Harry Turtledove - Advance and Retreat

“I see,” said John, who liked none of what he saw or heard.

Barre went on ranting. He didn’t sound like an actor. He sounded like a crazy man. “Thus always to tyrants!” he shouted, and thumped his fist down on the table in front of him.

“Maybe they could lock him up for being a lunatic,” John said hopefully.

Marshal Bart shook his head with just the hint of a smile. “You have been in the east a long time, John. Things are… different here in Georgetown. It took me a while to get used to it, too. A lot of men here favor Geoffrey. King Avram does not get upset about it as long as they keep it to talk, and they mostly do. There were serfs on the estates hereabouts till the war started, you know. In a lot of ways, this is more a northern town than one full of southrons.”

John had heard that. He hadn’t wanted to believe it. Evidently, it was true no matter what he wanted. He said, “They ought to clean out all those traitors, and crucify the worst of ’em.”

Now Marshal Bart gave him an odd look. “I said something not much different from that when I first got here, too, Brigadier. But King Avram would not-will not-hear of it. He says victory will cure what ails them. After we whip false King Geoffrey, we will all be Detinans together again, and we will have to live with one another. When you look at it that way, it is hard to say he is wrong.”

“Maybe.” But John the Lister cocked his head to one side and listened to young Barre a little longer. “To the hells with me, though, if I think that mouthy son of a bitch has any business running loose.”

“Well, I would be harder than Avram is myself,” Bart allowed. “But he is the King of Detina. We have fought this whole war to show the northerners that that is what he is. If he gives an order to let people like that alone, what can we do but leave them alone? Without turning into traitors ourselves, I mean?”

John thought that over. With a scowl, he said, “You know what, sir? I’m gods-damned glad I’m just a soldier. I don’t have to worry about things like that.”

“Some soldiers do,” Bart said. “When Fighting Joseph was head general here, he talked about seizing the throne after he won some victories.”

“It’s a wonder Avram didn’t take his head,” John said.

“Avram heard about it, but he only laughed,” Bart replied. “He said that if Fighting Joseph gave him the victories, he would take his chances with the usurpation. Then Duke Edward whipped the stuffing out of Joseph at Viziersville, and that was the end of that kind of talk. Our job is to make sure the traitors do not pull off any more little stunts like Viziersville, and we are strong enough to do it. That is why I brought your wing west. We will manage.”

We will manage . It wasn’t a flashy motto, nothing for soldiers to cry as they charged into battle. But it was a belief that Marshal Bart had turned into a truth, and a truth none of King Avram’s other generals had ever been able to find. John the Lister nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said.

However much Lieutenant General Bell didn’t want to admit it even to himself-perhaps especially to himself-General Peegeetee had been right about how things were in Nonesuch. Like most Detinans (and all the more because he was a healer’s son), Bell had spent time in sickrooms that held people who were going to die. Walk into such a room and you could see death brooding there, sometimes even before the bedridden patient knew the end drew near. Nonesuch was like that now.

King Geoffrey still made bold speeches. To listen to him, victory lay right around the corner. To look around in Nonesuch was to know Geoffrey was whistling in the dark. Everyone’s eyes fearfully went to the north, where Duke Edward and the Army of Southern Parthenia had ever more trouble holding Marshal Bart and his men in gray away from the last couple of glideway lines that fed the city-and, not so incidentally, the army. If Bart seized those glideways, Nonesuch-and Duke Edward-would commence to starve.

And even if Bart didn’t seize the glideways, how much would it matter in the end? Everything was scarce. Everything was expensive. Prices had been bad in Great River Province. They were worse here, much worse. Almost everything cost ten or twenty times what it had before the war began. Bell understood why, too, for the coins Geoffrey put out these days, though called silver, were copper thinly washed with the more precious metal. Bell didn’t like using them, either.

If a man had King Avram’s silver money, he could buy whatever he pleased, and at a civilized price. That also said too much about how the war was going.

For the time being, King Geoffrey was still feeding and housing Bell. Even if Bell had renounced command of the Army of Franklin, he remained a lieutenant general in his chosen sovereign’s service. How much Geoffrey welcomed that service at the moment was an open question. He did not publicly renounce it, though.

Not publicly renouncing Bell’s service and feeding and housing him were as far as Geoffrey went. Time after time, Bell tried to secure an audience with the king. Time after time, he found himself rebuffed. At length, his temper fraying, he growled to a flunky, “I don’t believe his Majesty wants to talk to me.”

The flunky, who remained as toplofty as if Geoffrey’s armies had overrun New Eborac City, looked at him from hooded eyes. “What ever could have given you that impression, Lieutenant General?”

Bell glowered back. “I’m having trouble believing the king has all this many meetings and such-like things.”

“Are you? What a pity,” the servitor murmured. “Some people will believe anything.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Bell asked.

“Why, what it said, of course,” the other man replied.

He refused to be pushed. He was as agile with words as a dueling master with sabers. After a while, Bell gave up and went away. That that might have been what King Geoffrey’s secretary had in mind never occurred to him.

But Bell, almost by accident, figured out a response to Geoffrey’s evasions. Since the king would not see him, since the king would not hear him, he started telling his story to anyone else who might listen. That included his fellow officers in Geoffrey’s capital, the nobles who thronged into Nonesuch to be near the king, and the merchants and gamblers who kept trying to get rich when everyone else got poorer and hungrier by the day. Bell talked-and talked, and talked.

After several days of this, everybody in Nonesuch was talking about what had happened in front of Ramblerton-and talking about Bell’s version of what had happened there. That version, perhaps not surprisingly, gave Bell as much credit as could be salvaged from what had befallen the north.

The rumors Bell had started soon reached King Geoffrey’s ears. And Geoffrey, who’d spent much of the war trying to strangle rumors, was naturally unenthusiastic about having more start. He didn’t summon Bell to him to discuss the officer’s reinstatement: he summoned him to try to get him to shut his mouth.

To Lieutenant General Bell, the difference in the two possible reasons for the summons was academic. That Geoffrey had summoned him to the citadel of Nonesuch was all that mattered. Bell was earnest, Bell was aggressive, but Bell had the political sense of a watermelon. Worse, he was completely unaware he had the political sense of a watermelon. As far as he was concerned, the summons represented a vindication of sorts.

Grim-faced guards in blue stood outside the citadel in Geoffrey’s capital. For the life of him, Bell couldn’t figure out why they looked so grim. They were here on ceremonial duty, weren’t they? If they’d been in the trenches of Pierreville with the Army of Southern Parthenia facing Marshal Bart’s army, they would have had some excuse for long faces. As things were? Not likely!