Harry Turtledove - Advance and Retreat

“Come on, boys,” Ned called. “We’ll hang a few more bruises on those southron bastards, and after a while they’ll give up and go home. We can do it. We always have. What’s one more time?”

A few of the unicorn-riders smiled and perked up. Most of them, though, kept that… trampled look they’d been wearing. When they compared what they heard to what they saw, they realized the two didn’t match. And what they saw, what everyone in the east who followed King Geoffrey couldn’t help seeing, was a great tide of disaster rising up to roll over them and drown them.

Captain Watson rode up to Ned. The young officer in charge of his siege engines said, “Sir, the catapults are about played out. We’ve done so much shooting with ’em, the sinew skeins are stretched to death. Our range is down, and our accuracy is worse. Where can we get more sinew?”

“Hamstring some southrons,” Ned answered.

Watson started to chuckle, but then broke off, as if unsure whether Ned was kidding. Ned wasn’t sure he was kidding, either. But he didn’t contradict when Watson said, “I can’t do that, sir.”

“Well, to the hells with me if I know where you’ll come up with any sinew,” Ned said. “Sinners, yes-sinners we’ve got swarms of. But sinew?” He shook his head. “What else can you use?”

“Next best thing is hair: long, coarse hair,” Watson answered.

“Then shave the unicorns,” Ned said at once. “Cut off their manes, trim their tails, do whatever you need to do. Start with my beast. Can troopers twist hair into skeins?”

“Uh, yes, sir. I’d think so,” Watson said dazedly. “It’s not hard to do, once you know how.”

“All right. Get started on it, then. Show ’em what they need to do. Don’t waste any time,” Ned said. “We’re going to need those engines-you can bet on that.”

Captain Watson nodded. “Oh, yes, sir. I know. I do believe I would have come up with that notion myself, but I know I wouldn’t have done it so fast.” He laughed. “After all, I didn’t do it so fast, did I?”

“Never mind,” Ned of the Forest said. “Just get on with it. Where it comes from doesn’t matter, long as you can make it work.”

“Do you know, sir, there are men-more than a few of them, too-who would want a promotion for coming up with an idea like that,” Watson said. “You don’t even seem to care.”

“I don’t, much,” Ned said. “Nobody’s going to promote me now. I’m already a lieutenant general, and King Geoffrey isn’t going to fancy up my epaulets any more. Besides, the mess we’re in now, the idea counts more than whoever had it.”

Some of his troopers didn’t care for the scheme at all. It wasn’t that they minded twisting unicorn hair into skeins for the catapults and repeating crossbows; they didn’t. But they hated the way the unicorns looked once shorn of shaggy manes and tails. In piteous tones, one of them said, “Lord Ned, those gods-damned southrons’re going to laugh at us when they see us riding such sorry beasts.”

“Too bad,” Ned answered heartlessly. “If they do laugh, Watson’ll shoot ’em out of the saddle with the hair he’s taken. That counts for more.”

Because he was who he was, he bullied them into going along with him with a minimum of fuss and feathers. That Captain Watson had trimmed his unicorn first helped. And the unicorn did look sorry after it was trimmed: more like an overgrown white rat with a horn on its nose than one of the beautiful, noble beasts that added a touch of style and old-time glory to modern battlefields, most of which, taken all in all, were anything but glorious. But if their leader was willing to go into a fight on a unicorn that looked like that, the troopers couldn’t very well cavil.

And Ned, for his part, didn’t care what his mount looked like. He felt none of what northern officers of higher blood called “the romance of the unicorn.” As far as he was concerned, a unicorn was for getting from one place to another faster than he could walk or run. He’d had plenty of mounts killed under him. If this one, shorn or not, lasted to the end of the war, he would be astonished.

Watson’s engine crews spent the wee small hours threading the roughly made skeins of unicorn hair into the engines. Their thumping and banging and clattering kept Ned awake. Those weren’t the usual noises he heard in the field, and they bothered him on account of that.

He poured honey into a cup of nasty tea the next morning, trying to make it palatable. It stayed nasty, but at least was sweeter. There not ten feet away stood Captain Watson doing the same thing. “Well, Captain?” Ned called.

“Pretty well, sir,” Watson answered, sipping from his tin cup and making an unhappy face. “How about you?”

“Hells with me,” Ned said. “How are the engines?”

“In working order,” Watson said. “Better than they were before we reskeined ’em. Thank you, sir.”

“Never mind me,” Ned told him. “Long as we can give the southrons grief.”

They got a fair amount of grief themselves later that morning, beating back an attack from some of Hard-Riding Jimmy’s troopers. The two disastrous days of fighting in front of Ramblerton had made Ned of the Forest despise the southron unicorn-riders. They would have made any normal man fear those troopers, but Ned reserved fear for the gods, and doled it out sparingly even to them.

The southrons had too many men and could put too many bolts in the air to make it any kind of fair fight. That being so, Ned didn’t try to make it one, either. Instead, he used a feigned retreat to lead the eager southrons-who did jeer at his men’s funny-looking unicorns-straight up to Captain Watson’s engines, which sat cunningly concealed at the edge of a thicket.

Watson had been right-the engines worked the way they were supposed to. A barrage of firepots and stones greeted the southrons. So did the nasty, mechanical clack-clack-clack of the repeating crossbows. Southrons tumbled out of the saddle. Unicorns crashed to the ground as if they’d run headlong into a wall. The survivors galloped away from the trap a lot faster than they’d galloped towards it.

“There’s a proper job of licking them,” Watson said, beaming.

Colonel Biffle remained gloomy. “They’ll be back, the stinking sons of bitches.”

“Oh, yes. They’ll be back,” Ned of the Forest agreed. “But they won’t be back for a while. The time they spend figuring out how they stuck their peckers in the meat grinder, our footsoldiers can use to get away. That’s what the game we’re playing is all about right now.”

“They won’t be so easy to trick next time,” Biffle said.

That was also true, without a doubt. Hard-Riding Jimmy had shown himself to be no fool. But Ned said, “Other side of the copper is, from now on they’ll look before they leap. That’ll slow them down. We want them slow. We don’t want ’em charging all over the landscape.”

Captain Watson nodded. He understood. Colonel Biffle had a harder time. He still wanted to beat the southrons here, even if he knew how unlikely that was to change the course of the war. Ned had stopped worrying about beating them, at least in the sense he would have used for the word before setting out on this campaign. Delaying them counted as a victory, for it let the battered fragments of the Army of Franklin put more distance between themselves and Doubting George’s disgustingly numerous, revoltingly well-fed, and alarmingly well-armed soldiers.

It isn’t fair, Ned thought. It isn’t even close to fair. If we had that many men and could give them the food and gear they need…

He laughed, though it wasn’t really funny. If the north could have raised and supported armies like that, of course it would have broken away from King Avram’s rule. But it couldn’t. It couldn’t come close. And nobody had ever said war was the least bit fair, Ned included. He’d used every trick he knew, and invented several fresh tricks on the spur of the moment. Expecting the southrons not to use their advantages of wealth and manpower was like wishing for the moon. You could do it, but that didn’t mean you’d get what you wished for.