“Can’t do it,” Gremio said solemnly.
“Of course you can’t,” Ormerod said. “Those serfs have been on that land ever since we conquered it. He’s got no business interfering with me, none at all.” He raised his voice to a battlefield roar: “Come on! Let’s give those southrons some of their justice!”
Crossbow quarrels whistled past him as he led his company forward. But his men were shooting, too. Cries from ahead said they’d hit some of the enemy soldiers. And then, sooner than he’d expected, his men were in among the southrons. The whole fight in these woods had been like that. The trees and bushes were so thick, they hid things till too late, and made the battle more a series of bushwhackings and ambushes than a proper standup fight.
The men in gray cried out in dismay and surprise-they hadn’t thought the northerners could bring so many men to bear on them so quickly. Some of them threw down their crossbows and shortswords and threw up their hands. Some retreated up the slope of Merkle’s Hill. And some, even taken at a disadvantage, stood and fought.
Some of the men who wouldn’t retreat and wouldn’t surrender had yellow beards and golden hair under their hats. “King Avram!” one of them shouted, hurling himself at Captain Ormerod.
For a moment, Ormerod wondered if he’d run into Rollant again. But no-he’d never seen this blond before. “You’ll get what you deserve, runaway,” he snarled, and thrust at the enemy soldier’s chest.
The blond was no swordsman: he almost spitted himself on Ormerod’s blade. Only at the last instant did he beat it aside with his own. His answering slash was fierce but unskilled. Ormerod parried, thrust again. This time, he felt the yielding resistance of flesh as the sword slid into the blond’s belly. He twisted the blade as he drew it out, to make sure the wound would kill. The serf shrieked like a lost soul. Captain Ormerod hoped he was.
“May the gods give you what you deserve,” Ormerod panted as the runaway sagged to the ground. He raised his voice again: “Push them!”
But as the men in blue tried to advance, a barrage of flying boulders and firepots smashed into the ground. And the southrons had a couple of their accursed repeating crossbows stationed among the trees where they could rake the more open ground in front of them. Some of Ormerod’s men shot back at the engines, but they were out of range for hand-held weapons. The advance faltered.
“I don’t think we can do it, Captain,” Lieutenant Gremio said.
Baron Ormerod wondered whether they could do it, too. Enough engines in front of footsoldiers would simply shred them before they could close. But he said, “I’m going forward. Stay behind if you haven’t got the nerve to come with me.” He brandished his sword and trotted toward the catapults.
His men followed. Gremio came with the rest. He was cursing under his breath, but Ormerod didn’t mind that. As long as he followed, he was welcome to think whatever he liked.
Soldiers in blue fell, one after another. Some lay unmoving. Some thrashed and writhed and shrieked. A few tried to crawl back in the direction from which they’d come. The rest of the company slogged on.
Every so often, a soldier would pause to shoot and reload: bolts hissed past Ormerod from behind as the bigger, heavier ones from the repeating crossbows hummed by him-some much too close-from the front. He’d heard of officers shot in the back during charges like this. A man would take out his hatred and say it was an accident-if it ever came to light, which it probably wouldn’t.
Gray-clad troopers around the siege engines began falling. Ormerod’s soldiers had finally fought their way into range. As more quarrels reached the engines, they shot less often and less effectively. At last, their crewmen scurried back into the woods to keep from getting killed.
Roaring with fierce glee, Ormerod’s men swarmed over the engines, smashing and slashing them with spades and shortswords. “Let’s see Avram’s sons of bitches pound us with these now!” Ormerod shouted.
“I think we would have done better to save them, so our own artificers could turn them against the southrons,” Lieutenant Gremio said.
In a narrow sense, he was probably right. Ormerod cared nothing about narrow senses. He said, “Let the boys have their fun, Lieutenant. Look at the price they paid to earn it.” The ground in front of the engines was covered with fallen soldiers.
The southrons did not give the survivors long to enjoy their little triumph. The men who’d served the engines weren’t the only soldiers in gray on that part of Merkle’s Hill. Pikemen and crossbowmen assailed Captain Ormerod’s company in such numbers, he had to order them to fall back.
They lost more men retreating to about the place from which they’d begun the attack on the engines. Ormerod wondered if the assault had been worth it. He shrugged and made the best of it: “We hurt them.”
“And they hurt us, too,” Gremio said.
Ormerod would have bet that his lieutenant would say something like that. “We can’t do these little tricks without losses,” he replied.
Gremio was ready to argue. He always was-what barrister wasn’t? “But does what we gained justify the losses?” he asked.
“I don’t know how to weigh that.” Ormerod looked at the sky again. The sun was low, very low. He cursed. “I do know we’re not going to run the miserable southrons off this hill today. I know that’s not good, too.”
“No, it isn’t.” Gremio didn’t argue that. Ormerod wished he would have. Instead, the lieutenant went on, “You can bet they’ll have more men in their lines tomorrow than they have today. You can’t bet on it with us. You can only hope.”
“I do hope,” Ormerod said. “Parthenia Province, you tell me?” He waited for Gremio to nod, then twisted his fingers into a gesture invoking the Lion God. “That’d be very fine indeed. So it would. So it would. Here’s hoping it’s true.”
“Colonel Florizel thought so,” Gremio observed.
“Maybe he knows more now than when you heard from him.” Ormerod looked around. “Have you seen him lately? I haven’t.”
A trooper said, “Captain, he’s wounded. He went down with a bolt in the leg a couple of hours ago.”
“No wonder I haven’t seen him,” Ormerod said. “Is it a bad wound?” A bolt in the leg could prove anything from a little gash to a killer. At Pottstown Pier, General Sidney, one of King Geoffrey’s best officers, had tried to stay in the saddle with a crossbow quarrel in the thigh and had quietly bled to death before anybody, including himself, realized how badly he was hurt. But the trooper only shrugged- he didn’t know. Ormerod muttered a curse.
Gremio said, “That means Major Thersites is in charge of the regiment. I don’t much care for him.”
“Don’t let him hear that,” Ormerod warned. Truth was, he didn’t care much for Major Thersites, either. Thersites grew indigo on an estate deep in the swamps outside Karlsburg. He was liege lord over a good many serfs and called himself a baron, though neither Ormerod nor anyone else in the neighborhood was sure he truly had noble blood in his veins. But he’d killed the one man who said as much out loud, and being good at killing wasn’t the worst claim to nobility in the northern provinces of Detina in and of itself.
Lieutenant Gremio said, “I know.” With fairly obvious relief, he changed the subject: “You’re not going to order us forward again before sundown?”
Ormerod shook his head. “Not me. I don’t think we can break the southrons, and I don’t see much point to anything less. Of course, if Thersites tells us to advance, then we will.”
“Oh, yes, I understand that,” Gremio said. “But I agree with you, sir. We’ve done everything we can do today, I think. We’ve driven the southrons a long way. We might have done even better if Leonidas the Priest had started his attacks when Count Thraxton first ordered him to, but we’ll never know about that, will we?”