The Heroes

‘Mine is the guilt.’
    Defeat, it seems, brings out the best in some men.
    ‘General Jalenhorm.’
    He looked up, face tipping into the torchlight, looking suddenly very old for a man so young. ‘Colonel Gorst, how are you—’
    ‘Marshal Kroy is here.’ The general visibly deflated, like a pillow with half the stuffing pulled out.
    ‘Of course he is.’ He straightened his dirt-smudged jacket, twisted his sword-belt into the correct position. ‘How do I look?’ Gorst opened his mouth to speak, but Jalenhorm cut him off. ‘Don’t bother to humour me. I look defeated.’
True.
‘Please don’t deny it.’
I didn’t.
‘That’s what I am.’
It is.
    Gorst led the way back down the crowded alleys, through the steam of the army’s kitchens and the glow from the stalls of enterprising pedlars, hoping for silence. He was disappointed.
As so very often.
    ‘Colonel Gorst, I need to thank you. That charge of yours saved my division.’
    Perhaps it will also have saved my career. Your division can all drown if I can be the king’s First Guard again.
‘My motives were not selfless.’
    ‘Whose are? It’s the results that go down in history. Our reasons are written in smoke. And the fact is I nearly destroyed my division.
My
division.’ Jalenhorm snorted bitterly. ‘The one the king had most foolishly lent me. I tried to turn it down, you know.’
It seems you did not try hard enough.
‘But you know the king.’
All too well.
‘He has romantic notions about his old friends.’
He has romantic notions about everything.
‘No doubt I will be laughed at when I return home. Humiliated. Shunned.’
Welcome to my life.
‘Probably I deserve it.’
Probably you do. I don’t.
    And yet, as Gorst frowned sideways at Jalenhorm’s hanging head, hair plastered to his skull, a drop of rain clinging to the point of his nose, as thorough a picture of dejection as he could find without a mirror, he was swept up by a surprising wave of sympathy.
    He found he had put his hand on the general’s shoulder. ‘You did what you could,’ he said. ‘You should not blame yourself.’
If my experience is anything to go by, there will soon be legions of self-righteous scum queuing up to do it for you.
‘You must not blame yourself.’
    ‘Who should I blame, then?’ Jalenhorm whispered into the rain. ‘Who?’
    If Lord Marshal Kroy was infected by fear he showed no symptoms, and nor did anyone else in range of his iron frown. Within his sight soldiers marched in perfect step, officers spoke clearly but did not shout, and the wounded bit down on their howls and remained stoically silent. Within a circle perhaps fifty strides across, with Kroy bolt upright in his saddle at itscentre, there was no lag in morale, there was no lapse in discipline, and there had certainly been no defeat.
    Jalenhorm’s bearing noticeably stiffened as he strode up and gave a rigid salute. ‘Lord Marshal Kroy.’
    ‘General Jalenhorm.’ The marshal glared down from on high. ‘I understand there was an engagement.’
    ‘There was. The Northmen came in very great numbers. Very great, and very quickly. A well-coordinated assault. They made a feint for Osrung and I sent a regiment to reinforce the town. I went to find more but, by that time … it was too late to do anything but try to keep them on the far side of the river. Too late to—’
    ‘The condition of your division, General.’
    Jalenhorm paused. In one sense the condition of his division was painfully obvious. ‘Two of my five regiments of foot were held up on the bad roads and have yet to see action. The Thirteenth were holding Osrung and withdrew in good order when the Northmen breached the gate. Some casualties.’ Jalenhorm recited the butcher’s bill in a dull monotone. ‘The majority of the Rostod Regiment, some nine companies, I believe, were caught in the open and routed. The Sixth were holding the hill when the Northmen attacked. They were comprehensively broken. Ridden down in the fields. The Sixth has …’ Jalenhorm’s mouth twitched silently. ‘Ceased to exist.’
    ‘Colonel Wetterlant?’
    ‘Presumed among the dead on the far side of the river. There are very many dead there. Many wounded we cannot reach. You can hear them crying for water. They always want water, for some reason.’ Jalenhorm gave a horrifically inappropriate snort of nervous laughter. ‘I’d have thought they might want … spirits, or something.’
    Kroy kept his silence. Gorst was unlikely