Marching Through Peachtree wotp-2

by Harry Turtledove

  By the way his soldiers fell to with spade and pick, they were relieved to get an order like that. They knew the value of earthworks, even if the general commanding the Army of Franklin had yet to figure it out. A trooper with several scars said, “Now we got a nest. If we see our chance, we can fly out. Or we can make those other bastards try and break in.”

  “That’s right,” Roast-Beef William said. “That’s just exactly right. As long as the numbers are anywhere close to even, we can keep the southrons off the glideway line and out of Jonestown.”

  A tiny alarm bell rang inside his mind. He knew only too well how many men his wing had lost during the fighting south and then west of Marthasville. He didn’t know how many the southrons had lost, only that they hadn’t suffered proportionately. And he knew they’d had more men to begin with, and enjoyed a steady stream of reinforcements. I wish I had the wherewithal General Hesmucet does, he thought enviously. People would reckon me a great soldier, too.

  But he couldn’t have that sort of wherewithal, which he also knew only too well. He had to make a few tired men into the equivalent of a host of fresh ones. Earthworks helped. And, if he saw the chance, he would strike out from them, strike toward the glideway line leading east to Dothan and beyond.

  Maybe we’ll get it back, he thought. Maybe things will go just right. They have before, every once in a while. But when a man had to count on it… Roast-Beef William grimaced. When a man had to count on it, his kingdom was in trouble.

  IX

  “Corporal Rollant!” Lieutenant Griff called.

  “Yes, sir!” Rollant answered, saluting.

  “Take up the standard, Corporal, for we’re moving out soon,” Griff said.

  “Yes, sir!” Rollant repeated. After offering the ritual gestures of respect to the company’s banner, he lifted the staff from where it had been thrust into the ground the night before. The company-Colonel Nahath’s whole regiment-was part of General Hesmucet’s great wheeling move against the glideway lines north of Marthasville. Southron soldiers had already overrun the line leading east to Dothan. Southron mages were now busy putting that line out of commission, so that the traitors could get no use from it even if they took it back.

  But Rollant didn’t think false King Geoffrey’s men would be able to do anything of the sort. The northerners hadn’t been able to do much to slow down the great wheel. If they couldn’t manage that, how would they make the southrons retreat?

  “Jonestown coming up,” Smitty said around a yawn. He didn’t seem ready for another day’s march.

  “Jonestown!” Rollant snapped his fingers. “That’s the name of the place. It went clean out of my head. If we grab that one, too, the traitors won’t have any glideways into Marthasville, will they?”

  “Nary a one,” Smitty agreed. “But I hear tell there are already northerners around the place, so we’re going to have to fight our way in.”

  “That’s the truth,” Sergeant Joram said. “I’ve talked with pickets who bumped up against them. They’re from Roast-Beef William’s wing, but nobody knows how many of ’em are in the town.”

  “Doesn’t matter how many there are,” Smitty said cheerfully. “We’ll lick ’em.”

  A year earlier, a boast like that would have struck Rollant as madness. Now, he found himself nodding. He thought they could clean up a whole wing from the Army of Franklin, too.

  “Come on, come on, come on!” Lieutenant Griff shouted. “Time to get moving. We can’t sit around here all day.”

  Smitty sighed. “He’s right, gods dammit. It’d be nice if we could, though.”

  “Wouldn’t it?” Rollant hurried forward, to take his place at the head of the company. I’ll be the one they shoot at first, he thought. That’s what standard-bearers are for. That’s why they made me a corporal.

  They hadn’t gone far before splashing through a little stream that never came up past their knees. Rollant enjoyed the cool water soaking his trousers, but did call out a warning he’d made before: “Check yourselves for leeches, if you know what’s good for you.” The country wasn’t very swampy, but in this part of Detina you never could tell.

  And, sure enough, a couple of men made disgusted noises. “Who’s got fire?” one of them said. They had learned not just to yank off the bloodsuckers, but to touch them with a glowing coal and make them let go.

  Someone had a firesafe, and got a tiny blaze going from the glowing punk he carried in it. The smoldering tip of a twig got rid of the pests. The company pressed on.

  “How far to this Jonestown place, sir?” Rollant asked Lieutenant Griff.

  “Not far,” the young company commander replied. “Four or five miles.”

  Rollant nodded. “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome,” Griff answered, a courtesy he never would have given Rollant the year before. He walked along for a few paces, then said, “Do you know, Corporal, you’re not what I expected?”

  He evidently meant it as a compliment. Rollant said, “Thank you, sir.”

  “You’re welcome,” Griff said again. “When we gave you your corporal’s stripes-Colonel Nahath and I, I mean, and Lieutenant General George, too-we didn’t think you would be able to keep them. We expected there would be quarrels, and men refusing to obey you. But that hasn’t happened. I wonder why.”

  “Maybe they see I can do the job, sir,” Rollant said. He hadn’t imagined they’d talked with Doubting George before deciding they could promote him.

  “Maybe.” Griff didn’t sound convinced. “I see that you’re doing it, mind you, but convincing ordinary Detinans of anything they don’t feel like believing is like herding tigers.”

  He was, without a doubt, right about that. No one knew better than blonds how stubborn Detinans could be. Rollant thought for a while, then suggested, “Maybe they see the stripes on my sleeve and not the man wearing the uniform tunic.”

  “That could be,” Griff allowed. “We’ve come a long way toward turning all our men into real professional soldiers, and one mark of the professional is respect for his underofficers.”

  “Don’t you worry about it, sir,” Rollant said. “I’m sure they call me a gods-damned blond son of a bitch whenever my back’s turned.”

  “And what do you think about that?” the lieutenant asked.

  Rollant shrugged. “Sir, if you think I never cussed an underofficer, I have to tell you you’d better think again.”

  “Not many soldiers who never have, I suppose,” Griff said, and then, in an altogether different tone, “Hello! What’s this?”

  This was men in blue tunics and pantaloons spread thinly across a field: northern pickets. They cried out in alarm as they caught sight of the southrons. Several of them raised crossbows to their shoulders and started shooting. Thwuck! One of the bolts, a frighteningly good shot, tore through the silk of the company standard.

  “Forward!” Griff shouted. “If they won’t go by themselves, we just have to chase them away.”

  Rollant held the standard on high and waved it back and forth as he advanced. It told the men where the company was supposed to go and lifted their spirits. That was why both southrons and traitors had standard-bearers. Making themselves conspicuous was why both sides had to change standard-bearers so often.

  “Avram!” Rollant shouted. “Avram and freedom!” More than most, he knew what freedom meant.

  More crossbow bolts whistled past him. Someone behind him let out a shriek. He couldn’t even look to see who it was. He could only go forward waving the standard. He ran clumsily, his head down, watching where he put his feet. If he fell from stepping in a hole and the standard went down, his company’s spirits would sag no less than if he got shot. He couldn’t do much about getting shot. He could, or at least he might, avoid imitating a jackass with the staggers.

  The northerners didn’t put up much of a fight. In their shoes, being so badly outnumbered, he wouldn’t have been ashamed to run away, either. A few of them turned and loosed hasty shots over t
heir shoulders. A couple of those struck home, too. But more traitors fell. Rollant watched dust puff from the back of one running man’s blue tunic as a quarrel hit him. The northerner threw his arms wide. His crossbow flew surprisingly far to one side as he let it go. He ran on for a couple of staggering steps, then fell on his face. He was still thrashing feebly when Rollant pounded past him.

  Beyond another belt of trees, the enemy had earthworks waiting. The surviving pickets dove into them. More traitors appeared on the shooting steps. They gave Avram’s onrushing men a couple of crisp, thoroughly professional volleys. Bell might have spent his men like coppers, but the ones he had left still knew their business.

  They knew it so well, in fact, that they knocked the southrons back on their heels and more. Men who had dashed forward suddenly dashed back. “Stand!” Lieutenant Griff shouted, his voice breaking in fury and humiliation. “Stand, gods damn you! You’ve been through worse!”

  He was right-they had. At that particular moment, though, they weren’t much inclined to listen to him. Rollant had seen that before, too. They’d come up against the traitors’ trenches too soon, too unexpectedly. What they could have taken in stride had they been ready for it caught them by surprise and threw them into panic. And so they fled.

  It wasn’t Griff’s company alone. That made Rollant feel a little better as he too fell back out of crossbow range from the northerners’ position. All the southrons who came up against them recoiled the same way. Officers up and down the line screamed, “Stand!” and “Hold fast, you stupid, cowardly sons of bitches!” and other such endearments, and none of them did the least bit of good.

  What saved the day, oddly enough, were the traitors themselves. Seeing the southrons taken with panic, they swarmed out of their trenches and pursued, roaring like lions all the while.

  “Come on!” Rollant shouted. “We can lick ’em! Now they’re up above ground, same as we are!”

  He wasn’t so vain as to imagine his voice turned the tide by itself. That would have taken a man like Fighting Joseph, now fighting no more. He heard plenty of officers and underofficers and ordinary soldiers shouting the same thing in different words. But his was one of the voices raised.

  And, by one of those chances the Thunderer and the Lion God might have understood but no mortal did, the southrons threw off their fear as quickly as it had seized them. They turned around and started plying the northern men with bolts. Pikemen tramped toward the foe in solid ranks. And the traitors, who had been storming forward as if this were the field by the River of Death, hesitated and then abruptly turned to flight themselves.

  Now their officers howled in dismay. What had been a bid for revenge against the defeats they’d suffered closer to Marthasville a few days before turned into another disaster now. The northerners had attacked with all their old verve, but hadn’t been able to sustain it. And when fear took them, it seized them even harder than it had laid hold of the southrons.

  “Stand!” “Hold!” “Shoot back, gods damn you!” the traitors’ officers howled. They might as well have told the Hoocheecoochee River to quit flowing. They could give all the orders they liked, but the men in blue paid them no attention. Having decided they couldn’t win the fight against the southrons, they seemed to have decided all hope was lost, and stampeded back toward Jonestown.

  Whooping with glee, the southrons pursued. Rollant ran right past a lieutenant from the Army of Franklin who was still shouting curses after his departed soldiers. Afterwards, the blond wondered whether his comrades had captured the traitor or simply slain him. He never found out.

  So great was the northerners’ fear, they made no serious stand in the trench lines their serfs had dug. A few of them paused, turned, and shot and the oncoming southrons, but most simply kept going. Escape was all they had in mind as they pelted back toward the hamlet of Jonestown.

  “By the Lion God’s sacred eyeteeth,” Lieutenant Griff said in dazed tones, “I do believe we may bag them all.”

  “May it be so, sir,” Rollant said. He waved the standard again and again. Cheers answered him. The southrons had no war cry to match the northern roar. That cry put fear in the heart of any man who heard it. But the shouts that burst from the throats of Doubting George’s men as they watched the enemy flee before them were ferocious enough for all ordinary use.

  When the traitors reached the outskirts of Jonestown, they did manage a rally of sorts. Rollant soon saw why: they were fighting to hold the southrons away from the glideway carpets that were even then carrying men in blue south out of the battle and back toward Marthasville.

  “Where are our catapults?” Rollant shouted. Most of the heavy engines, of course, were back by Marthasville, too, knocking the city down around the ears of its inhabitants and defenders. But some lighter ones had come north with the crossbowmen and pikemen. Now they had a target about which the men who served them could usually but dream. Land a few firepots on those fleeing carpets and no small part of the Army of Franklin’s strength would go up in smoke.

  Those would be men roasting on the carpets, of course. Rollant did his best not to think about that. As long as they were only targets in his mind, he wouldn’t have to dwell on what their torment meant. By reckoning him and his kind only serfs, they’d played the identical game for centuries.

  When the catapults did arrive, though, they pelted the rear guard in Jonestown, not the departing carpets, most of which were out of range by then. The traitors had engines of their own in the town, and showed no hesitation about bombarding the southrons. After Rollant saw a soldier from his regiment turned to a running, burning, shrieking torch, he stopped worrying about the rights and wrongs of war. He was in it, and beating down the enemy came before everything else.

  Doubting George’s men didn’t quite manage to bag all the traitors. The rear guard fought skillfully and stubbornly, and managed to withdraw south toward Marthasville in good order. They did know their business, no doubt of that. The war would have been much easier were they ignorant.

  Somehow, even the partial failure seemed not to matter so much. “We’ve got the glideway,” Rollant said as the sun set in blood ahead of him.

  “We didn’t finish the traitors’ army.” That was Smitty, sounding as indignant as if he were Marshal Bart.

  “Do you know what?” Rollant said.

  Smitty shook his head. “No. What, your Corporalship with all the answers, sir?”

  Rollant snorted. “You’re impossible. But I’ll tell you what anyhow: we’re getting to where it doesn’t matter whether we did or not. We’ve got the glideway line-the lines, I should say. The rest will take care of itself.”

  * * *

  Behind Captain Gremio, more firepots crashed into Marthasville. He could hear their hateful bursts. The breeze was out of the west, too, so he could smell the smoke from the burning city. He would have thought that, by this time, nothing much inside Marthasville would burn. He would have thought that, but he would have been wrong. Every day, the southrons started fresh fires.

  They weren’t just heaving firepots into the city, either. A rending crash told of a great stone striking home. A soldier from his company said, “There goes somebody’s house to hells and gone.”

  The fellow was bound to be right. When one of those heavy stones came down on something, whatever it hit broke. And if you don’t believe me, ask what’s left of Leonidas the Priest, Gremio thought with funeral-pyre humor.

  He was tempted to use the joke out loud. Before he could, Colonel Florizel called, “Come on, men. Move up. The attack will go in in a few minutes.” He chuckled to himself. “ `Go in’ is right, isn’t it, when we’re trying to take the Sweet One’s shrine away from the southrons? May she give them all a dose of the clap.” He extended the middle finger of his right hand in the usual Detinan invocation of the goddess of love. A lot of troopers imitated the gesture. So did Gremio.

  “Be ready. We have to be strong and fierce in the field.” Sergeant Thisbe spoke as if Fl
orizel hadn’t. “If we don’t lick the southrons here, this army is in a lot of trouble. We can do it.”

  “That’s right,” Gremio said. “We can-and we’ve got to. If we can take away the Sweet One’s shrine and the high ground around it, we cut off the wing that’s grabbed our glideway lines east to Dothan and up to the northern part of this province. Then we can break the stranglehold they’re putting on us and on Marthasville.”

  His sword was loose in its sheath. He went forward toward the shrine as if sure of victory. In his heart, he was anything but. The Army of Franklin had lost south of Marthasville. It had lost west of Marthasville. What was left of Roast-Beef William’s wing had come scurrying back to Marthasville from Jonestown in the north with its tail between its legs. And now Lieutenant General Bell was ordering this attack east of the city.

  Why not? Gremio thought acidulously. We’ve failed in the other three directions. I supposeBell’s trying for a clean sweep. That wasn’t fair. Gremio knew as much. He was past caring. He wished Bell had remained a wing commander. He was up to that job. Army commander? On the face of things, that seemed beyond him-as far beyond him as Mount Panamgam, home of the gods, was beyond the sky.

  Colonel Florizel still thought the sun god shone on Bell day and night. As far as Florizel was concerned, fighting was all that mattered. Whether you won or lost seemed much less important to him. Gremio had seen too much combat in the lawcourts and on the field to have much sympathy for that point of view.

  Pikemen formed up in front of the northern crossbowmen. Horns blared. Along with the rest of the officers in the attack, Gremio shouted, “Forward!” He waved his sword. He wouldn’t lead his men anywhere he wouldn’t go himself.

  “That’s the spirit!” Colonel Florizel said, and he brandished his own blade. A moment later, he turned to bawl something at another of his captains. He wasn’t keeping a special eye on Gremio any more. I did my best to get myself killed when we fought by Goober Creek, Gremio thought. I didn’t quite manage it, but I did persuade Florizel I’m no coward-for a while, anyhow.