“That could be,” Griff allowed. “We’ve come a long way toward turning all our men into real professional soldiers, and one mark of the professional is respect for his underofficers.”
“Don’t you worry about it, sir,” Rollant said. “I’m sure they call me a gods-damned blond son of a bitch whenever my back’s turned.”
“And what do you think about that?” the lieutenant asked.
Rollant shrugged. “Sir, if you think I never cussed an underofficer, I have to tell you you’d better think again.”
“Not many soldiers who never have, I suppose,” Griff said, and then, in an altogether different tone, “Hello! What’s this?”
This was men in blue tunics and pantaloons spread thinly across a field: northern pickets. They cried out in alarm as they caught sight of the southrons. Several of them raised crossbows to their shoulders and started shooting. Thwuck! One of the bolts, a frighteningly good shot, tore through the silk of the company standard.
“Forward!” Griff shouted. “If they won’t go by themselves, we just have to chase them away.”
Rollant held the standard on high and waved it back and forth as he advanced. It told the men where the company was supposed to go and lifted their spirits. That was why both southrons and traitors had standard-bearers. Making themselves conspicuous was why both sides had to change standard-bearers so often.
“Avram!” Rollant shouted. “Avram and freedom!” More than most, he knew what freedom meant.
More crossbow bolts whistled past him. Someone behind him let out a shriek. He couldn’t even look to see who it was. He could only go forward waving the standard. He ran clumsily, his head down, watching where he put his feet. If he fell from stepping in a hole and the standard went down, his company’s spirits would sag no less than if he got shot. He couldn’t do much about getting shot. He could, or at least he might, avoid imitating a jackass with the staggers.
The northerners didn’t put up much of a fight. In their shoes, being so badly outnumbered, he wouldn’t have been ashamed to run away, either. A few of them turned and loosed hasty shots over their shoulders. A couple of those struck home, too. But more traitors fell. Rollant watched dust puff from the back of one running man’s blue tunic as a quarrel hit him. The northerner threw his arms wide. His crossbow flew surprisingly far to one side as he let it go. He ran on for a couple of staggering steps, then fell on his face. He was still thrashing feebly when Rollant pounded past him.
Beyond another belt of trees, the enemy had earthworks waiting. The surviving pickets dove into them. More traitors appeared on the shooting steps. They gave Avram’s onrushing men a couple of crisp, thoroughly professional volleys. Bell might have spent his men like coppers, but the ones he had left still knew their business.
They knew it so well, in fact, that they knocked the southrons back on their heels and more. Men who had dashed forward suddenly dashed back. “Stand!” Lieutenant Griff shouted, his voice breaking in fury and humiliation. “Stand, gods damn you! You’ve been through worse!”
He was right-they had. At that particular moment, though, they weren’t much inclined to listen to him. Rollant had seen that before, too. They’d come up against the traitors’ trenches too soon, too unexpectedly. What they could have taken in stride had they been ready for it caught them by surprise and threw them into panic. And so they fled.
It wasn’t Griff’s company alone. That made Rollant feel a little better as he too fell back out of crossbow range from the northerners’ position. All the southrons who came up against them recoiled the same way. Officers up and down the line screamed, “Stand!” and “Hold fast, you stupid, cowardly sons of bitches!” and other such endearments, and none of them did the least bit of good.
What saved the day, oddly enough, were the traitors themselves. Seeing the southrons taken with panic, they swarmed out of their trenches and pursued, roaring like lions all the while.
“Come on!” Rollant shouted. “We can lick ’em! Now they’re up above ground, same as we are!”
He wasn’t so vain as to imagine his voice turned the tide by itself. That would have taken a man like Fighting Joseph, now fighting no more. He heard plenty of officers and underofficers and ordinary soldiers shouting the same thing in different words. But his was one of the voices raised.
And, by one of those chances the Thunderer and the Lion God might have understood but no mortal did, the southrons threw off their fear as quickly as it had seized them. They turned around and started plying the northern men with bolts. Pikemen tramped toward the foe in solid ranks. And the traitors, who had been storming forward as if this were the field by the River of Death, hesitated and then abruptly turned to flight themselves.
Now their officers howled in dismay. What had been a bid for revenge against the defeats they’d suffered closer to Marthasville a few days before turned into another disaster now. The northerners had attacked with all their old verve, but hadn’t been able to sustain it. And when fear took them, it seized them even harder than it had laid hold of the southrons.
“Stand!” “Hold!” “Shoot back, gods damn you!” the traitors’ officers howled. They might as well have told the Hoocheecoochee River to quit flowing. They could give all the orders they liked, but the men in blue paid them no attention. Having decided they couldn’t win the fight against the southrons, they seemed to have decided all hope was lost, and stampeded back toward Jonestown.
Whooping with glee, the southrons pursued. Rollant ran right past a lieutenant from the Army of Franklin who was still shouting curses after his departed soldiers. Afterwards, the blond wondered whether his comrades had captured the traitor or simply slain him. He never found out.
So great was the northerners’ fear, they made no serious stand in the trench lines their serfs had dug. A few of them paused, turned, and shot and the oncoming southrons, but most simply kept going. Escape was all they had in mind as they pelted back toward the hamlet of Jonestown.
“By the Lion God’s sacred eyeteeth,” Lieutenant Griff said in dazed tones, “I do believe we may bag them all.”
“May it be so, sir,” Rollant said. He waved the standard again and again. Cheers answered him. The southrons had no war cry to match the northern roar. That cry put fear in the heart of any man who heard it. But the shouts that burst from the throats of Doubting George’s men as they watched the enemy flee before them were ferocious enough for all ordinary use.
When the traitors reached the outskirts of Jonestown, they did manage a rally of sorts. Rollant soon saw why: they were fighting to hold the southrons away from the glideway carpets that were even then carrying men in blue south out of the battle and back toward Marthasville.
“Where are our catapults?” Rollant shouted. Most of the heavy engines, of course, were back by Marthasville, too, knocking the city down around the ears of its inhabitants and defenders. But some lighter ones had come north with the crossbowmen and pikemen. Now they had a target about which the men who served them could usually but dream. Land a few firepots on those fleeing carpets and no small part of the Army of Franklin’s strength would go up in smoke.
Those would be men roasting on the carpets, of course. Rollant did his best not to think about that. As long as they were only targets in his mind, he wouldn’t have to dwell on what their torment meant. By reckoning him and his kind only serfs, they’d played the identical game for centuries.
When the catapults did arrive, though, they pelted the rear guard in Jonestown, not the departing carpets, most of which were out of range by then. The traitors had engines of their own in the town, and showed no hesitation about bombarding the southrons. After Rollant saw a soldier from his regiment turned to a running, burning, shrieking torch, he stopped worrying about the rights and wrongs of war. He was in it, and beating down the enemy came before everything else.