Harry Turtledove - Marching Through Peachtree

Absalom the Bear came back to him in something of a temper. “Sir, may I withdraw the men now? If I keep sending them forward for long enough, the traitors will kill every last one of them, and then where will we be?”

“In the front rank, I assume,” George said mildly. His wing commander gaped at him. He went on, “No, you may not withdraw them, Brigadier. As you know, their purpose is not to break through but to distract.”

“It had better not be to break through.” Absalom’s voice was hot. “We haven’t a prayer of breaking through, any more than we did at-” He hesitated.

“At Proselytizers’ Rise, you were going to say?” Doubting George smiled.

Absalom the Bear didn’t. He looked positively bedeviled by bees. “That was Thraxton the Braggart’s magic going wrong. Otherwise, we’d have been battered there, too.”

As if to prove him right, northern wizards struck at the men in gray trying to get into the Vulture’s Nest. Their lightnings-most of their spells-were more potent than those of the southrons. Their magecraft been honed in keeping their blond serfs afraid and subjected. In the south, spells went into manufactories, and weren’t so readily adaptable to war.

Runners brought back reports of how the fight was going at the Dog’s Path. As far as Doubting George was concerned, they hardly needed to have come: the southrons had no more luck breaking through Joseph the Gamecock’s defenses there than at the Vulture’s Nest. He hadn’t expected better news, but he had hoped for it. Not all hopes were realized.

Wounded men came back past him in a steady stream. Some were walking, clutching wounded arms or roughly bandaged about the head. Others lay on litters: some still and silent, others writhing and screaming out their torment to the world at large. The hot iron stink of blood grew stronger as the day wore on, so that the battlefield took on the reek of a vast outdoor butcher’s shop-which, in a manner of speaking, it was.

The setting sun shone red as blood, too. When at last it touched the western horizon, George spoke again to the trumpeters: “Sound the recall. We’ve done everything we can do today.” As the notes that surely must have relieved his army rang out, he called for a messenger. When the runner trotted up to him, he said, “Go ask General Hesmucet if what we’ve done here today has been worth it.” Saluting, the young man dashed off.

He returned half an hour later, with twilight deepening. Saluting again, he said, “The commanding general’s compliments, sir, and he says this attack did just what it was supposed to do.”

“Good,” Doubting George said. “Considering what we paid, I’d hate to see it wasted.”

Joseph the Gamecock was about as happy as a man of his dour temperament could be. “We held them,” he said to anyone who would listen, as twilight deepened around him. “By all the gods, we held them!” He was as bubbly as if he’d been drinking sparkling wine.

His good mood even survived the arrival of a runner who said, “Sir, the scryers need to see you right away.”

“I’m coming,” Joseph replied. “The way I feel right now, I’d come even if it were King Geoffrey looking at me out of the crystal ball.” Geoffrey was his sovereign. He gave the king all due obedience. That didn’t keep him from thinking his Majesty had not a clue concealed anywhere about his person when it came to running a war.

But it wasn’t Geoffrey’s face in the crystal ball. It was one of Roast-Beef William’s brigadiers, an officer called Husham Forkbeard, who had charge of the northern garrison up in Caesar. Even in an outstandingly shaggy army, Husham’s whiskers were exceptional. At the moment, so was his alarmed expression. “Sir, you’ve got to help me!” he exclaimed the moment he saw Joseph the Gamecock.

“What’s wrong?” demanded the commander of the Army of Franklin.

“I’ll tell you what’s wrong, sir,” Husham replied. “What’s wrong is, we’ve got a whole great swarm of southrons pouring through Viper River Gap and coming straight for Caesar, that’s what.”

“I am an idiot,” Joseph said softly.

“Sir?” Husham Forkbeard asked.

“Never mind,” Joseph told him, which did not stop the commanding general from bitterly reproaching himself. Of course General Hesmucet wasn’t so stupid as to think he could break through at the Vulture’s Nest or by the Dog’s Path. He’d made a big, noisy demonstration there to keep the Army of Franklin in its position, and then swung part of his own enormous force north on a flanking maneuver-and it was liable to work. “You have to hold him,” Joseph said urgently. “You have to. If he takes Caesar, he’s got the glideway line between us and Marthasville. We can’t afford that.”

The understatement there would do till somebody came up with a bigger one. Joseph the Gamecock suspected that would take a while. If he couldn’t get supplies up from Marthasville, the only question was whether the Army of Franklin ran out of crossbow bolts before or after it started starving. Joseph didn’t care to make the experiment.

He didn’t intend to make the experiment, either. Husham Forkbeard asked, “What am I going to do, sir?”

All at once, everything became glassy clear for Joseph. “You are going to hold on till the end of tomorrow afternoon,” he replied. “You are going to hold on at any cost and at any hazard, but you are going to hold on. Do you understand me, Brigadier?”

“Yes, sir. I understand you fine,” Husham replied. “The only thing is, I don’t know if we can do it.”

“You will do it,” Joseph said coldly. “It is not a matter of choice. It is obligatory. If you run short of firepots and quarrels, you will receive the enemy with pikes and shortswords. Whatever happens, however, you will not retreat from Caesar and you will not yield the glideway line. You are to fight to the last man. If your soldiers are all slain, their ghosts are to continue the struggle.”

“Heh,” Husham said nervously. Then he saw that Joseph the Gamecock was not laughing-was, in fact, deadly serious. Husham nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Stout fellow,” Joseph said. “I will get reinforcements to you directly. You hang on till they arrive, that’s all.” He made it sound simple. He wished it were simple. He knew the problems involved in holding off a substantially larger force. He’d had to do it in Parthenia, defending Nonesuch against the massive southron attack up the Henry River.

And if I hadn’t been wounded there, the Army of Southern Parthenia would still be mine, and no one, very possibly, would ever have heard anything much of Duke Edward of Arlington . Joseph the Gamecock shrugged. He couldn’t do anything about that, not now. No one could do anything about that now, not even the gods. Dealing with the southron attack at Caesar was going to be trouble enough, and that was within the theoretical range of things possible.

“Hang on,” he told Husham Forkbeard once more. Then he nodded to his scryer. The fellow broke the mystical connection between his crystal ball and the one up in Caesar. Husham’s shaggy face vanished. Joseph the Gamecock hurried out of the tent, shouting for runners.

He sent one man off to order two brigades north right away. The others summoned his wing commanders to him as fast as they could get there. Roast-Beef William arrived first, and in a jubilant mood. “The way the men fought today goes a long way towards redeeming their sorry performance at Proselytizers’ Rise,” he said.

Leonidas the Priest came next. “The Lion God favored our arms with victory today,” he declared.

“I presume he told you afterwards that he’d done it?” Joseph murmured. The hierophant of the Lion God gave him a wounded look, but did not reply.