estimate there were at least two thousand, and no more than a hundred in the inn, most lightly armed. She swallowed at the simple horror of the arithmetic.
‘Are the gates closed?’
‘Prop them!’
‘Recall the Fifteenth!’
‘Is it too late to take…’
‘By the Fates.’ Aliz’ eyes had gone wide, white showing all the way around, darting about as if looking for some means of escape. There was none. ‘We’re trapped!’
‘Help will be coming,’ said Finree, trying to sound as calm as she could with her heart threatening to burst her ribs.
‘From who?’
‘From the Dogman,’ who had very reasonably made every effort to put as much ground between himself and Meed as possible, ‘or General Jalenhorm,’ whose men were in such a disorganised shambles after yesterday’s disaster they were no help to themselves let alone anyone else, ‘or from our husbands,’ who were both thoroughly entangled with the attack on Osrung and probably had not the slightest idea that a new threat had emerged right behind them. ‘Help will be coming.’ It sounded pathetically unconvincing even to her.
Officers dashed to nowhere, pointed everywhere, screeched contradictory orders at each other, the room growing steadily darker and more confused as the windows were barricaded with whatever gaudy junk was to hand. Meed stood in the midst, suddenly ignored and alone, staring uncertainly about with his gilded sword in one hand and the other opening and closing powerlessly. Like a nervous father at a great wedding so carefully planned that he found himself entirely unwanted on the big day. Above him, his masterful portrait frowned scornfully down.
‘What should we do?’ he asked of no one in particular. His desperately wandering eyes lighted on Finree. ‘What should we do?’
It wasn’t until she opened her mouth that she realised she had no answer.
Chains of Command
After a brief spell of fair weather the clouds had rolled back in and rain had begun to fall again, gently administering Marshal Kroy and his staff another dose of clammy misery and entirely obscuring both flanks of the battlefield.
‘Damn this drizzle!’ he snapped. ‘I might as well have a bucket on my head.’
People often supposed that a lord marshal wielded supreme power on the battlefield, even beyond an emperor in his throne room. They did not appreciate the infinite constraints on his authority. The weather, in particular, was prone to ignore orders. Then there was the balance of politics to consider: the whims of the monarch, the mood of the public. There were a galaxy of logistical concerns: difficulties of supply and transport and signalling and discipline, and the larger the army the more staggeringly cumbersome it became. If one managed, by some miracle, to prod this unwieldy mass into a position to actually fight, a headquarters had to be well behind the lines and even with the opportunity to choose a good vantage point a commander could never see everything, if anything. Orders might take half an hour or longer to reach their intended recipients and so were often useless or positively dangerous by the time they got there, if they ever got there.
The higher you climbed up the chain of command, the more links between you and the naked steel, the more imperfect the communication became. The more men’s cowardice, rashness, incompetence or, worst of all, good intentions might twist your purposes. The more chance could play a hand, and chance rarely played well. With every promotion, Marshal Kroy had looked forward to finally slipping the shackles and standing all powerful. And with every promotion he had found himself more helpless than before.
‘I’m like a blind old idiot who’s got himself into a duel,’ he murmured. Except there were thousands of lives hanging on his clueless flailing, rather than just his own.
‘Would you care for your brandy and water, Lord…’
‘No I would not bloody care for it!’ he snapped at his orderly, then winced as the man backed nervously away with the bottle. How could he explain that he had been drinking it yesterday when he heard that he was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of his men, and now the very idea of brandy and water utterly sickened him?
It was no help that his daughter had placed herself so close to the front lines. He kept finding his eyeglass drawn towards the eastern side of the battle, trying to pick out the inn Meed was using as his headquarters through the drizzle. He scratched unhappily at his cheek. He had been interrupted while shaving by a worrying report sent from the Dogman, signs of savages from beyond the Crinna loose in the countryside to their east. Men the Dogman reckoned savage were savage indeed. Now Kroy was deeply distracted and, what was more, one side of his face was smooth and the other stubbly. Those sorts of details had always upset him. An army is made of details the way a house is made of bricks. One brick carelessly laid and the whole is compromised. But attend to the perfect mortaring of every…
‘Huh,’ he muttered to himself. ‘I am a bloody mason.’
‘Latest report from Meed says things are going well on the right,’ said Felnigg, no doubt trying to allay his fears. His chief of staff knew him too well. ‘They’ve got most of southern Osrung occupied and are making an effort on the bridge.’
‘So things were going well half an hour ago?’
‘Best one could say for them, sir.’
‘True.’ He looked for a moment longer, but could scarcely make out the inn, let alone Osrung itself. There was nothing to be gained by worrying. If his entire army had been as brave and resourceful as his daughter they would already have won and been on their way home. He almost pitied the Northman who ran across her in a bad mood. He turned to the west, following the line of the river with his eyeglass until he came to the Old Bridge.
Or thought he did. A faint, straight, light line across the faint, curved, dark line which he assumed was the water, all of it drifting in and out of existence as the rain thickened or slackened in the mile or two between him and the object. In truth he could have been looking at anything.
‘Damn this drizzle! What about the left?’
‘Last word from Mitterick was that his second assault had, how did he put it? Been blunted.’
‘By now it will have failed, then. Still, tough work, carrying a bridge against determined resistance.’
‘Huh,’ grunted Felnigg.
‘Mitterick may lack many things…’
‘Huh,’ grunted Felnigg.
‘…but persistence is not one of them.’
‘No, sir, he is persistently an arse.’
‘Now, now, let us be generous.’ And then, under his breath, ‘Every man needs an arse, if only to sit on.’ If Mitterick’s second assault had recently failed he would be preparing another. The Northmen facing him would be off balance. Kroy snapped his eyeglass closed and tapped it against his palm.
The general who waited to make a decision until he knew everything he needed to would never make one, and if he did it would be far too late. He had to feel out the moment. Anticipate the ebb and flow of battle. The shifting of morale, of pressure, of advantage. One had to trust one’s instincts. And Marshal Kroy’s instincts told him the crucial moment on the left wing was soon coming.
He strode through the door of his barn-cum-headquarters, making sure he ducked this time, as he had no need of another painful bruise on the crown of his head, and went straight to his desk. He dipped pen in ink without even sitting and wrote upon the nearest of several dozen slips of paper prepared for the purpose:
