Sentry Peak (15 page)

“They must,” Gremio said. “Otherwise, how could such a dunderhead have become a general in the first place?”

“Now, Lieutenant,” Ormerod said, deliciously scandalized. “Do have a care what you say. Isn’t that libel?”

“Of course not,” Gremio replied with a barrister’s certainty. “Slander, yes. Libel, no. I wouldn’t waste time libeling Leonidas, anyhow—except for hymn books, there’s no proof he can read.”

Something buggy bit Ormerod. He swatted at it. Whatever it was, Gremio had proved he owned a sharper tongue than it did.

Sergeant Tybalt came out from behind a tree. He was buttoning his fly, which gave more than a hint of why he’d gone back there in the first place. Seeing Ormerod, he asked, “Sir, even if we do find the stinking southrons in this miserable country, how in the names of all the gods are we supposed to fight them hereabouts?”

“As best we can, Sergeant,” Ormerod answered. “As best we can.”

Tybalt looked dissatisfied. Ormerod didn’t blame him, but he had no better answer to give. Battles, proper battles, were usually fought in broad plains that gave both sides room to maneuver and to see farther than a few feet. But there were no broad plains here in this miserable country—Tybalt had had the right word for it—by the River of Death, only endless woods, mostly pine, some oak, punctuated by occasional farms and their mean little fields.

Colonel Florizel said, “Our ancestors beat back the blonds and broke them to servitude in country like this. If they could do it, we can do it, too.”

Lieutenant Gremio looked about to say something, too. Before he could, Ormerod contrived to kick him in the ankle. Gremio let out an indignant yelp. Ormerod looked as innocent as he could, which wasn’t very. Knowing Gremio, he had a pretty good idea of what the lieutenant would have said: something that exposed all the historical inaccuracies in Florizel’s remark.

“There’s a time and a place for everything, by the gods,” Ormerod muttered. Maybe Gremio heard him, maybe he didn’t. Ormerod wasn’t going to worry either way. Gremio kept quiet, and Ormerod did worry about that. Contradicting Earl Florizel at a feast where the audience was nobles and wealthy commoners was one thing. Contradicting Colonel Florizel, the regimental commander, and disheartening the sergeant the colonel had been encouraging was something else again. Perhaps because he was an aggressive barrister, Gremio had trouble grasping the distinction.

Before Ormerod could explain it to the lieutenant—not that Gremio, who was convinced he knew it all, would have been likely to listen—a sharp challenge rang out ahead: “Who goes there?”

“Hold up!” Ormerod called to the rest of his company. Then he pitched his voice to carry: “Who are you?”

“Third company, twenty-sixth regiment from New Eborac,” came the reply. “The sign is
Avram
. Give the countersign, or be known for a traitor and an enemy.”

Rage ripped through Ormerod. “The countersign is,
Die you son of a bitch!
” he shouted, and yanked his sword from its scabbard. “Come on, boys!” he yelled to his own company. “We’ve found some of the southrons, anyway.”

A crossbow quarrel hissed past his head and buried itself in a pine behind him. More than half its length had vanished. It would have done worse yet had it pierced him. His leg twinged. Yes, he knew what a bolt could do when it tore through flesh.

His men fought the way their ancestors had when attacked by blonds: they scurried behind trees and started shooting from in back of them. In country like this, how else could anyone fight? Captain Ormerod would have loved to come up with a different answer, a better answer, but none occurred to him.

“Geoffrey!” he shouted as he hurried toward a tree, too. He might brandish that sword, but how much good did it do him with no foeman within reach of his steel? “Geoffrey and provincial prerogative!” That was the slogan the northern provinces used to deny that Avram had the authority to make them do anything they didn’t care to do—such as freeing serfs from their ties to the land—unless their nobles consented.

“King Avram!” the southrons shouted back. “King Avram, and to the seven hells with provincial prerogative!” Other cries rose, too, wordless cries of pain as crossbow quarrels from both sides began finding targets.

A soldier near Ormerod went down. His feet drummed and thumped on the pine needles, but he wouldn’t be getting up again, not with a bolt between the eyes. Ormerod looked again at the sword in his hand. If the enemy charged, it would do him some good. Meanwhile . . . Meanwhile, he scrambled over and scooped up the shot man’s crossbow and pulled the sheaf of bolts off his belt. By the time he got back to his own tree, the soldier had realized he was dead and stopped kicking.

Ormerod set a quarrel in the crossbow’s groove, yanked back on the bow to cock it, and steadied his finger on the trigger. Sticking some part of his head out to look for a target gave him a certain amount of pause—supposed one of the gray-clad southrons was waiting for him to do exactly that? He would kick mindlessly for a few heartbeats and then stop, too.

This is your duty to King Geoffrey
, he told himself, and made himself do what was required. A quarrel slammed into the tree trunk a couple of inches from his head. He jerked back, cold sweat springing out on his brow. When he peered out again, it was from much lower down.

He shot at an enemy soldier. The fellow didn’t shriek, so he supposed he missed. Cursing under his breath, he loaded and cocked the crossbow as fast as he could. He wished he were ambidextrous, so he could have put the bow to his left shoulder and pulled the trigger with his left hand. That would have let him look out from behind the tree on the side enemy sharpshooters didn’t expect.

But no such luck. Like most men, he was doomed to predictability. “Forward!” he called to his men—at the same time as an officer on the other side was also shouting, “Forward!”

Ormerod’s men had learned in a hard, bloody school. They knew how to advance through woods. Some of them shot at the enemy and made him keep his head down while others actually moved forward. Then the two groups traded roles, the ones who had been shooting now leapfrogging past the men who, in new cover of their own, kept the southrons busy.

Against raw enemy troops, such tactics were almost bound to succeed. But the third company of the Twenty-Sixth New Eborac proved to consist of veteran soldiers who fought the same way as the men from Palmetto Province whom Ormerod commanded. The southrons offered his soldiers few targets as they worked their way forward—only the occasional glimpse of a gray tunic or a dark head or, now and again, a blond one.

Blond heads . . . When Ormerod realized what that meant, he let out a great, full-throated bellow of rage. “They’ve got runaways fighting for ’em, the bastards!” he shouted when he finally found words. “Now we really have to make them pay!”

He wanted to throw aside the dead man’s crossbow and charge the enemy swinging his sword, as if he were a conqueror from the heroic days not long after the Detinans first crossed the Western Ocean and cast down the kingdoms the yellow-haired men had made hereabouts. But the blonds who fought for King Avram didn’t lumber around in ass-drawn chariots and wield cumbersome bronze-headed axes. Their weapons were as good as his, and they had real Detinans alongside to help stiffen them if they faltered. The sword stayed in Ormerod’s scabbard.

As he ran forward, he wondered if any of those blonds there on the other side had escaped from his estate.
Maybe we’d do better coming after them with whips, to make them remember they serve us
, he thought. Then another crossbow quarrel snarled past him. He shook his head. The blonds had been serfs, but some of them were soldiers now.

“Avram!” they shouted. He recognized their accent—not so very different from his own, not much like the clipped tones most proper southrons used. “King Avram! Avram and freedom!”

“Avram and ass piss!” Ormerod yelled back.
Freedom
, he thought.
As if the serfs deserve it. Not likely. We made Detina what it is by conquering them. What would it be if we let them pretend they were as good as we are?
He didn’t know what it would be. He did know it wouldn’t be any place where he cared to live. He grimaced. Without serfs to work his fields and harvest the indigo, it wouldn’t even be any place where he could make a living.

“Forward!” the southron officer shouted again.

“Forward!” Captain Ormerod echoed. As if from far away, he heard other company commanders from Colonel Florizel’s regiment shouting the same thing, and other southrons as well. He paid them only scant attention. They weren’t directly affecting him, and so he didn’t worry about them. He had plenty to worry about right here—in these woods, he couldn’t tell what most of his own company was doing, let alone anyone else’s.

He ran for a pine up ahead. Somebody else was running for it, too—somebody in a gray tunic and pantaloons. Out came the sword he’d resheathed not long before. He set the crossbow down on the ground. Once he settled with the foe, he would pick it up again.

Had the enemy soldier had a bolt in the groove of his own crossbow, Ormerod might not have had such a good time of it. But the fellow’s crossbow was also empty. He threw it aside and yanked out his own shortsword to defend himself against Ormerod’s onslaught.

Steel belled on steel. Sparks flew. Ormerod’s lips skinned back from his teeth in a fierce grin. He had a proper blade, and knew what to do with it. The southron’s sword was intended for use only after all else failed. By the way the fellow held it, he hadn’t had to use it very often up till now.

“Ha!” Ormerod said. The slash would have split the southron’s skull, but the enemy trooper jerked his head aside at the last instant. The blade hacked off most of his left ear. Howling, dripping blood, he turned and fled, throwing aside the shortsword so he could flee the faster.

Ormerod took two steps after him, then checked himself. Any farther and he risked running into the gods only knew how many southrons. He snatched up his crossbow again, slid a bolt into the groove, and cocked the piece.

“Forward!” the southron captain, or whatever he was, shouted again. His voice didn’t sound as if it came from very far away. Ormerod froze into a hunter’s crouch, as he might have done going after tiger or basilisk in the swampy near-jungle of the woods of Palmetto Province. The enemy officer went on, “We can lick these bastards—they aren’t very tough.”

“No, eh?” But Ormerod’s lips shaped the words without the slightest betraying sound. Sure enough, there stood the southron, behind an oak not fifty yards away. Ormerod brought the crossbow to his shoulder. He pulled the trigger. The bowstring thrummed. The stock kicked against him.

And the enemy captain clutched at his ribcage and slowly crumpled to the ground. “Take that, you filthy, fornicating robber!” Ormerod yowled. “King Geoffrey and victory!”

The gray-clad soldiers cried out in dismay as their leader fell. But they had no quit in them. “Come on!” someone else—a lieutenant? a sergeant?—yelled. “We can still whip these bastards!” And, instead of falling back as Ormerod had hoped, the southrons surged forward more fiercely than before.

Some of them had their shortswords out, as did some of Ormerod’s men. Usually, one side or the other gave way in a fight like this. That didn’t happen here. Both Ormerod’s troopers and the southrons wanted to get their hands on their foes, and both kept coming despite everything their foes could do to them. It wasn’t an enormous fight, but it was as fierce as any Ormerod had seen.

A big blond fellow swinging his shortsword rushed straight at Ormerod, yelling, “King Avram and freedom!” at the top of his lungs. His slash would have taken off Ormerod’s head had it connected.

It didn’t. Ormerod parried and thrust. The blond—surely an escaped serf by his accent—beat the blade aside. “King Geoffrey!” Ormerod shouted. Then he stopped and stared—and almost got killed because of it. His next word was a startled bleat: “Rollant?”

“Baron Ormerod?” Rollant’s astonishment almost got him killed. For a quarter of a heartbeat, he started to duck his head and bow, as he’d been trained to do since boyhood when the baron went by. Had he finished the motion, Ormerod would have spitted him as if he were to go over the fire.

He’d dreamt of facing his old liege lord in battle, dreamt of killing him in any number of slow and nasty ways. He’d been sure Ormerod would take service with false King Geoffrey, just as he’d taken service with Avram, who was not only the rightful king but also the righteous king.

Reality proved vastly different from his dreams, as it had a way of doing. He’d never dreamt Ormerod would swing a long sword, while he had only a short one. He’d known the baron could handle a blade. In his dreams, it hadn’t mattered. Now . . . Now he backpedaled. However hateful his liege lord was to him, Ormerod was also a better swordsman with a better sword. And he looked as if he wanted to kill Rollant at least as much as Rollant wanted to kill him.

“Run away from me, will you, you son of a bitch!” he shouted, and thrust at Rollant’s face. Rollant had no idea how he managed to beat the northern noble’s blade aside, but he did. Then he sprang backwards, to put a tree between them.

Cheers from the north said more traitors were coming in. Rollant darted back to another tree. Ormerod was bellowing orders. Rollant couldn’t make out the words, but he knew the tone.
I’d better
, he thought.
He’s given me enough orders. He gave me one order too many, by the gods, and I’ll never take another one from him again
.

While the baron—the enemy officer—directed his company, Rollant put more trees between them. No, the meeting hadn’t gone as he’d dreamt. He counted himself lucky that it hadn’t gone as Ormerod was likely to have dreamt.

“Back! We have to fall back!” That was Sergeant Joram. Captain Cephas was down—some traitor had put a crossbow bolt between his ribs. Rollant didn’t know what had happened to the company’s two lieutenants. He didn’t care that much, either. As far as he was concerned, neither Benj nor Griff made much of an officer: Joram was worth both of them and then some.