Advance and Retreat wotp-3 Read online

  “What’s the point of talking if you don’t say what you mean?” Ned returned. He leaned forward. “Now, then-what do you mean to do about the southrons down in Franklin?”

  “General Hesmucet has marched west-he’s off the map,” Bell said, and Ned of the Forest nodded to show he followed. Bell went on, “Not only has he marched west, he’s taken all his best soldiers with him. That leaves nothing but odds and sods to hold Franklin and Cloviston. All we’ve got to do is win once, maybe twice, and we can get all the way to the Highlow River. What could stop us?”

  Ned’s eyes gleamed ferally as he thought about that. “You’re right. And wouldn’t Avram look pretty with egg all over his ugly mug? Thinks we’re licked, does he? Thinks we’re flat? Well, he’d better think again.”

  “That’s right. That’s exactly right. I think we’re going to get along just fine together, Ned,” Bell said.

  “You tell me what to do. If I can, I will. If I can’t, you’ll hear all about the reasons why, I promise you,” Ned said.

  Bell was his superior. Bell was also, or had also been, a ferocious fighting man in his own right. He’d never been one to encourage insubordination. Even so, he didn’t demand immediate, unquestioning obedience of Ned of the Forest, as he would have from anyone else. He just nodded and said, “Yes, we’ll get on fine.”

  “Good.” Ned gave him a sloppy salute he found himself gladder to have than many neat ones from lesser officers. The commander of unicorn-riders ducked his way out of General Bell’s pavilion. Bell wasn’t sorry to see him go. The commander of the Army of Franklin looked like a suffering god because he suffered-on account of both the ruined arm he still had and the ruined leg he no longer owned. The leg might be gone, but its ghost of sensation lingered, and that ghost was in constant, unending torment.

  Working awkwardly with his one good hand, Bell opened the leather pouch he wore on the belt that held up his dark blue pantaloons (one leg, of course, pinned up short). He pulled out a little bottle of laudanum and yanked the cork with his teeth. Then, tilting his head back, he took a long pull from the bottle.

  Odd-tasting fire ran down his throat. Laudanum was a mixture of brandy and poppy juice. If it wouldn’t kill pain, nothing would. Only two things were wrong with that. One was, sometimes even laudanum wouldn’t kill the pain Bell knew. The other was, he’d been taking the stuff ever since his arm was ruined at Essoville. After close to a year and a half, he needed much bigger doses to quell his agony than he had at first. By now, the amount of laudanum he took every day would have been plenty to kill two or three men who hadn’t become habituated to the drug, or to leave six or eight such men woozy.

  After he put the laudanum bottle away, Bell waited. He remembered the strange, almost floating sensation he’d got from laudanum when he first started taking it: as if he were drifting away from the body that still suffered. No more. Now laudanum was as much a part of his life as ale was part of a farmer’s.

  Little by little, the anguish receded in the dead arm and the missing leg, the leg that didn’t seem to know it was missing. Bell sighed with relief. Laudanum didn’t fuzz his wits any more, or make him sleepy. He was sure of that. He was just as sure he would have had trouble thinking without it. The few times the healers had run short of the drug-the north didn’t have enough of anything it needed, except men who despised King Avram-he’d suffered not only from his dreadful wounds but from the even more dreadful effects of giving up laudanum.

  He shuddered. He didn’t like to think about that. As long as he had the drug, he was still… at least the shadow of a fighting man. So what if he couldn’t bear a shield? So what if his stump was too short to let him sit a unicorn unless he was tied to the saddle? He was still a general, and a general who’d kept the surviving chunks of the Army of Franklin intact despite everything Hesmucet’s superior force had done to destroy them. He still had bold soldiers, and he could still strike a savage blow. He could-and he intended to.

  That sentry stuck his head into the pavilion. “I beg your pardon, sir, but Brigadier Patrick would like a moment of your time, if you have it to spare.”

  “Of course,” Bell said expansively. As the laudanum made him feel better about the world, how could he refuse?

  In strode Patrick the Cleaver. “Top o’ the day to you, General,” he said, saluting. The young brigadier’s voice held the lilt of the Sapphire Isle, where he’d been born. After a career as a soldier of fortune, he’d crossed the Western Ocean to fight for King Geoffrey. He’d risen swiftly. Bell reckoned him among the finest wing commanders in northern service.

  “What can I do for you now, Brigadier?” Bell asked, returning the salute. Yes, Patrick the Cleaver was one of the finest wing commanders in northern service. Bell doubted he would ever rise above the rank of brigadier, though. Even by Detinan standards, Patrick was devastatingly frank. Earlier in the year, he’d suggested that Geoffrey arm blond serfs and use them against King Avram’s armies. Geoffrey had not been amused. No one else had had the nerve to make that suggestion since.

  “What can your honor do for me?” Patrick repeated. “Why, sir, you can be after telling me when we set ourselves in motion against the gods-damned southrons.”

  “Soon,” Bell said soothingly. “Very soon.”

  “And when exactly might ‘soon’ be?” Brigadier Patrick inquired. “Sure and we shouldn’t be letting ’em set themselves to meet us, now should we?”

  “I don’t intend to do anything of the sort,” Lieutenant General Bell said. He also didn’t intend to order the Army of Franklin into motion right this minute. Laudanum filled him with a pleasant lassitude, almost as if he’d just bedded a woman. Since the drug made it harder for him actually to bed a woman, that was just as well.

  “Well, if you won’t let those southron spalpeens set themselves, when are we to move?” Patrick the Cleaver demanded. “For would it not be a fine thing to be having the Army of Franklin in the province of Franklin once more? Better that nor hanging about down here in Dothan, I’m thinking.”

  “Yes, and yes, and yes,” Bell said. “Yes, but how can we move till we gather supplies? Harvest time is long past. We can’t live off the country. Whatever we eat, we’ll have to take with us. The mages won’t be able to conjure it up-that’s certain. And we need more than food, too. Too many men in this army have no shoes on their feet. They’re wearing pantaloons and tunics they’ve taken off of dead southrons-either that or they’re wearing rags. We have to be ready before we march. Winter isn’t far off, and it can get cold down in Franklin.”

  Brigadier Patrick mournfully clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Mighty fine does this sound, your Generalship, sir, but are you sure there’s sense to it? For won’t the southrons, may they find themselves in the hells or ever the gods know they’re dead, the scuts, won’t they be mustering and resupplying faster nor we could ever hope to? If I was in charge of this army, now, I’d-”

  That was too much for Lieutenant General Bell’s always fragile patience. “You are not in command of this army, Brigadier,” he said in a voice like winter. “Nor are you ever likely to be. And you know why, too.”

  “I do that.” Patrick matched him glare for glare. “I’m not in good odor in stinking Nonesuch, is why, the reason being I was man enough to tell King Geoffrey the plain truth, the which he cared to hear not a bit.”

  “Put pikes and crossbows in the hands of our blond serfs?” Bell shook his head. “We can’t win the war with such so-called soldiers.”

  “The gods-damned southrons use ’em, and too many of our own brave lads dead in the dirt they’ve stretched,” Patrick said. “You tell me we can’t win the war with such soldiers? Well, I tell you this, Lieutenant General Bell, the which is the gods’ own truth: we can’t win the war without ’em. And that said, your Excellency, gods give you a good day.” He bowed stiffly and stomped out.

  “Miserable bog-trotting hothead,” Lieutenant General Bell muttered. No, it was no wonder at all that Patrick
the Cleaver would never enjoy a higher command.

  Bell reached for his crutches. He got one under his good shoulder and used it to help lever himself upright. Then he put the other one under his bad arm. That shoulder still hurt despite the laudanum. Making it bear some small part of his weight only made it hurt worse, too. If he hadn’t been a man who could stand pain, he would long since have cut his own throat or fallen on a sword.

  Moving like an inchworm, one hitching step at a time, he made his way out of his pavilion. His sentries, surprised to see him outside, stiffened to attention. He ignored them. He wanted to look at the encampment. It didn’t look much different from others he’d seen: a place full of tents and soldiers and lines of tethered unicorns. The woods of southern Dothan blazed with autumn colors around the campground. The day was bright and clear and crisp, without a cloud in the sky.

  But he could see the differences when he looked for them. As he’d told Patrick the Cleaver, too many of his men wore gray pantaloons and sometimes even tunics captured from the southrons. That didn’t just mean they couldn’t get enough uniforms of the proper color, though they couldn’t. It also meant that, in battle, the rest of his soldiers might start shooting at the wrong men.

  That was why he’d issued an order that captured pantaloons and especially tunics had to be dyed King Geoffrey’s indigo blue. A couple of kettles boiled and bubbled in the camps, with men taking out their newly dyed garments with sticks. Bell nodded in somber, leonine approval.

  Here came some of Ned of the Forest’s unicorn-riders. Bell eyed them.

  Unicorn-riders in the Army of Southern Parthenia were aristocrats one and all, their mounts the finest they could provide. They took pride in grooming the beasts, not just to keep them clean and healthy but to make them look as smart as possible before going into battle.

  By contrast, Ned’s men looked like so many teamsters. Their uniforms were even shabbier than those of Bell’s crossbowmen and pikemen. Slouch hats held the sun and rain out of their eyes. Their unicorns were in good enough condition, but nothing special. They didn’t look like men who’d been able to keep all of eastern Franklin and Cloviston in an uproar behind southron lines, or like men who’d routed a southron army three times the size of their own in Great River Province. But they had. No matter what they looked like, they could fight. Bell had to respect that.

  Overhead, a hawk flew south. Bell took it for a good omen, hoping it meant the Army of Franklin would succeed when it did move south. He would have been more nearly certain had the beast been a dragon. The dragon was Detina’s emblematic animal, the kingdom flying on its banners a gold dragon on red. To difference his men from those of Avram, Geoffrey had chosen a red dragon on gold.

  But dragons had been rare in western Detina even when the colonists from across the Western Ocean used iron and unicorns and sorcery to seize the land from the blonds then inhabiting it. A few of the great beasts were still said to survive west of the Great River, but Bell had never seen one. In the lands far to the east, in the Stony Mountains beyond the steppes, dragons not only survived but flourished. That did Bell no good with the omens, though.

  He shrugged a one-shouldered shrug. Even that hurt. But then, what didn’t? Omens or no, he-and the Army of Franklin-would march south.

  * * *

  Corporal Rollant liked garrison duty. He’d spent a lot of time putting himself in positions where strangers could kill him: at the battle by the River of Death, storming up Proselytizers’ Rise, and all through the campaign from the southern border of Peachtree Province up to Marthasville. No, he didn’t mind being back here in Ramblerton, well away from the fighting, at all.

  Most of all, he enjoyed strolling-or rather, swaggering-along the streets of Ramblerton in his gray uniform with the two stripes on his sleeve showing off his rank. Northerners, men and women who would gladly have left the Kingdom of Detina when Grand Duke Geoffrey proclaimed himself king in the north, had to get out of his way in a hurry, for along with the uniform he wore a shortsword on his hip and sometimes a crossbow slung on his back.

  They got out of his way as they would have for any ordinary Detinan soldier. If they hadn’t, he and his comrades would have made them sorry for it. He was one of King Avram’s soldiers, yes, but not an ordinary Detinan. Ordinary Detinans were swarthy, with dark eyes, dark hair, and, on the men, dark beards. Rollant was a blond, an escaped serf from Palmetto Province who’d fled south to New Eborac and made a good living as a carpenter till taking service with others from his city, from his province, to help liberate all the serfs in the north from their bonds to the land and to their feudal overlords.

  That would have been bad enough for the Detinans of Ramblerton. Serfs in arms had been their nightmare ever since their ancestors overthrew the blond kingdoms of the north. Because they’d easily won those wars, they professed to believe blonds couldn’t fight. The gray uniform on Rollant’s back argued against that.

  But the stripes on his sleeve were what really made the locals shudder. One of those locals called, “You there!”-not to Rollant, but to his friend Smitty, a common soldier walking at his side.

  “You talking to me?” Smitty asked. He was as ordinary a Detinan as any ever born, but for a silly streak.

  “Well, who else would I be talking to?” the Ramblertonian demanded.

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Smitty donned an expression of exaggerated idiocy. “You might be talking to my corporal there. He’s got more rank than I do. He’s the company standard-bearer, and I’m not.”

  The man from Ramblerton shuddered. “He’s a blond!”

  Smitty looked at Rollant as if he’d never seen him before. “Why, by the gods! So he is!”

  “By the gods is right! It’s against nature, that’s what it is,” the local said. “What do you do when he gives you an order?”

  After grave consideration, Smitty answered, “Well, most of the time I say, ‘Yes, Corporal,’ and I go off and do it. Isn’t that right, your Corporalship?”

  “Not often enough,” Rollant said gravely. “But most of the time, yes, that’s what you do. That’s what you’d better do.” He tapped the stripes on his sleeve.

  “I know it.” Smitty looked fearful. In confidential tones, he told the Ramblertonian, “He beats me when I disobey. He’s terrible fierce, he is. You wouldn’t want to mess with him, believe you me you wouldn’t.”

  Animal. Rollant read the word on the local’s lips. But the fellow didn’t have the nerve to say it out loud. What he did say was, “It’s a disgrace to the Detinan race, that’s what it is.” He walked off with his nose in the air.

  “How about that?” Smitty said. “How do you like being a disgrace to the Detinan race?”

  “Me? I like it fine,” Rollant answered. “But I thought he was talking about you.”

  “Was he? Why, that son of a whore! Of all the nerve,” Smitty said. He and Rollant both laughed. Rollant looked back over his shoulder. The Ramblertonian’s back had got stiffer than ever. The blond laughed again.

  But the laughter didn’t last. By proclaiming he intended to release the Kingdom of Detina’s blond serfs from their feudal obligations and ties to the land, King Avram had also, in effect, proclaimed they were, or could at least become, Detinans like any others. The whole of the north set about forming its own kingdom and went to war sooner than admitting that possibility. Even in the south, blonds had a hard time of it although legally on the same footing as real Detinans. Rollant had seen that for himself as a carpenter. He’d had to be twice as good as his competitors to get half as far.

  It was worse in the army. Detinans prided themselves on being a warrior race. They also assumed blonds couldn’t fight. Smitty had told the local he obeyed Rollant’s orders. And so he did-most of the time. A lot of his comrades had been less willing after Rollant won the promotion he would have had long since if his hair were properly black, his skin properly swarthy.

  Of course, if his hair were properly black, his skin properly swarthy, he
never would have had to flee from Baron Ormerod’s estate because he wouldn’t have been bound to the land in the first place. Detinans didn’t think about such things. Why should they? They didn’t have to. They weren’t bound, as his people were.

  “How do you suppose that bastard would like working somebody else’s land his whole life long?” Rollant asked Smitty. “How do you suppose he’d like his baron flipping up his wife’s skirt, and nothing he could do about it if he wanted to keep his head on his neck?”

  “Oh, he wouldn’t have to worry about that,” Smitty said.

  “Ha!” Rollant said. “Just shows you’ve never been a serf.”

  Smitty shook his head and repeated, “He wouldn’t have to worry about that.” Only when Rollant started to get angry did he condescend to explain himself: “Any woman he could get would be too ugly for a nobleman to want.”

  “Oh.” Rollant felt foolish. “All right. You got me there.” He laughed, a little sheepishly.

  The true Detinan flag, King Avram’s flag, gold dragon on red, flew above the keep at the heart of Ramblerton and on important buildings throughout the town. Displaying false King Geoffrey’s reversed banner was illegal as could be. Several Ramblertonians languished in jail for letting their patriotism outrun their good sense. As far as Rollant was concerned, they could stay there till they rotted.

  When he’d been back on Baron Ormerod’s estate, he would have reckoned Ramblerton the grandest town in the world. No more. After New Eborac City, it seemed small and only half finished. Not a single street was cobbled. All of them were dirt: dusty in the summertime, muddy now that winter was on the way. People flung their slops wherever they pleased, which meant the place stank even worse than it would have otherwise. And, toward the north, Ramblerton just petered out, clapboard houses gradually giving way to woods as one low ridge after another marked the land’s rise from the banks of the Cumbersome River.