Marching Through Peachtree wotp-2

by Harry Turtledove

  “Sergeant, you ought to be an officer,” Gremio said with unfeigned admiration. “That’s as neat a summing-up as I could do in a lawcourt, and how much do you want to bet that the people set over us haven’t got their thoughts together half so straight?”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Thisbe replied. “What I do know is, I don’t want to be an officer.” He wagged a finger at Gremio. “I really and truly mean that, sir. You’ve got a `let’s promote somebody to lieutenant’ look in your eye, and I won’t take the post even if you try to give it to me.”

  Gremio could hardly help believing Thisbe’s sincerity. “But why?” he asked, perplexed. “The company would be better for it. You know as well as I do that there’s a lieutenant’s slot open. You could do the job. You could do it better than anyone I can think of.”

  “I don’t want it,” Thisbe declared. “I’ve got enough things to worry about being a sergeant. Being a lieutenant would just complicate my life to the hells and gone. All I ever wanted to do was be a soldier. You’re not hardly a soldier when you’re an officer-no offense to you, sir.”

  What he said held some truth. Officers worried more about paperwork even than sergeants, while common soldiers didn’t have to worry about it at all (a good thing, too, since so many of them lacked their letters). But Thisbe capably handled the paperwork he had. More shouldn’t faze him. Something else lay behind his refusal, but Gremio couldn’t see what. He tried wheedling: “You’d make more money.”

  “I don’t care.” Now the sergeant was visibly getting angry. “I don’t want it, sir, and that’s flat.”

  “All right. All right.” Gremio made a placating gesture. One thing years in the lawcourts had taught him was when to back off. For whatever reasons, Thisbe really didn’t want to become an officer. That puzzled Gremio, who was always in the habit of grabbing for whatever came his way. However puzzled he was, though, he could see he wouldn’t change the sergeant’s mind.

  Later that day, as he’d feared, the southrons started bringing more men-some footsoldiers, others unicorn-riders like the ones who’d come in under cover of darkness the night before-into their bridgehead on the west bank of Snouts Stream. They also started bringing catapults over the bridges spanning the stream. Colonel Florizel ordered the regiment up to full alert. The other regiments in Alexander the Steward’s wing also put more men up on the shooting steps of their trenches.

  “Can we do anything more than that, sir?” Gremio asked Florizel. By we he didn’t mean the regiment, but the Army of Franklin as a whole. “Can we bring more men up to this part of the line? Can we bring more engines here? The gods-damned southrons will pound us flat unless we can hit back.”

  He waited for Colonel Florizel to get angry. He’d long since seen the regimental commander would have preferred a different sort of man as company commander: a noble, a serfholder, all the things Gremio wasn’t and wished he were. But Florizel sighed and said, “I’ve been screaming for that, Captain. It’s done no good. We’re stretched as thin as can be. To strengthen this stretch means weakening ourselves somewhere else. We have nothing to spare.”

  “The southrons do,” Gremio said.

  “I know,” Florizel replied.

  Then the war is lost, Gremio thought. If they can stretch us till we break and stay unbroken themselves, the war is lost beyond repair. He didn’t want to dwell on that. In fact, he refused to dwell on it. He said, “We’d better weaken ourselves somewhere else, sir, or they’re going to tear a hole right through this stretch of line.”

  “I’m not going to argue with you, because I think you’re right,” Colonel Florizel said, which did little to make Gremio feel any better.

  But reinforcements did come in, pulled from the far north. That meant Hesmucet’s line began to overlap that of Joseph the Gamecock, but it couldn’t be helped. A rupture here and Joseph’s line would be shattered. Gremio could see that. The southrons could see it. And, for something of a wonder, so could Joseph the Gamecock himself.

  The storm broke a couple of days later. It wasn’t a real storm like the ones that had done so much to delay the southrons before and after the battle of Commissioner Mountain: the weather, while hot and muggy as usual, was also bright and clear. The engines Hesmucet’s men had brought forward started pounding the northern line. Stones thudded home. Firepots burst, spilling gouts of flame into the entrenchments. Men shrieked when those flames bit. Repeating crossbows sent streams of quarrels skimming low above the trenches’ parapets.

  Despite the storm of missiles, Gremio shouted, “Up! Up and fight! If we stay hidden, the southrons will just walk right over us.”

  “Listen to the captain,” Sergeant Thisbe said. “He knows what he’s talking about.”

  Not least because Gremio and Thisbe wasted no time getting up on the shooting steps themselves, their men followed them. And if I’d stayed down in the trench, they would have skulked, too, Gremio thought. This business of commanding is a curious one indeed.

  Bowstrings twanged. Bolts whizzed toward the oncoming southrons. Some of the men in gray fell. Others shot back. Gremio drew his sword and brandished it. Much good that will do, he thought, but did it anyhow. A crossbow quarrel clanged off the blade. He felt the impact all the way up his arm to his shoulder.

  One of the northerners’ repeating crossbows began hosing darts at the southrons rushing across open ground. Men went down like grain before the scythe. But others, brave even if they did serve King Avram, kept coming. Some of them, shouting Avram’s name and, “Freedom!” leaped down into the trenches to try to force their way through and past King Geoffrey’s soldiers.

  In that close combat, Captain Gremio’s sword was good for something. The blade, nicked where the bolt had hit, soon had blood on it. Men strained and cursed and smote and screamed and bled and died. And, because the fight was province against province, sometimes brother against brother, each side understood every word its enemies said.

  When the southrons started crying, “Fall back!” Captain Gremio not only understood but grinned in something reasonably like triumph. “Yes, you’d better fall back!” he yelled. “Provincial prerogative forever!”

  “By the Thunderer’s beard, sir, we stopped them,” said Sergeant Thisbe, who wore no beard of his own.

  “They didn’t bring enough men forward,” Gremio agreed. “I rather thought they would make a better fight of it.”

  Thisbe panted. He had a cut above one eye and another on his arm, but neither seemed in the least serious. “I’m not sorry they didn’t, sir, and that’s the truth.” After a moment, he added, “You handled that sword of yours mighty well.”

  “Thank you,” Gremio said. He wasn’t used to such praise, and didn’t think he deserved it-which didn’t stop him from enjoying it when it came.

  Out in the open land between the northerners’ trenches and those of the foe, a southron let out a shriek-somebody’d shot him when he went out to pick up a wounded comrade. Other southrons shouted, “Shame!” and, “No fair!” Men making pickup, like men answering calls of nature, were usually reckoned improper targets.

  “Life isn’t fair,” Thisbe said.

  “Of course not,” Gremio answered. “If it were, the southrons’ army wouldn’t be twice the size of ours.” And no one would need barristers, either, he thought. But he didn’t say that aloud.

  King Geoffrey’s men celebrated their victory at the enemy bridgehead till the late afternoon. That was when word came of the breakthrough the southron unicorn-riders had made at the far northern end of the line Joseph the Gamecock had been defending. Victory or no victory, Gremio’s company, along with the rest of the northerners, abandoned the trenches they’d just held and retreated to the north once more.

  * * *

  Joseph the Gamecock had the nerve to be proud of himself. Of all the disgrace and embarrassment attached to the retreat from Commissioner Mountain, that galled Lieutenant General Bell more than anything else. As they rode north, Joseph turned
to him and said, “We haven’t left them anything they can use, not a single, solitary thing. One of the cleanest escapes ever, if I do say so myself.”

  “Huzzah,” Bell said sourly. “How many more retreats can we make before we go clean past Marthasville?”

  That got home. Joseph flushed and scowled. He said, “I still intend to hold Marthasville. Holding Marthasville is the point of this campaign.”

  “Really?” Bell raised an eyebrow. “I hadn’t noticed that it had any point at all, except perhaps giving ground. In the name of the gods, when do we get to fight back instead of running away?”

  “Lieutenant General, you are grossly insubordinate,” Joseph the Gamecock snapped.

  “If I am, sir”-Bell larded the commanding general’s title of respect with as much scorn as he could pack into it- “I’d say it’s about time somebody was. Now we’ve gone and lost Hiltonia and Ephesus, too, and how are we going to hold the line of the Hoocheecoochee River against the southrons? We have to hold it, wouldn’t you say, seeing as it’s the last line in front of Marthasville?”

  He’d hoped to whip Joseph into a greater anger than that which already gripped him. Maybe the general commanding would do something unforgivable. Considering how little faith King Geoffrey had in Joseph the Gamecock, it might not take much.

  But Joseph, instead of igniting, smiled a smile so superior, it made Lieutenant General Bell’s own temper kindle. “How will we hold the line of the Hoocheecoochee?” Joseph echoed. “I’ll tell you how: with some of the finest field works ever made, that’s how. I’ve had serfs digging for weeks. If you’d been paying attention, even a little, I daresay you might have found out. But that would be too much to hope for, wouldn’t it?”

  Bell glared blackly. And he had a comeback ready: “Field works, is it? How many lines of field works have the southrons already turned? I’ve lost track of just how many, but there isn’t one they haven’t turned. I know that for a fact.”

  “Sooner or later, they may push us back over the river,” Joseph the Gamecock allowed. “But we also have good positions on the other side.”

  “How lucky for us,” Bell said, acid in his voice. “And what happens when the southrons flank us out of those, too?”

  Joseph the Gamecock exhaled in exasperation. “They won’t, by the gods. We can hold the line of the Hoocheecoochee, and we will.” He didn’t wait for Bell’s next contradiction, but spurred his unicorn forward and away.

  Although Lieutenant General Bell could have ridden in pursuit of the commanding general, he didn’t. For one thing, riding fast hurt even more than riding at a regular pace. For another, Joseph knew his opinions quite well enough already. And, for a third, Bell didn’t want to give too much away. If Joseph the Gamecock got a little more suspicious of him…

  Well, how much difference would it make? How much was left to save here in Peachtree Province? Did the northerners have enough of an army here to save it? Of course we do, Bell thought, provided we have a man in charge who’s not afraid to use it.

  When the army started filing into the trenches covering the approaches to the Hoocheecoochee and the bridges over it, Bell discovered, to his surprise and not a little to his dismay, that Joseph the Gamecock had known whereof he spoke. The field fortifications in front of the river were formidable, and wouldn’t be easy to force. Marthasville and the vital glideway routes east that ran through it remained protected.

  But for how much longer? Bell wondered. What will go wrong? Something always has. We’ve been retreating for two months now. We can’t fall back much farther, because we’ve nowhere to fall back to.

  While he scowled and fumed, Major Zibeon found him a farmhouse behind the line in which he could make his headquarters. His aide-de-camp said, “Sorry it isn’t anything fancier, sir.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Bell answered. “Help me down from this beast, if you’d be so kind.” His head buzzed with laudanum; riding was hard on him. Zibeon undid the ties that kept him on the unicorn and steadied him while he positioned his crutches. “Thank you kindly,” Bell said, though the pain of the crutch in his left armpit was hardly less than he’d known while riding. Plant, swing forward; plant, swing forward. He made his way into the farmhouse.

  The farmer had already fled north, for which Bell was duly grateful; he didn’t feel like having to be sociable. A couple of serfs’ huts stood by the main house. Maybe the fellow who’d lived here had been a petty baronet, or maybe he’d just been a yeoman who’d come into the land to which the serfs were attached. The huts stood dark and empty now, with no naked blond children playing around them. The serfs had fled, too, though odds were they hadn’t fled north.

  “Is everything to your liking, sir?” Major Zibeon asked after he went inside.

  “If everything were to my liking, Major, we’d be fighting a good many miles south of this place,” Bell answered. His aide-de-camp grunted and gave him a reproachful look. He relented: “Seeing as we are here, this house will do well enough.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Zibeon said. “That is what I had in mind-as I think you knew well enough.”

  Few men were bold enough to reproach Lieutenant General Bell to his face. Joseph the Gamecock did it, but that hardly counted. Zibeon had the nerve to speak his mind. Because he did, Bell treated him with more respect than he would have otherwise. “Well, maybe I did,” he admitted.

  From up in the trenches, someone shouted, “Here comes the head of the southron army, out of the hills we just left.”

  “We should never have left them,” Bell muttered, more to himself than to anybody else. Then, grudgingly, he spoke aloud: “I’d better go out and have a look, don’t you think, Major?”

  “Might be a good idea, sir,” his aide-de-camp replied. Zibeon softened that; Bell could tell. What it meant in plain Detinan was, You’d have to be an idiot if you didn’t. Bell made his slow, painful way out of the farmhouse once more and, shading his eyes with the palm of his hand, peered south.

  Sure enough, the reddish dust hanging in the air above the hills was the sign of an army on the march. Through the dust came sparkles of sunlight on spearpoints and metal-shod unicorn horns. Bell wished for more rain, which would have laid the dust and slowed the southrons’ movements. Now, though, the sun blazed down on the Army of Franklin as fiercely as if the Sun God were angry at the north.

  How can we win, if even the gods turn against us? Bell thought. But he shook his big, leonine head. The gods surely fought for King Geoffrey. How could it be otherwise, when they’d subjected and bound the blonds’ gods just as the Detinans themselves had subjected the natives of this land and bound them to the soil?

  Pointing, Major Zibeon said, “Looks like the stinking southrons are going into line of battle.”

  “They always tap at our lines, thinking we’ll run,” Bell said. “It’s because we do run when Joseph the Gamecock tells us to. They take us for cowards, may they suffer in the seven hells for all eternity.”

  “We’ll make a few of them suffer now, unless I’m wrong,” Zibeon said. “They can’t hope to shift us when we’re in earthworks and they’re not.”

  “Earthworks make men cowards,” Bell declared. He was far from the only general on either side to sing that song, but sang it louder and more stridently than most. “If this were my army, we would come out and fight. We wouldn’t shelter behind walls of mud, the way we do now.”

  Up came the southrons. They shot a few bolts at the men in the trenches. Joseph the Gamecock’s men shot back. A few southrons fell. The rest drew back. They wouldn’t press home attacks against earthworks, either. Cowards, Bell thought. Nothing but cowards.

  Major Zibeon’s thoughts were going down a different glideway line. He asked, “How are we going to keep the southrons from reaching the Hoocheecoochee at a point beyond our lines? If they manage that, we’re in trouble.”

  There, for once, Bell felt some sympathy with Joseph the Gamecock. “Patrols of unicorn-riders,” he answered. He approve
d of such patrols. They were aggressive, and anything aggressive met with his approval.

  But Zibeon said, “Patrols of unicorn-riders are all very well, sir, but gods damn me if I think Brigadier Spinner’s the right man to lead our mounted men. I wish we had Ned of the Forest here.”

  “Everyone wishes for Ned of the Forest,” Bell told him. “There’s only one of the man, though, and he’s over by the Great River. Spinner is capable enough.”

  “The southrons can afford to get by with men who are capable enough,” his aide-de-camp said. “They have room to make their mistakes good. If we make a mistake, they’ll land on us with both feet. What we need is a genuine, for-true genius of an officer leading unicorn-riders. We only had two in all the north: Jeb the Beauty, who was over in Parthenia-”

  “And who, I hear, got killed not long ago,” Bell broke in with a sigh. “It’s a hard war, and it’s not getting any easier.”

  “Jeb the Beauty, who’s dead,” Zibeon agreed, “and Ned of the Forest. We need him here, at the point of decision, not off running a sideshow in the east.”

  “He and Count Thraxton had a row, as I recall. That’s what got him transferred,” Bell said. “I don’t know all the details; that wasn’t long after I turned lopsided.” He waggled his stump a little, even though it hurt. If he could laugh at his own mutilations, no one else would have the nerve to laugh at them.

  Zibeon’s bushy eyebrows climbed almost to his hairline. “A row? You might just say so, sir. If what people say is true, Ned came out and said he would challenge Thraxton, except he didn’t suppose Thraxton was enough of a man to accept it.”

  From what Bell had seen before his wound by the River of Death, Count Thraxton, whatever else one said about him, was a proud and touchy fellow. His own eyebrows rose. “And the count let that go by without taking the challenge and without punishing Ned of the Forest?”

  “He did indeed,” Zibeon said solemnly. “I have seen Ned of the Forest in a temper, sir. He’s not a man anyone at all would care to take lightly.”