Turtledove, Harry - War of the Provinces 01 - Sentry Peak by Turtledove Harry

Author:Turtledove, Harry
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf

VII

Rollant had never been so weary in all the days of his life. Now, he was yet a young man, so those days were not so many, but he had spent a lot of them laboring in the swampy indigo fields of Baron Ormerod's estate. Ormerod was not the worst liege lord to have, and never would be as long as Thersites remained alive, but he was far from the softest, and demanded a full day's labor from all his serfs every day. Rollant would not have cared to try to reckon up how many times he'd stumbled back to his hut at or after sundown and collapsed down onto his cot, sodden with exhaustion.

However many times it might have been, though, none of those days in the fields came close to matching this one. He'd been fighting for his life by the River of Death for two days straight. By all accounts, a good part of General Guildenstern's army was already wrecked. He knew how close Doubting George's wing had come to utter ruin.

George had pulled his regiment and the one beside it out of the line and sent it to the rear to face a couple of northern regiments that had got round behind them. If they hadn't driven back the traitors, he didn't see how George's wing could have survived, either.

But they had. And now, as the sun sank low in the direction of the Western Ocean, Rollant wiped sweat and a little blood off his forehead with the sleeve of his tunic. "That last traitor almost did for me," he told Smitty.

The youngster from the farm outside New Eborac nodded. "But he's dead now, and you're not, and I expect that's the way you want it to be," he said. He was surely as worn as Rollant, but could still put things in a way that made everybody around him smile.

"Sure enough," Rollant agreed. "Some of them don't have a much better notion of what to do with a shortsword than I do— and a gods-damned good thing, too, if anybody wants to know what I think."

Sergeant Joram said, "Don't fall down and go to sleep yet, you two. Nobody knows for sure they won't try and hit us one more lick." Rollant and Smitty exchanged appalled glances. If the traitors still had fight left in them after the two days both sides had been through . . .

Maybe they did. Way off to Rollant's left and rear, Thraxton the Braggart's men began their roaring battle cry. It was taken up successively by one regiment after another, passing round to Doubting George's front and finally to the right where Rollant stood and even beyond him to the remnants of the two regiments he and his comrades had broken, till it seemed to have got back to the point whence it started.

"Isn't that the ugliest sound you ever heard?" Smitty said.

"Yes!" Rollant agreed fervently. As the roars from the traitors went on and on, he stood there

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