“No,” Gremio said bluntly. “We’ve tried a couple of times, and paid the price for it. The ball’s in their court now. We’re just going to have to hold them back as best we can. We ought to be able to do that.”

“Oh, too bad,” Thisbe said. “I thought the same thing myself, and I was hoping you would tell me I was wrong.”

“I wish I could,” Gremio answered. He had the feeling that Colonel Florizel still believed they could throw the southrons back. That worried him; if the colonel, or those above him, tried to act on that belief, a lot of good northern men were going to end up dead-and, worse yet, dead for no good purpose. Gremio himself, he knew, might easily end up among their number. He disapproved of that idea with all his orderly soul. He was, to some degree, willing to die for his kingdom, but only if his death would actually do the kingdom some good. Dying in a fight foredoomed from the start struck him as wasteful.

Thisbe said, “I wish the southrons hadn’t got this bridgehead.”

“So do I,” Gremio replied. “We were all so pleased when we threw them back from Commissioner Mountain. And we should have been-that thrust would have killed us had it gone home. But this bridgehead…” He scowled. “It’s like an ulcer, or a wound that festers instead of getting better. We can die from this, too, even if it takes longer.”

“That’s how my father died,” Thisbe said quietly. “He laid his leg open with an axe, and it never healed up the right way no matter how the healers and the mages tried to fix it. The flesh just melted off him, and after a while he couldn’t live any more.”

“Things like that happen,” Gremio agreed. “My mother and father are well, gods be praised, or they were last time I heard from them, but I know you can’t count on anything. If I didn’t know that beforehand, this gods-damned war would have taught me plenty.”

“Yes, sir,” Thisbe said. “If I were the southron general, I’d either try to find a way through with those men already on this side of Snouts Stream, or else I’d use them to keep us busy here while I did my mischief somewhere else.”

“Sergeant, you ought to be an officer,” Gremio said with unfeigned admiration. “That’s as neat a summing-up as I could do in a lawcourt, and how much do you want to bet that the people set over us haven’t got their thoughts together half so straight?”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Thisbe replied. “What I do know is, I don’t want to be an officer.” He wagged a finger at Gremio. “I really and truly mean that, sir. You’ve got a `let’s promote somebody to lieutenant’ look in your eye, and I won’t take the post even if you try to give it to me.”

Gremio could hardly help believing Thisbe’s sincerity. “But why?” he asked, perplexed. “The company would be better for it. You know as well as I do that there’s a lieutenant’s slot open. You could do the job. You could do it better than anyone I can think of.”

“I don’t want it,” Thisbe declared. “I’ve got enough things to worry about being a sergeant. Being a lieutenant would just complicate my life to the hells and gone. All I ever wanted to do was be a soldier. You’re not hardly a soldier when you’re an officer-no offense to you, sir.”

What he said held some truth. Officers worried more about paperwork even than sergeants, while common soldiers didn’t have to worry about it at all (a good thing, too, since so many of them lacked their letters). But Thisbe capably handled the paperwork he had. More shouldn’t faze him. Something else lay behind his refusal, but Gremio couldn’t see what. He tried wheedling: “You’d make more money.”

“I don’t care.” Now the sergeant was visibly getting angry. “I don’t want it, sir, and that’s flat.”

“All right. All right.” Gremio made a placating gesture. One thing years in the lawcourts had taught him was when to back off. For whatever reasons, Thisbe really didn’t want to become an officer. That puzzled Gremio, who was always in the habit of grabbing for whatever came his way. However puzzled he was, though, he could see he wouldn’t change the sergeant’s mind.

Later that day, as he’d feared, the southrons started bringing more men-some footsoldiers, others unicorn-riders like the ones who’d come in under cover of darkness the night before-into their bridgehead on the west bank of Snouts Stream. They also started bringing catapults over the bridges spanning the stream. Colonel Florizel ordered the regiment up to full alert. The other regiments in Alexander the Steward’s wing also put more men up on the shooting steps of their trenches.

“Can we do anything more than that, sir?” Gremio asked Florizel. By we he didn’t mean the regiment, but the Army of Franklin as a whole. “Can we bring more men up to this part of the line? Can we bring more engines here? The gods-damned southrons will pound us flat unless we can hit back.”

He waited for Colonel Florizel to get angry. He’d long since seen the regimental commander would have preferred a different sort of man as company commander: a noble, a serfholder, all the things Gremio wasn’t and wished he were. But Florizel sighed and said, “I’ve been screaming for that, Captain. It’s done no good. We’re stretched as thin as can be. To strengthen this stretch means weakening ourselves somewhere else. We have nothing to spare.”

“The southrons do,” Gremio said.

“I know,” Florizel replied.

Then the war is lost, Gremio thought. If they can stretch us till we break and stay unbroken themselves, the war is lost beyond repair. He didn’t want to dwell on that. In fact, he refused to dwell on it. He said, “We’d better weaken ourselves somewhere else, sir, or they’re going to tear a hole right through this stretch of line.”

“I’m not going to argue with you, because I think you’re right,” Colonel Florizel said, which did little to make Gremio feel any better.

But reinforcements did come in, pulled from the far north. That meant Hesmucet’s line began to overlap that of Joseph the Gamecock, but it couldn’t be helped. A rupture here and Joseph’s line would be shattered. Gremio could see that. The southrons could see it. And, for something of a wonder, so could Joseph the Gamecock himself.

The storm broke a couple of days later. It wasn’t a real storm like the ones that had done so much to delay the southrons before and after the battle of Commissioner Mountain: the weather, while hot and muggy as usual, was also bright and clear. The engines Hesmucet’s men had brought forward started pounding the northern line. Stones thudded home. Firepots burst, spilling gouts of flame into the entrenchments. Men shrieked when those flames bit. Repeating crossbows sent streams of quarrels skimming low above the trenches’ parapets.

Despite the storm of missiles, Gremio shouted, “Up! Up and fight! If we stay hidden, the southrons will just walk right over us.”

“Listen to the captain,” Sergeant Thisbe said. “He knows what he’s talking about.”

Not least because Gremio and Thisbe wasted no time getting up on the shooting steps themselves, their men followed them. And if I’d stayed down in the trench, they would have skulked, too, Gremio thought. This business of commanding is a curious one indeed.

Bowstrings twanged. Bolts whizzed toward the oncoming southrons. Some of the men in gray fell. Others shot back. Gremio drew his sword and brandished it. Much good that will do, he thought, but did it anyhow. A crossbow quarrel clanged off the blade. He felt the impact all the way up his arm to his shoulder.

One of the northerners’ repeating crossbows began hosing darts at the southrons rushing across open ground. Men went down like grain before the scythe. But others, brave even if they did serve King Avram, kept coming. Some of them, shouting Avram’s name and, “Freedom!” leaped down into the trenches to try to force their way through and past King Geoffrey’s soldiers.