And then, before he could finish the traitor, a crossbow quarrel slammed into the fellow’s side. The northerner shrieked and clutched at himself. George drove his sword home to finish the man. That wasn’t sporting, but he didn’t care. If his soldiers couldn’t stop the northerners here, everything would unravel.
Not far ahead of him, Absalom the Bear’s axe rose and fell, rose and fell. Somewhere or other, the broad-shouldered brigadier had actually learned to fight with the unusual weapon. He beat down enemy soldiers’ defenses and felled them as if felling trees. Before long, nobody tried to stand against him.
Nor could the northerners in Doubting George’s rear stand against his hastily improvised counterattack. He’d sent only a couple of regiments against them, but their own force was none too large. Instead of breaking through and rolling up his line, they had to draw back toward their own comrades, leaving many dead and wounded on the field and carrying off other men too badly hurt to retreat on their own.
Lieutenant General George caught up with Brigadier Absalom as the traitors sullenly fell back. Absalom plunged his axe blade into the soft ground again and again to clean it. He nodded to George. “That was a gods-damned near-run thing, sir,” he said.
“Don’t I know it!” George said fervently. “And it’s not over yet. We just stopped them here.”
“If we hadn’t stopped them here, it would be over,” Absalom the Bear observed.
That was also true. Doubting George surveyed the field. He couldn’t see so much of it from here at the bottom of Merkle’s Hill as he would have liked. After pausing to catch his breath, he asked, “Where did you learn to fight with an axe?”
“I read about it in that fellow Graustark’s historical romances,” Absalom answered, a little sheepishly. “It sounded interesting, so I found a smith who was also an antiquarian, and he trained me as well as he knew himself.”
“I’d say he knew quite a bit.” George kicked at the bloody dirt. “I wish I knew what was happening farther west. Nothing good, gods damn it.” He kicked at the dirt again.
VII
Rollant had never been so weary in all the days of his life. Now, he was yet a young man, so those days were not so many, but he had spent a lot of them laboring in the swampy indigo fields of Baron Ormerod’s estate. Ormerod was not the worst liege lord to have, and never would be as long as Thersites remained alive, but he was far from the softest, and demanded a full day’s labor from all his serfs every day. Rollant would not have cared to try to reckon up how many times he’d stumbled back to his hut at or after sundown and collapsed down onto his cot, sodden with exhaustion.
However many times it might have been, though, none of those days in the fields came close to matching this one. He’d been fighting for his life by the River of Death for two days straight. By all accounts, a good part of General Guildenstern’s army was already wrecked. He knew how close Doubting George’s wing had come to utter ruin. George had pulled his regiment and the one beside it out of the line and sent it to the rear to face a couple of northern regiments that had got round behind them. If they hadn’t driven back the traitors, he didn’t see how George’s wing could have survived, either.
But they had. And now, as the sun sank low in the direction of the Western Ocean, Rollant wiped sweat and a little blood off his forehead with the sleeve of his tunic. “That last traitor almost did for me,” he told Smitty.
The youngster from the farm outside New Eborac nodded. “But he’s dead now, and you’re not, and I expect that’s the way you want it to be,” he said. He was surely as worn as Rollant, but could still put things in a way that made everybody around him smile.
“Sure enough,” Rollant agreed. “Some of them don’t have a much better notion of what to do with a shortsword than I do-and a gods-damned good thing, too, if anybody wants to know what I think.”
Sergeant Joram said, “Don’t fall down and go to sleep yet, you two. Nobody knows for sure they won’t try and hit us one more lick.” Rollant and Smitty exchanged appalled glances. If the traitors still had fight left in them after the two days both sides had been through…
Maybe they did. Way off to Rollant’s left and rear, Thraxton the Braggart’s men began their roaring battle cry. It was taken up successively by one regiment after another, passing round to Doubting George’s front and finally to the right where Rollant stood and even beyond him to the remnants of the two regiments he and his comrades had broken, till it seemed to have got back to the point whence it started.
“Isn’t that the ugliest sound you ever heard?” Smitty said.
“Yes!” Rollant agreed fervently. As the roars from the traitors went on and on, he stood there almost shuddering, feeling to the fullest those two days of desperate battle, without sleep, without rest, without food, almost without hope.
Almost. There was, however, a space somewhere to the back of George’s battered host across which those horrible roars did not prolong themselves-a space to the southeast, leading back in the direction of Rising Rock. At last, just before the sun touched the horizon, orders came that the men were to retreat back through that space.
In profound silence and dejection, Rollant began to march. No one, not even the irrepressible Smitty, had much to say during the retreat. The only sounds were those of marching feet and the occasional groans of the wounded. Rollant clutched his shortsword-his crossbow remained slung on his back, for he’d shot his last bolt-and wondered if Thraxton’s men would try to strike them as they fell back.
But the northerners let them go unmolested. As he stumbled along through the deepening twilight, Rollant wondered if Thraxton’s army was as badly battered as Guildenstern’s. For his own sake, for the sake of the army of which he was one weary part, he hoped so.
“We held them.” That was Lieutenant Griff. He sounded as tired as any of the men in his company. He’d led them well enough-better than Rollant had expected him to-and he hadn’t shrunk from the worst of the fighting. If his voice broke occasionally, well, so what? He went on, “The rest of Guildenstern’s army ran away, but we held the traitors and we’re going off in good order.”
“That’s right.” Somebody else spoke in a rumbling bass. Rollant knew who that was: Major Reuel, who’d been in charge of the regiment since Colonel Nahath went down with a bolt through his thigh. “And Lieutenant General George chose us to throw back Thraxton’s men when things looked worst. Us. Our regiment. And we did it, by the gods.”
Rollant suspected Doubting George had chosen them more because they were handy than for any virtue inherent in them, but that was beside the point. Where so many men deserved to be embarrassed, he and his comrades could walk tall. They’d done their best.
Smitty said, “Doubting George was the rock in the River of Death, and the traitors couldn’t get past him.”
“Let’s give him a cheer,” Rollant said, and a few men called out, “Huzzah for Doubting George!”
A few more men shouted out George’s name the next time, and more the next, and more still the time after that, so that soon the whole company, the whole regiment, and the whole long winding column of men were crying his name. That made Rollant walk taller, too. It made him feel much less like a soldier in a beaten army and more like one who’d done everything he possibly could.
And then he heard a unicorn’s hooves on the dirt of the roadway. He peered through the deepening gloom, then whooped. That was Lieutenant General George on the white beast. “Huzzah!” Rollant shouted, louder than ever.
Doubting George waved his hat. “Thanks, boys,” he said. “I don’t know what in the seven hells you’re cheering me for. You’re the ones who did the work.” He touched spurs to the unicorn and rode on.