Marching Through Peachtree wotp-2 Page 7

  Men in blue caps and tunics peered out of the trenches at the advancing southrons. Rollant waited for shouts of alarm to ring out. He also waited for firepots and stones to start flying from engines, and for repeating crossbows to start hosing the southrons’ ranks with death.

  As he tramped forward, he yanked the bowstring on his crossbow back to the locked position and set a bolt in the groove. All he had to do now was raise the weapon to his shoulder and pull the trigger. Loading without orders went against regulations, too. He didn’t care. Neither did most of the other veterans. Sergeant Joram stalked by. He had a quarrel in the groove of his crossbow, too.

  Closer and closer to the enemy lines came the southrons. “Why aren’t they shooting at us?” Smitty demanded. “We’re in range, gods know.”

  “Maybe they don’t see us,” Rollant said. “Maybe… maybe our magic really is working.”

  Smitty shook his head. “There’s got to be some kind of explanation that makes better sense than that.”

  But the northerners kept right on not shooting even after the southrons’ crossbow bolts started landing among them, even after men started falling and crying out in pain from wounds. “What the hells is going on?” Rollant heard a man in blue yell, nothing but confusion in his voice.

  And then, either because some traitor mage defeated the southrons’ spell or because the two armies drew too close together for it to hold any more, the northern men in the trenches realized there were indeed foes in front of them. They cried out again, this time in rage and fear. Those whose crossbows were loaded started shooting, but they weren’t so ready as they might have been.

  A northerner stuck his head up above the rampart in front of the trench so he could see to aim. Before the enemy soldier could shoot, Rollant did. He missed; his quarrel dug into the rampart and kicked up dirt into the traitor’s face. He came close enough to killing the fellow, though, to make him duck down in a hurry instead of doing any shooting of his own.

  Frantically reloading, Rollant yanked back the bowstring and set a new bolt in the groove. All around him, other southrons were doing the same. Somebody right in front of him dropped a quarrel in his haste to reload. Instead of snatching another one from the sheaf, the soldier stopped and stooped to pick up the one he’d dropped. “Clumsy fool!” Rollant shouted, doing his best not to trample the man.

  “Futter you, blondie,” the soldier said.

  Rage ripped through Rollant. Worst of it was that he couldn’t fall on the fellow and give-or try to give-him the thrashing he deserved. Maybe after the battle was over, if they both came out alive, they would have something more to say to each other, with words or with fists. Now… now the northerners were awake to their peril. The real fight was with them, not with the man who also fought for King Avram.

  But how are they and he different? Rollant wondered.

  One obvious answer was that the trooper in a gray uniform like his own wasn’t trying to kill him at the moment, and the traitors were. A southron only a couple of feet from Rollant went down with a groan, clutching at the quarrel that had sprouted in his belly. “Litter!” Rollant shouted. “Litter over here!” He doubted if the healers would be able to save the man; wounds that pierced the gut usually killed by fever if they didn’t kill by bleeding.

  He had no more time to think about that than he did about the southron who didn’t love blonds. He shot at the northerners again, reloaded, and shot once more. He didn’t know if any of the quarrels struck home. What he did know was that his comrades were scrambling over the rampart and starting to drop down into the trenches Joseph the Gamecock’s soldiers manned. He slung his crossbow, yanked out his shortsword, and swarmed over the ramparts himself.

  He’d fought in the trenches before. The only good thing he could say about it was that he could hit back at the foe. Charging the enemy when he was entrenched… that was worse. But this was quite bad enough. Men screamed and groaned and slashed at one another and shot one another and swung clubbed crossbows and wrestled and punched and kicked and bit.

  Reinforcements in blue came rushing up from the direction of Caesar to try to hold the southrons back. But more men in gray from Doubting George’s army dropped down into the trenches. A crossbow bolt scored a bleeding line across the back of Rollant’s hand. Half an inch lower and it might have left the hand crippled forever.

  “Forward!” Lieutenant Griff shouted shrilly.

  Forward they went-for a little while. After that, the enemy got as many reinforcements as they did. That made the fighting even more desperate than it had been. Rollant was no great swordsman. He’d never used a sword before the war: only a woodworker’s tools. And the shortsword was a clumsy weapon anyhow. But his blade soon had blood on it.

  “King Geoffrey!” the traitors shouted, and “Provincial prerogative forever!” and “To the seven hells with King Avram!” and “To the seven hells with the blonds!” Here and there, when they surged east again in a counterattack, they would capture some of Avram’s soldiers and manhandle them back to the rear. They had camps for southron prisoners, just as there were camps for northern prisoners in the south. But they didn’t manhandle any blonds back to the rear. Ex-serfs who’d taken service against their liege lords almost always ended up dead on the field when things went wrong for their side.

  I can’t be captured. Rollant knew that. In the early days of the fighting, a few blonds had been forcibly returned to serfdom. That didn’t happen any more. The northerners hadn’t needed long to realize a man who’d taken up arms against them once was liable, even likely, to do it again as soon as he saw the chance.

  Some time in the middle of the day, a lull fell over the field, with both sides equally exhausted. Rollant had a moment to snatch a few breaths and look around. He discovered Smitty only a few feet away, also panting and looking around to see what the attack had gained.

  “Well, this isn’t like going at that Vulture’s Nest place,” Rollant said. “We could’ve kept fighting there till the last war of the gods and never broken through.”

  “We’ve got a chance here, sure enough,” Smitty agreed. “More room to wiggle here. That other gap, we almost had to go in there single file to get at the fornicating traitors.”

  Rollant pointed ahead. “You think we’ll take that Caesar?”

  “We’d better,” his comrade answered. “If we don’t, Doubting George’ll eat every one of us, and without salt, too.”

  “You’re right,” Rollant said, and forced a smile. The Detinans dimly recalled the days when their ancestors had been maneaters. Those days were long gone now, and had been for centuries even before the dark-haired men crossed the Western Ocean and set foot in this land, but the memory lingered in jokes like that. So far as Rollant knew, none of his own forebears had ever done anything so barbaric.

  Other small things reminded Rollant he wasn’t quite an ordinary Detinan, even if he fought alongside thousands of them. Pointing ahead again, he said, “Who or what’s a Caesar?” He had no idea.

  To his surprise, Smitty only shrugged. “Beats me. Probably just a made-up name.”

  “Suppose you’re right.” Rollant seized the moment to plunge his sword into the nearly blood-red dirt of southeastern Peachtree Province-very different from the black mud he’d grown up with in the swamp country of Palmetto Province-to clean it. He said, “Our magecraft did work, at least pretty much.”

  “So it did.” Smitty nodded. “That’s something. I bet the traitors are mad enough to spit nails like a repeating crossbow, too.”

  “Probably.” Rollant cocked his own hand-held crossbow, fit a bolt to the groove, and took a shot at motion in the trenches the northerners still held. As often happened, he couldn’t tell whether he hit or missed.

  That one shot seemed to be a signal to resume the fight. A thirty-pound stone ball from a northern catapult thudded down only a few paces away. Some of that blood-red dirt splashed up and hit Rollant in the face. A southron soldier the stone struck screamed, but
not for long. More southrons started shooting at the enemy. Before long, the battle blazed at full fury once more.

  And at full fury it remained for the rest of the day. Try as they would, the southrons didn’t manage to break into Caesar. But Rollant was sure the enemy spent men like coppers holding them out. “They can’t go on doing that,” he said as the sun sank behind the town. “They won’t have an army left if they do.”

  “That’s always been one thing we could do,” Smitty said. “If all else fails, we can grind the bastards down till they’ve got nothing left. Only trouble with that is, it grinds down an awful lot of us, too.”

  “I know,” Rollant said dolefully. “But it’s pretty plain we aren’t any smarter than they are, even with General Hesmucet in charge instead of General Guildenstern. So we’d better be tougher, wouldn’t you say?”

  “We’d better be something, anyhow,” Smitty answered. “The something I am right now is gods-damned tired.” He took his blanket from his knapsack, cocooned himself in it, and started to snore.

  Rollant stayed awake a good deal longer. Maybe that meant he’d had more sleep the night before. Maybe-and more likely-it just meant he was too keyed up after the day’s hard fighting to wind down in a hurry.

  The traitors seemed very much awake, too. Their campfires burned brightly all the way back to Caesar. Every once in a while, a bolt or a stone or a firepot would land among the southrons. By all the signs, they needed to be ready to fight again in the morning, or perhaps in the middle of the night.

  Rollant had just dozed off when Sergeant Joram shook him awake for sentry-go. Rubbing sleep out of his eyes, he stared off to the west. “What’s going on there?” he asked, pointing to two new blazes beyond the profusion of northern campfires.

  “Gods damn me if I know,” Joram answered. “Maybe they’re burning what they can’t use.”

  But what Joseph the Gamecock’s men were burning, dawn revealed, was the pair of wooden bridges over the Rubicon, the river that ran west of Caesar. They’d kept campfires going close to the southrons, but they’d had only a handful of men around them. Now their whole army had crossed the Rubicon, and was retreating toward Marthasville as fast as it could go.

  Lieutenant General Bell could not have been more revolted if he’d faced the prospect of losing his other leg and having his other arm crippled. His men tramped glumly north, along with the rest of the Army of Franklin. The only man in the whole army who seemed satisfied with what they’d done at Viper River Gap was Joseph the Gamecock.

  “We hurt them,” he said when Bell, strapped onto his unicorn, rode up to remonstrate. “We hurt them badly.”

  “But they hold the field… sir,” Bell growled.

  “But the field is not important,” Joseph answered. “No field this side of Marthasville is important. We’ll find another miserable little place to defend in a few days and let them squander more lives attacking it.”

  “When do we attack them?” Bell asked.

  “If we see a chance, we can do that,” Joseph said. “More likely, though, we’ll go on defending.”

  That made Bell take a swig from his jar of laudanum. But not even the potent drug eased the turmoil in his mind. As soon as the army stopped for the evening, he began a new letter to King Geoffrey. May it please your Majesty, he began with malice aforethought, knowing that what he had to say would not please the king at all, I have just witnessed and been compelled by circumstances to take part in the most disgraceful and disgusting withdrawal ever recorded in the annals of warfare.

  “Is that too strong?” Bell wondered aloud. He shook his big, leonine head. It wasn’t. He would have taken oath to any and all gods that it wasn’t.

  Joseph the Gamecock ordered this army out of its works and into retreat, abandoning all parts ofPeachtreeProvince from Caesar northward to the provincial border to the foe. The Army of Franklin-the Thunderer grant that it see once more the province for which it was named-was not defeated in the fieldworks it was trying to defend. Caesar was not on the point of falling when the general commanding abandoned it to an evil fate.

  He paused to ink his pen once more and to look up at the ceiling of his pavilion, seeking inspiration from the gods or wherever he might find it. A moment later, the pen was racing across the paper again. However well the Army ofFranklin fought in the fieldworks, I have seen no sign that it can fight outside of them. Entrenching does indeed kill soldiers’ spirits. The sorcery is slow and exceedingly subtle, but no less sure for that.

  “What to do?” he muttered. “What to do?”

  So long as the general commanding has and is knownto have your confidence, your Majesty, we can but obey his orders and hope they will serve, however unlikely that may seem. But it would be disastrous and unfortunate to see this campaign come to an ignominious conclusion when you have officers who would gladly serve you for the sake of the glory they might win in the said service.

  I have, sir, the honor to remain your most humble and obedient servant… Bell signed his name, sanded the letter dry, sealed it, and sent it out in the same clandestine way he had with his earlier missive. He didn’t know what results that one had had-none he could see yet. He hoped this one would do more.

  “Cowardice,” he muttered. “If it’s not cowardice, it must be treason. They are there. How can we drive them away without hitting them?”

  It all seemed obvious to him. It seemed so obvious, he started to hitch his painful way over to Joseph the Gamecock’s pavilion and confront him. After heaving himself to his feet-no, to my foot, he thought-he checked himself. Even he could see that that would do him no good.

  He took the bottle of laudanum from his pocket, pulled the cork with his teeth, and swigged. As always, it tasted vile. As always, he didn’t care. “Ahhh,” he said, the soft, sated sigh of a man returning to the bosom of his beloved. He waited for the potent mix of spirits and poppy juice to work its will on him. He had not long to wait.

  Calm flowed through him. He no longer wanted to do anything dreadful to Joseph the Gamecock. He recognized that that would not be a good idea: if without leave he assailed the general commanding, had he any hope of afterwards ascending to the command? No. Surely it would go to a plodder like Roast-Beef William. Best to wait, then, and let his letters work… if they would.

  As the laudanum took its soft, sure grip on his soul, he floated away from some, at least, of the pain tormenting him. And as the pain receded, so did some of his anger at Joseph the Gamecock. With enough laudanum in him, Bell could look at things more disinterestedly. James was assuredly loyal to the kingdom if not to the king. He was doing what he thought best, what he thought right.

  “That doesn’t mean it is right, though,” Bell rumbled. Laudanum might ease his mind, but didn’t change it.

  He grabbed his crutches, heaved himself upright, and went out into the hot, muggy, firefly-punctuated night. “Good evening, sir,” Major Zibeon said smoothly, materializing at his side.

  “And what, by the gods, is so good about it?” Bell demanded. “Did you see one chance, one single, solitary chance, where we might have struck the enemy today?”

  “No, sir,” his aide-de-camp answered. “And I was looking for such a chance, too.”

  “So was I,” Bell said. “I didn’t see one, either. If I had, I would have hurled my men against the gods-damned southrons in the open field, and to the seven hells with what Joseph the Gamecock had to say about it.”

  “I have no doubt you would have, sir.” Zibeon did not sound approving.

  “We’ve got to hit the southrons a blow,” Bell insisted, as he’d been insisting since before the campaign began. “How far north will we go before we dare turn and face them again? All the way to Marthasville?”

  “Not so far as that, sir,” Major Zibeon said, sounding as much like a good servant as a soldier. “From what I hear, the general commanding intends to halt at the fieldworks outside Fat Mama.”

  “Hells of a name for a town,” Bell muttered; that
one penetrated even laudanum. Then, more slowly than he would have done before he was maimed and had to drug himself to hold anguish at bay, he called up a map in his mind. “Fat Mama? That’s bad enough-it’s halfway to Marthasville, by the Lion God’s fangs.”

  “Not quite, sir,” his aide-de-camp replied. “And the position is quite strong. With any luck at all, we should be able to hold them there for some time.”

  “I doubt it,” Bell said, unconsciously imitating Lieutenant General George. “Joseph will decide we’re too fornicating outnumbered, and he’ll find an excuse to skedaddle again.”

  “As Hesmucet comes farther up into Peachtree Province, the glideway path on which he depends for food and crossbow bolts and firepots and such grows longer and longer,” Zibeon said. “He needs more and more men to guard it, which leaves him with fewer and fewer men to put in in the field against us.”

  Bell fixed him with a stare so cold and fierce, it might indeed have come from the Lion God. Campfirelight only gave his eyes a cold glitter that made his aide-de-camp involuntarily give back a step. “So what?” Bell said. “Joseph won’t care. You mark my words. He doesn’t want to fight, is what’s wrong with him.”

  “I think you’re mistaken in that, sir,” Major Zibeon said, gathering himself. “And Joseph is looking for ways to get Ned of the Forest to attack Hesmucet’s supply line. When Ned strikes a glideway track, you may be sure it is properly struck. Ned plays the game for keeps.”

  “It is not a game,” Bell insisted. “It is a war for the safety of our kingdom, one we must not lose. But if such as Joseph remain in charge over us, the war will be lost before it is well begun, for we shall do no fighting in it.”

  “Joseph believes the war is already lost, if it be a matter of man against man, for the southrons have too many more men than we do,” Major Zibeon said. “To him, our best hope is to make the southrons weary of spending their lives to subdue us.”