A northerner stuck his head up above the rampart in front of the trench so he could see to aim. Before the enemy soldier could shoot, Rollant did. He missed; his quarrel dug into the rampart and kicked up dirt into the traitor’s face. He came close enough to killing the fellow, though, to make him duck down in a hurry instead of doing any shooting of his own.
Frantically reloading, Rollant yanked back the bowstring and set a new bolt in the groove. All around him, other southrons were doing the same. Somebody right in front of him dropped a quarrel in his haste to reload. Instead of snatching another one from the sheaf, the soldier stopped and stooped to pick up the one he’d dropped. “Clumsy fool!” Rollant shouted, doing his best not to trample the man.
“Futter you, blondie,” the soldier said.
Rage ripped through Rollant. Worst of it was that he couldn’t fall on the fellow and give-or try to give-him the thrashing he deserved. Maybe after the battle was over, if they both came out alive, they would have something more to say to each other, with words or with fists. Now… now the northerners were awake to their peril. The real fight was with them, not with the man who also fought for King Avram.
But how are they and he different? Rollant wondered.
One obvious answer was that the trooper in a gray uniform like his own wasn’t trying to kill him at the moment, and the traitors were. A southron only a couple of feet from Rollant went down with a groan, clutching at the quarrel that had sprouted in his belly. “Litter!” Rollant shouted. “Litter over here!” He doubted if the healers would be able to save the man; wounds that pierced the gut usually killed by fever if they didn’t kill by bleeding.
He had no more time to think about that than he did about the southron who didn’t love blonds. He shot at the northerners again, reloaded, and shot once more. He didn’t know if any of the quarrels struck home. What he did know was that his comrades were scrambling over the rampart and starting to drop down into the trenches Joseph the Gamecock’s soldiers manned. He slung his crossbow, yanked out his shortsword, and swarmed over the ramparts himself.
He’d fought in the trenches before. The only good thing he could say about it was that he could hit back at the foe. Charging the enemy when he was entrenched… that was worse. But this was quite bad enough. Men screamed and groaned and slashed at one another and shot one another and swung clubbed crossbows and wrestled and punched and kicked and bit.
Reinforcements in blue came rushing up from the direction of Caesar to try to hold the southrons back. But more men in gray from Doubting George’s army dropped down into the trenches. A crossbow bolt scored a bleeding line across the back of Rollant’s hand. Half an inch lower and it might have left the hand crippled forever.
“Forward!” Lieutenant Griff shouted shrilly.
Forward they went-for a little while. After that, the enemy got as many reinforcements as they did. That made the fighting even more desperate than it had been. Rollant was no great swordsman. He’d never used a sword before the war: only a woodworker’s tools. And the shortsword was a clumsy weapon anyhow. But his blade soon had blood on it.
“King Geoffrey!” the traitors shouted, and “Provincial prerogative forever!” and “To the seven hells with King Avram!” and “To the seven hells with the blonds!” Here and there, when they surged east again in a counterattack, they would capture some of Avram’s soldiers and manhandle them back to the rear. They had camps for southron prisoners, just as there were camps for northern prisoners in the south. But they didn’t manhandle any blonds back to the rear. Ex-serfs who’d taken service against their liege lords almost always ended up dead on the field when things went wrong for their side.
I can’t be captured. Rollant knew that. In the early days of the fighting, a few blonds had been forcibly returned to serfdom. That didn’t happen any more. The northerners hadn’t needed long to realize a man who’d taken up arms against them once was liable, even likely, to do it again as soon as he saw the chance.
Some time in the middle of the day, a lull fell over the field, with both sides equally exhausted. Rollant had a moment to snatch a few breaths and look around. He discovered Smitty only a few feet away, also panting and looking around to see what the attack had gained.
“Well, this isn’t like going at that Vulture’s Nest place,” Rollant said. “We could’ve kept fighting there till the last war of the gods and never broken through.”
“We’ve got a chance here, sure enough,” Smitty agreed. “More room to wiggle here. That other gap, we almost had to go in there single file to get at the fornicating traitors.”
Rollant pointed ahead. “You think we’ll take that Caesar?”
“We’d better,” his comrade answered. “If we don’t, Doubting George’ll eat every one of us, and without salt, too.”
“You’re right,” Rollant said, and forced a smile. The Detinans dimly recalled the days when their ancestors had been maneaters. Those days were long gone now, and had been for centuries even before the dark-haired men crossed the Western Ocean and set foot in this land, but the memory lingered in jokes like that. So far as Rollant knew, none of his own forebears had ever done anything so barbaric.
Other small things reminded Rollant he wasn’t quite an ordinary Detinan, even if he fought alongside thousands of them. Pointing ahead again, he said, “Who or what’s a Caesar?” He had no idea.
To his surprise, Smitty only shrugged. “Beats me. Probably just a made-up name.”
“Suppose you’re right.” Rollant seized the moment to plunge his sword into the nearly blood-red dirt of southeastern Peachtree Province-very different from the black mud he’d grown up with in the swamp country of Palmetto Province-to clean it. He said, “Our magecraft did work, at least pretty much.”
“So it did.” Smitty nodded. “That’s something. I bet the traitors are mad enough to spit nails like a repeating crossbow, too.”
“Probably.” Rollant cocked his own hand-held crossbow, fit a bolt to the groove, and took a shot at motion in the trenches the northerners still held. As often happened, he couldn’t tell whether he hit or missed.
That one shot seemed to be a signal to resume the fight. A thirty-pound stone ball from a northern catapult thudded down only a few paces away. Some of that blood-red dirt splashed up and hit Rollant in the face. A southron soldier the stone struck screamed, but not for long. More southrons started shooting at the enemy. Before long, the battle blazed at full fury once more.
And at full fury it remained for the rest of the day. Try as they would, the southrons didn’t manage to break into Caesar. But Rollant was sure the enemy spent men like coppers holding them out. “They can’t go on doing that,” he said as the sun sank behind the town. “They won’t have an army left if they do.”
“That’s always been one thing we could do,” Smitty said. “If all else fails, we can grind the bastards down till they’ve got nothing left. Only trouble with that is, it grinds down an awful lot of us, too.”
“I know,” Rollant said dolefully. “But it’s pretty plain we aren’t any smarter than they are, even with General Hesmucet in charge instead of General Guildenstern. So we’d better be tougher, wouldn’t you say?”
“We’d better be something, anyhow,” Smitty answered. “The something I am right now is gods-damned tired.” He took his blanket from his knapsack, cocooned himself in it, and started to snore.
Rollant stayed awake a good deal longer. Maybe that meant he’d had more sleep the night before. Maybe-and more likely-it just meant he was too keyed up after the day’s hard fighting to wind down in a hurry.
The traitors seemed very much awake, too. Their campfires burned brightly all the way back to Caesar. Every once in a while, a bolt or a stone or a firepot would land among the southrons. By all the signs, they needed to be ready to fight again in the morning, or perhaps in the middle of the night.