“The gods help those who help themselves,” Fighting Joseph agreed. Hesmucet wished he wouldn’t have done so with a cliche, and then wished for all the gold in the Golden Province far to the east while he was at it.
“Maybe,” James the Bird’s Eye said, “we could give ourselves a better chance of reaching the river with magic.” For a southron to rely on wizardry was out of the ordinary in this war, but Major Alva was no ordinary southron mage.
“Not a bad notion,” Hesmucet agreed. “I will take that up with our sorcerers.” By that, he meant he would take it up with Major Alva, and all the wing commanders understood as much. The rest of the mages in the army, from Colonel Phineas on down, came close to matching the youngster only if all their efforts were added together. Looking from one officer to another, Hesmucet asked, “Anything else? Anyone think we have a real chance of going through Joseph the Gamecock’s position instead of around it?”
Nobody said anything, not even Fighting Joseph, who was much given to overcoming obstacles by charging straight at them and smashing them flat with his hard head. Hesmucet didn’t know whether to be relieved at the show of good sense or sorry he didn’t get the chance to squelch his annoying subordinate.
With a small shrug, he said, “Dismissed.” As the generals trooped away, he called for a runner and told him, “Fetch me Major Alva. Don’t just tell him I want him and then leave. Bring him back here yourself.”
“Yes, sir.” The soldier grinned; he’d been one of Hesmucet’s runners for some little while now. “If I don’t bring him, he’s liable to forget to come at all, isn’t he? He’ll just stand there thinking fancy thoughts.”
“He doesn’t know a whole lot about subordination,” Hesmucet agreed wryly. Alva knows even less about subordination than Fighting Joseph does, he thought. Fighting Joseph understands what he’s supposed to do; he just doesn’t do it. To Alva, the whole idea is bizarre. That thought led to another: if he’s not the ultimate free Detinan, who in the seven hells is?
Off went the runner. He returned in due course, Alva in tow. The mage did remember to salute when he came up to Hesmucet, and seemed proud of himself for remembering. “You wanted me, uh, sir?” he said.
“That’s right,” the commanding general answered. He gave Alva more leeway than he did to any other soldier in the army. Alva had earned more than any other soldier had. Hesmucet went on, “Can you work out some sort of masking spell that will let Marble Bill’s unicorn-riders get down to the Hoocheecoochee without the traitors’ finding out about it till too late?”
Major Alva gave him a bright smile. “Funny you should ask me that, sir. Marble Bill asked the very same thing a couple of days ago.”
“Did he? Well, good for him,” Hesmucet said. That was more initiative than the commander of unicorn-riders usually showed.
“Yes, sir, he did. I gave him a cantrip I thought would serve.” Alva’s smile slipped. “It didn’t. The northerners had a counterspell that sniffed it out, and beat back his column of riders.”
“Ah. Too bad,” Hesmucet said. “Well, they have good wizards of their own, and keeping us off the Hoocheecoochee is very important to them.”
“Their wizards are strong, but they aren’t all that good,” Alva said. “There’s a difference.” If there was, Hesmucet couldn’t see it. Alva added, “What’s so important about the river, anyway?”
“By the gods!” Hesmucet muttered. His pet mage lived in a world so abstract, things of real value meant nothing to him. Gently, the general commanding explained: “It’s the last big barrier in front of Marthasville, Major. If we can get across, Joseph the Gamecock will have a hells of a time keeping us out of the city.”
“Oh. All right.” The sorcerer nodded. He wasn’t stupid-on the contrary-but was as narrowly focused as a good burning glass. “I suppose that means you’ll want me to try another masking spell, then.”
“I did have that in mind, yes.” Hesmucet nodded, too. “Or anything else that will get us over the Hoocheecoochee-I’m not fussy about how it happens.”
Alva’s face tightened into the mask of concentration Hesmucet had come to know well. Alva sometimes stayed like that, hardly moving, hardly even seeming to breathe, for a couple of hours at a stretch. This time, though, he came out almost at once, to ask, “You will not want this to be a showy spell, am I right?”
“Showy?” Hesmucet frowned. “How do you mean?”
“A showy spell is something the other side notices,” Alva answered. “You’ll want them to notice nothing at all till the knife goes into their back? Not to have the slightest idea they’re being diddled?”
“Isn’t that how every single masking spell under the sun works?” Hesmucet asked.
“Oh, no… sir.” Major Alva sounded shocked. He launched into a technical disquisition in which Hesmucet found himself following perhaps one word in three. He did gather that some masking spells were like lamps shone in the enemy’s eyes, while others hung an opaque curtain between the foe and what he wished to see and still others sought to be transparent. He also gathered that the last sort was the hardest to bring off. It would be, he thought.
“You have it right,” he told Alva when the mage finally ran down. “I don’t want the traitors to have any idea what’s going on till it’s too late for them to do one fornicating thing about it.”
“I’ll see what I can come up with, sir.” Like a groundhog slipping back into hibernation, Alva returned to his trance of study.
There were other ways besides the sorcerous to keep the northerners from finding out what Hesmucet had in mind. He didn’t entrench up close to the traitors’ positions, but placed pickets well in front of his own lines. The enemy wouldn’t be able to see how many soldiers he had in place and how many he was using for his casts up and down the Hoocheecoochee, or how ready his army was to move in a hurry if somehow he managed to find a crossing.
Joseph the Gamecock has to be worried, he thought. He knows the Hoocheecoochee is his last strong line as well as I do. Feints toward the river both north and south kept false King Geoffrey’s unicorn-riders galloping this way and that. They couldn’t afford to assume that any move was a feint, not here they couldn’t. They had to take each one seriously.
Hesmucet won approval from one source whose opinion he valued-Doubting George said, “This is all very fine work, sir. The wider we stretch the traitors, the sooner they’ll break.”
“Glad you agree, Lieutenant General,” Hesmucet told him. “And glad we’re working together as well as we are.”
“So am I, sir,” George replied. “Only one who’d laugh if we pulled opposite ways, though, is Geoffrey.”
“There is that.” Hesmucet’s laugh held little real mirth. “Not that such considerations have stopped a good many other officers from wrangling with one another.”
“True enough, true enough. We’re a band of brothers, is what we are-and brothers fight like cats and dogs.”
“Don’t we just?” Hesmucet eyed his second-in-command. “If you were in Joseph the Gamecock’s boots, what would you do?”
“About what he’s doing,” George said. “I don’t know what else he could do, not with an army barely half the size of ours. He’s managed to make a nuisance of himself, hasn’t he?”
“Yes.” Hesmucet admitted what he could hardly deny. “Gods damn it, though, we need Marthasville. King Avram needs it. The whole kingdom needs it, to show we’re winning the war.”
“We go forward,” Doubting George said. “One lurch at a time, we do go forward. And Marshal Bart has Duke Edward of Arlington and the Army of Southern Parthenia pushed a lot farther north in Parthenia than they really want to be.”
“So he does,” Hesmucet said, “though the latest, I hear, is that Earl Early the Jubilant has managed to get loose and come south for an attack on Georgetown.”
“D’you think he can take the place?” George asked.
“I doubt it,” Hesmucet answered, and his wing commander smiled. Hesmucet w
ent on, “Have you seen the works around Georgetown, Lieutenant General? They make the ones Joseph the Gamecock has thrown up here look like sand castles by comparison. King Avram set his artificers to work as soon as the war against Geoffrey began, and I don’t believe they’ve slowed down from that day to this.”
“No doubt you’re right, sir, but if all the soldiers are up in Parthenia with Marshal Bart…” Doubting George’s voice trailed away. “The best fortress in the world isn’t worth a counterfeit copper without some men inside it.”
“Avram can fill the forts up with clerks from all the Georgetown offices and hold off Earl Early till Marshal Bart has time to bring some real fighting men down from his own lines,” Hesmucet said. “With those works, even clerks with crossbows would do for a little while.”
“Here’s hoping it doesn’t come to that,” George said, and then, thoughtfully, “I wonder what sort of works Joseph the Gamecock has waiting for us outside of Marthasville itself.”
“We’ll find out, I hope.” Hesmucet smiled a wolfish smile. “And, once we cross the Hoocheecoochee, all the glideways to the east, to Dothan and the Great River, fall into our hands, even if we can’t break into the city yet.”
“That’s true. I hadn’t thought of it quite so, but that’s true,” George said. “And false King Geoffrey won’t be very happy about it, either.”
Hesmucet clasped both hands to his breast in false and exaggerated sympathy. George laughed out loud. “Too bad. My heart’s just breaking,” Hesmucet said in syrupy tones.
George laughed again, louder and harder. “If we do cross the Hoocheecoochee,” he said, “poor Geoffrey’s going to have kittens.”
“So he will,” Hesmucet agreed. “I told you once: what Geoffrey calls a kingdom is nothing but two armies and a lot of wind and air. Once we get over the river, we’ll show all of Detina how empty the north is.”
“May it be so. I think it will be so,” George said.
“We’ll make it so,” Hesmucet said. “Once we’re over the river, Joseph the Gamecock won’t be able to keep us from making it so.”
“Only trouble is, we’re not over the river yet,” George said.
“I think Alva can let us get men down to it even if we can’t manage any other way,” Hesmucet replied. “And once we reach it, we’ll cross it. Our artificers can throw a bridge over it in a hurry. Then”-he grinned-“we see what happens next.”
* * *
“Corporal Rollant!” Lieutenant Griff called.
“Yes, sir!” Rollant said proudly. He was sure he felt better about being promoted to the lowest grade of underofficer than Bart did about rising from general to marshal. For a blond to get stripes on his sleeve in King Avram’s army, to gain the privilege of giving orders to free Detinans…
“Take up the standard, Corporal!” Griff said.
“Yes, sir!” Rollant repeated, even more proudly than before. The company’s flag and its heavy pole seemed to weigh nothing at all as he lifted them from their stand. The soldiers saluted the standard as if worshiping a god. And so they are, he realized. This flag means Detina to them, and they reverence the kingdom as much as the Lion God or the Thunderer.
His mouth quirked up in what wasn’t really a grin, no matter what it looked like. They certainly wouldn’t risk their lives to free blonds from their-from our-bondage to the land, he thought. Avram hadn’t much wanted to fight the northerners over serfdom. He’d chosen war only when Geoffrey tried to set up his own kingdom in the north.
Horns blared. “Form up!” Lieutenant Griff screamed. The company he led hurried to obey. Rollant started to go to his own place, next to Smitty and Sergeant Joram. He’d taken that place ever since accepting King Avram’s silver on enlisting. But it wasn’t his any more. Now he belonged at the van of the company, so he could use the standard to signal which way the men should go.
The honor was not unmixed. For one thing, standard-bearers, by the nature of their job, made prominent targets. If the last fellow who carried the flag hadn’t got shot on Commissioner Mountain, Rollant wouldn’t have had it now. And, for another, he felt eyes on him as he took his place alongside Griff and the company trumpeter. Not all of his comrades were happy to see a blond promoted above them. Too bad, Rollant thought. If they’d wanted to save the standard, one of them could have done it himself.
Voice cracking as it often did, Lieutenant Griff said, “Men, our company-and Colonel Nahath’s regiment as a whole-have the distinction of probing up towards the Hoocheecoochee. This is a privilege granted only a few regiments of footsoldiers. The unicorn-riders are doing much more of it. But Lieutenant General George knows what we can do. He’s seen us fight. By the gods, he’s fought alongside us, on Merkle’s Hill by the River of Death. We’ll show him we deserve this chance he’s giving us, won’t we?”
“Yes, sir!” the men roared.
Rollant shouted as loud as anybody else. He had to, for appearance’s sake. But that didn’t mean he was excited about getting the chance to try to approach the Hoocheecoochee. He knew what Lieutenant Griff meant, no matter what the young officer actually said. What Griff meant was, What we’re going to try probably won’t work, but it does have a fair chance of getting a lot of us killed.
He looked toward Smitty. The farmer’s son caught his glance, shrugged ever so slightly, and raised an eyebrow, as if to say, What can you do? Smitty had been through a lot. He had no more trouble uncovering Griff’s hidden meaning than Rollant did.
Once Griff stood aside, Colonel Nahath harangued the whole regiment. His speech was smoother and more polished than Griff’s, but amounted to the same thing. Rollant felt like shrugging, too, but couldn’t, not standing out there in front of everybody. Nahath had got his orders, and was having to make the best of them. Rollant hoped there was a best to be made.
After the regimental commander stepped back, the horns blared again. “Forward!” Lieutenant Griff shouted, along with all the other men in charge of companies. Forward his own company went. Forward Rollant went at his head.
The day was hot and muggy. At this season of the year, any day in the north of Detina was likely to be hot and muggy. Flies buzzed and bit. With the flagstaff in his hands, Rollant couldn’t slap them away so readily as he had had before. His new rank and station had some difficulties he hadn’t thought about.
With so much heat and moisture, something close to a jungle grew down toward the southern bank of the Hoocheecoochee. Only a few roads ran through the undergrowth. Hoofprints and unicorn turds warned that the traitors patrolled them regularly. Rollant wouldn’t have wanted to meet unicorn-riders in such cramped surroundings.
A squirrel chittered in the branches overhead, scolding the marching soldiers. A jewelbird, glittering green with a ruby head, buzzed around Rollant and then flew off toward the north. The standard-bearer turned to Lieutenant Griff and said, “Sir, where I come from, we’d reckon that was good luck.”
“We haven’t got that superstition in New Eborac,” Griff said. Rollant bristled; he didn’t think of it as a superstition. But then Griff softened the comment: “We haven’t got that many jewelbirds, either. Too far south, and the winters are too cold.”
“I know.” Rollant nodded. “I miss ’em.” He didn’t miss many things about Palmetto Province. Jewelbirds, though, had never done him any harm. “Back around the serfs’ huts, some people would hang a bowl of molasses and water up at the top of a pole to get them to come and feed there.”
“What for?” Griff asked. “To catch them?”
“No, sir!” Rollant heard the shock in his own voice. “Catch a jewelbird? That’d be about the worst kind of bad luck there is. We just liked to have ’em around, on account of they’re pretty. We couldn’t have much that was pretty, but I never heard of a liege lord who minded us drawing jewelbirds to our huts-didn’t cost anything, except for the little bit of molasses.”
Griff tramped on for a while. Rollant wondered if he’d talked too much or too openly. Smitty wouldn’t h
ave minded his remarks. Neither would Sergeant Joram. But then the company commander said, “When you first got to New Eborac, Corporal, you must have felt as if you’d fallen into some whole new world. The biggest city in Detina can’t be anything like an estate outside Karlsburg.”
That was far and away the most perceptive comment Rollant had ever heard Lieutenant Griff make. “You’re right, sir,” the escaped serf said. “Are you ever right! When I first came down south, I thought I would go clean out of my mind. So many people, and all of ’em packed together like olives in a jar… But I got used to it. And do you know what the best part was?”
“I know what it would have been for me,” Griff replied. “What was it for you?”
“Nobody could tell me what to do,” Rollant said at once. “I was on my own. I’d starve if I didn’t work hard. Things weren’t easy, especially at first, but I was working for myself, not for my gods-damned liege lord. When somebody gave me silver, I got to keep all of it. That’s pretty fine.”
Again, Griff marched on for several silent steps. Again, Rollant wondered if he’d gone too far. But the young lieutenant said, “No wonder you’ve got stripes on your tunic sleeve and our flag in your hands. You sound just like any other free Detinan.”
I am just like any other free Detinan, Rollant thought. But that was true only in certain ways. One way it was untrue was in the eyes of a great many free Detinans, from south as well as north. Rollant would have guessed Griff to be among that number, but he seemed to be mistaken there.
On trudged the regiment. “Where are the traitors?” Rollant wondered. “I’d have thought they’d’ve pitched into us by now.”
Lieutenant Griff’s leer might have come from Smitty. “Do you really want them around, Corporal?”
“Want them? Hells, no, sir. But what you want and what you get are two different beasts.” Any serf learned that in a hurry, generally about as fast as he learned to walk or talk. Soldiers got the same lesson, but at an older age.
Marching Through Peachtree wotp-2 Page 20