Robert Adams - Champion of the Last Battle

“And as for prisoners, what about that strange, dark woman and her band of scruffy scum we captured in our glen? Rifles! Our Skohshun legends speak of them or something similar—they used to be common, apparently, in our lost homeland. God in Heaven, if I had enough of them I could go through this land like a hot knife through butter! But she doesn’t know how to make them ... or, at least, she claims she doesn’t, nor even how to make the charges and projectiles for them. She does say that she could lead us to where a fair number of the rifles are buried, but from the maps she drew up, we’d have to go directly through the very heart of New Kuhmbuhluhn to get there.”

Sir Djaimz continued his report. “All save three of the short-hafts from Colonel Pease’s regiment are dead or seriously wounded, but with the exceptions of Farr’s, Taylor’s and Gambel’s sergeants, no other shorts were lost.

“However, the loss of officers was exceptionally high. Colonels Farr and Taylor are wounded, Colonel Gambel is dead. A total of seven other officers are fit for duty from the entire before-battle complement of those three regiments. Five of the six staff officers who rode with you down to the rear areas are dead. Lieutenant Bryson is wounded; so too is Ensign Grey. I’d sent the lad down to find you. Instead, he apparently essayed to stop the New Kuhmbuhluhn horsemen headed for Gambel’s regiment, single-handedly; the surgeon had to take off one of his legs at the knee, but he thinks he’ll live.”

“Poor valiant little bugger,” thought the old man, then, “Oh, Jesus, Lady Pamela, his mother, will ream me out a new arsehole for this! Fine piece of female flesh, there, that woman ... if only I were twenty years younger ... ten, even ... ? But she’ll not stay widowed long, if I’m any judge of these matters. Now young Tom can be honorably retired into the reserve and get to work siring a new generation of Greys on some likely chit.”

After a brief but noticeable pause, Senior Colonel Sir Djaimz said gravely, “Although not in the same way, thank God, we have been flanked, taken in the rear, before—several times within my memory and probably many more than that in your own, sir—but our losses have never been this heavy before, mostly for the reason that the short-haftmen were there to do their principal task, that of defending the otherwise highly vulnerable rear and flanks of the pike lines for a sufficient time for men to ground pikes, turn about and form a hedge of two fronts or a porcupine, whichever seemed best at that time and place.

“Now, sir, while I am not necessarily saying that that would have worked in this case, not against a mixed force of both heavy horse and light horse plus a contingent of heavy-armed foot, I do state categorically that our chances to avoid such a bloodletting as our arms have this day experienced would have been far better had we had our shorts in the proper place when they were needed.”

“You’ll rise high, my boy,” thought the brigadier, “either in rank or by your neck from the end of a rope. You know damned well just who, just which noble arsehole, is directly culpable for this calamity, know as well as do I.

“It’s really my fault, though. I should’ve foreseen something like this happening under the circumstances. I knew that that damned Potter was displeased with the alignments, and I knew he is a cousin of the earl, and I knew that the earl—unlike his old father, God rest his soul—does dote on playing at war captain, when he finds or makes himself the opportunity.

“So, it’s going to be entirely up to me to gingerly chew our esteemed leader out for his tragic folly, this time. Sir Djaimz here obviously wouldn’t dare do so; he has too much to lose to chance incurring the earl’s disfavor. At least my place is secure.

“But I’ll put that particular chore off until I can speak clearly and precisely—there must be no misunderstanding of aught I say to him.

“Well, I suppose that the next, logical step is going to be to march on New Kuhmbuhluhnburk itself, and call on it to surrender ... not that I think the feisty bastards will, mind you. No, I’d wager we end up besieging them there ... unless the place is weak enough to fall by storm, which I doubt on general principles. Odd, that no scout of ours has ever been able to get an actual sight of that city and come back to us with the tale. Even our herald was not allowed close enough to give us any idea of the defenses of the place. But I must plan to act on the assumption that New Kuhmbuhluhnburk is at the very least defensible and well garrisoned and, being a mountain city, probably has sources of unpollutable water inside the walls, as well.

“And so, Ahrthur Maklarin, that leaves two options: entrench and throw zigzags close enough to tunnel and undermine a likely stretch of wall, or simply hunker down on the spot and try to starve the buggers out, if we can’t find a traitor or two to open a stray gate to us of a dark night.

“From last year’s crop of prisoners and from those we captured when we took our glen, I get an impression that out from the foot of the capital there spreads a long, wide and exceptionally rich plain. Conceivably, we could live well off their own lands while besieging their city. But as we’ve here learned to our sorrow, not all of these New Kuhmbuhluhners think or act alike. There’s a wide streak of shrewd canniness runs through some of the leaders, so no doubt but our folk up in the north will be on short rations, are our men on the siege lines to be fed for however long it takes to achieve a capitulation. But it can and must be done. Our folk are tough, accustomed to privation, and they and their forefathers before them have done the like before to support a field army. They will not conceivably stick at doing it all again, not to gain a prize so rich as these lands, this Kingdom of New Kuhmbuhluhn.”

The Skohshun army stayed in place, remained in the camps they had come to call Twin Hills for long and long after the disastrous battle. The seriously wounded, if they lived through it, were wagoned back to what they called Skohshun Glen and the wagons returned with foodstuffs, beer and other necessities of field life.

Long before he could even sit up straight without blinding pain, the brigadier had reassumed his command. The young Earl Devernee had taken his oral birching with far better grace than Sir Ahrthur had foreseen. Apparently he had been shaken to his innermost core of being by the sanguineous results of his intemperate decisions of that morning before the battle. This fact cheered the battered old man mightily, for he had much yet to do and he had not relished the thought of an ongoing feud with his nominal superior whilst he went about his necessary tasks with the army.

Of the three, lonely prisoners—all wounded—taken in the aftermath of the battle, two were New Kuhmbuhluhn nobles, and they gave him precious little information he had not had ere this. The third, once stripped of armor, proved to be a dark and lovely woman; but she could not or, more likely thought the brigadier, would not speak any comprehensible tongue. Her racial similarity to the woman prisoner up in the glen struck him early on, so he suddenly decided to have all of the prisoners brought down to the camps, thinking that he might well find a use for them between here and New Kuhmbuhluhnburk.

As regarded the army, there was no rebuilding of Colonel Fair’s regiment possible, not without stripping the last reserve pikeman from the glen, nor could all the vacant places in the ranks of the other two regiments be filled in. Therefore, he had Farr’s regimental banner sent back in the same wagon that bore the wounded officer himself; it and he would become a part of the reserve establishment until/when/if there were enough trained bodies to again fill that unit out.