Advance and Retreat wotp-3

by Harry Turtledove

  Joseph had traded space for time, again and again. Not Bell, not after he took command of the Army of Franklin. He’d gone right out and slugged toe to toe with Hesmucet’s bigger army… which went a long way toward putting the Army of Franklin in its present unhappy predicament.

  Ned shifted Captain Watson’s engines along with the men from the right. They were the only things that could give his riders a decent chance against the quick-shooting crossbows Hard-Riding Jimmy’s men used. By the shouts of dismay from the southrons when the repeating crossbows clattered into action, Jimmy’s troopers knew it, too.

  Of course, had Ned’s unicorn-riders already been under attack on the right when Hard-Riding Jimmy’s men hit them on the left, he wouldn’t have been able to shift troopers and engines like that. All through the war, the southrons had had a certain trouble coordinating their blows. A good thing, too, Ned thought. They’d’ve whipped us a long time ago if they really knew what they were doing.

  Northern magecraft had also helped hold King Avram’s armies at bay. That made it all the more disconcerting when lightning crashed down from a clear sky and wrecked one of Captain Watson’s precious, newly reskeined catapults. A few minutes later, another deadly accurate thunderbolt set a second siege engine afire.

  “Major Marmaduke!” Ned of the Forest roared furiously. “Where in the godsdamnation are you, you worthless excuse for a mage?”

  The wizard in the blue robe came over at a fast trot. “I’m… sorry, sir,” he quavered. “I’ll do my best, but he’s too quick and strong for me.”

  “He’d better not be,” Ned ground out. “Without those engines, my troopers are dead men. If they lose them, Major, you’re a dead man.”

  Marmaduke went even paler than he was already. He did not make the mistake of thinking Ned was joking. When the commander of unicorn-riders spoke in such tones, joking was the furthest thing from his mind.

  And, perhaps more inspired by fear than he’d ever been by patriotism, Major Marmaduke succeeded in deflecting the next strokes from the southron sorcerer. The lightnings smote, yes, but not where the engines were. The invaluable repeating crossbows survived, and kept spitting death at Hard-Riding Jimmy’s men. Eventually, the southron unicorn-riders drew back in discouragement.

  Made it through another day, Ned of the Forest thought. How many more?

  * * *

  Rollant wasn’t much with needle and thread. His wife would have laughed if she’d seen the clumsy botches he’d made of some repairs to his uniform. But Norina was back in New Eborac City, so he had to do what he could for himself. And sewing a third stripe on his sleeve wasn’t a duty. It was a pleasure.

  He’d never expected to make sergeant’s rank. Come to that, he’d never expected to make corporal’s rank, either. If the south hadn’t needed bodies to throw at false King Geoffrey’s men, he might never have got into the army at all.

  Bodies… His mouth twisted at that. If two Detinan soldiers hadn’t suddenly become no more than bodies, he wouldn’t have been promoted once, let alone twice, and he knew it. Snatching up the company standard when the standard-bearer went down won him his corporal’s stripes-that, of course, and staying alive once he did it. And now Lieutenant Griff was dead, too, Sergeant Joram was Lieutenant Joram… and Corporal Rollant became Sergeant Rollant.

  Ordinary Detinans could get promoted without having someone die to open a slot for them. Blonds? It didn’t look that way. But ordinary Detinans could also get promoted when someone did die. Sitting crosslegged in front of the fire by Rollant was Smitty, who was making heavy weather of sewing a corporal’s two stripes onto the sleeve of his gray tunic.

  He pricked himself, yelped, and looked up from what he was doing. “This whole business of being an underofficer seems like more trouble than it’s worth,” he said.

  “No.” Rollant shook his head. “Oh, no. Not even a little bit. This is as good as it gets-it says the army likes what you’re doing, what kind of a man you are.”

  To him, that meant a great deal-meant everything, in fact. Respect always came grudgingly to blonds… when it came at all. But Smitty, a Detinan born, took his status for granted. “I know what kind of man I am, gods damn it. I’m a man who’s sick of getting shot at, who’s sick of sleeping on the ground, and who’s ready to pack this whole stinking war in and go home.”

  “Can’t do that. Not yet. Not till it’s over,” Rollant said.

  “Don’t remind me,” Smitty said mournfully. He raised his voice to call out to a couple of common soldiers to gather up water bottles and fill them at a nearby creek.

  “See what happens?” one of them said: a Detinan speaking his mind, as Detinans did. “You haven’t even got the stripes on your sleeve yet, and already you’re treating people like you were a liege lord.” Off he went, still grumbling.

  Smitty turned to Rollant. “Thunderer’s ballocks, Sergeant, but we’re getting a poor sort of common soldier these days.” His voice brimmed with righteous indignation.

  Rollant gaped at him, then started to laugh. “When you were a common soldier and I was a corporal, didn’t you bray like a whipped ass whenever I asked you to do the least little thing? If that wasn’t you, it sure looked a lot like you.”

  “Oh, but I didn’t understand then,” Smitty said. “Now I do.”

  “I know what you understand,” Rollant told him. “You understand you’d rather get somebody else to do something for you than do it yourself.”

  “Well, what else is there to understand?” Smitty said.

  Although the blond thought Smitty was joking, he wasn’t sure. He answered, “I’ll say this, Smitty: the liege lords up here think the same way. It’s great for them, but not for their serfs.”

  “Fine,” Smitty said. “You can do as much work as a common soldier and still keep your stripes. Or you could-I don’t see you doing it.”

  “It’s different in the army,” Rollant insisted.

  “How?”

  “Because…” Rollant grimaced. Spelling out what he meant wasn’t so easy. He did his best: “Because the army tells me what I’m supposed to do, and what all sergeants and corporals are supposed to do. And it doesn’t have one set of rules for ordinary Detinans and a different set for blonds-now that blonds get paid the same as ordinary Detinans it doesn’t, anyway.”

  “That never was fair,” Smitty allowed.

  “Gods-damned right it wasn’t,” Rollant growled. “If they send us out to get killed the same as anybody else, we’d better make the same silver as anybody else, too. And Sergeant Joram-when he was a sergeant, I mean-did the same things as I’m doing. So if you don’t like it, take it up with him.”

  “No, thanks,” Smitty said, in a way implying that that subject wasn’t open to discussion. Whether he liked the rules or not, he didn’t like Joram, regardless of rank.

  He went back to sewing the stripes onto his sleeve. Rollant returned to adding the sergeant’s stripe. Joram came up to the fire with a shiny new lieutenant’s epaulet on the left shoulder of his old, faded gray tunic. The only place the tunic still displayed its original color was where the underofficer’s chevrons he’d just cut off had protected the wool from sun and rain.

  When Rollant and Smitty jumped to their feet and saluted, Joram grimaced. “As you were,” he said, and then, “I’m not used to this-not even close. I never wanted to be an officer.”

  “I never wanted to be a corporal, either,” Smitty muttered.

  “Shall I tear those stripes off before you finish putting ’em on, then?” Joram asked. Smitty hastily shook his head. Lieutenant Joram nodded in something approaching satisfaction.

  Rollant couldn’t say he hadn’t wanted his promotion. He hadn’t counted on it; he hadn’t even particularly expected it. But he’d craved it, just as he’d craved corporal’s rank after giving himself the chance to earn it. Rank meant the Detinans had to recognize what he’d done. It would vanish at the end of the war, but what it meant would remain inside him forever.
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br />   “Is all well here?” Joram asked, plainly serious about meeting his new responsibilities.

  “Yes, sir,” Rollant and Smitty chorused.

  “Good.” The new company commander went off to another campfire.

  The troopers Smitty had sent out came back with the water bottles. They started to dump them at the new corporal’s feet. Rollant shook his head. “You know that’s not how you do it. Take each one to the man it belongs to and give it to him. To begin with, you can give me mine.”

  He took it from one of the soldiers. He’d delivered plenty of water bottles before he got promoted. Now that was someone else’s worry. Rollant didn’t miss it, or cutting firewood, or digging latrine trenches, or any of the other duties common soldiers got stuck with because they were so common.

  Smitty unrolled his blanket and started wrapping himself in it. “We ought to grab whatever shuteye we can,” he said. “Come morning, they’ll try and march the legs off us again.”

  He wasn’t wrong, as Rollant knew too well. His own legs were weary, too; he could feel just how much marching he’d done. But he said, “As long as we’ve got the traitors on the run, I’ll keep going. I’d chase that serfcatching son of a bitch of a Ned of the Forest all the way up into Shell Bay if I could.”

  “He came after you when you ran away?” Smitty asked, a strange blend of sympathy and curiosity in his voice.

  “Not him-he’s always worked here in the east,” Rollant answered. “But there are plenty more like him over by the Western Ocean. I hate ’em all. I know every trick there is for shaking hounds off a trail, and I needed most of them, too.”

  “And you did all that so you could come down to New Eborac and get yourself three stripes?” Smitty said. “You ask me, it was more trouble than it was worth.”

  Rollant also spread out his blanket. He knew Smitty was pulling his leg. Some jokes were easier to take than others, though. “Maybe it looks that way to you,” the blond said. “To me, though, these three stripes mean a hells of a lot. They mean I can give orders-I don’t have to take ’em my whole life long.”

  Smitty eyed him as he cocooned himself in the thick wool blanket. “You may be a blond, your Sergeantly Magnificence,” he said, “but I swear by all the gods you talk more like a Detinan every day.”

  “It’s rubbed off on me-like the itch,” Rollant answered, and fell asleep.

  “Up! Up! Up!” Lieutenant Joram shouted at some ungodsly hour of the morning. All Rollant knew when his eyes came open was that it was still dark. He groaned and unwrapped himself and relieved his own misery by booting out of their bedrolls the men who’d managed to ignore the racket Joram was making.

  After hot, strong tea and oatmeal thick and sweet and sticky with molasses, the soldiers started after the Army of Franklin again. Rollant had had to get used to the idea of eating oatmeal when he came down to New Eborac. In Palmetto Province, oats fed asses and unicorns, not people. Right now, though, he would have eaten anything that didn’t eat him. Marching and fighting took fuel, and lots of it.

  The northerners had also abandoned their encampments, a few miles north of those of Doubting George’s army. But they’d left Ned of the Forest’s unicorn-riders and a small force of footsoldiers behind to slow down the retreating southrons. The troopers and crossbowmen would take cover, fight till they were on the point of being outflanked, and then fall back to do it again somewhere else. They weren’t fighting to win, only to delay their foes. That, they managed to do.

  Even though the rear guard kept the southrons from falling on the Army of Franklin one last time and destroying it, Bell’s army kept falling to pieces on its own from the hard pursuit. More and more men in blue tunics and pantaloons gave up, stopped running, and raised their hands when King Avram’s soldiers came upon them. Most went off into captivity. A few-those who came out of hiding too suddenly, or those who just ran into southrons with grudges-met unfortunate and untimely ends. Such things weren’t supposed to happen. They did, all the time, on both sides.

  Even after surrendering, northerners stared at Rollant. “What is this world coming to, when blonds can lord it over Detinans?” one of them exclaimed.

  “It’s simple,” Rollant said. “I wasn’t stupid enough to pick the losing side. You were. Now get moving.”

  The prisoner looked from one ordinary Detinan in gray to the next. “You fellows going to let him talk to me like that?” he demanded indignantly.

  “We have to,” Smitty answered, his voice grave.

  “What do you mean, you have to?” the prisoner said. “He’s a blond. You’re supposed to tell him what to do.”

  “Can’t,” Smitty said. “He’s the sergeant. We tell him off, he gives us the nastiest duty he can find, just like a regular Detinan would.”

  “I think you people have all gone crazy,” said the man from the Army of Franklin, setting his hands on his hips.

  “Maybe we are crazy,” Rollant said. “But we’re winning. If we can win while we’re crazy, what does that make you traitors?”

  “I’m not a traitor.” The northerner got irate all over again. “It’s you people who let blonds do things the gods didn’t mean to have ’em do-you’re the traitors, you and that gods-damned son of a bitch of a King Avram.”

  “If the gods didn’t want me to do something, they’d keep me from doing it, wouldn’t they?” Rollant said. “If they don’t keep me from doing it, that must mean they know I can do it, right? And since you traitors are losing the war, that means the gods don’t want you to win it, right?”

  His comrades in gray laughed and whooped. “Listen to him!” Smitty said. “He ought to be a priest, not a sergeant.”

  And Rollant saw he’d troubled the captured northerner. The man said nothing more, but he looked worried. He hadn’t before. He’d looked angry that the southrons had taken him prisoner, and at the same time relieved that he wouldn’t be killed. Now, his brow furrowed, he seemed to be examining the reasons for which he’d gone to war in the first place.

  Rollant jerked a thumb toward the south. “Take him away. I’d like to give him just what I think he deserves, but I have to follow orders, too.”

  Off went the prisoner, still looking worried. From not far away, Lieutenant Joram boomed out an order Rollant had heard a great many times since joining the army, but one he’d come to enjoy the past few days: “Forward!”

  “Forward!” Rollant echoed, and waved the company standard. And forward the company went. Sooner or later, Ned of the Forest’s troopers would try to slow them down again. Even if the northerners managed to do it, they wouldn’t delay King Avram’s men for long.

  If something happens to Joram-not that I want it to, but if-will they make me a lieutenant? Rollant wondered. It wasn’t quite impossible; there were a handful of blond officers, though most of them were healers. But it also wasn’t even close to likely, and he had enough sense to understand as much. He’d been lucky to get two stripes on his sleeve, amazingly lucky to get three.

  For that matter, considering the fighting he’d seen, he’d been amazingly lucky to come through alive, and with no serious wounds. He wanted that luck to go on, especially with the war all but won. Next to staying in one piece, what was rank? If they’d offered to make him a lieutenant general like Bell, but with Bell’s missing leg and ruined arm, would he have taken them up on it? Of course not.

  The war couldn’t last too much longer… could it? He wanted to live through it and go home to Norina. Getting killed-even getting hurt-now would be doubly unfair. He’d done everything any man could do to win the fight. Didn’t he deserve to enjoy the fruits of victory?

  He snorted. He was a standard-bearer. He had no guarantee of staying alive for the next five minutes. “Forward!” he shouted again. If anything did happen to him, he would be facing the foe when it did. And if that wasn’t a quintessentially Detinan thought, when would he ever have one?

  * * *

  Lieutenant General Bell sat in a carriage as the Ar
my of Franklin tramped over a wood bridge to the northern bank of the Smew River. The Smew ran through rough, heavily wooded country in northern Franklin. Bell wished he were on a unicorn, but days of riding had left his stump too sore for him to stay in the saddle. If he didn’t travel by carriage, he would have been unable to travel at all. No matter how obvious that truth, it was also humiliating. He felt like a civilian. He might have been going to a temple on a feast day, like any prosperous merchant.

  To his relief, the men didn’t seem bothered about how he got from one place to another. They waved to him as they trudged past. Some of them lifted their hats in lieu of a more formal salute. Bell waved back with his good arm.

  “We’ll lick ’em yet, General!” a soldier called.

  “By the gods, we will!” Bell answered. “Let’s see them try to drive us off the line of the Smew!”

  He wanted to make a stand while he still remained here in Franklin. Even if the Ramblerton campaign had accomplished less than he would have liked-that was how he looked at it, through the most rose-colored of mental spectacles-he didn’t want to have to fall back into Dothan or Great River Province. Staying in Franklin would show the doubters (he didn’t pause to think about Doubting George) both in his own army and in King Geoffrey’s court back at Nonesuch that he was still in charge of things, that these battered regiments still responded to his will.

  Boots thudded on the planks of the bridge. More men, though, had none. Their feet, bare as those of any blond savage, made next to no sound. Some of them left bloody marks on those gray and faded planks. The weather was not far above freezing, and the road up from the south an ocean of mud. How many of the surviving soldiers had frostbitten feet? More than a few, surely. More than Bell cared to think about, even more surely.

  Here came Ned of the Forest’s unicorn-riders and the rest of the rear guard. The unicorns’ hooves drummed as they rode over to the north bank of the Smew. “Come on, sir!” Ned yelled to Bell. “Nobody left between you and Avram’s bastards.”