Sentry Peak (42 page)

Hesmucet managed a smile of sorts. “Well, it was our left a little while ago. If that’s not progress, I don’t know what is.” He knew perfectly well it wasn’t progress, or anything like progress. But if he didn’t admit that to anyone else, he didn’t have to admit it to himself, either.

Lightning bolts smashed down out of the clear sky. They didn’t strike the men in gray struggling to advance, but they came too close to make Hesmucet happy. The runner said, “Where the hells are
our
wizards—uh, sir?”

“That’s a good question.” Hesmucet raised his voice to a shout: “Alva! Where have you gone and got to, Alva?”

“Here, sir!” The young mage came running up. “What do you require, sir?”

“Are you good for anything besides fogs and mists?” Hesmucet asked. “These northern whoresons are giving our boys a hard time. I want you to do something about that, gods damn it. Show me what you can manage.”

“I’ll do my best,” Alva said. “I wish I could have had a little more notice so I could have prepared more effects, but—”

“But nothing,” Hesmucet said. “You’re a mage who knew he was going to be in the middle of a battle. How much fornicating preparation do you need?”

“I don’t need any fornicating preparation, sir,” Alva answered with a grin. “All I need there is a friendly girl.”

That stopped Hesmucet in his tracks, as surely as Doubting George’s men had stopped the traitors on Merkle’s Hill. Before Hesmucet could start up again, Alva began to incant. Hesmucet stared as the Lion God appeared in the sky over the battlefield. The god roared anger down at the northerners. Then, walking on air, his great tail lashing across a quarter of the sky, he stalked toward the place where the northern mages on Funnel Hill were likeliest to be standing.

“You don’t do things by halves, do you?” Hesmucet knew he sounded shaken, but couldn’t help it.

“I try not to, sir,” Alva answered calmly. “Anything worth doing is worth overdoing, or that’s what people say.”

“Is it? Do they?” Hesmucet rallied. “Leonidas the Priest would not approve of you at all, young fellow.” Alva laughed the clear, boyish laugh of someone feeling his full power for the first time. It occurred to Hesmucet to wonder just
how
great that power was. “Ah . . . Alva . . . That isn’t
really
the Lion God up there, is it?”

“Just a simulacrum,” the young mage said. “Nothing to worry about—and the real Lion God probably won’t even notice. From everything I’ve been able to find out, the gods pay a lot less attention to what goes on down here on earth than most people think. You almost wonder if it’s worth your while believing in them.”

“No, I don’t,” Hesmucet said. “What I wonder is what the younger generation is coming to. If we don’t believe in the gods, our magic will fail, and then where would we be?”

“We’d manage.” Alva sounded perfectly confident. “I think we could get along just fine with nothing but mechanical devices.”

“Not bloody likely!” Hesmucet exclaimed. “How would you replace a firepot or a glideway, for instance?”

“I don’t know, not off the top of my head,” Alva admitted, “but I’d bet we could do it if we set our minds to trying.”

“Easy enough for you to say when you haven’t got anything riding on it,” Hesmucet told him. “Next thing you know, you’ll say you could make light without fire or magic, or else that you could capture sounds out of the air without a crystal ball.”

“It might be interesting to try,” Alva said in thoughtful tones.

Hesmucet cursed under his breath. He’d succeeded in distracting the mage, which was the last thing he needed. The image of the Lion God above the enemy was fading, fraying. “You might want to fix that up,” he suggested.

“No, no point to it,” Alva said. “They’ve figured out it’s not real. I’ll let their mages tear at it for a while. As long as they’re doing that, they won’t make any mischief of their own. I’ll come up with something else in the meantime.”

Make them respond—don’t respond to what they’re up to
, Hesmucet thought. General Bart had said the same thing.

“You might make a general one day,” Hesmucet told Alva.

“Not likely.” The young mage didn’t try to hide his annoyance. “The north treats its wizards much better than we do.”

“You were the one who pointed out there are reasons for that,” Hesmucet said. “Maybe you would have done better to stay with the mechanic arts.”

“Maybe I would have,” Alva said. “But it’s rather too late to worry about that now, wouldn’t you say? I’ve got work to do, even if it’s work that won’t ever get me fancy epaulets.”

What sort of work he had in mind became evident in short order, for lightning bolts crashed down onto King Geoffrey’s men on Funnel Hill from out of the clear sky. Unlike the manifestation of the Lion God that had appeared a few minutes before, the lightnings were unquestionably real.

When Hesmucet remarked on that, Alva nodded and smiled as if he were a clever child. “That’s the idea, sir. You mix the real and the illusions together till nobody on the other side is sure which is which. Then the enemy has to test everything, and you can give him some nasty surprises.”

“You’re a menace, do you know that?” Hesmucet said. “All I can tell you is, I’m gods-damned glad you’re on our side. You’d be worth as much to the traitors as Count Thraxton, I think.”

He meant it as a compliment. Alva took it as an insult. “That old foof? He’s not so much of a much.”

“He’s very strong,” Hesmucet said. “If you don’t believe me, go ask General Guildenstern. But you’ll have to go a long way to ask him, because he’ll be sent off to fight the wild blonds out on the steppes if he’s lucky enough to stay in the army. Thraxton wrecked his career, and the bastard came within an eyelash of wrecking his whole army. If Doubting George hadn’t held on, there at Merkle’s Hill . . .”

When Alva answered, Hesmucet doubted his words had anything to do with anything: “Sir, have you ever seen a rhinoceros?”

“Yes, a time or two, in zoological parks,” Hesmucet said, too surprised not to give back the truth. “So what?”

“A rhinoceros is a great big strong beast with a pointed horn, right?” Alva said, and Hesmucet had to nod. The young mage went on, “And most of the time, it isn’t dangerous at all, because it can’t see past its own ears. No matter how strong it is, it hasn’t got any brains to speak of, either. Most of the time, it’ll charge in the wrong direction. Every once in a while, it’ll squash something flat, but not very often. That’s Thraxton, sir. That isn’t me.”

“No, I can see that,” Hesmucet said, doing his best not to laugh out loud. “You’re practicing to be a viper.”

“That I like,” Alva said. “That suits me fine. I’ll stay by the edge of the trail and bite from ambush—and what I bite will die.”

“Splendid.” Hesmucet pointed toward the top of Funnel Hill. “What do you say to biting some more of those traitors? We may take the hill yet.” By now, though, the sun was sinking toward the western horizon. Even if his men did take Funnel Hill—which struck him as unlikely, despite his bold words—they wouldn’t be able to turn and move on Proselytizers’ Rise from the flank, which had been the point of the attack in the first place.

Maybe Alva saw the same thing. Maybe not—he wasn’t a general, only a kid with more brains than he knew what to do with. He said, “I’ll try my best, sir.”

His best proved hair-raisingly good, even for Lieutenant General Hesmucet, who was, as he’d said, on the same side. Flames suddenly sprang into being all along the northerners’ lines, as if one of the hotter hells had decided to take up residence on earth for a while.
They can’t be real . . . can they?
Hesmucet thought.

He had to nerve himself before asking Alva. Partly, that was not wanting to distract the sorcerer. Partly, it was . . . Hesmucet would have hesitated to call it fear, but he would have hesitated to call it anything else, either.

When at last he did put the question to the mage, Alva smiled an unpleasant smile. “If you have trouble telling, sir, think how much more trouble the traitors must have. Often enough, an illusion you can’t tell from the real thing is as good as the real thing.”

Hesmucet nodded. He’d heard the like from other sorcerers, too. But he said, “I want a straight answer, if you don’t mind.”

“And if I do?” But Alva seemed to think twice about the wisdom of twitting a fierce-faced lieutenant general. “Well, sir, to tell you the truth, most of it’s illusion. Most, but not quite all. Some of the traitors up there on the hillside are really roasting, and that makes them all thoughtful.”

“I can see how it would,” Hesmucet said. “It’d make
me
thoughtful, that’s for gods-damned sure. Now—what can they do about it?”

“Cook,” Alva said happily. Hesmucet laughed.

But Thraxton the Braggart wasn’t the only mage the northerners had. Before long, the flames faded. Hesmucet wondered how many men they’d seared. Not enough for his purposes: he saw that quite soon. Shouting King Avram’s name, his own men charged the enemy’s trenches on Funnel Hill. They charged—and, not for the first time that day, they were driven off with heavy loss.

Now Alva sounded indignant: “Why can’t the traitors just panic and flee?”

“Because they’re Detinans, same as we are,” Hesmucet answered, “and because they’re a pack of stubborn bastards, too, maybe even more than we are. Would
you
like to try to stand up to the might of most of the kingdom when all you had to help you was the north?”

“I never thought about it like that, sir,” Alva said. “As far as I’m concerned, they’re traitors, and that’s all there is to it.”

“Oh, they’re traitors, all right,” Hesmucet said. “But that doesn’t mean they’re not brave men. I don’t think I’ve ever seen braver.”

“Or fighting for a worse cause,” Alva remarked.

“Splitting the kingdom, you mean? Of course,” Hesmucet said. Alva stirred beside him. Before the mage could speak, Hesmucet went on, “If you aim to talk about the blonds, I’m going to tell you something first. What I’m going to tell you is, I don’t much care about them one way or the other. If you want to think they’ll make good Detinans, go ahead. I have my doubts. But I obey my king, and my king is King Avram. I haven’t got any doubts at all about that.”

Alva eyed him as if he’d never seen him before. “You are a very . . . peculiar man, aren’t you, sir?”

“Thank you,” Hesmucet said, which only seemed to confuse the mage further. He added, “What I am right now, thank you very much, is an
angry
man. We aren’t going to take that stinking hill. You’ve done everything you could—you’ve been splendid, Alva, and that’ll go into my report—but we aren’t. And we needed to. This whole army will have to work harder because we didn’t.”

“Don’t you worry about it, sir,” Alva said. “We’ll lick them.”

“How can you be so sure?” Hesmucet asked. “You’re the one who said the gods don’t worry about us so much as we think.”

“Even so,” Alva said.

“Well, then?” Hesmucet growled. He knew he sounded impatient. As far as he could see, he could hardly sound any other way. The fight on Funnel Hill wasn’t going the way he wished it were.

“There’s more of us, and we’ve got more engines,” Alva said. “If we lose in spite of that, we should be ashamed of ourselves.”

“General Bart says the same thing,” Hesmucet replied. “He’s right about the war. I’m pretty sure about that. But I don’t know whether he’s right about this fight here—and right this minute, this fight here is all that counts.”

Lieutenant General George was not happy with the role General Bart had assigned to his army. The soldiers General Guildenstern had formerly commanded were making what amounted to a noisy demonstration against Proselytizers’ Rise. Even if Bart hadn’t spelled it out in so many words, their assignment was to keep Thraxton the Braggart’s men busy in the center while Fighting Joseph and Hesmucet won glory on the wings.

Bart’s orders did read,
If possible, your force shall scale the heights of Proselytizers’ Rise and expel the enemy therefrom
. “I like that,” George said to Colonel Andy. “I truly like that. If the gods themselves attacked Proselytizers’ Rise from below, could they carry that position?”

“Sir, I . . .” His aide-de-camp spoke with all due deliberation, and with malice aforethought: “Sir, I doubt it.”

“So do I,” Doubting George said morosely. “By the Thunderer, so do I.”

“General Bart doesn’t think this part of the army can really fight,” Andy said. “He doesn’t think we’re worth anything.”

“I’m very much afraid you’re right,” George said. “And, as long as he gives us impossible positions to try to take, all he has to do is see that we haven’t taken them to get all his assumptions proved for him.”

“It isn’t fair,” Andy said. “It isn’t even close to fair.”

“Well, there I would have to agree with you.” George raised a forefinger. “Now don’t get me wrong. I want this whole great force to whip Count Thraxton. That comes first, and I’ve said so many times. But I don’t want my men, so many of whom fought like heroes by the River of Death even though we lost, I don’t want them slighted.”

“I should say not, sir,” Andy replied. “It’s a reflection on them, and it’s also a reflection on you.”

Privately, Doubting George agree with that. Publicly . . . He said what he’d been saying: “No one man’s part is all that important. But I think we could serve the kingdom better with different orders.”

“Do you want to complain to Bart?” Andy asked. “It might do some good.”

“Unfortunately, I doubt that,” George said. “It wouldn’t make the commanding general change his mind, and it would get me a reputation as a whiner, which is not the reputation I want to have.”

Pulling the brim of his hat down lower over his eyes, he watched his men doing their best to go forward in the face of formidable odds. The eastern slope of Proselytizers’ Rise was very high and very steep. No one could reasonably be expected to get close to it, let alone scale it with an enemy waiting at the top.

But, as long as George’s men kept trying, Thraxton couldn’t move any of his own soldiers away from Proselytizers’ Rise to Sentry Peak or Funnel Hill.
We’d be a proper fighting army if Bart would let us
, George thought. Then, reluctantly, he checked himself.
As long as the battle is won, how doesn’t much matter. And there will be credit to go around.