The Heroes

was only by a valiant action of your Majesty’s First Cavalry that further disaster was averted. The Northmen are now well entrenched around the Heroes. One can see the lights of their campfires on the slopes. One can almost hear their singing when the wind shifts northerly. But we yet hold the ground south of the river, and the divisions of General Mitterick on the western flank, and Lord Governor Meed on the eastern, have begun to arrive and are preparing to attack at first light.
    Tomorrow, the Northmen will not be singing.
    I remain your Majesty’s most faithful and unworthy servant,
    Bremer dan Gorst, Royal Observer of the Northern War

    The gathering darkness was full of shouts, clanks and squeals, sharp with the tang of woodsmoke, the even sharper sting of defeat. Fires rustled in the wind and torches sputtered in pale hands, illuminating faces haggard from a day of marching, waiting, worrying.
And perhaps, in a few cases, even fighting.
    The road up from Uffrith was an endless parade of overloaded wagons, mounted officers, marching men. Mitterick’s division grinding through, seeing the wounded and the beaten, catching the contagion of fear before they even caught a whiff of the enemy. Things that might have been just objects before the rout on the Heroes had assumed a crushing significance. A dead mule, lamplight shining in its goggling eyes. A cart with a brokenaxle tipped off the road and stripped down for firewood. An abandoned tent, blown from its moorings, the yellow sun of the Union stitched into the trampled canvas.
All become emblems of doom.
    Fear had been a rarity over the past few months, as Gorst took his morning runs through the camps of one regiment or another. Boredom, exhaustion, hunger, illness, hopelessness and homesickness, all commonplace.
But not fear of the enemy.
Now it was everywhere, and the stink of it only grew stronger as the clouds rolled steadily in and the sun sank below the fells.
    If victory makes men brave, defeat renders them cowards.
    Progress through the village of Adwein had been entirely stalled by several enormous wagons, each drawn by a team of eight horses. An officer was bellowing red-faced at an old man huddled on the seat of the foremost one.
    ‘I am Saurizin, Adeptus Chemical of the University of Adua!’ he shouted back, waving a document smudged by the first spots of rain. ‘This equipment must be allowed through, by order of Lord Bayaz!’
    Gorst left them arguing, strode past a quartermaster hammering on doors, searching for billets. A Northern woman stood in the street with three children pressed against her legs, staring at a handful of coins as the drizzle grew heavier.
Kicked out of their shack to make way for some sneering lieutenant, who’ll be elbowed off to make way for some preening captain, who’ll be shuffled on to make way for some bloated major. Where will this woman and her children be by then? Will they slumber peacefully in my tent while I doss heroically on the damp sod outside? I need only reach out my hand …
Instead he put his head down and trudged by them in silence.
    Most of the village’s mean buildings were already crowded with wounded, the less serious cases spilling out onto the doorsteps. They looked up at him, pain-twisted, dirt-smeared or bandaged faces slack, and Gorst looked back in silence.
My skills are for making casualties, not comforting them.
But he pulled the stopper from his canteen and offered it out, and each in turn they took a mouthful until it was empty. Apart from one who gripped his hand for a moment they did not thank him and he did not care.
    A surgeon in a smeared apron appeared at a doorway, blowing out a long sigh. ‘General Jalenhorm?’ Gorst asked. He was pointed down a rutted side-track and after a few strides heard the voice. That same voice he’d heard blathering orders for the last few days. Its tone was different now.
    ‘Lay them down here, lay them here! Clear a space! You, bring bandages!’ Jalenhorm was kneeling in the mud, clasping the hand of a man on a stretcher. He seemed to have shaken off his huge staff, finally, if he had not left them dead on the hill. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll have the best of care. You’re a hero. You’re all heroes!’ His knees squelched into the muck beside thenext man. ‘You did everything that could have been asked. Mine was the fault, my friends, mine were the mistakes.’ He squeezed the casualty’s shoulder then stood, slowly, staring down.