cripple didn’t. Had he been whole, he could have hurled himself into the fighting when things went wrong. He could have killed several of Doubting George’s men on his own. He could have made them kill him. He wouldn’t have had to live through the disastrous battle, wouldn’t have had to suffer this humiliation. And, once dead, he could have looked the Thunderer and the Lion God in the eye and assured them he’d been as gallant as it was given to a mortal man to be.
Instead… here he sat, with the Army of Franklin as mutilated as he was.
He pulled out the little bottle of laudanum and stared at it. Then he pulled the stopper off with his teeth. If he gulped the whole bottle instead of his usual swig, maybe that would be enough to stop his heart. On the other hand, maybe it wouldn’t. He’d got used to ever bigger doses of the drug. He’d had to, to come even close to holding his unending pain at bay.
A small gulp sufficed him. He put the bottle back into the pouch on his belt. In a little while, some of the pain from his wounds would ease. In a little while, some of the pain from the lost battle would recede, too. Yes, laudanum was marvelous stuff.
Relief had just started to sparkle along his veins when a scryer came into the pavilion and said, “Sir, King Geoffrey would speak to you by crystal ball.”
“Would he?” Bell said grandly. “And what if I would not speak to him?”
Instead of answering that, the scryer stood there with his mouth hanging open in surprise. Maybe that was lucky for Bell. He reached for his crutches. Unfreezing, the scryer said, “I’ll tell him you’re on the way.”
“Yes, do that,” Bell said. But, as the scryer turned to go, he added, “Wait. What does the king want to talk about?”
“Why, how the fight went, sir,” the scryer replied. “What else?”
“Yes, what else?” the commanding general agreed gloomily. The laudanum hadn’t done nearly enough to shield him from what was bound to be King Geoffrey’s wrath. “Go on. Go on. Tell his Majesty I’m coming as fast as I can.”
The scryer disappeared. Lieutenant General Bell wished he could do the same. He’d led the Army of Franklin south. He’d fought hard. And he’d lost. He’d lost disastrously, in fact. Had he won, he would have been a hero. He hadn’t. He wasn’t. Instead of the credit, he would get the blame. That was how things worked.
Bell couldn’t have moved fast even if he’d wanted to. He wanted anything but. This camp seemed much too small to house the Army of Franklin. Up till tonight, it would have been. But this was what remained of the army. Bell scowled and shook his head. Wounded men groaned as healers and mages did their best to help them. A cricket too stupid to realize how cold it was let out a few lethargic chirps. An owl hooted. A unicorn whickered. Soldiers snored.
Only a few hitching steps to the scryers’ pavilion. A guard outside held the tent flap wide so Bell could go in. He could have done without the courtesy.
There was the king’s face, in one of the crystal balls. The others were mercifully dark. Bell wished this one would have been, too. As usual, folding himself so his fundament came down on a stool was an adventure, but he managed. “Your Majesty,” he said, nodding to the image in the crystal ball.
“Lieutenant General.” King Geoffrey favored him with a single curt nod. Geoffrey had a lean, almost ascetic countenance, with burning eyes, a long, thin blade of a nose, and a disconcerting beard: it grew under his chin but not on the front of it. Bell, who sported a particularly luxuriant growth of face foliage, had never understood why his sovereign chose to trim his whiskers that way.
“How may I serve you, your Majesty?” Bell asked.
“Tell me how things stand in the east,” the king replied. “Have you won the victory over the southrons our cause so badly needs?”
“Well… no. Not yet,” Bell said, looking down at the dirt under his foot.
King Geoffrey frowned. He looked unhappy even at his most cheerful. When he was unhappy, a man could watch the end of the world on his face. And he’d been a soldier, so he knew what questions to ask to determine the exact situation. “Tell me your present position,” he said crisply.
“We are… about fourteen miles north of Ramblerton,” Lieutenant General Bell replied, wishing he had the nerve to come right out and lie to his sovereign.
Geoffrey’s eyebrows leaped like startled stags. “Fourteen miles!” he burst out. “Did I hear you correctly, Lieutenant General?” He sounded as if he hoped he hadn’t-not for his own sake, but for Bell’s.
But he had. “Yes, your Majesty,” the commanding general said unhappily.
“What happened?” King Geoffrey demanded. “You lost… twelve miles of ground today?”
“More like ten miles,” Bell said. “We lost a couple of miles in yesterday’s fighting, but we took a strong defensive position at the end of it.”
Geoffrey rolled his eyes. The motion, shown in perfect miniature inside the crystal ball, seemed even more painfully scornful than it would have face to face. “Oh, yes, Lieutenant General, it must have been a wonderfully strong defensive position.” His sarcasm flayed. “By the Thunderer’s thumbs, you probably would have run all the way up to Dothan by now if the gods-damned southrons had forced you out of a weak position.”
Bell hung his head. “We held their footsoldiers-most of them, anyhow-for quite a while,” he said. “But Hard-Riding Jimmy’s unicorn-riders got into our rear with their quick-shooting crossbows, and… and… and we broke.” There. He’d said it. He waited for the King to do or say whatever he would.
“You… broke.” Geoffrey’s voice was eerily flat.
“Yes, your Majesty. We were assailed from front, rear, and flank by an army more than twice our size. We fought hard, we fought bravely, for a very long time. But in the end… In the end, we couldn’t take the pounding any more. The men did what men will do: they tried to save themselves.”
“Assailed from front, rear, and flank by an army more than twice your size,” King Geoffrey echoed, still in that tone that showed nothing of what he was thinking. “And how, pray tell, did you manage to put the Army of Franklin in such an enviable strategic position?”
“Your Majesty!” Bell said reproachfully.
“Answer me, gods damn you!” Geoffrey screamed, loud enough to make every scryer in the tent whip his head toward the crystal ball from which that anguished cry had come. “You went south to whip Avram’s men, not to… to throw your own army down the latrine.”
“This result is not what I intended, your Majesty.”
“A man who walks in front of a runaway unicorn doesn’t intend to get gored, either, which does him no good at all,” King Geoffrey ground out. “My army, Lieutenant General Bell! Give me back my army!”