Harry Turtledove - Advance and Retreat

“Hmm.” Alva thought it over. John had the odd feeling he was taking a test. When Alva suddenly smiled, he decided he’d passed it. “Oh. Perspective!” the mage said. “I should have figured that out for myself.” He thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand to show how stupid he thought he was.

“It’s nothing to worry about.” John the Lister almost added, by the gods , but at the last instant checked himself. Given what the conversation was about, the phrase didn’t fit.

“But I was wrong. I don’t like being wrong.” By the way Major Alva said it, he didn’t like it at all. He gave a partial explanation: “A mage can’t afford to be wrong very often.”

“From everything I’ve heard and from everything I’ve seen, you’re not wrong very often,” John said.

“I don’t dare,” Alva replied. “Sir, I started with nothing. The only reason I’ve got anything at all is because I’m good at wizardry. I’ll ride it as far as I can here in the army. When I get out, I’ll go even further. This is what I can do. This is what I’m good at. I’m going to be as good at it as I can.”

“All right, Major.” John the Lister nodded. “You sound like a proper Detinan to me: out to paint your name on the wall with the biggest letters you can. This is a kingdom where men do things like that.”

“This is the best kingdom in the world, sir-in the whole gods-damned world .” Major Alva spoke with great conviction. “Anybody can be anything here, if he’s good enough and works hard enough. That’s why the northerners are such fools to want to leave. Do they think they’ll be able to climb to the top with all their pigheaded nobles clogging the road up? Not likely!”

“I don’t know whether they worry about getting to the top so much as keeping blonds on the bottom,” John said.

“But that’s stupid, too.” Alva, plainly, had no patience with stupidity, his own or anyone else’s. He pointed to a blond in the trenches, a blond with a corporal’s emblem on the sleeve of his gray tunic. “Take a look at him. He’s getting ahead because he’s good at soldiering. If he were an ordinary Detinan, he’d probably be a lieutenant by now, but even blonds can get ahead here.”

John the Lister had no enormous use for blonds. He wasn’t thrilled at the idea of unbinding them from the land and making them citizens like proper Detinans. If it weren’t for splitting the kingdom, he would have been happy to let the north take most of them out of Detina. “Next thing you know,” he said, “you’ll be talking about women the same way.”

“Oh, don’t be silly, sir,” Alva said. “Some people do, but they’re a bunch of crackpots.”

“Well, we see eye-to-eye about something, anyhow,” John said with a certain amount of relief. The wizard, plainly, was a radical freethinker, but even he had his limits. The general commanding went on, “Now, is there anything you notice in these works that could be stronger from a wizardly point of view?”

“Let’s see.” Alva didn’t want to commit himself without looking things over, which made John think better of him. He paced along behind the rearmost of three lines of entrenchments, looking out over them toward and along the north-facing slope. At last, he said, “Would Lieutenant General Bell really be dumb enough to try to drive us out of this position?”

“ I don’t know,” John said. “Only Bell knows how stupid he really is. But we’d be stupid not to give him the warmest reception we could, wouldn’t we? How can we make sure of doing that?”

“Sir, I think you’ve done it,” the mage replied. “I saw a few engines you might bring up closer so they’d throw farther. Other than that…” He shook his head. “I can feel the defenses you’ve set up against the traitor’s battle magic. They should work.”

“You’re the one to say that. You put most of them up.”

“I told you-I’m good.” Alva had no false modesty-and probably little of any other sort.

“How soon do you think they’ll attack?” John asked.

Now the wizard looked at him in some surprise. “ I don’t know, sir. I deal with enchantments. You’re the fellow who’s supposed to be a soldier.”

I’ve just been given the glove , John the Lister thought. His voice dry, he said, “I do try to impersonate one every now and again, yes.”

Alva looked at him in surprise of a different sort. “Have you been listening to Doubting George, sir?” he asked reproachfully.

“Not for a while now,” John answered. “Why?”

“Because I don’t run into a lot of men who are supposed to be soldiers” — Alva seemed to like that phrase, while John didn’t, not at all- “who know what it is to be ridiculous.”

“That only shows you haven’t spent enough time paying attention to soldiers,” John the Lister told him. “The only officers who don’t know what it is to be ridiculous are the ones who’ve never led men into battle. Those sons of bitches on the other side will do their best to make a monkey out of you, and sometimes they’ll bring it off.”

“What have they got to say about you?” Major Alva asked.

“If I’m doing my job, they say I’m trying to make a monkey out of them, too,” John replied. “Whichever one of us does best, the other fellow ends up swinging through the trees.” He mimed scratching himself.

“Sounds like the Inward Hypothesis in action to me,” Alva said. John glared at the wizard. Alva mimed scratching himself, too, carefully adding, “Sir,” afterwards.

Captain Gremio’s shoes thudded on the bridge the northerners had thrown across the Trumpeteth River.

His company wasn’t so loud crossing over the bridge to the south bank as he would have liked. Not enough of them had shoes with which to thud. Bare feet and feet wrapped in rags made hardly any sound at all.

Unicorn hooves drummed quite nicely. From atop his mount, Colonel Florizel called, “Step it up, men! They’re waiting for us in Poor Richard.”

So they are , Gremio thought unhappily. And they’ve had a little while to wait now, too-plenty of time to dig trenches to fight from . Trenches saved lives. Without them, Joseph the Gamecock wouldn’t have been able to delay Hesmucet up in Peachtree Province for nearly so long as he had. And then Bell brought us out of our trenches and hit the southrons as hard as he could. And we lost Marthasville, and we’re losing the rest of Peachtree, too .

“Keep moving,” Sergeant Thisbe said. “We have to whip the southrons.”

“The sergeant’s right,” Gremio said. “We’ve got more men than John the Lister, and we’ll swamp his whole army.”

I hope we will. We’d better. Gods help us if we don’t. Maybe they won’t have dug too many trenches. Maybe.

His shoes stopped thudding and started thumping on dirt. “Over the river,” Thisbe said. “Not far to Poor Richard now.”

On they marched. One of the soldiers in the company exclaimed in disgust. “What’s the matter, Ludovic?” Gremio asked.

“I just stepped in some unicorn shit,” Ludovic answered.

“Well, wipe it off your shoe and keep going,” Gremio said.

“Captain, I haven’t had any shoes for weeks now,” Ludovic said.

“Oh. Well, wipe it off your foot and keep going, then,” Gremio said. “I don’t know what else to tell you. You can’t stop on account of that.”

“Make the southrons pay when you get to them,” Thisbe said.

“Wasn’t the gods-damned southrons. Was our own gods-damned unicorn-riders. I’d like to make those sons of bitches pay, them and their shitty unicorns.” Ludovic scattered curses with fine impartiality.