Harry Turtledove - Advance and Retreat

“Why, how the fight went, sir,” the scryer replied. “What else?”

“Yes, what else?” the commanding general agreed gloomily. The laudanum hadn’t done nearly enough to shield him from what was bound to be King Geoffrey’s wrath. “Go on. Go on. Tell his Majesty I’m coming as fast as I can.”

The scryer disappeared. Lieutenant General Bell wished he could do the same. He’d led the Army of Franklin south. He’d fought hard. And he’d lost. He’d lost disastrously, in fact. Had he won, he would have been a hero. He hadn’t. He wasn’t. Instead of the credit, he would get the blame. That was how things worked.

Bell couldn’t have moved fast even if he’d wanted to. He wanted anything but. This camp seemed much too small to house the Army of Franklin. Up till tonight, it would have been. But this was what remained of the army. Bell scowled and shook his head. Wounded men groaned as healers and mages did their best to help them. A cricket too stupid to realize how cold it was let out a few lethargic chirps. An owl hooted. A unicorn whickered. Soldiers snored.

Only a few hitching steps to the scryers’ pavilion. A guard outside held the tent flap wide so Bell could go in. He could have done without the courtesy.

There was the king’s face, in one of the crystal balls. The others were mercifully dark. Bell wished this one would have been, too. As usual, folding himself so his fundament came down on a stool was an adventure, but he managed. “Your Majesty,” he said, nodding to the image in the crystal ball.

“Lieutenant General.” King Geoffrey favored him with a single curt nod. Geoffrey had a lean, almost ascetic countenance, with burning eyes, a long, thin blade of a nose, and a disconcerting beard: it grew under his chin but not on the front of it. Bell, who sported a particularly luxuriant growth of face foliage, had never understood why his sovereign chose to trim his whiskers that way.

“How may I serve you, your Majesty?” Bell asked.

“Tell me how things stand in the east,” the king replied. “Have you won the victory over the southrons our cause so badly needs?”

“Well… no. Not yet,” Bell said, looking down at the dirt under his foot.

King Geoffrey frowned. He looked unhappy even at his most cheerful. When he was unhappy, a man could watch the end of the world on his face. And he’d been a soldier, so he knew what questions to ask to determine the exact situation. “Tell me your present position,” he said crisply.

“We are… about fourteen miles north of Ramblerton,” Lieutenant General Bell replied, wishing he had the nerve to come right out and lie to his sovereign.

Geoffrey’s eyebrows leaped like startled stags. “ Fourteen miles!” he burst out. “Did I hear you correctly, Lieutenant General?” He sounded as if he hoped he hadn’t-not for his own sake, but for Bell’s.

But he had. “Yes, your Majesty,” the commanding general said unhappily.

“What happened ?” King Geoffrey demanded. “You lost… twelve miles of ground today?”

“More like ten miles,” Bell said. “We lost a couple of miles in yesterday’s fighting, but we took a strong defensive position at the end of it.”

Geoffrey rolled his eyes. The motion, shown in perfect miniature inside the crystal ball, seemed even more painfully scornful than it would have face to face. “Oh, yes, Lieutenant General, it must have been a wonderfully strong defensive position.” His sarcasm flayed. “By the Thunderer’s thumbs, you probably would have run all the way up to Dothan by now if the gods-damned southrons had forced you out of a weak position.”

Bell hung his head. “We held their footsoldiers-most of them, anyhow-for quite a while,” he said. “But Hard-Riding Jimmy’s unicorn-riders got into our rear with their quick-shooting crossbows, and… and… and we broke.” There. He’d said it. He waited for the King to do or say whatever he would.

“You… broke.” Geoffrey’s voice was eerily flat.

“Yes, your Majesty. We were assailed from front, rear, and flank by an army more than twice our size. We fought hard, we fought bravely, for a very long time. But in the end… In the end, we couldn’t take the pounding any more. The men did what men will do: they tried to save themselves.”

“Assailed from front, rear, and flank by an army more than twice your size,” King Geoffrey echoed, still in that tone that showed nothing of what he was thinking. “And how, pray tell, did you manage to put the Army of Franklin in such an enviable strategic position?”

“Your Majesty!” Bell said reproachfully.

“Answer me, gods damn you!” Geoffrey screamed, loud enough to make every scryer in the tent whip his head toward the crystal ball from which that anguished cry had come. “You went south to whip Avram’s men, not to… to throw your own army down the latrine.”

“This result is not what I intended, your Majesty.”

“A man who walks in front of a runaway unicorn doesn’t intend to get gored, either, which does him no good at all,” King Geoffrey ground out. “My army, Lieutenant General Bell! Give me back my army!”

“I would like nothing better, your Majesty,” Bell whispered.

“How many men have you got left?” the king asked. “Any at all? Or is it just you and some gods-damned scryer wandering in the dark?”

“No, sir. Not just me,” Bell said with such dignity as he could muster. “After the… the initial collapse” — he had to keep hesitating- “we retired in… fairly good order. We could fight again tomorrow if we had to.” We’d get slaughtered, but we could fight .

By the way King Geoffrey’s eyebrows twitched, he was thinking the same thing. But he didn’t say anything about that. What he did say was, “You did not answer my question, Lieutenant General. How many men have you got left?”

“Sir, I have not tried to make a count,” Bell answered. “My best guess would be about half of those who went into today’s fight.”

“ Half?” Geoffrey yelped painfully. “That’s even worse than I thought, and I thought I’d thought things were as bad as they could be.” Now he paused, perhaps wondering whether he’d said what he meant to say. Apparently deciding he had, he continued, “What happened to the rest of them? Shot? Speared?”

“Not… not all, your Majesty,” Bell said; the king seemed intent on embarrassing him every way he could. “Some unknown but, I fear, fairly large number of men were captured by Doubting George’s footsoldiers and unicorn-riders.”

“And probably glad to come out of it alive,” Geoffrey commented, yet more acid in his voice. “What do you aim to do now? Whatever it is, do you think it will matter? Or will the southrons smash you to pieces, come what may?”

“I don’t think so, your Majesty,” Bell said. “We still can resist.” King Geoffrey hadn’t asked him how many engines he’d lost. That was likely just as well. If the king heard that Doubting George’s men had captured more than fifty, he’d burst like a firepot, except with even more heat. And Bell couldn’t blame him, however much he wanted to. He almost blamed himself-almost, but not quite. The disaster had to be someone else’s fault. Didn’t it?

Had General Guildenstern won a victory, he would have got drunk to celebrate. John the Lister was sure of it. He saw Doubting George drunk, too, but drunk on triumph rather than spirits.

“I told you so,” George cackled. “Gods damn it, I told you so. I told you, and I told Marshal Bart, too. And do you know what else? I was right , that’s what else. We didn’t just lick ’em. We fornicating wrecked ’em.”