Sentry Peak

by Harry Turtledove

  “How can I watch?” somebody else said-maybe the offender, maybe not. “I can’t see the nose in front of my face.”

  “It ain’t that dark, Lionel,” yet another soldier said, “and you’ve got yourself a cursed big nose.” Lionel expressed loud resentment of this opinion. Several other people spoke in support of it.

  Rollant thought Lionel had a big nose, too. He thought most Detinans had pretty good-sized beaks. He didn’t join the debate, though. The Detinans were willing to let blonds fight for them. They were much less willing to hear what blonds had to say. That didn’t strike him as fair, but a lot of things didn’t strike him as fair.

  Then somebody stepped on his heel, almost stripping the boot from his foot. “Careful, there,” he said.

  “Sorry.” Whoever was marching along behind him didn’t sound very sorry, but he didn’t step on Rollant any more, either.

  They tramped east. It was, Rollant realized little by little, a large column. Whatever he was part of-nobody’d bothered explaining it to him-looked to be something important. He didn’t suppose they would have sent out the column on a night march if it weren’t important. He hoped they wouldn’t, anyhow.

  Somebody rode by on a unicorn. “Keep going, men,” he called. “When we get to the river, we’ll give the traitors a surprise.” He raised his hat. Starlight gleamed from his shiny crown.

  “That’s Bill the Bald!” Smitty exclaimed. “He must be in charge of this whole move.”

  “I’d like it better if we had Doubting George in charge of us,” Rollant said. “If he kept us from getting licked by the River of Death, I expect he can do just about anything.” Smitty didn’t argue with him.

  Dawn began turning the eastern sky gray and then pink. Rollant started to be able to see where he was putting his feet. He tried to see more than that, to see where the enemy was. He couldn’t, not yet.

  Smitty said, “Next thing we’ve got to find out is if the pontoons make it to where they’re supposed to be when we make it to where we’re supposed to be. If we can’t cross the river, we sure as hells can’t do the fighting we’re supposed to do.”

  “Cross the river?” Rollant said. “Nobody ever tells me anything.”

  “I’m telling you now, aren’t I?” Smitty said. Rollant nodded, but he still meant what he’d said. He always got rumors more slowly than most of the others in the company. He knew why, too: he was a blond. He’d mostly given up complaining about it. Complaining didn’t make people talk to him any more, and it did make them think he was a whiner. He didn’t think so, but one of the lessons of serfdom and the army alike was that hardly anybody cared what he thought.

  Lieutenant Griff still led the regiment; Captain Cephas wasn’t fit to march or fight. Griff pointed ahead, toward the Franklin River. “That’s Brownsville Ferry, where we’re going,” he called to the company. He actually sounded as if he knew what he was talking about. “We’ve got more men coming, I hear. Between them and us, we’ll drive the traitors back and open up a proper supply route.”

  “Why didn’t he tell us all that before we started marching?” Rollant asked.

  “He probably didn’t know himself,” Smitty answered. “How much you want to bet somebody briefed him while we were on the road here?”

  Rollant thought about it. It didn’t take much thought. He nodded. “That sounds right.” As the company commander had, he pointed. “Look at those big wooden boxy things floating in the river.”

  “Those are the pontoons.” Smitty’s voice cracked with excitement. “And see? We’ve got the wizards in place to do what needs doing with ’em. By the gods, that didn’t always happen when General Guildenstern was in charge of things.”

  Sure enough, the mages on this bank of the Franklin were busy incanting-and the northerners on the far bank of the river didn’t seem to have any sorcerers in place to challenge their spells. Under their wizardry, the pontoons formed a line straight across the Franklin River. More mages-and some down-to-earth, unmagical artificers, too-spiked planks on the pontoons to form a makeshift bridge. The blue-clad traitors did have a few soldiers in place on the far side of the river. They started shooting at the artificers as soon as they got within range. They hit some of them, too, but not enough to keep the bridge from getting finished. Rollant whooped, even though that completed bridge meant he was going into danger. He wasn’t the only one cheering, either-far from it.

  Trumpets blared. Gray-clad soldiers swarmed onto the bridge and charged toward the enemy: unicorn-riders first, then pikemen, then crossbowmen like Rollant and his comrades. “We are to drive back the enemy wherever we find him,” Lieutenant Griff said grandly.

  Rollant set a quarrel in the groove of his crossbow and cocked the weapon. The rest of the soldiers in his company did the same. They couldn’t do much in the way of driving unless they could shoot. More and more of King Avram’s men flooded over the bridge. By now, the sun had risen. Rollant saw the men who followed King Geoffrey running away, some of them pausing every now and then to shoot at his comrades and him. It wasn’t that they weren’t brave; he knew too well that they were. But General Bart’s sudden, strong move to seize this river crossing had caught them by surprise, and they didn’t have enough troopers close by to stop it.

  Then his own feet were thudding on the timbers of the pontoon bridge. “King Avram!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. “King Avram and freedom!”

  He didn’t hear anyone yelling for King Geoffrey and provincial prerogative. His boots squelched in the mud on the far riverbank. He looked around wildly for somebody to kill.

  But there weren’t that many northerners around. The men who’d gone over the pontoon bridge ahead of Rollant had killed some of them, while others had run away, seeing themselves so outnumbered. Rollant shot at one traitor who’d decided to run a little later than his comrades. His bolt caught the enemy soldier right in the seat of the pantaloons. The fellow let out a howl Rollant could clearly hear and ran faster than ever, one hand clapped to the wound.

  “Nice shot!” Smitty said, laughing. “He’ll remember you every time he sits down for the next year.” He waved to Sergeant Joram. “Put it in the report, Sergeant-Trooper Rollant has made himself a pain in the arse to the enemy.”

  “What are you talking about?” Joram demanded-he hadn’t seen the shot. Smitty explained. The sergeant condescended to chuckle. “All right, that’s not bad. But our job is to kill the whoresons, not just stick pins in their backsides.”

  All Rollant said was, “Yes, Sergeant.” He wanted to kill the traitors, too. He didn’t want to kill them because they were traitors, or because they were trying to tear the kingdom to pieces. All that was for ordinary Detinans. He wanted to kill them because one of their number had used him like a beast of burden till he was a grown man and able to run away, because uncounted thousands of them used other blonds the same way (and used their women worse), because almost every Detinan in the north wished he were a liege lord and able to use blonds so. If that wasn’t reason enough to want the traitors dead, Rollant was cursed if he knew what would be.

  “Soldiers coming!” somebody called. “Coming out of the east!”

  Rollant wasted no more time worrying about reasons to want to kill the enemy. The most basic reason was simplicity itself: if he didn’t kill northerners, one of them would be delighted to kill him. He put a new quarrel in his crossbow with frantic haste, then yanked back the string to cock the weapon.

  Smitty had sensibly found shelter behind a low stone fence. Rollant got down behind the fence with him. Crouching on one knee, he peered over the fence in the direction of the rising sun. Sure enough, there came the cloud of dust that bespoke marching men.

  It was a large cloud. “A lot of those bastards heading this way,” Smitty said.

  “I know,” Rollant answered. “Well, we wondered where they were. Now we know. They want us, they’ll have to pay for us.”

  “That’s right,” Smitty said. “They made us charge fences, b
ack there in front of Rising Rock. Now we’ll see how well they like it, gods damn them.”

  Rollant nodded. One of the things soldiers in this war quickly learned was how much protection mattered. A man behind a solid stone wall could stand off several out in the open-provided an engine or a wizard didn’t knock down the wall. That, unfortunately, happened, too.

  And then, to his surprise, Rollant heard cheers from King Avram’s soldiers farther east. Some of the cheers had words attached to them. And those words were among the most welcome he’d ever heard: “They’re ours!”

  When he heard those words, he cheered, too. He cheered, yes, but he didn’t show himself, not yet. When Detinans fought Detinans, one army looked all too much like another. Men had killed their own generals before, and you were just as dead with a friend’s bolt through you as with a foe’s.

  But then somebody yelled, “Those are Fighting Joseph’s men, come to help us hold the supply line against Geoffrey’s traitors.”

  At that, Rollant did get to his feet. If people could see who led the newcomers, he was willing to believe they followed King Avram. Then he saw the general himself, and did some yelling of his own: “There’s Fighting Joseph!”

  A lot of men were yelling Fighting Joseph’s name, and he waved to the ordinary soldiers. He was an extraordinarily handsome man, with ruddy features and a piercing glance. Back in the west, he’d promised to lead his army straight to Nonesuch. If he had, people wondered if his next move would have been to overthrow King Avram and seize the throne for himself. They’d stopped wondering in a hurry, when Duke Edward of Arlington used half as many men as Fighting Joseph led to whip him soundly at Viziersville. He still made a good division commander, though.

  “Hello, boys!” he called now from the back of the fine unicorn he rode. “We’re here, and there’s plenty more coming along after us. Your days on short commons are done, and once you’ve filled your bellies, we’ll throw the traitors out of here and boot them back to Peachtree Province once and for all.”

  Everybody cheered. Rollant shouted himself hoarse. Smitty threw his hat in the air-and then recovered it in a hurry, before Sergeant Joram could growl at him for going without it. As he put it back on his head, he said, “It may not be so easy. Geoffrey’s men’ll try and knock us out of here, you wait and see if they don’t.”

  IX

  “Those sons of bitches!” Major Thersites shouted in a perfect transport of rage. “Those idiotic, gods-damned sons of bitches! What in the hells have we got generals for in the first place, if they can’t keep things like that from happening?”

  Captain Ormerod had never seen him so furious. He wished Colonel Florizel were still commanding the regiment; Florizel was gentleman enough to keep his annoyance under control. He was also gentleman enough to tell the officers under him why he was annoyed. Cautiously, Ormerod asked, “What’s gone wrong now, sir?”

  “I’ll tell you what’s gone wrong,” Thersites snapped. “The great mages and mighty scholars who command us have let the stinking southrons put a decent supply line back together, that’s what. How are we supposed to starve those buggers out of Rising Rock if they can bring in as many victuals as we can?”

  “Oh, dear,” Ormerod said, in lieu of something a good deal stronger. “How did that happen?”

  “How? I’ll tell you how,” Thersites growled. “All our bright boys were sound asleep, that’s how. They hit Brownsville Ferry from east and west at the same time, and ran our soldiers right out of there. Of course we never expected it. Why would the southrons want to keep themselves fed?”

  Maybe he was right about how the unfortunate event had happened, maybe he was wrong. He was, as always, so full of bile against those set above him that Ormerod had trouble trusting his own judgment there. But Thersites was surely right about what the southrons’ advance meant. “We have to push them back,” Ormerod said.

  “You can see that.” Thersites didn’t have any trouble with Ormerod-he outranked him. “I can see that. But can the great philosophers over on Proselytizers’ Rise see that? Not bloody likely!” He spat in fine contempt.

  A couple of hours later, though, Earl James of Broadpath came riding up to the base of Sentry Peak on a unicorn that would have done better hauling a winery wagon. “Come on, you lazy good-for-nothings,” he called. “We’ve got some southrons to clear out east of here.”

  “How did they get there in the first place?” Thersites asked him.

  “Pulled a march on us, caught us by surprise,” James of Broadpath answered. “It’s war. These things happen. What matters is whether you fix them or not. Get your men ready to fight, Major.”

  “Yes, sir,” Thersites said. James nodded and rode on. Thersites turned to Ormerod. “You heard the man. Let’s get ready to move.”

  “Yes, sir,” Ormerod said, as Thersites had before. “Who will take our place here?”

  “I have no idea, Captain,” the regimental commander answered. “But I’m not going to worry about it, either. I hope the big brains will see they need to move somebody else in if they move us out. I hope so, but you never can tell.”

  With that something less than ringing reassurance, Ormerod had to be content. He hurried back to his own company, shouting for the men to line up ready to march. “What now?” Lieutenant Gremio asked in some exasperation. “Are they going to throw us at Rising Rock? They’re asking for us to get slaughtered if they do.”

  “No, it isn’t that,” Ormerod said, and explained what it was. He added, “Remember what happened to Dan of Rabbit Hill and Leonidas the Priest. Criticizing the commanding general isn’t smart.”

  “Getting ourselves in this mess isn’t smart, either,” Gremio retorted. “If I see that someone is an imbecile, should I keep quiet about it?”

  “I don’t know. Should you?” Ormerod said. “Thersites certainly hasn’t. Do you want to be just like him?”

  As he’d thought it would, that gave Gremio pause. The barrister from Karlsburg grimaced and said, “All right, Captain, you’ve made your point. And this is something that needs doing, no doubt about that. Will anyone replace us here?”

  “I don’t know,” Ormerod said. “Nobody bothered to tell me.” Gremio grunted and rolled his eyes.

  Ormerod’s company was the second one ready to march. That spared him and his men the rough side of Major Thersites’ tongue. “This isn’t a ladies’ social, Captain,” Thersites snarled at the commander of the last company to assemble. “If you don’t care to run the risk of getting shot, you shouldn’t have come along in the first place. You could be back in Palmetto Province happy and safe, you know.”

  “Yes, sir. I’m sorry, sir,” the luckless company commander said through clenched teeth. Colonel Florizel would never have used him so; Colonel Florizel was a true northern gentleman. Major Thersites, as far as Ormerod could see, was a first-class son of a bitch. But, with Florizel wounded, he was also the regimental commander, and the company commanders had to put up with him.

  “Let’s go,” Thersites said. Off went the regiment, along with several others from the slopes of Sentry Peak. Ormerod wondered if they would have enough men to shift the southrons. He couldn’t do anything about that except wonder. When he wondered out loud, Gremio said, “They’ve been getting plenty of reinforcements. Where are our fresh troops coming out of the east? Or anywhere else, for that matter?”

  “Haven’t seen ’em,” Ormerod answered, just as the regiment began to move. He raised his voice: “Come on, men! We can do it! Forward-march!” What a liar I’m turning into, he thought, not having the faintest idea whether they could do it or not.

  “We should have come this way weeks ago,” Gremio said. “If we had, we really could have starved the southrons out.”

  “What did I tell you before?” Ormerod asked.

  “If you want to report me to Thraxton the Braggart, go right ahead,” Gremio said. “He’s sent away better officers than the ones he’s kept, with the possible exception of Leonidas th
e Priest.”

  Ormerod didn’t want to report him to Count Thraxton. For one thing, he’d have to report him through Major Thersites, and Thersites said worse things about Thraxton than Gremio ever had. For another, Ormerod wanted nothing more than to close with the southrons and to drive them out of the north. Here he was, finally getting his chance. He just shook his head and kept marching.

  It wasn’t going to be easy. The closer he got to the southrons’ positions, the more obvious that became. Avram’s men were taking advantage of every fence and clump of trees and tiny hillock they could. Whoever was in charge of them plainly knew his business.

  And they had unicorn-riders, too, men who galloped out, shot their crossbows at the advancing northerners, and then hurried away before anything very much could happen to them. It was like getting stung by gnats, except that some of the stings from these gnats killed.

  “Where’s Ned of the Forest when we really need him?” Lieutenant Gremio said.

  “Off to the Great River,” Ormerod answered. Gremio’s expression was eloquent.

  As the northern force approached the enemy line, engines opened up on them. The engines opened up a little too soon, as a matter of fact, almost all the stones and bursting firepots falling short. Ormerod felt better to see that: it was nice to know the southrons could make mistakes, too.

  In a great voice, Major Thersites shouted, “Form line of battle!”

  “Form line of battle!” Ormerod echoed to his men. Veterans, they knew how to go quickly from column into line, where raw troops would have been all too likely to make a hash of the job. And, he saw, they would have a good, solid screen of pikemen in front of them. That would help. If anything helped, that would help.

  Someone off to one side winded a horn. Ormerod knew the horn calls, too. “Forward!” he shouted, along with the other officers in the force James of Broadpath had collected. Forward the men went, roaring like lions with the northern battle cry that often seemed worth a couple of regiments all by itself.