“All right, then. I’ll say no more about it.” But Doubting George held up a forefinger. “No, I will say one thing more after all. If by any chance you have friends who think the same way you did, make it very plain to them that I will not be a party to any of this. I ask no names. I don’t want to know. But if there has been some stupid conspiracy, I expect it to dissolve.”
“Yes, sir. It will, sir.” Absalom the Bear fled as precipitately as most of General Guildenstern’s army had when James of Broadpath threw his soldiers into the gap in the southrons’ line. But he hadn’t fled quite fast enough. He’d told George what George hadn’t wanted to hear.
Now alone on the streets of Rising Rock, George sighed. His breath smoked in front of his face. The day, like a lot of days lately, was cool and damp and misty. Maybe that mage Hesmucet had found was doing his job. Maybe the weather would have been like this anyway. How could anyone not a mage tell?
At the thought of Hesmucet, Doubting George sighed again. He did want a larger command, and recognized that the other lieutenant general was more likely to get it. But that mattered only so much. He’d meant every word he said to Absalom the Bear. As a Parthenian, he, like Duke Edward of Arlington, had had to choose between ties to Detina and ties to his province. Unlike Edward, he’d chosen the large kingdom. He knew the choice he’d made, and didn’t regret it.
Smashing the traitors is the most important thing. Doubting George had to make himself believe that beyond the shadow of a doubt. He’d given up too much not to believe it. He would get his confiscated estate in Parthenia back if Avram beat Geoffrey, but how much would it be worth with the serfs freed, with no hope of bringing in the crops that supplemented his meager army pay?
“I don’t care,” he said, as if someone had asked him the question aloud. “By all the gods, I don’t.” If that weren’t true, he would have been wearing blue pantaloons and calling Geoffrey his sovereign. And, as if that weren’t bad enough, he might have been serving under Thraxton the Braggart. Next to that dreadful prospect, the thought that Hesmucet might gain some extra preferment didn’t look so bad.
George looked toward Proselytizers’ Rise and then toward Sentry Peak. He couldn’t see them, which meant the northerners there couldn’t see him, either. He wondered what Count Thraxton was planning. He couldn’t have much of an attack in mind hereabouts, not if he’d sent James of Broadpath off towards Wesleyton.
I wouldn’t have done that. Doubting George shook his head. No, I wouldn’t have done that at all. He was a defensive fighter, first, last, and always. You have to be daft to send a big part of your army away when the other fellow is building up his forces. Well, maybe you don’t have to be daft, but it certainly helps.
Did Thraxton really think his magecraft could make up for his lack of men? Maybe he did. It hadn’t at several other fights, but maybe he did. That, in George’s opinion, was another bit of daftness. Well, Thraxton’s troubles weren’t his, for which fact he heartily praised the gods.
He began walking toward the north end of town, toward the trenches and barricades he’d ordered built after General Guildenstern’s army had had to fall back to Rising Rock from the River of Death. Magecraft or no magecraft, anyone who tried to take those fieldworks would have his work cut out for him. The works were stronger now than they had been when first made right after the grinding retreat from Peachtree Province, and better manned, too, but the traitors wouldn’t have enjoyed trying to take them even then. No one enjoyed trying to take a position Doubting George chose to defend.
“Here’s the general!” someone called from the trenches. Southron soldiers whooped and cheered. A couple of them scaled their hats through the air.
“Careful, boys,” George said. “You’ll make old Thraxton and his pet he-witches try and curl my beard for me if they find out I’m around.”
“And do you think they can do it?” a soldier asked, as if delivering a cue in a play.
“Oh, I have my doubts,” George answered. The soldiers cheered louder than ever. They played up the nickname he’d got back at the military collegium, and enjoyed it when he did the same.
“Shut up, you gods-damned noisy fools!” a northern sentry yelled from his post not far beyond the line.
“To the hells with you!” the southrons yelled back, and much else besides. They finally made the enemy soldier so angry, he shot his crossbow at them. The bolt harmlessly buried itself in the ground. A southron added, “And you can’t shoot worth a gods-damn, either!”
“Why don’t you southron bastards go back to your own kingdom and leave us alone?” the sentry called.
“This is our kingdom!” George yelled before any of his men could answer. “Detina is one kingdom. It always has been. It always will be.”
“Liar!” the northerner shouted back. “If you think we’re going to let that son of a bitch of an Avram turn all our blonds into nobles, you can gods-damned well think again.”
“He’s never said he wanted to do anything of the kind.” George rolled his eyes in exasperation. “All he wants to do is turn them into Detinans.”
“That’s bad enough!” the sentry said, and shot another crossbow quarrel in the direction of the southrons.
“Don’t worry about him, sir,” said one of the soldiers in gray tunic and pantaloons. “He shoots at us all the time, but he hasn’t hit anybody yet.”
“You ought to send out a couple of fellows with knives and get rid of him once for all,” George said.
Eyes wide, the soldier shook his head. “By the Lion God, no! If we sneak over and cut that bastard’s throat, the stinking traitors are liable to put somebody there who really knows how to handle a crossbow.”
“All right.” Doubting George yielded the point. He had to fight hard not to yield to laughter, too. “Leave him there, then, if it makes you happy. In that case, though, you have to go on listening to him.”
“He’s a fool,” the soldier said dismissively. But the question he asked next showed he wasn’t quite so sure: “Sir, do you think a blond could ever become a Detinan nobleman? Do you think that could ever happen?”
George had his doubts but, for once, didn’t voice them. He didn’t much care for the idea, but he also didn’t tell the soldier that. What he did say was, “I don’t know and I don’t care and I’m not going to worry about it. Don’t you worry about it, either. Like I said, the only thing that matters is holding the kingdom together. If we can do that, the gods will take care of us, right?”
“Yes, sir,” the fellow said. “That’s a good way to look at things, sir.”
“I hope it is,” Doubting George said. He hadn’t thought about the question the trooper had put to him. He wondered whether King Avram had thought it all the way through. If blonds were to become the same as real Detinans in law, what was to keep them from becoming part of the nobility? What was to keep them, even, from marrying into the royal family? Nothing he could see.
He shrugged. It wasn’t his worry, for no blonds would marry into his family any time soon. He was perfectly happy with his wife, who was now living in a rented house in Georgetown. He hadn’t even tomcatted around his Parthenian estate when he was there, as so many nobles did. Unlike a lot of his neighbors, he wasn’t liege lord to young serfs who looked like him.
How will the blonds make their way in the world if they aren’t serfs any more? he wondered. He shrugged again. He didn’t see any of them in this regiment, but he’d had a fair number under his command, and they’d fought as well on Merkle’s Hill and other places as anybody else. That had surprised him at first, but one thing he didn’t doubt was what he saw with his own eyes.
Having looked over the fieldworks with his own eyes, he went back into Rising Rock. When he got to the hostel where General Bart made his headquarters, Colonel Andy said, “Oh, there you are, sir.”
George looked around behind himself, as if he might have been somewhere else. “Well, yes, I think so. What of it?”
“Only that the commanding general’s b
een looking for you, sir,” his adjutant replied.
“Ah.” That was business. Doubting George nodded. “Well, he’ll probably find me pretty soon. Will he find me in his rooms, do you suppose?”
“Er, yes, sir, I believe he will.” Andy suffered George’s occasional fits of whimsy in much the same way as he might have suffered a bout of yellow fever.
“Good,” George said. “I’ll wander upstairs, then, and see if he does find me there.” He headed for the fancy spiral staircase, leaving his adjutant scratching his head behind him.
When he knocked on the commanding general’s door, Bart opened it himself. General Guildenstern would have, too, but Guildenstern likely would have had to shoo a scantily clad blond wench out of the chamber first. Not being a noble had never stopped him from tomcatting. “Good day, George,” Bart said. “Good to see you.”
“Good to be seen, sir,” George said, deadpan as usual.
Bart scratched his head. His quizzical expression looked very much like Andy’s. He rallied faster than George’s aide-de-camp had, though, saying, “How would you like to look over the latest plan for attacking Count Thraxton’s army?”
“I think I’d like that pretty well, sir,” George answered.
“Do you, eh?” Bart said. “I was wondering if you’d tell me you didn’t care.”
Innocent as a sneakthief who’d seen a judge more times than he could count, George said, “I can’t imagine why, sir.”
“No, eh?” General Bart’s eyes glinted-or maybe it was just a trick of the light. “I doubt that.”
“I can’t imagine why, sir,” George repeated, and stepped into the commanding general’s chamber.
* * *
Rain drummed down out of a chilly, leaden sky. Captain Ormerod’s boots squelched in mud when he stepped out of his tent. Peering south from the forward slopes of Sentry Peak toward Rising Rock, he saw rain and mist and not much else. He cursed. Even his curses sounded dull and commonplace and gray.
Then he said, “If this is what licking the southrons up by the River of Death got us, gods damn me to the hells if I don’t think we’d’ve been better off getting whipped.”
Lieutenant Gremio was looking south, too, with rain dripping from the brim of his hat and from a threadbare cape some southron didn’t need any more. He shook his head. “Losing is always worse,” he said, ready as ever for an argument. Sure enough, he was a barrister to the very core of his being.
But Ormerod said, “No. Look at the southrons.”
“I can’t, not with all this rain and fog.” Gremio was also relentlessly precise.
Precision notwithstanding, Ormerod ignored him. “Look at the southrons,” he repeated. “They lost by the River of Death. They had to run back here and hole up in Rising Rock. And they went and did things. They brought in more men. They made sure they kept their supply lines open. What can we do to them now?”
“Beat them again,” Gremio answered.
“Fine,” Ormerod said. “Let’s beat them. How do you propose to do it?”
“I’m not a general,” Gremio said. “Even you have a higher rank than I do, sir.” He let reproach creep into his voice-probably reproach for Ormerod’s having that higher rank. “But I am sure those in command must have some notion of how to go about it.” Maybe that was where the reproach came from. Maybe. Ormerod didn’t believe it.
He said, “If they do, they’ve done a hells of a good job of keeping it secret from everybody else.”
Gremio grunted. He couldn’t very well deny that, not when it was staring not only him but the whole Army of Franklin square in the face. At last, sounding a good deal less than happy, he said, “We can only hope that all the changes the army has seen will lead to a happy result.”
“Not fornicating likely.” That wasn’t Ormerod; he and Gremio both jerked in surprise. When Ormerod whirled, he found Major Thersites standing behind them. Thersites could move quiet as a cat when he chose. He stood bareheaded in the chilly rain, letting it drip down his face. “Not fornicating likely,” he said again, relishing the phrase. “We had our chance, had it and didn’t take it. Now we’re just waiting for the other boot to drop-on us.”
Ormerod wished Colonel Florizel still commanded the regiment. Florizel was a good, solid fellow; even when he worried, he never showed it. Thersites, on the other hand, spoke his mind in a thoroughly ungentlemanly way-and would gleefully gut anyone who accused him of being ungentlemanly. Picking his words warily, Ormerod said, “It is true that we might have done better after the fight by the River of Death.” Finding himself agreeing with Thersites made Ormerod wonder about his own assumptions.
“Better?” Thersites snorted now. “We couldn’t have done worse if we’d tried for a year. I’ve seen plenty of mugs of beer with better heads on ’em than Thraxton the Braggart’s got.” That jerked a laugh out of Ormerod. Thersites went on, “Not chasing Guildenstern hard-that was plenty smart, wasn’t it? And sending James of Broadpath off to the hells and gone when the southrons are getting ready to up and kick us in the ballocks-why, gods damn me to the hells if that wasn’t even smarter.”
It was true. Every word of it was true. Ormerod knew as much in his belly. He still wished Thersites hadn’t come right out and said so. The man had a gift for pointing out things that would have been better left unnoticed.
Gremio spoke with as much care as he would have used before a hostile panel of judges: “I think Count Thraxton ordered Earl James away because the two men had a certain amount of difficulty working together.” As a barrister, he saw the world in very personal terms.
Thersites saw it that way, too. He also saw it in very earthy terms. “James is no fool. He knows Thraxton is a dried-up old unicorn turd, same as everybody else with an ounce of common sense does. No wonder Thraxton sent him off to Wesleyton. He knows what a proper general’s supposed to be like, James does. Thraxton ran Ned of the Forest out of this army, too, and don’t think we won’t regret that.”
He’d complained about Ned’s departure before. Ned, Ormerod thought, is what he wishes he were. Gremio said, “We can’t do anything about it now.”
“Of course we can, by the Thunderer’s hammer,” Thersites said. “We can pay for it-and we will.” He squelched away.
“What a disagreeable man,” Gremio said. But he said it in a low voice. He was right, too, no doubt of that. But being right about a disagreeable man’s disagreeability (Ormerod wondered if that was a word, and rather hoped it wasn’t) could have disagreeable consequences.
“He says what he thinks,” Ormerod observed.
“If that doesn’t prove my point, curse me if I know what would,” Gremio answered.
Ormerod went back to what they’d been talking about before Thersites made his appearance: “What are we going to do here? What can we do here, except wait for the southrons to hit us and hope we can beat them?”
“I don’t know,” Gremio said-not the most common admission for a barrister to make. “As I told you before, I hope our generals do.”
“Well, I hope so, too,” Ormerod said. “I hope for all kinds of things. But hoping for ’em doesn’t mean I’m going to get them. If Count Thraxton doesn’t know what in the hells he’s doing, he could have fooled me.”
Lieutenant Gremio raised an eyebrow. But he was too smooth to contradict his superior too openly. Instead, he changed the subject: “If you had everything you hope for, what would it be?”
“Why, for us to have our own kingdom,” Ormerod answered at once. “For us to whip the southrons out of our land. That’s what we’re fighting for, isn’t it?”
“And after we’ve won the war?” Gremio asked.
“All I want to do is go back to my estate and go on like nothing ever happened,” Ormerod said. “That’s what we’re fighting for, too.”
“Well, so it is.” But Gremio had an ironic glint in his eye that Ormerod neither liked nor trusted. The barrister from Karlsburg asked an innocent enough question: “How likely do you thi
nk that is?”
Ormerod didn’t like to reflect any more than he had to. “If we can lick the southrons, why shouldn’t things go back to the way they ought to be?”
“They might,” Gremio allowed. “They might, but I wouldn’t count on it. And if they don’t, it’s Avram’s fault, the gods chase him through the seven hells with whips forever.”
Even Ormerod figured out what he was talking about. “You mean the serfs, don’t you? With King Geoffrey running things, they’ll fall back into line soon enough, you wait and see.”
“I hope you’re right,” Gremio said. “As I say, though, I wouldn’t count on it. Avram’s told the blonds they can be free, and they aren’t going to forget. Ideas are corrosive things.”
“Chasing the serfs through the fields with whips will bring them back into line,” Ormerod said. “They’ve risen up before. We’ve whipped them every fornicating time they tried it. If we have to, we can bloody well do it again.”
“We’ve done such a good job of sitting on them-the past hundred years especially-that most of them forgot things could be any other way,” Gremio said. “It won’t be like that any more.”
“We can do it,” Ormerod repeated, but he didn’t sound quite so sure of himself any more. “Or we could do it, anyway, if the southrons didn’t keep stirring up trouble in our land. That’s another reason to have our own kingdom: to keep them from bothering the blonds, I mean.”
“Yes, but can we?” Gremio asked. “If they don’t respect provincial borders, why should they care about the bounds between kingdoms?”
With a grunt, Ormerod studied a new idea. The more he studied it, the less he liked it. As Gremio said, ideas were corrosive things. They kept a man from resting easy with the way the world had always worked. “We’d have to conquer the southrons, beat ’em altogether, to keep ’em from meddling. That’s what you’re saying.” He sounded accusing. He felt that way, too.
“We can’t conquer the southrons, not in a thousand years,” Gremio said. “The south is bigger than we are.”
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