“How can you be so sure?” Hesmucet asked. “You’re the one who said the gods don’t worry about us so much as we think.”
“Even so,” Alva said.
“Well, then?” Hesmucet growled. He knew he sounded impatient. As far as he could see, he could hardly sound any other way. The fight on Funnel Hill wasn’t going the way he wished it were.
“There’s more of us, and we’ve got more engines,” Alva said. “If we lose in spite of that, we should be ashamed of ourselves.”
“General Bart says the same thing,” Hesmucet replied. “He’s right about the war. I’m pretty sure about that. But I don’t know whether he’s right about this fight here-and right this minute, this fight here is all that counts.”
Lieutenant General George was not happy with the role General Bart had assigned to his army. The soldiers General Guildenstern had formerly commanded were making what amounted to a noisy demonstration against Proselytizers’ Rise. Even if Bart hadn’t spelled it out in so many words, their assignment was to keep Thraxton the Braggart’s men busy in the center while Fighting Joseph and Hesmucet won glory on the wings.
Bart’s orders did read, If possible, your force shall scale the heights of Proselytizers’ Rise and expel the enemy therefrom. “I like that,” George said to Colonel Andy. “I truly like that. If the gods themselves attacked Proselytizers’ Rise from below, could they carry that position?”
“Sir, I…” His aide-de-camp spoke with all due deliberation, and with malice aforethought: “Sir, I doubt it.”
“So do I,” Doubting George said morosely. “By the Thunderer, so do I.”
“General Bart doesn’t think this part of the army can really fight,” Andy said. “He doesn’t think we’re worth anything.”
“I’m very much afraid you’re right,” George said. “And, as long as he gives us impossible positions to try to take, all he has to do is see that we haven’t taken them to get all his assumptions proved for him.”
“It isn’t fair,” Andy said. “It isn’t even close to fair.”
“Well, there I would have to agree with you.” George raised a forefinger. “Now don’t get me wrong. I want this whole great force to whip Count Thraxton. That comes first, and I’ve said so many times. But I don’t want my men, so many of whom fought like heroes by the River of Death even though we lost, I don’t want them slighted.”
“I should say not, sir,” Andy replied. “It’s a reflection on them, and it’s also a reflection on you.”
Privately, Doubting George agree with that. Publicly… He said what he’d been saying: “No one man’s part is all that important. But I think we could serve the kingdom better with different orders.”
“Do you want to complain to Bart?” Andy asked. “It might do some good.”
“Unfortunately, I doubt that,” George said. “It wouldn’t make the commanding general change his mind, and it would get me a reputation as a whiner, which is not the reputation I want to have.”
Pulling the brim of his hat down lower over his eyes, he watched his men doing their best to go forward in the face of formidable odds. The eastern slope of Proselytizers’ Rise was very high and very steep. No one could reasonably be expected to get close to it, let alone scale it with an enemy waiting at the top.
But, as long as George’s men kept trying, Thraxton couldn’t move any of his own soldiers away from Proselytizers’ Rise to Sentry Peak or Funnel Hill. We’d be a proper fighting army if Bart would let us, George thought. Then, reluctantly, he checked himself. As long as the battle is won, how doesn’t much matter. And there will be credit to go around.
And if the battle isn’t won, where will the blame land? He imagined coming before the panel of Avram’s ministers empowered to review the conduct of the war. He imagined some crusty, white-haired pen-pusher rasping, “You were requested and required to drive the traitors from this place called Proselytizers’ Rise. Would you care to explain to us how you failed to carry out your duty?”
He wouldn’t be able to. He knew he wouldn’t be able to. If the king’s ministers saw the ground, they might possibly begin to understand. Without seeing the ground? Not a chance, he thought. Not a single, solitary chance, not in any one of the hells. All they would see was that he’d got an order and failed to carry it out. And that panel was full of vindictive souls. They would remember he was a Parthenian. They would forget he was called the Rock in the River of Death. And they would, without the tiniest fragment of doubt, kill his soldierly career.
By all the gods, we’d better win.
Seeing where he was, seeing what lay ahead of him, seeing what his orders were, he had to rely on Fighting Joseph to his right and Lieutenant General Hesmucet to his left. He wasn’t going to win the battle by himself. He hated that. Relying on others came no easier to him than it did to most Detinans. If he had to do something, he wanted to be in charge of it. But this battle was too big to make that possible. Come on, Fighting Joseph. Make them run.
Colonel Andy pointed. “Look, sir! We’ve got a lodgement there, right at the base of the Rise.”
“So we do,” Doubting George said. “Next question is, can we keep it?”
They couldn’t. George hadn’t really expected that they would, not with the advantage in numbers the northerners held. The traitors rolled boulders down onto his men, sweeping them away as a blond scullery maid might sweep crawling ants off a wall. They rained firepots on the southrons, too, and plied them with crossbow quarrels. A few men in gray clung to the ground they’d gained, but more-even those who weren’t hurt-fell back. George had a hard time blaming them.
“I thought we had something going there,” Andy said dejectedly.
“I hoped we had something going there,” George replied, which wasn’t the same thing at all.
“The traitors will know they’ve been in a battle, by the Lion God’s fangs.” Colonel Andy looked and sounded as belligerent as a man could when he wasn’t doing any actual fighting himself.
“I want them to know they’ve lost a battle,” George said. “Right now, Colonel, I have to confess, I don’t know how to make that happen, not on this part of the field.”
“I wish I did, sir,” his aide-de-camp said.
“I wish you did, too. I wish anybody did. I hope we’re doing well on the ends of the line, because we’re in a devils of a fix here in the middle.” Doubting George sighed. “We’re all doing the best we can. I have to remember that.”
“General Guildenstern was doing the best he could, too,” Andy said acidly.
“Why, so he was,” George said. “Guildenstern is a brave man, and he had the start of a good plan. I think General Bart has a better plan, and it may well work. But he gave me a hard role to play.”
Shouting King Avram’s name, his men made another lunge toward the eastern face of Proselytizers’ Rise. A few more of them got into the trenches of the base of the Rise. Some of the ones who did came out again. Nobody seemed able to hold on there. You are not here to win the battle, George reminded himself. You’re here to keep the men on the wings from losing it. Remembering that came hard.
“There’s some sort of a commotion over to the north,” Colonel Andy said.
“Well, so there is.” George peered off in that direction, trying to figure out what sort of a commotion it was.
Andy’s voice broke in excitement: “It’s-it’s the northerners running back from the slope of Sentry Peak, that’s what it is!”
“Looks that way,” Doubting George agreed. “And there’s our men after them, too. Looks like Fighting Joseph has won himself a victory, it does, it does.”
“It sure does,” his aide-de-camp exulted. After a moment, Andy said one more word: “Oh.”