Marching Through Peachtree wotp-2

by Harry Turtledove

  His surviving wing commander nodded. “If he did, we’d be on his flank like a tiger on an ox.”

  William had missed a point: the rain hindered Joseph’s movements no less than those of the southrons. But even Joseph the Gamecock, who picked nits as naturally as he breathed, didn’t correct him. He didn’t need to attack. He needed nothing more than to hold on, and to hold Hesmucet out of Marthasville. As long as he succeeded in doing that, he was living up to the responsibility with which King Geoffrey had entrusted him.

  Not that Geoffrey will thank me for it, he thought. Geoffrey never thanks me for anything. No-that’s not true. He’d thank me if I dried up and blew away. But he was desperate enough to put me here, and now he has to make the best of it.

  He knew Geoffrey wasn’t happy that he’d had to yield so much of southern Peachtree Province. On the other hand, Duke Edward of Arlington and the Army of Southern Parthenia had yielded just about all of southern Parthenia to Marshal Bart. Bart was a lot closer to Nonesuch-and to King Geoffrey-than Hesmucet was to Marthasville.

  “To whom will you give command of Leonidas’ wing?” Roast-Beef William asked.

  There was a question to make even a moody man like Joseph the Gamecock stop brooding. But for piety and courage, Leonidas the Priest had been singularly, even plurally, lacking in the military virtues. If his wing acquired a commanding officer who knew what he was doing… Joseph didn’t smile. That would have been disrespectful to the dead, especially with Leonidas still unburned and with his spirit, therefore, still free and vengeful. Whether he smiled or not, though, he was far from brokenhearted.

  “I think I shall appoint Brigadier Alexander-not James of Broadpath’s engines chief, who’s back in Parthenia now, but the man they call the Steward,” he said. “He’s a solid fellow.”

  “Old Straight? I should say so!” William nodded vigorous approval. “Solid as the day is long. Brave, industrious, knows what he’s doing.”

  “It will make a pleasant change, won’t it?” Joseph said. That was unkind to the memory of the hierophant of the Lion God, but not too much so.

  William added, “I’m sure Lieutenant General Bell will also think well of the choice.”

  “It’s not his to make. It’s not his to approve of,” Joseph said testily. Day by day, he grew less happy with Bell. The man carped and complained about everything, yet was reluctant to strike when ordered to do so. It must be the pain, Joseph thought. He’s only a shell of the man he used to be. Too bad, because I could use that man. The one I have…

  As the officers came back up Cedar Hill, Joseph told off some ordinary soldiers he saw to take charge of Leonidas’ body. Then he and his comrades went off to his headquarters. He sent a runner to summon Alexander the Steward, and another to give Bell word of Leonidas the Priest’s untimely demise. With a little luck, the new wing commander would prove less recalcitrant than Leonidas had been. He could hardly prove more recalcitrant, Joseph thought.

  The runner he’d sent to Bell returned. “The lieutenant general’s compliments, sir,” the fellow said, “and he asks if having a new wing commander means we’re more likely to advance against the enemy.”

  “We would be more likely to advance against the enemy,” Joseph the Gamecock said icily, “if Lieutenant General Bell were in the habit of following orders.”

  “Uh, shall I take that message back to him, sir?” the runner asked.

  “No, never mind,” Joseph said. “He either knows it already or is unlikely to believe it from my lips.”

  Before long, another man approached him: not a soldier this time, but a fellow in maroon velvet tunic and pantaloons of civilian cut who wore on his head a hat that put Joseph the Gamecock in mind of an inverted chamber pot. Bowing, the newcomer said, “Your Grace, I have the honor to represent Duke Brown, who is of course King Geoffrey’s satrap for Peachtree Province.”

  “Of course,” Joseph replied. His opinion of the provincial satrap was indeed brown; he gave the duke far higher marks for mouth than for brains. Wondering what had caused Brown to send out this chap, he inquired, “And what does his Grace think I can do for him?”

  His tone suggested that, whatever it might be, Duke Brown was undoubtedly laboring under a delusion. The man with the maroon pantaloons and ugly hat gave no sign of noticing that tone. He said, “The satrap sent me here to remonstrate with you.”

  “To remonstrate with me? Why?” Joseph asked. “What have I done to him?” What have I done to set off the gods-damned fool now?

  “Sir, he feels he must protest your excessive utilization of the province’s glideway carpets,” Duke Brown’s man replied. “Your constant traffic in this part of the province is having a most deleterious effect on civilian travel in Peachtree Province.”

  “You are joking,” Joseph the Gamecock said.

  “By no means, your Grace,” the study in maroon said. “The satrap has received numerous complaints from nobles and commoners alike as to the adverse impact on their travel requirements the continued requisitioning of carpets for your forces has caused, and feels he must respond to the citizenry.”

  “I see,” Joseph said.

  The civilian beamed. “I knew you would be reasonable, sir. Ah… what is that you are writing?”

  “A pass to take you through my lines, so you can bring Duke Brown’s complaints directly to General Hesmucet. Since he is the true cause of my excessive use of the glideways, he is the one who should hear about the satrap’s concerns. He has the name of a reasonable man. I am sure, when he hears he is bothering civilians, he will turn around and march back down to the south.”

  “You mock me, sir,” Duke Brown’s man said indignantly. “You mock my principal as well. This shall not go unnoticed.”

  “And I shall not lose a moment’s sleep over it,” Joseph the Gamecock said. “I have some small hope of coping with the enemy. But when the idiots alleged to be on my own side commence to move against me, I find myself helpless to resist them.”

  “How dare you use such a word, sir?” the civilian said. “How dare you?”

  “I dare because I am a soldier, and it is my duty to dare,” Joseph replied. “That is more than the satrap can say.”

  “You will go too far, if you have not already,” the man in maroon said, biting the words off between his teeth. “And, speaking of soldiers, I will have you know that Count Thraxton has come to Marthasville, and is examining your conduct of this campaign very closely-very closely indeed.”

  “By all the gods, I’m delighted to hear that-just delighted,” Joseph said. “Thraxton the Braggart’s the reason the Army of Franklin was in the fix I found it in-and now King Geoffrey sends him up here to sit in judgment on me? Not a chance he’ll be prejudiced, is there? Not half.”

  “Your Grace, I don’t know what you want me to say.” The man in maroon sounded worried-not out of any concern for me, Joseph judged, but because he fears he’ll end up in trouble with the satrap. Well, too fornicating bad for him.

  “Go tell Duke Brown that I am going to use the glideways as much as I need to, so I can defend his province for him whether he wants me to or not,” Joseph the Gamecock snapped. “And if by any chance you should happen to see the ever so illustrious Count Thraxton, thank him for me for the lovely predicament he left me in. And now he looks over my campaign? Gods protect me from my friends!”

  Had the fellow in maroon velvet lingered another moment, Joseph would have sped him on his way with a good, solid kick in the fundament. He might have realized that, for he withdrew precipitately even without the added impetus of the commanding general’s boot. Joseph’s stomach twinged. Hearing Thraxton the Braggart is around makes me as dyspeptic as he is.

  Thraxton had brains. He also had a complete inability to get along with anyone else (a trait Joseph shared) or to make anyone follow his lead (which was not one of Joseph’s difficulties). The only exception to the general rule was that Thraxton had somehow formed an intimate friendship with King Geoffrey, a friends
hip that endured through thick and thin-and, given Thraxton’s other talents, or lack of same, there’d been much more thin than thick.

  He has Geoffrey’s ear. He will drip poison into it. Joseph was as sure of that as he was of tomorrow’s sunrise. He shrugged. He couldn’t do anything about it. All he could do was hold the line of Commissioner Mountain and Snouts Stream as long as possible. The more southrons who died trying to pry him out of his position, the better the chance that the south would sicken of the war and make King Avram quit it or face upheaval at home.

  Lieutenant General Bell would attack, the general commanding the Army of Franklin thought. He tossed his head like a man bothered by gnats. Duke Edward of Arlington, when angry, would twist so he seemed to be trying to bite his own ear. Joseph’s gesture wasn’t far removed from that. Bell would do any number of stupid things if only he had the chance. My job, not least, is to make sure he doesn’t get it.

  Count Joseph sighed. But how am I supposed to manage that? He saw no clear answer. He’d seen few clear answers since the days when the northern provinces first broke away from Detina. He kept fighting nonetheless.

  V

  O nce again, your Majesty, our forces have been orderedto make an inglorious retreat, Lieutenant General Bell wrote in yet another of his secret letters to King Geoffrey. Once again, we have taken heavy losses trying to hold a position that could not be held, this time including that heroic and pious soldier, Leonidas the Priest. Once again, the spirits of the men suffer because they always fall back and are never permitted to advance against the foe. How long, your Majesty, can this go on?

  Bell examined that, wondering if it was too strong. He decided to leave it in. The king needed to know what was going on up here. If I don’t tell him the truth, who will? Bell thought.

  “Commissioner Mountain,” he muttered under his breath. Who would have imagined General Hesmucet could have pushed the Army of Franklin back so far so fast? Who would have imagined Joseph the Gamecock would fall back so far so fast? Bell thought. That was what it came down to. “Disgraceful,” Bell said, again quietly. He wished he could shout.

  Reaching for the bottle of laudanum he always carried, he yanked out the cork and drank. Then he sat in his folding chair and waited for relief. He needed ever larger draughts to get it, and got less no matter how much he took.

  If he looked back over his shoulder, he could practically see Marthasville. Camp rumor said Count Thraxton had come there to take a long look at the way Joseph the Gamecock was fighting the southrons. Bell didn’t like the rumor. He was the one who was supposed to be informing King Geoffrey of how things were going. He had no great use for Thraxton the Braggart; the man had made a hash of the fighting by Rising Rock. Bell had been flat on his back then, still recovering from the amputation of his leg. He remembered the jouncing agony he’d gone through in the retreat from Proselytizers’ Rise up into Peachtree Province. Thraxton had botched the battle, no two ways about it.

  But Thraxton was also Geoffrey’s friend. If the king decided to remove Joseph from his command, would he give that command back to Thraxton? Bell shook his leonine head. “That would be madness,” he rumbled. “Every man jack and every officer in this army knows of Thraxton’s blunders. The command should go elsewhere.”

  He knew exactly where the command should go. He’d left hints in his letters to King Geoffrey. Maybe I should stop hinting and come right out and speak my mind, he thought. After all, the safety of the kingdom depends on it.

  Voices outside his pavilion-voices, and then one of his sentries stuck his head inside and said, “Sir, General Joseph is here to see you.”

  “Joseph? Here to see me?” Even with the gentle cloud of laudanum between himself and the world, Lieutenant General Bell knew his superior must not spy the letter to King Geoffrey. He swept it out of sight beneath some other papers, then nodded. “I am always pleased to see him.” That was a lie, of course, but a politic lie.

  When Joseph the Gamecock ducked his way through the tent flap, he looked more pleased with himself and with the world as a whole than was his wont. “Let the southrons come,” he said. “Yes, by the gods, let them come! They’ll bloody their noses on our line, and they can’t outflank it.”

  “You have said this before, your Grace,” Bell replied. “You have also proved mistaken before.”

  “Not this time,” Joseph said. “As long as the rains keep coming, General Hesmucet will have a devils of a time moving men and supplies for them, and we’ve got solid sets of entrenchments running twenty miles north up Snouts Stream. I don’t think they can do it.”

  “And when shall we attack them?” Bell inquired.

  Joseph the Gamecock gave him a sour look. “I am in no hurry to make such an effort-and, if you will recall, the last time I tried to persuade you to send your whole wing forward, you broke out in a case of jimjams.”

  “The enemy had engines on our flank. To advance would have been to give him a perfect chance to massacre us,” Bell insisted.

  “You are the only one who ever saw those engines-and that includes the southrons,” Joseph said.

  “I was there. You were not. Had you been there, you would have seen them, too. But you do not seem to consider your place to be at the fore.”

  They’d called each other cowards now. They both glared, in perfect mutual loathing. Joseph the Gamecock said, “I have been glad to discover you will at least fight on the defensive.”

  “Sir, I find your manner offensive,” Bell replied.

  “I had hoped to find yours offensive, but no such luck,” Joseph said. “Still, so long as we fight hard here, the southrons will get no closer to Marthasville. And that is the point of the exercise.”

  “That may be one point of the exercise, sir, but it’s not the only point,” Bell said. “The other thing we have to do is drive the southrons from our land, drive them back where they belong-and send them off with their tails between their legs, so they’ll know better than to trouble us again.”

  “Good luck if you should ever be in the position to try, Lieutenant General,” Joseph the Gamecock said. “I don’t think it can be done now, not with things as they are. If some miracle-worker were to appear with crossbows that would shoot twice as far and ten times as fast as the usual weapons, we might whip King Avram’s men back to their kennel, but what are the odds of that? Without it, we have to try to make the foe sicken of the war. That’s my view, at any rate.”

  “I know, sir,” Bell said sourly. “You never tire of stating it.”

  “That’s because-although you may find it hard to believe-I have officers who don’t want to hear it,” Joseph the Gamecock replied. “I’m certain you of all people find that incredible.”

  “Heh,” Bell said, unwilling to show Joseph he had the slightest idea what the general commanding was talking about now.

  “You are holding an important part of this line, Lieutenant General,” Joseph told him. “I expect you to do just that: to hold, I mean. If a breakthrough occurs on the stretch of line where you command, you will find that I do not take the matter lightly. You have already failed more often than you should. Shall I comment further, or do I make myself plain?”

  “Libelously so, sir,” Bell said.

  Joseph the Gamecock clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Libel must be committed to writing, as anyone of your temperament should have learned by now. Slander is oral. And you must always remember that proof of truth is the best defense against either. Good day, Lieutenant General.” He left Bell’s pavilion seeming even more pleased with himself than he had been when he came in.

  Bell muttered something decidedly slanderous. By Joseph’s standards, he’d done a good deal of libeling, too. He cared not a fig for Joseph’s standards; the only ones that mattered to him were his own. Taking the letter he’d been working on from its place of concealment, he finished it, sealed it, and sent it off to Nonesuch in the same clandestine way as he’d despatched the others.

  Sooner or
later, King Geoffrey will have to listen, he thought. Gods grant it won’t be too late.

  He wished he were in command of the Army of Franklin. He would get it moving south again. How could Geoffrey hope to establish a kingdom when the southrons sat on half the land he claimed? The Army of Franklin hadn’t seen the province of Franklin for months. If I were in charge, I’d head straight for Ramblerton and set the province free.

  For now, though, Bell had to fight under another man’s orders. And Joseph had warned him he was being watched. Bell didn’t think King Geoffrey would acquiesce in his dismissal, but didn’t care to take the chance, especially not with Thraxton the Braggart close at hand. Nothing unfortunate would or could happen while Thraxton was on watch.

  Grudgingly, Bell admitted to himself that, for a defensive position, the one anchored by Commissioner Mountain and Snouts Stream was solid. The southrons would have a hells of a time breaking through it. But Joseph had already abandoned other strong defensive positions. Bell didn’t dwell on the fact that he and poor Leonidas had talked Joseph into abandoning the one by Fat Mama. He seldom dwelt on the past, unless it was to his advantage.

  After another gulp of laudanum, Bell seized his crutches and levered himself to his foot. Even with the drug, working a crutch under his left arm hurt like broken glass, like fire, like knives. The healers swore the festering in his stump had burned itself out, but he could still feel that not everything was right in there. He doubted it ever would be.

  For that matter, he could still feel his whole right leg, though the part of it he still owned stopped not much farther down than his prong hung. Sometimes it was just there, as real as flesh till he tried to put weight on it. Sometimes the part that was missing hurt even worse than the part that remained. Those were the bad times, for even laudanum had trouble dulling the phantom pain. The healers said there was no cure for that but time. He’d even asked the mages if there were any spells to exorcise the ghosts of absent body parts. To his disappointment, they’d told him no.