The flunky, who remained as toplofty as if Geoffrey’s armies had overrun New Eborac City, looked at him from hooded eyes. “What ever could have given you that impression, Lieutenant General?”
Bell glowered back. “I’m having trouble believing the king has all this many meetings and such-like things.”
“Are you? What a pity,” the servitor murmured. “Some people will believe anything.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Bell asked.
“Why, what it said, of course,” the other man replied.
He refused to be pushed. He was as agile with words as a dueling master with sabers. After a while, Bell gave up and went away. That that might have been what King Geoffrey’s secretary had in mind never occurred to him.
But Bell, almost by accident, figured out a response to Geoffrey’s evasions. Since the king would not see him, since the king would not hear him, he started telling his story to anyone else who might listen. That included his fellow officers in Geoffrey’s capital, the nobles who thronged into Nonesuch to be near the king, and the merchants and gamblers who kept trying to get rich when everyone else got poorer and hungrier by the day. Bell talked-and talked, and talked.
After several days of this, everybody in Nonesuch was talking about what had happened in front of Ramblerton-and talking about Bell’s version of what had happened there. That version, perhaps not surprisingly, gave Bell as much credit as could be salvaged from what had befallen the north.
The rumors Bell had started soon reached King Geoffrey’s ears. And Geoffrey, who’d spent much of the war trying to strangle rumors, was naturally unenthusiastic about having more start. He didn’t summon Bell to him to discuss the officer’s reinstatement: he summoned him to try to get him to shut his mouth.
To Lieutenant General Bell, the difference in the two possible reasons for the summons was academic. That Geoffrey had summoned him to the citadel of Nonesuch was all that mattered. Bell was earnest, Bell was aggressive, but Bell had the political sense of a watermelon. Worse, he was completely unaware he had the political sense of a watermelon. As far as he was concerned, the summons represented a vindication of sorts.
Grim-faced guards in blue stood outside the citadel in Geoffrey’s capital. For the life of him, Bell couldn’t figure out why they looked so grim. They were here on ceremonial duty, weren’t they? If they’d been in the trenches of Pierreville with the Army of Southern Parthenia facing Marshal Bart’s army, they would have had some excuse for long faces. As things were? Not likely!
Well fortified with laudanum, Bell hitched along on crutches past the guards and into the citadel. King Geoffrey’s throne resembled nothing so much as a gilded dining-room chair. Well, how much does Geoffrey resemble a king? Bell asked himself. But the answer to that formed in his mind at once: more than Avram does, by the Lion God’s fangs!
Had Bell not been mutilated, he would have had to bow low before his sovereign. As things were, he contented himself with a nod and a murmured, “Your Majesty.”
“Lieutenant General,” Geoffrey replied, his voice colder than winter.
Bell waited for the king to order a blond servitor to bring him a chair. The king did no such thing. As Bell stood there, taking weight on his left leg and right crutch, Geoffrey glowered down at him from that cheap-looking throne. That was when the general began to suspect how angry at him the king really was. Bell should have been sure of that from the moment the second day’s fighting in front of Ramblerton went wrong. He should have, but he hadn’t, in spite of General Peegeetee’s warning. After the wounds he’d taken, though, the prospect of facing down a king fazed him not in the least.
“Considering what you did to my kingdom, Lieutenant General, you have gall and to spare, complaining of your treatment at my hands,” Geoffrey said at last.
“You named me commander of the Army of Franklin to fight,” Bell said, “or so I inferred, at any rate. Since the moment I replaced Joseph the Gamecock, that is what I endeavored to do.”
“I named you commander of the Army of Franklin to fight and to win,” King Geoffrey said. “Instead, you threw your men away, so that the Army of Franklin exists no more. I do not thank you for that, or for misliking the fact that I accepted your resignation the instant you tendered it.”
“I served the north proudly, and the best I knew how,” Bell said. “I faced our foes, and fought them in my own person. The wounds I bear prove it… your Majesty.”
“No one has ever questioned your courage, Lieutenant General,” Geoffrey answered. “Your wisdom and your judgment, on the other hand…”
“You knew what sort of man I was when you placed me in command, or so I must believe,” Bell said. “If you did not expect me to challenge the foe wherever I found him, you should have chosen another.”
“I not only expected you to challenge the enemy, I expected you to destroy his armies,” King Geoffrey said. “I did not expect you to destroy your own.”
“No one can make war without suffering losses. Anyone who thinks he can is a fool,” Bell said. “The enemy had more men, more siege engines, and, in the last fight, more quick-shooting crossbows than we did. He was better fed and better shod. We fought with the greatest of courage. We hurt him badly. In the end, we did not achieve quite the success I would have desired.”
By then, Lieutenant General Bell had considerable practice in making disasters sound palatable. Not quite the success I would have desired seemed bloodless enough, especially if whoever was listening didn’t know what had followed from that so-called incomplete success. King Geoffrey, unfortunately, knew in intimate detail. “Gods help us if you’d been defeated, then!” he exclaimed. “The eastern provinces probably would have fallen right off the map.”
“Your Majesty, I resent the imputation,” Bell said stiffly.
“Lieutenant General, I don’t care,” Geoffrey answered. “I have no army worth the name left between the Green Ridge Mountains and the Great River. Marthasville has fallen. Hesmucet has torn the living heart out of Peachtree Province, as if he were a blond priest sacrificing a bloody goat. Franklin and Cloviston will likely never see my soldiers again. And whom do I have to thank for these accomplishments, which must surely make King Avram grateful? You, Lieutenant General, you and no one else.”
Had Bell won great victories, he would have wanted to share credit with no one else. He was more inclined to be generous about sharing blame. “No one else?” he rumbled. “What about the officers who could not get me grain or shoes or crossbow bolts? What about the officers who could not get me reinforcements when I needed them so desperately? What about the subordinate commanders who let me down again and again? I could not fight the southrons all by myself, though often it seemed I had to try.”
“What good would reinforcements have done you?” King Geoffrey asked poisonously. “You would only have thrown them away along with the rest of your men.”
“I am so very sorry, your Majesty,” Bell said with just as much venom. “You have been such a perfect paragon of leadership, a paladin of proficiency, all through our struggle. If not for your blunders-”
“You were my worst blunder!” the King screamed. “Next to you, even Joseph the Gamecock looks like a soldier.”
“Next to you, even Avram looks like a king,” Bell retorted, a true measure of how disgusted he was.
They stared at each other in perfect mutual loathing. “You are dismissed,” Geoffrey said in a voice clotted with fury. “Get out of my sight. If you ever come into my sight again, I shall not answer for the consequences.”
“You already have plenty of consequences to answer for,” Bell jeered. “And if you crucify me, how long will you last before Avram crucifies you?”
Geoffrey turned pale, not from fear but from fury. “I am going to win this war,” he insisted. “I shall yet rule a great kingdom.”
“Oh, yes. Indeed, your Majesty. And I am going to win the mile run at the Great Games next year.” Bell cursed his mutilation not
because he wouldn’t win that race but because he couldn’t turn and stomp out of King Geoffrey’s throne room. The slow progress he made on crutches wasn’t the same.
He wondered if he’d pushed Geoffrey too far. If the king decided to have him seized and crucified to encourage the others, what could he do about it? Not much was the obvious answer. A one-armed, one-legged swordsman was not an object to strike fear into the hearts of palace guards.
But for the click of Bell’s crutch tips on the stone floor and the thump of his shoe, all was silence absolute. Maybe Geoffrey’s had an apoplexy and fallen over dead, Bell thought hopefully. He didn’t turn around to look. For one thing, turning around on crutches was commonly more trouble than it was worth. For another, he was all too liable to fall victim to disappointment if he did turn. And so he didn’t.
He got out of the throne room. He got out of the citadel. He made his hitching way back to his hostel. Only when he’d sat down in his room did he remember he’d come to Nonesuch not to give Geoffrey a piece of his mind (he didn’t have that many pieces to spare) but to seek reinstatement.
Reinstatement he would not get now. That was plain. He’d commanded his last army for King Geoffrey. “Well, it’s Geoffrey’s loss, gods damn him,” Bell muttered. He remained convinced he’d done everything he could-he remained convinced he’d done everything anyone could-to serve the north well. If things hadn’t always gone quite the way he would have wished… Well, if they hadn’t, that couldn’t possibly have been his fault. His subordinate commanders had botched too many fights the Army of Franklin should have, would have, won if only they’d followed his clear orders.
If they weren’t a pack of blundering fools, he thought, why did so many of them end up dead at Poor Richard? They got what they deserved, by the Thunderer’s hairy fist!
And one of these days-one of these days before too long, too-King Geoffrey would also get what he deserved. Bell could see that plainly now. Anyone coming into Nonesuch after long absence could see the kingdom was dying on its feet. Only someone who stayed here nearly all the time, like Geoffrey, could have any possible doubts on that score. We’ll all be stuck with Avram, and we’ll all be stuck with blonds.
Hating the idea but not knowing what he could do about it, Bell took his little bottle of laudanum off his belt. He yanked out the stopper and swigged. Healers sometimes gasped and turned pale when he told them how much laudanum he took every day. He didn’t care. He needed the drug. It held physical torment at something close to arm’s length. A good stiff dose also helped him avoid dwelling on any of the many things he didn’t care to contemplate.
He caressed the smooth glass curve of the laudanum bottle as if it were the curve of a lover’s breast. Till he was wounded, he’d never known how marvelous a drug could be. He tried to imagine his life these days without laudanum-tried and, shuddering, failed. Without laudanum, he wasn’t truly alive.
“And I never would have known if I hadn’t been wounded,” he murmured. “I would have missed all-this.” He caressed the bottle again. Laudanum made him real. Laudanum made him clever. As long as he had laudanum, everything that had happened to him, every single bit of it, was all worthwhile.
* * *
Captain Gremio had seen more in the way of warfare than he’d ever wanted. Now, in his own home province, he saw the final ruin to which the hopes of the north had come. Colonel Florizel’s soldiers had joined with the forlorn handful of men Count Joseph the Gamecock was using to try to hold back the great flood tide of General Hesmucet’s advance. With the addition of Florizel’s veterans, Joseph the Gamecock now had a forlorn double handful of men.
Handful or double handful, what Joseph didn’t have was enough men.
Hesmucet’s soldiers ranged through Palmetto Province almost as they pleased. Joseph had hoped the swamps and marshes in the north near Veldt would slow the southrons down as they swarmed south toward Parthenia. Building roads through the trackless wilderness, the southrons had broken through the difficult country faster than Joseph or any other northerner imagined possible.
Now Karlsburg, where the War Between the Provinces began and where Gremio lived, was lost. It wasn’t that Hesmucet’s men had captured the place. They hadn’t. They’d simply passed it by, heading for Hail, the provincial capital, and leaving a trail of devastation in their wake. Karlsburg would belong to Avram’s men as soon as they bothered to occupy it. At the moment, they were showing it the ultimate contempt: they weren’t even wasting their time to conquer it.
As a regimental commander, Gremio could hope to get answers to questions that would have kept his men guessing. When Count Joseph’s men camped outside of Hail one chilly night that made the place seem to live up to its name, he asked Colonel Florizel, “Sir, is there any chance we can hold them out of this city?”
Florizel looked at him for a long time before shaking his head. “No, Captain. We couldn’t hold them out if we had twice our men and they had half of theirs. We are ruined. We are finished. We are through.”
That would have hit Gremio harder if he hadn’t already expected it. “What can we do, sir?” he asked.
“Fall back through Hail. Destroy whatever’s in there that the gods-damned southrons might be able to use. Stop on the south bank of the next river we come to. Pray to the gods that we can delay Hesmucet for a few hours. If we’re very, very lucky, maybe we can even delay him for a whole day. Then we fall back to the river after that and pray to the gods again.” Florizel, who’d carried so much on his broad, sturdy shoulders for so long, sounded like a man altogether bereft of hope.
Gremio had been without hope for a long time. He’d hoped to borrow a little from his strong-hearted superior. Finding none, he gave Florizel his best salute and went back to his regiment. “What’s the news, sir?” Sergeant Thisbe asked, perhaps hoping to borrow some from him.
“The news is… bad, Sergeant,” Gremio answered, and relayed what Colonel Florizel had said.
Thisbe frowned. “You’re right, sir. That doesn’t sound good. If we can’t hang on to Hail, what’s the point of going on with the war?”
“You would do better to ask that of King Geoffrey than of me,” Gremio said. “His Majesty might be able to answer it. I, on the other hand, have no idea.”
“All right, sir,” the underofficer said. “I won’t give you any more trouble about it, then. Seems to me we’ve got trouble enough.”
“Seems to me you’re right,” Gremio said. “I wish you weren’t, but you are.”
If they had tried to fight in Hail, they would have been quickly surrounded and destroyed. That was obvious. Like Doubting George’s army after the fight in front of Ramblerton, General Hesmucet’s force kept extending tentacles of soldiers, hoping to trap its foes. As Joseph the Gamecock had in Peachtree Province, he traded space for time. The difference here was, he really couldn’t afford to lose any more space at all, and he-along with the north-was fast running out of time.
Old men and boys and women cursed Joseph’s soldiers as they marched south through Hail. A white-bearded fellow pointed to the governor’s palace and shouted at Gremio, who stood out perhaps because of his epaulets: “That’s where we started! That’s where we said we wouldn’t be part of Detina any more, not if gods-damned Avram was going to take our serfs off the land where they belong. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
“It means a great deal to me, sir,” Gremio answered stiffly.
“Then why the hells are you running away instead of fighting to save it?” the old man howled.
“Why? Because we can’t save it,” Gremio said. “If we try, we’ll lose the palace and we’ll lose this army, too. This way, the army lives to fight” — or to run, he thought- “another day.”
He didn’t convince the man with the white beard. He hadn’t thought he would. The local kept right on yammering complaints and protests. That, of course, did him no good at all. Meanwhile, Joseph the Gamecock’s army went about wrecking everything in Hail that might h
ave been of some use to General Hesmucet. They set the arsenal ablaze: it had more sheaves of crossbow quarrels and more squat, deadly firepots than the soldiers could take with them. Up in flames they went, to keep the southrons from seizing them and flinging them at Joseph’s men.
Bolt after bolt of indigo-dyed wool and cotton cloth burned, too. Hesmucet’s men might dye it gray and turn it into their tunics and pantaloons. Better they didn’t have the chance. So said Joseph, and no one disobeyed. More fires rose up to the heavens.
Joseph had almost waited too long. His little army was just pulling out of Hail at sunset as the vanguard of Hesmucet’s much bigger army entered the provincial capital. Gremio’s regiment stopped for the night a few miles south of town, when it got too dark to march any farther. Campfires flickered to life.
Sergeant Thisbe pointed back toward Hail. “Look!”
Fire made the northern horizon glow red and yellow and orange, though light had leaked out of the rest of the sky. “The town is burning,” Gremio said dully, less sad and surprised than he’d ever dreamt he might be. “Maybe our fires got loose. Maybe the southrons are torching it. What difference does it make now? What difference does anything make now?”
“How can we go on?” Thisbe asked. “The place where everything started… in the southrons’ hands and burning? How can we go on?”
Gremio looked north toward those flickering flames, which leaped higher every moment. Everything in Hail was going to burn; nothing could be plainer than that. And nothing could be plainer than the answer to Thisbe’s question, either. Gremio looked around. No one but the underofficer was paying the least attention to what he said. “We can’t go on any more,” he replied. “What’s the use? It’s over. It’s done. It’s broken. We’ve lost. The sooner this cursed war ends, the better.”
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