Marching Through Peachtree wotp-2 Read online

  “I have heard Joseph upon this subject more times than I care to. He would, I am certain, make a most excellent bookkeeper,” Bell said, acid in his voice. “Up until this time, I was unaware that casting accounts had become a cardinal military virtue.”

  Zibeon was an imperturbable sort of man, but he winced. “Your outspokenness may land you in difficulty, sir,” he remarked.

  “So what?” Bell said with a laugh. “What can my friends do to me that my foes haven’t done already?” He made certain the crutch under his right armpit was secure before gesturing at his ruined body.

  Did Major Zibeon flush? In the firelight, Bell couldn’t be sure. His aide-de-camp said, “If you offend those set above you badly enough, they can remove you from your command.”

  “Only Joseph the Gamecock is set above me in all the Army of Franklin,” Bell said. “Should he dare to have the nerve to seek my removal, you may rest assured I would appeal to the king.”

  “Would Geoffrey hearken to such an appeal?”

  He’d better, Bell thought. But not even Major Zibeon knew of the letters he was writing to the king in Nonesuch. And so Bell stuck to what everyone in the northern provinces-and probably half the southrons, too-knew: “King Geoffrey and Count Joseph have been known to disagree in the past. Anyone who disagrees with Joseph may have Geoffrey on his side.”

  “May, I believe, is the critical word,” Zibeon said. “Remember, sir, that we left Detina over the question of who was and who should be at the top of the hierarchy. Geoffrey’s natural instinct is to support those who are higher against those who are lower. That means Joseph, not you.”

  “My natural instinct is to go out and smash the enemy,” Bell retorted, “and Joseph the Gamecock has done a good, thorough job of stifling it. I am no bookkeeper on the battlefield, regardless of what he may be.”

  “When we get to Fat Mama-”

  “No.” Bell cut off his aide-de-camp with a toss of the head. “I told you once, and I tell you again, he’ll find some excuse to run away from there, too. You mark my words and wait and see.”

  “Yes, sir,” Major Zibeon said tonelessly. “If you will excuse me, sir…” He strode off into the night.

  Lieutenant General Bell grunted. He didn’t think he’d convinced Zibeon. On the other hand, he didn’t worry about it very much. His aide-de-camp had gone on and on about hierarchies. In the hierarchy of the northern army, Bell ranked far above Zibeon. He didn’t have to worry about what the major thought unless he chose to do so.

  Unfortunately, the same did not apply to Joseph the Gamecock’s opinions. Joseph could do as he pleased here-could and would, unless King Geoffrey reined him in. “Fat Mama,” Bell said contemptuously. He turned around and stumped back into his pavilion.

  When he lay down, he couldn’t sleep. He took another slug of laudanum. The doses he poured down would have felled a man not used to the drug: would have knocked him out and might have stopped his heart. But the laudanum didn’t even make Bell sleepy. If anything, it energized him, so that he lay on his cot with thoughts whirling like comets through his brain. Not all of them would be the best thoughts; he knew that. He would have to look at them in the morning, or whenever he turned out to be less drugged.

  When I’m drugged all the time, though, how do I choose between the good ideas and those that aren’t so good? he wondered. He shrugged, then wished he hadn’t; even with the unicorn-stunning dose of laudanum in him, pain shot through his ruined left shoulder.

  He did eventually fall asleep, whether in spite of the laudanum or because of it he could not have said. And as he slept, he dreamt. In his dream, he was whole. He had two legs. His arm did everything an arm should do. And, indeed, he did more than a mortal man might expect to do, for he found himself flying up to the mountain beyond the sky where the gods dwelt.

  “What is your wish?” the Lion God asked him. The god had a lion’s head on a hero’s body, though his hands and feet were clawed and a tail lashed from the base of his spine.

  Even facing the gods, Bell did not hesitate. “Lord, let me lead this host!” he said fervently.

  “What will you do with it if you lead it?” the Thunderer asked.

  “Go forth and fight the foe wherever I find him,” Bell answered.

  The two martial gods looked at each other. “So shall it be,” they said together.

  Lieutenant General Bell woke up then, with the sound of the gods’ voices ringing in his ears, ringing in his soul. He knew he remained a cripple. For a moment, for one precious moment, it didn’t matter. “The Army of Franklin shall be mine,” he whispered. He hadn’t asked the gods how well he would do with the army if he got it. He didn’t worry about it now that he was awake, either.

  III

  “So this is how we’re going to play the game, eh?”

  Doubting George said to Hesmucet as the southron army tramped north towards a hamlet with the unlovely name of Fat Mama.

  “That’s how it looks to me,” General Hesmucet answered. “We’ll fight somewhere, Joseph the Gamecock will pull back, and then we’ll have to fight again.”

  “He’s not been making things easy for us,” George observed. “Of course, that’s not his job, is it?”

  “He won’t stake everything on one throw of the dice, gods damn him,” Hesmucet said. “We flanked him out of Borders, we beat him out of Caesar, but his army’s still intact, and he’s still got it between us and Marthasville.”

  “And as he falls back, he concentrates his force. And we have to thin ours out to protect our supply line,” Doubting George said. “That’s not good. If Ned of the Forest got athwart the glideway…”

  “I’m doing my best to make sure that doesn’t happen,” Hesmucet said. “I’ve sent a good-sized force of unicorn-riders out from Luxor on the Great River against him. With luck, Sam the Sturgeon will whip Ned. Even without luck, he’ll keep him too busy to bother our supplies.”

  “May it be so.” Lieutenant General George pointed ahead. “What are those men doing?”

  “They’re digging trenches, that’s what they’re doing,” Hesmucet said.

  George had already seen that for himself. “Yes, sir,” he said. “What I should have asked was, why are they doing it? We’re supposed to be on the march, not so? Did you give any order for us to entrench?”

  “Lion God claw me if I did,” Hesmucet answered.

  “Well, then,” George said, and rode toward the soldiers who were digging in. “What are you men playing at?” he demanded in his most formal tones.

  “Making us some trenches, sir, just in case,” one of the southrons replied.

  “I see that. What I don’t see is any traitors close by,” George said. “In case of what, then? Since there aren’t any traitors close by, why do you think you need the earthworks?”

  “Just in case, sir, like I said,” the soldier answered. He flipped another spadeful of red Peachtree dirt up onto what would be the parapet of the growing trench. “Somebody saw that the northerners had been digging a couple of fields over, so we thought we’d better have some trenches of our own.”

  “What kind of preposterous excuse are they giving?” General Hesmucet demanded as he rode up.

  “As a matter of fact, sir, it doesn’t sound so preposterous to me,” Doubting George replied, and then explained.

  “Gods damn entrenchments!” Hesmucet burst out. “Gods damn them to the seven hells. They take the offensive spirit away from our soldiers altogether.”

  “No, sir. I wouldn’t say that.” George shook his head. “The Detinan soldier fights his war the same way he runs his farm or his shop. If he invests in fighting, he expects that investment to pay.”

  “Well, these fellows are a pack of idiots for entrenching when there aren’t any traitors in sight,” Hesmucet said, and George couldn’t very well disagree with that. The general commanding raised his voice: “You boys had better get moving and keep moving, or I’m going to have to find out who in the hells you are.”r />
  “Uh, yes, sir,” the soldiers said in a ragged chorus. They abandoned their half-dug trenches and hurried away.

  “Disgraceful,” Hesmucet said.

  “I still don’t think so, sir,” Doubting George replied. “They fight hard whenever we send them at the foe. Think of that fight by Caesar a few days ago. You can’t ask for more than those men gave.”

  “You can always ask for more,” Hesmucet said in a steely voice. That grim determination was thought-provoking. Hesmucet repeated, “You can always ask for more,” and then added, “Sometimes asking for it makes the men give it to you.”

  “A point,” George said. “A distinct point.”

  “What I want to know is, will we ever get to this Fat Mama place?” Hesmucet grumbled. “In this country, the gods would have to work a miracle for us to get anywhere at all. I rode through it twenty years ago, and it hasn’t changed since-certainly not for the better in any way.”

  That was a distinct point, too. Swamps and pine woods and stands of shrubs and thorn bushes and saplings that had sprung up where the pines were cut down dominated the landscape. The roads, when there were roads, were narrow and seemed to wander at random rather than actually going anywhere. Without the sun in the sky, George would have had no idea where north lay.

  With cries of alarm, a whole company of soldiers a hundred yards ahead started running away as fast as they could go. “Now what?” Hesmucet growled.

  Before long, one of those cries of alarm developed words, or at least a word: “Hornets!”

  “If you’ll excuse me, sir,” Doubting George said, and rode away from trouble as fast as he could. He was not unduly surprised to discover General Hesmucet also retreating as fast as he could persuade his unicorn to go.

  “By the power vested in me as commanding general, I hereby declare those wasps traitors against King Avram,” Hesmucet declared.

  “That sounds good to me, sir,” George said. “Shall I order the men to arrest them and take them back to Georgetown for trial?” Before Hesmucet could reply, he went on, “Or do you suppose they’re enough of a trial right here?”

  Somebody yelled as he was stung. More soldiers broke ranks to escape the hornets. Ruefully, Hesmucet said, “They’re doing more to slow us down than Joseph the Gamecock has so far.”

  “You were the one who said it, sir: as long as he holds Marthasville and keeps his army in the field, he’s doing everything false King Geoffrey could ask of him. He’s not the same sort of fighter as Duke Edward, but he knows his business.”

  “I can’t argue with you there, much as I wish I could,” Hesmucet answered. “He pulled out of Caesar just as slick as you please-didn’t leave so much as a wagon or an ass that wasn’t too lame for us to use.”

  Before too long, the front of the line of march sorted itself out again. But the hornets caused a traffic jam all out of proportion to the amount of harm they could have done and to the number of men they actually stung. When a handful of people stopped and flabbled because of the wasps, everybody else behind them had to stop and wait while the chaos subsided. Delay went through the whole long column of marching southrons, as one could watch a devoured pig going through a big snake.

  And then, just when things finally seemed to have got back to normal, the roads opened out on a little northern town-one that wouldn’t have existed if it weren’t for a crossroads-called Dareton. Joseph the Gamecock had left a brigade of men behind there to skirmish with the southrons.

  Colonel Andy, Doubting George’s adjutant, was indignant. “What can he hope to accomplish with that?” he demanded rhetorically. “He can’t possibly hope to hold us back.”

  “To hold us? No, not when his whole army couldn’t at Borders or Caesar,” Doubting George said. “To delay us? To give him more time to settle in at Fat Mama farther north and make it tougher to crack? That’s what he’s got in mind, sure as I’m looking at those works ahead.”

  “Not chivalrous,” Andy sniffed. “Not sporting, either.”

  Peering at the fieldworks in front of Dareton, Lieutenant General George was inclined to agree. Red earth ramparts sheltered soldiers and made catapults and repeating crossbows harder for the southrons’ engines to reach. “He’ll try to do us as much harm as he can and then pull back,” George predicted.

  “Let’s just mask his position and then go on,” Andy said.

  But it wouldn’t be that easy or that cheap. By the way Joseph the Gamecock’s artificers had sited their wards, they’d made sure the southrons couldn’t pass on the open ground between Dareton and the forest to the east without coming in range of their weapons.

  “Do you know what I am going to do?” Doubting George said, a certain bleak amusement in his voice.

  “No, sir.” Andy didn’t sound amused at all. He sounded thoroughly indignant at Joseph the Gamecock.

  “I am going to get rid of a cockroach by dropping an anvil on it.”

  “Sir?” Andy didn’t get it. When the gods were passing out imagination, he’d been in line for a second helping of diligence. That made him an excellent adjutant, and would surely have made him a disaster as a commander.

  “Never mind, Colonel,” George said soothingly. “I’ll show you.” He began giving orders.

  The southrons’ siege engines rumbled forward on their wheeled carts. They started heaving stones and darts and firepots at the entrenchments in front of Dareton. The catapults in the fieldworks answered back as best they could, but Doubting George had ordered far more engines into action than Joseph the Gamecock had left with the defenders.

  And George threw more men at Dareton than Joseph had left behind to hold the place-many, many more. The whole Army of Franklin might have held his assaulting force out of the town. Then again, it might not have. A single lonely brigade, however feisty, had not a chance.

  Its commander soon realized as much. He left one regiment in the field to hold up the southron army for as long as it could, but got the rest of his men out of the trenches and marching through Dareton and on to the north. Here and there along the line, columns of smoke rising into the sky marked burning siege engines the traitors couldn’t take away with them.

  All in all, it was a minor triumph of delay. Glum prisoners came trudging back through the southrons’ lines. They cursed the men who’d caught them, they doubly cursed every blond they saw in a gray tunic, and they cursed Doubting George when they saw him.

  “Freeze in the seven hells!” some shouted, at the same time as others were yelling, “Fry in the seven hells!”

  George turned to Colonel Andy. “If half of me freezes while the other half fries, on average I ought to be pretty comfortable.”

  “Er, yes,” his adjutant replied, and George stifled a sigh. He’d long since realized Andy had not a dram of whimsy concealed anywhere about his person. That being so, why was he disappointed now? Because nobody likes to make a joke and have it fall flat, he thought.

  “Forward!” he shouted once more, and forward the soldiers went. But the stubborn defense at Dareton had cost them three hours of marching time, at the very least. Joseph the Gamecock’s army was surely using that time to good advantage. George thought about marching his men into the night to make up for the time they’d lost.

  He thought about that-and then dismissed the notion after one section of the army followed a looping country track through the woods that proved to double back on itself, so they took their comrades in flank. If they’d been northerners, his force would have been in trouble. As things were, straightening out the traffic jam and getting everybody on the right road took almost as long as smashing through the entrenchments in front of Dareton had.

  Could we do this at night? George wondered. He shook his head. It struck him as unlikely. Weariness wasn’t the only reason armies halted when darkness fell.

  And so the army encamped at sunset well short of Fat Mama. Campfires sent savory smoke into the sky, smoke made more savory by the meat roasting above a good many of those fires. Som
e of the meat came from cattle the army had brought along. Some, George was sure, came from local beasts that had met an untimely demise thanks to southron foragers. That was against the rules of war King Avram had set forth. To the king, the northerners remained his subjects and were not to be despoiled. The reality was that the northerners hated Avram and his soldiers, and those soldiers returned the disfavor. If they were hungry, they would eat whatever they could get their hands on.

  Some commanders discouraged them. Doubting George looked the other way. The harder the time the north had, the sooner the war would end-that was how he thought of things.

  And, as always happened when southron armies penetrated into a new part of the north, blonds on the run from their liege lords started coming into camp. Some were men alone, others whole families together. The army had plenty of use for laborers and washerwomen, and the liege lords who had to do without the labor of their serfs would, with luck, contemplate the cost of rebellion against their rightful sovereign.

  Taking in blonds also had costs, though. George remembered the one who’d murdered his wife and the officer who’d been trifling with her, though he’d also died, at the officer’s hands. That had been a nasty business all the way around.

  George grunted and shook his head. That was a nasty business on a small scale. The nasty business coming up would be much larger and much worse. One way or the other, this campaign and Marshal Bart’s in Parthenia would say who won the war, and why. “It had better be us,” George said, and rode on toward the north.

  * * *

  Captain Gremio found the little town of Fat Mama remarkable in no way but its name. It held a couple of thousand people, taking Detinans and blonds together, and had a main street full of shops, a few streets full of houses, the local baron’s keep, and not much else. Lesser nobles’ manor houses dominated the countryside, with the serfs’ shacks usually close by.

  Except for the glideway path that ran through Fat Mama and the low hills to the east and south of the town, Joseph the Gamecock never would have stopped there. Gremio was sure of that. As things were, his company, along with the rest of Colonel Florizel’s regiment, filed into trenches already waiting for them, trenches Joseph had had the local serfs dig ahead of time.